Then the stack of rubble she stood on abruptly gave way, collapsing beneath her.

  Chapter 25

  As the support fell away from beneath her feet, Sam launched herself toward the nearest beam, grabbing onto it. From beneath her, she heard a scream, abruptly cut off. Sweet Jesus, had she just crushed three people?

  The pain of hanging from her damaged shoulder and stretching her sore ribs brought tears to her eyes. She flailed her feet, trying to find purchase. Everything was tilted at crazy angles. She didn’t know how long she could hold onto the slanted beam, dangling at an angle, her left hand a foot above her right. Her grasp was tentative, only by fingertips, the six-by-twelve much too broad to wrap her fingers around.

  She couldn’t maintain this position for long, and she couldn’t let go and crash back down through the layers of debris. Gritting her teeth and gripping as tightly as she could with her fingertips, she kicked up several times and finally managed to swing her right foot over the beam, jamming her calf onto an exposed nail. She yelped as the jolt of pain shot through her entire body.

  Clenching her jaw, she ripped her leg away from the nail so she could slide the rest of her body on top of the beam. Gasping and moaning, she then lay on top of the rough wood, hugging the beam tightly to keep from sliding down into God-knows-what.

  As she panted through waves of pain, she felt blood streaming down her leg, an unwelcome rivulet of warmth in the bitter cold. At least the injury was to her calf, not her thigh, so she was unlikely to bleed to death anytime soon.

  There’d been only one scream when whatever she’d dislodged had crashed below. But that could mean anything. That the crash had only frightened Nicole or Daniel. Or that everyone was now dead.

  No. She couldn’t think like that. Chase, when we first met, you told me that a macho FBI agent couldn’t drown in a flooded canyon. Well, you can’t die in a collapsed building, either. Nicole, you have to continue to make me feel like a gawky hick. And Daniel, you’re just a kid.

  She inched up the slanted beam, gripping it tightly with her hands and thighs, trying to remember how she’d climbed a tree as a child. Unfortunately, this was a square tree. The beam’s edges dug into her legs. Her progress was painfully slow. Emphasis on the painful. She tried not to focus on her distance above the ground, measured by the bright red drops of blood that fell to spatter the debris beneath her.

  Finally, she reached the point where one beam crossed another, and she was able to put a foot into the top of the X where they crossed. She yelped as the new beam shifted a few inches with her weight, jarring her injured leg, but then the timber stuck in its new position. The final layer of plywood overhead, she could see, was actually a small section of the roof that was still intact, sitting on two trusses at the back of the building. The front of the lodge had completely collapsed from the impact of the avalanche, but some upright structures remained in the rear of the building.

  After pulling herself up, she wormed her way out onto the slanted roof on her stomach, blinking snowflakes out of her eyes. She was thrilled to see that she had indeed heard an engine. In fact, there were two machines nearby now, a huge snowcat around which some of the injured were gathering, and even more miraculous, a track hoe with a bucket attached to its long, jointed arm, parked near the edge of the collapsed lodge. Volunteers were carefully extracting pieces of debris from the pile, loading them into the track hoe bucket. In the distance, a small squadron of snowmobiles buzzed around the buried parking lot.

  The star she had seen occupied only a small patch of clear night sky, and as she watched, a large bird silently flapped its wings through that space, white against the black expanse. An owl. A snowy owl. Could it be? Out of the species’ common range, but not unheard of. So strange to think of all the other species going about their normal lives, oblivious to the human drama here. She’d give anything to be that owl right now.

  The owl was gone in seconds. As the magical creature vanished into the night, Sam’s senses abruptly returned to the disaster surrounding her.

  “Hey!” She waved her headlamp in the air. “Up here! Up here! I found three survivors.”

  Heads pivoted. A few bystanders raised their hands and pointed in her direction. She slid on her backside over the snow on the roof to the ground. Even though she landed in soft snow, a jolt of pain from her injured calf nearly caused her to pass out. With a squadron of blackflies buzzing across her field of vision, she limped toward the track hoe operator, a ski patrol employee trotting at her elbow, asking her over and over if she was injured.

  Duh. Hell yes, she wanted to say. But she needed to stay focused.

  Waving at the track hoe operator in the cab, she told him, “Three people are trapped in the back of the building there, beneath where I came up.” She pointed.

  “Alive?” he asked.

  She grimaced. “They were when I left them. And I thought I heard moaning from under the floor, but that doesn’t make sense.”

  He pursed his lips for a second, then told her, “It might. There are bathrooms below the main level.”

  “Oh God.” Did anyone buried down that far have a chance? “I believe we could—carefully—lift out pieces and clear a way to get the people on the main floor out.”

  Clumps of ice in the track hoe operator’s beard moved along with his lips as he said, “Not we. Let us take care of it.”

  “You need to be fast. They’re all hypothermic, and at least one is unconscious.”

  Ice-Beard nodded. “We got it. You need to look after yourself now.” He cast a meaningful glance at the man who stood beside her.

  The ski patrol guy wrapped a thermal blanket around her shoulders. “Let’s get you warm.”

  “But—”

  Blake appeared at her other side. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “But . . .” Sam gestured toward the building, where several red coats were climbing up to her exit hole, gesturing the backhoe closer. The machine pivoted, dumped its load, moved toward the building and extended its bucket toward the ski patrol crew on the roof.

  “Sit.” Blake pushed her down onto a stack of wooden pallets and handed her a bottle of water. He pulled a long splinter of wood from her hair. “You look like you just dug your way out of a grave.”

  “I did.” She didn’t want to think about the girl who hadn’t moved, or the man’s cold hand. “But I found Chase, and Nicole, and a kid named Daniel.” She clutched her housemate’s arm. “But, Blake, they are in such a bad way. Nicole has this huge shard of glass in her head, and Daniel is sandwiched, and Chase—” Her voice broke, and she had to take a big swallow of water before she could continue. “Chase was unconscious. When I left him, he was completely unresponsive.”

  “But alive.”

  “Yes, alive.” She abruptly remembered that she had just described Claude’s condition as well as Chase’s. “How’s Claude?”

  “Also still unconscious, but also still alive. They’re getting ready to evacuate the worst cases on the big snowcat. There are ambulances waiting down the mountain.”

  Sam surveyed the bystanders, didn’t see anyone familiar. “Blake, have you seen my friend Gina? Two ski patrol guys went to find her a couple of miles away.”

  Blake shook his head. “But all the resort personnel have come down from the Heather Meadows area now, so it’s confusing.”

  Oh, sweet Jesus, what if they hadn’t found Gina? What if there was another avalanche? What if none of them came back?

  Another red-coated ski patrol person appeared at Sam’s side, a dark-haired woman this time. She elbowed her way in front of Blake. “I’m Kristi, I’m an EMT. Let me have a look at you.”

  Lifting Sam’s chin, she shone a penlight into her eyes. “I’m okay,” Sam complained, blinking.

  “I don’t think so,” Kristi argued. “How about this leg?”

  Kneeling, Kristi gently wrapped her hands around Sam’s right ankle beneath her blood-soaked pants and raised Sam’s injured leg onto her knee.

  The world started to spin. “Uh,” Sam heard herself say. She felt Blake’s hands on her shoulders just before everything went black.

  * * * * *

  When Sam opened her eyes, the world was moving again, the ceiling above her shifting back and forth. Another earthquake? Panic flooded her veins. She had to get out of the building before it collapsed in on her. She tried to sit up.

  “Whoa there, hon.” An unfamiliar voice accompanied the dark face that leaned over her. The woman’s arms pressed Sam back into a sleeping bag. “You’re in the snowcat. Sorry to put you on the floor, but it was the best we could do right now. We should be back to the road in a few minutes and the ride will smooth out.”

  Snowcat. The machine was crawling over the avalanche debris on its caterpillar treads. No wonder everything was rocking back and forth. She tried again to sit up. The woman tried again to push her back.

  “I’m okay, really,” Sam assured her.

  “No, you’re not, but I guess you can sit up. For now. I’ve got other patients who are more urgent.” She moved away.

  Sam leaned back on her hands, felt something tear in her shoulder, then sat up straighter, cradling her arms against her stomach. Her right leg hurt like it had been bitten by a rattlesnake. The nail.

  Chase. Nicole. Daniel. Had they made it out? Gina? Claude?

  She blinked, peering around the dim interior of the vehicle. Bodies were strapped into ski patrol sleds and some onto stretchers, more lying on the floor. She was sandwiched between a man she’d never seen before and a woman she didn’t recognize at first. On second glance, it was Gina.

  Sam laid a hand against her friend’s shoulder, on top of the sleeping bag Gina had been slipped into. “Oh, thank God! Gina?”

  Opening her eyes, Gina licked her chapped lips before answering. “Hi.”

  “I saw a snowy owl,” Sam murmured. Her friend would appreciate the miracle of that.

  “Awesome.” Gina’s sigh was more of a low moan.

  “You okay?” Stupid question. Nobody on this ride was okay right now.

  “Hanging in. Gotta live so I can kill that wolverine guy.” She grimaced. “Or gal. I didn’t dream that, did I?”

  “No,” Sam said. “There were two different people, a man and a woman. Boy and girl, whatever.” At least she thought they’d seen a man snatch up Feisty, and then they’d uncovered that young woman buried in the snow.

  Ice mask. Imprisoned, drugged, buried wolverine. Climbing up a tree, clawing out of a grave of snow. Digging out Gina. Scratching her way out of the icy creek beneath the broken snow bridge. Crawling through the collapsed lodge, again and again. Could that all have happened in one day? It seemed like months had passed since the ski competition.

  “Chase?” Gina asked.

  Sam’s gaze searched the stretchers. The blood-soaked head bandage peeking out from a blanket two stretchers away was most likely Nicole. And next to her, with an attendant pumping up a blood pressure cuff on his arm, lay Chase. Still unconscious, if the way his arm dropped limply back to his side was any indication. The EMT or nurse or doctor or whatever he was wore a grim expression on his face. What did that mean?

  She wanted to shout the question across the row of wounded, but the grinding noise of the snowcat’s treaded tracks would drown out her words. To reach Chase, she’d have to crawl over other victims.

  Was that Daniel in the far corner? At her feet, a dark form bent over a ski patrol sled she believed was occupied by Claude. Blake straightened, then spotted her. “Sam!” His voice was hoarse. “You’re awake.”

  “I think so,” she told him. “Are you all right, Blake?”

  He nodded. His eyes glistened in the dim light. “They let me ride along because I know four of you.”

  The front tracks of the snowcat rose up a hill, then the vehicle careened sideways before bumping down onto more level ground. Many of the inert forms surrounding her moaned and gasped at the shifting movements. Sam grabbed the edge of Gina’s sled for stability, pressing her own jaws tightly together to keep from shrieking; her ribs felt like they were grinding against one another. A surge of nausea burbled up her esophagus, and she closed her eyes, swallowing hard to keep from vomiting. She slid down to lay flat again.

  Blake encircled her upthrust foot with his hand on top of the sleeping bag. “There’s nothing you can do right now, Sam. It’s not your job. Help is here. Get some rest.”

  Help is here. Gina, Chase, Nicole, Claude, and—she was reasonably sure—Daniel had been rescued and pulled out of the wreckage. Maybe others, too. Had there been others still alive inside? Others she hadn’t found?

  It’s not your job. She welcomed the darkness and the opportunity to simply lie still in a warm place. And although every inhale reminded her that she was injured, breathing felt pretty great, too. She’d never take warmth and air for granted again.

  Chapter 26

  “How do you know the owners of that house?” the female police officer asked Maya for the tenth time.

  “Owner,” Maya corrected. “Summer Westin. Blake just lives there. He pays rent.”

  “And you live there, too?”

  She sighed. “Sort of. I have—had—a tent in the backyard. Eaze or James destroyed it. And my sleeping bag.”

  The officer glanced up from her notepad on the table. “Are you currently experiencing homelessness?”

  Maya grimaced at the politically correct phrase. WTF, just say homeless already! She was currently experiencing frustration and boredom, and she was working up to experiencing fury. “Yeah, I guess. Although I have the tent. And Sam—Summer Westin, the homeowner—and Blake let me use the toilet and shower and wash my clothes, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s sorta home, isn’t it?”

  Her brain swelled with flashbacks to the cozy apartment she’d shared with the other counselors at Wilderness Challenge, and then to the next one with her college roommates. They’d all abandoned her. Now all she had was the tent. Had been the tent. She toyed with the Coke the cops had given her, twisting the half-empty can around on the table. “Hey, I’m not the criminal here.”

  “We are looking for the others, er”—the officer referred to her notepad—“James and Eaze. Now, how do you know Eaze?”

  Maya raised her chin to glare at the annoying buzzing, flickering light overhead in the police station interview room. Hadn’t those fluorescent tube monstrosities been outlawed years ago? She’d been through this whole story at least an hour ago with a male officer. She knew the officers had access to her juvie history, the burglaries, the thefts. That history was supposed to be erased, now that she was twenty-one. They might be invisible to the public, but her crimes were still there in the files for cops to see. They never cut her a break. “Eaze is what he calls himself. His real name is Ethan Zeran. And his buddy James Winnow was destroying the place with him.”

  “Were you in your tent when this break-in started?”

  Maya explained again about being at the community college library and seeing the two driving by. She left out the whole attempted rape scenario.

  “Why did you think they would break in?”

  Maya fiddled with the cuff of her shirt sleeve. “I knew they wanted money, and they saw me, and Eaze knows where I live, and he’d been by earlier, so he knew Sam and Blake were gone. He knew I wouldn’t be home, and he and James thought Sam and Blake had money.”

  “So you suspected they might break in. But you didn’t call the police?”

  Maya snorted and frowned at the ceiling-mounted camera in the corner of the room. “Like you’d do something if I said someone might break in?”

  “Umm-hmmm,” the officer hummed noncommittedly. “Do you know where the owner of the house is?”

  Leaning back in the hard wooden chair, Maya clasped her hands behind her head. If she wasn’t under arrest, could she just stand up and leave now? “I tried to call Sam. I know they all went skiing today.”

  “Skiing?” The officer’s eyebrows shot up. She raised her chin. “At the Mount Baker ski area?”

  “Yeah. Listen, right now you need to take me back to the house so I can go find that cat. He might need a vet.” Maya chewed the inside of her cheek, trying to distract herself from the thought that Simon might be dead.

  The officer’s worried expression didn’t change.

  “What’s with the face?” Maya asked, annoyed. “You don’t like cats?”

  “There was a major avalanche at the Mount Baker Ski Area today. It collapsed one of the huts. Dozens buried. Lots more injured.”

  Maya pushed herself upright in her chair, her hands gripping the chair arms. “Was Sam hurt? Was Blake?”

  The officer shook her head. “They’re bringing everyone down now. The hospital will know about survivors soon. The others . . . might take days.”

  “I need to go.” Maya stood up. “Give me back my cell phone.”

  A commotion in the hallway caught her attention.

  “Fuck, man! I don’t care what that bitch told you, I was nowhere near that place!” Two officers flanked James as they walked past the doorway. When he spotted Maya inside, he narrowed his eyes, throwing shade at her from the hall.

  She shouted at him, “Where’s Eaze?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he sneered. Then, apparently remembering that the officers were listening, he faced them. “I don’t know where her boyfriend is.”

  The officer on his right grasped James’s arm to urge him farther down the hallway. She heard him snarl, “Lawyer! I want a lawyer. Now!”

  “Chill,” one of the cops told him. “We just need to hear your story.”

  Maya sank back into her chair. James Winnow came from a rich family. His family probably had lawyers on standby. He would be back on the street in ten minutes. And Eaze was still out there somewhere. And now, James would remind him that she’d ratted them out. Shit. She’d only stabbed him in the shoulder; probably just enough to make him red-eyed furious.

  How could she have ever cared for that sleazeball? How could she ever have thought Eaze cared for her? Life was so messed up. She’d probably end up shot or stabbed or run over and die in a ditch somewhere like her druggie mom had. With her luck, that ditch would be filled with six inches of icy water and those plastic bags of dog poop that people left beside the trails. Could her world get any worse?