Shards of Hope

Chapter 8

ZAIRA TURNED HER back into the wind, protecting Aden’s face as the rain and the wind hit the leather jacket she wore. Realizing she couldn’t afford to lose body heat through exposure, not if she was to get Aden to safety before her own body gave out, she tried to search for the larger rainproof jacket and could see nothing in the darkness and the rain. It was only when she shifted to better protect Aden that she realized she’d accidentally knelt on the jacket.

Placing Aden’s head very carefully on her thigh and making sure his hood was on, his jacket zipped up, she pulled on her own. She had to fight the wind to do it, water running from her drenched hair down her spine. That wasn’t good, but hopefully the jacket would keep out the worst of it now. Pulling on her hood, she tied the drawstring under her chin tight before slipping on the gloves she’d stuffed into the pockets.

Three hours she’d been out. If Aden was going to be unconscious that long, she had to come up with plan B, find some way to protect him from this vicious weather. She’d have to dig, she decided. Use her hands to make a shallow indentation where—no, the water would fill that up. If she lost consciousness and didn’t keep his head up or keep the rain off his face, he could drown.

Unable to sense his pulse through her thick gloves, she bent her face to Aden’s, tried to feel his breath as she continued to consider and discard possible options. If only she could carry him, but he was too heavy. She might be able to create a litter, drag—

“Zaira.”

Jerking up, she looked down at his closed eyelids, wondering if she was having an auditory hallucination as a result of the fragmentation caused by the aloneness, but then he lifted the thick, curling lashes so unexpected in the otherwise clean lines of his face. “Out?”

She spoke against his ear so he’d hear her. “Yes, I got it out.” When he tried to sit up, she helped him, leaning his back against a tree. “Keep your head down!” she said into his face, the rain and the wind loud around them. “I’m going to see if I can find any of our supplies!”

“Line. Of. Sight.” It was ground out between his teeth, and she saw more than heard the words.

She understood regardless. “I won’t go far!” It’d be easy to become turned around in this terrain and weather, lose one another.

Crawling on her hands and knees in an effort to get below the wind, she banged her knee into the sharp corner of a metal object. The medkit. Immediately taking it back to Aden, she put it by his thigh. It held the implant he’d taken out of her head; Zaira knew it was critical they protect that. Even if she and Aden didn’t make it, if the squad found the implant, it would offer some answers.

She protected the medkit with her body as she opened it to retrieve the last tiny bottle of concentrated nutrient drink. “You need strength,” she said when Aden would’ve pushed it toward her. “I’m not leaving you and we need to move.” This group of trees had appeared strong earlier, but the wind was all but pushing them over now, revealing their dangerously shallow roots. “I can’t carry you. You’re too damn big.”

As if in a period to her words, a tree not far from them crashed to the earth with a sound so loud it cut through the weather, the impact reverberating along the ground. Another tree fell soon afterward, snapped in half like a matchstick.

“Quick,” Aden ordered, and took the drink.

Crawling forward again, in the direction of the wind, she found the now empty daypack plastered against a tree. The only other things she found were three solid energy bars trapped in the roots of a tree and, oddly enough, the penlight, which had become stuck against a large rock.

She put the items in the pack, crawled back to Aden’s side, and added the medkit to it. “Can you walk?”

In answer, he levered himself up and seemed to find his balance after a shaky start. Getting up, she rose on her toes as he bent forward so they could speak. “The energy hit helped,” he said. “My head’s pounding, but I can function.” Taking the daypack, he pulled it on, then slipped his arm around her waist. “Stay together!”

She gripped the back of his jacket. “Go!”

Another tree slammed to the earth only inches from them. It was no longer safe to stay here but heading out onto open ground left them brutally exposed to the elements. And those elements were in a punishing mood. Lightning lit up the sky in a jagged white-hot burst in the distance, thunder boomed, and each drop of rain hit like a tiny shard of ice, cutting at their faces and soaking everything not covered by the rainproof barrier of their jackets.

Her combat pants had some built-in weather protection but nothing designed to deal with this kind of a storm. She could feel water trickling into her socks, knew her feet would be ice-cold before long. Aden had to be in the same situation. Cold, however, was a problem they’d handle when it became an issue. Right now, it was about making it to safe harbor, any safe harbor. They could not stay expos—

Her stomach suddenly cramped again and this time, she couldn’t control the nausea.

Bending forward to throw up, she tasted blood.

ADEN helped Zaira up after her convulsive retching, shivers wracking her body so uncontrollably that it felt as if she’d shatter. Holding on to her more tightly, he used all his energy to help her move.

“I’m going to lose consciousness soon,” she said against his ear when he bent toward her. “I’ll be dead weight.”

He’d carry her until he couldn’t walk anymore. Because he would never again watch one of his people die without doing everything in his power to stop it. “Do you know how many Arrows I had to let go?” he asked her. “How many I couldn’t assist, couldn’t get out when they began to fracture?”

“They understood, Aden. We all did.” Her fingers clenched in his jacket, her left leg beginning to drag. “You were fighting for our survival and they died in battle.” Harsh breaths. “Don’t take that honor from them by using their deaths as a whip with which to punish yourself.”

His shin hit a rock hidden in the dark, the impact hard enough to bruise bone, but he kept going. “Stop talking. Conserve your strength.”

“And stop winning the argument?”

If Aden had known how to smile, he thought he may have at that instant. Zaira’s razor-sharp words told him she was still fighting. But he didn’t know how to smile, his emotions crushed beneath the heavy weight of Arrow training until he wasn’t sure they existed—but he wanted to find out.

“Thank you,” Zaira said unexpectedly the next time he bent toward her. “For not leaving me alone in the dark.” A breath that didn’t sound right. “For keeping your promise.”

You’ll never be alone again. I will always be there for you.

He’d made that promise to the suspicious, ferocious girl she’d been. Tonight, on this desolate landscape under an unfriendly sky, he made it again to the strong, determined, just as ferocious woman she’d become. “I will never leave you. No matter what.”

No answer.

“Stay awake!” He shook her slightly, only breathed again when she made a protest. “Tell me about your first assignment.”

“I cocked it up.” Her voice was sluggish and almost inaudible in the howling wind, but she was still breathing, still conscious. “I was sent in to retrieve evidence of a serial killer and I got caught in the room with him.”

“Since he ended up dead, I don’t think you erred.”

“Everyone ends up dead around me. You should be careful.”

“You’ve kept those in the Venice compound alive and functional and they’re some of our most fractured.” He squeezed her when she didn’t reply. “Zaira.”

“ ’m awake,” she mumbled as the rain suddenly slowed to a light drizzle then cut off altogether, almost as if they’d passed the line of demarcation of a heavy cloud bank. Aden knew the lull wasn’t going to last, so he took the chance to scan the area, saw a large stand of trees not far in the distance. They appeared much more solid than the ones under which they’d previously taken shelter—and as far as he could see, none was in any danger of collapsing.

If he and Zaira made it there, they could hunker down and he could try to figure out how to fix her injuries. Part of his brain tried to tell him it was too late, that he didn’t have the equipment to fix the damage, but Aden wasn’t about to give up. He would fight for her till the last beat of his heart and hers.

“Aden, my mind wants to reach out.”

“Fight it.” Another burst of pain could incapacitate her. “Think about the next dinner at Ivy and Vasic’s house.”

“Do you think,” she said between gasped breaths, “Ivy expected so many Arrows to take her up on her offer of an open door?”

“Ivy is an empath. She likes people—she even likes Arrows.”

Zaira’s body got heavier, but she continued to drag her feet forward. “I think I’m hallucinating.”

She sounded too lucid to be hallucinating. “What do you see?” He couldn’t see anything of interest.

“Giant paw prints in the mud.”

Stilling, he glanced toward the ground. He hadn’t focused on it except to make sure they didn’t run into anything, but Zaira’s head had been hanging down. He lowered her into a seated position against a large rock and, wiping his hand over his face to rid it of the water dripping from the hood, took out the penlight.

“You’re not hallucinating. I can’t be certain, but I think they’re feline.” And very fresh. The prints had to have been made since the rain stopped, and that couldn’t have happened more than two minutes earlier.

“What kind of cat has paws that big?”

Using the penlight to trace the edge of the print, he saw the shape of claws, measured the size of the pad using his gloved hand as a comparison. “A changeling cat. One of the large predators. Tiger, leopard, jaguar.”

Zaira’s body rocked with another wave of shivers, her teeth clattering together as she tried to form words. “A-a-r-re we—” Clenched teeth, clenched fists as she brought the shaking under control with icy strength of will. “Are we in the Sierra Nevada?”

While the Sierra was SnowDancer wolf territory, the SnowDancers had some kind of a treaty with the DarkRiver leopards, so Zaira’s question was a valid one. “We might be, but probability is low—the chopper would’ve never escaped SnowDancer notice.”

Everyone knew the wolves were very unwelcoming when it came to outsiders—“shoot first and ask questions of the corpses” was their rumored motto. “A small cabin, a small group—that could’ve flown under the radar in such a vast territory, but the chopper would’ve lit up their surveillance satellites and, bad weather or not, we’d be drowning in wolves by now.”

“Terrain wrong for DarkRiver.”

“Yes. I don’t think we’re in Yosemite.” It was possible they were near the territory of another feline pack. On the other hand, given the cats’ reputation for roaming far distances in their youth, it was equally possible they were near a single solitary changeling. If Aden could locate the owner of these paw prints, that changeling could go for assistance—if he or she didn’t attack them on sight. Many changelings remained leery of Psy.

It was, however, their only chance.

They walked as fast as they could, hoping to beat the rain that was starting to spit again. If it poured down, the trail would be erased in a heartbeat, and with it, their first real chance of survival. Zaira finally lost consciousness what must’ve been about eight minutes later, and from the blood she’d coughed up, he knew she’d die if she didn’t get medical attention soon.

No, he thought, you do not get to die.

Lifting her into his arms, he carried her tucked against his chest. She was so small in comparison to the others in the squad, but she was deadly and strong and part of their future . . . part of his future. When he went to his knees in the mud, he got up again, muscles straining and arms locked around her. His body protested, the leg injury he’d sustained in the fight outside the bunker starting to make itself felt, but he was still functional, still able to walk.

Following the tracks of the changeling deep into the trees just as the rain pounded down again, he wasn’t prepared for the tracks to simply disappear. Not with the canopy offering enough protection that he should’ve had another minute or two at least. He put Zaira down very carefully before taking out the penlight again and checking the ground. Nothing . . . but big cats could often climb.

He turned just in time to see the glowing eyes of a large jungle cat coming at him.

The impact crushed the air from his lungs, slamming his body into the rain-soaked forest detritus. His training told him to fight, but he lay quiescent. “My partner is badly injured and in need of medical attention. Will you offer assistance?” If the answer was no, Aden would use the knife he’d palmed, get away from the changeling.

It might not be an easy fight, but he wasn’t going to fail with Zaira’s life at stake.

Growling, its teeth flashing in the dark, the changeling walked over to Zaira’s body. Aden could see spots now, realized this was a leopard, but, judging from the “welcome,” not any leopard he knew. Sending Aden a glowing yellow-green glance after sniffing at Zaira, the leopard bared its teeth and took off, moving so fast that Aden had no hope of following him.

The darkness swallowed him up a heartbeat later.

Either the cat was going for help or his answer was no to the request for assistance. Regardless, Aden had to keep going, try to locate a vehicle so he could get Zaira to a medic, or find a comm beacon he could hot-wire to send a message to the squad. Simply hunkering down was not an option. She’d die.

He refused to think too hard about the fact that so far, they’d glimpsed no signs of civilization, no evidence that there might be a comm beacon or station in the vicinity, much less roads or traffic. That was self-defeating behavior and he was an Arrow trained to survive.

Rising, one of his ribs feeling as if it had cracked under the impact of the leopard’s pounce, he picked Zaira up again and continued on. As long as his body functioned, he would walk.

A hard droplet of water penetrated the canopy to hit his cheek, then came another and another and another, until all around him was a torrential rain that sought to shove him to the earth. And then the wind slammed into him, the gale so strong that each step felt like fighting his way through a brick wall.

So be it.

“Stay alive,” he said to Zaira, then gritted his teeth and took the next step.

That was when the bullet wound in his leg finally tore wide open.