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Still, she landed with an ooof. The air escaped her lungs in a rush. She lay still for two heartbeats. Then, fairly certain she hadn’t injured herself, she struggled to her feet and began trudging down the hill through snow-laden trees and brush toward the highway, far below. Past that road and a rambling quarter-mile descent of land to the beach lay the endless blackness that marked the Pacific Ocean. She’d made this trek several dozen times, more and more frequently, as the ludicrousness of her “captivity” had made it impossible for her to stay, and she knew where she was going.

Even so, a ribbon of fear had wound itself around her heart. Catherine was an old biddy—far older than her years on earth—but she was their aunt, and even though she was completely screwed up, she did want only to keep her nieces safe and secure. Ravinia couldn’t imagine what would happen if she actually wasn’t around.

She kept us safe from Justice, she thought.

Ravinia’s jaw locked. It wasn’t all Catherine, she reminded herself. She and Ophelia had helped rid the earth of that whack job as well.

At the edge of Highway 101, Ravinia stepped onto the shoulder of the road and slipped right down to her knees. Snow wasn’t the norm around here, but she could remember how it was in ’08, when it buried everything and everybody lost power for days on end, well, except for Siren Song, with its generator.

Carefully, her nerves thrumming with urgency, she found her footing and started south down the road, toward Deception Bay. There wasn’t a car to be seen. Nobody wanted to trust the slickness of the roads, and Ravinia, with an eye toward the western edge of Highway 101, with its limited guardrails, could understand. No, she’d never driven a car, but she’d ridden with “friends” she met on her nightly vigils, and she sure as hell got a thrill when they went around some of these snakelike corners a little too fast. There was a slow decline in the road that wound into Deception Bay, but that descent was still a few miles ahead, and Ravinia was worried. How long was it going to take to find help? Would she be in time?

She and her sisters had carried Catherine into the lodge and stripped her of her clothes. Carefully, they’d wrapped her in blankets and laid her in front of the fire, but with Lillibeth’s wailing, and Isadora’s fretting thoughts of trying to find Earl, and Cassandra’s wide-eyed stares when she’d joined them, as if she were looking into the bowels of hell, well . . . nothing positive had happened. Ophelia’s sudden disappearance hadn’t helped, and then Cassandra had whispered, “It’s because Aunt Catherine knows . . . ,” and Ravinia had asked, “Knows what?” and when no one said anything, Ravinia

had had enough. They needed action. They needed emergency help. They didn’t need to huddle together like scared mice, shivering inside the lodge.

No more, she’d thought then, and now she thought it again. No more.

She was fifteen minutes into her hike when a car with chains chinging through the snow caught her in the beams of its headlights. The sedan slowed. Cautiously, Ravinia glanced at the driver as he rolled down his window.

“Need a lift?” he asked.

He was old. And there was a woman with him on the passenger side who looked about the same age, his wife, maybe. “We got caught in this mess, but we’re almost home,” she said.

“Do you have a cell phone?” Ravinia asked.

“Sorry, honey. We don’t own one. What are you doing out alone on a night like this?” she asked.

“Are you going to Deception Bay?” Ravinia cut through her concern. No time for explanations.

“We’re going through it,” the man said. “Heading to Tillamook.”

“If we make it,” his partner said with asperity.

“You can drop me in Deception Bay,” Ravinia decided and opened the back door when he gestured for her to help herself. She could find a phone once she was in the small seaside town, she decided, not realizing she’d crossed her fingers for good luck until she happened to look down at her gloved hands.

CHAPTER 18

Visibility had dropped to the square of snow directly in front of his headlights. Hale found he was saying the same thing over and over again in his head: Just a little bit farther. Not much more. Just a little bit farther. Not much more.

He wasn’t far from the summit. She’d said she was on this side of it. He couldn’t have missed her. Couldn’t have. Her lights would be on. Her battery would still be working, or maybe she still had the engine running. God, he hoped so. It was damn cold. Damn cold . . .

He had a blanket in the backseat. And in the cargo area he had the carpet he’d used to put on the chains, although some snow had clung to it and melted, so it was a bit wet. But if Savvy was cold, really cold, he could give her his coat and wrap her in the blanket and carpet, if need be.

Jesus.

His chest felt as if it were in a vise.

A sound came from behind him, and he looked in the rearview mirror to see a sheriff’s car following after him, light bar flashing red and blue, but no siren. At the same moment his peripheral vision caught sight of car tires, covered already with an inch of snow, but sticking out of the ditch and spinning slowly like rubber plates on two sticks. The rest of the Escape was in the ditch, on its side.

Savvy! Finally!

Hale yanked his steering wheel a little too energetically, and he immediately went into a slide, which he corrected with a slow turn into the slide as he yanked his foot from the accelerator. His TrailBlazer took a couple of 360s, but it finally stopped, facing west. The Clatsop County sheriff’s car that had been behind him tried to stop, couldn’t, then fishtailed on past him for a bit before the driver got it under control.

Hale didn’t have time to look. He was stopped about ten feet east of the Escape and climbed out of the TrailBlazer into sideways snow, only to immediately lose his footing. The road was like glass beneath the snow—a sheet of ice. He wished he had studs. Far better than chains, but the thought flew into his head and out. Scrambling to his feet, he half crab-walked, half slipped and slid through the blinding precipitation to Savvy’s car.

“Savannah!” he yelled. “Savannah!”

His gut clenched. What if she wasn’t alive? What if she was seriously injured? Having problems with the labor? The birth?

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