“I heard her—” My throat is tight. “Nick, that sounded like—”
“I know what it sounded like,” he says, voice taut but controlled. “But you don’t help her by dying next to her. We move. Together. Now.”
I force air into my lungs, try to pull myself back from the edge of pure, blinding terror. The rope between us is tight, our boots braced against the slick ground as we push forward into the storm.
If she fell…
No. No. No. She can’t have. She can’t.
Nick keeps his body angled toward the drop, watching every step we take. “The light came from just ahead,” he shouts over the wind. “She’s close.”
I can barely hear him. All I can hear is that scream, tearing through my head, over and over.
Please be alive, Emms. Please.
Chapter 16
Emma
My fingers are socold they barely feel like mine as I fumble with the torch on my phone. I manage to switch it on and lift it, waving it weakly through the thick air. For a moment the beam cuts through the gloom and I let out a shaky breath, hoping Alex sees it.
But then my hand jerks with the wind. My grip slips. The phone skids across my palm, bounces off a rock and tumbles down the slope.
“No!” My voice cracks as the tiny light vanishes into the mist below.
Panic explodes in my chest. The phone was my lifeline. My only way of—
I scramble after it before I can think better of it. I plant one foot down the slope, reaching for anything, everything, but the moment my boot touches the wet grass it slides. My legs shoot out from under me and I slam onto my hip. Instinct makes me claw at the ground. My fingers dig desperately into the cold, wiry grass, stopping me only because I happen to grab a tuft thick enough to hold my weight.
My whole body trembles. Not from the cold, though that’s brutal too. From the terror.
I can’t move. I don’t dare. If I try to stand, I’ll slide again, and I don’t know what’s below me. It feels steep. Exposed. Wrong.
Hot tears spill over my cheeks, instantly chilled by the wind. I curl myself tighter against the earth, pressing my forehead into my arm as though that might steady the shaking inside me.
Get a grip. Get a grip. Get a grip.
But I can’t. I’m frozen and I’m terrified and every horrible voice I’ve ever heard is suddenly shouting over the storm.
You’re such an idiot. You can’t do anything right. Always making a mess, always needing saving.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to breathe past the knot in my throat. Alex told me to stay put. Alex told me he was coming. I have nothing left but those two facts, but right now they’re everything.
Stay. Put.
I force myself to lean back ever so slightly until I’m wedged against what might be a lump of rock. My fingers throb from gripping the grass so hard. My legs ache from holding still. Time stretches strangely up here. It feels like minutes and hours at the same time.
The wind whistles over the ridge and every sound makes me flinch. I strain to listen for anything human. Footsteps. A voice. The scrape of boots on stone. Anything.
Nothing.
More tears spill, hot and frightened. I try to swallow them, but they keep coming.
Alex is coming. Alex will find me. Alex promised.
I cling to that thought until the storm almost drowns it out.
Then, faint through the roar of the wind, I hear it.
