The building shuddered, sloshing his beer over the rim. Simultaneously, Nicole’s coffee slopped over the rim of her cup. They both scooted their chairs back from the table, and Nicole wiped at the coffee stain on her sweater. “What the hell?”

  Around the room, adults rose to their feet, grabbing their children, murmuring questions. The low hum of noise grew in volume. The teens standing in front of the window, staring up the ski slope, suddenly erupted in a barrage of swear words. “Shit!” “Fuck!”

  These exclamations were quickly followed by “Run!” as the teens thundered away from the glass.

  The entire crowd turned away from the windows at the front of the lodge, fleeing like a herd of antelope under attack from a pride of lions. Few made it through the exit doors before the wall of snow slammed into the lodge.

  Chapter 8

  No one knew where she and Gina were. Nobody was going to come to their rescue. Nobody! Adrenaline flooded through Sam’s veins as she pictured the world above, beautiful and serene and silent again, no sign of those dying under the shifted snow. Was Gina suffocating right now? The poacher? Feisty?

  Focus. Slow down your heartbeat and breathing. Her heart didn’t want to respond to those commands, so she held her breath for a few seconds to force her body to listen. The cocoon of snow already felt frozen against her back and legs. Clenching her jaw, she moved her right hand above her, waving it as best she could. A shower of snow sifted down onto the top of her head. That inspired a turbulent mix of panic and hope. Tilting her head back the inch that her tomb allowed, she strained her gaze upward.

  Was that a patch of light above, somewhere near her wrist? Not sunlight, but at least a lighter patch of snow. Was her hand sticking out above the snow?

  All she could feel with the fingers of that hand was cold—snow, air, she couldn’t tell. And trapped as it was above her heart, soon it would be completely numb. She twisted the hand around, waved it, and felt it bang against something solid on the right side. She willed her fingers to explore. A sharp projection of some kind. Maybe the stub of a snapped-off branch? She hoped so. It had to be.

  Flattening herself against the tree trunk, she stretched and sucked in a breath. Clutching the projection as tightly as she could, she pulled. Did she move up a few inches? The painful scrape of tree bark against her cheek seemed to promise that she had. She thought she had succeeded in even moving her left hand up a bit, although she could feel the leather ski pole strap strangling her wrist, impeding her efforts. Her left foot seemed stuck, too. Was the damn snowshoe still strapped to her hiking boot? Her right foot could slide a little.

  She couldn’t feel the constraint of straps around her shoulders or hips. Her pack must have been ripped off by the cascading snow. Her back and buttocks and shoulders, pressed against the enveloping snow, felt wet, making the frozen wall behind her slick. Her body heat was melting the blanket of snow. For now. How long would it take to turn back into ice?

  She swallowed hard, trying to quell the panic rocketing through her brain. She was a toddler who’d fallen down a well. Or an unborn infant stuck in her mother’s cervix, waiting for the next contraction to free her. Or crush her.

  Sucking in a deep gulp of air, she expanded her chest as much as possible, and using every muscle in her body, she pushed against her frozen surroundings, trying to pack the snow as far away and as densely as she could. If she succeeded in making some sort of birth canal for herself, she didn’t want loose snow to shift and fill the space, entombing her forever.

  She couldn’t die like this, in a coffin of snow. This would fulfill her father’s worst nightmare, that she would die in some horrific event in the wilderness. Reverend Mark Westin had mellowed over the years, gradually coming to accept her gay housemate and her erratic career choices, but he still didn’t understand why any sane woman would choose the life his daughter led, when she could have chosen marriage and children and a stable home life like most of his parishioners did.

  Right now, Sam had to admit that maybe her father had a point. “Sorry, Dad. I’m going to do my best to get out of here. Pray for me.” She didn’t believe in prayer, but her father did, and maybe he had an open line to God that she had never discovered.

  “Summer?”

  Sam’s heart thudded in her chest. A faint, tinny sound, muffled by snow. A voice?

  Shit, was that her cell phone in her jacket pocket? There was no way to reach it. That one word was all she heard, just her given name. Only two people in the world called her by her given name: her father, and Starchaser Perez.

  “Dad?” Her voice now seemed loud in the tight space. She held her breath for a moment, listening. “Chase?”

  The cracking sounds around her had stilled. Nothing more. Had she only imagined hearing her name? Had she somehow summoned her father by imagining how he’d feel about her death? The longer she listened, the more the quiet seemed oppressive. Ominous. Total absence of sound.

  She was listening to the silence of a tomb.

  Chapter 9

  Time seemed to move in slow motion as the snow shifted beneath Blake’s skis. He tensed for the collapse and his inevitable fall into the snow sliding down the canyon, but the slope he stood on merely sank a few inches and then stopped like an elevator lurch, sending a vibration through the landscape. He crouched, paralyzed, afraid to move.

  The cloud of snow filled the air like a fog of icy flour. Shrieks from the ski lift echoed behind him, but for a few long moments, he could see nothing beyond his own black-gloved hands clenched around his ski poles. Then the snow finally sifted from the air around him and settled to the ground. The cloud of white fog below emitted screams and horrendous cracking sounds, as if an unseen battle with the devil was taking place within it.

  When the air finally cleared, Blake’s jaw dropped. The scene at the bottom of the slope didn’t seem real. He didn’t want it to be real. The avalanche had buried the bottom of the chairlift. He could see only a bit of the lodge, or what used to be the Raven Hut Lodge. From his position, it appeared to be only a crushed shell surrounded by snow. The tsunami of snow had washed over and around the lodge and snapped most of the trees that stood between the lodge and the road below.

  Blake’s heart pounded in his throat. He’d just witnessed a mass burial. How many skiers had been on the slope? How many were in the lodge? The word that leaped to his tongue was one of Claude’s Quebecois epithets, and he murmured it aloud. “Tabarnak!”

  Such a weird swear word, something to do with the Catholic church, but Claude had told him it roughly translated as “fuck.”

  Some figures were struggling to free arms or legs from the snow. A handful of individuals were running or skiing or limping toward the collapsed building. Skiers who had managed to get off the chairlifts were breaking free from their catatonic states and careening down the slope, well off to the side of the rough avalanche field.

  Dozens of people were shouting or screaming names of friends or family. Cacophony. People trapped on the lift screamed from their seats. As Blake watched, two of them kicked off their skis and dropped to the snow below.

  Claude! Where was Claude? Blake raked his gaze over the spot where he’d last seen his lover standing on his skis, staring up at him. Nothing but chunks of ice and snow now. No sign of a human there. He searched farther down the slope, toward the lodge, spied a woman half-buried, trying to dig her legs out of the snow, and farther on, a man pulling a child out.

  He saw no sign of Claude. Merde, as Claude would say. Shit.

  Sam had been near the Heather Meadows Lodge covering the competition, so unless that area had also been buried, she’d probably be safe. But Chase and Nicole? He hadn’t seen them on the lifts or slopes. Had they already gone home, or had they been in the Raven Hut lodge?

  Clenching his teeth, Blake angled his skis into a snowplow and slowly slid down the littered slope, his skis chattering over ice chunks and small rocks.

  Claude had been wearing a blue ski jacket and a striped blue knit hat, which he insisted on calling a “tuque.” The first skier Blake encountered was a woman in a gold jumpsuit, lying sideways in the snow, one ski on her foot. He stopped beside her still form, dug the snow away from her face, and was rewarded when her eyes opened.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I . . . uh . . .” Seeming stunned, she struggled to push herself up out of the snow, and he helped by pawing the icy crystals away with his gloved hands and then offering her his arm for leverage so she could sit up. All around him, he heard cries of anguish or pain. These were the victims who could breathe. How many were dying right now under the snow?

  “My boyfriend . . .” the woman sputtered, glancing around.

  She would survive. He stood up. “I have to go.”

  Dazed, Blake moved off, searching for a blue ski jacket and a striped tuque.

  Chapter 10

  Inside the ski lodge, after the surge of snow and furniture and the hail of falling beams and rocks finally stopped, Chase found himself sandwiched between two chairs. Nicole was face down on the floor a short distance away, her torso under an overturned table. They were imprisoned by hard-packed snow in a nest of debris and furniture broken by the impact. Somewhere close by, a child was screaming.

  Shards of glass glinted in shafts of light that shone through the wreckage, and a jagged piece of thick glass was embedded in the crown of Nicole’s head. Blood stained her auburn hair a darker red.

  “Nicole!” Chase struggled to pull his right leg from between the seat and back of a chair. The leg of another chair pressed against his neck. He’d bitten his tongue, and blood streamed down his chin. His lower back hurt like hell where he’d been hit by a falling beam. His abdomen echoed the pain from colliding with a flying table. A large rock lay by his head, and he pictured the two-sided fireplace in the lodge, a beautiful structure built of native stone. And the fire had been lit. He inhaled, gasping as pain ricocheted through his lungs, but didn’t smell any smoke. With luck, the snow had snuffed out the flames.

  Luck seemed a completely nonsensical concept right now. He tried to wipe the nightmare fears of fuel and broken electrical wires from his frantic thoughts.

  Although he could see his former partner, he couldn’t reach her. “Nicole?”

  It was an eternity before her head moved. Groaning, she twisted her head in his direction.

  “You are alive!” He blew out a sigh of relief, but winced from severe pain in his lower ribs. They were probably broken.

  “Barely.” Pulling a hand from under the table, she moved it toward the shard of glass.

  “Don’t!” he yelped. “There’s a big piece of glass in your scalp.” He didn’t voice his fear that it might extend through her skull and into her brain.

  “Wonderful.” Her hand flopped back to the ground. “So we both look like Frankenstein’s monster.”

  That told him about his appearance. “Are you injured anywhere else?”

  “Hard to say. My left ankle is shrieking almost as loudly as my head.” She closed her eyes for a moment, braced her forearms on the debris beneath her, tried to push at the table top across her back, panting with the effort, then finally gave up. “I’m pancaked here. You?”

  He pushed at the chair leg that rested against his neck. It shifted a few inches, and he was able to move his head out from beneath it. Pain shot through his body like a lightning bolt. Yes, broken ribs for sure. A few inches above his head rested a section of wall, or maybe part of the roof, with a heavy beam still attached. “I’m okay,” he finished. “Maybe. Sort of.”

  “Lucky you.” Nicole sighed and rested her cheek on the floor. Through the debris piled above them, a fine dust of snow sifted down onto her hair. “I have an ominous feeling that it’s going to get cold in here real soon, and I left my ski jacket on my chair.”

  “I did, too,” Chase said.

  “I don’t suppose those chairs followed us, along with the rest of this furniture.”

  Chase lifted his head a couple of inches off the floor to scan the immediate area. “No coats in sight,” he reported.

  The child’s shrieks had softened to sobbing now, but he heard at least two other voices. Somewhere outside, a woman was calling for Emma, and a man yelled “Jeremy!” Moans came from different locations inside the building. Then the structure overhead shifted with a loud screech, followed by a crash. Several voices screamed in terror or in pain.

  Chapter 11

  A trickle of icy water descended Sam’s neck and slithered down her backbone. Her parka hood was probably filled with snow. Her body heat was leaching away by the second. She had to move now if she was ever going to move again. She shoved backward against the snow again. After she’d strained outward for a minute, Sam reversed her motion and did her utmost to wrap herself around the tree trunk. She pointed her left toe down, or at least envisioned pointing it downward so the damn snowshoe, if there was one attached, might hang more vertical from her boot when she pulled up her foot. She also tried to straighten her left hand so the pole strap might slip off. Pushing her chin and chest and the thigh of one leg against the rough bark of the tree, she pulled hard on whatever she held onto above, and wrenched herself up a few more inches.

  Every muscle in her body screamed with the effort. Slushy snow slid down her upright arm into her face, obscuring her vision, slithering into her nose and mouth. She exhaled through her nose, snorting, and was rewarded with another trickle down her lip—snowmelt or blood, she couldn’t tell. Using her tongue, she pushed a wad of slush from her mouth, whimpering.

  At least she had air. For now. Maybe not for much longer. Her own labored breathing and moans were the only sounds her ears could pick up. Snow pressed against her right shoulder and her backside, crowding her. She pulled again. Something—a tendon or muscle, please not a vertebra—popped in her back. The tree bark scoured more skin from her face. But she was alive, and she was climbing. Well, dragging herself up inches at a time with only one usable arm, like a zombie arising from a grave.

  No, like a one-armed chimpanzee—she liked that vision better. An amazingly strong chimp. A champion weightlifter chimp. She willed that image into her imagination—an ape so muscular and skillful that it could haul itself upward with one arm and swing through the trees like Tarzan. An orangutan. Maybe a gorilla; they were even stronger. Blake had shown her an article about Neema, a gorilla in Evansville that had learned sign language. She pictured herself as Neema, who could no doubt lift her entire body weight with one arm. Wouldn’t it be amazing to actually communicate with an ape? If she survived, she hoped she’d get a chance to see that gorilla in the future.

  Chimp, orangutan, gorilla, pull! Blink and snort away the sinking snow. Embrace the tree. She tried to wrap her right leg and foot around it, stay positioned so that she didn’t slip back down. Pushing her right shoulder as hard as she could against the snow, she struggled to create space to bend her elbow. Another icy trickle snaked down her back between her skin and her clothes.

  Pull. Again. Push against the snow with her back, against the tree with her right foot, her chin, her cheek. She could no longer feel her toes. Her teeth were beginning to chatter. Hypothermia would soon render her muscles useless. How many more minutes did she have?

  Pull! She managed to drag her left arm a few inches upward with every effort, although the strap still cut painfully into her wrist. Her left foot was harder to slide than the right, so aggravating, the damn snowshoe still dragging on its straps, threatening to break her ankle. If only the binding would break instead.

  But finally, her face was out. Air! As she leaned her head back against the snow, her brain abruptly replayed a déjà vu moment of near-drowning in the Galápagos, when after finally surfacing, she’d been so thrilled to suck in air again from earth’s atmosphere instead of from a scuba tank. But here, instead of relishing the sudden brightness of warm daylight and the return to her normal environment, the world was frigid, her whole body was trembling, heavy snowflakes were plopping onto her wet face, and she was not yet saved.

  But she could finally push her right elbow down on top of the snow, and she slowly inched her shoulders and other arm out. Yep, the damn pole was still attached to her wrist. The basket was broken half off and the shaft was bent. Her wrist was ringed with a red welt, and her left arm and shoulder hurt like hell from being stretched. Laying the ski pole horizontally on top of the snow, she pushed down on the shaft with both arms, gasping in pain, and slowly extracted her legs. She was grateful to see both her feet still wore boots. And one damn snowshoe. With numb fingers, she unbuckled the straps and kicked it away.

  Thank God she’d run for the trees. The avalanche had launched her the last few yards into the grove of firs. Many of the surrounding trees were bent, and a few at the leading edge had snapped as the snow piled up against the upper sides of their trunks. Although she’d lost her hat and her gloves, she counted herself lucky to still be wearing her ski jacket and pants as well as her boots. She’d read stories of avalanche victims stripped naked by cartwheeling through speeding snow.

  I’m alive, Dad. Survived another adventure. At least so far.

  Sam took a shuddering breath through her teeth, clamping her chattering jaws together as she analyzed her injuries. Everything hurt, especially her left ankle, her left shoulder, and the side of her face that had scraped against the tree. Her nose was numb, probably a blessing.

  But she couldn’t rest. Her clothes were wet, and if she didn’t keep her body in motion, she’d soon be reduced to a shivering statue. It would be mortifying to crawl out of an avalanche only to freeze to death on top of her former coffin.

  She wasn’t sure she could stand up. Stabbing pains shot through her lower back and legs as she rolled to her hands and knees, but she finally pushed herself to her feet. Wiping blood off her face, Sam glanced up the slope. Gina had been above her. Red parka.