Chapter 8
No sound came from the corner. No shifting of boots, no rustle of heavy wool.
"You must be drained," she murmured softly, her heart aching with sudden, fierce gratitude. "You gave me your strength. You kept me alive when my wolf gave up."
She dropped to her knees on the frozen gravel, crawling into the black hollow toward him, her hands extended into the dark.
"I've got you now," she whispered, ready to pull him forward into the light, ready to step out onto the snow at his side. "Lean on me. We do this together."
She leaned across the dark cavern floor, tilting her face up to press her lips to his frost-dusted jaw, reaching out with both hands to cradle his shoulders.
Her palms met empty air.
Elena’s momentum carried her forward; her hands plunged straight through the space where his broad, heavy chest should have been, slapping hard against the petrified, ice-solid stone of the cave floor.
The breath was knocked from her lungs.
"Mathias?" she gasped, her hands scrambling frantically across the slate.
There was no body. No heavy shearling cloak. No heat.
Beneath her fingers, the floor of the crevice was bare, barren rock, coated in a thick, undisturbed crust of ancient hoarfrost.
"Mathias?!"
Panic, cold and suffocating, slammed into her chest. She scrambled backward on her knees, her breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps. The hollow was completely, impossibly empty.
Her trembling hand dove into the interior pocket of her vest, her knuckles striking the hard plastic cylinder she had guarded since the avalanche began.
The emergency flare.
With shaking fingers, she tore the safety cap away with her teeth, gripped the casing, and violently struck the phosphorus head against the flint.
*SHKKK!*
A blinding, violent fountain of crimson sparks detonated into the darkness, hissing with thick sulfurous smoke. The searing red light painted the cavern in bloody, unforgiving relief—exposing the barren, empty hollow where she had slept alone, and throwing the rest of the chamber into stark illumination.
Elena turned, holding the hissing flare high.
Across the chamber, ten feet away on the opposite wall, the crimson glare caught a massive, collapsed slab of limestone—and the motionless, snow-dusted shape pinned beneath it.
