With every step, no matter how gentle, a jolt went up her leg, all the way to her hip. More and more, she felt like she might throw up from it, so she clamped her jaw tight and tried to focus on each new goal. First the big fir tree fifty feet ahead of them, then the boulder twenty-five feet away. Now it was just getting from one tree to the next, simply taking each step without slipping and tumbling down the mountainside.
The warmer coat Colter had made her buy was back in her luggage, in his ruined truck. She was wearing the one she’d arrived in, which could handle Chicago’s tough wind chill, but not this. Not being stranded on the side of a mountain, only the trees blocking the sudden gusts of ice-cold wind. Not the dampness seeping into her bones as the snowflakes soaked through her jeans, slid into her gloves whenever she grabbed a tree branch for support.
“Hang on,” Colter said.
Kensie grabbed the nearest tree, sagging against it as Rebel pressed close to her side. Kensie suspected it was to lend her warmth, but even the dog was starting to look cold. Kensie’s eyes slid shut and she tipped her head, resting it, too, against the tree. It felt iced over and it soaked her hood even more, but right now, she didn’t care. More than anything, she craved sleep.
When she heard Colter swear, it was harder than it should have been to open her eyes again. “What ’sit?” she slurred. Her mind felt foggy, but not so foggy she didn’t realize that was a bad sign.
Hypothermia did that. Kensie focused on her fingers and toes, trying to decide if she could feel them. It was strange that she couldn’t tell. She tried to wiggle her toes and almost lost her balance. “What is it?” she asked again, enunciating carefully.
Lines raked Colter’s forehead and she wanted to smooth them away, wanted to make the worry in his sky-blue eyes disappear. But it was all she could do to stay on her feet.
“I thought we might have gone far enough to get service.”
For a long moment, his words made no sense. Then she glanced at his hands, which were stuffing his cell phone into his pocket. Despite having warm gloves, his hands were bright red, the fingertips an alarming white. As soon as he’d returned the cell phone to his pocket, he shoved his hands back into his gloves, rubbing them together.
“We walked that far?” she asked, happy she wasn’t slurring anymore. At least she didn’t think so.
“No. We’re headed sort of perpendicular to the path we took to the cabin, down the mountain. We’re not going toward Desparre, but there’s another town out this way. It looked like I might have a signal, but the call kept dropping. I tried texting 911 anyway.”
“How will they find us?” Her words ran together, barely comprehensible, and Kensie tried to focus, tried to get her sluggish mind to connect properly with her mouth. She tried it again, and this time he understood.
“We’ve got to keep moving.”
She whimpered, the idea of continuing on any farther seeming impossible.
In response, Colter slid closer, wrapped an arm around her waist, taking some of her weight even as his jaw clenched.
The sight gave her strength and she stiffened, took a deep, cold breath. If she gave up, she knew he’d carry her as far as he could. But what if her extra weight was the difference between his making it or dying on this mountain? “I’m okay,” she told him, surprised when her voice came out determined and clear.
She had to make it. For Colter and Rebel, who’d put their lives on hold to help her. And for Alanna, who might already be packed up in the Altiers’s car, on her way to some other out-of-the-way town, where she might stay hidden for another fourteen years. If Kensie died here, no one would know the truth about who had taken her sister.
That wasn’t going to happen.
She stiffened her shoulders and took a step forward. Her injured leg gave out on her and she hit the ground hard, her head smacking the dirt and snow. The world rotated in a dizzying swirl and then she was sliding, picking up speed as she went.
Reaching out, Kensie grappled for anything. Her hand snagged a low-lying branch and she held tight. Her back arched up off the ground, then came back down, but somehow she held on, the image of Colter’s worried face giving her strength. She couldn’t die like this. She couldn’t give him one more loss to grieve, one more reason to blame himself when it wasn’t his fault.
It took her a minute to realize she’d stopped moving, but she didn’t let go of the branch, because it was still steep. Then Colter came sliding down next to her, half out of control, Rebel right behind him.
“You okay?” Colter’s voice was panicked.
She tipped her head back toward him and tried to smile. Tried to reassure him without words that she was all right, that she wasn’t giving up. That they’d make it.
But the truth was, she wasn’t sure. Because when she tried to push herself to her feet, no matter how much she gritted her teeth, her leg kept giving out on her.
“It’s okay,” Colter said, bending next to her.
Then she was up, dangling over his shoulder again. Tears spilled over, even as she tried to stop them, knowing the moisture was just going to freeze on her skin.
Colter grunted, using tree branches for leverage, his right leg dragging slightly behind him. Keeping pace beside him, Rebel pressed close against him and Kensie saw the dog’s back left leg was barely taking weight.
She didn’t need to be
