Her eyes filled with tears, and her chin quivered. “D-don’t humor me, Luke.”
“No! I’m not humoring you, I’m trying to distract you. And myself. Here,” he said, uncrumpling the card and handing it to her. “Okay, let’s hear what other sage advice good old Roger has for me.” He arched an eyebrow. “Maybe at the end of the note, he tells us where he stashed the snowcat.”
Probably as much from her own curiosity as wishing to humor him,Camry hesitantly started reading out loud from where she’d left off yesterday morning. Using the laces he’d stolen from her other boot, and a pair of pants he’d taken from their gear, Luke carefully started to wrap her ankle.
He paused when she stopped reading with a hiss of pain. “Sorry. I’m trying to be gentle. Go on, keep reading.”
“But Roger said there’s a chance I might never walk properly again,” she whispered, her chin quivering again. “Luke, you have to do what he says, and take me straight to my aunt Libby. She’s really a highly skilled trauma surgeon, but she also has a gift for healing people by only touching them.”
“You won’t just be walking properly, you’ll be running a marathon by this summer,” he said, giving her arm a squeeze. “Keep going. You’ve reached the part where I stopped reading.”
Her eyes searched his, looking for . . . hell, for some sign he believed her, Luke figured. He went back to work on her foot, wrapping several layers of the heavy pant material around her leg, from her knee to down past her heel. He then gently tied it in place, careful not to make it too tight around the swelling.
He heard her take a shuddering breath; then she started reading again.
I warned you this was going to seem impossible, Renoir. But making a miracle is actually the easy part, whereas living with the realization that you really are in control of your own destiny is what’s truly daunting.
So I wish you the best of luck, young man—not only on your immediate journey, but on your life’s journey as well. Now don’t you go feeling bad that I left before you got to thank me for all I’ve done for you; we’ll be meeting again one day, so you’ll get your chance. Godspeed, Renoir. Your faithful servant, Roger de Keage.
Luke snorted. “If we meet again, I’ll likely wring his neck.”
“My God,” she whispered. “He’s the father of the clan MacKeage.”
“The father of practical jokes, you mean,” he muttered.
“Um . . . there’s a P.S.”
Luke snorted again. “The old bastard does love to pontificate.”
She dropped her worried gaze back to the card. “ P.S.,” she read. “You’re down to six hours and forty-four minutes, Renoir, so you might want to get cracking on making that miracle.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Four hours later, Luke was worried that instead of saving Camry’s life, he very well might be killing her. For the third time in half an hour, he dropped to his knees beside the sled, utterly exhausted from the grueling pace he’d set, and peeled back the tarp. Tigger blinked up at him from inside Camry’s jacket with a mournful whine, then gently lapped her pale cheek before looking at Luke again.
“I know, Tig,” he said between ragged breaths as he took off his gloves. He reached in and touched Camry’s neck, feeling her faint pulse, which had grown steadily fainter in the last four hours. “I’m worried about her, too.
You’re doing a good job of keeping her warm,” he crooned, sliding his hand under the jacket to make sure the dog’s weight was still on the mattress, and not putting pressure on Camry’s ribs. He rubbed Tigger’s ear. “Let’s hope it’s the extra pill I gave her that’s making her sleep, and not shock.”
He wrapped his arm around Max when the dog came over and nosed Camry, also whining worriedly. “Okay, gang, we need to come up with a new game plan,” he whispered, his hand trembling as he patted Max. “Because this one isn’t working.”
Max drove his nose inside the sled beside Camry’s body, then lifted his head with Roger’s pointed hat in his mouth and dropped the hat on her face. When Luke quickly snatched it off, Max nosed Camry’s hair with a whine.
“Okay, if it will make you feel better, I’ll put it on her,” Luke said, carefully replacing the wool hat she was wearing with the heavy velvet pointed one.
Camry stirred, and two faint flags of color appeared on her cheeks.
Luke touched his finger to her pulse again and found it much stronger. “Whoa,” he whispered on an indrawn breath. “That certainly helped.” He glanced at Max, then at Tigger. “Any other suggestions? Because at this point I’m open to anything, no matter how harebrained it might sound.”
Max suddenly took off down the road, then just as suddenly veered into the woods. He stopped, looked back at Luke, and started barking.
Luke stood up, groaning when his muscles protested, and closed the tarp back over the sled. “Come on, Tig. Let’s go see where Max thinks he’s going,” he muttered, hooking the rope back over his shoulders and starting off down the road.
But he suddenly picked up his pace with renewed hope. Maybe Max smelled a wood fire or something else that meant that help was close by.
When he reached the spot where the Lab had gone into the woods, Luke found what looked like a game trail. Max was standing about twenty yards in, facing him, his tail wagging. He barked again, then took off deeper into the woods.
Luke glanced down the road—the certain path to civilization—then back toward where Max had disappeared, trying to see through the trees. The sun had dropped below the horizon already, even though it wasn’t even four o’clock. Today was the shortest day of the year, and Luke knew that he was facing the longest night of the year. But even in what little light that was left, he could see that the lake was about a hundred yards from where he was standing.
Out of sight now, Max started barking excitedly.
Luke looked back down the road. He didn’t want to expend his energy on a wild-goose chase, but he didn’t want to walk right past help, either.
Tigger suddenly jumped out of the sled and started lunging through the deep snow right past him, following Max’s path.
“I guess that settles that,” he muttered, stepping back to check on Camry. When he saw she was looking far less pale than she had been, he turned and started following the dogs. The trail emerged onto the shoreline, and Luke stopped beside Max and Tigger, who were looking out at the lake, their wagging tails brushing the snow.
Luke pulled his GPS out of his pocket, called up the screen that told him exactly where he was, and realized that he was still sixteen miles from Winter’s house by way of the tote road. A chill ran down his spine as he recalled Roger’s note; it appeared he hadbeen taking two steps back for each step forward.
They had traveled only two miles in four hours.
Which meant that at the rate he was walking—which was only going to get slower the more tired he grew—it was going to take him days to get them out of these woods. He zoomed out the map on the screen and saw that if he cut diagonally down the lake, Pine Creek was less than six miles away.
Of flat going.
With a full moon to light the way.
And possibly thin ice that he wouldn’t be able to see.
Did he have the right to risk drowning Camry . . . to save her foot?
But it wasn’t really her ankle that worried him; he was afraid she was going into shock. And though he didn’t know much about medicine—emergency or otherwise—he was pretty sure shock was fatal if not treated in time.
He stepped to the sled and peeled back the tarp, plopped down in the snow and took off his glove, then reached in and wrapped his fingers around Camry’s hand. He looked back out at the expanse of lake in front of him. Could he really shut down his brain long enough to follow his heart?