She nodded, keeping her eyes trained on me as if I were her lifeline. That sick feeling came back over me, but I couldn’t decide which part of me it came from.
“Almost there,” she whispered and I nodded.
And then the ice spilt.
One minute her eyes were trained on me and the next I couldn’t see her at all. The lake seemed to open up and Piper was falling… plunging right down into the unknown icy depths of the lake.
“Piper!” I yelled, stepping forward, desperately seeking some kind of sign that she was still there. I saw the red of her hat bob up from the water and heard her cough.
I watched as she reached for something to grab onto, anything to pull herself to safety.
But there was nothing. The ice around her had shattered, leaving her in the center of a circle of water. She could maybe swim to the edge and pull herself up… if she didn’t die of hypothermia first.
Die.
Death.
Dead.
This was it. This was what I’d been waiting for. This was the perfect opportunity to let her die. Chances were I wouldn’t be able to save her anyway.
“Dex,” she sputtered, her red head bobbing to the surface again. I looked up as she reached her gloved hand toward me. “Dex!”
She would be dead in minutes… if not seconds.
All I had to do was wait.
And then the ice split beneath me.
Icy water hit me and it felt like a million sharp needles stabbing me at once. It was so cold it stole my breath and then made me cough. Coughing delivered a frigid dose of water down my throat and then I was floating…
Floating in a dark sea of ice, my body completely numb.
And then my eyes opened. Through the water I could see something flailing around. Something struggling to live.
My survival instincts kicked in and gave me a burst of adrenaline.
I pushed my arms upward, hoping to break the surface, and when I did, I gulped in the air like a starving man. My glasses were gone, claimed by the lake, so my vision was blurry.
But I could still make her out.
We were closer now. The current must have pushed me closer, or maybe it was the force of my fall. Whatever it was I pushed myself toward her, the weight of my wet clothes making it nearly impossible. I made it to her and latched onto her arm, seeing her lips were already turning blue. Out around her floated a red scarf and I yanked it away from her body and drug myself and her toward the edge of the ice.
The edge was brittle, but it was our best chance. I tried to hoist her up onto the solid sheet, but she was heavy and my arms were weak. The snowmobile was so close, but it felt so far away.
“Help me, Piper,” I told her. “Help me help you.”
She wasn’t as responsive as I needed her to be. She was sluggish and felt like dead weight to my shaking, heavy arms.
Holding on to her with one arm, I used my free arm to reach toward the snowmobile. Maybe if I could get a hold of it, I could use it to pull myself up out of the water. Every time I leaned on the ice to pull myself up, it broke off a little more, plunging us back down into the water.
It looked like I was, in fact, going to kill my Target.
But I was going to die with her.
I threw my arm out again, giving it one last try, when something latched on to me and I felt myself being pulled upwards. I looked up and saw nothing but blackness…
My vision was going. I was losing consciousness.
