Snowbound (24 page)

Kalyn heard the explosion as she swiped the magazine for the Browning back from Fidel. She limped through the darkness of the first-floor corridor, desperate for some decent light to see how badly she’d been cut. It hurt terribly, particularly through her midsection, though she didn’t seem to be bleeding as profusely as before.

She stopped thirty feet from where the corridor opened into the lobby. The white wolf moved past the freestanding hearth, trotting in her direction, toward the south-wing corridor. At first, she thought it hadn’t seen her, that perhaps it was heading for the staircase, but its head was already dipped, hackles rising, and she could hear the deep, guttural rumbling in its throat—a low, malicious growl. The Browning was in the lobby, she’d left Fidel’s knife in the alcove, and there was no time to reach the only unlocked door in the vicinity—the room where she’d left her sister, unconscious.

There are weapons on the fourth floor—a shotgun and a machine pistol.

The wolf passed into the darkness of the corridor, and she turned and ran as hard as she could up the passage, every step sending a shock of agony through her abdomen.

She reached the alcove, heard the wolf panting behind her, closing the distance between them with every stride. She was telling herself she’d outrun him in the stairwell, thought for some reason he couldn’t move as quickly up the steps.

She turned into the stairwell.

The gray wolf was coming down the last flight of stairs, and it snarled when it saw her, its teeth wet in the moonlight, black with blood.

The white one was fast approaching.

She saw the window, the glass broken out, rushed over, climbed up onto the sill, glanced back, the wolves right there, yellow and pink eyes raging.

No other choice. She jumped down into the snow—a rush of cold—thinking,
The front entrance is locked, but I can bang on it, get him to let me in. If I can get there, I can make it back inside.
But it was a long way, the entire length of the south wing, through deep drifts.

She was practically swimming through the snow now, clumps of it falling down her collar, melting on her neck, and the wind had kicked up, blowing powder into her face like a swarm of tiny pins.

It was a bright night, with a huge moon and loads of stars, but her vision seemed to be darkening. She looked back, having already gone thirty feet out from the window, saw one of their heads emerge from the snow, the wolves fighting their way through deep powder in a movement that resembled swimming dolphins.

• • •

Will thought,
I’m not dead
. He sat up, unsure of how long he’d been unconscious. For a moment, he could see only a single frame of white. Someone, presumably Devlin, was calling out to him, but her voice was distant and muddled.

His vision restored—washed-out tones of lantern light and shadow, Rachael sitting up behind him, conscious and intact, her pants blackened from the close-range detonation.

Rachael asked, “Are you okay?” but his voice seemed trapped in his head.

Devlin was kneeling in front of him, and he tried to read her lips, but the disorientation stymied his effort.

Will climbed to his feet and careened into the wall.

• • •

Kalyn moved faster now, groaning with each step, focused on nothing but her legs powering through the snow. The next time she looked up, she realized she’d veered off course, away from the lodge, and was actually heading downslope toward the lake and the floatplane dock.

The wolves were still coming. She could see nothing of the white one but its eyes.

She reached the lakeshore, the moon’s reflection in the water disturbed, waves slamming into the snowy bank.

The wolves kept coming.

She looked up toward the lodge entrance, and there he was, wading toward her through the snow, a black duffel bag slung over his shoulder, a machine pistol in one hand, a Mossberg in the other.

The sound of the Beretta and the bullets ripping through the snow was lost to the wind. Kalyn only saw the wolves disappear under the snowpack, where they would remain until next June, when the snow broke and the scavengers came.

Javier stopped a few feet away, the black fabric over his right shoulder shredded by buckshot.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

Kalyn stood shivering in the cold, bracing against the wind. “Your friend had a fairly liberal interpretation of ‘don’t touch her.’ ”

“You killed him.”

She nodded.

Javier glanced back at the lodge. “Just you and me and the Innises now.”

Kalyn felt lines of blood trailing warmly into her boots.

“So,” Javier said, unscrewing the silencer from the Beretta’s barrel, “shall we?”

• • •

“You can barely stand, Will.”

“My balance is coming back.” He took the shotgun out of Devlin’s hand. “You both stay here. How’s your leg?”

“It hurts bad.”

“I know, but you’re lucky, Rach. That flashbang went off right underneath you.”

“What’s a flashbang?” Devlin asked.

“Stun grenade.”

Somewhere beyond the walls of Ethan’s room, a shotgun thundered.

“Is that inside?” Rachael asked.

“I can’t tell.”

Staccato shots responded to the Mossberg, automatic gunfire, which from inside the lodge sounded like beads dropping on a glass table.

Will staggered out into the corridor and closed the door behind him, his ears still ringing, unable even to hear his own footsteps as he hurried down the stairs and into the passage.

• • •

The wind shrieked under the brilliant Alaskan moon, building towers of snow against anything in its way.

Will saw the blood briefly—black smears by the lakeshore—before the wind concealed it with snow.

Waves of dizziness washed over him.

He spotted what appeared to be bloody tracks leading away from the lake toward the woods, though in the brutal wind, they were vanishing before his eyes, and would certainly be gone before he could reach the trees.

He collapsed, struggled back onto his feet, and started toward the woods as the tracks filled in, smoothed over and erased by the coldest wind ever to sting his cheeks.

Nine days ago, Kalyn Sharp had come to his home in Colorado. Nine days.

Is it over?
he wondered. Nothing would have surprised him now.

He tried to deny the relief lurking in the nether regions of his conscience, but there was something so inescapably fitting about them killing each other, if that was in fact what had happened out here.

Will stopped after ten agonizing steps. He didn’t have the strength to walk into those woods and dig through four feet of snow to find their bodies. He scarcely had the balance to stand. But he went on—tired, so very tired—when all he wanted was to make a fire in the library and fall asleep with Devlin and Rachael in his arms, wake up someplace else.

Devlin felt the g force push her down in the seat as the seaplane lifted into the air, the inner lake falling away, the lodge and the floatplanes dwindling into toys, accessories to a child’s train set.

The sound of the props intensified, the De Havilland Twin Otter roaring south.

It was four hundred miles to Anchorage. Two hours to civilization. Devlin glanced around the cabin at the surviving women. She reached down, took her mother’s hand in hers, laced their fingers together. Rachael smiled. Between the pair of 620-horsepower engines and no headphones, it was too noisy to talk.

Staring out the window, Devlin said a prayer for Buck Young. The bush pilot had landed on the inner lake yesterday morning, found them, and then flown back to Fairbanks for help.

Devlin turned her attention toward the world below, thinking,
Somewhere down there, under all that snow, lies Kalyn
. Her father had searched until dawn for their bodies, but the wind had tucked them away for a long hibernation. She registered a flicker of relief and sorrow, would always remember flying out of this wilderness because of the tension inside her, the unresolvable contradiction she would just have to live with, and for years to come would mark this moment, in all its emotional complexity, as her first breath, first heartbeat as a grown-up.

Soon the Wolverine Hills had diminished into forested ripples of earth. She turned away from the window, from this wilderness she would not see again, swallowing to release the pressure in her ears.

Cook Inlet opened into the Gulf of Alaska, a universe of glittering dark blue water that stretched to the horizon. Devlin watched the paths of ships and oil tankers moving south toward the Pacific and continental America.

The De Havilland banked and descended. They were over land again, and looking out her window, Devlin could see the skyline of Anchorage and, just beyond, the shining, glaciated sprawl of the Chugach Range.

They touched down at Lake Hood Seaplane Base just shy of 1:00
P.M.
, after taxiing for several minutes over the choppy water. Two seats ahead, a woman began to sob uncontrollably, so loudly that everyone could hear, even over the drone of the props.

A second woman started to cry, then a third. They were all on Devlin’s side of the plane, and when she peeked over the seat in front of her, she saw them staring out the windows.

She looked, too, the glass streaked with windblown lake water. They were approaching a series of docks, and right away, she picked out their destination. A dozen ambulances had backed up to the one on the end, the rear doors thrown open, paramedics standing by with stretchers. Devlin spotted a procession of police cruisers behind the ambulances, lights flashing, waiting to escort the women to Providence Alaska Medical Center. Two fire engines idled beyond the cruisers—they would lead the motorcade. A nearby parking lot was filling fast with cars, vans, three news trucks—giant satellites perched on their roofs, transmitting the scene across the world.

A crowd had formed along the shore. People were taking pictures, shooting videos. Firemen and police officers stood guard behind a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape.

The woman sitting two rows back suddenly shouted, “Oh God, there’s Jimmy! It’s Jimmy! He’s a teenager!”

Devlin noticed that a handful of people had been allowed past the police barrier. They were gathered at the end of the dock—husbands, sisters, brothers, children, parents—and Devlin could see that every one of them stood crying, hands cupped to mouths, some outright weeping and prostrate, others signing “I love you” toward the seaplane.

The engines quit.

Devlin looked at her mother, her father, saw tears running down their faces, too. There was no stopping it, the emotion so sharp, so intense, it seemed to suck the oxygen out of the cabin. The women on the other side of the plane were unbuckling their seat belts, leaning across to look out the windows that faced the dock, searching for their loved ones amid the throng.

The pontoons bumped into the wooden pylons. The base crew went to work tethering the plane, tying down the props.

The families of the women pressed up to the end of the dock, and Devlin watched a man kneel down and reach out over the water, his hand just able to touch the window that framed his wife’s face.

His voice was muffled, but Devlin heard him say, “Oh God, Melinda! Oh God!”

“Jeff!”

A police officer walked over and patted the man’s shoulders, said, “Sir, I know it’s emotional, but we have some women on the plane who need immediate medical attention.”

“I’m right here, Melinda!” he yelled. “Right here!”

The officer led him and the others a little ways back from the plane.

The pilot opened the De Havilland’s door. Light streamed in. Devlin felt the frigid air, thought she smelled the ocean. A paramedic ducked into the plane—a young man with a goatee and stylish sideburns—his face darkening at the sight of the passengers.

He steadied himself and said, “We have ambulances waiting outside for everyone.”

Rachael stood up, said, “Take that woman in front first.”

The paramedic knelt down. “What’s her name?”

“Natalie.”

He was staring at an eighty-pound woman, severely malnourished and catatonic, who’d suffered so much trauma, it had destroyed her mind.

“My name’s Rick,” he said. “Your family’s here, Natalie. I’m gonna carry you out, okay?”

He unbuckled the safety belt and lifted the woman from her seat, turning around carefully in the cramped space near the door and the cockpit. Through her window, Devlin watched another paramedic take Natalie out of Rick’s arms. He was cradling her like a child, her eyes open yet seeing nothing. Someone draped a blanket over her.

A man emerged from the crowd, staggered toward Natalie. He was pale and shell-shocked, like he’d encountered a ghost or become one himself.

Rachael grabbed Devlin’s and Will’s hands. “Guys?” she whispered. “You see what you did? It isn’t just about our family.”

Outside, the paramedic said, “Is this your wife, sir?” The man had no voice, could only nod.

“Why don’t you come with me. You can ride with us to Providence.”