“A gun?” I asked.
“Bears. And other things that go grrrrr in the night.” She tucked the gun away somewhere on her shadowy figure. “Get your rain gear. I’ll get the others.”
Skyla ducked outside, yelling orders, and a scurry of action erupted from the other tents. I found my poncho, shrugged it on, and stepped out into the mêlée.
Skyla shouted over the storm. “Everybody stay low, spread out, and get across to the woods as fast as possible.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and drew in a deep breath. This sucked. Badly. I dashed out into the open, doing a kind of crazy duck waddle. I am not a lightning rod… I am not a lightning rod. My imagination morphed the distance to the trees into the equivalent of several football fields, when I was certain it had been only fifty yards or so. I huffed and puffed and eventually reached the trees along with the others.
“Get deep,” said Skyla, who had remembered to grab a flashlight. I mentally smacked myself for panicking and forgetting mine. A flash of green lit Skyla’s face, and she passed me a glow stick. “Work your way into the woods, Mundy.”
“You really are a marine, aren’t you?” I said. Skyla either didn’t hear me or was too focused on trekking into the dark forest to reply. I fell in behind her and concentrated on not tripping over roots and rocks.
“Stay between the trees,” Skyla yelled out across the woods. The beams of other flashlights bobbed in the distance, but the storm drowned out the others’ voices. Skyla eventually stopped in a space where the trees had grown into a sort of semi-circle. “Get here in the middle and stay low,” she said. “You don’t want to be too close to any one of the trees. Let them take the hit, but don’t be close enough to get a second-hand jolt.”
I nodded and toddled out to the center. The thick canopy of spruce and pines did little to stop the rain, but they protected us better than the tents. The other women had taken shelter farther away. The storm dampened their shouts and dimmed their lights. Even though Skyla probably sat somewhere nearby, I felt incredibly alone as the storm raged around me. I crouched into a ball, trying to conserve body heat, and pulled my hood low over my face.
I guess that’s why I didn’t see the wolf until he attacked.
Skyla screamed as the beast tackled me. He passed over me in a streak of dark shadow, rank breath, and wet fur. Sharp claws raked across my chest, and teeth tore into the soft meat at the juncture of my neck and shoulder. I shrieked and rolled over, curling into a ball, fetal position fully employed. I threw my arms over my head and waited for the wolf to come back.
Skyla shined her flashlight at a dark place behind me. She drew her gun from a holster at her hip and pointed the barrel in the direction of her flashlight beam. Slowly she spun in a circle, shining her light in an arc, keeping her gun up and ready. My heart flailed against my ribs and pain throbbed somewhere in the back of my mind, but terror and adrenaline had temporarily numbed my senses.
Silent and moving as fast as a striking snake, the wolf lunged from the shadows behind Skyla. I screamed. Skyla turned and fired but missed. The wolf escaped into the shadows again. Several of the other women from our group must have heard the gunfire. They called out to Skyla. “Stay back,” she yelled at them. “There’s a wolf.”
“Don’t shoot us by mistake,” someone hollered in reply.
“Then stay the hell back like I said!” Skyla muttered a string of curses under her breath. “God, I don’t like firing this thing in the dark, especially when I’m surrounded by people I can’t see.”
Skyla holstered her gun and drew something else from her side—a long, wide knife. A bowie knife. I don’t know how I knew that—probably some random fact passed on by my brother. She spread her legs wide, lowering her center of gravity, and swiveled her head like a probing owl.
The wolf sprang from the darkness, aiming for me again. Skyla leapt for him, and the two fell to the ground, their dark shadows writhing like angry demons, grunting and growling, snarling and cursing. She had dropped her flashlight, but its ambient glow cast the fight in an eerie, gothic haze.
The wolf barked a high-pitched cry, and Skyla kicked him aside. He rounded on her and hunkered low, braced for another attack. The wolf’s lips rolled off its teeth, and a snarl ripped from its chest. I rolled to my knees and backed away. Skyla sidled closer, placing herself as a barrier in front of me.
Somewhere deep down, I objected to my helplessness, but I had no weapon and no clue how to defend myself. The awareness of my vulnerability and uselessness settled in my gut like rotten meat. I didn’t care to be a victim.
The wolf lunged. I yelped and fell back. Skyla jabbed with her knife, but the wolf feinted to one side, spun, and came at her again. Skyla slashed with her knife once more—this time making contact. The wolf yipped and scurried away. He repositioned for another assault, but then he hesitated and prowled before us, considering, studying, calculating.
“That’s right, you dirty bastard,” Skyla said, panting. She reached a free hand around to her side, where she had holstered her gun. “You’re messing with the wrong bitch.”
The wolf growled, baring his teeth, and eased back into the shadows.
Skyla shifted closer to me. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The light of a nearby glow stick revealed bloodstains, thick and dark, saturating my shirt. I brushed my fingers over my shoulder and found shredded flesh and bone and more warm blood. “Shit, shit, shit,” I whimpered. The assessment of my wounds revived my pain. I sucked in a breath, gritted my teeth, and fought the urge to black out, or vomit, or both.
“Hold it together,” Skyla said. “We’re going to get through this.”
Each heartbeat drained blood from the gashes in my neck and shoulder. The little I remembered about anatomy from high school biology classes suggested the wolf’s attack had missed the major arteries. Or else I’d be dead by now. Still, the adrenaline dump and blood loss had devoured my energy stores. A dizzying sickness stirred my stomach, and black spots sprinkled across my vision.
Skyla drew her gun and antagonized the wolf again, which seemed like the wrong thing to do. “Come on out, you mutt son of a whore. Why the hesitation? Afraid to finish what you started?”
As if he understood, the wolf darted in from the shadows, fast and snapping its teeth at Skyla. She fired, but he moved too fast—unnaturally fast. He dodged aside. Skyla fired at him again. The wolf screamed an ear-splitting, gut-wrenching issue of canine pain and dashed away into the darkness. Skyla pumped her fist. “Got the bastard!”
“Hang in there, girlfriend,” she said to me. I barely heard her—keeping my eyes open required all of my concentration. “If he comes back, I’ll finish him off.”
“Keedokee,” I said, intoxicated by exhaustion and pain. I pulled my knees into my chest, closed my eyes, and sank into my thoughts, retreating to the comfort of old memories: Mani and me, playing on the beach together as children. An imaginary hot sun warmed my skin. I clung to that sensation like a lifeline. The vividness of the memory transported me away from the grove of trees and into a paradise of blessed heat and bright daylight, but then Skyla called my name, and the desperation in her voice brought me to the present. I opened my eyes but then clenched them shut again, blocking out the blinding glare of… sunlight?
“Mundy.” Skyla’s voice was dulled by the rain, but I heard her surprise. “What the hell are you doing?”
What the hell, indeed. The ground, the trees, the air itself reflected a brilliant radiance. Heat waves shimmered throughout the open space. I shook my head, blinked, and rubbed my eyes. Vivid dreams I had learned to accept, but hallucinations worried me. Only crazy people hallucinated, people whose grasp on sanity had slackened. But it wasn’t a hallucination if Skyla could see it too, right?
Skyla’s question indicated the vision was real.
The light and the heat were true—and they were radiating from me. On top of injury and blood loss, whatever this was, this illumination
, this force, it guzzled my strength like a thirsty desert gulps the rain. Shock sapped my responsiveness. A fog settled around the periphery of my awareness and thickened into impenetrable darkness. The light and heat faded away, and a cold blackness took its place.
In my waning consciousness I imagined the sound of horse hooves. Death coming for me on a pale horse? I giggled.
A beam of light flashed and sliced through the haze. Another growl, deeper and louder than the wolf’s, roared into the trees. Voices. Yelling. I let the darkness lull me away, finding it preferable to the mind-blurring pain in my shoulder and neck.
Someone shouted. I knew that voice, and hearing it brought me to the surface of consciousness again. Hands grasping. Arms lifting. “Solina?” I forced my eyes open. Skyla’s flashlight highlighted the planes and angles of a familiar and totally unexpected face. Aleksander Thorin? Here? Now? Impossible. I shut my eyes again. “You’re safe, Solina,” Thorin said. “I got you.”
“What are you doing here?” Skyla asked.
“Search and rescue,” Thorin said. “What does it look like?”
“There’s an awful lot of blood. The bastard came out of nowhere.”
“Where did he go?”
“Little Miss Sunshine here went off like a flare. Air traffic in Anchorage was taking off and landing in her glow. I only saw the wolf for a second after that, and he was bugging out. Full tactical retrograde.”
“You say that light came from her?” Thorin jiggled me until I opened my eyes again. “Solina, can you explain?”
“Snirrreee,” I said. It made perfect sense in the moment.
“What?”
“She’s losing it,” Skyla said. “We’ve got to get her somewhere safe and stop the bleeding.”
“What about you?” Thorin asked. “You’re not in the best shape, either.”
“I’ve got a first aid kit and some basic field medic training,” she said. “It’ll be enough to hold me together for now.”
“If you can make it through the night, I’ll send Joe and Hugh out to collect your group first thing in the morning.”
“I’ll be all right,” Skyla said. “Just take care of her.”
I must have groaned or something because they both fell silent. Someone squeezed my good arm. “Hang in there, chick,” Skyla said. “You got guts, remember? And girls with guts survive.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Wake up, Miss Mundy.”
“Unghh,” I said as an agonizing pain stabbed into my awareness. I clawed through a thick, cloying darkness and pried apart my eyelids. My blurry vision sharpened to reveal one solitary figure, haloed by soft lamplight. He looked like a holy figure in a renaissance painting. Or he would have, if not for his dishevelment.
Thorin leaned over me, and worry shone in his dark eyes and in the lines around his mouth. “I know you’re hurting, and I’m going to give you something that will help, but it will knock you out again. I have some questions I would like to ask you first.”
I swallowed a few times, trying to moisten the dry sock lodged in my throat. A glass appeared at my lips, and I gulped until water dribbled down my chin. When I blinked, the room came into focus—not a hospital, but a bedroom.
“You’re in the apartment over my store,” Thorin said, reading my thoughts. “Your wounds are cleaned, stitched, and bandaged.”
Reflexively, my hand went to my shoulder, but Thorin caught my fingers and pushed them away. “What about infection?” I said, envisioning Old Yeller foaming at the mouth.
Thorin sat beside the bed in a straight-backed chair. His hair hung around his face, unkempt from his trek through the rain. Mud and blood, my blood, stained his T-shirt. “I’m a competent medic,” he said. “And if what Skyla told me was true, you have little to fear when it comes to germs.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because the things that cause infections have no chance of withstanding the type of radiation you emanated.”
“Radiation?” I squeaked. I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to stick my fingers in my ear and sing la la la at the top of my lungs. Either that, or accept this was one of my dramatic, vivid dreams.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Thorin asked.
I coughed, and it felt like wolf claws raking into me again. I gasped and gritted my teeth until the pain subsided. Thorin waited for me to answer his question, but I delayed, not wanting to think about the horrors that had recently occurred. “What were you doing there?” I asked. “How did you know we were in trouble? How did you get me here?”
Thorin narrowed his eyes. His nostrils flared, and he exhaled an angry rush of breath like a bull preparing to charge. “Give and take, Miss Mundy,” he said. “Give me information, and I’ll return the favor.”
“How should I know what happened? One minute we were running for cover in the middle of a storm and the next a crazy wolf was trying to eat me.”
“I told you that you were making yourself vulnerable by going on this trip.”
“I am way too tired and in entirely too much pain to argue with you.”
A slim smile tugged at Thorin’s lips. “That’s the smartest decision you’ve made since coming to Alaska.”
I would have flipped him off, but lifting my hand required too much effort. My head throbbed, and the acid in my stomach churned in time to the beat, threatening to evacuate the remnants of my rehydrated dinner. “Either you’re going to have to give over those pain meds, or you’re going to end up interrogating a very sick interviewee. If you need me to demonstrate with graphic details, I’ll be glad to.”
Thorin sniffed and reached into a drawer in the nightstand beside my bed. He pulled out a hypodermic syringe and uncapped it. Needles didn’t bother me, not after wolf claws and fangs. Thorin waved the syringe at me like a carrot before a donkey. “There’s nothing more you can tell me? Any detail could help. It’s important I understand what we’re up against.”
“Please, Thorin.” My voice gave away, and if I said anything more, I would break into tears.
Thorin’s resolve crumpled. He uncapped the needle and sank it into my arm, bringing instant relief. “Miss Mundy, it would be wise to give your full cooperation.”
“Or what? Torture?”
Thorin set aside the empty needle and pushed his hair off his face. “There are things going on you know little about. I admit I know only modestly more than you. With your cooperation, we all might find some kind of understanding.”
“Who is ‘we’?’” I asked, sinking into a fuzzy place in my head.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out soon enough. For now, you just need to rest.”
I closed my eyes. Heavy sand filled my arms and legs and rendered me immobile. Not that I wanted to go anywhere. I only wanted the pain to stop. And I wanted to sleep. Sleep would solve all my problems. “I glowed,” I mumbled.
“Yes. I’d like to know how you did it.”
“I’m crazy.”
Thorin chuckled, and the sound of it gave me an even warmer and tinglier feeling than the medicine. In the last, hazy moments before my lights blinked out, Thorin said, “If you are crazy, Miss Mundy, then the rest of us are completely insane.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You look like death dug up from the grave,” Skyla said. She dumped several packets of Splenda in a huge cup of coffee and passed it to me. Her dark skin hid all but the worst bruises and scrapes, but she still looked like a wolf’s chew toy. She grunted and eased into a chair that kept a vigil at my bedside.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said. “Vogue named it the new look for fall.”
Thorin’s meds had kept me in a haze for a couple of days, but my healing had progressed to the point that, as long as I didn’t make sudden moves, a handful of ibuprofen managed the pain. But caffeine withdrawal was proving to be a bitch, so I raised the coffee cup and drained half of it in one giant gulp.
“Wow,” Skyla said, pausing with her own cup halfway to her lips.
&
nbsp; “I think eighty percent of my pain and discomfort was due to coffee deficiency.”
“Has it started working yet?”
“Why?”
“Because we need to talk.” Skyla leaned forward, put her elbows on her knees, and cupped her chin in one hand. “Are you ready to dismiss coincidence?”
“What do you mean?”
“That attack was no fluke.”
I groaned and fell against the pillows, then groaned again when that hurt.
Skyla arched an eyebrow. “You deny?”
“No.” I frowned. “It’s all connected.”
“Of course it is.”
“But how?”
Skyla puffed her cheeks and blew out the breath; the dark curls lying over her brow danced in the gust. “Have you ever felt out of place?”
I squinted and shook my head, not understanding.
“Okay, what I mean is, to put it bluntly—”
I interrupted. “You, blunt?”
“Snark all you want, but you are not who you thought you were.”
“Yeah, I got that. So, who am I?”
Skyla sighed and stood. She went to the window and gazed out at the bay. “I have some guesses. I researched while you were in oblivion, and I want to run some things by you.”
Thorin appeared in the doorway, materializing like a ghost. He had a real knack for that, I’d noticed. “I’d be interested to hear your conclusions as well,” he said.
Thorin was polished and refined in a charcoal suit and crisp shirt and tie. His hair gleamed like spun gold. Instead of refining him, the suit sharpened his angles and exaggerated his dangerousness. Although, with him, it was probably no exaggeration. Thorin tugged an upholstered chair from the corner and settled it beside Skyla’s seat.
The three of us stared back and forth at each other, wondering who would go first. Finally Skyla exhaled and slunk to my bedside. She plopped into her chair. “I was poking around at wolf myths like shape changers, skin walkers, werewolves, and loup-garou.”
Midnight Burning Page 11
