Escaping the Arrogant Dark Moon Alpha novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Over the Line

The slide buries the road behind them, Tobin steers Marlow through the dark to the cairn by dawn, and then he asks who pulled his rope closure on April 3, and she says she did.

The snow above us cracked with a sound.

"Gas," Tobin said. "All of it. Don't turn."

I shoved both sticks forward.

The cat lurched up the road, tracks screaming on the ice underneath.

Behind us the whole bowl let go.

I saw it in the side mirror, a white wall pouring down through the dark.

It filled the road where we'd been ten seconds earlier.

The cab shook so hard my teeth knocked together.

Snow dust blew over the roof and blotted out the windshield.

For a long moment there was nothing but white and the roar.

Then it stopped.

The engine was still running.

So were we.

I looked in the mirror again.

The pass road behind us was gone, buried twenty feet deep from the rocks to the drop.

Nobody was following us up that road tonight.

Nobody was going back down it either.

"He fired at us," I said.

My voice came out very calm, which scared me more than the slide.

"He fired at the slope," Tobin said. "He wanted you to turn around and go home crying."

"That's the same thing."

"Yes."

He leaned forward and wiped the fog off the glass with my parka sleeve.

"Headlights," he said. "Nobody's watching now."

I flicked them on.

The road ahead climbed into a gray nothing of blowing snow.

I couldn't see the edge.

I couldn't see the rocks.

"Fifty feet straight," Tobin said. "Then a soft left. There's a culvert under the snow on the right, so stay off it."

I drove fifty feet straight.

I took the soft left.

The cat stayed on the road.

"How do you know that?"

"I walked this road every week for eight years. I dug a pit on every turn."

"You can't see anything."

"I can feel the tilt in the seat."

He talked me up the mountain for two hours.

Turn here.

Slow there.

There's a cornice on the ridge above this switchback, so don't idle under it.

Once he told me to stop dead, and I did, and he climbed out into the wind.

He kicked the snow at the edge of the road and listened to it.

Then he climbed back in, shaking.

"Drift over the old washout," he said. "Go right of the pole."

I went right of the pole.

On the left, the snow slumped off into the dark where the road used to have a shoulder.

Around three in the morning his stomach growled so loud I heard it over the diesel.

"Glove box," I said.

He opened it.

There were six granola bars in there, my emergency stash.

He ate one in two bites.

Then another.

"They feed you in that cell?"

"Soup. Bread. Oatmeal on Sundays." He opened a third bar. "The cook put raisins in the oatmeal. I think it was a protest."

"Against you?"

"Against the Alpha. She hates raisins."

I laughed.

It came out of me like a cough, and it hurt.

I hadn't laughed since the gala started.

He ate the fourth bar slower, watching the road.

"You're going to eat all of them," I said.

"I'm going to eat all of them."

"That's my emergency food."

"This is an emergency. I've been eating oatmeal with raisins for eight months, Sowell."

He held out the fifth one to me.

I shook my head.

He ate it.

The sixth he put in my parka pocket, the one he was wearing.

"For later," he said. "In case there's a worse emergency."

The wind dropped as we climbed.

The clouds thinned above the ridge, and the stars came out, hard and white.

There was still no moon.

At four-fifty in the morning the headlights found the cairn.

It was taller than me, a pile of black stones capped with snow.

My father had brought me up here once when I was small, in summer.

He'd told me not to touch it.

I drove past it slowly, the tracks crunching.

Something let go at the back of my neck.

It wasn't the bond.

The bond had been asleep all night, a cold quiet place under my ribs.

This was something I'd never known I had, a thread, and it snapped.

I gasped.

Beside me Tobin had both hands flat on the dash.

"You felt that," he said.

"What was it?"

"The pack." He leaned back against the seat. "We're out, Marlow. We're not his."

I stopped the cat on the Idaho side and sat there with the engine running.

My hands were shaking again.

"Your grandmother wrote that down too?"

"She wrote everything down."

The sky over the far valley was starting to go gray.

Below us the road dropped through the trees toward a town I'd never seen.

I'd lived twenty-seven years on one mountain.

I'd never once been on this side of the line.

Tobin was quiet for a long time.

Then he turned in his seat to look at me.

His face was thin and tired in the dash light, and very steady.

"I want to ask you something," he said. "I've wanted to ask it since April."

My stomach dropped.

"Okay."

"I roped the Crown that morning. I walked the line myself. I tied every knot."

"I know."

"Somebody pulled it before the Embrys came up the lift. Somebody who knew where the knots were." He didn't blink. "Who pulled my rope on April third?"

I could have lied.

I'd been lying for eight months by keeping my mouth shut.

I looked at the cairn in the mirror, black against the snow.

"I did," I said.

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