“That’s ababysong.” Maya’s voice was full of condescension. “Can we sing something by Taylor Swift?”
“No Taylor Swift,” Artie and Derek said in unison, making him grin again.
The beam of his flashlight illuminated a protected area, and he headed toward the spot. After scrambling over some loose rocks, he turned and helped the kids negotiate the tricky footing. When he reached a hand toward Artie, however, she gave him a look and climbed over the rocks without assistance. Biting back a smile, Derek returned to the front of their little group.
“Look, girls,” Artie said. “Derek’s found us the perfect spot to hang out and wait for your dad.”
He grinned. “It is perfect, isn’t it?” A rock overhang and a nearby tree created a natural shelter, blocking most of the wind and intermittent snow. Shucking the backpack, he reached inside and handed Artie some protein bars and the emergency blanket. When he pulled out one of the water bottles, he frowned.
“I forgot. The water’s frozen.” He started to return it to the pack, but Artie grabbed it before he could.
“I’ll put it under my clothes, against my skin,” she said, ushering the girls into the protected nook. “It’ll melt.”
The mental image made Derek’s brain take an inappropriate leap. “Lucky water bottle,” he muttered.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” He hurried to grab the aerial flare, as well as a couple of spiked ones. “I’ll announce our presence.”
* * *
Holding back a smile, Artie put her arms around both of the girls. “Watch. It’s kind of like fireworks. Well, boring fireworks.”
Derek launched the aerial flare into the dark sky, where it glowed red as it rose and fell.
“Your dad and the other searchers will see that,” Artie said, hugging the kids against her sides. “It’ll tell them where we are and that we’ve found you.”
It took a couple of tries before Derek found a spot soft enough to drive the first spike connected to the bottom of a flare into the ground. He climbed above their improvised shelter to place the second flare. Once both were lit, he returned to their spot under the overhang.
They arranged themselves under the emergency blanket with Derek and Artie sitting with the girls on their laps. Artie winced at the hard and lumpy rock under her, made worse by Maya’s weight on her legs, and the icy bottle tucked under her clothes that was numbing her side. To add to her misery, she had to take off her gloves in order to unwrap the protein bars. Despite all the discomforts, though, her relief that the girls were found and safe outweighed everything.
“Eat this,” she said, passing out the protein bars and donning her gloves, “and tell me what happened.”
Zoe and Maya chewed mulishly for a while, but Artie waited patiently, eating her own bar in three eager bites. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the food touched her lips.
Surprisingly, Maya was the one to break the silence. “Zoe told him to do it.”
“Maya!”
“What? You did!”
“I didn’tmeanit!” Zoe sounded like she was about to cry again. “I waved at him to come back.”
“You told Chase to go out on the ice?” Artie wasn’t surprised. She’d figured it was something along those lines.
“I dared him,” Zoe admitted, the words rushing out as if a dam had broken. “And then he fell in, and Derek pulled him out, but he wasn’t moving. They took him away in an ambulance, and we thought he was dead.” She finished on a wail.
Her sister’s tears set off Maya, as well.
“It’s not crying time yet.” Artie tried to keep her voice stern, even when all she wanted to do was hug them close and join them in shedding buckets of tears. “You need to be brave for a little longer.”
“Suh-superheroes.” Maya hiccuped, wiping her nose on her cuff.
“Exactly,” Artie said, hugging the girl tightly.
“Is that why you ran?” Derek asked Zoe, who was making a valiant effort to stop her sobs. “Because you thought it was your fault?”
She nodded, her breath shuddering with leftover tears. “I thought the sheriff would arrest me for m-murder.”
