Jack’s head went up. “What was that?” he whispered.
There was a snap of twig from across the creek and Kate froze. She was dressed in a Pendleton flannel shirt in a green-brown-gold check and blue jeans, colors dull enough to fade literally into the woodwork of an autumn forest, deliberately chosen to do so. Jack was similarly dressed. It was after dark besides, and she and Jack were standing at the base of the deadfall, the remaining root structure splayed around them like an ungainly hundred-legged starfish. Her ears strained for movement, words, anything.
A woman’s voice came from farther down the creek, angry, demanding, in German.
From directly across the creek, at the other end of the trunk, came a male reply, also in German, short and to the point. Kate didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Jack’s arm gripped her shoulders.
Eberhard couldn’t know they were there, not with any certainty.
Senta’s voice came again, furious this time, imperious, filled with a passionate wish to be revenged that would have been translatable from any language.
Eberhard replied again, shortly. Kate caught the word “nacht.” From the Christmas carol she was pretty sure that meant “night.”
Yes, she thought, it is night, it’s too dark for you to be out here stumbling around, go back to the lodge, don’t find me, don’t find Jack, go back to the lodge and let me find Jack some shelter, let me treat his wounds, let me regroup, find my strength, and then I’ll be happy to face you down when and where you choose, you sadistic, raping, murdering sons of bitches, go back to the lodge, go back, go back.
Eberhard didn’t move, and for a single terrifying moment she thought that the intensity of her feelings had reached him somehow, had halted him as he was about to turn and go back.
The voice came to her out of the night. “Good night, Fraulein Kate. Sleep well. In the morning light when we come you will have need of sleep. Senta is not happy with you, oh no.”
A ploy, that’s all it was. If he’d really thought they were there he would have crossed the log. Wouldn’t he?
There was a deep, rich chuckle, and Kate found herself wondering if he could smell Jack’s blood. She thrust the image from her mind and tightened her arm around Jack’s waist.
The chuckle was followed by a step, another, the distinctive sound of careless, inexperienced feet traveling through the undergrowth, crushing twigs, snapping branches, mowing down bushes, letting everybody know for miles around who and what they were and where they were going.
Kate let out a soundless breath she hadn’t even known she was holding and sagged against the roots of the deadfall only so long as Eberhard’s heavy footsteps were still within earshot, Jack leaning against her.
The second they weren’t, she pulled free. “Can you make it down the bank?”
“I’ll try.”
She didn’t like the sound of his voice, rough-edged with pain, or the sound of his breath, which had begun to rasp, as if he were breathing through more than his nose. She dropped down the bank to the bed of the creek and turned to guide him down. He stubbed his toe on a rock and went down to one knee, unable to stifle a moan of pain.
“Come on, Jack,” she said, pulling him to his feet. “Keep moving. They know this area, hell, we walked them all over it when we were looking for Hendrik. We have to get somewhere they haven’t seen, that they aren’t familiar with.”
She urged him upstream, goading, beseeching, praising, scolding, her urgent need for haste hindered by his slow, halting progress. Moonrise wasn’t far off, she thought as she guided him around a boulder. She didn’t care if it was brewing up a storm; strong winds had a habit of pushing clouds out of the way as fast as they had brought them up in the first place. Eberhard had said they were headed for the lodge, had certainly sounded like it, but there was nothing to say he hadn’t doubled his tracks and was after her right now.
If their positions had been reversed, Kate would have been.
Quartz made up a good part of the creek bed—it had been the site of a gold mine, after all—and she was grateful for it. White stones gleamed up at them through the darkness and guided their feet. As their eyes became accustomed to the dark they tripped less and moved faster.
Kate tried not to think that the creek bed would be a natural trail to take in following the two of them. At least the wind was loud enough now to cover the sound of their footsteps. If Senta and Eberhard were behind them, they wouldn’t hear anything. Of course, Kate and Jack wouldn’t hear them, either. They could be right behind them, just around the last bend in the creek, one of them could have somehow gained ground on the far side of the creek, they could be waiting—
She caught herself. It did her no good to think that way. She had watched a wolf pack pull down a caribou calf once, cut it out of the herd and run it right off its feet, too tired to be terrified any longer of its fate. It could happen to her, to Jack, right here, right now, if she let it. Jack was moving in dogged silence, placing one foot in front of the other with the exaggerated care of a drunk, but his hand was clutching his belly as if he were afraid his guts were going to spill out. Kate was afraid they were, too. Maybe they should just find a convenient boulder and sit down, maybe—
No. Kate Shugak didn’t give up, she didn’t give in and she wouldn’t give out.
The wind whipped the tops of the trees back and forth. The boughs rustled. The clouds scudded overhead, and as she had thought it might, now and then a gleam of moon showed through. It was as quickly extinguished.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. The line popped into her head from out of nowhere, and, a little giddy, she went with it.
It was from a ballad, a form of poetry that in her opinion was greatly overlooked, from galloping the good news from Ghent to Aix with Browning to riding to spread the alarm to every Middlesex village and farm with Longfellow to taking the oath of the Brother-in-Blood with Kipling. What was this poem? For some reason she found it hard to concentrate. She hitched her arm around Jack’s waist, took a firmer grip on his hand and plowed on.
The Highwayman, that was it. Who had written it? Hoyle? Royce? Noyes, that was it, Alfred Noyes. She began to recite it in a breathless whisper, the way she had memorized it that semester of discovery at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, so long ago and so far away.
“‘The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,’” she whispered to the wind, bringing her feet into the rhythm of the words. One made the other easier; she wasn’t sure which.
“‘The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas.’” The creek turned right abruptly, marked by a tumble of rock down a bank and three dangerously tilted spruce trees.
“‘The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor.’” There wasn’t anything moorish about this landscape.
She recited it all, all the bits she could remember, Jack’s body an ominously increasing weight. By the time the highwayman was shot down like a dog on the highway she was more than giddy, she was light-headed and unsteady on her feet, but they had covered a lot of territory, perhaps a mile, perhaps more. Was the highwayman riding, riding, riding, not up to her door but up her backside? Were they going to be cut down like a dog, too? Like Mutt?
She guided Jack around a pile of rock without either one of them falling on their faces and turned right with the creek. She could feel the ground rising, and was aware that the creek bed was leading her slowly but surely in the direction of the ridge. The ridge where Demetri and Old Sam might lie dead.
Or might be waiting for help.
Or ready to offer it.
She wouldn’t know until she got there.
And she wasn’t going to get there tonight. Her head hurt and she was exhausted. Ahead, a dense stand of what might be diamond willow loomed blackly against the bank.
“Come on, Jack,” she said. “We’ll crawl in there.”
He let her tug him toward it, let her manhandle him up the bank, let her haul him into the heart
of the thicket. Leaves lay loose all around. She pushed together a pile between two low-lying limbs and bullied Jack onto it, lay down next to him and scooped up more for cover. He was out at once, his breathing stertorous. The wet spot on the front of his shirt was crusting over. She stripped her shirt off, cut the sleeves from it with her Swiss army knife and cut them into clumsy strips, operating mostly by touch. She wadded the body of the shirt against his wound and tied it down with knotted-together strips of sleeve.
It was too dark to do anything more. Careful not to touch his wound, she wrapped herself around his unconscious body, one leg across his thighs, one arm across his chest, her head snuggled into his shoulder. Her nostrils were filled with the smell of his blood. She was still shivering.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the down comforter on her bed on the homestead back in the Park, a thick fluff of feathers between some smooth linen blend that kept her warm on the coldest nights of winter. If she tried, she could remember just how toasty it felt to lie beneath that comforter, how safe, how secure, how very, very warm, and how much warmer it was when Jack shared it with her.
She slept.
*
Something cold pressed against her cheek. Rain. There was a soft, keening sound. Wind. The storm was on them. She murmured an inarticulate protest and burrowed her face against his shoulder.
“Kate.” His voice held only the weakest echo of its usual deep assurance. “Wake up. We’ve got company.”
The meaning of his words penetrated her consciousness and she shot upright in a shower of leaves, ready to fight.
Mutt was lying next to them.
“Mutt!” Uncaring of the loudness of her shriek, forgetting for the moment the danger they were in, Kate threw her arms around Mutt’s neck and buried her face in the thick gray fur. “Mutt,” she said, her voice muffled. Unbidden, hot tears slid down her face and soaked Mutt’s neck.
She pulled back and ran her hands over Mutt’s body. One came away sticky with congealed blood. Mutt’s left side just forward of the haunch was laid open, fur and flesh parted in a four-inch gash to show the white gleam of bone beneath. “Christ,” Kate breathed.
Mutt’s right eye was almost swollen shut, and cautious investigation revealed a hard knot halfway between eye and ear. A blow from a rifle butt, perhaps. Painful, but not fatal.
Not fatal to the receiver, she thought. She welcomed the red wave of anger that swept over her this time, warming, animating, inspiring.
She became aware of the quality of silence on the other side of her and turned to see that Jack’s eyes were closed. “Jack?”
No response.
Fingers made clumsy by dread searched for a pulse in his throat. It was barely there, faint, erratic, but there.
His legs and hands were cold. Everywhere she looked was blood, matting his shirt, her makeshift bandage, the grass, the leaves, her hands, the left leg of her jeans where it had rested against his thighs.
“Jack, come on, wake up.” She pulled him toward her, trying to discover in the pale light of dawn how badly he’d been hurt. “Jack? Jack?”
His eyelids fluttered open. “Kate?”
“Jack!” Kate was ashamed of the tears that sprang to her eyes and blinked them back. “God, Jack, you scared me, I thought you were dead.”
A faint smile crossed his face. “Damn near.”
“Can you roll toward me? I can’t see—” His face twisted and he groaned as he turned. She raised the shirt padding his wound to peer beneath, and her words stuck in her throat. Most of his left side had been shot away. Part of an intestine was falling out of his stomach, and something else she couldn’t identify.
She looked around frantically for anything to hold him together until she could figure out how to get him into the lodge and get some fluids into him. George had to be on his way back by now, he had to be. “Jack, I’ve got to get you back to the lodge,” she said. “Put your right hand here and press, can you do that? Jack?”
His eyes opened again, and this time they were very clear, the clearest, the surest, the most loving she’d ever seen them. One hand raised as if to touch her cheek, didn’t quite make it. He said something in a voice too low for her to hear. She leaned forward, tears sliding down her cheek to fall on his. “What?”
The words were little above a whisper. “Light.”
“What?”
He struggled for breath. “What you are. Light bright shining.” He tried to smile. His hand dropped.
“Don’t,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you dare die on me, you miserable bastard, don’t you dare!”
One corner of his mouth turned up in the parody of a grin. “You’ll give orders to Peter at the gate, girl.”
“Bet your ass.” He winced and she said immediately, “Does it hurt? Where?”
A ghost of a laugh drifted out. “Everywhere. Don’t worry about it. We can’t go back to the lodge. What about Eberhard, and Senta?”
“I’ll fry their livers and serve them to you for breakfast,” she said fiercely.
His grin was a real one this time. “That’s my girl. One more reason why I love you, Kate.”
“Why this time?” she managed to say.
“Your fine-tuned sense of justice. Look out for Johnny for me, okay?”
“Look out for him yourself!” she shouted, breath catching on a sob.
“Promise?”
“I promise.” Her voice broke over the last word.
He shivered suddenly, grin fading. “I’m cold.”
All she had to put over him was leaves and those she heaped high over both of them, cuddling close, giving him all the heat from her body she had. Mutt struggled to her feet and dragged herself to his other side.
“Mutt?” he murmured.
“Right next to you,” Kate said. Mutt was watching quietly, yellow eyes knowing.
Jack turned his head and saw her. “Good girl. Good girl, Mutt. You got a piece of one of the bastards, anyway. Good girl.”
Mutt gave a “Whuff!” of acknowledgment and touched her nose briefly to Jack’s cheek before turning to lick again at her injured side.
Jack smiled up at Kate. “See? Life goes on.”
“Not without you,” Kate said.
It was a plea, a prayer, an appeal, please don’t go, please don’t go and leave me here all alone.
“Someday without you,” he said. “But not today.”
The tears came in a flood then, she couldn’t stop them. “Jack—”
“I love you, Shugak,” he said.
“I love you, too. Goddamn you. Jack, I love you, too.”
“Jesus, now I know I’m dying,” he said.
This time he actually managed to laugh out loud, a shadow of its former self but a real laugh nonetheless.
A laugh cut off abruptly by a guttural, phlegmy choking sound. His body stiffened.
The last breath rattled out as his body relaxed on the long exhalation, and it was as simple as that.
He went slack in her arms, everything that was him going somewhere else, somewhere from her.
She pulled him to her with frantic hands, head cradled to her breast, kissing him, hungry, frenzied kisses on his lips, his eyes, his cheeks, again and again as if she could forcibly breathe the life back into him, as if her love must be enough to make him live.
“No,” she said, at first in disbelief.
“No,” she shouted angrily, defiance in the face of death.
Her head fell back and she screamed it out loud to the sky, the earth, Calm Water’s Daughter and the Woman Who Keeps the Tides, Agudar, Raven, Buddha, Jehovah, all the gods old and new who had ever made useless promises to believers and failed yet again to keep them.
“No!”
Fifteen
I was afraid you were dead.
TIME PASSED. It began to rain, at first only a gentle pattering against the leaves above, increasing to a hard, cold, steady downpour that penetrated even that dense canopy before it ceased, to leave everyt
hing wet and dripping.
Kate sat with her arms around Jack, rocking back and forth, rocking, rocking, rocking.
Mutt whined, a questioning sound. Kate didn’t hear her.
Rocking.
Mutt heaved herself painfully to her feet, staggered a few steps and fell heavily.
Kate didn’t notice.
Rocking.
Mutt hauled herself across Jack’s body, crowding Kate.
Kate didn’t notice.
Rocking.
Mutt whined again, licked Kate’s cheek, rough tongue scraping damp skin.
Nothing.
Rocking.
Mutt barked once, sharp, right in Kate’s face.
She’d never done anything like that before in her life, and Kate blinked at her.
Mutt did it again.
The rocking stopped.
Kate looked down at Jack, eyes closed, slight smile on his lips, gaping wound in his side, warmth leaving his body even as she tried to hold it in with her arms, with her spirit, with her love.
In that moment she almost gave up.
“Jack.” she said. “Jack.”
The words were torn from her lips by the increasing wind, which ruffled the tops of the trees, the boughs creaking and groaning with the strain. A stray draft blew through, although she could barely feel it, which seemed odd. All she had on on top was the T-shirt she had worn beneath her flannel shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, and everything was soaked from the dew and the rain. She should be freezing. Instead, she felt warm. Warm and sleepy.
Lassitude crept over her and her eyelids drooped. Never mind, she thought. Her eyelids drooped, her shoulders sagged, her head nodded. Never mind. Let it go, just let it go.
A momentary silence fell, a lull between gusts.
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