Spirit of a Hunter (17 page)

Behind them, the tempest of chaos erupted.

Chapter Ten

The echo of chaos fell away as Sabriel led Nora over the next crest of mountain. The moon played peekaboo with scalloped clouds. Amazing how many stars freckled the navy skin of sky. Thing was, she shouldn’t have time to notice these things. Even though her footing was shaky in the darkness, they should be walking faster while they had the chance to get ahead.

At the rate they were moving, they’d never catch up to Tommy and Scotty, and the Colonel’s men would round them up as easily as cattle.

“I can walk faster, you know,” Nora said, unable to keep her irritation from boiling over.

“I know, my super woman. I’m making sure we have enough gas to go the distance.”

Damn him, he was laughing at her. And his slow pace was having another unnerving effect. With night cloaking the woods that usually distracted her, she was aware of him. Of his constant proximity. The steady, calm of his voice. The brush of his fingers against hers
when he passed her an energy bar or offered her some trail mix. Of the strength of his hand on her shoulder when he asked her how she was holding up. A simple gesture that left her so flushed, she had to take off an extra layer to dissipate its heat.

“We’re going to have to rest soon.” Sabriel stopped and reached for his hydration tube.

Nora pressed by him only to realize she had no idea where he was heading. “We have to keep going.”

“You’re dead on your feet.”

“Super women can keep going when their kid’s in danger.”

“Even super women have to change their socks.”

She wanted to spit out more of the venom poisoning her thoughts, but he was right again. Her feet were getting too hot and blisters would not help her keep up the pace. She sat on a fallen log and dug out a pair of dry, if not clean, socks and unlaced her boots.

And as much as she counted on his strength, his skill, his confidence to get her to Scotty, she had to learn to take charge of her own fate. She had to make sure that she could find her way to Scotty and back to civilization. “Show me how to find my way in the woods.”

The moonlight’s shadows hid his expression, but could not disguise the intentness of his study. “I’ll take you where you need to go.”

Now she’d gone and hurt his feelings. “I’m not doubting your ability. But if something happens to you, I have to be able to get help.” She hung her damp socks on her pack, avoiding the piercing prod of his gaze.
“Your cell phone hasn’t worked in days. Not that I could tell anyone where to find us.”

He sat in silence, unlacing his boots, changing his socks, then retying the laces with meticulous care. “At the next stream,” he said, “we’ll stop and, while the filter purifies water for our hydration bags, I’ll show you the basics of map and compass.”

“Deal.” Her lungs emptied on one long release of air, unpenning tension and giving her steps a new bounce.

The next stream took an hour to find. Already, the purple break of dawn rimmed the peaks of mountains. Fatigue ached through her body, making her bones and muscles heavy and her eyes gritty. “What can I do while you purify the water?”

“Get out the Jetboil and some oatmeal. Grab the map and compass while you’re at it.”

He washed the mud of his camouflage from his face and hands. Then, while he pumped water, he explained the marking on the map—how contour lines worked, where they were now, and Tommy’s two possible destinations, the hiking trails, the highways, the rivers, what the colors meant, and the easiest way to find help.

“But Tommy isn’t using a regular map,” Sabriel said, taking a break from pumping water to start the stove.

Nora sat back on her heels and wrapped her arms around her knees. “What kind of map, then?”

“Songlines.”

She frowned. “Songlines?”

“It’s an ancient navigational system used by aboriginal people. It creates invisible footpaths across the land.
Cues that act like road signs even in a place like this forest where one hill pretty much looks like the next and one creek is hard to tell from another.”

“How?”

“Look back. Remember how we talked about birches and how they tend to die young?”

She nodded, seeing the trio of white birches at the top of the hill in the graying light of dawn, remembering the shredded state of their papery bark.

“If I took you there and asked you to think about the last conversation we had, you could probably find the point and retrace your steps to it.” He smiled as he capped the hydration bag and slid it back in her pack. “Tommy, though, he started giving the reference points song titles and then he’d sing them all together to make himself a map. Off-key. You know how he can’t carry a tune to save his life. Since I hung out with him, I got caught up in the game, too.”

“‘Route 66,’ ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ ‘Blueberry Hill,’” Nora whispered, a new respect forming for Tommy’s outside-the-box brain.

The thought of songlines appealed to her. Songs, stacking them up into playlists, their beats, their lyrics, their emotions had allowed her to survive her mother’s rocky romances—their lustful beginnings, their stormy middles, their bitter endings. George had been the exception. His arrival and his departure had both been quiet. Not her mother’s style at all. Maybe that’s why Nora had liked him so much. George had given her her first radio for her eleventh birthday. She’d learned to
tune out her mother’s drama, and tune in the radio to blissful escape.

“You know Tommy’s songline,” she said and looked up at Sabriel with renewed admiration. “That’s why you don’t need the map. That’s how you know he’s going to either Mount Storm or Goose Neck Mountain.”

“Pilgrim’s Peak is in the other direction.”

“Teach me his song.”

Sabriel ate up the last of his oatmeal with more gusto than warranted. “I told you I’d get you and your son back safely.”

“Like you said,” Nora said, washing up her oatmeal-gummed cup, “it doesn’t hurt to be ready for unexpected trouble.”

So he gave her Tommy’s song and, with each title, hope of soon holding her son burgeoned.
I’m coming for you, Scotty
.

* * *

T
HE TRAIN TRESTLE
joined the Kestrel and Merlin campgrounds. The nineteen-mile triangle of tracks was on a pocket of privately owned land that bordered the Gray Goose Wilderness Area and was maintained for the use of an old-fashioned steam engine that pulled three dining cars, a four-star kitchen and a glass observation car that made the riders feel as if they were flying over the valley. On the two-hour ride, passengers were served a four-course meal and breathless views.

Technically, he and Nora were trespassing. Not that anyone policed the tracks so high off the ground. Not that they had any choice with the Colonel’s men closing
in on them. Nora had fallen asleep sitting up, repeating Tommy’s songline over and over again. She’d been on her feet for almost a day. He’d figured he could give her an hour. What he hadn’t figured was that the Colonel’s men would catch up to them so fast.

The train tracks were the shortest way to get across the mile-wide gorge and to a phone to get help with his cell dead. “Come on.”

Nora stayed planted on the legal side of the tracks, eyeing them as if they were vipers that would rear back and bite. “Those are train tracks.”

“You’re a sharp observer, super woman.”

She frowned at him. “There could be a train.”

“Closed for the season.” Though he wasn’t sure.

She tentatively stepped onto the tracks, shaking as she looked over the side at the rusty-looking structure holding them five stories above the ground and the tiny line of a creek meandering below.

“Don’t look down and you’ll be fine.”

“Sure. I can do this.”

Going over the schedule in his mind, Nora following him, he stepped from tie to tie with confident strides. One lunch service. One dinner service. April to October. But just when in October the train stopped running, he couldn’t remember.

They were halfway across the gorge when a deep-throated roll, long and drawn out, reverberated in the air. Hell, he’d guessed wrong. They couldn’t race fast enough to beat the train back to far side of the gorge. Not that the business end of Boggs’s pistol was a destination
of choice. That left forward, head-on, until the next support tower.

“That’s a train whistle.” Nora stumbled over a tie. His hand twisted back to steady her, then tugged to prod her along.

“Yep.” He kept running, holding her hand tight in his, keeping her ahead of her fears.

“It’s coming closer.”

“Yep.”

“There’s no ground next to the track in case you hadn’t noticed,” she said, voice not quite steady. “We’re stranded in midair.”

“Yep.”

The silver nose of the engine rounded the mountain’s flank, came straight at them.

“Sabriel!”

“Come on, Nora. Don’t quit on me now.”

“We’re going to die!”

“Not today.”

The click-clack of wheels raced with his thoughts. Gauging the architecture below him from the shadows slanting onto the trees, he stopped and turned to face her. “Climb over.”

Her chest pumped air in and out of her overworked lungs. Her eyes took over her face. “Over where?”

“The side. There’s a support right under you.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You want me to—”

“You want to argue or you want to stay in one piece?” The beastly shape of the train rammed toward them in a clatter of iron on iron, its long, deep whistle, a deafening
warning. Sabriel shinnied down the side, braced himself on the iron lacework and reached for Nora.

She muttered something he couldn’t make out, but got down on her knees and slinked down the side, inch by careful inch, shaking all the way, but moving. The girl was tough.

“I’ve got you.” He guided her feet onto the iron brace. “Slide down.”

She did, ending up snug in the
V
of the narrow brace.

The train chugged above them, click-clacking against the rails, right into their bones, threatening to jolt them right off their perch. Its whistle rent the crisp autumn air, echoing eerily against the mountains surrounding the valley in a crown, piercing brain, shocking heart. Sandwiched between his body and the support, Nora had nowhere to go, but he tightened his grip anyway and firmly chased away the image of her plunging down into the abyss below.

“I’ve got you,” he said into her ear. “I won’t let you fall.”

“If you do,” she answered back, “I’ll kill you.”

He laughed. “That’s my girl.”

Resolve under stress. Pulling up her bootstraps even though she was scared spitless and keeping her goal foremost in her mind. With her for a mother, Scotty had a chance of surviving the Colonel’s soul-stealing influence.

Because Sabriel couldn’t help himself, he stroked her hair, his gaze never leaving hers until the throb of train on track ebbed and the whistle gave one last mournful wail.

“You okay?” he asked, and pushed away from the soft curves of her body.

She nodded, then jabbed him in the chest with the heel of her hand. “Done for the season?”

“Slight miscalculation.” That could have had dire results.

“You almost got us killed.”

Almost lost her Scotty. Almost handed the Colonel another victory. Having seen the Colonel’s work at close range, Sabriel understood her fear.

Movement on the far side of the tracks caught his attention. The Colonel’s men. Three of them, curbed for now three-quarters of a mile away, by the train chugging toward them. “We’re going to have company as soon as the train rounds the bend. Let’s roll.”

He helped her back up onto the tracks, and they ran the quarter mile to the other side of the gorge. On solid ground once more, they paralleled the tracks to the station where Sabriel knew there was a pay phone.

He scanned the station, empty now that the train held the squirm of passengers captive, found no signs that Boggs had called ahead to have someone waiting to pick them up. “I need to make a phone call.”

Still holding his hand, Nora balked. “We can’t go there. The Colonel’s men are going to find us. We have to keep going.”

Sabriel wasn’t an impulsive man. Work was done in calculated steps. He erred on the side of caution, his taste for adrenaline having died a long time ago. He wasn’t given to sentiment. Ranger School had taught
him that the best of plans could sometimes go awry and that a soldier had to be prepared for unforeseen troubles. That a man had to take responsibility for his actions.

And that sometimes, the right action was asking for help.

“Can’t get cell reception in this notch,” he said as he stepped onto the gravel parking lot. “I’ve got three men tied up. This might be my only chance to call Seekers and have them picked up.”

His last chance to let someone know how deep a hole he’d dug.

* * *

T
HE HARD RINGS
of the target Nora imagined painted on the middle of her back rankled as they ran toward the station. Any second, she expected the real slam of a bullet to find the bull’s-eye.

The Colonel’s men had to be sprinting down the tracks by now. How long before they caught up with them? Ten minutes? Five? How could Sabriel expose them to capture when they should be widening the distance while they could?

“News flash,” she said. “There’s still three of the Colonel’s men right behind us, and they don’t want to make nice. Especially not after the mind games you played on them.”

Sabriel leaped onto the platform, his hiking boots drumming a confident tune against the wood planks.

“Hello,” an old man dressed like a stationmaster straight out of a history book said. The man studied them and kept struggling with the lock to the station’s
door. Gray hair poked from beneath his black cap and smile lines crinkled his sparkling blue eyes. “The train’s already left.”

“Ran into a bit of trouble,” Sabriel said with a genial smile as he shook his head and looked down at his muddy clothes. “Got a phone around here? Can’t get reception on my cell.”

“Part of the backcountry charm.” The man’s smile raised the broom of his mustache to sweep his ears. “Old-fashioned rotary dial phone’s around the corner.”