Altar of Bones (71 page)

R
Y, PLEASE
…

He was so heavy, so unmoving.
Please, God. Ry, don’t you be dead on me, don’t you dare be dead
.

Zoe dug her fingers deeper into the folds of his coat and pulled with every bit of strength she had. It was enough to keep him from sinking to the bottom; it wasn’t enough to get him up and out of the pool.

“Mother, damn you. Help me,” she shouted.

For a moment Zoe thought her mother might have paused and looked back, but then Anna Larina kept going, through the hole and into the glowing red chamber.

Zoe felt Ry thrash beneath her hands, heard him cough. She sat back on her heels and pulled again, sobbing his name, while he clawed at the rocky ledge of the pool, and then he was out, streaming black water, shuddering with every harsh breath. He rolled over and half sat up, bracing his back against a stalagmite, pressing his hand to his right shoulder, and Zoe saw blood seep out between his fingers.

Then she heard her mother scream.

Zoe’s head jerked around, and what she saw didn’t seem real. The ground beneath Anna Larina’s feet had disappeared. “Mother!” Zoe shouted, horrified, wanting to run to her, to save her, but she couldn’t let go of Ry. For an instant, her mother seemed to hang suspended over a gaping abyss, and then she plunged, and she was screaming, screaming.

Her mother’s screams seemed to turn into a high-pitched whine, and the whine got louder and louder as the ground began to vibrate and then to shake.

“Get out!” Ry shouted above the noise that was now like a train bearing down on them.

Zoe tried to grab him, to wrest him up onto his feet, but he pushed her away from him. “No. I’ll slow you down.
Go
.” And he shoved her again, harder.

“I’m not leaving you, you idiot!” Zoe screamed. She knocked his flailing hand aside and covered his body with hers, as dirt and bits of rock rained down on them.

She thought,
I’m going to die
, and she was engulfed by a terrible sadness. It was too soon.

G
RADUALLY THE GROUND
stopped shaking and the terrible shrieking noise became a low rumble and died.

Slowly, Zoe lifted her head off Ry’s chest. “Is it over?” she asked, more of the gods than of him.

But something in her already knew that it was over, that this was the final riddle. Rocks and boulders and debris now filled the hole where the chamber with the altar of bones had been. To protect the altar from the world, it had been taken from the world forever.

An image filled Zoe’s mind then, of her mother in that last instant before the ground opened up and swallowed her. She’d had her back to Zoe, her face riveted on the altar, and even as she was falling to her death, Zoe knew she hadn’t been able to look away.

Ry groaned, and Zoe rolled off him fast, suddenly afraid that she’d made his gunshot wound worse, throwing herself on top of him the way she had. He looked bad. The hand he had pressed to his shoulder was now covered in blood. Already his eyes looked glazed, feverish.

He did still have the strength to get to his feet, though. And she could never have said how she did it, but somehow Zoe got both herself and him squeezed through that slit in the rock without her freaking out completely. She was more scared of the thought that her mother had brought some of her
mafiya
goons along with her as backup, and they were now hidden among the trees that bordered the lake, ready to open fire with their semiautomatics.

She had no choice, though. Ry’s wet clothes were freezing on him. She had to get him warm or he would die of hypothermia before she could even get him to a hospital.

R
Y WAS BARELY
conscious by the time they staggered out from behind the frozen waterfall. The lake felt eerily still and was almost completely enshrouded by the creeping night, only a wisp of blue polar light still clinging to the snow-sodden clouds. She bore as much of his weight as she could as they slogged through the snow to where they’d left the Arctic Cat, her eyes scanning the ice-crusted pines and piles of boulders, her body braced for the flash of gunfire.

We made, we made it
, her mind sang in a singsong as Ry fell into the Cat’s rear seat, grunting from the pain.

But then Zoe felt, more than saw, a flash a movement among the trees and she whirled. She stood frozen, her eyes straining against the encroaching darkness, but all was still.

A white hare darted out from behind a tumble of rocks. Zoe started to let out a breath, then she caught it again.

Eyes
.

A pair of yellow eyes floating close to the ground, and then another, and another.

And then the wolves began to bay.

… this is the starving season. The wolves will be out
.

Oh, God. Please, dear God …

“Key’s in the ignition,” Ry wheezed. “Start it up. Turn on lights. Should scare them off. Need the blankets, Zoe. Cold.”

Zoe leaped on the Cat, started it up, turned on its headlights, and the pack of wolves, which had already begun to slink onto the lake, turned tail and ran back into the trees.

Zoe got the vodka out first, and Ry’s teeth knocked against the bottle as he drank from it with his free hand. His other hand was still pressed against his shoulder, but the blood had now soaked his coat to the knees.

As Zoe tore open the space blankets and wrapped them around Ry, her frantic eyes searched the shoreline for the wolves. She couldn’t see
them anymore, but she could feel them, moving through the darkness, getting close again.

Ry was having trouble catching his breath, she thought she could practically see the life draining out of him.
But you’re gonna get him to a hospital, Zoe girl, and then he’ll be all right. They’ll take the bullet out and—

“Something’s wrong,” Ry said, his voice a bare rasp. “Bitch only shot me in the shoulder. Shouldn’t feel this bad.”

Zoe finished tucking the second blanket under his hip, then leaned closer into him to be sure he heard her. “You’re going to hang on for me, Ryland O’Malley, you hear me? I’m getting you to a hospital, so you’re going to hang on.”

“Bone juice,” he said, his breath wheezing in and out. “Don’t give it to me.”

“I’m not going to let you die. I’m not.”

“No altar of bones. No matter what. Want you to swear … sacred promise … you won’t.”

Zoe shook her head, feeling her tears freeze on her cheeks as soon as they hit the air. “Ry, you can’t expect me … I love you.”

“Then swear on that. Swear it.”

A sob tore out of her, so hard it wrenched her chest. “Okay, I swear it. On my love—”

A wolf lunged at them from out of the darkness. Zoe screamed and instinctively flung the vodka bottle at the beast’s head. He shied away at the last second, snapping and snarling, then the entire pack whirled and disappeared into the darkness again.

Zoe nearly fell in her panic to get into the Cat’s driver’s seat, and then the horrible thought hit her—she’d never driven a snowmobile in her life.
What if … what if …

The wolves had regrouped already and were coming back. She jerked the front end of the Cat around, shining the light full on them, and they backed off again, but not so far this time, and she could see the hunger and the killing instinct in their yellow eyes.

“Ry,” she screamed. “How do I drive this thing?”

But he must have passed out because he didn’t answer.

Suddenly, a loud crack, like a rifle shot, exploded above their heads,
and something came hurtling at them from out of the sky, stabbing into the snow barely a foot in front of them—

A giant icicle, the length and width of a man’s forearm.

Zoe stared at it in horror for a suspended second. Then the whole world seemed to explode above her, as the giant frozen waterfall broke apart, raining deadly blocks and spears of frozen ice down on top of them.

Zoe searched frantically for a gearshift, something … then she saw a button next to the ignition. She pressed it and the Arctic Cat shot forward.

Just as the head of the frozen waterfall broke free of the bluff and came crashing down in a mountainous avalanche of ice and snow.

T
HE FIRES FROM
Norilsk’s smelters lit up the blue-black arctic sky, silhouetting the smokestacks.

The first factory she hit, on the outskirts of town, looked shut up and abandoned. Then she spotted a couple of men huddled around a fire they’d built in an old oil drum. They squatted on their haunches, holding hands wrapped in rags out to the flames, and they barely looked up, even when she nearly drove the Cat right through them before she was able to wrench it to a stop.

“Hospital?” she croaked, and tiny icicles shattered and fell from her eyebrows and the front of her hood.

One of the men, who had a red sock cap pulled nearly to his eyes, said, “Go seven blocks, then go right. After that you keep on going and going and going. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, only it’s so big you can’t miss it once you
are
out there. I’ll give it that. They say it’s the biggest hospital in Russia. It’s a thousand beds, they got, so—”

The Cat’s skis ground on the ice-coated pavement as she shot forward, craning her head around to look over her shoulder at Ry. She could barely make out his face, he was so covered with snow. He’d passed out long ago, and now even his eyelids looked blue.