New pain flared in his injured leg, but he was beyond screaming, beyond caring. The white light went dim, the pain receded, and the world grayed out.
Then, blessed gods, he was breathing again!
He coughed out water, sucked in biting cold air, and shuddered as it burned his lungs. Slowly, the world came back into focus. Sort of.
He was hanging on to something solid, pointy, and buoyant, and the bitingly cold current was carrying him along. For a minute, all he could do was concentrate on breathing—in and out, in and out. Then his other senses started coming back online: He could hear the rush of the river and feel his ribs hurt with the effort of moving the air. His throat burned and his injured leg throbbed with dull, cold agony. But he was alive!
He went weak with relief. Hell, he was weak, period. It was all he could do to hang on.
“Fucking A,” he croaked. “I can’t believe you guys got me out of there.” His voice sounded strange in his ears.
Even stranger was the silence that followed.
Jarred fully awake by a sudden slash of fear he couldn’t pinpoint, he opened his eyes and squinted, trying to make sense of the shadows and moonlit reflections.
He was hanging on to a piece of deadfall; the nubs of broken branches dug into his ribs and stomach, but at least the thing was keeping his head above water. He was floating along, carried by the river’s current, paced by other flotsam from the wreck. He saw a couple of hockey sticks and what looked like the unopened package of gym socks he’d had in his bag.
Then the reflections shifted and the white flash stopped looking like a lumpy plastic bag and started looking like something else entirely.
His already freezing body iced further and his heart stuttered. “No.” The word came out chattering and broken. “NO!”
That wasn’t Dewey’s face, open-eyed and fixed in death. The shadows around it weren’t a body that moved limply with the current.
No. Impossible. He wouldn’t believe it. His buddies were alive, they had gotten him out, they had—
Suddenly, he heard his own voice saying, “Kabal ku bootik teach a suut.” And although he didn’t know the old tongue, the words somehow translated themselves inside his head: The gods pay; you return the price.
The ice inside him shattered as the rest of it came back—the god’s voice, the bargain it had offered.
“The sacrifices will be taken as tradition holds,” it had said. He hadn’t thought about what that meant; he’d been starving for oxygen, fighting to live.
“Joe? Dewey?” His voice wobbled on the word. “Come on, you two, answer me!”
A soft touch of cloth brushed his arm as something heavy, solid, and yielding bumped into him from behind. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t not look.
A harsh sob caught in his throat at the sight of a moon-silvered face and shadowed, lifeless eyes.
“Joe.” The word turned to a groan when he saw that the white splash had drifted nearer and definitely wasn’t a bag of socks. “Dewey.”
Grief broke over him like a storm, filling him with a huge, terrible anger.
“No!” He lashed out, hammering at the water that surrounded him, at the deadfall that had saved him. “Damn you, that wasn’t fair! I didn’t know! I couldn’t think!” He lost his grip and went under, then fought his way back up, screaming, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t fucking mean it!”
He thrashed and fought until he was bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, clinging limply to the floating wood as tears streamed down his face, feeling barely warmer than the water surrounding him.
He sobbed for his friends, and for himself, and when his body went increasingly numb and his grip slipped, he was tempted to let go, tempted to even up the gods’ precious balance on his own terms.
He didn’t, though, because the sacrifices had already been made, and because Woody had taught him better than to quit.
The sound of a car’s engine punched through the shock and misery. He jerked around in time to see a pair of brake lights disappear around a turn in the middle distance. Adrenaline gave a cold-numbed kick at the sight of a light farther downstream, shining on a small building and a dock.
The black riverbanks rose high everywhere else, ominous and impassable.
“Okay,” he said through teeth that had stopped chattering as he passed from cold to the beginnings of hypothermia, despite his hereditary toughness. “You can do this.”
Using one leaden arm to paddle, he turned the deadfall, angling to hit the shore pretty far upstream of the dock; he was too damn weak to fight the current, so he would have to use it instead.
Making sure that the floating bodies were securely snagged on the trailing branches, he looped his arm around a sturdy protruding branch and gave a huge frog kick.
He screamed hoarsely, and nearly passed out when his bad leg awakened from warm numbness to raw agony. His cries echoed off the water and the high riverbanks as he convulsed against the deadfall. He clutched the worn branches to keep his head above the water, but his struggles shifted the floating tree, causing it to spin in the frigid current, seeking a new balance.
The branch he’d been holding on to snagged his shirt and dragged him under as the log rolled, taking him with it.
No! His heart hammered as he yanked with fingers weakened by cold, shock, and pain. The fabric tore and gave, and then snagged again, pulling so tightly that there was no way he could get free. He was trapped, pinned helpless mere inches away from air. Flailing, he tried to roll the tree, snap the branch, tear the fabric, to do something, anything , to break free.
Please gods, please gods, please gods! The mantra cycled in his head, though with a sick sense of inevitability now that he knew what the gods were capable of.
His lungs ached with the now-familiar pain of oxygen deprivation. Adrenaline flared through him, giving him a final, desperate spurt of strength that he used to twist himself into a painful knot. He brought up his good leg, jammed it against the tree trunk, and pushed with everything he had left.
The shirt cut into him; the collar tightened across his windpipe with a pressure that made his instincts say, Stop. You’re choking. But choking didn’t matter when there was no air left to breathe, so he bore down and wrenched against his bonds.
For a second nothing happened. Then the shirt tore, and he was free!
He tumbled away from the deadfall, spinning head over ass underwater, not sure which way was up.
Terror clawed at him alongside pain and the reflexive need to breathe. Then his head broke the surface, more by accident than anything. Cold air slapped his face as he sucked in huge gulps of air, keeping his head above water with spastic churns of his arms and one good leg, while the other hung useless, dragging in the current.
He wasn’t going to be able to tread for long. He had to get out of the water.
He blinked into the darkness, taking too long to focus, then even longer to comprehend the sight of the deadfall some twenty feet farther downstream, with Dewey grotesquely snagged and pulled partway out of the water, so his arms were draped over a couple of branches, his head cocked the way it did when he was about to fire off one of his killer put-downs.
Brandt’s heart lunged into his throat and even though he knew it was an illusion, he yelled, “Dewey! Hey, Dewey!”
