"Yes," she says. "I do."
I nod once and stand, and we start to gather our things. "One more thing," Caroline says as she shrugs my flannel into place over her shoulders. "When we get to town, you're buying me the greasiest, least bean-adjacent meal that sad little place can produce. That's my fee."
"Noted," I say.
God help me, I'm almost smiling when I say it.
21
CAROLINE
Hiking fourteen miles through a blizzard starts off exactly as bad as it sounds.
And then it gets worse.
For the first hour, I keep up a respectable internal monologue. I narrate the descent to an imaginary jury.Ladies and gentlemen, observe the plaintiff, one Caroline Oglethorpe, formerly of East Seventy-Eighth Street, currently of Nowhere, dressed in an oversized flannel and a borrowed jacket, following a former Bratva enforcer down a drainage that has clearly never been approved by any municipal safety board.
The snow wails back like the angriest jury that's ever been summoned.
Afon walks in front of me, breaking trail. That means he plows a furrow through knee-deep powder with his body so that I can walk in his wake like the ugly duckling. Every few minutes, he checks over his shoulder to make sure I haven't died yet.
Wolf ranges ahead and behind, materializing out of the white like a furry cryptid, then vanishing again.
By the second hour, the imaginary jury has been dismissed. My world has narrowed to the back of Afon's jacket and the placement of my next step. My ankle, which Afon wrapped this morning, is more pissed than ever. Each step stings.
"How are you doing?" Afon calls back.
"Living the dream," I shout. "Five stars. Would descend again."
"I thought we agreed not to bullshit bullshitters."
"It'll hold," I say.
He nods grimly and keeps on moving.
The creek shows up around mile three, and let me say: whoever wrote poetry about babbling brooks never met this one. This asshole body of water doesn't babble or chuckle or any of those merry little verbs. It sorts of snarls menacingly beneath a layer of jagged ice. Afon hauls me across the bad sections. I don't even bother pretending I can do it without his help.
This is the plan, and the plan is working. That's what I keep telling myself. Miserable was the forecast. It's right on schedule.
And then Wolf stops.
He goes rigid in the trail ahead of us, one paw lifted mid-stride, ears swiveled downslope like satellite dishes, and his hackles rise in a slow ridge from his neck to his tail. I've seen this exact posture once before, in the cabin, the morning everything went wrong.
Afon's fist comes up. I have absorbed enough of his wordless military semaphore by now to know this meansstop and shut up, and I do both.
For a moment, there's nothing but the wind being litigious.
Then, under the storm: a whine. Mechanical. Rising and falling in pitch, somewhere below us and to the east, working back and forth like a sewing machine stitching its way across the mountain.
A snowmobile. Maybe two.
My stomach goes parasailing off the nearest cliff.
Afon doesn't move for thirty full seconds. He stands with his head canted, the snow piling up on his shoulders like the world's worst dandruff. Then he comes back to me, close enough that he doesn't have to shout.
"They're running a search pattern," he says. "Lower slopes. East side of the drainage."
"Inthis?" I gesture at the apocalypse around us. "I thought the whole point of the storm was that nobody sane would be out in it."
