Again.
On what feels like the twentieth attempt, I finally hook it with the tip of my shoe, and let out a victory cry bordering on mania. The toehold is precarious, gravity doing its damnedest to suck me back in the other direction.
No way, asshole. You can’t have me.
With every muscle in my leg screaming in agony, I pull myself in by my toe, fighting the wind, fighting fatigue, fighting mental anguish until finally I reach out with my hand and feel the rough, wet rock beneath my fingertips.
Quickly, I clip into one of the old bolts, sending a prayer of thanks to whoever put it there.
I climb the last few feet to the cave and, with the very last bit of strength I’ve got, haul myself inside.
The clatter of the hail turns to a din, and a new warmth pulses all around me. Sprawled out on my belly, I give myself a moment to catch my breath, then slowly raise my head, peering inside the dark space of the cave.
I’m still here, mostly in one piece.
“Thank you,” I exhale into the deep.
“You’re welcome,” comes an unexpected reply.
And there, from somewhere inside that gnawing blackness, a pair of glowing yellow eyes blinks to life, and a shadow in the shape of a man peels away from the wall and stalks toward the light.
Toward me.
Three
STEVIE
“Shoulda known it was you, Stevie Milan.” The shadow-man crouches down and extends a hand, his grin warm and familiar. “Only girl crazy enough in all of Arizona to summit the Grande on a day like this.”
I take in the sight of his boyish dimples and the dark hair flopping into his eyes, which are thankfully not glowing at all. He’s filled out a bit since high school, but beneath the new bulk, there’s no mistaking my old friend.
“Luke Hernandez?”
Relief floods my body, erupting in a laugh that probably sounds insane. After the morning I’ve had, I don’t care. I grab his hand and scramble up to my feet, crashing into his bear-hug. “Holy shit, it’s good to see you.”
As kids, Luke and I went on exactly one date—bonfire party, just after eighth-grade graduation. Our budding romance came to a spectacular end later that night when he put a scorpion down his pants on a dare, earning himself a trip to the emergency room and the infamous nickname, Scorpion King.
I dumped him on principal—even at fourteen, I knew any dude stupid enough to put a venomous creature near his dick wasnotboyfriend material—but we stayed friends. He was into climbing, just like me and Jessa, and while our classmates spent the next five years getting stoned and feeling each other up behind the Gas-N-Grab out on Route Nine, the three of us made the desert our domain, mapping out the most challenging routes up the Grande, hiking through the sagebrush, talking about all the mountains we wanted to scale and countries we wanted to visit—the bright, shiny dreams of three kids looking for their ultimate escape.
Luke was the only one who ever made it out, though.
“I thought you were in California building hotels or something?” I ask, trying to remember what I heard from his mother, who still lives in town and comes into Kettle Black every day to steal our scones and talk our ears off.
Luke presses a kiss to the top of my head, crushing me against his chest. “I missed you too much to stay gone, baby girl.”
Um…Baby girl?
Back up.
He’snevercalled me that before. Or missed me, for that matter. Yeah, we were peas in a pod for awhile there, but halfway into junior year, he bounced to go live with his Dad out west. After a brief goodbye over pizza and a bucket of hot wings, Jessa and I never heard from him again—not even when my parents died. No social media, no texts, no postcards.
Jessa and I were bummed when he left, and yeah, it stung that he lost touch. But I never held it against him. I was dealing with my own issues back then, struggling to understand the magick inside me and the parents who wanted to talk about anythingbut, wondering if I’d be stuck working at Kettle Black the rest of my life, forever searching for my bigger, better “someday” on the horizon. I was glad Luke found his, even if it meant leaving me and our dusty-ass desert town behind.
But five years later, he randomly pops out of a cave during this insane storm, tossing out terms like baby girl?
Seriously?
He’s got me in a vice grip, and this whole thing is feeling weirder by the minute.
