Chapter One

They were all dead.

All except her.

She was sure of that.

She didn’t know how long it had been since the impact or how long she’d remained bent over with her head in her lap. It could have been seconds, minutes, light-years. Time could stand still.

Endlessly, it seemed, torn metal had shifted before settling with a groan. The dismembered trees—innocent victims of the crash—had ceased to quiver. Hardly a leaf was stirring now. Everything was frightfully still. There was no sound.

Absurdly she thought of the question about a tree falling in the woods. Would it make a sound? It did. She’d heard it. So she must be alive.

She raised her head. Her hair and shoulders and back were littered with chips of shattered plastic—what had previously been the window next to her seat. She shook her head slightly and the chips rained off her, making tinkling, pinging little noises in the quiet. Slowly she forced herself to open her eyes.

A scream rose in her throat, but she couldn’t utter it. Her vocal cords froze. She was too terrified to scream. The carnage was worse than an air-traffic controller’s nightmare.

The two men sitting in the seats directly in front of hers—good friends, judging by their loud and rambunctious bantering with each other—were now dead, their joking and laughter forever silenced. One’s head had gone through the window. That fact registered with her, but she didn’t look too closely. There was a sea of blood. She slammed her eyes shut and didn’t open them until after she’d averted her head.

Across the aisle, another man lay dead, his head thrown back against the cushion as though he’d been sleeping when the plane went down. The Loner. She had mentally tagged him with that name before takeoff. Because the plane was small, there were strict regulations about weight. While the passengers and their luggage were being weighed before boarding, the Loner had stood apart from the group, his attitude superior and hostile. His unfriendliness hadn’t invited conversation with any of the other passengers, who were all boisterously bragging about their kills. His aloofness had segregated him—just as her sex had isolated her. She was the only woman on board.

Now, the only survivor.

Looking toward the front of the cabin, she could see that the cockpit had been severed from the fuselage like a bottle cap that had been twisted off. It had come to rest several feet away. The pilot and copilot, both jovial and joking young men, were obviously, bloodily, dead.

She swallowed the bile that filled the back of her throat. The robust, bearded copilot had helped her on board, flirting, saying he rarely had women passengers on his airplane and when he did, they didn’t look like fashion models.

The other two passengers, middle-aged brothers, were still strapped into their seats in the front row. They’d been killed by the jagged tree trunk that had cut into the cabin like a can opener. Their families would feel the tragedy with double intensity.

She began to cry. Hopelessness and fear overwhelmed her. She was afraid she would faint. She was afraid she would die. And she was afraid she wouldn’t.

The deaths of her fellow passengers had been swift and painless. They had probably been killed on impact. They were better off. Her death would be long in coming because as far as she could tell, she was miraculously uninjured. She would die slowly of thirst, starvation, exposure.

She wondered why she was still alive. The only explanation was that she was sitting in the last row. Unlike the rest of the passengers, she had left someone behind at the lodge on Great Bear Lake. Her goodbye had been drawn out, so she was the last one to board the aircraft. All the seats had been taken except that one in the last row.

When the copilot assisted her aboard, the rowdy dialogues had ceased abruptly. Bent at an angle because of the low ceiling, she had moved to the only available seat. She had felt distinctly uncomfortable, being the only woman on board. It was like walking into a smoke-filled room where a heated poker game was in progress. Some things were innately, exclusively male, and no amount of sexual equality was ever going to change that. Just as some things were innately, exclusively female.

An airplane leaving a hunting and fishing lodge in the Northwest Territories was one of those masculine things. She had tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, saying nothing, settling in her seat and staring out the window. Once, just after takeoff, she had turned her head and inadvertently made eye contact with the man sitting across the aisle. He had looked at her with such apparent disfavor that she had returned her gaze to the window and kept it there.

Besides the pilots, she was probably the first one to notice the storm. Accompanied by dense fog, the torrential rain had made her nervous. Soon the others began to notice the jouncy flight. Their braggadocio was replaced with uneasy quips about riding this one out and being glad the pilot was “driving” instead of one of them.

But the pilots were having a difficult time. That soon became apparent to all of them. Eventually they fell silent and kept their eyes trained on the men in the cockpit. Tension inside the aircraft increased when the two-man crew lost radio contact with the ground. The plane’s instruments could no longer be depended upon because the readings they were giving out were apparently inaccurate. Because of the impenetrable cloud cover, they hadn’t seen the ground since takeoff.

When the plane went into a spiraling nosedive and the pilot shouted back to his passengers, “We’re going in. God be with us,” they all took the news resignedly and with an amazing calm.

She had bent double and pressed her head between her knees, covering it with her arms, praying all the way down. It seemed to take an eternity.

She would never forget the shock of that first jarring impact. Even braced for it, she hadn’t been adequately prepared. She didn’t know why she had been spared instantaneous death, unless her smaller size had allowed her to wedge herself between the two seats more securely and better cushion the impact.

However, under the circumstances, she wasn’t sure that being spared was a favorable alternative. One could only reach the lodge on the northwestern tip of Great Bear Lake by airplane. Miles of virgin wilderness lay between it and Yellowknife, their destination. God only knew how far off the flight plan the plane had been when it went down. The authorities could search for months without finding her. Until they did—if ever—she was utterly alone and dependent solely on herself for survival.

That thought galvanized her into action. With near-hysterical frenzy she struggled to release her seat belt. It snapped apart and she fell forward, bumping her head on the seat in front of her. She eased herself into the narrow aisle and, on hands and knees, crawled toward the gaping tear in the airplane.

Avoiding any direct contact with the bodies, she looked up through the ripped metal seam. The rain had stopped, but the low, heavy, dark gray clouds looked so laden with menace they seemed ready to burst. Frequently they belched deep rolls of thunder. The sky looked cold and wet and threatening. She clutched the collar of her red fox coat high about her neck. There was virtually no wind. She supposed she should be grateful for that. The wind could get very cold. But wait! If there was no wind, where was that keening sound coming from?

Holding her breath, she waited.

There it was again!

She whipped her head around, listening. It wasn’t easy to hear anything over the pounding of her own heart.

A stir.

She looked toward the man who was sitting in the seat across the aisle from hers. Was it just her wishful imagination or did the Loner’s eyelids flicker? She scrambled back up the aisle, brushing past the dangling, bleeding arm of one of the crash victims. She had studiously avoided touching it only moments ago.

“Oh, please, God, let him be alive,” she prayed fervently. Reaching his seat, she stared down into his face. He still seemed to be in peaceful repose. His eyelids were still. No flicker. No moaning sound coming from his lips, which were all but obscured by a thick, wide mustache. She looked at his chest, but he was wearing a quilted coat, so it was impossible to tell if he were breathing or not.

She laid her index finger along the top curve of his mustache, just beneath his nostrils. She uttered a wordless exclamation when she felt the humid passage of air. Faint, but definitely there.

“Thank God, thank God.” She began laughing and crying at the same time. Lifting her hands to his cheeks, she slapped them lightly. “Wake up, mister. Please wake up.”

He moaned, but he didn’t open his eyes. Intuition told her that the sooner he regained consciousness the better. Besides, she needed the reassurance that he wasn’t dead or going to die—at least not immediately. She desperately needed to know that she wasn’t alone.

Reasoning that the cold air might help revive him, she resolved to get him outside the plane. It wasn’t going to be easy; he probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more.

She felt every ounce of it as she opened his seat belt and his dead weight slumped against her like a sack of concrete mix. She caught most of it with her right shoulder and supported him there while she backed down the aisle toward the opening, half lifting him, half dragging him with her.

That seven-foot journey took her over half an hour. The bloody arm hanging over the armrest snagged them. She had to overcome her repulsion and touch it, moving it aside. She got blood on her hands. It was sticky. She whimpered with horror, but clamped her trembling lower lip between her teeth and continued tugging the man down the aisle—one struggling, agonizing inch at a time.

It struck her suddenly that whatever his injury, she might be doing it more harm than good by moving him. But she’d come this far; she wouldn’t stop now. Setting a goal and achieving it seemed very important, if for no other reason than to prove she wasn’t helpless. She had decided to get him outside, and that’s what she was going to do if it killed her.

Which it very well might, she thought several minutes later. She had moved him as far forward as possible. Occasionally he groaned, but otherwise he showed no signs of coming around. Leaving him momentarily, she climbed through the branches of the pine tree. The entire left side of the fuselage had been virtually ripped off, so it would be a matter of dragging him through the branches of the tree. Using her bare hands, she broke off as many of the smaller branches as she could before returning to the man.

It took her five minutes just to turn him around so she could clasp him beneath the arms. Then, backing through the narrow, spiky tunnel she had cleared, she pulled him along with her. Pine needles pricked her face. The rough bark scraped her hands. But thankfully her heavy clothing protected most of her skin.

Her breathing became labored as she struggled. She considered pausing to rest, but was afraid that she would never build up enough momentum to start again. Her burden was moaning almost constantly, now. She knew he must be in agony, but she couldn’t stop or he might lapse into deeper unconsciousness.

At last she felt cold air on her cheeks. She pulled her head free of the last branch and stepped out into the open. Taking a few stumbling steps backward, she pulled the man the remainder of the way, until he, too, was clear. Exhausted beyond belief, the muscles of her arms and back and legs burning from exertion, she plopped down hard on her bottom. The man’s head fell into her lap.

Bracing herself on her hands and tilting her head toward the sky, she stayed that way until she had regained her breath. For the first time, while drawing the bitingly cold air into her lungs, she thought that it might be good to still be alive. She thanked God that she was. And thanked Him, too, for the other life He’d spared.

She looked down at the man and saw the bump for the first time. He was sporting a classic goose egg on the side of his temple. No doubt it had caused his unconsciousness. Heaving his shoulders up high enough to get her legs out from under him, she crawled around to his side and began unbuttoning his bulky coat. She prayed that she wouldn’t uncover a mortal wound. She didn’t. Only the plaid flannel shirt that no game hunter would be without. There were no traces of blood on it. From the turtleneck collar of his undershirt to the tops of his laced boots, she could find no sign of serious bleeding.

Expelling a gusty breath of relief, she bent over him and lightly slapped his cheeks again. She guessed him to be around forty, but the years hadn’t been easy ones. His longish, wavy hair was saddle brown. So was his mustache. But it and his heavy eyebrows had strands of blond. His skin was sunburned, but not recently; it was a baked-on, year-round sunburn. There was a tracery of fine lines at the corners of his eyes. His mouth was wide and thin, the lower lip only slightly fuller than the upper.

This rugged face didn’t belong in an office; he spent a good deal of time outdoors. It was an agreeable face, if not a classically handsome one. There was a hardness to it, an uncompromising unapproachability that she had also sensed in his personality.

She wondered uneasily what he would think when he regained consciousness and found himself alone in the wilderness with her. She didn’t have long to wait to find out. Moments later, his eyelids flickered, then opened.

Eyes as flinty gray as the sky overhead focused on her. They closed, then opened again. She wanted to speak, but trepidation held her back. The first word to cross his lips was unspeakably vulgar. She flinched, but attributed the foul language to his pain. Again he closed his eyes and waited several seconds before opening them.

Then he said, “We crashed.” She nodded. “How long ago?”

“I’m not sure.” Her teeth were chattering. It wasn’t that cold, so it must have been from fear. Of him? Why? “An hour, maybe.”

Grunting with pain, he covered the lump on the side of his head with one hand and levered himself up, using the other hand as a prop. She moved aside so he could sit up straight. “What about everybody else?”

“They’re all dead.”

He tried to come up on one knee and swayed dizzily. She reflexively extended a helping hand, but he shrugged it off. “Are you sure?”

“Sure they’re dead? Yes. I mean, I think so.”

He turned his head and stared at her balefully. “Did you check their pulses?”

She changed her mind about his eyes. They weren’t like the sky at all. They were colder and much more foreboding. “No, I didn’t check,” she admitted contritely.

He nailed her with that judgmental stare for several seconds, then, with a great deal of difficulty, pulled himself to his feet. Using the tree behind him for support, he struggled to stand up and regain his equilibrium.

“How...how do you feel?”

“Like I’m going to puke.”

One thing about him, he didn’t mince words. “Maybe you should lie back down.”

“No doubt I should.”

“Well?”

Still holding his head in one hand, he raised it and looked at her. “Are you volunteering to go in there and check their pulses?” He watched the faint color in her cheeks fade and gave her a twisted smile of ridicule. “That’s what I thought.”

“I got you out, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” he said dryly, “you got me out.”

She didn’t expect him to kiss her hands for saving his life, but a simple thank-you would have been nice. “You’re an ungrateful—”

“Save it,” he said.

She watched him lever himself away from the tree and stagger toward the demolished aircraft, pushing aside the branches of the tree with much more strength than she could have garnered in a month.

Sinking down onto the marshy ground, she rested her head on her raised knees, tempted to cry. She could hear him moving about in the cabin. When she raised her head and looked, she saw him through the missing windshield of the detached cockpit. He was emotionlessly moving his hands over the bodies of the pilots.

Minutes later, he thrashed his way through the fallen tree. “You were right. They’re all dead.”

How did he expect her to respond? Nah-nah-nah? He dropped a white first-aid box onto the ground and knelt beside it. He took out a bottle of aspirin and tossed three of them down his throat, swallowing them dry. “Come here,” he ordered her rudely. She scooted forward and he handed her a flashlight. “Shine that directly into my eyes, one at a time, and tell me what happens.”

She switched on the flashlight. The glass over the bulb was cracked, but it still worked. She shone the light directly into his right eye, then the left. “The pupils contract.”

He took the flashlight away from her and clicked it off. “Good. No concussion. Just a rotten headache. You okay?”

“I think so.”

He looked at her skeptically, but nodded.

“My name’s Rusty Carlson,” she said politely.

He barked a short laugh. His eyes moved up to take in her hair. “Rusty, huh?”

“Yes, Rusty,” she replied testily.

“Figures.”

The man had the manners of a pig. “Do you have a name?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a name. Cooper Landry. But this isn’t a garden party so forgive me if I don’t tip my hat and say, ‘Pleased to meet you.’”

For two lone survivors of a disastrous plane crash, they were off to a bad beginning. Right now Rusty wanted to be comforted, reassured that she was alive and would go on living. All she’d gotten from him was scorn, which was unwarranted.

“What’s with you?” she demanded angrily. “You act as though the crash was my fault.”

“Maybe it was.”

She gasped with incredulity. “What? I was hardly responsible for the storm.”

“No, but if you hadn’t dragged out that emotional, tearful goodbye to your sugar daddy, we might have beat it. What made you decide to leave ahead of him—the two of you have a lovers’ spat?”

“None of your damned business,” she said through teeth that had been straightened to perfection by an expensive orthodontist.

His expression didn’t alter. “And you had no business being in a place like that—” his eyes roved over her “—being the kind of woman you are.”

“What kind of woman is that?”

“Drop it. Let’s just say that I’d be better off without you.” Having said that, he slid a lethal-looking hunting knife from the leather scabbard attached to his belt. Rusty wondered if he was going to cut her throat with it and rid himself of the inconvenience she posed. Instead, he turned and began hacking at the smaller branches of the tree, cutting a cleaner path to make the fuselage more accessible.

“What are you going to do?”

“I have to get them out.”

“The...the others? Why?”

“Unless you want to be roommates with them.”

“You’re going to bury them?”

“That’s the idea. Got a better one?”

No, of course she didn’t, so she said nothing.

Cooper Landry hacked his way through the tree until only the major branches were left. They were easier to step around and over.

Rusty, making herself useful by dragging aside the branches as he cut them, asked, “We’re staying here then?”

“For the time being, yeah.” Having cleared a path of sorts, he stepped into the fuselage and signaled her forward. “Grab his boots, will ya?”

She stared down at the dead man’s boots. She couldn’t do this. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. He couldn’t expect her to do something so grotesque.

But glancing up at him and meeting those implacable gray eyes, she knew that he did expect it of her and expected it of her without an argument.

One by one they removed the bodies from the aircraft. He did most of the work; Rusty lent him a hand when he asked for it. The only way she could do it was to detach her mind from the grisly task. She’d lost her mother when she was a teenager. Two years ago her brother had died. But in both instances, she’d seen them when they were laid out in a satin-lined casket surrounded by soft lighting, organ music, and flowers. Death had seemed unreal. Even the bodies of her mother and brother weren’t real to her, but identical replicas of the people she had loved, mannequins created in their images by the mortician.

These bodies were real.

She mechanically obeyed the terse commands this Cooper Landry issued in a voice without feeling or inflection. He must be a robot, she decided. He revealed no emotion whatsoever as he dragged the bodies to the common grave that he’d been able to dig using his knife and the small hatchet he found in a toolbox beneath the pilot’s seat. He piled stones over the shallow grave when he was finished.

“Shouldn’t we say something?” Rusty stared down at the barbaric pile of colorless stones, put there to protect the bodies of the five men from scavenging animals.

“Say something? Like what?”

“Like a scripture. A prayer.”

He shrugged negligently as he cleaned the blade of his knife. “I don’t know any scriptures. And my prayers ran out a long time ago.” Turning his back on the grave, he stamped back toward the airplane.

Rusty mouthed a hasty prayer before turning to follow him. More than anything, she feared being left alone again. If she let the man out of her sight, he might desert her.

That was unlikely, however. At least not right away. He was reeling with fatigue and on the verge of fainting. “Why don’t you lie down and rest?” she suggested. Her strength had deserted her long ago. She was running only on adrenaline now.

“Because night’s coming on fast,” he said. “We’ve got to remove the seats of the plane so we’ll have room to stretch out in there. Otherwise you might have to spend a night in the great outdoors for the first time in your life.” He sarcastically added the last as an afterthought before reentering the airplane. Moments later, Rusty heard him cursing viciously. He came out, his brows drawn together in a fierce scowl.

“What’s the matter?”

He held his hand up in front of her face. It was wet. “Fuel.”

“Fuel?”

“Flammable fuel,” he said, impatient with her ignorance. “We can’t stay in there. One spark and we’ll be blown to China.”

“Then don’t build a fire.”

He glared at her. “Once it gets dark, you’ll want a fire,” he said scornfully. “Besides, all it would take is a spark from anything. One piece of metal could scrape against another and we’d be history.”

“What do we do?”

“We take what we can and move.”

“I thought it was always best to stay with the airplane. I heard or read that once. Search parties will be looking for a downed plane. How will they find us if we leave the crash site?”

He cocked his head arrogantly. “You want to stay? Fine, stay. I’m going. But I’d better warn you that I don’t think there’s any water near here. The first thing I’m going to do in the morning is look for water.”

His know-it-all attitude was insufferable. “How do you know there’s no water?”

“No animal tracks around. I suppose you could exist on rainwater for as long as it held out, but who knows how long that will be.”

When and how had he noticed that there were no animal tracks around? She hadn’t even thought to look. In fact, having no water was almost as frightening as having to cope with wild animals to get it. Search for water? How did one go about that? Wild animals? How would she defend herself if one attacked?

She’d die without him. After several moments of deliberation, that was the grim conclusion she reached. She had no choice but to go along with whatever survival tactics he knew and be grateful that he was there to implement them.

Swallowing her pride, she said, “All right, I’ll go with you.” He didn’t even glance up or otherwise acknowledge her. She had no way of knowing whether he was glad or sorry over her decision. By all appearances, he was indifferent. He was already making a pile of things he’d salvaged from the wreckage. Determined not to be ignored, Rusty knelt down beside him. “What can I do to help?”

He nodded toward the luggage compartment of the aircraft. “Go through the luggage. Everybody’s. Take whatever might come in handy later.” He handed her several tiny suitcase keys, which he had obviously taken off the bodies before he buried them.

She glanced warily at the suitcases. Some had already popped open as a result of the crash. The victims’ personal belongings lay strewn on the damp ground. “Isn’t that...violating their privacy? Their families might resent—”

He spun around so suddenly that she nearly toppled over backward. “Will you grow up and face facts?” He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Look around. Do you know what our chances are of coming out of this alive? I’ll tell you: Nil. But before I go down, I’m going to fight like hell to stay alive. It’s a habit I have.”

His face moved closer to hers. “This isn’t a Girl Scout outing gone awry; this is survival, lady. Etiquette and propriety be damned. If you tag along with me, you’ll do what I tell you to, when I tell you to. Got that? And there won’t be any time to spend on sentiment. Don’t waste tears on those who didn’t make it. They’re gone and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Now, move your butt and get busy doing what I told you to do.”

He shoved her away from him and began collecting pelts that the hunters had been taking home as trophies. There was mostly caribou, but also white wolf, beaver, and one small mink.

Holding back bitter tears of mortification and accumulated distress, Rusty bent over the suitcases and began sorting through their contents as she’d been instructed. She wanted to strike out at him. She wanted to collapse in a heap and bawl her eyes out. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her do either. Nor would she provide him with an excuse to leave her behind; he would probably grab at the flimsiest.

A half-hour later she carried her findings and added them to the pile of articles he had gathered. Apparently he approved of her selection, which included two flasks of liquor. She couldn’t identify it by the smell, but Cooper wasn’t particular. He seemed to enjoy the healthy drink he took from one of the flasks. She watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed. He had a strong neck, and a solid, square jaw. Typical, she thought peevishly, of all stubborn mules.

He recapped the flask and tossed it down along with the books of matches, a travel sewing kit, and the extra clothing she had accumulated. He didn’t remark on how well she’d done. Instead he nodded down at the small suitcase she was carrying. “What’s that?”

“That’s mine.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He yanked the suitcase from her hand and opened it. His large hands violated her neat stacks of pastel silk thermal underwear, nightgowns, and assorted lingerie. He pulled one set of leggings through the circle he made of his index finger and thumb. His gray eyes met hers. “Silk?” Coldly, she stared back at him without answering. His grin was downright dirty. It insinuated things she didn’t even want to guess at. “Very nice.”

Then his grin disappeared beneath his mustache and he tossed the garment at her. “Take two sets of long johns. A couple pairs of socks. A cap. Gloves. This coat,” he added, piling a ski jacket atop the other garments he’d selected. “One extra pair of britches. A couple of sweaters.” He opened the zippered, plastic-lined travel bag she’d packed her cosmetics and toiletries in.

“I need all of that,” she said quickly.

“Not where we’re going you don’t.” He rifled through her cosmetics, heedlessly tossing a fortune’s worth of beauty-enhancing creams and makeup into the rotting, wet leaves. “A hairbrush, toothpaste and toothbrush, soap. That’s it. And, just because I’m merciful, these.” He handed her a box of tampons.

She snatched it out of his hands and crammed it back into the cosmetic bag along with the other few items he had allowed her.

Again he grinned. The juxtaposition of his white teeth and wide mustache made him look positively wicked. “You think I’m a real son of a bitch, don’t you? You’re just too nice to say so.”

“No, I’m not.” Her russet brown eyes flashed hotly. “I think you’re a real son of a bitch.”

His smile merely deepened. “It’s only gonna get worse before it gets better.” He stood up, glancing worriedly at the darkening sky. “Come on. We’d better get going.”

As soon as he turned his back, Rusty slipped a colorless lip gloss, a bottle of shampoo and a razor into the bag. He might not need to shave before they reached civilization, but she was sure she would.

She jumped guiltily when he turned back and asked her, “Do you know how to shoot one of these?” He held up a hunting rifle.

Rusty shook her head no. Only yesterday she’d seen a beautiful Dall ram being brought down with a rifle just like that. It was a distasteful memory. Rather than celebrating the kill, her sympathies had been with the slain animal.

“I was afraid of that,” Cooper muttered. “But you can carry it anyway.” He hooked the heavy rifle over her shoulder by its leather strap and placed another, presumably his own, over his shoulder. He shoved a fearsome-looking pistol into his waistband. Catching her wary glance he said, “It’s a flare gun. I found it in the cockpit. Keep your ears open for search planes.”

By seaming up the neck of a sweater with a shoelace, he had fashioned a backpack out of it. He tied it around her neck by the sleeves. “Okay,” he said, giving her a cursory inspection, “let’s go.”

Rusty cast one last sad, apprehensive look at the wreckage of the airplane, then struck out after him. His broad back made an easy target to follow. She found that by keeping her eyes trained on a spot directly between his shoulder blades, she was able to put herself into a semitrance and ward off her memory of the bodies they had left behind. She wanted to lapse into forgetfulness.

She plodded on, losing energy with each step. Her strength seemed to be seeping out of her with alarming rapidity. She didn’t know how far they had gone, but it couldn’t have been very far before it seemed impossible for her to put one foot in front of the other. Her legs were trembling with fatigue. She no longer swatted aside the branches that backlashed, but indifferently let them slap into her.

Cooper’s image grew blurry, then began wavering in front of her like a ghost. The trees all seemed to have tentacles that tried to catch her clothes, tear at her hair, ensnare her ankles, impede her in any way possible. Stumbling, she glanced down at the ground and was amazed to see that it was rushing up to meet her. How extraordinary, she thought.

Instinctively, she grasped the nearest branch to break her fall and called out weakly, “Coo...Cooper.”

She landed hard, but it was a blessed relief to lie on the cool ground, damp and soggy as it was. The leaf mold seemed like a compress against her cheek. It was a luxury to let her eyes close.

Cooper murmured a curse as he shrugged off his backpack and let the strap of the rifle slide down his arm. Roughly, he rolled her over onto her back and pried her eyelids open with his thumbs. She gazed up at him, having no idea that her face was as pale as death. Even her lips were as gray as the clouds overhead.

“I’m sorry to hold you back.” She was vaguely surprised that her voice sounded so faint. She could feel her lips moving, but she wasn’t sure she had actually spoken aloud. It seemed imperative to apologize for detaining him and being a nuisance in general. “I’ve got to rest for just a minute.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, uh, Rusty. You rest.” He was working at the hook and eye buried deep in the fox-fur collar of her coat. “Do you hurt anywhere?”

“Hurt? No. Why?”

“Nothing.” He shoved open her coat and plunged his hands inside. He slipped them beneath her sweater and began carefully pressing his fingers against her abdomen. Was this proper? she thought fuzzily. “You might be bleeding somewhere and don’t know it.”

His words served to clarify everything. “Internally?” Panicked, she struggled to sit up.

“I don’t know. I don’t— Hold it!” With a sudden flick of his hands, he flipped back the front panels of her full-length coat. His breath whistled through his teeth. Rusty levered herself up on her elbows to see what had caused him to frown so ferociously.

The right leg of her trousers was soaked with bright red blood. It had also made a sponge of her wool sock and run over her leather hiking boot.

“When did you do this?” His eyes, razor sharp, moved up to hers. “What happened?”

Dismayed, she looked at Cooper and wordlessly shook her head.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

“I didn’t know,” she said weakly.

He slipped his knife from its scabbard. Pinching up the blood-soaked hem of her trousers, he slid the knife into the crease and jerked it upward. With one heart-stopping stroke, it cut straight up her pants leg, neatly slicing the fabric all the way from her hem to the elastic leg of her underpants. Shocked and fearful, she sucked in her breath.

Cooper, gazing down at her leg, expelled a long, defeated breath. “Hell.”