by DC Little
She missed the warmth immediately, but the fire inside her pushed her on. Giving her shelter one last, forlorn glance, she hefted her pack to her back and started off into the deep snow. It took her only two steps in before she waded back out of the knee high snow into the protection of the grove. Opening her pack once again with growing irritation, she yanked out the pieces of leather that she tied over the top of her moccasin boots and her thighs. If she traipsed through that deep snow without her gaiters, it would soak her feet within an hour. That could be the death of her.
Pack tied back up and gaiters on, she pondered the situation a little more clearly. She had to go. It wasn’t something she could explain, but she knew something or someone needed her help. To get to them, she would need something to keep her from sinking to her knees with every step. It would triple the time to make it to...where? She didn’t even know.
Glancing at the snow-laden branches around her, she unsheathed her knife and attacked the nearest promising branch. After ten minutes, she had a litter of cedar branches at her feet. She used one of the leather straps that held her bear fur onto her pack, leaving only one to hold the heavy burden. She cut the other in half. It would take too long to dig through her pack to find more straps right now.
She had seen her dad make emergency snowshoes several times. Right now she wanted to kick herself for not bringing her sturdier, fully functional snowshoes she had sitting in her dwelling at home...doing no good to her at this moment. She knew the snow was coming. How had she forgotten them?
With a growl that reminded her of her father, she wove the cord around the branches, tying the main sticks together and allowing the cedar leaves to expand out. Leaving a bit of cord at the end, she tied them across her moccasins and tried them out in the shallow snow. They stayed on, so she gently walked into the deep drift, only sinking a few inches rather than eighteen.
“Well, they’re not my best,” she muttered, “but they’ll do. Great, now I’m talking to myself.”
She shook her head as she adjusted her pack and made wide sweeping steps. The constant swoosh-swoosh of the branches sweeping the snow calmed her. The pulsating still beat inside her, the urgency still threatening, but taking action gave her purpose.
She didn’t know what guided her steps or how she knew to turn one direction or the other. The calling came from within her as if the Creator gave her an internal compass. The calm soon faded as she felt her destination near. Not knowing what to expect filled her with tendrils of excitement that overpowered the fear of the unknown. She belonged here...wherever here was.
>>>—ORION—<<<
Orion shivered, each shake sending waves of pain through his leg. For the last ten minutes, he had screamed as he repeatedly hit the branch that speared through his thigh, pinning him to the ground. He looked down at the red snow underneath him, doing his best not to pass out from the sight. So much blood.
His strategy wasn’t working, leaving his hand bruised and his wound even bigger. His leg throbbed in between the deep piercing jabs that left him dizzy. Think. Think. They had a medic at the coalition...what had he said?
With a burst of realization, Orion pulled out his sling. He couldn’t bring himself to cut the paracord that had been so hard to find, so he wrapped the entire length of it above his wound. Tying it off sent him gasping in agony, but the red snow stopped expanding.
After catching his breath, Orion shifted onto his elbows to inspect what pinned him. The branch of the pine tree was no thicker than his thumb. A dead branch would be easy to break, but the green of it gave too much flexibility to snap. Once again he reached for the knife, remembering when his hand touched only his pants that he had given it to Lily.
He instantly regretted tossing his pack so far out of reach. Within it he had other tools he could use, including the knife he had found in Mills’ pocket.
Lying back in the snow, Orion watched the swirling white flakes whip around. The wind, now more of a breeze, made interesting patterns in the air. Well, if dying had to be done, he couldn’t think of a more beautiful place to do it. The image lulled him into a cathartic state until a flash of his sister’s face overlaid the swirling snow. After Lily’s face came Callie’s, and Shiloh’s, and all the girls that depended on him.
He had promised Lily he would return, telling her to hold out, remain strong, and run to Shiloh as soon as any threat appeared. Her wide eyes had watched him, and he knew she struggled with the desire to believe him over the need to believe in the false safety the Old Man preached. Sending her to Shiloh was a risk, but he didn’t want the girls to think he had abandoned them. Shiloh would keep the girls as safe as she could. She would find food, too. That one had the strength of leadership in her quiet way.
The question was time. Eventually, one girl would slip up, and the coalition would find them. At that point they were at the Old Man’s mercy, and Orion didn’t put too much stock into what Meyers’ mercy meant for the girls. The man had an archaic vision for women’s role in society. Rage fired inside him, burning off the shivers that had him trembling.
“Selfish brat,” Orion called himself. “People are relying on you, and you’re just going to give up? Call it a day?” His voice sounded eerie to his own ears, swirling around in the wind. He grit his teeth as he pushed back up to his elbows.
He knew it was futile, but he hollered for Mulroney just in case. The others were gone. If they had survived the storm, they were far from where he laid pinned. He mentally heard Mulroney’s grumbling voice and realized he would miss the grump.
“Hope you made it, Mulman,” Orio said, needing to hear his own voice.
Reaching for the branch, he peeled back the bark he had loosened with the worthless hacking that would surely leave his now swollen hand black and blue. Within his mind, he had stored more knowledge than most. From an early age, he observed others, gleaning information without them knowing. The one good thing Meyers did for him was to encourage his reading. Left alone to occupy himself while his mother attended to his baby sister and the Old Man ran the coalition, he devoured book after book.
One series he loved to read had these ingenious cowboys that used their surroundings to get out of real pickles, as they called them. Well, this definitely was a pickle. A wry smile pushed at his lips. What would those cowboys do in this situation?
One story had a cowboy roped and bound, left in a desert wash to die. He had used a rock to cut the ropes. It took a long time, but he had done it.
Orion searched the ground for rocks, knowing about two feet of snow covered any hopes of that. He lay back, continuing to search his mental database for any useful bit of information. When an idea finally popped into his mind, he sat forward, feeling the niggling of hope fluttering inside him.
He looked down at his sling tied around his thigh. Taking that off could cause him to bleed out, especially with the effort he knew he would need. Bending at the hips as best he could, he searched through the branches until his hands felt something besides branches and pine needles. His boot felt strange under his gloved and frozen fingers, but eventually he fiddled around enough until he found what he hoped was the shoelace. It took him at least another twenty minutes and two rest breaks before he had pulled the lace free.
Holding his prize, he sank back into the snow and caught his breath. His work was only half done, if that. The cold soaked into his back, and he realized his jacket had soaked through. If he didn’t get out of here and into some sort of shelter, he would freeze to death, still pinned under the pine. Thinking of his sister and the other girls, he pushed up with determination to see this through.
After peeling off the bark all the way around the branch, he wrapped the shoelace around the smooth stick. Fresh pine infiltrated his senses as he pulled the string one way and then the other, sawing with all the force he could muster. The position was awkward. His arms ached after a dozen pulls, and it would take a hundred times more than that to get through enough to break it off.
He a
llowed himself a brief rest after twenty repetitions and began again. The vibration sent a stabbing pain into his thigh and down his lower leg. The whole appendage ached, his arms ached, his head pounded, but on he pushed. When he thought of giving up, he thought of his sister, Shiloh, and little Callie, and pushed on.
Orion felt his sanity fade as he lost himself to the motion of sawing back and forth. His body leaned back, pulling on the string, making his arms’ job that much more difficult, but he couldn’t feel them much, anyway.
The last time he had checked, the branch had barely more than a dent in it, and the shoelace had unraveled. With a snap, he fell back into the snow, sending a puff of flakes to settle back on top of him. Somewhere in the fuzzy depths of his mind, he understood the shoelace had finally broken.
He tore the soggy gloves off his hands and looked at his frozen fingers, flaming red and stiff. Turning them this way and that, he marveled at the waxy-looking flesh. He knew that meant something, but couldn’t pull it out from his hazy mind. They no longer shook. In fact, he no longer shivered at all.
The snow had stopped falling. Maybe it was warming up, yet the light dimmed as if the sun sank low on the horizon. He shook his head, trying to clear it. He needed to get out of here. Breaking the branch from the top obviously wasn’t working. He wracked his mind, which seemed as stable as a buoy on the river.
His head spun as he sat up to look at the situation again. Sure enough, the cut in the branch only came to a quarter of what he needed. He followed it down to his blood-soaked pants and the red snow beneath. Elation cleared his head for a moment. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
He dug, noticing he didn’t really feel the cold of the snow as he attempted to clear it from the side of his leg but ignoring the thought. His excitement died as the second swipe of his fingers hit something solid. The sensation sent odd pins and needles into his wrists, but not his fingers or the end of his hands.
Following his hand down to the snow, he saw that his blood had frozen into a solid sheet of ice. Without a stick, a rock, a knife, or anything useful, there was no getting through that layer.
He threw his head back and yelled. The sound echoed oddly around him. No one heard. No one came. Lying back in the snow, he panted, not wanting to give in but not knowing what else to try. He pulled at his jacket collar, suddenly feeling as hot as a summer's day. Unbuttoning his coat, he smiled at the odd and occasional stick or scrap piece of metal he used as a button.
A button. Could a button help somehow? He bent his neck, trying to loosen the sharpest and strongest button with no luck. Frustrated, he struggled out of his jacket to get a better look at the button. His fingers were useless, turning purple now. He couldn’t bend them or use them to grip anything.
Another scream erupted from him as he threw his jacket in anger. Immediately, he fell back into the snow, realizing what he had just done. His only source of warmth was now out of his reach. It was over. He was done for.
“I’m sorry, Lily. I let you down again...and the girls.” He squeezed his eyes shut, determined not to cry even while looking death in the face. As a young child, he swore an oath to never cry again. No one would have that power over him again, not even fate.
Keeping his eyes closed, he tried to wrap his delusional mind around the fact that he was dying. It didn’t take him long until he decided he didn’t like that idea and began singing a song to distract himself. It was one of those silly songs that kids sang around fires. He had taught it to the girls on long, frosty nights. Of course, they had had to whisper it.
“And the tree in the hole and the hole in the ground and the green grass grows around and around and the green grass grows around,” he sang, his voice sounding farther and farther away.
Would the others come looking for him? Maybe they would hear his song. Mulman wouldn’t have left him, would he?
He continued the song as his voice became quieter and words more mumbled until he felt the shadow of someone standing over him. He opened his eyes for a moment, blinked and squinted, his heart not even hammering nor jumping in surprise when he saw the figure above him.
“Hey Dad, we’ll be together at last, huh?” Orion pushed out a half-hearted wheezing chuckle. “What? All these years and you have nothing to say?”
His dad continued to stare down at him. His eyes accused him of leaving his sister behind, and indignation filled Orion. How could his dad blame him for abandoning his sister when he had abandoned them all? He continued ranting until the image of his father flickered, faded, and somehow turned into the most beautiful creature he had ever seen—an angel with long flowing red hair.
CHAPTER SIX
>>>—MERCY—<<<
Mercy hid behind a wide pine, feeling the air and sensing the fading pulse so close now. An arrow sat nocked in her bow, but she hadn’t even bothered to pull the string back.
She had traveled for hours in the deep snow as the pulsing within her kept her going. It had only been a few minutes since she had heard a human voice travel eerily on the wind. The rise and fall sent her skin rolling in goosebumps.
She saw his jacket first. It stopped her short. A part of her knew she was being led to a man, but seeing the reality gave her pause. In over eighteen years, she had seen no one who didn’t live in Zion. Her heart raced with the thought as she took a step forward.
A bare arm flung out from the branches of a fallen tree, limp and ghostly white. The temperature had dropped so suddenly as this storm had hit them yesterday, surely the man could not have survived without his jacket...or any clothes. Warily, her heart pounding a rhythm of fear and excitement, she walked wide around the tree that protected her from the view of the man.
The man lay motionless, his body lying in a shallow ditch of snow, most likely made by his movements. In a quick scan, she immediately noticed not only did he have pants on, but the tree skewered him to the ground. His blood had made a frozen lake of red beneath him.
Was he…?
She squeezed her eyes, not wanting to see a dead man, even if it was no one she knew. The pulse still beat within her but had lost its fervency, now weak and intermittent.
Taking a step closer so that she blocked the slow falling flakes from landing on him, she peered down into his handsome face. Short, almost black hair didn’t give his head much protection, and the scruff growing on his cheeks and chin was almost as long. His thick, dark lashes fluttered.
Mercy took a hand from her bow and pulled back her hood to see him better. “Hello?” The word sounded more like a breath as she held hers, hoping to get a response.
The young man’s eyes shot open, and she found herself lost in the deep blue of twilight. “Am I dead?”
Mercy dropped, setting her bow aside. She kept her face expressionless, but internally, pure chaos erupted. The eyes. He had THE eyes. Her blood rushed so loudly she barely heard his whispered words. Spots clouded her vision, and she knew the telltale sign of passing out.
Quickly squatting next to him, she could smell the sharp scent of pine mixed with something she couldn’t name, but the weirdly familiar aroma calmed her.
His eyelids lowered before fluttering back open, trying to focus on her. “Do angels not talk?” His words slurred, but a small quirk of his lip gave him an innocence, and somehow Mercy knew she would be safe.
“You're not dead,” she said, slipping her arrow back into her quiver and ducking her head through her bow to wear it on her back, out of the way. She reached out to touch his frozen hands, but dropped them when she felt a shock wave travel through her.
His eyes flashed open again, staring at her wide-eyed. “What was that?”
Mercy ignored him. She didn’t know what it was, but she felt it still tingling inside of her, and it made her feel vulnerable. She hated feeling vulnerable.
She had to shift focus. The man was half naked, lying in the snow for who knows how long. His slurred speech, waxy frozen fingers, clothes flung all over the place, and the fact that the guy didn
’t even shiver told her everything she needed to know.
“You have advanced stage hypothermia. We need to get you warmed up.”
“I heard angels had magic,” he slurred out, almost incomprehensible. “Is that what you zapped me with? I need to live...the girls...they rely on me.”
For someone on death’s doorstep, the guy sure talked a lot. Mercy had to keep herself turned away and focused on a task. Those eyes made her forget what she needed to do. She inspected his wound where the branch went through his thigh. Her eyes scanned the entire area, noticing something tied above the puncture.
Thank goodness he had the lucidness to constrict the blood vessels and slow the bleeding. It would take time to get him unstuck. He needed warmth before then.
She walked around, gathering his discarded clothing. After shaking out his shirt, she did her best to keep her eyes off his lean torso as she knelt at his head.
“We need to get your clothes back on.”
He pushed her away weakly. “No, I’m hot,” he murmured.
“You’re delusional,” she snapped, forcing his head through his shirt and dressing him like a young, disobedient child.
“You smell good,” he mumbled as she yanked his shirt over his washboard abs.
They were just abs. Most guys at Zion had abs like that, and they walked around shirtless all the time in summer. Why did his make her face fill with heat?
“Is this what heaven smells like?” He reached a limp, purpling hand toward her hair.
“You’re going to find out soon, if you don’t cooperate.” Her words held more retort than she intended, but the guy got under her skin. It left her feeling unsettled and wary.
Focus on the task.
She shook out the two sweaters he had before tugging them on him. She noticed how rough and thick their fabrics were even with holes in them. She could see how they could keep a person very warm. When pulling his jacket together, she paused, fingering the buttons, especially the pieces of metal.
