Ice (15 page)

“And if we don’t?”

He smiled at her. “Then we’ll walk the rest of the way to town.” After tonight, a long, difficult walk in the cold seemed like a cakewalk.

“I need something hot to eat before I even think about walking out of here.” Bundled up in her blanket, Lolly headed into the hallway, and toward the stairs.

Lolly hated, hated,
hated
to go back into the kitchen. Because she hated it so much, she forced herself to keep going, to not hesitate. The memory of what had happened here remained too strong, even though so many other memories—good and bad—had been made tonight. But she wanted and needed warm food in her belly, and she refused to allow a dead man to keep her from it. He was dead; she wasn’t. She’d won.

With the power out the electronic ignition on the stove wouldn’t work, so she found the matches and lit a burner on the stove; the flame gave off heat and a little bit of light, enough for her to look for some candles
and the oil lamps she knew were still here, somewhere. She turned, and stopped dead in her tracks, hugging the blanket closer to her. Several drawers were standing open, and her heart lurched at the sight.

She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Darwin and Niki must have been looking for something, but what? Anything that could be sold, she imagined. She wondered if she’d ever again be not afraid. From here on out was she going to jump at the sound of every ring of the doorbell or creak of the house? Would she be suspicious of every stranger?

Gabriel was in the living room, lighting the gas fireplace, laying their clothes out to dry. She wouldn’t think about Darwin; she’d think about Gabriel. She would concentrate on finding the candles, getting some soup heated, then they’d settle down in front of the fire.

It hadn’t bothered her before, but she suddenly realized how lumpy she’d looked in all those clothes, layer upon layer. How mortifying, no matter how necessary it had been. She wanted to look good for Gabriel, and wasn’t that a kick in the pants? She’d never cared very much what anyone thought of her appearance, much less Gabriel, but now … now she wished she had the blue sweater that her friends said made her eyes shine, and those really expensive snug jeans that made her butt look fantastic. She touched her wet hair. She could really use a hair dryer, too.

With one hand holding the blanket, which was
wrapped tightly around her, Lolly collected a sauce pan from the cabinet, then grabbed a can of soup from the pantry. She set the can on the counter, reached into an open drawer for the can opener … and froze.

When she’d last been in this kitchen, she’d been trying to fight off Darwin, and she had instinctively scanned the room for weapons. At that time, the block of knives had been full—out of reach, but full. Now, the largest knife in the collection was gone.

Why would they have taken a knife when they both had guns?

A chill ran up her spine. Niki could’ve survived the crash and come back. They hadn’t heard her breaking through a window, and Gabriel had locked the front door. But her keys had been in her purse, and Niki had had the purse.

Lolly could barely breathe. She’d been so intent on getting warm, so sure Niki was either dead or down for the count, she hadn’t even thought about the keys.

The nightmare came roaring back. The fear and the cold gripped her.

“Gabriel!” she screamed, whirling to run, and she came face-to-face with the nightmare.

Niki—bleeding, limping, holding the missing knife in her raised hand—lurched toward Lolly.

Lolly threw herself backward until she slammed into the cabinet, and then she had no place to go. She grabbed the can of soup and threw it; it bounced off
Niki’s shoulder. “Fuck!” Niki said furiously. “That hurt, bitch!”

Lolly grabbed the saucepan and threw it, and when Niki ducked she seized the chance to dart to the side, away from the cabinets. There was a small dried floral arrangement on the kitchen table; she threw that, too. Niki ducked again, and kept coming.

Then Gabriel was there, fast and silent on his bare feet, looming out of the darkness. He hit Niki from behind, the impact sending her crashing into the cabinets. She screamed with pain, tumbled to the floor. Gabriel pounced, grabbed the hand that held the knife, and slammed it against the floor over and over again until she lost her grip and the knife clattered to the floor.

Immediately, Niki began to wail. “Stop! I’m hurt! My arm … I think my arm is broken.” She began to sob. “What was I supposed to do? You killed Darwin and then you left me out in the cold to
die
. How could you?”

Easy
, thought Lolly. She didn’t feel sorry for the woman at all, even though dried blood caked her face, her clothes. But Niki continued to whine; just like Darwin, she went from enraged attacker to pathetic beggar in a heartbeat. How many times had that act worked for them? Gabriel didn’t buy it, though, and neither did Lolly.

“Shut up,” he said brusquely, and reached for her other wrist to secure it.

Infuriated that her tactic hadn’t worked, Niki
screamed and swung the empty pistol that she’d pulled from her coat. Gabriel jerked his head back but the barrel caught him on the outside corner of his right eye and whipped his head around. She surged up, shoving him back, and the blow had stunned him enough that for a second he couldn’t react fast enough. Niki scrambled up and away, scooping up the fallen knife and lunging for the back door.

Gabriel gave a quick shake of his head and launched himself in pursuit.

Her heart beating so hard she could barely breathe, Lolly jerked open the cabinet door under the sink, grabbed the hammer from the small open toolbox that had been there as long as she could remember, and followed them both.

Gabriel caught up with Niki on the back porch. The cold seared his bare skin. He had on nothing but a pair of wet jeans, not even a shirt he could pull off and use to snag the knife away from her. She whirled, lashing out with the knife, and he leapt back. She was nothing but a shadow in the darkness; only instinct, and experience gained by fighting with men who had been trained for combat, helped him avoid the blade. She was drug-crazed, unpredictable, and lethal as hell.

He wished he’d had time to grab something, anything, he could use as a weapon, or to block the slashing knife, but when Lolly had screamed his name he’d reacted instantly, without pausing to look around. He’d known, known without doubt, that
somehow the homicidal bitch had not only survived the slide off the side of the mountain, but had managed to get out and make it back to the house. All he’d thought about was getting to Lolly before Niki could.

Niki darted in, slashed at him, darted back. She missed, but not by much. She came at him again, and he saw the glint of the blade swiping at his stomach. He jerked back, grabbed for her arm, missed. From the corner of his eye he saw more movement at the door, and his heart almost stopped. Lolly!

“No!” he yelled. The last thing he wanted was her out here in the dark, where he wouldn’t be able to tell her from Niki, but Niki would know exactly who Lolly was. Niki whirled toward the new threat and he heard her laugh as she surged forward. He knew he couldn’t get to her in time to grab her arm, knew he couldn’t move fast enough to knock Lolly out of the way, but he tried anyway, leaping for her even as his heart whispered that he was too late, too late …

Lolly swung the hammer. She could barely make out a dark shadow coming toward her, but Gabriel yelled from somewhere to the left and she knew it wasn’t him. It was so dark she had no real way to judge distance, but she swung as hard as she could and was almost astonished when the hammer struck something with a sickening sound that was both a solid thunk and yet somehow squishy.

Then Gabriel was there, enveloping her in a body-slam of a rush that knocked her back into the mud room. She knew it was him, knew his scent, felt the bareness of his arms and chest. They crashed to the floor and the impact knocked the hammer free from her grip. He rolled off immediately, leaping to his feet and whirling to meet Niki’s next attack, but … nothing happened. No drugged-out maniac came through the door. There was nothing but silence from the back porch.

“Get my flashlight,” Gabriel said, breathing hard, and Lolly scrambled to her feet. The blanket … somehow she’d lost the blanket and she was completely naked, but she’d worry about that later. Frigid air swept through the open door, stinging her flesh as she raced to the stairs where Gabriel had dropped his coat when they first came in. The fireplace in the living room was lit, providing enough light that she found the coat with no problem, fumbled in the pocket, pulled out the big foot-long flashlight, turned it on, then ran out to the back porch again.

Gabriel took the flashlight from her and shone it on the heap that lay on the floor. Niki was collapsed on her stomach, breathing shallowly, her face turned away from them. The knife lay on the floor beside her hand. Gabriel moved forward, kicked the knife well out of her reach, and only then did he stoop to pick it up. The beam of the flashlight plainly showed the damage the hammer had done to her head.

And even as they watched, she tried to heave herself
to her knees. What was she, the fucking Terminator?

“Why won’t she die?” Lolly whispered, evidently thinking along the same lines. “What do we have to do, put her in a vat of molten steel?”

And then Niki died, after all, very quietly. The shallow breathing stopped.

Gabriel caught Lolly’s arm, steered her back into the house. Bending down, he snapped up the blanket and wrapped it around her. She was trembling like a leaf, and though there was a lot he needed to do, at the moment holding Lolly was more important than anything else on that list. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy,” she whispered.

“Seriously, look at me.”

She looked up at him, and what he saw assured him that she was indeed okay, or at least as much as someone unaccustomed to violence could be in such a situation. She wasn’t happy, but neither was she collapsing under a ton of misplaced guilt. She’d done what she had to do, and she accepted that.

He kissed her, then left her standing in the middle of the kitchen hugging the blanket to her shivering body, and went back out on the porch. He crouched beside Niki, reached out and touched her throat in search of a pulse. Nothing. He blew out a sigh of relief.

Some of the freezing rain blew onto the porch, settling on Niki’s body and on his bare skin. His feet felt almost as frozen as they had been an hour ago. He
wasn’t dressed for this shit, so he left Niki where she was, and went back into the house.

When he closed the back door he took a moment to lock it. Couldn’t hurt.

The seconds dragged on, and Lolly listened hard. She should move, do something, follow Gabriel or run away. She found she could do nothing but stand there, hold tightly on to the blanket, and listen to her own heartbeat as she waited. Was it over? Was Niki going to somehow get up again, ignoring death? Lolly wanted peace; she wanted this night to be over.

She heard the back door close, and her heart matched its thud. A moment later Gabriel walked into the kitchen, blessedly alone and unharmed.

“Is it really over?” Her voice shook.

“It’s over. She’s dead,” Gabriel said as he came to her, tightened the blanket around her cold body, held her close.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Lolly hadn’t thought she’d ever be glad to hear that anyone was dead, but pure relief washed through her. She rested her head on Gabriel’s shoulder, wallowing in the strength and warmth of it. “I killed her,” she whispered.

Gabriel stepped back, made her look him in the eye. How could he be so calm? So steady? The flame on the stove flickered, casting strange shadows over
his face. “Good job,” he said briefly, paying a very subtle compliment to her strength by not sugarcoating anything.

Lolly squared her shoulders. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “She was coming after you with a knife. She would’ve killed us both.”

Lolly took the few steps that separated her from the stove and turned the knob that killed the flame, plunging the room into darkness. “I don’t want soup, I don’t want anything that comes out of this damned kitchen,” she muttered.

“We need to eat,” he argued.

“I have breakfast bars,” she said, hugging the blanket to her cold body and walking away. If she never set foot in this kitchen again she’d be perfectly happy.

Gabriel followed her out of the kitchen, so when she stumbled on the end of the blanket—halfway through the dining room—he was there to catch her, to keep her from falling on her face. After everything that had happened, to trip over the trailing end of a blanket shouldn’t be traumatic, but tears welled up in her eyes. Gabriel heard them, saw them, maybe felt them, and lifted her into his arms. She let him, without a word of protest that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. At the moment she didn’t feel capable at all. He whispered soothing words. She didn’t pay any attention to what those words were, but she felt the intent, the comfort, to the pit of her soul.

The living room was like another world: warm, lit by the fire, quiet. What was left of the storm raged on
the other side of the window, beyond the sturdy walls, but for the first time tonight that storm was separate and unimportant. They were alive. They had survived a threat that was greater than the storm.

Gabriel lowered her to the sofa and sat beside her, continuing to hold her close. Lolly wanted to stop shaking, but couldn’t. It wasn’t the cold that made her tremble, not this time.

“I think I’ll hire someone to come in and pack up everything that’s left,” she said, her gaze on the fire, her body fitting nicely against Gabriel’s.

“Probably not a bad idea.”

“If I thought we could make it safely to town tonight, I’d be out that door in five minutes. I can’t come back here after this. I don’t ever want to see this house again.”

“Too bad.” His voice was a rumbling whisper, as if he were simply thinking out loud.

Lolly lifted her head and looked at him. “What?” Surely she hadn’t heard him correctly. “Seriously?” How could he think she could ever look at this house as home again? Why would anyone in their right mind want to return after a night like this one?