by Susan Sey
Tim hooked his hands through Cara’s pack straps and yanked her to her feet, shoved her forward. “Keep going,” he shouted, and Willa realized that they were all shouting now. The roar of the fire had built into a scream. It filled her head and jittered through her veins, it inhabited her muscles and drove her feet into a sprint.
The scent of sanctuary was stronger now, sliding underneath the smoke and heat and dying birds. The trail gave a sudden lurch under their feet in the dark, angling steeply uphill and Willa cried out in relief. This was the last climb, she knew. They would crest their last hill and the Devil River was just a slippery scramble away, hiding in a deep notch between two piney ridges. She couldn’t see anything but she knew the trees were thinning as they climbed, knew the horizon would break free fifty yards ahead. Twenty-five. Ten.
The breath sawed in and out of her lungs, hot and useless. Her chest ached, her legs shook, but still she ran. Tim’s pack was close enough to touch and she knew he had his hands on Cara’s, driving her forward. Eli was right behind her, too, she realized suddenly, his hold on her own pack the only reason she hadn’t hit her knees half a dozen times in the past thirty seconds. A wave of love for him crashed over her.
“Come on, come on, come on,” he was muttering behind her. “Just over the hill, Cara!” he shouted. “You’re almost there!”
Then suddenly the trees were gone. They were standing on a sharp basalt ledge with a view that had been drawing hikers for a hundred years. And they could finally see.
The world was a deep pulsing orange, and the forest on the other side of the river was a spiky black silhouette, backlit by an advancing wall of flames. A fist of fire reached between the trunks as Willa watched, wrapped itself around the base of a two-hundred-foot pine and lifted it casually out of the ground. The tree exploded into fire, flew into the sky like a rocket and tumbled down the steep embankment toward the river. Willa cried out or tried to, but the air was blisteringly hot, as wavy as old glass. It scorched her throat and killed her voice. Plumes of fire floated through the air like clouds, rode the swirling updrafts, leapt from tree to tree like squirrels. They rained sparks, tiny fires floating out of the sky to drill through her clothes, bite at her skin. And there below them was the river.
It spilled among a jumble of rocks, black and rough and fast, racing toward the cliff, toward the lake below. But just before the edge, a massive hole opened up in the basalt, a perfectly round void the river had drilled from its own stream bed, a gaping maw into which the river fell and disappeared. It was a hundred yards downriver from them but the current was fast and greedy. One bad step could toss a hiker into it and—
“Go!” Eli shouted and reached around Willa to give the baby lawyers a mighty shove. They slid and stumbled down the slick, mossy rocks, and Willa followed. The river leapt and boiled at the base of the hill, the wind ripping waves up out of the surface and slapping them back down again. She didn’t break stride when she hit the edge, refused to let herself think about the hungry Kettle waiting downstream. She just threw off her pack and tossed herself into the water.
It swallowed her with an icy shock that closed her throat and sent a fresh fear trembling down her spine. If the Kettle didn’t kill them — or the fire — the cold water might. Lake Superior didn’t drown people so much as freeze them to death. The water was only waist-deep where they’d crashed into it, so she shoved herself to her feet. The current snatched and pushed at her, though, and her boots slid in the loose rocks tumbling along the riverbed. She went down hard. Water filled her nose and mouth and a thread of panic stitched through her starving lungs.
Then Eli’s hand was on her collar and she was hauled half out of the water. Her upper body landed across a large, flat rock in the middle of the river, her hips and legs still submerged. Eli was standing in the water in front of the rock Willa was clinging to, his back to the current, his chest to the rock. She could hear the baby lawyers shouting somewhere downstream, so presumably they hadn’t tumbled to their deaths in the Kettle.
“I have to help them with their fire shelter,” he shouted.
“What?” Her throat was on fire, her arms breaking out in goosebumps even as they burned in the heat.
He shoved a flat packet into her hands. “Here, hold onto this for a second.” He wrestled himself and the sodden pack he was still wearing out of the water until he was sitting on the rock beside her. He took the packet from her numb hands, ripped it open and gave it a hard shake. The furnace-blast of wind filled it and it snapped open. It looked like a tent/sleeping bag hybrid made of aluminum foil. He dropped the mouth of the fire shelter into the water and let water flow into it until the bottom sank. He hopped off the rock on Willa’s side this time, dug his boots into the gravel and braced against the current. He slipped the shelter over Willa’s boots and pulled it up to her shoulders until she was wearing it like a sleeping bag.
“Here,” he said, and threaded her hands through a couple of webbing loops near the top. “Use these to hold the hood down over your head until I get back. And Willa?” He grabbed a handful of her t-shirt and hauled her forward, pressed his mouth to hers with fierce promise. “I’m coming back. Do you hear me? I’m coming back for you.”
Then he stepped away from the rock and let the current sweep him toward the baby lawyers. She clung to the rock and watched him disappear.
He’d left her.
CHAPTER 36
SHE SHIVERED, THE air hot enough to scorch her throat while her legs went numb in the icy water filling her shelter. Tears — stupid and helpless — gathered in her eyes. She was going to die. They all were. But she was going to do it alone. A laugh broke through her tears, bitter and unsurprised. Of course she was going to die alone. Why should her death be any different than her life? She closed her eyes, rested her cheek on the rock and let the hood of the fire shelter slip down to her shoulders.
She didn’t blame Eli. He loved her. He’d said so and she didn’t doubt him. But he was who he was, and protecting others was as integral to his survival as oxygen. He couldn’t save himself before making sure everybody else was okay, even a couple of barely-adult idiots with better debate skills than survival instincts.
But at least the question that had been eating him alive since losing his entire crew had finally been answered: He wasn’t capable of enriching himself while risking others. It was a brand of selfishness that simply wasn’t in him. So there was no way he could leave a couple of bone-heads to their stubborn fate while the slenderest hope existed that he could save them and her, along with himself. Even through her pain and terror, she was aware of a deep, glowing satisfaction. Eli was finally whole again, doing exactly what he had been put on this earth to do — protecting the helpless.
It didn’t, however, change the fact that death was coming for them, relentless and ravenous. Nor did it change the fact that Willa was going to face it alone because everybody she cared about had something more important to do, somebody more important to save. As usual.
Even as the thought crossed her mind, she could taste its bitterness. It was an ugly thought, selfish and wrong. But fuck it. If she wanted to spend her last few moments alive feeling sorry for herself, she had every right.
A morbid curiosity opened her eyes for her. Would she see death coming, she wondered, or would it surprise her? She had a feeling death was always a surprise, no matter how resigned you thought you were. She watched without interest as animals boiled out of the flaming forest on the far side of the river, appearing suddenly through air gone opaque with heat and smoke. They flew from the woods — rabbits and raccoons racing and bounding along the ground, squirrels driven out of the tree tops. A wolf bolted out of the tree line maybe twenty yards upstream, yipping in agony, its coat in flames. It crashed smoking into the river, fought through the shallows then hit the current and began to swim.
A spasm of hope caught her off guard. Not hope for herself, but for that wolf. Come on, come on, Willa thought, watching it dig in against
the pitiless current. You can do it. You can beat it. You can win. And for a moment, she thought maybe it would.
The wolf struggled toward the far riverbank, its lips peeled back with effort. It was small for a wolf, probably a juvenile, and the river dragged nastily at it, snatching and grabbing. The wolf fought, though, finally gaining its feet on the rocky bottom. Willa’s heart leapt in triumph as it dragged itself toward the shore. But then it stopped, teetering in the shallows, gauging the jump it would have to make out of the water. The rocky bank it faced was so high, the ledge so steep.
“Please,” she murmured as the wolf gathered itself for that last crucial leap. “Oh, please.”
It lunged, and fell short. It folded to its knees, beaten, and surrendered to the current. The water snatched at its limp body, swirled it back into the heart of the river straight toward her. A horrified pity flooded her, and she cried out. To the wolf, for the wolf? She had no idea. But the lonely heart in her reached out as the battered wolf floated by, and suddenly her hands reached out as well. She watched it happen as if her body belonged to somebody else — the wolf’s body tumbling down the river, then her hands slipping free of the webbing loops connecting her to the fire shelter and reaching out. She understood, even as the current stripped the fire shelter off her and sent it spinning downstream, that she wasn’t close enough to catch the wolf. Just like she understood that she would leap to meet it.
She did. She shoved away from the rock, dropped into the icy water, and snatched her arms around a limp, beaten wolf.
She went under, tumbled over and over until she didn’t know which way was up. Until she’d lost any inclination to even figure it out. She was dead; they all were. And it was ridiculous to think a glorified sleeping bag could change that.
Eli had tucked her into one all the same, of course, just like he was tucking the baby lawyers into theirs. It was useless, and Willa figured he knew it, but his soul demanded he try.
And in that dark, airless moment of surrender, Willa finally understood.
Eli was going to die a good death, the kind of death that would honor him. And by wrapping her arms and her mind around a bewildered, terrified animal, by giving it comfort in a way that only she could, Willa was going to do the same.
Love pulsed through her, filled her empty lungs and glowed deep inside her soul. The water was punishingly cold and the wolf was a sodden weight in her arms but she wasn’t alone anymore. Eli was with her. They would die separately, yes. But they wouldn’t die alone. They couldn’t. Not with their souls whole and love between them.
And it was love. He’d said he loved her, and he’d been right. She loved him right back. If she died with one regret it was that she’d never told him so. But he knew it. Somehow, she believed, he knew.
Her boots struck something hard and unyielding, and instinct had her taking the shock with her knees. She gripped the wolf by the scruff and pistoned her legs. She shot upward. Her head broke the river’s madly roiling surface and she dragged a desperate breath into screaming lungs. She shook her head hard, cleared her eyes and realized she’d been sucked into a small eddy created by a dead tree that had fallen across a bend in the river. The Kettle hissed and roared just around the bend, and the center of the river sprinted madly toward it. Willa’s heart gave a thud of horror. It had been nothing but the purest luck that had landed her and her soggy wolf here in this relatively protected eddy instead of flinging them over the edge into oblivion.
A few feet of gravelly sediment had collected in front of the fallen tree trunk, creating the closest thing to a beach the North Shore had to offer. The river tugged on her, trying to pull her back out into the current and sweep her gleefully into the Kettle. She snatched at the dead tree instead, and hauled herself out of its grip. She dragged herself into the shallower water and dragged the wolf up with her. She couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead but she couldn’t do anything about that. All she could do right now was make sure that her face and wolf’s were out of the water while keeping the rest of their bodies as submerged as possible. She doubted it would make a difference in the long run — dead was dead — but she’d protect the both of them as best she could.
She cradled the wolf to her chest, buried her face in its sopping scruff and thought about her thinnie. The fire shrieked and gobbled, its roar a seismic trembling that inhabited the air she was trying to breathe. It was driving itself into her lungs, breath by super-heated breath. The wolf stirred suddenly in her arms, whimpered restlessly, and Willa rubbed her cheek against it. “Shhh, now. I’m here. You’re not alone.”
And she would make that mean something.
She threw her mind fiercely toward the serenity of her fairy ring, to the impossible age of that rock and the unshakeable calm that came with it. She felt it creep into her soul, that calm, and allowed it to spread its cool fingers through her body. Death and life and death again spiraled out in endless parabolas in her mind, one feeding into the other into the other until Willa was just one more star, stitched into the incomprehensible pattern of the universe. Ending to beginning to ending, turning around and around, forever and ever, amen. Everything within her settled, surrendered, and she cast that stillness over the wolf in her arms like a quilt. Tucked it around them both. She was aware of the heat and the scream of the fire but the thinnie and its unassailable wisdom stood between it and her. In her heart there was nothing but calm and love.
Eli, she thought, and smiled. She whispered his name in her mind like a prayer, like a benediction, like an amen. Eli. She sent it out into the universe, too. To him. She understood the impossibility of it, but if there was any chance that he could hear her, she wanted him to know that her last thought was of him. That it had brought her peace and immeasurable joy.
And she heard in return, Willa.
“Willa!”
It wasn’t until Eli actually fell on top of her that she realized his voice wasn’t just in her head.
He seized her by the shoulders, hauled her upright and shook her. “Willa! Willa!”
She didn’t bother trying to speak. Her throat was too burned, her relief too acute. She simply threw her arms around him and released a cry that tore loose something deep inside her. It was a shocking sensation. Eli had already turned her inside out, or so she’d thought. Surely there hadn’t been a single piece of her soul that he hadn’t exposed to the pitiless light of day. Evidently there had been one, a crucial pocket of bitterness and fear hidden away. A little nugget of doubt sowed deep in her soul, a seed that had needed one last abandonment to bloom.
Eli’s return obliterated it. Ripped it out by the roots and flung it out to be swallowed whole by the Kettle.
His hands on her shoulders were like vise grips and he shook her, hard. “Jesus Christ, Willa! You scared me to death! Why didn’t you stay on the rock? Why didn’t you stay?”
“I’ve stayed my whole life!” she shouted back, surprising herself. She hadn’t known the words were coming until she heard them, ragged and burned. “Stayed and stayed and stayed, hoping somebody — anybody — would come back for me! Nobody ever did, okay? Nobody ever came back!”
“Yeah? Well I did.” He glared at her. “I said I would, and I did.” He let her go and leapt to his feet. He snatched up the sopping wet fire shelter at his boots — her shelter? Had he rescued it from downriver somehow? “God, Willa. Do you know what I thought when I saw this floating toward the Kettle?” He gave it a violent shake. “I thought you were in it! I thought you were going to die while I stood there and watched!”
“Well I didn’t!”
“And you’re not going to, either!” He dropped to his butt in the water beside her and shoved his boots into the slimy mouth of the soaking wet fire shelter. Then he grabbed her boots and shoved them in as well, and started dragging the whole sodden mass up over their thighs. “Budge up there, Willa. Neither of us is huge but these things aren’t really made for two. We’re going to have to get cozy.”
She lifted her bo
ttom obediently and let him slide the thing underneath her with a sense of unreality. She’d given up. She’d accepted death, but here he was, yelling at her and fighting for their lives. For her life.
“You really came back for me,” she said wonderingly, and it settled inside her like a warm stone. It sank straight to the bottom of her battered soul and set up a serene, steady glow.
“Of course I did.” He glared at her.
“Of course you did.” She laughed, a sharp burble of sound that rode the line between joy and disbelief. “I love you, Eli Walker.”
He rolled his eyes. “Now she tells me.”
“You knew already?”
“Of course I knew.” He hiked up his own butt and pulled the shelter up to their waists. Found the webbing loops attached to the hood and threaded his hands through them. “But it’s nice to hear you say it. I love you, too.”
“I know that now. I really do.”
He cast a glance toward the opposite bank. The fire had roared forward, was gobbling up the last few yards of forest and gathering itself for the leap over the river. “This is going to get ugly, Willa. We’re going to have to just ride it out.” He hesitated. “Do you trust me?”
“More than anything,” she said promptly, and it was true. That last pocket of doubt had been torn away and she was his.
“It’s time to lie down, then. I have to drag this thing over our heads and we’re going to lie here, belly down, until we hear the hotshots calling our names, you understand? The water’s going to protect us as best it can but the air outside this shelter will be hot enough to kill us if we open it up too soon, never mind the fire. Are you claustrophobic?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t think so.” She drew the wolf’s limp body into her arms. “She’s coming, too. I won’t leave her.”
Eli stared at the half-burned wolf and sighed. “No, I know you won’t.”
