How much time did they have? Must have been at least ten minutes since they jumped into the water. Were they screwed? Done for? Hypothermic muscles atrophied?
No. No, forget that.
“No…way.” She ground her teeth into silence, planted her hands on the earth, and pushed. “Elias.” The word was so slurred it came out sounding likeliar. She said it again.Liar. Liar.“Up. Get up.”
No movement. No reaction.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t. They hadn’t survived everything—he hadn’t been hunted for so long—to end up a shivering pile of meat on the bank of this lake.
As if in response to her thought, another crack resounded from the water’s busy surface, immediately followed by the faint echo of a scream. Holy shit, the lake was eating their pursuers. As Elias had predicted, they were stuck. And it sounded as though the ice was grinding them up like hamburger meat.
Too stubborn to give in to the cold’s pull, she rolled away from Elias, so hard she wound up with her face in the sludge. From there, getting up was a matter of life and death, since she refused to drown to death—in mud. “Come on. Move it, yeti.”
Bo slinked to her and nudged Leo on with her wet nose. She swallowed, planted her hands, and straightened her shaking elbows with a groan.
One stiff leg up and under, then she was standing on her own two feet. Wobbly but alive.
A look at Elias’s gray face told her he was too, though barely.
Chapter 18
Survival depended on lots of factors. Training played a part, at least for Leo, and overall fitness—both physical and mental. There was instinct too—that indefinable thing that told people to duck when they hadn’t yet heard a weapon being fired. In the air, instinct had saved her ass over and over again.
Led by instinct and hardheadedness, she bent, slid her numb hands under Elias’s shoulders, and let herself fall back—his weight working against gravity to keep her up. They went maybe five inches, but even that pulled his feet from the water, bringing the promise of dry ground that much closer.
Her hard exhale blew a cloud of vapor into the air.
Wet fabric clung to their bodies, held them in death’s cold grip, seeping through skin into muscles and bones.
The only thing that kept her brain moving and her lungs pumping was her will to survive.
She looked down at the man who’d saved her life, splayed out like an oversized rag doll, and amended that thought. It wasn’t just her will that kept her here. It was Elias’s.
And now it was payback time.
Another heave back and up, over rocks that dug into his heavy frame, hard enough to bruise. Didn’t matter. What mattered was getting him dry and warm. Before his heart stopped.
Talk about a shitty twenty-four hours.
For some reason, that made her laugh. The spasms started low in her belly to mingle with the shivering that still wracked her entire frame, and came out of her mouth in weird bursts, the sound nothing like her usual voice.
Another foot up, closer to the trees now. Close. Close.
Another foot, another.
Was his shivering slowing down? Oh no. That was bad. She leaned forward and grabbed his chin in one hand, said his name loudly. No response. He was cold and wet and pliable as a dead fish.
Had to get him out of those clothes.
Shit. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get them into the shelter of the trees and off this wet, pebbly shore.
His eyes opened. They were green, not the light brown she’d thought. Green and clear as glass in the fading daylight. They met hers, held them for three long seconds, and then rolled into the back of his head.
“Oh, no. No, you don’t,” she whispered, her voice having let out ages ago. “You stay here, Elias. Stay with me.”
Bo let out a low, mournful sound, drawing Leo’s attention back to the water’s edge. The bag. There’d be something in there she could use.
She raced down as fast as her feet would take her, half crawling and stumbling over the sharp, uneven rocks, and dragged the pack up.
