Behind Niki, a shoe scuffed pavement. The sound, small as it was, got her attention. Delia and Tom, having left the mobbed event at a local hotel, but still needing to talk, had pulled into this strip mall parking lot. With dusk coming on, every business had shuttered for the evening, so the lot had been helpfully vacant, except for one lone vehicle.
When they first arrived, no one had been in or near the battered old compact. Glancing over her shoulder, Niki spotted a woman, thirtyish, arms hugged to her chest, pacing alongside the car. She looked frazzled and worried.
“Are you okay?” Niki turned and called to her.
“My door lock is frozen,” the woman shouted back. “I tried turning it, but now my key is stuck.”
“Have you tried pouring hot water over it?”
“Nicola!” Delia said from the SUV’s interior, “What are you doing?”
“I would, but there’s nowhere to get any,” the woman said. “Everything’s closed and there’s nowhere else around here.”
Niki turned back toward the SUV and leaned in. Their driver had not waited to hold the door for her after all and sat behind the wheel. Delia’s doing, no doubt. Niki didn’t exist whenever her mother was around.
“Do we have any coffee or hot water in the mini-bar?” Niki asked.
“No, miss,” the driver said. “Just chilled water and other bottled drinks.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a lighter, would you?”
“I don’t smoke.”
Nor did Delia or Niki. Niki wished Tom hadn’t driven off moments before. He did smoke.
Damn. She could solve the dilemma in seconds, warming the lock using her gift. Hot liquid or a lighter would have been her first choice—no need to risk public exposure of her talent when a simpler answer would do—but in case neither worked and she did have to use her ability, they would have provided cover, with everyone assuming the lighter or water had done the trick.
“I’m sorry, we don’t have anything hot either,” Niki told the woman.
The driver started their SUV’s engine.
“Nicola!” Delia said. “Would you get in, please?”
Niki didn’t like the idea of leaving the woman here alone. The strip mall fronted on a remote stretch of highway, with the next nearest businesses at least two miles away. At the moment, the sky spit only the tiniest of ice crystals at them, but a heavy snow was forecast for this evening and Niki figured they had just fifteen minutes of daylight left. After that, the temperatures would fall dramatically.
“Would you like me to give it a try?” she asked the woman.
Niki would do it. Unfreeze the lock and hope the woman believed Niki had merely gotten lucky.
“I don’t think that would be good. The key feels ready to snap off already.” The woman held up a cell phone. “I called a locksmith.”
“Nicola, get in this car right now.”
“I think we should wait with her.” Niki said to her mother.
“Who?” Delia said.
Really? Was her mother that oblivious to others around her?
“The woman over there. Her car lock is frozen. She’s called a locksmith but–”
“A locksmith? From how far away? They could take an hour to get here. Or three!” Delia said.
“Exactly,” Niki said. “Don’t you think someone should wait with her until he arrives?”
“We’re late for our flight as it is.”
“It’s a private charter. Your charter. It’s not like they’re going to take off without you.”
Slightly shrill with annoyance up to this point, Delia’s voice deepened and sweetened. Niki felt mother’s unnatural power suddenly inject her, a startling nick of pain as the needle slid in, and then bliss. She’d never shot up with heroin, but she always imagined this was what addicts must experience, the irresistible happiness of listening to the drug and allowing it to guide your thoughts.
“Niki,” the drug urged her, “get in the car. We have a long way to go and you know I hate to be late. It would be rude to keep the flight crew at the airport waiting.”
A part of Niki recognized immediately what was happening. Her mother was using the gift on her. Niki’s conscience wouldn’t let her give up the fight just yet, however. She heard herself protest, her words barely making sense to her and echoing from across a great mental gulf.
“If…snows...hard the locksmith can’t get here?”
“Does she have a jacket?” the drug asked.
“Yes.”
“Then she’ll be fine. She can walk to help.”
“But–”
“Nicola...Niki...look at me.”
Delia Lusk’s periwinkle blue eyes were the heart of the high it was to know her. If you met her gaze, you became stoned on her, lost to the outside world. It didn’t matter who you were, she was your religion for as long as she opted to exert her power over you.
“Get in the car. Now.”
Without another word to the woman in the parking lot, neither wishing her good luck nor good-bye, Niki climbed into the SUV. They sped off, on their way toward the airport.
The following morning in L.A., Niki went online and checked the local news for the town they’d visited, still concerned. She wanted to know how much snow the area had received and how it might have impacted the roads. Instead she came across a small news item.
Nadine Grimley, 32, was raped in a strip mall parking lot at around 7:40 pm. She’d been locked out of her car, the online newspaper reported, and was waiting for help to arrive. The locksmith found her collapsed next to her vehicle, half-covered in snow.
Niki accepted full blame. She would never forgive herself. She had to find a way out of her mother’s grasp.
Chapter 10
Delia had always assumed Niki wasn’t gifted like she was. Niki guarded her secret obsessively. If her mother had known, or even suspected Niki could manipulate the temperatures and states of certain substances, she’d never leave her alone. She’d push and pry until she had a definitive answer as to exactly what Niki could do. Then she’d use her own gift to exploit her daughter. Niki envisioned a number of ways Delia could abuse her ability by exerting control over her, not the least of which would be for entertainment purposes. Delia’s star still shone brightly, but eventually it would fade and her mother would require something else to reignite it. What better object than a daughter she could put on display, in front of audiences, the larger, the more money and attention they raked in, the better. It wouldn’t matter if people thought Niki’s gift nothing more than a stage magician’s illusion. In fact, believing that might entice audiences all the more, leaving them to wonder and speculate on how she performed her “tricks.”
Worse, Niki would be helpless under her mother’s unique power. Unable to say no, or get away once snared in Delia’s psychic web, she would be trapped at her side for years, until audiences either grew bored, or her mother died.
Bryce paused on the steep ascent, sensing Niki had yet to move. Niki hugged the hill as before, hands manically gripping the ski poles, one snowshoe dug deep into the slope as Bryce had instructed.
“I won’t tell,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it?”
She could sputter and yammer out a denial, but what was the use in pretending?
“It’s not strangers I’m worried about.”
One of those expressive eyebrows of his lifted, as he looked a question at her.
“It’s my mother. I can only guess how Delia of the Red Carpet would love knowing her daughter had a special little something she could use to her career’s advantage.”
“Your mother is Delia Lusk?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He didn’t ask why she didn’t want her mother to find out. He also failed to ask the usual questions strangers did once they found out her mother was one of the film industry’s glitterati. What’s she like? What’s it like being the daughter of a movie star? Do
you know…? Fill in the blank with that person’s favorite actor or actress.
Instead, Bryce’s silence was laced with understanding, as well as an odd sadness. Something in his own family background resonated for him?
“I promise, Iris,” he said. “I won’t be telling anyone about you.”
Iris. Oops. They’d just met, but she’d already blown a big piece of her identity by telling him she was Delia Lusk’s daughter. A few minutes on Google and he’d soon realize Iris was the name of her deceased best friend, not hers. She was now an open webpage, while he kept his own story a mystery.
“You have a gift?” she asked.
He stared off at distant treetops, clearly uncomfortable, but nodded.
“I hear people calling.”
“Calling…”
“For help, mostly.”
“All the time?”
“No, thank God.”
Niki shivered. “I’ll say. I instantly wondered what it would be like to hear every desperate person’s cries for help with the problems in their lives.”
He refocused on her, that same intensity from minutes earlier trained on her once again.
“When I do hear someone, I know it’s important.”
“And this person, the one we’re going to save?”
“Got turned around and wandered away from the resort last night in the storm.”
Using the new method Bryce had shown her of kicking into and then stamping down on the snow, Niki restarted her trek up the mountainside. Delia may have prevented her from saving Nadine Grimley from sexual assault, but her mother wasn’t here to control her, and by damn she would do her best to reach this avalanche survivor.
“Alright, then. Let’s go get your victim,” she said.
When they reached the top of the ridge, however, and she got a clear view of what lay beyond, her spirits fell. Her determination evaporated.
Impossible.
She’d counted on finding a plateau of sorts, a place where the mountain leveled out, at least for a while, and at worst, a descent similar to the climb she’d just made.
Not this.
She and Bryce crowded side by side on the knife’s edge. If the ascent to this spot had been a steep one, the other side was pure 90-degree rock face. The “summit” they’d reached was a couple of feet wide, maybe a more generous three feet in spots, as it ran along the ridge to the east and west. Vertigo assaulted her. Dizziness nearly sent her plunging over the edge. She squatted down to feel closer to the earth so she’d be less likely to pitch over.
Gazing out across the small, snow-choked ravine below, she detected the results of the avalanche instantly. Snapped and uprooted trees, and a river of dirt and rock mixed with ice, had roared down the center, filling it until it resembled more of a valley than a cleft between mountain ridges. Here and there bits of wreckage from a now unidentifiable structure, the hut Bryce had mentioned, popped up out of the white or lay scattered across its surface.
He might have a head wound, but he wasn’t delusional. There really had been a second slide.
“Were you caught in that?”
“Yes.”
“What am I thinking? Of course you were, or else you would have come looking for help hours ago.”
She visualized him tumbling downhill with broken slabs of ice at 60 mph, whirled like the contents of a giant front-loader washing machine, and slammed ruthlessly up against trees and boulders, drowning in snow. It was a miracle he’d survived. Had it taken him all this time to dig himself out? Or had he lain unconscious atop the snow and only recently woken? Either way, no one had come to his rescue. With every resource concentrating on the larger disaster behind them at the resort, he’d had to find help on his own.
If the slide was real, that meant this wasn’t just a goose chase or a case of her having to humor the crazy person. Another, very real victim lay somewhere under all those tons of debris. Was that person still alive? She couldn’t picture how she’d stay sane were she buried like that.
More now than ever, she regretted having gone with Bryce when he’d asked, not because she didn’t want to help, but because she knew she could only disappoint. If she’d refused him back at the café, he would have inevitably gone on to the next person he found, ideally someone better equipped than she was to render aid.
“Bryce,” she said, voice soft, shaking her head. “You should have chosen someone else.”
She studied the mess below a moment longer, and then pulled out her cell phone. It refused to show a single bar.
“I can’t believe this!” she said. “We’re on top of a mountain and I can’t get a signal?” Angry, she shoved it back in her pocket. “Let me go back and get help. Now that you’ve shown me where it is, I can guide people to the spot. You can go down, stay with the victim, and–”
She broke off, wondering why Bryce hadn’t yet interrupted. Though standing tall to her fearful crouch, and steady as ever on his feet, he squinted in thought, or pain. She couldn’t tell which, and decided it was pain. Never should she have let a man with a head wound travel this far. She should have found some way to convince him to get medical help. This place wasn’t that difficult to find. He could have told rescuers where to look. The problem was that people with head wounds didn’t always think clearly. Hence his stubborn insistence on this quest.
What do I do now? I don’t know what to do.
Should she try to haul Bryce back to civilization against his will?
Good luck with that.
Or continue on this insane two-person rescue mission, realizing the avalanche’s second victim was likely dead and beyond rescue?
You could always just leave.
She could. It was the smartest, most sensible thing to do. Now that she knew the location of the avalanche, she could run back and get help on her own, without Bryce’s cooperation. He might–
“Iris, there’s no time,” Bryce said, anticipating her train of thought. “Do you know how long it takes a rescue team to get organized and on their way? I do. They’re trained to react quickly, but it still takes time. Especially if they’re in a spin at that other disaster.”
He gestured toward the wide debris field below with a flick of his chin. “He doesn’t have any left.”
“Bryce, please,” she said.
“All I need is an extra pair of hands. Then we’ll call in the cavalry.”
“But I’m not a rock climber. I’m terrified of heights. I’m in reasonable shape but I’m not the Hulk. You need someone else for this. Some guy would be better. Someone big.”
Bryce squatted down next to her and his sheer stoicism pulled her in, compelled her to face him. She really had no answer she could give to what she saw in his darkest of grey eyes. Calm and quiet, they told her failure wasn’t an option. Not his failure. Or hers.
“You’ll do.”
Chapter 11
“I can’t climb down that. I just can’t,” Niki backed one more step away from the rock face beneath her and Bryce. She’d never even used the climbing wall at her gym, where ropes, harnesses, and helpful spotters kept people from killing themselves.
“Not planning on it,” Bryce said. “We’re going about another hundred yards. On the other side of that,” he indicated a large outcropping, jutting into the ravine, perpendicular to the ridge, “the angle isn’t as steep and half of it is a snow-covered slope like the one we just climbed.”
Still doubtful, but grateful for another option, she let Bryce take point along the narrow summit. He made it look easy, like any casual stroll through a winter wonderland. For Niki, it was like creeping along a balance beam the height of Mt. Everest. Each shuffling step she took on the narrow strip of semi-level snow was a hard-fought victory. She wanted so badly to close her eyes until they reached their destination, and half-considered doing it, hoping it might relieve her vertigo, but knew she couldn’t afford a single misstep.
“Are you here with family for the holidays?” she asked. She didn’t expect
Bryce to answer, but talking took her mind off her fears.
As she suspected would happen, he didn’t answer. He just wasn’t a talker. Besides, they’d reached the tall outcropping. A shelf of ice covered in a few inches of snow encircled the rocks, the path barely wider than one of Niki’s borrowed snowshoes. She considered removing the shoes, but didn’t want to lose the extra traction they provided.
Her poles were of no use in navigating the shelf. She let them dangle from her wrists by their straps while she clung to the rocks with gloved fingers. Handhold to handhold, clumsy, shuffling step by shuffling step, she inched around the obstacle. As the rock curved, she lost sight of Bryce and though she told herself not to worry, fear attacked, loosening her control over her abilities. Ice in the crevices she touched began to melt under her fingertips, turning each makeshift grip slippery as a wet ice cube. Her whole body blasted heat and the snow beneath her sagged as it lost its winter-hardened composition.
Panic seeded itself in her chest.
“Quick, Iris, another step.”
Bryce had returned, climbing nimbly around the rock, facing into it and stepping sideways on the balls of his feet. She wished she could emulate him, but with the snowshoes it wasn’t possible. Her fingers locked on the only hold that hadn’t given way thus far and wouldn’t let go. She might be emitting enough heat to melt a glacier, but she was frozen in place, unable to move.
“Iris,” Bryce coaxed. “Another step. That’s all you have to do. I promise. Just one step.”
I can’t. I’m going to die.
Inch by inch, the snow supporting her cratered under her feet, pebbles and loose rock giving way. Her snowshoes slipped and slid. The weight pulling down on her fingers became unbearable. She was going to fall.
“Iris. Move your damn foot!”
He barked the command. Her muscles responded. She lifted and swung her rear foot around the one ahead and dug in just as the ice dropped out from under it. Flailing, her hands sought new holds. She slapped the stone hard, bruising her palms and jamming fingertips, but miraculously found a way to tether herself.
Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances Page 26
