Snapping fire shot through her leg when Shelby landed at the bottom of the wall of jumbled rocks.
The breaths came hard and harsh as she struggled to draw air.
Nausea nailed her as she tried to shift her foot. With ginger movements, she tugged off her gloves and held out her shaking hand. Running it over her leg, she encountered a hard, irregular bump angling the bone midway down the limb. And dampness soaked the inner layer of her alpine pants.
She screamed.
Her vision dimmed, and she had to fight back the darkness that threatened to entomb her.
Beneath this unstable wall of rock, what light remained at dusk was gone. Only shadows of trees and nearby boulders were visible. Fighting another wave of hot nausea, she slipped off the backpack and fished around for her flashlight. Bursts of pain from her leg made her fight the urge to throw up every few seconds.
Oh man, if she survived this mess, her brothers were going to kill her.
An angry shout filtered down to her from above.
Unless Eric killed her first.
“Shelby?” His voice echoed thin and angry against the rock wall.
“Down here,” she croaked.
She scooted away from the pebbles and debris that rained down as he skidded and scrambled down the unstable bluff. His shadowy shape filled her vision until he rustled in his backpack and clicked on a headlamp.
“Shit.” He dropped to his knees and shoved the band for the light around his head. In the shadow of the headlight, his mouth pressed into a hard, grim line. He ran hands over her body and stopped suddenly. “Damn it. Your leg.”
“I know,” she panted.
“You want me to remind you how this was a stupid idea and you could have been killed?”
“I’ve got the idea.” The words had to be gritted out through another hot rush of agony shooting up her thigh.
“Everything else okay? Any chest pain? Are you breathing all right?” He ran his hands back over her again, businesslike and professional. A few spots made her wince, but nothing else felt broken. He did a quick check with the stethoscope then nodded.
Fishing around in his backpack, he pulled out a moldable splint. When he cut her pants away, every movement of her leg created a new blast of fire licking the raw bone and skin.
It didn’t help that she saw everything he saw. Including the pieces of her tibia and fibula sticking out from midway down her leg. The leg had already swelled, and blood mixed with glistening yellow marrow oozed from the open wound. In better news, the chilly air soothed the hot swelling.
She laid her head back on the cold, rocky ground and stared up at the dark night sky. So bad. An inappropriate laugh tried to erupt from her lips. Shit, this was a bad situation.
After wrapping her leg with gauze, he fixed the splint in place. The pain surged, then faded to a constant throb. Worry and concern poured out of him, ramping up her barely contained panic.
“Okay for now?” he asked. The headlamp cast his face in skeletal shadow.
She shivered. “Peachy.” How the heck were they going to get out of here with her mangled leg? She swallowed. They would do it slowly, and it was going to hurt like a bear.
“Yeah, right.” He rummaged into an outside pocket of his pack and pulled out the radio. “Kerr?”
Static.
“Kerr? It’s Eric. Over.”
Nothing.
He bent his head and changed the knobs. Then tried again. No response.
“Should work,” he said, staring up at the black sky. “Are we that far off the line of sight?”
“Supposed to work even in nooks and crannies, or so the package insert claimed.” She groaned. “You may need to go back up top and call him.”
“I’m not leaving you alone.” He swung his head around, the rocks and rough ground illuminated in the flashlight’s glow. When he turned back to her, the light hit her in her eyes and she flinched away. “Sorry.” He tilted the beam down. “What the hell happened up there?”
Frowning, she tried to recall. “I heard the child’s cry. It was getting louder. Like it was in pain, suffering. I don’t know. All that mattered was finding the source of that sound.” She pointed above her head. “So I stopped at the edge, there. As I looked over to see what was down here, a weird feeling like someone shoved me in the back. And then I ended up here.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“No kidding. The backpack took most of the impacts on the rocks.” The leg throbbed and she grimaced. “Until that last big jolt, of course.”
“Damn. From where I stood, it almost appeared that something had come up behind you and pushed.”
“For real?”
“Like a shadow or something. A bear?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Bears don’t act like that. And it was there one minute, gone the next.”
“A shadow?”
“Yes.”
“Like what I saw at the ranch. And right when we found Troy.”
“Sounds similar.” His lips rolled into a hard line. “That’s real bad, then.”
“I know.” A buzzing started in her head, and she cringed as a wave of pure malice sliced through her skull. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
Pushing her hands down on the cold ground, she tried to scramble to her feet. And failed. Painfully. She panted, “We have to get out of here. Something’s really wrong.”
“I agree. But I can’t get you up that bluff on my own.”
Those imaginary icy fingers climbed her neck. “Then you need to go. Get out of this place.”
“Are you nuts? No, I won’t leave you here, Shel.” Irritation, fear, and anger surged from his mind to hers. His view of her broken leg and her dirty, bruised body shook him to the core. Nothing hidden. No filter. Fear for her life took a starring role in his thoughts right now.
And she knew every last thing he saw and thought because she was the terminus of the mental pipeline from his brain to hers.
“Damn it.” The tarry, black evil sensation clogged her nose. She couldn’t breathe. “Go. Please.”
A chuckle—was it real or in her head?—reverberated against the rocks. Low and painful, like a mallet pounding thick metal, the sound traveled through the ground and into her bones. Into her head, her ears. Even in the night, she could still get a sense of trees and rocks. The clouds let a tiny bit of light through.
But behind Eric, there was an absence of light.
An absence of air.
An absence of anything.
Right behind his shoulder.
Two low red embers appeared, like eerie eyes, floating a few feet away from him. Fixed on Eric and Shelby.
As she opened her mouth to scream, a rumble sounded deep in the earth and traveled up through the rocks. Deep cracks reverberated above them. Debris showered down.
“Damn it!” Eric lurched forward, grabbed her by the armpits and shoved her back against the wall, jarring her already bruised body and shooting torment into her splinted leg. Her flashlight skittered out of her hand and away. With snaps and cracks exploding all around her, she scooted under a tiny overhang and covered her head.
“Come here, Eric!”
“Okay, I—” The headlamp light dimmed as a roar of rocks plunged around him. The last thing she saw was his horrified, shadowed face as he was buried.
Dim light straggled out between the rubble.
“Eric?” Nothing. “Eric?” Heartbeats rattled in her chest, like a snare drum roll.
A slight glow came from a few feet away, beneath the rubble, and ignoring the fire slicing along her leg, she crawled toward the light. Feeling around, she encountered large and small rocks. She pulled them away from the light, uncovering most of his head and torso.
The flashlight, still attached to his head, continued to glow.
“Eric?” With a shaking hand, she rocked his prone body.
No movement.
No answer.
Nothing.
No thoughts or images flowed from his mind.