Dakota
Sweat rolled down my back and off my arms. The waistband of my jeans was soaked through, but I swung the axe with a sure, steady rhythm in the early afternoon. I needed to have plenty of firewood stashed safely under shelter before the massive winter blizzard hit, buried us in snow and closed the pass. Hiding out in my family’s cabin outside the outskirts of Aspen had made a survivalist out of me, and my instincts told me I was going to need a lot of cut wood.
But at the moment 55 degrees felt too warm, so I shrugged out of my shirt. I got lost in the movement and the exercise. Even though I was sweating profusely, my skin felt numb. I was numb by choice.
It was better than facing my demons. For now, the turmoil inside me was dormant. I wasn’t quite at peace, but I was empty. Better to be a wasteland than a maelstrom.
Maybe I should have sought help six months ago, but talking about it only made it worse. Although now I wasn’t sure if the silence was keeping me in perfect balance, either…but I hadn’t had a flashback in a while, and I’d take precarious over those horrifying memories any day.
Thunk. The ax bit deep. The cold air against my sweaty skin barely registered. I had retreated so far into my isolation that the numbness had reached my skin. I didn’t even want to think about how long it had been since someone touched me. It was much too long ago—so long ago, it might have been a dream.
Time drifted past as my muscles tightened and released. Stretched and contracted.
There was no wind, not even a breath to disturb those leaves, but there soon would be. With winds exceeding 35 miles an hour, a blizzard’s ferocious buffeting was responsible for the famous whiteouts, when the air was filled with blowing snow. It was so easy to get caught and not know which way to go. In a whiteout, the horizon disappeared.
I lived my life in a whiteout.
It was eerie, almost, the stillness. There wasn’t a sound except for the soft whoosh of snowfall and the crackling as it hit the aspens’ withered leaves.
I got into the rhythm of the cutting, and before I knew it, an icy gust blew across my back yard from the cliff edge that provided both a spectacular view and my probable future.
The cliff. It was my weapon of choice to put an end to the constant mental torture and terror. It’s why I was holed up here, yet I lived in an agony of indecision, with demons as my constant companions.
Finally I realized that I’d piled up more than enough wood to last the week or so before I would be dug out enough that I could go for more supplies. Breathing hard, I swiped the sweat from my forehead before it trickled down and burned my eyes. For a moment, I stood there, noticing my breath frosting the air. It had been snowing for a while. I just failed to notice. It thickened as I watched, then all of sudden a deluge of white.
That’s when I realized that the front end of the blizzard had arrived, its cold iced along my skin. I hadn’t felt the bite due to my exertions, since the core of me always seemed to be raging hot.
A tangle and press of vile demons trying to take over.
I turned to reach for my shirt. She was about 20 yards away, too far to shout and be heard above the wind. Her long white blonde hair rippled like the flutter of angels wings against the backdrop of winter white. Distracted by her and why she was here, I dropped my axe. Trudging through the new powder, she trailed a backpack, slogging slowly towards the cliff through the fresh snow. Anger boiled through me and my shackled demons laughed.
Not a woman. Not here. I couldn’t bear it.
If I lost my numbness, my equilibrium, it was open season on me.
Even this glimpse of her disturbed my peace, and I desperately needed my peace. Heavy snow obscured my vision and, with a shot to my heart, I realized I couldn’t see the horizon.
It had blindsided me. The monster was here.
I quickly headed toward the cliff, cutting our distance in half. Why was she on my property, and what did she want? Didn’t she realize that this was private land!?
I was just about to call out. I had almost made it to her when I heard her piercing scream. She must have gone over the cliff! And I was too far away to help.
I stopped dead. That scream echoed in my head, mingling with the screams, shouts, and gunfire that came boiling out from behind the locked door in my mind. I looked around and the snow vanished. I was surrounded by people running, screaming and dying, their blood flowing like water. A voiceless panic hung at the back of my throat. My head hurt. I could hear my own pulse in my ears. The dread in me escalated suddenly to cold-sweat terror. I clenched my teeth against a moan of fear and dropped to my knees. I would have prayed if I could have uttered a word past my frozen lips.
The man from my nightmares was there, his flattened, broken nose, the scar that ran from the corner of his mouth. I knew his pockmarked face as well as I knew my own face in the mirror. As vividly as the endless nights of beatings and torture at his cruel hands. I was chained and I couldn’t move. The manacle cut into my wrist as I fought to get free. I couldn’t get to her. She was too far away. My head ached from the butt of the rifle that drove me to my knees. I couldn’t get to her, save her…I promised…Elsa! Death breathing on the back of my neck, it was so close. I covered my ears, but it did no good, the screams were trapped inside my head. I could still hear them, see her face, see what they were doing to her. The horror and the helplessness crashed into me. Stop it! Stop it! I can’t bear it.
My skin was burning with cold as I came to awareness lying in the snow in a fetal position. The fury and the terror ebbed away like that fading scream. The woman! The cliff. My training kicked in and I staggered to my feet and ran.
God, please don’t let her be dead at the bottom.
I braced myself for the sight of her broken body. But mercifully she was huddled on a ledge about ten feet below.
“Are you all right?” My voice sounded rusty from disuse. Damn thoughtless woman.
“I think so,” she said, the undertones of panic in her voice reaching out and awakening the demons, who tried to suck me back in. But she was in dire need of help and finally my memories and terrors receded in the wake of the urgent need to rescue her.
Then she tilted her face up to me. The look of her slammed into me like a bludgeon to the chest. I couldn’t breathe. She had the face of an angel, heavenly eyes that promised solace and mercy. All legs and tiny waist and silky hair. Her mouth was a lush bow and promised wickedness, expressly fashioned to blow a man’s mind.
My world exploded into color that bled into the white, saturating it until it was soaked with breathtaking hues. My eyes met hers, deep blue in a pixie face of some kind of otherworldly creature, as if she had materialized out of a long-forgotten tale of faeries and dragons.
It was the strangest moment. She looked at me as if she knew me and had not expected to find me here. But I didn’t know her. I had never seen her before.
I would have remembered a face as lovely as hers.
“Oh, thank God! Can you help me?” she called, staring up at me, snowflakes drifting onto her hair, her eyelashes…melting on her soft lips.
My sigh of frustration, or weariness—probably both—hung in front of my face in a frosty puff. I should just let go, just sail over the edge to the bottom and, finally, end this anguish.
It would solve all my problems.
But then she would surely die.
“Are you hurt?” A part of me was already assessing the situation, figuring the best way to get down to her and to bring her back up. I needed to know how much she could help me.
“No, except for my ankle. I twisted it when I fell.”
Beneath my concern for her safety I was pissed as hell. I couldn’t control the innate need in me to save her. It was ingrained in my bone and sinew. But I also didn’t want her here. Not anywhere near me.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. Sprinting quickly toward the back porch and the shed, I reached the wooden deck. Breathing hard, my breath fogging in the chill air, I grabbed my climbing gear and headed back, my upper body still heated, whether from the sight of her or from the flashback, I didn’t know. My gut churned. I’d have to touch her. She would have to touch me. After the isolation, the thought of it felt alien.
It scared me.
As I tied the end of a rope to the deck, the snow was coming down even harder. I trailed it out and pegged it into the ground at the base of the cliff. The snow was starting to pile up, but I trampled around it to make sure I could find the peg when I came back up.
I put on the belt, drove a piton into a nearby boulder, clipping on a carabiner, threaded the rope through it, then giving the rope a couple of hard pulls to make sure it was secure. Heading to the lip of the cliff, I called down to her. “I’m on my way.”
I rappelled down the side of the cliff. When I reached her, she didn’t move, just looked at me like I was crazy. Probably because it was below freezing and I had no shirt on.
“Well, I’m sure you’re not the abominable snowman, because you don’t have enough fur.”
“Fucking jokes? At a time like this? That’s what you got for me?” My concern for her made me nastier than I would ever have been under other circumstances. Wind screamed around us, the deep throaty voice of the vicious monster that was almost upon us. I had to get her the hell off this ledge.
She blinked several times and I could only hope she wasn’t going to cry.
“I’m too afraid not to make jokes.” She gave me a weak smile and I had to look away quickly, or I would have been unable to drag my gaze from her beautiful face. I tried not to admire what a trooper she was being in the face of my anger.
I knelt down, trying not to frighten her any more than she already was. “Can you walk?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
The night had spiraled out of control—and the only thing that could keep us alive was being in control. I was the only thing standing between her and death. Helplessness meant death, and I’d met that bastard up close and personal. He’d already done his worst.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here.” Adrenaline and exertion were the only things that kept me from freezing to death.
“I can’t leave without my backpack.”
“What? You’ve got to be joking again!”
“I-It’s d-d-down b-below,” she said shivering.
“This is a pretty unstable place for us to be. I think you should forget about it,” I tried to be firm.
“I can’t,” she cried and those innocent-looking eyes widened and filled with tears. And, I went to jelly just like that. “P-p-lease, g-get it for m-me. I’m b-begging you.” Her deep blue eyes pleaded with mine, her lower lip, plump and trembling, her sorrow and panic pulling me under and drowning me in her. And it was a helluva way to go. Like I had time for this, but I couldn’t say no.
I looked over the edge and saw it perched perilously on a small ledge. It was pink and yellow with Winnie the Pooh on the face. I took a deep breath and went over, using the rock face for leverage. As I got to the ledge, it began to crumble. She screamed just as I caught the strap. The damn thing was heavier than I expected. It wrenched my shoulder. That grayness washed over me and I dangled from the rope, fighting the memory, fighting the flashback and the gibbering demons who waited to claim me.
“Are you okay?” she yelled down, and I looked up to see her determined expression, and the shining gratitude that I had been willing to risk my life for Pooh. That expression galvanized me. I latched on to her gaze, using her glorious blue eyes to anchor me, and hung on, pushing the screaming memories, the demons, away from me as if I was walking underwater.
I couldn’t let the demons loose. She needed me!
“Don’t scream!” I gritted out through clenched teeth. If she screamed, the demons would consume me.
I pulled myself up to her ledge and she grasped the backpack, clutching it to her. She looked up at me with such appreciation, but I didn’t want her to look at me like that. I wasn’t a hero. Heroes didn’t run and hide. Heroes didn’t fail
“Thank you. Thank you so much!”
It seemed so surreal to be out here, without a shirt, without a jacket, sharing a ledge in a blizzard with this beautiful woman.
“I want you to put your arms around my neck and then wrap your legs around my waist when I stand up. Hold on as tight as you can. Do you understand?”
She nodded, slipping her arms through the backpack, securing it to her back.
“When I get to the top, I’m going to stop so you can get off my shoulders. I want you to crawl forward until you’re on solid ground. Then I’ll come up. We need to move. This storm is about to bury us.” Snow swirled around us, the wind savage as I grasped her arm. As I lifted, she rose up on her good foot and I swung her onto my back.
I wasn’t prepared when she touched my bare shoulders. The contact jarred me, made me curse softly between clenched teeth. Her legs clamped around my waist and I bit my lip at the sensation. As soon as she was situated, I began to climb, picking my way as carefully and quickly as I could, using depressions or protrusions in the rock to leverage us up. When I reached the top, I said, “Go, but be careful.” She crawled off me and I clambered the rest of the way up. By now the world was white.
I easily found the stake and picked up the line that I had strung from the deck. I couldn’t see the structure through the hard-blowing snow. I slipped my arms under her and lifted. I was starting to get really cold. She made a surprised sound as I hugged her to my chest. She was light, warm, and smelled like heaven. It was as if someone took a baseball bat to my senses and clubbed them open and aware, filled with blood and pain.
I didn’t need this as I trudged through the swirling snow with her in my arms. After only moments of that angel face and those open and blue eyes on my face as I walked, I wanted to snap at her to stop looking at me. I climbed the stairs up to the deck and into the back of the cabin. I kicked the door shut behind me. Through the kitchen and into the living room, I dropped her on the couch like a live grenade. But I couldn’t possibly run. I couldn’t get away. I’d have to take the blast full out. She needed me.
And the healer inside me was compelled to help her.
She clutched her backpack and eyed me.
“What the fuck did you think you were doing?” I shouted as soon as it was safe to vent my adrenaline and fear over the sheer stupidity of almost losing such a woman to that damn cliff.
“That’s personal,” she said softly, and I found myself feeling like the bad guy in this story.
“You’re on my property. I have a right to ask.”
She looked away, but not before she’d scanned me thoroughly, and ignited a flash burn inside me.
The demons laughed and danced, pushing against the flimsy safeguards I’d built just at the edges of my vision.
She lifted her chin and steel came into those blue eyes. “You can ask all you want. I don’t have to answer.”
“What is your name?”
“Alissa Thompson. Yours?”
I scowled at her.
“Or you can just scowl at me.”
Geezus, even her name was beautiful. I could barely stand to look at her. My heart contracted and I turned my head away when she frowned. “Dakota Grey,” I snapped.
“Well, Dakota, I came here for my own reasons. I’d prefer not to share them.”
“Even though you barged onto private property?”
She gave me a steady, I’m-not-talking look and didn’t say a word.
“How did you get here?” She didn’t look like Elsa, the woman who haunted me, but her femininity and her blond hair reminded me of her.
“I drove my car, but had to abandon it below when it got stuck in a snow bank, probably because I have no snow tires.”
“Unbelievable.” I huffed out a really exasperated breath and rubbed my temple. “It wouldn’t matter if your car was ready to start up and drive off! You’re not going anywhere. You’re stuck here for however long it takes for that monster out there to pass through.”
“What?”
“There’s a blizzard. Did you think I was kidding?” I sent my hands through my damp hair at the panic twisting in my gut. “You’re stuck here, probably through Christmas.”
She bit her plump bottom lip and my skin caught fire. Not what I needed, on top of everything else.
“Oh, no! I can’t stay here.”
I frowned at her, shaking my head. “You have no choice and neither do I.”
Her eyes narrowed at my snotty tone. “Well, with this kind of hospitality it should be such a jolly holiday.”
I leaned down and gritted out between my teeth. “You’re lucky you’re not dead.