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She was struggling to sit, rolling half on her side and using her hands to push herself upright. The hood of her slicker was down, her head unprotected; her dark hair was plastered against her skull and running with water, she’d been crawling over incredibly rough ground for God only knew how long, but she was moving, she was still in the game, still trying.
His stomach clenched. He’d let her down by letting the horse get away. With the horse, he’d have had her safe and dry in about an hour. Now he’d have to carry her out of here, and he had no idea how long it would take on foot to reach his camp. If he were humping a pack on fairly level ground he knew he could easily set a pace of four miles an hour, but carrying a person, in this kind of terrain? No way. He’d end up stepping off a cliff and killing both of them. With luck, they’d reach his camp by daylight, which was hours from now, hours before he could see to her ankle, hours before she could get warm and dry.
He went back to her side, back down on one knee, and helped her to a sitting position. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” She looked around, a little dazed. “I feel … a little funny. Where did … it hit?” She was trembling and breathless, and her voice was weak, but there was no hint of hysteria in her tone, thank God. Maybe one day he’d tell her how deeply he appreciated that she’d held it together. Male or female, and he’d seen some guys lose it in combat, hysteria in a life-or-death situation just made the odds for survival get even longer.
“Far enough away that we aren’t dead, and that’s all that matters.” Lightning was still popping, thunder still rolling in metallic echoes across the mountains. Just because they’d survived one lightning strike that was way too close for comfort didn’t mean they’d survive the next one. They weren’t out of danger yet, not by a long shot.
“The horse is gone.” He said it baldly, a flat statement of fact.
She nodded, a single bob of her head.
He waited for the angry blast of recrimination, because no way Angie Powell would let the opportunity pass to tell him what a stupid asshole he’d been. Instead she sat there, her trembling increasing until it wasn’t trembling at all but body-shaking shudders that left her gasping for air, and finally she opened her mouth.
“Chad … Krugman … killed Davis.” She sucked in more air. “Shot at … me. Took the horses.” She stopped, and if possible her shaking intensified. He remained silent, surprised that she hadn’t ripped into him, changing into something far more deadly. Even though he’d called himself all kinds of a fool for riding out in such a dangerous storm, he’d kept going because those pistol shots in the dead of night couldn’t have meant anything good. There were ramifications he had to think about, but not right now. Right now, the most important thing was getting to shelter. He’d concentrate on that for the time being, and after they’d had a chance to get some rest would be the time to think about strategy and possibles.
She tried to say something else but the words just wouldn’t form, whether because she was so cold and exhausted or for some other reason he didn’t yet know. Maybe she was in too much pain. He put his arm around her, pulled her in tight against his chest and shoulders as if by physically bracing
her he could pass some of his strength on to her. He’d done it on battlefields, and for whatever reason the human contact always seemed to help. Finally she gathered her strength and said, “Bear.”
Bear? The word came out of nowhere. His head jerked around, his gaze sharply scanning and his right hand already lifting the rifle he held, but no four-legged threat was in sight. Visibility was so poor that didn’t mean much, but for now he was going with what his eyes were telling him. He scowled down at her. “Whaddaya mean, bear?”
“It came … must have been circling the camp … horses going crazy. It got … Davis’s body. Huge. Biggest bear I’ve seen … I was right there, on the ground—”
She stopped, but then there really was nothing else she needed to say. Dare clamped his jaw tight. Seeing a bear savage a body at close range, even knowing the man was already dead, would be enough to traumatize anyone. And she knew bears, knew the danger she’d be in if this one had scented her.
Fucking great. Not only was there a killer out there after her, but now he had to factor a man-eating bear into the equation. He had only one other question, the most important one: “Grizzly or black?”
“Black.”
He grunted. That sure as hell put the worst twist on an already bad situation. Grizzlies were aggressive as all hell, like a buzz saw wearing stinky fur, but they normally attacked for a reason: intruding into their territory, getting too close to a kill, startling it, or the worst situation of all, getting between a female and her cubs. Black bears were different; they came after people without any of the triggers that would set off a grizzly. Bear lovers could protest all they wanted that bear attacks were almost always the human’s fault, but most people who actually lived in bear country knew better, at least where black bears were concerned.
They needed to be moving. With a predatory black bear in the area, the sooner they got to his camp, the better.
“Let’s get going,” he said. “It’s a long way to camp. How do you want to start out, on my back or over my shoulder?”
She shook her head. “You can’t carry me. It’s too far.”
“Don’t start being a pain in the ass,” he snapped. Patience wasn’t his strong suit—or his weak one, come to that. And the comment was fucking stupid, because when hadn’t she been a pain in the ass? “If you could walk at all, you wouldn’t have been crawling, and even if I help you, you can’t hop several miles in this terrain. I’ll repeat your two choices: on my back, or over my shoulder. Choose.”
Another flash of lightning made her flinch. She wiped a shaking hand across her face, and he realized again how close she was to the end of her rope. “Which one is easiest for you?” she finally asked, and the ease with which she gave in told him more than words ever would how much this night had taken out of her.
“Easy isn’t a factor. Never mind, I just made up your mind for you. We’ll start out with you over my shoulder, so I can keep my right hand free to carry the rifle. I want to be able to shoot if I need to. After we put some more distance between us and your camp, we’ll switch to piggyback and you can carry the rifle. Think you can stay awake to shoot if you have to?”
Her eyes were huge, dark hollows in her pale face. “Oh, yeah,” she said grimly. “I’ll stay awake.”
Chapter Fourteen
Dare pulled her upright and clamped an arm around her waist to hold her steady as she ground her teeth and worked through the surge of pain caused by blood going to her foot. When he could feel her relax a little he eased his grip, but kept her weight leaning against him; the way she was shaking, her balance was precarious even if she hadn’t been holding her right foot off the ground.
“Okay, here’s the way we’re going to do this.” He took the saddlebags from her and settled them over his left shoulder, with one bag hanging over his back and the other over his chest. The strap of her mud-caked rifle was hooked over his right shoulder. His own rifle was in his right hand. “You’re going over my left shoulder. Use your left arm to hook around my waist, and I’ll be using my left arm to steady you. Between the two of us, you should be fairly secure. I know you’re tired and cold and you want to rest, but what I need you to do is hold the flashlight in your right hand and shine it in front of me, so I can see where I’m going. Can you manage?”
He couldn’t really tell in the darkness, broken by the surreal flashes of light, but he thought she gave a faint, grim smile. “Hold a flashlight? Yeah … I can do that.”
It had been a dumb-ass question; a woman who had crawled down a mountain could definitely handle a flashlight. And at any other time she’d have pointed out to him what a dumb-ass question it was, but tonight she seemed to be passing up opportunities to chew his ass out. That almost worried him more than the situation they were in, because what if she had a head injury she hadn’t told him about?
Well, hell. Only one way to find out, and that was to ask. “Have you banged your head on anything?”
