Alaska Heart (32 page)

“Not if I hurt you first, you won’t.” His steel blue eyes lasered into me, pinning me in place like a bug in a little boy’s collection. He lunged forward, and his hands grabbed my throat. I hacked at his wrists with my hands, but his grip had tightened around my neck. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t scream. All I could do was think about the other women he had strangled and dumped by the Chena. I didn’t want to be one of them.

In the tight cockpit, I couldn’t maneuver my legs to help me out of his hold. I frantically scanned the area for something—anything—I could use in my defense. The only thing I found within reach was my camera, still in my lap. As my lungs struggled for air and my vision grew hazy, I curled my fingers around the camera. I depressed one of the buttons, causing the flash to blink in a staccato pattern. It was enough to distract Brian.

In that millisecond of disorientation, I brought my hand up, camera in palm, and bashed it into the side of Brian’s face. I nailed him square on the cheekbone, and he howled. He pulled his hands off my neck to press them to his face. I had split the skin on his cheek, and he gaped at his own blood sifting through his fingers.

“Whore.” He reached for me again, but I had pulled the door open beside me. After leaping from the Super Cub, I fell to the ground, completely missing the footholds below the door. The cold ground scraped into my palms and knees, but I scrambled to my feet and bolted for the trees.

Brian descended on me almost immediately. His long legs had no trouble closing the small gap between us. He pulled me down by the shoulders, and my legs crumpled beneath me. I landed in a patch of snow with Brian on top of me. We tumbled down a small decline, and I clawed at the muddy ground, gaining some space again. I hopped to my feet and ran. Didn’t look back.

My palms burned from the gashes in them. Fresh blood dribbled down my wrists, but I pushed on. Brian crunched through the terrain only steps behind me. I leaped over fallen logs and snow mounds, my lungs heaving with each movement. Though I had left my gloves and hat in the plane, I wasn’t cold. Sweat doused my entire body as I ran for my life. All those extra minutes on the treadmill had not been in vain.

Denali passed by me in a dizzying swirl of white, brown, and green. What had looked so picturesque only a week ago with Dale now crawled with danger. I had no idea where I was headed, but had to keep moving.

I cried out when Brian’s arms wrapped around my waist in a vise grip. He wrestled me to the ground. My head snapped back, and my skull knocked into a small boulder. The pain blasted through my head, and my vision wavered.

“Told you I’d have to hurt you,” Brian snarled.

“Yeah,” I gasped, pointing to his face, “but I hurt you first.”

The last thing I saw before passing out was the swelling on his cheek.

****

When I awoke, my lower body was cocooned in a thick sleeping bag. My ankles were bound, and I sat against a tree. No. Wait a minute. Scratch that. I was tied to the tree. I wriggled a little, but the rope that held me captive was securely tied. The movement made my head scream in protest. The back of my neck was wet. Sweat or blood? It didn’t make a difference at this point.

Brian was not in the immediate area. How long had I been out? Apparently long enough for him to go back to the plane, get rope, and tie me. A makeshift camp had been set up as well. A small beige tent sat a few yards away from me, and the remains of a fire still glowed in the center of the little clearing in front of me. It looked as if an animal had been spit-roasted over the fire, and I cringed at the thought of Brian skinning and eating the poor creature.

The patch of sky peeking between the treetops above me grew dark as a light snow fell. I’d left all my stuff in the plane, so I had no way to contact anyone. No phone. No laptop. Nothing.

Except the multi-tool in the back pocket of my jeans.

Fidgeting around, I maneuvered my hand to my pocket and sighed at the small bulge. My fingers wormed their way into my pocket, and I fumbled around until I had the knife firmly in my grasp. I carefully extracted it and worked the blade open.

At the snap of a twig to my left, my head jolted up, and pain swam through my skull. Brian’s chokehold had bruised the muscles in my neck.

“Welcome back, gorgeous.” Brian knelt beside me. “Have a nice snooze?” He slipped his backpack off his shoulder and opened it. The slice in his cheek was purpling beneath the dried blood.

I was glad I got in at least one shot. “How long was I out for?”

“Longer than I thought you would be. It’s Wednesday night. You pretty much lost a day.”

Lost a day!
This was getting worse by the second.

“Brian, this is ridiculous. What are you going to do with me?”

“Ah…pretty much whatever I want.” He looked around. “Absolutely no one to stop me out here.” He plunged his arm into his pack and extracted something that looked like a high-tech squirt gun. “But my first order of business is to mark you as one of mine.” He scuttled next to me and unzipped the sleeping bag. He pulled a knife from the pocket of his jeans.

Hacked to pieces by a lunatic. Wasn’t that the reason I hadn’t wanted to come to visit Dale in the first place? Life was so twisted sometimes.

I clamped my eyes shut as Brian cut into my jeans with the knife. He was strangely careful not to touch my flesh with the blade. When a good-sized hole was started in my pants, he ripped it open with his hands to expose my upper thigh.

“I usually prefer the forearm, but because I had to tie you up we’ll improvise. Besides, you’re not like the others. You’re special.” He pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal his own arm. My eyes zoomed in on the tattoo sprawling over his skin. It had been splayed across the TV too many times this week for me not to recognize it.

A wolf’s head. Gaping jaws. Bared, bloodthirsty teeth. Narrowed, yellow eyes.

“How could you kill all those women?”

“Taught them manners is more like it.” The words slid past his clenched teeth. “I tried charm first, and it worked for a little while, but women are so…harsh, Alanna.”

When he looked at me, tears rested at the corners of his eyes. His emotions were all over the map, changing with the wind. An unstable psychotic was worse than your run-of-the-mill lunatic. He brushed away the tears and focused on my exposed thigh. Slipping his hand inside the hole in my jeans, his cold fingers caressed my skin. I tried to move away from his touch, but I had nowhere to go, no options.

“Hold still now. You don’t want me to mess up my work here.”

“Brian, please,” I begged as I discretely sawed the ropes binding me.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t have to live with it for long. In fact, you won’t have to live long at all.” His gaze shot to mine, and the crooked grin that spread across his lips was down right insane. “I’ve let you live longer than the others. I’ve been generous.”

Why didn’t that comfort me?

Brian lowered the ink gun until its tip needled into my skin. It pinched, but it wasn’t the pain that had me screaming.

“Hush now. I can’t concentrate.”

I jammed up my knees, but Brian moved with me and swayed out of range. He straddled both my legs and took a minute to trace the contours of my chin with his fingertip. He was so much bigger than me. I couldn’t throw him off.

“I like the fire in you. Even if it causes me to get a few bruises.” He skimmed his fingers over his puffy cheek. “The others weren’t a challenge at all. But you…you’re going to be worth the effort.” He traced a wavy line along my thigh. “Oh, and you’re absolutely gorgeous when you’re unconscious, you know.”

Had he touched me while I was out? I shuddered at the thought.

Brian bent over my leg again and resumed his drawing. Each line he colored in threw me deeper into hopelessness. Nothing I could say would stall him any longer and when he was done with the tattoo, then what? Would I wind up like the other women he had dumped by the Chena River?

No
. The voice that sounded in my head was a little Meg and a little Dale. No, I wasn’t going to go out this way. No fucking way.

“I think you could get help, Brian.” I flinched when he fumbled with the ink gun.

“I make my own help.” He gestured to the tattoo. “This helps.”

“Obviously it doesn’t help. You wouldn’t have to keep doing it if it helped.”

He shook his head as he continued to sketch in the wolf on what used to be a pristine piece of thigh. “Maybe I like doing it.”

“You’re a successful writer, Brian, for a popular magazine. Surely your life means more than this.”

He shook his head.

“You do work for
Expedition Earth,
don’t you?” Was I a complete moron? Did I believe a stupid story he had fed me about being a writer?

“Yes, I do work for
Expedition Earth
,” Brian said. “Killing is only a hobby.”

“Ever try tennis?” Fear hadn’t numbed my sense of humor. Good to know. “You could find someone. Someone who’ll love you. All of you. You don’t have to do this.”

“Don’t I?” He brought his face to within inches of mine, and fury filled his cobalt glare. “Could you look at this every day? Could you?” He threw his hat off and angled his head so his scar filled my vision. Up that close, every detail hit my eyes. Something of that magnitude must have taken multiple staples to seal.

“It’s not that—”

“No, no, no.” Brian’s rage cut me off. “Don’t tell me it’s not that bad. It is bad. It felt bad. It looks bad. It reminds me every damn day how I had everything and then lost it all.”

Now it was my turn to be angry. “People have everything and lose it all the time, asshole. You think you’re the only one to suffer that? C’mon.” I even managed an eye roll.

“Your little affair with the musher hardly qualifies as ‘having everything,’ Alanna.” His tone was acidic and condescending.

“I wasn’t talking about Dale and me,” I shot back. “Open a damn newspaper, Brian. Watch the news. Tragedy is all around us. Every second of every hour of every day. But people overcome that kind of loss every day too, and they go on to do things that matter.”

My words and tone stunned Brian into silence. He slid off my legs and knelt beside me, his eyes combing over my face. Reaching up a hand, he attempted to touch my cheek, but I jerked away.

“No one’s suffered like me,” he whispered.

I met his stare with a fire of my own burning in my eyes. Then I focused on the half-drawn wolf ear on my thigh. It didn’t look like much yet, but it still sickened me.

Brian put the ink gun aside and inched closer to me. He leaned in as I cut through the last rope holding me to the tree. With a liquid-like movement, I arced my hand up and over, sinking the knife blade of the multi-tool into Brain’s shoulder. His eyes widened while his mouth dropped open. No sound came out as he keeled over, his hand groping for the knife handle. Before he could find it, I reached up and yanked out the knife. After slicing through the ropes holding my ankles, I bolted to my feet and took off as Brian lay, howling in agony on the forest floor.

Amazing how animal-like his cries sounded in Denali.

I flew over the terrain, my feet barely touching the earth as I wove deeper into the woods. I half hoped to run into a grizzly so I could point him in Brian’s direction. My lungs begged me to stop and rest, but I had to deny them. Though I didn’t hear Brian stampeding around behind me, the only way to keep my distance from him was to keep moving.

The flap Brian had cut into my jeans flopped open as I moved, sending snowy, nighttime air into my pant leg. The farther into the woods I got, the darker the shadows became. Trouble was I didn’t know which way was out. With Dale, we had entered and exited Denali through the main gates of the park. My landing with Brian in the Super Cub had not been standard protocol to say the least. I had no idea where that open field was in the grand scheme of the park. I also didn’t know how far Brian had lugged me from the plane’s landing site to the tree. To the unfamiliar eye, every tree in Denali looked the same. I could have been going in circles for all I knew.

With so many unknowns, hope surrendered to the cold.

I finally stopped to rest on a boulder as the shadows darkened to blackness. The snow stopped, and silver strands of moonlight filtered through the pines, shedding enough light to keep me from totally freaking out. As I caught my breath, things stirred on the ground nearby. Every noise had my head snapping up, expecting Brian. I’d gotten him pretty good with the pocketknife. Nothing fatal, but he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the pace I had maintained. Something about running for your life puts a little extra push in your step.

I bent down closer to my thigh and shook my head at the wolf ear Brian had managed to carve into my leg. Should I have let him finish the tattoo? Would that have been better? What was I supposed to do with a wolf ear on my thigh?

In the curtain of night that was closing over Denali finding the entrance to the park would be impossible. As much as I didn’t want to spend the night alone in the wilderness with my pocketknife as my only supply, I didn’t have any other choice. If I wandered with my vision so limited, I could get into worse trouble.

If there was such a thing.

I pushed to my feet and wandered a little farther until my foot sank into a patch of soft earth. I lost my balance and careened to the ground, wrenching my ankle in the process. Motionless on the chilled ground, I was tempted to stay there and let whatever night creatures came upon me have me. A voice in my head—the one that sounded like Meg and Dale mixed together—insisted I get up and carry on, so I did.

As I got to my feet, pain shot up my entire leg. Limping along, using trees for support as I went, I finally came upon a small rock cave.

“Someone’s looking out for you, Cormac.” Throwing a thankful glance to the sky, I stood outside the mouth of the cave to listen for a few moments. Wouldn’t be a good thing if I walked into an occupied cave in the middle of the forest.