"Hold on," I order for the second time.
Caroline's arms lock around my waist. I pin the throttle.
We tear out of the clearing heading north, the snowmobile's track biting into the snow and spitting a rooster tail behind us. The trail is narrow and overgrown, more memory than path, but I ran it last night in full dark and I can do it again in the gray light with my eyes half shut.
The first shot cracks behind us as we hit the tree line. It snaps through branches somewhere to our right. Wide, but not wide enough for comfort. A second follows, closer, and I hear it hiss past at a pitch that tells me it's a rifle round, not a pistol.
These are not the same sloppy shooters from the logging camp.
Someone has upgraded the personnel.
I lean into a hard left turn around a granite outcrop. Caroline's grip tightens until I can feel her knuckles digging into my ribs. Wolf adjusts his weight behind us, brave and certain.
A third shot finds something.
Me, to be specific.
The impact is a hot, bright line across my left side, just above the hip. It's only a graze—the bullet kissed the skin and kept going. But that doesn't stop the pain. There's searing heat, followed by a wetness seeping into the waistband of my jeans. At least the muscles underneath still work and the bones are intact.
I don't flinch.
I don't slow down.
And I sure as hell don't tell Caroline.
The trail climbs. The snowmobile's engine screams as the grade steepens, the track clawing for purchase on the icy ground. Trees close in on both sides. Behind us, the shots have stopped, which means we're out of range or they've lost line of sight. Either works.
We climb higher into the mountain, away from the cabin, the logging camp, Pine Hollow, and every piece of infrastructure that connects this wilderness to the civilized world.
The air thins. The trees change from birch to spruce. The snow deepens.
I keep one hand on the throttle and press the other against my left side, where the blood is warm and steady against my palm.
It'll keep. Everything keeps, until it doesn't.
12
CAROLINE
Four miles,Afon said.Four miles north and a thousand feet up.
What he failed to mention was that those four miles would be conducted at a forty-degree incline through snow deep enough to bury a moose, on a stolen snowmobile, with a hundred-and-thirty-pound Rottweiler breathing down my neck like a furry rear gunner. By the time the trees finally thin out, my thighs have lost all sensation and my face has been wind-blasted into the texture of a pork rind. I will never complain about the 6 train again. Compared to this shit, the 6 train is a chariot. The 6 train is a limousine. The 6 train is the height of human transit achievement.
Finally, we reach what is surely one floor below heaven, and come to a stop. The engine dies.
"We're here," Afon says.
I lift my head from between his shoulder blades, where it has been wedged for most of the ride, and take a gander at what "here" looks like.
Aw, dammit.
The mining hut makes Afon's cabin look like the Aman.
It's a squat rectangle of gray, crumbling stone and weathered timber, maybe twelve feet by sixteen, shouldered up against a granite face like it's hiding from the wind. Which, to be fair, is a good call, because the wind up here is absolutely miserable. The roof is corrugated metal gone orange with rust. There's one window, small and deep-set, with glass so old it has actual ripples in it. A stovepipe pokes up at a bizarre,Alice in the Wonderlandkind of angle.
"It's charming," I say in a false cheery voice. "It's givingYellowstonemeets Soviet gulag."
Afon grunts and swings off the snowmobile. Without his support, I slither off the seat like a Jell-O mold escaping its tin. If it weren't for Wolf hopping down at a very opportune moment and throwing his weight into my hip, I would've probably kept on slithering down the mountain all the way back to Pine Hollow.
