Hold Your Breath (Search and Rescue) (17 page)

It was only when she heard the rumble of Callum’s truck starting that she pushed away from the door. With a sigh, she headed for the kitchen. The soup was bubbling gently and smelled amazing, but she turned off the burner. Between Callum driving in the storm and their unexpectedly mind-blowing make-out session, Lou’s stomach was knotted. She’d wait until he returned to eat.

She fidgeted, playing with the soupspoon. The familiar nervous restlessness that seemed to be her constant companion lately when she was alone rose up in her, making her chest burn. She resented how her stalker had turned her cabin from a refuge to a source of fear. Her gaze settled on the bottle of whisky she’d bought the previous fall. It was mostly full, only missing the single shot she’d taken on Christmas evening after a disastrous phone conversation with her parents.

“What the hell,” she muttered, reaching to grab the bottle. It wasn’t like she was going on any dive-team calls that night after Callum’s strict instructions not to leave the cabin. Unscrewing the cap, she took a drink right out of the bottle, wincing as it burned all the way down.

Coughing, she squinted at the bottle. “I feel like such a mountain woman.” Her voice was husky from the residual burn of the alcohol. “Drinking whisky straight from the bottle while getting snowed in at my log cabin.”

After a second swig, she coughed again and screwed on the top, placing it back in its usual spot on the counter. Turning toward the living room, she suddenly felt the room rock from side to side, and she grabbed the edge of the breakfast bar to steady herself.

“Whoa. Am I that much of a lightweight?” She took a tentative step toward the couch. The floor seemed to hold steady, so she tried another one. By the time she’d reached the sofa, the cabin was shifting under her feet again, and it was a relief to sit. When she tipped her head back against the cushion, the room spun. Lou squeezed her eyes closed, but her brain kept whirling until everything went black.

* * *

The wind sounded strange. It was roaring and crackling at the same time. Lou frowned, but her eyes didn’t want to open, so she listened to the weird-sounding wind for another second. She was so tired, and her head pounded in time with her heartbeat. Her limbs felt heavy, as if weighted down. She was so nice and warm. All she wanted to do was sleep, so she let her brain drift…until a stinging on her hand made her start awake.

Her eyelids lifted, revealing a blur of orange. Blinking rapidly, she forced her vision to clear, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. Flames were everywhere. Glowing yellow and red and all shades in between, they leapt and played like living things.

Her cabin was on fire, and she was trapped inside.

Lou shoved herself off the couch in a panic, but her legs went soft, and she tumbled to the floor. Pushing to her hands and knees, she fought for control of her limbs. It was as if her body didn’t belong to her, like she was a clumsy puppet. Her arm collapsed beneath her, sending her down to land painfully on her elbow.

As she looked up, she got her first clear view of the burning cabin. Fire rippled up the walls and across the ceiling, enclosing her in a flaming trap. Burning chunks of wood fell to smolder on the floor, and a small piece of flaming material landed on her hip. It took a second before she felt the burn, and she swatted it off of her, smacking the fabric of her pajama pants until she was sure no embers remained. Everything was wrong. Her thoughts were scattered and hazy, and she couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Fear joined the smoke in clogging her breathing.

Out.
The word rang sharply in her brain, piercing the confused fog of her thoughts and her rising panic. She tried again to stand, but she hit the floor hard, sending pain radiating from her hip. With a groan, she started to crawl across the floor in the direction of the door. Smoke pinched her lungs, making every breath hurt. She coughed once but then held back the need to do it again, afraid she’d never be able to stop hacking once she started.

Out.
Squinting, she hunted for the door with watering eyes. The room was both too bright and too dark at the same time, making it hard to see anything. Lou forced herself to think. This was her home. She knew where the door was. Crawling next to the couch, she yelped as a chunk of burning wood fell, bouncing off her calf.

Her body was heavy and her thoughts sluggish. A large part of her brain wanted her to hide and cry and try to go back to sleep. Maybe this was just a nightmare—a horrible, realistic,
painful
nightmare. Despite the blurriness of her mind, however, she knew it was real.

Shoving back the panic that wanted to overwhelm her, she clung to her one goal—finding the door. Through the door would be cold and snow and relief from the heat that burned her, inside and out. Her shoulder bumped something—a wall. That was good. The door was in a wall. All she had to do was decide to go left or right.

Her eyes were useless, tearing so heavily that everything was a blur, flames and darkness melding together. She groped the wall, trying to feel something—anything—familiar that could give her a clue about where she was. Her fingers bumped something soft and heavy, sending it swinging.

She dug through the thick sludge of her thoughts, trying to identify what she’d found. When she clutched it harder, it fell onto the floor in front of her, the silky surface brushing her cheek on the way down.

“Ski pants!” she tried to say, but she choked on the words and the smoke and her clumsy tongue. With the realization that she was under the coatrack, she knew exactly where the door was. The smoke was thicker there, clogging her lungs and stinging her eyes so badly that a constant flow of tears blurred her vision. The few feet seemed endless as she crawled toward the exit, escape so close she could almost taste her relief.

Pushing up onto her knees, she grabbed the doorknob and toppled back, pulling it open as she went. Cold air rushed inside, soothing her overheated body and making the flames behind her roar with renewed fury. Her arms shook as she pushed herself back to her hands and knees, and a semihysterical part of her mind wondered if she’d be reduced to rolling. That was what she was supposed to do in a fire, right? Stop, drop, and roll?

She tried to clamp down and close off the odd thoughts, but it was getting harder and harder to hold on to her plan.
Out.
She was so close. All she needed to do was make it through the doorway, and then she’d be free of the inferno, of the raging heat and too-bright darkness and smoke that made it impossible to breathe or see. One hand in front of the next, a forward slide of one knee and then the other—all she could focus on was moving forward an inch at a time.

Her head bumped something, making her look up. It looked like…legs?

“Oh, thank God!” she rasped, hardly able to force any sound from her stripped and raw throat. “Help! Help me, please!”

There was no answer from the person in front of her, no movement at all. Rocking back onto her knees, she looked up and up at the figure. From her vantage point, the person towered over her like a giant. She swayed, blinking her tearing eyes, and the form seemed to shrink to normal—almost small—size before growing to a terrifying height again. When her blurry gaze reached his face, she sucked in a painful breath that tore at her throat. In the flicker of shadow and light, he looked like a monster.

Then her eyes cleared slightly, and Lou realized it wasn’t a nightmare in front of her, but a person wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus.
Fireman!
was her relieved thought, although that didn’t seem to fit. Except for the SCBA mask, he wasn’t wearing any bunker gear. Instead, he was all in black, from his boots to his hat.

“Please,” she tried to say, although it came out as a rasp.
Why is he just standing there?
she wondered, her voice shrill in her mind.
Why isn’t he helping me?
She reached toward the figure, wanting to catch hold of his arm, but he shifted out of reach. Confused and swaying, Lou stared at him.

Then the man lifted a booted foot, placed it in the center of her chest, and
shoved
.

Even as she tumbled back into the burning cabin, Lou couldn’t comprehend what the person had just done. The door slammed closed as she lay sprawled in the entryway, shock holding her motionless. Then it all suddenly clicked into place. Her stalker. Her stalker had likely drugged her, had set her cabin on fire…and now he was going to watch as she burned alive.

The realization sent a surge of rage through her, clearing her head and smothering her panic. Okay. If she couldn’t go out the front door, then she’d just need to find another way out of the cabin. There was no way she’d let that asshole win. She was going to get out—even if it killed her.

As the flare of anger burned out, though, terror crept in its place. Just outside the door was someone who wanted her dead. She struggled to crawl, to pull herself back into the burning house, away from the killer. Fear stole the last of her coordination, though, and she lurched forward, cracking the point of her chin against the floor.

Darkness threatened to dim the flames, and she tasted something metallic mixed in with the thick flavor of ash in her mouth. The horror of the murderer so close to her forced her back to her hands and knees, and she started a slow, crawling shuffle toward where she thought her bedroom was.

The floor was getting hotter. She could feel blisters forming on her palms. Her knees stung—either from being scraped on the hard floor or from burns. Either way, Lou had to ignore the pain. Her hand bumped something, and she snatched it back before it could burn her. It hadn’t felt hot, though, so she tried again, reaching out tentatively to discover the back corner of the couch.

Her body drooped in relief, but she pressed forward, keeping her shoulder close enough to brush along the back of the sofa as she moved. The smoke stung her eyes, covering them with a haze of tears. She could barely see, and then even that was gone as the flames roared upward, whiting out her vision. Her lungs caught with each breath, but she blamed it on the smoke. She wasn’t sobbing. She wasn’t.

A rain of sparks danced across her back. Her yelp of pain came out as more of a hoarse huff of air, and she shoved over onto her back to smother them before they could burn her. It ran through her head on repeat—the image of her pajamas going up in flames, her skin charring, the pain… Her puffs of breath turned into legitimate sobs she couldn’t seem to stop. Tears rinsed her eyes, and her vision returned for a moment. She immediately wished it hadn’t.

An enormous beam—black and glowing red, like it had just been tossed from hell—lay across the couch, dropping sparks and burning bits onto the floor…and Lou. The now-flaming cushions were the only thing keeping the beam from crushing her. With rasping, desperate sobs, she rolled, escaping from the threat.

Her evasive maneuver left her in the center of the room, disoriented and unsure of which way she should go. A growing sense of dizziness reminded her that every breath was poison and her time was running out. The entire room was ablaze, bright and deadly.

She desperately tried to plan, not to curl up and wait to burn, to die. Bathroom? The only window was too high and too small for her to fit. Living room? She might be able to squeeze through the opening in the ancient crank-style windows, but they opened to the front of the house, right where
he
was waiting. The thought of the horrific figure who’d left her to burn destroyed the tentative hold she had on her sobs. They ripped through her, painful and hoarse. If she managed to escape the horror inside her ruined cabin, he’d be waiting—waiting to finish what the fire had started. Either way, she was dead.

Please,
her mind begged.
I don’t want to die!

Darkness was creeping around the edges of her blurred vision. Her skin felt dry and so, so hot. Lou struggled to push herself to her hands and knees, but her arms slipped out to the sides, dropping her on her front. Her mind screamed at her to move, to get out of this nightmare of smoke and heat and blinding flames, and she tried to pull forward in a belly crawl. Her arms weren’t working right, though, and she didn’t know where she was going.

She turned her head, blinking away tears from smoke and regret. That thing with Callum was so new, and she’d never know how their story would end.

Or maybe she would. Maybe it would end with her dying in her cabin.

Knock it off,
the voice in her head, the only part of her that wasn’t pathetic and whining, ordered.
Move.

Forcing her heavy, uncoordinated arms in front of her, she dragged her body forward an inch and then two. She didn’t know where she was going or what her plan was, but she did know that she wasn’t going to give up and die, sniveling and helpless. Another pull, and she advanced painfully slowly across the floor.

A large shape interrupted the pattern of the flames, and she blinked her watery eyes to clear them. When she saw the human figure running toward her, she started shoving herself backward.
He’s inside! He’s inside and going to kill me!
her brain shrieked. But then his face—blackened and familiar and so beautiful—was close to hers.

“Callum?” she mouthed, unable to force any words from her roasted throat. He was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear over the roar of the fire. That was okay, though, because it was enough that he was there, hoisting her off the floor and against his chest. She allowed her body to go limp. It wasn’t up to her to save herself anymore. Callum had come for her.

As they approached the door, Lou opened her mouth, trying to force words through her burning throat. She had to warn him about the attacker—what if he was still out there? Before she could speak, the masked figure appeared, and her words of warning emerged as a hoarse, almost silent scream that was swallowed by the thunder of the flames.

She braced for an attack, but Callum ran toward the man, rather than away. Squinting through watery eyes, she realized that this man was in full bunker gear and was urging them out of the open door, rather than kicking them back into the burning cabin. Callum flew through the doorway, and the cold air washed over her for the second time that night. She sucked in breath after breath, exhaling in a hacking cough that shook her entire body.