“All right, we’re turning back, Shel.” Eric pivoted, expecting her right behind him. Nothing. His chest tightened as he peered into the swirling cloud cover.
Minutes later, she emerged from the blowing snow. Her breaths came out as high-pitched wheezes. Her hands pushed down on her thighs with each slow step in the deep powder. He knew that technique—it helped get a little more power out of the legs, right up until the person totally bonked.
Damn her, coming on this mission but still not 100 percent healthy. What was she thinking? The team searched at ten thousand feet in the wilderness in deteriorating conditions. Anything could go wrong on the best day.
What good had that argument done? With Shelby? None at all.
He waited until she caught up.
In the lower light, she’d removed the sunglasses and now they hung on a band around her neck. The force of her gaze hit him in the solar plexus. Always had. The gold flecks in her brown eyes glittered like pyrite in a sunlit streambed.
Or like gentle embers right before exploding into a raging inferno. He flinched at her scowl.
Freckles dotted her pale skin, which had pinkened from the cold. The Search and Rescue pack dwarfed her tall, thin frame. Her delicate bone structure didn’t deceive him. The woman was tough. But mortal.
Damn it all, what was he supposed to do with her?
“We have to turn back for the night,” he said. “The sun—wherever it is—will be down in an hour. Full dark in two.”
Gold glinted as her eyes narrowed, and she stuffed her fisted hands on her hips and faced him with square shoulders. She drew in a big, angry breath.
Whatever she was about to say, he didn’t want to hear it.
“Keep going.” Her voice came out hoarse, ragged. “We’re going to find him.”
“No. This whole situation is ridiculous. You being up here like this.” He ignored the set of her chin. “You know it’s true.”
“Come on. I know we can get to him. I can’t let another—” A convenient coughing jag stopped her.
Another person die. That’s what she’d been about to say. Yeah. Once he’d found out about her ability to find lost people, it didn’t take him long to realize she’d missed a big one years ago. His teenage crush, Leah. Shelby had failed to find his girlfriend before she had died.
Not that he blamed Shelby. Not exactly. Maybe her power hadn’t fully formed back then. Maybe being a little drunk that night messed up the ability. However, since finding out about her gift, he’d wanted to ask those hard questions, figure out why she had failed to find Leah that night. But he didn’t want to risk alienating Shelby in the process.
He shifted the pack’s weight. “It’s too dangerous to stay out here. The weather is getting worse. We don’t know how far this guy is from us. Hell, we don’t even know if the guy is alive. If it’s worth us risking our lives out here. Decision made. We’re leaving.”
She stared at him in frozen silence for a full minute until he worried that she was having a seizure or something.
“Damn you.”
Over the wind, he almost missed her whispered words, but he didn’t miss how her entire frame tightened up and hunched into itself.
Pinching the bridge of her nose, she closed her eyes and slowly rotated until her frame locked into a position, aimed slightly downhill. Her orange eyebrows, still not grown back in from being singed off in the fire, furrowed as she gasped. Oh no, was she—
“Shelby, stop!”
She raised a gloved hand, palm toward him, and he didn’t dare touch her. What would breaking her concentration do? Then a guttural sound escaped her lips as what color remained in her face drained away to ash.
As she pitched forward, Eric hauled her against him, alpine outerwear, backpack and all, using his body to hold her upright.
A tear leaked from the corner of one of her eyes, and the impact of that bit of moisture hit him far harder than it should have. He ignored how good—how right—it felt to be this close to her, and instead hung onto her for all he was worth.
After a few seconds, the color on her cheeks improved. She inclined her head and croaked, “That way. He’s alive but barely. If we stop now, he’ll die.”
“But you don’t know how far—”
She wet her dry lips. “I’m not leaving without finding this guy.”
If she felt as bad as she looked, Shelby might not be leaving here, period. His heart thumped an extra beat.
No. She would not die up here if he had anything to do about it.
“You’re killing me here, Shel.” He kept one arm around her, and refused to inhale the hint of apple pie and fresh air when the top of her helmet-covered head stopped right below his line of sight.
What good did it do to argue? She gave new meaning to the term stubborn.
He glanced at his crackling radio. “What do you want me to tell Rodney and Amanda? Because Ben is calling us back to base camp.”
“Tell them we might have heard something uphill of their position. We’ll go downhill a bit. Have them start walking at an angle toward us, and we’ll meet up.”
She eased away from him, the deficit leaving him cold, and not from the dropping temperatures.
Pulling out the radio, he relayed the information to the other team below them and then let Ben know that they were going another fifteen minutes. His team leader was unhappy, given the deteriorating conditions, but gave them the green light to go a little longer.
A slice of raw, hot fury shook him to his toes.
She blinked and wheezed, waiting.
Eric’s decision could cost someone’s life, and he wasn’t talking about the skier.
The heat swirled away, replaced by ice-cold stabs up his back. The freezing wave flooded his chest and belly. Could he get her out of here in one piece and alive?
Shit. He had no control over this situation, and his inability to manage everything going on could cost more than he was willing to pay.
One look at the set of her mouth and wide stance softened his hard-nosed approach. He could no more stop Shelby than he could stop an avalanche. Results might be the same, though.
Damn it.
He motioned for her to precede him. “Go on, then, radar. Cut trail, find this guy, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
She adjusted the pack, stepped around him, and trudged down off the spine of the ridge.
• • •
Crap, crap, crap. Shelby was in big trouble.
She had a problem that could kill her out here, on the edge of a steep alpine ridge in the middle of nowhere in the Tetons.
She couldn’t see.
No way would she tell Eric the extent of her breathing problems, but at least she could cover her wheezing well enough. That little show of defiance and pride back there, trying to get into the head of the victim because she wanted to show Eric what’s what? It had blinded her. Even now, she could barely see in front of her because of the blurriness, worsening by the minute.
Dumb. One wrong step and she’d slide to her death, thousands of feet to the bottom of the steep mountain. Who the hell hiked up here in a cloudbank, in the blowing snow, with deteriorating conditions and night coming on, and then did something that made them freakin’ blind? Fair enough, it wasn’t like she didn’t know the vision loss might happen again. She’d lost her sight for a few minutes after getting into Zach and Sara’s minds a couple of weeks ago.
Today, though, it had been fifteen minutes since she activated her ability, and her vision wasn’t clearing up. In fact, it was getting worse. How long would she be impaired this time?
Fear walked pointy fingers up her spine and rested a thin hand on her neck.
And squeezed.
She kept blinking to clear her vision, but it didn’t help. A tremor shook her arms and legs. No way was she safe out here in this condition.
Was the blindness permanent? Air stopped halfway up her windpipe. Her heart pounded in a tight chest.
Damn it, what if she became a liability to her family? With Dad’s recent stroke, they couldn’t afford for anyone else in the family to get sick or injured. If she couldn’t see to work on the ranch, that debility would destroy her brothers. Please, let this be temporary.
Eric mumbled into the radio. She could barely make out the response from Amanda down the hillside, but she could hear her teammate’s—and Rodney’s voices nearby. They were getting closer.
Even without trying to connect with the search target, she still got a sense of the skier’s mind, like his life force or whatever voodoo you wanted to call it was a magnet, pulling her closer. Another series of harsh coughs strafed her lungs, and she whimpered with each breath.
Time was running out for this guy; she could feel his life slipping away. Eric would hold her to the fifteen minutes, for the sake of the rest of the team. If they didn’t find the guy in time, he’d be dead. Simple as that.
To her right, down the hill, Amanda’s and Rodney’s voices grew louder.
Boom, boom. Shelby’s head throbbed in time with the heartbeat of the lost skier, the pounding thuds urging her to move faster. Faster. The light around them had settled into a flat, dim gray that had nothing to do with the waning daylight. She scrubbed a gloved hand over her eyes. All it did was make them tear up. Nothing came into focus. All shapes blended into dull nothingness.
Her foot twisted on the uneven, snow-covered ground. Shooting pain chased away the throat-clutching terror that threatened to freeze her in her tracks. Hiking the Tetons while blind. Beyond stupid.
But she had to find the man, had to meet up with her teammates. It was imperative. Rodney and Amanda needed to find the victim and quickly.
Because if Shelby found the guy, she couldn’t help him. She couldn’t even see a few feet in front of her anymore.
Her foot shot out from beneath her. Sliding a few feet down the slope, she landed hard on her other knee. She dug her gloved hands into snow and rock. How far was she from the edge? If she started to slide again, would she ever stop?
Yeah, she would. A lot later. And that was the problem.
“Damn it,” Eric spat, crunching through the snow.
“I’m fine.” Even she didn’t believe the words.
“That’s it. We’re done here.” He grabbed under her armpit, pulled her back up and spun her around. His face smeared into a gray blur. Thank God she couldn’t see the pissed-off Eric face, the one with the tight jaw and disappointed narrowing of his eyes.
Concentrate on business. A victim was out there, alive. Barely. “A little farther. Come on, we can get to this guy.” Easing out of his grip, she continued toward the pull of her target’s mind.
Whatever Eric muttered behind her was likely descriptive and uncomplimentary. The surge of nasty yellow ire that blasted past her confirmed his feelings on the matter.
“Hey!” Rodney called out.
“Got something, you guys,” Amanda shouted.
Shelby concentrated on not falling off the mountain as she forced her rubbery, burning legs to move.
Amanda’s anxious tone cut through the thick clouds around them. “He’s over here! Get out the supplies.”
Approaching the voice, Shelby detected lights—headlamps—and shadows. Not much else.
Those imaginary fingers on her neck squeezed again. Yeah, she was in big trouble. Blind hikers didn’t survive long above tree line. Or anywhere deep in the Tetons, for that matter.
Her body jerked to a stop. “Stop, Shel. You almost stepped on him. What’s wrong with you?” Eric yelled.
Sinking down to her knees, she scrubbed at her eyes and squinted. Two fuzzy lights and three dark shapes appeared with a smidge of color haloing each form.
Oh, shit.
Eric relayed position through the radio. Ben’s team would work their way up to a rendezvous point back below the ridge behind them. It would be up to Eric’s team to transport the guy to that point. Alive.
Eric’s team minus one.
“Can you get an IV in him, Shel?” he asked. “You’re our best stick. The guy needs fluids fast.”
Grabbing Eric’s leg, she tugged him down until he knelt next to her. She pulled him close so her mouth was close to his ear.
“You know that trick I did back there to get in this guy’s head?” she whispered.
She felt, rather than saw, his nod.
“You know how two weeks ago that mental trick wiped me out?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this time I can’t see anything.”
“At all?”
“Nothing.”