Page 43 of Hunted

There was no answer. Okay, so she was asleep. He shouldn’t feel such an intense need to hear her voice, anyway. It was ridiculous. As ridiculous as the crushing disappointment of falling asleep with her in his arms, then waking up to find her gone.

She needs you!

Romano rolled his eyes at his own apparent mental instability. But he decided there was no use fighting it. He got out of bed, reached for the gas lamp nearest him and turned the knob. The flame grew brighter, reaching its yellow fingers into the corners, chasing shadows away.

He stood up and turned toward the bunks. He’d just look at her, assure himself that she was okay, and maybe he’d be able to get some sleep.

Only, she wasn’t there. The bunk was empty. The sight of it was like a blow between the eyes and he took an involuntary step backward at its impact.

He swore, then checked the bathroom, and swore some more. The camper was as empty as her bed. And her shoes and jeans were gone, and so were the jacket and the flashlight.

“Dammit, she’s gone to the house.” The note on the table confirmed his suspicion, when he finally noticed it there.

I’m hiking to the house just to take a look. Be right back. Promise.

Okay, okay, calm down, he told himself. So, she’d sneaked out while he slept. So, she’d done exactly what he’d told her not to do. So what? It didn’t mean the world was going to end.

He gathered his clothes, picked up his gun. She’d been right from the beginning. There was barely a snowball’s chance in hell that White had left men behind to watch her place. She’d be all right. She’d be fine.

He squinted through the RV’s windshield, frowning. And then he reached past the steering wheel to turn on the headlights.

But even their blazing white glow couldn’t penetrate the blizzard blanketing the night. He couldn’t see a yard in front of the RV. Not a yard. Sometime while he’d been sleeping, a brutal wind and blinding snowstorm had kicked up. And Lexi was out there somewhere. A chill of foreboding slipped up his spine, and again he heard his dead wife’s meaning-laden whisper. She needs you.

He swore. It couldn’t have been this bad when she’d left. Couldn’t have been, or she wouldn’t have gone. Lexi was too smart for that. This was the Adirondack forest, for God’s sake. She wouldn’t have gone out there alone in a storm like this. He hoped she’d reached the house safely before the blizzard had unleashed its fury, and that no one had been there waiting for her when she had.

He pulled on every sweatshirt that remained, including one of the new hoodies, and fished her pills out of the glove compartment in case she needed them. Then he picked up his duffel bag. Hunching forward, he headed out into the storm.

Lexi made it halfway, she figured, before the snow began flying horizontally instead of vertically, driven by an ever-strengthening, frigid wind. She lost her bearings. It was ridiculous. Stupid, to get lost in a place she knew so well. All she had to do was follow the fire trail, for God’s sake. Problem was, she could no longer see the fire trail, and the flashlight she gripped was a joke against the power of the sudden storm. When she’d left the camper, it had been cold, yes, but not like this. Now there was a bitter, harsh wind that turned wet snowflakes into razors. There was no light, no darkness. Just snow. She couldn’t even make out the shapes of the trees she moved among, until she was nearly inhaling their bark. There was nothing to guide her. The wind moaning eerily through the boughs overhead seemed like the voice of her father. Condemning. Scornful just as he’d always been.

Yes. He had been. Unreasonably, miserably hateful toward her, even before the dementia had set in.

All her life, really. She’d never admitted that to herself before. Down deep, she realized that she’d always thought of herself as unworthy of him. Everyone said he was a great man. She heard it all the time, saw proof of it in the awards and certificates that had lined their home during the height of his career. He’d invented vaccines that had saved countless lives. He was practically a god. To a child, a great man who hated her was proof she was not good enough.

But the truth was, he was just a mean bastard to her for no reason at all.

Her nose and cheeks burned, razed by the blizzard’s claws. It hurt to inhale the frigid air, and her lungs screamed with every breath. She felt her heart trip over itself and begin to gallop. The cold and the fear tried to send her into tachycardia, but Lexi fought it. She forced herself to remain calm and tried to take slow, deep breaths. She ordered her body not to betray her now.

She’d left her meds in the camper.

Her hands were wet and slowly going numb, and her feet had long since mutated into solid ice chunks. She couldn’t feel them anymore when she stepped on them, so she lurched along, trying to find her way.

But there was no more sign of the fire trail, and she wasn’t sure whether she’d have known it even if she’d somehow stumbled onto it again. She only knew she wasn’t on the trail now. Somehow she’d veered into the forest. That was obvious by the trees that loomed into her vision with every few steps, towering, but too far apart to provide sufficient shelter from the wind-driven snow. Panic chilled her even more deeply than the cold. But she fought it. There had to be a way to get through this.

She squinted in the snow, trying to see something that would give her a clue which way to go, and finally decided to backtrack. She might be able to find her way back to the fire trail, or maybe all the way to the camper if she just followed her own tracks. Turning in place, she aimed the flashlight at the ground, searching for the footprints she’d left in the snow. She had to bend almost double and hold the light only inches above the ground to see them. Loose snow swirled and whipped around her lower legs like the ghostly mist in a horror movie. Only more deadly. She finally found a shallow indentation in the snow that marked the place where she’d stepped. Then another. Slowly she started back.

She was shivering now. Shaking so hard her teeth rattled and her muscles burned and the flashlight beam jerked and danced in crazy patterns. She pulled her hands up into the sleeves of Romano’s jacket, wrapped her arms around herself, huddled into the hood, and bent into the wind that screamed in her ears.

But in only a few yards, the footprints vanished. The blizzard had already filled them in. And now just what on earth was she going to do?

Keep moving. Just keep moving, Lexi, or you’ll die out here.

She tried to obey the voice of reason, did for a while. Until it became impossible. The tachycardia came on full force. Her breathing quickened because her brain wasn’t receiving enough oxygen. She gasped, sucking breaths of freezing air into her lungs, but she knew it wasn’t enough to sustain her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t breathing in enough, it was that her heart wasn’t pumping it efficiently.

Dizziness came as she’d known it would. She groped for a support, her hand sweeping through the falling snow, finding nothing to grasp. She’d only passed out from one of these attacks once in her life. But she knew she was very close to making it twice. And then the snowy ground reached up to surround her face. Its cold was an icy slap, an injection of awareness. She managed to pull herself up again. But her rally didn’t last. She staggered forward a few more steps only to collapse against the skin-scraping bark of a massive pine. Her stinging face pressed to the trunk, she tasted its fragrance with every breath.

Romano knew which way she would have gone. He left the headlights on, which would help for a little while. As soon as he stepped out of the camper, the cold bit right through every layer of clothing he wore. Damn. It was frigid, killing cold, with this wind behind it. She wouldn’t last long in cold like this. No one would.

He thought about her episodes, the way her heart could take off and that it was sometimes triggered by fear. She’d be afraid right now, if she was out in this storm. If she was lost, she’d be terrified.

---