But I’d still been expecting someone who would have had a house out in the middle of nowhere. A survivalist, perhaps. Maybe some sort of mountain man who also happened to like the comfort of a sofa and full kitchen when he got home from the hunt.
Instead, I was looking at a man who looked for all the world like he belonged in a university, teaching classes. He was clean-cut, with salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Behind those glasses lay a very intelligent face which, though lined with age, didn’t exactly scream “wild forest living.”
He was wearing blue slacks, a sweater vest, and some sort of lab coat. And loafers. Loafers, for God’s sake.
My brain came skidding to a stop and then started forward again, trying desperately to re-catalog where I thought we were—and who I thought we were with. But no matter how hard it scrabbled, it couldn’t give me anything that seemed reasonable.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, too shocked to remember my manners.
Too untrusting to think that I might need them. Because whoever this guy was, and no matter how sophisticated he might appear to be, he’d still brought us here without asking whether we wanted to come.
Would I have rather stayed in the forest, freezing to death? Probably not. But I didn’t like it when people made my decisions for me. Particularly when those decisions impacted my wife and her health.
And I was still more than a little bit scarred by what had happened in Randall’s cabin. Yeah, maybe people helped just out of the goodness of their hearts. Sometimes. But that wasn’t my most recent experience—and my most recent experience was definitely going to drive my current actions.
To my shock, he strode forward with his hand extended. “Marlon Jones,” he said quickly. “Very pleased to meet you. And you are…?”
“John,” I replied firmly. “John Aikens. We were—”
“How is your side, John Aikens?” he asked, interrupting me. When I opened my mouth to argue, he put a hand up to stop me. “I don’t need to know why you’re here. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And it might be better for both of us if I never know. But I do care about how your side is. I had to patch you up quickly, and I didn’t do as extensive a job as I would have liked.”
I snapped my mouth shut, trying to process all of that. He looked like a college professor, but he didn’t talk like one.
No, the things he was saying made it sound like he’d been part of the military. And involved in a part that dealt with top-secret situations. No one in the real world—the world normal people inhabited—ever said things about it being better if they didn’t know certain things.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked quietly.
I could see from his face that he understood exactly what conclusions I’d jumped to, and that he accepted it. But he didn’t show me anything else. Instead, he asked again, “Your side? Is it feeling better?”
“Yes,” I answered, my voice monotone. “Now where is my wife?”
At that, he whirled around and made his way into the room he’d been standing in front of.
“In here,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “And I’m glad you’re awake. I wasn’t expecting you to wake so quickly, but I’m glad you did. I haven’t treated her yet, and I’m going to need help.”
I followed after him, my gaze going around him to see Angie laying in another bed in a room that looked… well, exactly the same as the others I’d been in. Which seemed incredibly odd—and brought back the question of where exactly we were.
Who was this guy, why was he living in such a big house out in the middle of nowhere, and why the hell did he have so many rooms that looked exactly the same? None of it made any sense. None of it matched anything I’d ever experienced.
But he had Angie. She was alive, and her color looked better than the last time I’d seen her. I could see that her leg was still strapped up in the splint Randall had put on her, so this Marlon character wasn’t lying about not having treated her yet, but she was at least… well, human-colored again. She was warm. She was safe.
And at that, I started to breathe again. Started to forgive Marlon for having brought us here without our permission.
“I’m going to need you to help me move her,” Marlon was saying as he walked toward her bed. “And quickly. That leg is broken, as I’m sure you’ve realized, and though the bleeding has been slow, she’s still lost an awful lot of blood. I can’t replace the blood. But I can set the leg and sew her up. After that, it’s up to her to come back to us.”
He seemed to notice that Angie was awake and listening to every word he said at that point, and he gave her what I thought was a mostly kind smile.
“Think you’re up to it, my girl?” he asked softly. “If I put you back together, can you do the rest?”
“Damn right I can,” she said through cracked lips.
I grinned widely at that. That was the woman I’d married—and the woman I hadn’t seen since the bear attacked us. The fact that she was giving him sass, that alone was worth the price of admission. That alone made me feel like everything was going to be okay.
Marlon turned to me with one eyebrow lifted. “In that case, we need to get her downstairs to my… surgical room. That’s where I have the heavier tools. And we need to do it while there’s still enough daylight to see by, or we’re going to be in trouble. I have a generator out here but it’s old, and it’s not capable of doing much more than keeping the house warm. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like doing surgery by candlelight.”
“I don’t like doing surgery at all,” I replied, putting all my distrust and fear behind me. “But I’m guessing it’s even harder by candlelight. How do we want to do this?”
“The splint will make it easier, but we obviously can’t use her leg to lift her,” Marlon said quickly.
We both paused to take stock of the situation, and suddenly the solution presented itself to me. Angie was laying on a quilt—with another over her—and that would provide the ideal means for carrying her.
“We carry the quilt underneath her,” I said firmly. “If we grab it close enough to her body, it’ll keep her from rolling around. And it will mean we don’t have to put any pressure on that leg. Will give us better maneuverability. Also, it’ll make it easier to put her down once we get downstairs.”
Marlon cast me a considering—and, I thought, respectful—glance. “Military,” he stated. “I saw your tags, so I suspected. But I didn’t know how long you might have served—or how much training you had.”
I reached down to take a hold of the quilt, figuring we had plenty of time to have that particular conversation later. “Enough to know how to move an injured soldier, Cap,” I told him quickly. “Now let’s get her down there so you can get started. I want her patched up as soon as possible. There might be men coming after us, and if they arrive, I want her in a state where I can move her without feeling like I’m going to hurt her.”
Approximately seven minutes later, we had gone down the hall I had yet to travel, found another door at the end, and descended a set of stairs into what I thought was either the first floor of the house or a basement of some sort. Whatever it was, it had been built with the need for daylight in mind. Two entire walls were taken up with large windows that let in the bright, snow-white sunlight.
“Awful lot of windows for a house in the middle of a snow-prone area,” I noted, trying to prod for some more information on who he was and what the hell this house was about.
He gave me a shrug, careful not to disturb the woman we were carrying between us. “They’re energy efficient,” he said quickly. “Double-paned, low-emissivity glass. Keeps the cold out and the heat in, or vice versa. And I like the daylight. You never know when you’re going to need it.”