Chapter Sixteen
“Will you stop that?” Ezra asked, doubled over and winded with a white-knuckle grip on a tree branch.
I panted beside him, my whole body screaming to run faster and farther than I’d ever run in my life. “Stop what? Breathing?”
He leveled a dark look at me and shook his hair out of his eyes. “Look at your hands.”
Oh. They were glowing faintly, a fine sheen of radiance around them. I sucked in a careful breath and called it back to me. “Sorry. It’s only that you’re a murderer and Ainsley just ordered you to kill me.”
“You, too, are a murderer,” Ezra pointed out mildly. He looked paler than I remembered. The freckles across his cheekbones and nose stood out like flecks of dirt.
“Do you want me to stop or not?” I asked, not feeling any more in control after being called a murderer. No matter how true it was.
“I want you to stop,” he allowed through gritted teeth.
“Then shut up.”
We kept running. The forest carved a path for us, thorny bushes parting and saplings leaning away like polite strangers on the street. It was Ezra, I knew. Ezra panting in the night, beckoning the brush to make way.
“Careful,” Ezra gasped, throwing his arm out to keep me from hurtling right over the riverbank.
I stopped short, grabbing him instinctively, a dizzy swoop of fear running through me as I saw how far the darkness stretched to the river below. There was no moon tonight, and the drop was a whispering abyss.
“There.” He gestured—rather, he let the branches gesture for him. “There’s a rope ladder here.”
“To where, precisely?”
“To the river. I have a raft down there.”
My voice thinned. “I can swim, but I’m not exactly good at it.”
He huffed a frustrated breath. “Then don’t fall off the raft.”
My arms shook with the effort of making my way down the swaying ladder. I imagined Ainsley waking and chasing after us. Mustering others to come and hunt us down. I imagined Ezra deciding to kill me after all.
I imagined falling.
“Stop looking down,” he said from below, strained. “It’s easier if you don’t look.”
I reminded myself that he was my enemy. But I needed his help to escape to safety. Then I could kill him for murdering Julian. “You’ve done this before. I haven’t. Don’t tell me what’s easy or not easy.”
“Well, we haven’t got all night for you to familiarize yourself with the ladder,” he snapped back.
I missed a rung and nearly kicked him in the face.
After that, I descended slowly and steadily—and silently.
His big hands found my waist and guided me to a narrow muddy bank.
He seemed to have trouble catching his breath, and I could feel the ragged puffs of air against the back of my neck.
For a heartbeat, I wanted to stop and stay like that, bolstered and safe. No longer running.
Then we were moving, both of us tugging at a log raft he quickly unleashed from a fallen tree jammed into the bank by a past flood. It was hard, sweaty work. Work that silenced my mind, let me focus only on my aching body—and not on the sharp memory of what I’d done to Ainsley’s men.
What I’d done.
His eyes.
I choked on a small miserable cry.
Ezra looked up, his grimace of exertion softening. “You’ll have plenty of time to think on it later, if you’re lucky,” he said quietly.
I nodded in acknowledgment, silenced by the confused tangle of emotions that gripped my throat.
The current tugged at the raft the moment we freed it from the sucking mud. “Hurry now,” he said, lifting me with a grunt. “Try to stay low and hang on to these ropes. Don’t jump around or move, and I’ll handle the rest, all right?”
The raft bobbed under me, and I swallowed a startled scream as Ezra shoved hard at the bank with a long pole and the river grabbed us and spun us.
I’d never been on a boat, let alone a small raft that didn’t appear particularly seaworthy.
Frigid water splashed up between the rough-hewn logs lashed together with hemp and leather.
I couldn’t feel my fingers, but I held a knot of wet rope like a lifeline.
We tilted. The dark horizon of trees shifted. My stomach gave a cold lurch.
“Can I close my eyes?”
“I don’t see why not,” Ezra said, breathing hard.
I closed them for only a moment. It was worse not knowing if we were about to strike a rock or whether Ezra was still there.
“Can I help?” I shouted over the rushing water. That seemed like a better idea than pretending I wasn’t on a deadly raft.
“No.” He grunted, one hand on the pole and the other on a rope fastened to a knot at his feet.
“The river is high today. Higher than it ought to be for rafting. Best we can hope for is to make it a few miles and start walking on the other side.” Each word was a struggle as he strained and shifted, seeming to see things in the water and responding to them with small shifts and quick pushes of the pole. “I can’t hold both—can you brace me?”
There was no time for propriety. I gripped the rope with one hand and wrapped my other arm around his thigh, trying to offer him some leverage as he used both arms to maneuver the pole.
The turbulence of the river was changing, the flow kicking white froth like lace around us.
Slick black rocks emerged from the water like great turtles.
We spun.
“Is this bad?” I shouted.
“Yes.”
“Are we going to tip over?”
He didn’t answer. I swallowed back a startled scream as we struck a rock, I tightened my grip as best I could.
My arms ached. My knees hurt where they were jammed against bristly wood.
We stopped moving for a long moment, the raft giving a sickening tilt before the current spun us again and we skirted the large rock we’d hit.
The river was louder now—roaring. The darkness amplified it, made it all that I knew as I held Ezra and icy water splashed up and soaked us both.
“Your hair looks like blood when it’s wet,” he said.
“Pay attention!” I would have pinched his leg if my fingers had any feeling left in them.
I thought I heard him laugh, but by the time I looked up at his shadowed face, it was bone pale and tight with the effort of keeping us afloat.
His eyes held a resigned sort of fear and something worse—a dazed exhaustion I hadn’t seen there before. When he looked down at me with an apology in his eyes, I knew we wouldn’t make it to shore.
“Hold on to me,” he said. I could barely make the words out.
We hit another rock, and he pitched forward, losing his balance.
The pole jammed in the rocks, spinning him out of my grip as the raft and I continued moving, and he stubbornly gripped the slick wood.
He let go too late and crashed onto his stomach at the edge of the raft.
Water rolled over his torso, muffling his pained scream, and I grabbed at his arms, trying to keep him from sliding off into the darkness and leaving me alone on this stars-forsaken excuse for a watercraft.
Together, we managed to wriggle back to the center of the raft. There was something dark on my hands, but the next rolling crash of water washed it away. “Hold the line,” I tried to call out, wrenching his hand to where I’d been gripping the loop of hemp to stay on the raft.
His fingers fumbled once, twice, before he grabbed it and grabbed me, eyes widening. “Jo—”
I expected us to hit something. Instead we hit … nothing.
The downriver edge of the raft dropped, tilting over a massive rapid. Like a cat trying to claw its way out of a barrel of water, I fumbled and grasped. Yet there was nothing to reach for but the black sky above, and the water sucked us into its dark embrace.
It immediately became clear that no amount of swimming practice mattered in an angry river.
Kicking out, I tried to find a rock to stop myself on.
The force of the water jammed my knee against my chin.
My arms jerked out senselessly, reaching for something I was supposed to be holding, something I wasn’t supposed to let go of.
Ezra.
He was nowhere. All I knew was the cold and the loud rage of the water that carried me too fast to gain purchase on anything.
The current pulled me under, and I foolishly screamed, my lungs screaming in turn as I tried to find my way back to the air.
Breaking the frothy surface, I gasped, swallowed water, and tried kicking my feet and arms again in the best approximation of strong swimming I could manage.
It was too hard. My clothes were heavy. My limbs were heavy.
A voice cut through the rush of water. For a moment, I saw a sliver of Ezra’s pale face.
He was much farther downriver and closer to the edge.
Of course. He understood the mechanics of the forceful water.
I had to treat it like a machine. I couldn’t fight the current.
I had to work with it, allow it to slowly divert me toward the calmer eddies along the shore.
Only … I was so cold. And my boots were leaden. And Ezra was so far away.
“Swim!” he screamed raggedly, finding water shallow enough to stand in and reaching for me with a wild look on his face. “This way!”
In the darkness, another figure emerged from the thick brush at the low bank.
I could only manage a glance every few moments as I carved at the water uselessly, unable to make headway to the shore.
I couldn’t draw enough breath to shout a warning.
Water flooded my nose and mouth. My vision was going starry and gray.
It was a man. More slender than Ezra, but tall.
Not as pale. He was shouting, too, but I couldn’t make out his words over the screaming fuzzy sound of rapidly losing consciousness.
I rolled onto my back, fighting for another breath—and a cold, wet thing landed on my face hard enough to split my lip.
In a blaze of indignant anger, I grabbed it, intending to kill it—and then I recognized the texture of rope in my swollen fingers. Rope. Rope!
I held it with the last of my strength and will, then found that all I had to do was hold on, try to angle my face up for a breath, and let the rope pull me out of the grasp of the rapids.
This was better than swimming, I observed.
The water softened around me, still violently cold, but welcoming now.
I could nap in it. I could close my eyes here and sink into a bed of night.
“Josephine!” Hands slapped my face.
I tried to slap back, but my arms didn’t work right.
Angry jewel-toned eyes and light-brown skin appeared in my woozy field of vision. “You were supposed to leave!”
I grunted what was meant to be a laugh. “That’s what Ezra said.”
The forest man didn’t seem amused.
I was dragged to the muddy bank, then propped up against a rotted log that felt delightfully soft against my back.
I was little more than an oversized doll, no longer particularly in control of my limbs.
Or my thoughts, it seemed. Because those eyes were so familiar, the disdain in them comforting in their own cold way.
I could have sworn, as the river rushed by us with a sound like laughter, that it was the ghost of Julian come to criticize me for not following orders.
That was the kind of thing he’d do, I was sure.
“I’m not a ghost.”
Had I spoken aloud?
Ezra worried at my hair, fingers searching around my scalp. “Think she hit her head?”
I smacked his hand away. My breathing came in coarse, sticky gulps. Little by little, each inhale filled me back up with the life force I needed to think straight and see that no ghost stood before me.
It was Julian, sopping wet with a rope coiled around his forearm. And Ezra didn’t appear to be particularly surprised.
With a growl, I launched across mud and stones on all fours, determined to kill one or both of them with my bare hands.