Page 22 of Northern Escape


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She noticed him watching her and the smile vanished. She pulled the cover up over her mouth again. “We need to move. We only have about four and a half hours of daylight this time of year. We’re not going to reach Solitaire before sundown, but if we push, we can make it before the next sunrise.”

“How far is it?”

“A hundred miles, give or take.” She tilted her head to one side then the other as if mentally weighing her calculations. “No, it might be closer to one-fifty. I don’t know exactly how far off course we went looking for a place to land.”

“And one hundred fifty miles will take how long?”

She glanced up. he followed her gaze. Pale blue sky spotted with fluffy clouds.

“If these conditions hold,” she said, “andif the dogs want to runandif I don’t have to cut a trailandif we don’t have any other problems, eighteen hours. Give or take.”

So in perfect conditions, it would take nearly a full day. Somehow, he doubted they’d find perfect conditions, considering how swimmingly this trip had already gone.

He stared into the thick trees surrounding the lake. He didn’t see anything resembling a trail. He’d had some wilderness survival training in the military and even he had no idea which direction they needed to go. It all looked the same to him. “There’s nothing between here and Solitaire?”

“There might be. If we’re lucky, once we’re out of the mountains, we might find a village. But I never count on luck because out here she’s a cold, cruel bitch.”

“Jesus.” He shifted his gaze to the plane. It was starting to look like an excellent shelter from the biting cold. “Shouldn’t we stay?” Every survival TV show he’d ever watched said it was important to stay put in situations like this.

She nodded. “We absolutely could wait here and hope our call for help got out to someone who cares. That could take anywhere from one hour to… oh, never.”

“Good point.”

“Besides, you only stay put if you don’t know what you’re doing, have no gear, and no way out. That is not us.” She stuck her fingers in her mouth and gave a sharp whistle. The dogs ran over to the sled and lined up in front of the thing like they knew what they were doing. Which, having run the Iditarod, they probably did.

He was the fish out of water here, and he didn’t like it.

Bree shot him a smirking glance over her shoulder as she fastened each dog into its harness and put booties on their feet. The pack was excited, tails wagging, Nugget and Diggy singing their joy, and every furry body vibrating with energy. They wanted to run.

When she got to the last harness and found no dog waiting, she straightened with her hands on her hips and looked around. “Moonbeam!”

Ellis turned toward the snowbank in time to watch Moonbeam take another flying leap off it. She hit the ice, but instead of sliding again, a sharp crack reverberated through the air like a gunshot, and the dog plunged through.

The other dogs howled and yipped.

Bree screamed. “Moonbeam!”

Ellis didn’t think. He peeled off his parka, yanked off his boots, and ran out onto the ice in his socks. He didn’t feel the cold until the ice gave way under him a foot from the hole and he hit the water. There weren’t words for the cold he experienced in that moment. It was like knives cutting him all over. It froze the air in his lungs, but he knew better than to gasp. That was how you ended up drowning.

Moonbeam thrashed at the edge of the ice, trying to climb out but only succeeding in making the hole larger. Already shivering so hard his teeth knocked together, he swam over to her. She still wore her plane harness and he tried to grab it, but his fingers wouldn’t cooperate enough to grasp the strap. Instead, he scooped his arms under her butt and hoisted her up onto the ice.

“R-r-run,” he told her in a whisper. The cold had stolen his voice.

She did as she was told, bolting toward shore where Bree and her pack waited for her. Once there, she shook off the water and seemed no worse for wear. Good.

He, on the other hand, was in deep, icy shit. The cold had invaded every cell in his body. He swore even his heart was shivering. He tried to pull himself up in the same place he’d lifted Moonbeam, but while the ice had held her forty pounds, it crumbled under his nearly two hundred. He tried another spot with the same result. The ice around the hole wasn’t strong enough to hold him. He couldn’t get out. He treaded water and felt the fight draining out of him.

Was this how it ended for him? It’d be ironic for him to die in Alaska when he’d spent his entire childhood wanting to escape and half his adulthood never wanting to return. And yet here he was freezing to death because he’d gone chasing after a father he didn’t want to care about with a woman who thought he was a feckless idiot.

Aw, hell. Maybe he was.

After all the responsibilities he’d had piled on him as a teenager and then the rigid structure of the military… when he was finally free of it all he’d wanted nothing more than to stay free. It didn’t make him a bad guy, right?

Right?

Fuck it. He was a bad guy. A useless, reckless, irresponsible jackass. He knew it, and since he was on the verge of passing out and drowning— or would he freeze to death first?— he might as well admit it to himself.

No one was going to miss him when he was gone. He never thought he cared about stuff like that. His motto had always been play hard, die young, and go out on a blaze of glory. But knowing he wouldn’t be remembered fondly, knowing he wouldn’t be missed— it hurt. It fucking sucked.

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