14. Chapter 14 #2
I look up at him. His face is close enough to feel his breath.
His eyes are blue and clear and completely present…
the man, not the wolf. His hand on my wrist is the same hand that grabbed me that day I bathed him, the same grip, the same position.
But everything about it is different. That grip was reflex. This was choice.
I throw my arms around him.
The contact is graceless…my torn palms flat against his back, my face against his shoulder, my body shaking with adrenaline and the memory of the ground dropping away.
He goes rigid for half a second, and then his arms come around me.
Carefully. His hands settling on my back, his chin against my hair.
He holds me the way he held me when he took me from the transport—like something he won’t let fall. But this time, nobody is screaming. Nobody is running. He’s just holding me on a mountainside because I’m shaking and he’s there.
“You saved me,” I say against his shoulder. My voice is unsteady. I don’t care.
He’s quiet for a moment. His hand moves on my back, a slow, deliberate stroke between my shoulder blades.
“No,” he says. “You saved me.”
I pull back and look at him.
His face is open in a way I haven’t seen before, stripped of the rawness of surfacing from the wolf and the blankness the drugs left behind. He means what he said. He may not have the words to explain it yet, but I believe him.
The hand still around my wrist is the same one that caught me in the sickroom. Same grip. Same bones under my fingers when I cover them with my own.
Everything else has changed.
Then the helicopter sound returns, distant and south of us.
“We need to move,” I say.
He nods, gets to his feet, and offers me his hand.
I take it.
His palm is scraped. Mine is torn. Our fingers fit together badly at first, blood and grit and shaking muscles, but neither of us lets go as we climb.
The afternoon wears on. The helicopter makes two more passes, each one closer, the grid tightening. We stay in the shadow of the rock face, using the granite to mask our heat signatures, and every time the rotors fade, we push higher.
Rafael’s speech doesn’t go back. Whatever the rescue cracked open stays open. He talks as we walk; not constantly, but naturally. Pointing out changes in the air pressure. Noting where the rock transitions.
“How do you know all of this?” I ask, eventually.
He turns to look at me. “I don’t know. I just do.”
I leave it at that, certain that the person he was will unfold in its own good time. But I like what I’m seeing so far.
The weather turns late in the afternoon. The temperature drops so fast I can feel it in my chest with each breath. The clouds that were high and gray all day settle down around us, thick and wet. The first flakes of snow hit my face like cold needles.
“There,” Rafael says. He’s stopped, his hand on a rock face, his head tilted. “Behind this. The air is moving. There’s space.”
I look where he’s pointing. A gap in the rock, barely visible, a dark line where two granite faces overlap. Not an obvious entrance. A fold in the mountain you’d walk past a hundred times without noticing.
“How big?” I ask.
“Big enough.” He slips through the gap.
I follow.
The cave opens up beyond the entrance; not a cavern, but a chamber maybe fifteen feet deep and ten wide. The ceiling is low enough that Rafael has to duck, and it strikes me that I haven’t realized how tall he is. I’m not short by any means, but I have to tilt my head back to look into his face.
Inside, the floor is packed earth and dry. Dry, thank God. After a full day in rain and mist and now snow, the dryness of it makes my legs weak.
Someone has been here before.
Not right now; no actual occupation. But the signs are there.
A ring of blackened stones near the back wall, arranged for a fire pit.
A stack of firewood against the far side, dry and split, too neatly piled to be deadfall.
A folded square of oiled canvas tucked behind a rock.
When I pull it out, it’s dusty but intact; heavy-grade tarp, the kind you can rig for shelter or wrap around yourself in a freeze.
Beside it, there’s a fire striker and a battered tin cup.
“There’s scent.” Rafael’s voice is quiet. He’s standing near the entrance, his head tilted. “Not fresh. But it’s here.”
I sniff. He’s right. Underneath the mineral smell of rock and the cold, there’s something else. Faint. Musky. Heavier than wolf. Not human, not exactly.
“I don’t recognize it,” I say.
“Neither do I.” His brow furrows. “It’s not wolf.”
Whatever it is, whoever was here, they left a fire pit, dry wood, and a tarp. I’m not in a position to be suspicious of gifts.
The entrance faces south, which means the wind doesn’t reach in. The temperature inside is cold but stable, several degrees warmer than the mountain outside.
The snow is falling harder when I look back through the gap. The world outside is disappearing into white.
“This’ll work,” I say.
Rafael is standing at the back of the cave, one hand on the rock wall. His eyes are half-closed. He’s listening again…or feeling. Reading the stone the way he reads the air, with senses I don’t fully understand.
“There’s a fissure back here that leads into the mountain. But it’s clear,” he says. “Defensible.”
“Good.”
The snow thickens. The entrance narrows to a gray slit as the weather closes in around us. Within an hour, the mountainside will be invisible. The helicopters won’t fly in this. The thermal imaging won’t work through the rock.
We’re hidden. We’re sheltered. We’re alone.
I sit on the dry ground with my back against the cave wall, and my body registers the absence of movement for the first time all day. The ache in my hip. The sting of my torn palms. The bone-deep exhaustion of ten hours of climbing on no food and stream water.
Rafael sits against the opposite wall. The cave is narrow enough that our feet would almost touch in the middle if we stretched our legs. The light from the entrance is fading as the snow builds.
He’s watching me, his eyes indigo in the dim light. His face calm. Present.
“Your hands,” he says.
I look down. My palms are raw from the rock, the skin scraped and beading red.
“They’re fine.”
“They’re bleeding.”
“I said they’re fine.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he leans forward, reaches across the narrow space, and takes my hand, turning it palm-up. His fingers are gentle. He looks at the scrapes, the torn skin, the grit embedded in the heel of my palm.
“Can I?” he asks.
My chest tightens. “Can you what?”
He doesn’t answer. He lifts my hand and blows on it. Softly. His breath is warm, and it clears the grit, and the sting eases. His thumb traces the edge of the scrape with a touch so light I barely feel it.
He’s tending to me.
The reversal is so complete it makes my throat ache. Two weeks of my hands on his body. My bandages, my cloths, my fingers on his pulse. And now he’s holding my hand in a cave on a mountain, blowing dirt out of a wound, and the care in it is so disarming that I’m not sure how to respond to it.
“Thank you,” I say.
He sets my hand down. Carefully. Like something he doesn’t want to let go of. I don’t want him to let go of it either.
The snow hisses against the rock outside. The light dims. The cold deepens, and the dry cave air can only do so much against it.
It’s going to be a long night.