As Darkness Gathers (Dark Betrayals Book 2) (8 page)

Timothy flopped down beside me, and Clay set the backpack at my feet, rolling his shoulders as he sat on the other side of him.

“How old are you, Timothy?” I reached into the bag and then passed out the pretzels and water.
 

He ripped open the cellophane package and tilted the bag up to his mouth. “Fifteen,” he said before crunching the snack. “Last week was my birthday, and I have a break from school this week. We come every year. We have since my mom left ten years ago.” He peered into the package and turned to me, abashed. “Do you think there’s enough for me to have another pack? I’m sorry. I was really hungry.”

I wanted to brush the straggling dark hair back from his forehead, but I refrained and handed him the rest of my pretzels. “I don’t want all of mine.”

He bit his lip. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Just eat these slower.” I looked up from Timothy’s bent head and found Clay watching me. “How far do you think we’ve come?” I asked.

He glanced at the sky. The faint glare of the sun was directly above us. “I’d say about four, five miles.”
 

I swallowed.
 

“We’ll get there,” he said.

I lifted the bottle to my lips, trying not to gulp my water, and was reluctant when I put it away. Once the bag was repacked, I stood. Clay rolled his shoulders again and reached for it, but Timothy pulled the backpack onto his own narrow frame.
 

“We should take turns carrying it.”

Clay nodded. “You set the pace, then.”

A steady drizzle of sleet set in late in the afternoon. The trees and the ponchos I’d made provided some protection, but icy water soon dripped from my chin and slid down my neck.
 

As the shadows deepened and snow started mixing with the sleet, Clay called for us to stop. “We need to take shelter for the night and get out of this.”

Timothy found a fallen tree which, from the looks of the thick, bare trunk, had lain on the forest floor for some time.

“We’ll look for branches and limbs,” Clay said, retrieving the axe from the bag. “Timothy and I won’t be more than shouting distance away.”

Even with that promise, I had to fight not to call after them as they disappeared into the growing shadows. I busied myself with collecting fallen pine needles and spreading them in a blanketing layer on the ground beside the tree. I pushed the makeshift poncho off my head so I could hear more than just the patter of sleet on the plastic, but every creak of a branch or snap of a twig made me jump. I pulled the poncho back up as my hair began to dampen, chilling me further.

Relief had my heart pounding in my chest when I heard my name called.

“Here! Over here!”

They dragged large branches still covered with needles and cones and laid them at an angle, overlapping, against the fallen tree. When they’d finished, our shelter for the night was a small, prickly lean-to.
 

Timothy crawled in first with the bag and lay on his back, wedging himself against the tree. I followed him in and lay on my side facing away from him, finding the tight space to be surprisingly warm and, for the most part, dry. There was just enough room for Clay to slide in on his back beside me.

My ears had tuned to the sounds of the forest settling into night, but I was startled when I heard a deep, snuffling breath behind me. “He fell asleep?”

Clay’s chest rumbled with a suppressed chuckle. “That’s what five-star accommodations will do to a guy.”

I couldn’t stifle my low laughter.

“There we go,” Clay murmured. “You were so quiet today I was concerned.”

“I’m trying to believe I did the right thing.” I shifted and winced when a rock dug into my shoulder.
 

“Here, lift your head.” He slipped his arm under me and pulled me closer until my head was pillowed on his shoulder. “Better?”
 

I nodded. His shoulder wasn’t soft, but he gave off body heat like a furnace and there was comfort lying held against him.
 

“You did what you thought best,” he said, his voice low. “And that’s all anyone can do.” His chest rose and fell evenly beneath my hand. After several moments, I wrapped a tentative arm around him. He lifted his other hand and clasped my wrist in a loose grip. At first, I thought he meant to push my arm away, and I started to withdraw, but his hand tightened and he held on to me.

It was too dark to see now, so I whispered, “Do you have a family?”
 

If he did, I thought his wife would forgive me for finding such security in his arms on this night.
 

“No, none.”

“Not even a girlfriend?”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Not one of those, either. You?”

“I was in a relationship. For almost two years. I just broke it off when he asked me to marry him.” Inexplicably, my eyes brimmed. “He’s a good man, and I hurt him.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.”

“No, but that doesn’t lessen his pain.”

“You had to do what was best for yourself.”

I nodded, ignoring the pain as the movement pressed the knot on my temple against his shoulder. “Clay?”

“Hmm?”

“Will you hold me a little tighter, please?”

It was a silly, weak request but he encircled both arms around me without comment. I ended up lying almost halfway across his chest with my head tucked under his chin, my arm wrapped around him and my leg across his thighs.
 

“Comfortable?” His tone was dry, and it made me smile.

“You’re too hard to be comfortable. But I feel better.”

He shook with silent laughter, but then I felt the slight tug of his fingers in my hair and was able to close my eyes and not be so afraid.

My eyes were gritty the next morning from lack of sleep. I winced when I rubbed them and my fingers came away smudged. I didn’t want to contemplate how I must look with several-day-old makeup and unwashed hair. My mouth felt fuzzy from the lack of a toothbrush.

Timothy and Clay stirred and woke, and then, rather than crawl from our small lean-to, we shoved branches and limbs from overhead and stood. The layer of snow that had collected on our shelter fell around us.

I ached—from the crash, from traversing the rugged terrain, from the hard ground and the cold and the dampness that seemed to have seeped through my clothes and into my bones overnight.
 

We ate more pretzels, but they did little to ease the pangs in my midsection. I drained my first bottle of water and saw that Timothy and Clay had done the same.

I took a hobbling step and sat on the trunk of the fallen tree. My head spun as I bent and struggled with the laces of my boots and then pried them off. I flexed my toes and ankles, bit back a moan, and then held my boots upside down, dumping out the debris that had collected in them.

Clay knelt in front of me and unwrapped the swath of plastic bags around my feet before I could protest. Despite the attempt to waterproof my boots, my socks were damp, my toes and heels saturated with blood.

Timothy sat beside me. “Oh no,” he whispered.

“It’s nothing.” I tried to pull away from Clay.

He manacled my ankle in his hand and drew the sock off my right foot. He made a rough sound in the back of his throat when I sucked in a pained breath as the wool was pulled away from where it had stuck to the open blisters. “Ah, Finch.”

I winced as he rolled off my other sock and I got a good look at my feet. What had started out as blisters had turned into raw, open wounds due to the continued aggravation of our trek. The tops of my toes and backs of my heels were covered in bloody sores.

I looked away and when I spoke, panic injected a wavering tinge in my voice. “Put my socks back on, Clay. Hurry, I don’t want to see it.”

“Shh.” He cupped my blotchy red and painfully numb feet between his palms and rubbed warmth into them, careful to avoid the areas where layers of skin had been worn away. “You’re okay. You’re going to be fine.”

I sniffed and dragged the back of my hand over my eyes. My fingers trembled, and my skin came away damp.

“Timothy, hand me my other bottle of water and that roll of gauze.”

Timothy scrambled to obey him, but I shook my head. “No! No, not your water. And the gauze. If someone’s hurt—”

“You’re hurt,” Clay said, and the undercurrent of steel in his voice silenced me. I tried to pull away when Timothy handed him the bottle of water but stilled when he said, “If you keep fighting me, I’ll end up spilling most of the water.”

Tears streaked down my dirty cheeks as Clay poured water into his cupped hand and bathed the wounds on my feet. Timothy recapped the bottle and tucked it into the backpack as Clay dried my feet with the tail of his shirt then accepted the roll of gauze Timothy had found in the bottom of the bag. Timothy sat beside me again and clasped my hand tightly.
 

I couldn’t explain to either of them that my tears weren’t from pain. The abraded, gaping wounds stung with the ferocity of having dozens of needles driven into my skin. But, in truth, I didn’t know why I was crying.

Clay’s hands were gentle as he wrapped my feet. He had draped my grimy socks over his thigh, and he hesitated once he tied the ends of the gauze and secured the bandages. “I hate to do this,” he muttered.

I released Timothy’s hand to scrub the moisture from my face. “We have to keep going.”

He blew out a breath. “I know.” He rolled my socks back over my feet, fitted the plastic bags over them, and then slipped my boots on, bracing them on his knees to tie the laces.

I stared at him as he stood, and then he leaned down and pressed his lips to mine in a swift, hard caress. I blinked as he straightened and tucked a hand under my elbow to help me to my feet.
 

“Do you think you can manage okay?”
 

I knew my own eyes were wide, and Timothy’s gaze bounced back and forth between us.
 

“Of course.” My voice trembled, but I cleared my throat and bent to hoist the backpack onto my shoulders. Timothy made a sound of protest, but I said as I started out, “Everyone shares the load.”

As I walked, my muscles warmed and the stiffness eased, but the endless hours of high stepping through meadows filled with snow, slogging through half-frozen bogs, and picking a way over the increasingly rocky terrain was exhausting. There was no trail, our only directional guide the hazy sun.

Our southwest heading took us in a long, slow descent, and by the time the glare of the sun had moved into the western sky, my knees protested, the joints feeling as if the bones were grinding together with every step. The gauze protecting the sores on my feet provided some relief from the chafing of the rough wool, but the farther we walked, the more it felt like hot razors raked over my flesh. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth against the pain, and my lips were cracked and chapped.

I had my head down, trudging along with numb purpose, when Clay said, “Finch, stop.”

The low urgency in his voice froze me in place, and I looked up, taking in our surroundings. We had just entered a snow-laden, marshy break in the forest, and no more than ten feet in front of me stood a moose with two calves. A squeak of alarm escaped before I could contain it, and I tensed, ready to run.