Alphas in the Wild (14 page)

As quickly as it had come, the pressure squeezing the life out of her body vanished. Tina shot to a sitting position and sucked air until her oxygen-starved lungs calmed. She wanted to scream—to curl into a ball and howl—but she was afraid if she gave in to hysteria, she’d never get herself under control again.

Even though common sense told her the danger had passed, she couldn’t stop shaking. Once she thought her legs might support her, she tottered to the window, grasped the light-blocking drapes, and shoved them aside. Medical school and residency had destroyed her natural sleep-wake cycle. She’d installed the room-darkening shades in an attempt to normalize it, except it hadn’t worked. She still was awake until very late. Most nights she struggled to get four hours sleep.

Still numb and shaking, she gazed out the window. The glass frosted with cold told her it must’ve dipped below freezing last night. The sky in the east held a pearlescent cast. Dawn. It would be a sunny autumn day in Leadville, Colorado. Too bad the sun wouldn’t percolate into her soul. Tina wrapped her arms around herself. She was so cold she wondered if she’d ever get warm again.

Think,
she commanded herself.
There’s got to be a way out of this.

Yeah, like what?

Years had passed since she entered into what she’d always considered a pact with the devil. The farther she’d gotten from that nightmare in the Andes, the more certain she’d become that she’d never have to keep her end of the bargain. So much for that pipedream.

Tina walked to her dresser. She tugged the ragged, sweat-soaked T-shirt over her head and surveyed her bedroom. For once in her life she was unsure what to do. Gooseflesh rose, a visceral reminder of her nakedness. She pulled black sweatpants and a top out of a drawer and put them on, followed by ankle socks and her running shoes. She picked up her iPhone to consult its calendar and then dropped it back onto the top of the dresser. October 15th. In two months and ten days, her time would be up.

Adrenaline shot through her. Her stomach roiled. Bile burned the back of her throat. She strode down the hall and stopped in the kitchen long enough to pour water and beans into the coffee maker and set the timer. Knowing she’d have hot coffee waiting when she returned, she let herself out the back door and sucked in a restless breath. The vista of the Rockies, jagged against a bluebird sky, usually soothed her.

Not today.

Her jogging route was always the same: eight miles and two thousand feet of climbing. It took a little less than ninety minutes. She did it every day she was home, regardless of the weather. In winter it took longer because she used snowshoes.

Tina turned to glance at the buff-colored, turn-of-the-century, two-story farmhouse she called home. It had been in her family for ages. A few miles out of town, she’d always considered the location perfect because no one bothered her.

Wind bullied the last of the leaves off the aspen trees. She debated returning to fetch a hat, but didn’t want to go back inside. Her house wasn’t hers anymore. The thing—mountain spirit or shaman or whatever the fuck he was—had invaded her territory. It felt sullied. Unclean.

I’m going to have to get over that.

She didn’t believe in the paranormal. She was a scientist, goddammit, trained to believe in what she could see and feel and touch, in what was illuminated under her microscope when she worked in an Emergency Room. Her experience nearly seven years before had been so surreal, she’d relegated it to high altitude hypoxia.

Tina ran hard to clear her mind, except it didn’t work. Sweat slicked her sides. Her breath came fast. She’d buried the memory of what happened in Bolivia, but it came roaring back with a vengeance, almost as if it resented the hell out of the subterranean prison she’d confined it to at the very bottom of her psyche.

* * * *

S
even years ago in the Andes

Tina struggled against wind. It wanted to flatten her, or worse, blow her off Illimani’s long, summit ridgeline. She was by herself. Twenty-two hundred vertical feet separated her from her camp on the edge of the glacier.

“At least I can still see,” she muttered. “And I got the summit.”

She glanced at her watch illuminated in the beam of her headlamp. One in the morning. Normally, she would’ve waited until around then to start climbing, but wind shrieking like a banshee had made it impossible to sleep. She’d set up her camp at eight p.m. and headed for the mountaintop without stopping to think too hard. She wanted Illimani’s summit. It was the second highest peak in Bolivia and a huge massif with five separate highpoints.

And now I’ve done it.

Careful,
a different inner voice cautioned.
Ninety percent of climbing accidents happen on the way down.

A vicious blast of wind buffeted her. Tina slammed one of her ice axes into the snow to anchor herself to the mountain. As if her grim thoughts were prophetic, clouds descended, obliterating what had been a clear sky in a matter of minutes.

What the fuck?

She peered through impenetrable muck and halted her descent. “Shit,” she muttered. “I can’t see.” Surely the clouds were a momentary event. They’d pass, especially in this wind. They had to. Minutes ticked by. Visibility eroded even farther. She took a steadying breath and then another. No sat phone. No radio. No one even knew where she was.

Yeah, I broke a bunch of really important rules.

This peak was supposed to be easy.

Oh, shut up.

“Got to pull myself together.” Tina spoke out loud to calm herself. She visualized where she’d been on the mile-long ridge. She’d passed the false summit, so she had to be close to the lip that dropped off a fifty-degree cliff. Her heart thudded against her ribs. She panted from more than the twenty thousand foot altitude. She swallowed, but dry throat tissue grated against itself. Stooping, she gathered some snow in a glove, made a ball out of it, and placed it in her mouth.

Another blast of wind was so intense she planted her other axe. “Get going,” she instructed herself. “Now.”

Moving by feel, one painstaking step at a time, Tina worked out a rhythm. She probed the snow ahead with an axe. If it held, she moved down to it and stopped. To counteract the vertigo from navigating through thick fog, she counted steps. Her first guess was it wouldn’t take more than five hundred to reach the edge of the ridge. On three fifty-six, one of her axes punched through into open air. Tina threw her body backward, gasping.

This was how climbers died. By getting cocky and making bad decisions.

She got to her feet on legs that shook and shoved an axe into the snow. A chunk fell away. She moved a few degrees to the right; more snow flaked off. By the time she’d inscribed a forty-five degree arc, she knew she had to be at the end of the ridge. Tina fumbled at the hardware belt hanging from her harness and got an ice screw. She threaded it carefully into what felt like firm snow, clipped in a carabineer, and ran her rope through it. Next came a breaker bar attached to her harness so she could rappel down the steep part.

If this went well, she’d be on the glacier in minutes.

Her breath came fast. She moved more by feel than anything else. Her headlamp beam was weak, and she didn’t have fresh batteries. She tossed out a silent prayer to the god who took care of climbers, children, and fools. That done, she double-checked her rope and attachments, and turned to face the slope. Her ice axes dangled from her wrists; her crampon points bit into the snow. She backed down until she felt the slope steepen and then moved the hand that would control her descent out to the side. Her other hand gripped the rope over her head to steady her descent.

The minute she put her full weight on her anchor, it ripped out of the snow. The rope, worthless since it wasn’t attached to anything, flew through the breaker bar. An end whapped her in the face.

Holy Christ. I’m falling...

She flailed her axes like a wild woman. Once. Again.

One connected with something and held. Tina slammed in the other, followed by the front points of her crampons. She screamed. Wind ripped the sound away as soon as it left her throat. Fright balled her stomach into a burning knot. One of her crampon front points slipped.

Can’t stay put. Got to move down. No point in going up. Nothing solid up there.

Images of falling to her death pounded through her head. To keep from going mad, she lectured herself out loud. “Move one thing at a time. Three solid points of attachment before I move anything. Test everything. Then test it again... Okay, here we go.”

Finally, the angle of the slope eased. Her rope had been nothing but a pain in the ass, dangling from the breaker bar attached to her harness. She’d stabbed her front points through it time and time again. Past the steepest part, she let herself move a little faster. The edge of the glacier was the most welcome thing she’d ever found.

She tugged the rope free and tried to coil it, but her hands shook so badly she couldn’t. Tina dropped the rope onto the snow and sat on it. It was an indulgence, but she cradled her arms around her body and cried. She was a long way from safety, but the sheer relief of being off the steep face was overwhelming.

The wind hadn’t let up at all. Though not as bad as it had been on the ridge, it was still gusting at forty or fifty miles an hour. She unbuckled her pack and forced herself to eat an energy bar washed down with water from the bottle stashed in her parka to keep it from freezing. Her headlamp flickered. She shut it off.

Tina shivered. She was still a thousand feet above her camp, and she had to cross a glacier riddled with crevasses. The transit would be child’s play on a sunny day—or even by moonlight. A night like this one with near zero visibility turned it into a deadly game of Russian roulette. If she’d brought a sleeping bag, she would’ve stayed put for what was left of the night.

She wasn’t totally certain exactly where her camp was. She hadn’t thought to set wands to mark her route. She didn’t have a GPS with her. Tina struggled to her feet and buckled her pack into place. She’d made a series of neophyte climbing errors, beginning with assuming clear weather would last the next twenty-four hours. She’d badly underestimated Illimani.

The mountain was laughing at her.

Tina thought about laughing back, but didn’t want to tempt fate. Besides, she didn’t feel much like laughing. She flicked her headlamp back on and checked her compass to make sure she wouldn’t descend the wrong side of the mountain. Back to counting steps, she contained her fear as best she could. The glacier wasn’t particularly steep, but...

A brutal chop of wind sent her sideways. She planted both axes, but the snow beneath her gave way. Tina tumbled into blackness.

Aw shit, it’s a crevasse, a crevasse, a crevasse,
echoed in her mind.

She crashed through two snow bridges. The third one held. She was afraid to breathe, afraid to do anything that might threaten the fragile margin standing between her and death. In the feeble beam of her headlamp, she glanced upward.

Fifty feet. I fell fifty feet. Thank God nothing’s broken.

Snow bridges were always thicker at their ends. She moved ever so cautiously until she was right next to the smooth inner ice wall of her tomb. She slung an axe into the ice. It bounced off. She tried again. Same result. She kicked with her front points. After many attempts, she was sweating and panting.

“Goddammit,” she shrieked. “Fuck.”

“Got to get hold of myself,” she muttered. “If I don’t, I’m as good as dead.”

Tina shut her eyes. If she couldn’t climb out with her tools, maybe she could pound in ice screws. They had threads. She wasn’t certain she had enough to make it all the way out, but she could recycle them as she climbed.

No choice. Not really. She’d freeze to death if she didn’t keep moving. It was very cold in the crevasse. Colder than it had been out on the glacier.

It took a long time to twist the first ice screw in. The second one was easier. Using screws, carabineers, her rope, and jumars, she made it about twenty feet from the snow bridge when her headlamp died. “Shit.” She pounded impotently against the ice. “I can’t believe I was this stupid. Shit. Fuck. Damn it all to hell.”

I can curse all I want, I’m going to die here.

She hung limply in her harness. Her sweat-damp body shivered. The doctor part of her wondered how long it would take to die. Freezing to death was a lot like going to sleep. She wasn’t certain what time it was, but it couldn’t be much past four. Dawn was at least two hours away. Maybe she could hold on, but she didn’t think it likely.

A putrid smell filled her nostrils. It got even colder.
“Human woman,”
sounded deep in her mind in a strangely accented voice.

“Who said that?” Tina twisted from side to side, but she couldn’t see a thing in the blackness.

Aw crap, I’m hallucinating.

“I offer you a chance to live,”
the voice continued.

“How could you possibly do that?”

Am I losing my mind? Hypoxia? Harness cutting off my wind?

“If I bring you to the surface, you will return to me and live out your days in the Cordillera Real. You must give me your word.”

“Huh? What do you mean return? I’m already here.” Tina’s brain felt wrapped in cotton batting. None of this made sense. Maybe she was already dying, and her mind was playing tricks on her.

“You will have seven years in your human world, doctor. Once it is over, you must return to me. Do you agree?”

Her mind raced feverishly, but she had nothing to lose by playing along. “Um, sure. If you can get me out of here, go for it.”

“Unlatch the thing holding you to the wall.”

Fear sluiced through her, and she tightened her hands on the rope. “Not on your life.”

A macabre chuckle filled the icy hole under Illimani’s glacier.
“Not my life, yours.”

She started to ask how he knew she was a doctor when a high-pitched whistle bounced off the crevasse walls. The infernal screeching stabbed ice picks into her brain. Cold air closed around her. It smelled like a charnel pit, ripe with things long left to rot.