Her head... her face... rests in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. Her hands clutch my hide.
Warmth.
Her life. Against me.
A new sound. It starts in my chest. Deep. Low. It is not a growl.
It is a rumble.
It vibrates through me. Into her.
Mine.
11
BETTY
Darkness.
Not the darkness of night. This is a complete, primal, suffocating darkness. A darkness so total it feels like being buried alive in cold, black earth.
The only other reality is the sound.
The blizzard screams. It is a high, keening wail of a thousand tortured ghosts, a sound of pure, mindless rage. The sound of the world being torn apart, just outside our tiny pocket of stillness.
I am pressed against a wall of stone, and it is so cold it burns. The frigid cold seeps through my cloak, through my tunic, a hundred icy needles pricking my skin.
My breath is a series of short, sharp pants, each one a white puff of air I cannot see.
"Threk?"
My voice is a small, stupid, terrified sound, instantly swallowed by the roar of the wind.
He is here. Of course he is. He is the other wall.
He is the door.
His massive, ten-foot body is wedged into the opening of this cleft in the rock. He is a living, breathing plug of muscle and hide, and his back is to me. The wind howls and slams against his body, but he is a mountain. He endures.
I am huddled in the tiny, black space behind him.
"I... I can't see anything," I whisper, my voice trembling. "I can't even see my own hands."
It's a lie. My hands are fisted in my lap, my thick mittens useless against the tremor that has seized my entire body. I am vibrating so hard my teeth ache.
A low grunt rumbles from the shadow in front of me. It's a sound I feel more than hear, a vibration that travels through the rock, into my back.
I am here.
"It's cold," I say, stating the obvious, the words tumbling out of me. I need to talk. I need to fill the blackness with something other than the screaming wind and the chattering of my own teeth. "It's so... so cold. I've never... never felt a storm like this."
The paralysis from the Dark Elf encounter is gone, replaced by a new, sharp terror. We are going to die here. We are going to freeze in this black hole, and they will find our bodies in the spring, frozen together.
My guilt is a physical, nauseating thing. I did this. I brought him out here. I brought him on this hopeless quest. I am killing him.
My hand comes up, my mittened fingers fumbling for my hair. I can't find a strand. I just fumble, a panicked, useless gesture in the dark.
Stop it.
