Darkness by Karen Robards

Author:Karen Robards [Robards, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2016-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Hold up,” Cal said. “Let’s take a break.”

He was breathing hard, and Gina realized that she was, too. Gasping for air, actually, and still troubled by the stitch in her side. She grimaced and bent over, rubbing the place where it hurt.

“You all right?” he asked.

She nodded, too winded and in too much pain from the cramp to speak. They were in an area that she’d passed through on the way down, when her biggest concern had been making his phone call and she’d had no idea of the horrors awaiting her. This part of the mountain had apparently experienced a landslide at some point, because large boulders lay all around, partially blocking the path and also, she saw now, blocking them from the view of anyone who might be looking their way from above or below. Of the same near-black, volcanic composition as the mountains themselves, they were dusted with snow.

Good choice of location if they had to stop, Gina thought, then sat down abruptly on a boulder that was the approximate size and shape of a low bench. She had no choice: now that she’d stopped, her legs had turned to jelly and were refusing to support her.

You are not going to lose it.

It was an easy thing to tell herself. She was light-headed, though, and wobbly, and the boulder and the path and the steep, snowy slope behind her suddenly seemed as insubstantial as the drifting feathers of mist. Some eiders were nesting in the rocks nearby. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear and identify them from the soft rrr, rrr sounds they made.

Closing her eyes, Gina hung her head, breathing in the thin blue air, waiting for the dizziness to recede, for the stitch in her side to pass.

Cal didn’t say anything, simply sat down beside her. Never mind that she’d just seen him kill a man with a butcher knife, which officially made him the scariest person she’d ever met: he was big and solid and armed, all good things. Plus she was pretty sure they were on the same side. The warmth of his body so close against hers made her feel anchored, grounded. An instant, involuntary flashback to the way he’d kissed her heated her blood. That brief moment when their eyes had connected in the kitchen told the story—somehow in the midst of chaos and horror they had formed a bond. Despite everything—her uncertainty about how much she could trust him, the inescapable truth that if he hadn’t fallen out of the sky on top of her, none of these dreadful things would be happening—she took comfort in his presence.

She opened her eyes, saw that he’d put the backpacks on the rocky ground near his feet, and was relieved to discover that the backpacks, and his feet, and the path, and the mountain, and everything except the fog, remained stationary. The wind had picked up. Cold and damp, it blew in gusts from the bay, smelling of the sea, sending clouds of fog scudding past them like sailboats in a regatta.

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