1. Kinsley #2
Lightning cracks again and I see the path stretching ahead of me, narrow, rutted, hemmed in by rhododendron thickets so overgrown their branches form a tunnel.
Water pours down the trail toward me like a creek that decided to change course, and I'm walking against it, uphill, in the dark, in a pastel trench coat that now weighs approximately forty pounds and clings to me in ways that are both unflattering and actively dangerous.
The belt has come untied and drags behind me through the mud like a sad little tail.
Something moves in the trees to my right.
A crash of underbrush, heavy and fast. I freeze mid-step with one boot half-sunk in clay and the pastry box crushed to me and every single hair on my body standing straight.
The crash fades. Whatever it was moves away, uphill, through the thicket.
Bear. Deer. My own heartbeat echoing off tree trunks.
I don't know. I don't want to know. I start walking again, faster now, my breath ragged and loud.
"This is a growth experience," I gasp between steps. "This is character building. This is what the book would call a threshold moment and I am crossing it with grace and a positive attitude and if I survive this I am going to leave such a negative review on that glamping website."
The trail levels out. The trees thin. And through the rain, through the dark, I catch the faintest glow.
Warm light, amber and steady, bleeding through the storm from somewhere up ahead.
A window. A building. Something. My legs, which had been filing formal complaints with every step, find a reserve of energy I didn't know they had.
I half-run, half-slide up the last stretch of trail, mud spattering the remnants of my trench coat, the pastry box disintegrating in my grip, rain streaming into my eyes so I can barely see.
But I don't need to see. I just need to get to that light.
The light resolves through the rain into a single window, large and square, set into a wall of dark timber.
I blink water from my lashes and the building takes shape in pieces.
Not a glamping tent. Not the cedar-and-glass eco-retreat with the fairy lights and the composting toilet that the website promised.
This is a cabin. A real one. Massive, rough-hewn logs stacked and chinked with pale mortar that stands out even in the dark, a steeply pitched metal roof shedding water in curtains from its eaves, a covered porch that runs the width of the front face and holds a cord of split firewood stacked chest-high against the railing.
The whole structure hunches against the mountainside like it grew there, like the trees stepped aside and let the rock underneath push it up through the soil.
No fairy lights. No tasteful canvas. No welcome mat with a cute saying about unplugging.
Just raw, unapologetic shelter built by someone who expected the mountain to try to kill them and planned accordingly.
It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I stumble up the last stretch of trail where it widens into a muddy clearing.
A truck sits to the left of the cabin, some kind of heavy-duty pickup so caked in dried mud and fresh rain that its color is a mystery.
Beyond it, a smaller outbuilding, maybe a shed or a smokehouse, its door latched shut with a heavy chain.
The amber glow comes from that single front window, and as I get closer I can see the source.
A fire. Not a candle, not an electric lamp, but actual flames throwing their light through glass that's thick and slightly warped with age.
The fire paints the porch in gold and shadow, and the heat of it, even the idea of it, the promise of warmth behind those walls, makes my legs buckle.
I catch myself on the steps. Three of them, broad and solid, made from the same heavy timber as the cabin walls.
My hands are shaking so badly that the pastry box, what's left of it, nearly slips from my grip.
The pink cardboard has gone purple with water, soft as cloth, and the twine holding it together has stretched and loosened until the whole thing sags like a wet hammock.
I can feel the croissants inside, reduced to dough.
The macarons are certainly paste. Twenty-two dollars of artisanal French baking, drowned in a mountain storm.
I hold the box tighter anyway because my fingers have locked around it and I'm not sure I can make them open even if I want to.
I drag myself up the steps. My boots leave prints so muddy they're almost black against the porch boards.
The overhang blocks the rain and the sudden absence of water hammering my skull and shoulders is so disorienting that I sway and have to brace one hand against the wall.
The logs are rough under my palm, bark still intact in places, cold and damp but solid.
Real. I'm touching something real and it isn't moving and the ground isn't sliding and the water isn't pulling at my ankles and for one brief, delirious second I want to press my whole body against this wall and just stay here.
Just stand here on this dry porch and listen to the storm rage past me and never move again.
But the cold won't let me rest. It's in my bones now, not just on my skin.
My jaw is clenched so tight my teeth ache and my whole body is vibrating with shivers that come in waves, each one harder than the last, rolling up from my feet through my core and out through my shoulders until my vision blurs with the force of them.
My fingers are white. Not pink, not pale.
White. The nails have gone a color I don't want to think about, bluish and strange, and I can't feel them anymore.
I can't feel the pastry box, just the pressure of my own grip, locked and distant.
I find the door. Massive, a single slab of planked wood banded with iron hardware, the kind of door that belongs on a medieval fortress and not a dwelling where a normal human person lives.
There's no doorbell. No knocker. No cheerful placard that says "Welcome to the Serenity Summit Glamping Experience.
" Just wood and iron and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
I knock. The sound vanishes into the storm.
I knock harder, my knuckles cracking against the wood with no coordination, just desperation dressed up as rhythm.
I can hear myself making sounds that aren't words, thin whimpering gasps between each hit of my fist, and I hate them but I can't stop.
I pound with the flat of my palm. My wrist. Both fists together, the pastry box crushed between my forearm and my ribs, my forehead tipping forward until it rests against the door and I'm just hitting and shaking and breathing and praying to whoever listens to freezing women on dark mountains.
The door swings inward so fast I stumble through the threshold.
Then one shape does resolve. And my brain, already running on fumes and panic, tries to process what it's seeing and simply fails.
The man fills the doorway the way the cabin fills the clearing.
Completely. He's enormous, a full foot taller than me and built with the kind of mass that doesn't come from a gym membership but from years of swinging an axe and hauling timber and doing whatever it is that men do on mountains to get shoulders that wide.
He wears a dark thermal shirt pushed up to his elbows, revealing forearms roped with tendon and vein, and his hands are the largest I've ever seen on a living person.
One of those hands holds a rifle. Not a cute hunting rifle from a magazine spread, not a prop, but a long, dark, very real firearm held with the casual ease of someone who considers it an extension of his own arm.
His face is all beard and fury. A thick, dark, unkempt beard that covers his jaw and chin and blends into hair that's too long and pushed back from a forehead creased with hard lines.
His left eyebrow carries a scar that cuts through it at an angle, pale against tanned skin, and beneath it his eyes are green.
Not warm green, not friendly green. The sharp, green of something predatory that has just been disturbed in its den and is deciding in real time whether the disturbance is a threat or an annoyance.
Those eyes sweep over me in a single pass, top to bottom, sorting the mud-caked trench coat, the destroyed boots, the dripping hair plastered to my face, the soggy pink box clutched to my chest like a life preserver.
He lowers the rifle. Not all the way, just enough that the barrel points at the floor between us instead of at my sternum.
His jaw works behind the beard and his nostrils flare and he steps forward into the doorway, his massive frame blocking the firelight so that his shadow falls over me and swallows what's left of the warmth.
His mouth opens. He's going to say something. Ask something. Demand something. I can see the hard line of his lips forming a word that I'm already certain won't be welcoming.
But I don't hear it. The shivering peaks into something that doesn't feel like shivering anymore, something that buzzes white and electric in my vision and turns the firelight behind him into a shrinking tunnel.
My knees unlock. The pastry box slips from my fingers and hits the floorboards with a wet slap, splitting open, spilling ruined croissants across the threshold between his boots.
I see them fall from very far away, from the wrong end of a telescope, and then the telescope closes and the light goes out and the last thing I register is the rough grain of the porch boards rushing up to meet my cheek and the heavy thud of something, maybe the rifle, being dropped very fast.