‘I’ll be back,’ I assured the goat as I hurried towards the road. ‘Just clearing up my sister’s mess.’
CHAPTER THREE
ASTER
In my defence, the boulder looked a lot like a house from the road.
Almost as soon as my suitcase and I had cleared the rockfall after being unceremoniously abandoned, it started to snow. Visibility, which before had only been hampered by gnarled trees and massive outcrops of rocks, became woefully poor. Like, wave-my-hand-too-far-from-my-face-and-I’d-lose-it poor.
At first, I’d stuck to the road. Bonnie had said to follow it and I’d be fine. I’d shuffled along the rutted track, my hands turning into claws once more as I alternated the arm dragging my suitcase.
I wouldn’t have left the road unless I was certain what I could see off to the side was a house. What else could the big, square darkness in the middle of the swirling white making up the rest of my vision be?
As I neared it, the bumps on top I’d assumed were chimneys turned out to be rocks and the square to the side I thought might be a car turned out to be a rockand the freaking house itself turned out to be the mother of all freaking rocks.
I’d chuckled to myself. Silly Aster. Only I could mistake a moss-covered boulder for a house. Lucas would find this hilarious once I found the actual cabin and thawed out enough to call him.
Shivering despite the ridiculous number of layers I had on, I turned back to the road.
It wasn’t there any more.
I swear I did a literal about-face, but my sense of direction must have been knocked askew by my inability to see anything—except for rock formations masquerading as houses—more than half a metre from my nose.
I shuffled to the left—no joy—and to the right—even less joy. The road had totally vanished.
Oh, and my phone had no signal. Obviously.
I decided heading generally upwards had to take me in the same vague direction as the road, so set off the way that made my thighs burn the most.
And now I was lost in a snowy wilderness, trying desperately not to panic about the uptick in likelihood I would freeze to death. In general life it was statistically quite low. I mean, if someone was going to accidentally wander into an unattended industrial freezer, it would probably be me, but I’d managed not to make a snowman of myself yet.
I maintained that the delirium of trawling through the snow coupled with trying to keep the increasing chances of my impending death from making me curl up in a ball were why I was talking to myself. That wasn’t something I did every day of my life. No siree.
‘Inuits have a name for you.’ Okay. So maybe I’d gone a step past talking to myself. ‘Something that means annoying-arse-snow-that-doesn’t-look-pretty-or-fall-in-neat-piles-but-is-tiny-balls-of-fury-that-hurl-themselves-at-unsuspecting-travellers.’
A flurry gusted into my face, but the snow couldn’t be offended. Itwasannoying. Nothing like any snow I’d seen before. It wasn’t settling, but instead whirled around in the wind and pummelled me with the force of a thousand teeny bullets.
‘If you could stop, that would be great.’ I wasn’t above bargaining with the weather gods if it meant a brief reprieve from this onslaught. ‘Ten minutes would be splendid. You can have a rest, I can find the road, and afterwards we can all get on with what we do best. I can not die out here in the wilderness and you can continue being the most useless kind of snow known to man. Deal?’
I blinked away the icy pellet that had hurdled my lashes and dive-bombed straight into my eyeball.
‘Dick move,’ I muttered, lowering my head to avoid any more kamikaze snow.
I wanted to stay chipper. Bonnie would have taken one look at the weather when she got to her cosy cottage and realised her mistake in sending me into the mountains alone. A rescue crew would be on their way soon to find and retrieve me. In a few minutes, this terrifying aloneness in a snowstorm would be over and I’d be clutching a hot chocolate and laughing about what a numpty I was to have left the road.
I really,reallywanted to stay chipper, but the section of my brain committed to staying upbeat was minuscule. The rest was a roaring chasm of doom.
I was going to die out here. No one would find me, not until it was too late. If I was lucky, I’d begone when they found me, frozen under a pile of snow that had decided the only place it wanted to settle was on top of me.
‘I don’t want to die.’ I knew how stupid it was to start crying in the middle of a life-or-death situation, but I couldn’t stop the tears coursing down my face. Or, that’s what they tried to do. The salty water froze as it broached the tops of my cheeks, forming an itchy crust.
I reached up to wipe it away, placed my foot wrong, and tumbled to the ground.
‘This is it,’ I cried, as more tears escaped then immediately froze around my eyes. ‘This is the place where I die.’
I hadn’t hurt myself when I’d fallen, the ground springy beneath my knees and hands, but the effort of standing was too much. What would I do once I was on my feet again? There was no path to follow, just an endless trek upwards until I fell again and that time I really would be too exhausted to get up. Why not shorten the process and choose to die here? It seemed as good a place as any to turn into a frozen statue.
Letting my backpack slip to the ground, I slumped against my suitcase. I pulled my legs up to my chest, cradling what warmth I could to myself as the snow pelted me.
