“They can’t have got far,” he said over his shoulder. “Not with the wounded woman, not with last night’s weather and this morning’s deep freeze.” He allowed himself an evil smirk. “Think you can pick up the pace?”
It had been shit luck that the downpour to end all downpours had come through and cleared all trace. There wasn’t an identifiable track to be found. The rain, the freeze, the wind, they’d all come together to obliterate any signs of passage.
After a long day’s slog, they’d come to a crossroads. Three possible paths toward Schink’s Station, none of them direct. None of them the obvious choice.
A sign would be nice right now. Not that he believed in divine intervention. There’d been times when his life had depended on some kind of goodwill—whether Ganesh’s, God’s, or Mother Nature’s, he frankly hadn’t cared. Of course, the last time he’d looked to the heavens for help, he’d lost everything that mattered. But then, he had more faith in nature than in any god. In his mind, the two were intertwined, he supposed.
Maybe he should have brought Emma here, when all was lost. Maybe this place would have healed her when the medicine hadn’t.
Shaking that silly notion from his head, he let the past wash out of him and focused on today. At this moment, he wished for a sign—not to save face in front of Deegan, but to finish this thing once and for all.
The clouds parted and he spotted it then—high in the sky: a bald eagle, the bird slow, wide winged and graceful. Its lazy, circular descent brought it to alight at the very top of the mountain before him, where it perched proudly, framed by clouds on other side, like a painting, or a dream.
Or the very sign he’d been seeking.
“Up it is,” Ash said with a smile, feeling lighter than he had all day.
Muttering curses behind him, Deegan scrambled to keep up.
Chapter 33
Holy crap.Leo couldn’t believe what she was seeing. This was a hallucination. It had to be.
Her eyes flicked back to where Elias waited, watching as she climbed over the last rocky rise. From below, he was a bulwark—a silhouette flattened by the dark and outlined by the sunset, which would have been breathtaking enough on its own. But what lay just beyond him made everything all the more surreal.
He stepped over the stream and reached for her hand.
“Come on.” His grip tightened, he moved forward and she let him pull her up beside him. For a breathless handful of seconds, she took in the sight of the iron-red structure, built into a shallow dip in the mountain. Not once had she spotted this place from the air, which wasn’t surprising, given how the trees had grown around and even inside it.
“Parts of the roof look intact,” she said, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“Yep.”
“There a fireplace in there?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Too risky anyway.”
Her excitement ebbed, leaving her feeling dull and deflated. “You really think someone’s close?”
“Not close,” he said, his voice rising on the end. That inflection told her he had his doubts.
“But you feel safe here.”
“Can’t be seen from the sky, only one way in, so it’s easy to keep watch.” He eyed the path they’d taken to get up here. Not thatpathwas the right word for it. Incline might work, although devil stairs was closer. The path was there; it was just so well-hidden among the sheer rocks that it was almost impossible to spot. “And those traps I set will help. For now, we rest.” He looked up at the sky. “And wait out the weather.”
Her heart sank. “Again?”
He turned back to eye her with a smile and a wink. “Yeah. But I bet you won’t mind it so much here.”
After placing that mystery at her feet with as much pride as a cat with a kill, he continued up into the tight little valley.
The structure—rambling and rickety looking—was pure Alaska. Hopes and dreams beaten, time and again, by nature. It climbed up along what looked like a crack in the mountain, which revealed itself to be a river, loud in its bubbling, frenzied rush to the bottom. She couldn’t tell if the place was a house or a factory or a mine, but the multiple levels and sloping metal roof made her think the latter.
Bo followed Elias at a run, yipping with excitement, while Leo went more slowly, caution making her careful—although she wasn’t sure what she was most worried about: her bones or her heart.
At the bottom, water flowed from an unseen source and gathered in small, strange-colored pools. “What’s that smell?” She squinted. Was the water steaming?
“Sulfur.”
