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Her voice came from behind us, and she must have taken Lance completely by surprise because his grasp on me loosened then fell away.
I turned and he was on the ground, apparently out cold, and my big sister was standing over him, in the pool of light from Ada’s powerful torch, brandishing some kind of weapon.
‘Oh, thank God!’ I heard Ada cry out.
I looked at Skye and she looked at me, then we both looked down in horror at Lance.
‘I can’t have killed him, surely?’ shouted Skye. ‘All I did was whack him with a branch.’
I started to laugh hysterically at that, trembling legs and sheer relief rendering me incapable of anything else at that moment.
Skye was still clinging onto her weapon. In the spotlight of Ada’s beam, she looked like the heroine in a play on stage, likely a dark thriller. Then she started to laugh herself, a little hysterically. ‘Do you think we should sit on him in case he wakes up?’
‘Good idea.’ Ada joined us, uttering a heart-felt expletive as she peered over the ledge to the gushing water below. She pulled me into a hug. ‘Thank God you’re safe.’
I stood there, feeling weak as a new-born kitten, in the circle of Ada’s comforting arms. We hadn’t hugged like this since I was about five, if ever. Tears were pricking my eyes. It was relief. But it was also raw emotion.
Ada thought she’d lost me, and her desperation was evident in the way she was holding me so tightly, as if she’d never let me go.
‘Over here!’ I heard Skye shout, and when Ada and I parted, we saw two figures with torches making their way towards us.
‘Kurt?’ I muttered in disbelief, as he reached my side.
‘Help! He’s getting up!’ yelled Skye, but even before Kurt could react, a burly figure was lumbering down the slope to her rescue.
Nash?
He grabbed a dazed-looking Lance and with Kurt’s help, frog-marched him up the bank to the path.
‘Come on, mate,’ I heard Nash say. ‘You don’t want anything bad to happen to Rori.’
Lance shook his head wearily and we followed them scrambling upwards until, to my relief, I felt the solid earth of the track beneath my feet once more.
Far below us, we watched a police car glide into the little car park...
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I lay on Ada’s long, squashy sofa, half-propped up with cushions, shivering under a duvet and several blankets but feeling so grateful to the people milling around me.
I’d started to shake as Kurt, his arm around me, led me down to his car, and I hadn’t been able to stop on the drive back to the house.
‘Hot sweet tea,’ announced Skye, kneeling at my side and presenting me with a mug. ‘Sounds disgusting but Ada says it’s really good for shock.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She was making up the bed for you in the spare room but worrying it wasn’t warm enough in there, so now she’s on a frantic search for a hot water bottle.’
‘Oh, tell her not to worry. I’m warming up now. I’ll be fine.’
Skye grinned. ‘You’d better make the most of all this fuss. Ada really thought you were a goner. But now that you’re clearly alive and well, no doubt things will drift back to normal.’
I chuckled. ‘Protest marches and shouting at vape-sucking teens on the village green?’
‘Something like that. Nice to see that she’s human, though, when one of her brood is in danger.’
I nodded, feeling thoroughly cosseted and determined to enjoy it.
Nash and Kurt had followed us back to the house in their cars, and I’d managed to say a quick thank-you to Nash before he left, for his part in the rescue. I still had no idea how he ended up being there at the waterfall at the critical moment, but I was hugely grateful to him, anyway.
