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"It's been six months--Alzheimer's. Four years ago, he started forgetting things. It got worse pretty quickly, and after about a year, when it started to affect his reflexes in the plane, he finally let me take him to the hospital in Galena. The disease progresses differently for everyone, but for Dad, it seemed to take hold of him so fast." Alex let out a deep, reflective sigh. "I think he gave up as soon as he heard the diagnosis. I don't know, I think maybe he was giving up on life even before then."
"How so?"
It wasn't meant to be a prying question, but she bit her lip as he asked it, a reflexive reaction that said she probably felt she'd already told him more than she'd intended. From the sudden, uneasy look she gave him, he could see that she was trying to size him up somehow, trying to decide if it was safe to trust him. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, her gaze turned back out the windscreen as if she couldn't tell him and look at him at the same time. "My, um ... my dad and I moved to Alaska when I was nine years old. Before that, we lived in Florida, down on the 'Glades, where my dad ran seaplane charter tours of the swamps and the Keys."
Kade studied her in the dim light of the cockpit. "That's a whole different world from here."
"Yeah. Yeah, it sure was."
A sudden metallic clatter sounded from somewhere on the plane, and the cockpit gave a vibrating shudder. Kade held on to his seat, grateful to see that Alex wasn't panicking. Her attention went laser sharp to her instrument panel, and she gave the plane some added speed. The shake and rattle calmed, and the ride smoothed out once again.
"Don't worry," she told him, her tone as wry as her expression. "Like my dad used to say, it's a scientific fact that some of the most alarming aircraft noises can only be heard at night. I think we're okay now."
Kade chuckled uneasily. "I'm gonna have to take your word on that." They flew over a sloping peak, then made a gradual direction change that brought them back over the Koyukuk below.
"So, what happened in Florida, Alex?" he said, returning to the subject he had no intention of dropping now. Instinct told him he was mining close to pay dirt about the secrets she seemed to be holding, but he wasn't looking to further his mission right now. He was genuinely interested in her--hell, if he was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he was starting to truly care about her--and he wanted to understand whatever she'd been through. Hearing the pain beneath her words, he wanted to help heal some of it if he could. "Did something happen to your father or you in Florida?" She shook her head and gave him another of those measuring, sidelong looks. "No, not us ... but my mom and my little brother ..."
Her voice broke, quiet and choked off. Kade could feel a scowl pulling his brows together as he stared at her. "How did they die, Alex?"
For one stunning moment, as her eyes held his, unblinking and stark with revisited fear, a cold dread began to form in his gut. The small compartment they shared some eight thousand feet off the ground got even tighter, compressed by Alex's terrible silence beside him.
"They were killed," she said at last, words that only made Kade's pulse beat faster when he considered one possible cause--a terrible cause that would make this whole involvement with Alex even more impossible than it already was. But then she gave a shrug of her shoulders and looked straight ahead once more. She sucked in a deep breath and released it. "It was an accident. A drunk driver blew a traffic light at an intersection. He plowed into my mom's car. She and my little brother were both killed on impact."
Kade's scowl deepened as she recited the facts in a rush, as though she couldn't spit them out fast enough. And recite seemed an apt description, because something about the explanation struck him as being too pat, too well rehearsed.
"I'm sorry, Alex," he said, unable to tear his scrutinizing, now-suspicious gaze away from her. "I guess it's a small blessing that they didn't suffer."
"Yeah," she replied woodenly. "At least they didn't suffer." They flew for a while without speaking, watching the dark landscape beneath them alternate from the lightless patches of tightly knit forest and jagged, soaring mountains, to the electric-blue glow of the snowcovered tundra and foothills below. In the distant sky, Kade saw the eerie green flash of the northern lights. He pointed it out to Alex, and though he'd seen the aurora countless times from the ground in the near century since his birth, he'd never been in the sky to watch the streaking colors dance across the horizon.
"Incredible, isn't it?" Alex remarked, clearly in her element as she navigated in a wide arc to give them a longer look at the lights.
Kade watched the display of colors, but his thoughts were still on Alex, still trying to piece together the facts from the loose bit of fiction she seemed to want him to believe. "Alaska is about as different as you can get from Florida, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is," she said. "My dad and I wanted to start over--we needed to, after Mom and Richie--" She took a breath as though catching herself from saying something more than she intended. "After they died, my dad and I flew to Miami to book a flight to someplace where we could start our lives over again. There was a globe in one of the bookstores at the terminal. Dad showed me where we were, then asked me to pick out the place where we should go next. I chose Alaska. When we got here, we figured Harmony sounded like it would be a friendly town for us to make a new home."
"And was it?"
"Yeah," she said, her voice a bit wistful. "It feels different to me now that he's gone, though. I've been thinking it might be time for me to take another look at the globe, see another part of the country for a while."
Before Kade could probe any further down that path, the single engine's rattle and shake was back with a vengeance. Alex sped them up again, but the noise and shudder persisted.
"What's going on?"
"I'm going to have to take us down now," she said. "There's the Tulak cabin below. I'll try to land as close as I can."
"All right." Kade glanced out the window to the ground coming up beneath them more quickly than he liked. "Just try to put it down easy. I don't see anything close to a runway down there." He needn't have been concerned. Alex brought the shuddering plane down onto its skis in a soft glide, managing to miss a couple of ancient spruces that seemed to materialize out of the darkness as they coasted over the top of the powdery snow. The cabin was right in front of them now, but Alex slowed the Beaver and steered into a gentle curve, navigating pretty damned tightly on precious little preparation for their abrupt landing.
"Jesus, that was close," he said as they came to a stop in the snow.
"Think so?" Alex's amused expression spoke volumes as she powered down the engine. She climbed out and Kade followed her up to the engine. She peered inside. "Dammit. Well, that explains the problem. A couple of screws must have jiggled loose of the engine cowling and fell out." Kade knew as much about engine cowlings as he did knitting. And he had no business hoping the plane's trouble would keep him stranded in the wild with Alex for a few hours. Better yet, a few nights.
"So, what are you telling me, we're grounded until we get some help?"
"You're looking at the help," she told him, shooting him a grin as she walked back to grab her toolbox from the plane's cargo hold.
Part of Kade's reason for bringing her out with him to the remote location had been to once and for all get to the bottom of what she knew about the Toms killings. Now, after the half-truth she'd told him about the deaths of her mother and brother, he had another reason to question her. And he told himself that if it did turn out that Alex knew something about the existence of the Breed--and all the more so if that knowledge had anything to do with the loss of her family members in Florida--then relieving her of the burden of that memory would be doing her a kindness.
But this wasn't just about his mission. He'd tried to convince himself it was, but duty had taken a swift backseat from the moment he arrived at Alex's place today. The way his pulse hammered around this female sure as hell wasn't part of the plan. His heart was still banging from the sudden landing, but as Alex came back to where he stood, looking smart and capable and too damned adorable as she went to work on the engine, the banging in his chest settled into a heavy throb.
