“Hey!” I called out to her as soon as I was close enough to grab at her, “Hold still! I’m going to?—”
Her hands seized my arm the moment we made contact, giving her enough leverage to practically crawl up the side of me and use me as a human buoy.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”
Naw, fuck.
The worst part about panicked drowning people is they’d always sacrifice you out of pure instinct to get one last meager breath before you both plunged under the water’s surface again.
Treading water, I shook her off me. “Jesus, woman. Hold still!”
Before she could reach around to grab at me again, I shoved my hand under the nylon strap wrapped around the back of her life jacket and dragged us both backward, side-stroking toward where I’d last heard Talos blow his whistle from.
The water was high and hard to navigate through with the use of only one of my arms free, and given the added weight of Ellen and us fighting against a very healthy current, my body was feeling the burn.
I was going to wake up jacked as shit tomorrow.
Three more sharp bursts of the whistle sounded out, a little bit to my left and slightly further down from where we were.
Like a guiding fairy light through a dark and decaying forest, I kept us pointed toward the sound. The bright yellow of the raft was hard to miss, much like our helmets, even through the rapids.
Talos had the younger couple working overtime dragging their paddles down and keeping the craft pointed our way while he had his own paddle outstretched in our direction, feverishly waving it.
The last few yards were the worst, with time slowing the moment I reached out to brush my hand along the edge of Talos’s paddle, just barely missing it before my hand plunged back into the water. My body ached, the adrenaline already wearing down now that we were so close.
“Grab it, I’ll pull you back!” Talos shouted as he waved the paddle again.
His words almost had me rolling my eyes.
Well, yeah. I sure as hell hoped you would.
Because the alternative was getting the cops to come fish our bodies out of the water. I highly doubted Blake was ready to deal withthatkind of fiasco.
Once I actually managed to get a hold of it, the plastic of the paddle bit into my hand with how hard I gripped it. With a single heave, Talos dragged us back toward the side of the raft. My upper body slammed into it, though not hard enough to hurt.
Or maybe that was still the adrenaline talking.
“All right, Ellen,” I heaved her against the craft. “Up you go.”
Two sets of hands reached over the side to drag her out of the water, the entire thing tipping dangerously backward with the added force of grabbing her and settling new weight onto the vessel. I kept my hand wrapped tight around one of the rope loops hanging off the side of it while we bobbed, allowing my body to float and recover in the meantime.
If this wasn’t a case of someone practically drowning, I would’ve thought being out here in the water practically freeballing it was lovely.
“Come on.” Talos’s voice came from above me right as his hands found the front of my life vest and hauled me up. “Blake will kill me if I let you die out here.”
My toes curled at the thought of him even giving a shit outside of a business perspective, let alone enough for Talos to say something. There was the possibility of that being exactly what he meant—that letting a client perish on property would be cause for many-a-lawsuit and probably the last thingAustin Adventureswas looking to garner publicity-wise.
I wasn’t by any means a public figure, however, I doubted Avery or Silas would let that shit go peacefully and without raising some kind of hell in order to find out what exactly had gone down at this camp that got my passport stamped with a one way ticket to the meat locker. Avery alone had enough money tohire plenty of lawyers to bury this place into the ground if he so chose to.
My friends could be pains in my ass plenty, but they were also my ride-or-dies through and through. Thick and thin, I knew I could count on them.
I grunted the second Talos dropped me unceremoniously onto the floor of the raft, my body finally flagging as the last of my remaining adrenaline bled out of me. To me, it was crazy how easily my strength had been zapped from my very bones with none of the work I’d spent years maintaining to show for it.
How the hell anyone survived a dip in the rapids was beyond me.
Distant crying caught my attention next, sending me turning my head toward the sound of it.
The older couple was huddled together, their arms wrapped around each other in a sweet way that normally would’ve had me smiling at the charming sight and almost forgetting about the near-death experience we’d all just shared.
