But first things first, and he didn’t like that she hadn’t answered him right away when he asked the first time. He also didn’t like the way she was listing to the side, as if she was about to fall over. He clamped one arm around her, propped her against his raised knee. “Were you hit?”
She was dragging in deep, ragged breaths, the way people breathed when they’d pushed themselves to the limit. Her head wagged to one side. “No. My right ankle.”
“Break or sprain?”
Another shuddering breath. “I don’t know. Sprain, I hope.”
Either way, she obviously couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t do anything for her until he got her back to the camp. He rapidly assessed the situation. There were several things that he needed to do, and they all needed to be done more or less simultaneously, but the obvious number one priority was getting her on the horse. He could find out what happened, tend to her ankle, and use the sat phone to call for help once he had her safe. The sat phone was virtually useless right now, anyway, because of the fucking weather.
“Okay, let’s get you on the horse,” he said gently, hooking the rifle’s strap over his shoulder to free both his hands. He slid his left arm under her knees, his right arm around her back, centered his own balance, and pushed himself up with her cradled in his arms. He’d barely reached an upright stance when he abruptly felt tingles race over his scalp and skin, like hundreds of spiders, making every hair on his body stand up. “Shit!” he said, and even as the word was coming out of his mouth he threw himself down, spread-eagled on the soggy ground with Angie under him, as if he could somehow shield her from a lightning bolt.
The blast of light was deafening. Light should be just light, but this was sound, too, an explosion of sheer energy that was almost like being body-slammed. There was no space between light and noise, it came all at once as if a giant had stomped the earth. The ground shuddered beneath them, something he found vaguely comforting, because if he could feel that then they hadn’t just been fried. His ears rang, his nose burned from the chlorine stench of ozone, and beyond all of that he could hear the horse screaming in panic.
“Shit! Fuck!” He launched himself off Angie, forcing his body to respond even though his head was still reverberating from the force of the nearby strike. The buckskin was rearing, its eyes rolling white in terror, fighting for all it was worth to jerk free. Dare scrabbled on feet and hands for the first couple of feet before he could catch his balance, and in those crucial two seconds the delay cost him, disaster struck, in the form of a tree branch. It wasn’t even that large of a branch, but the whipping wind broke it free and it came sailing out of the night like a rock from a slingshot, and slapped across the animal’s chest and neck.
The buckskin went wild. Before Dare could throw himself at its head and catch the bridle to pull it down, with a powerful wrench of its neck it pulled the reins free and ran. It didn’t just run a few yards and stop, the way horses usually did; it bolted, terrified out of its wits, and in a few seconds was completely lost in the night.
“Goddamnit!” Dare bellowed. “You stupid fuck!” He didn’t know if he meant himself or the horse, but fuck, now they were stuck on foot and the damn sat phone was in the saddlebag, so he couldn’t even call for help when the weather cleared. The horse might stop a hundred yards away, but with the darkness and the weather he’d never be able to see it. He didn’t think so, though; that horse was so scared it might not stop running until it couldn’t run any farther. He hoped it didn’t stumble and break its fool neck.
He stood there, breathing hard and fuming with frustration, so angry at himself for not tying the reins more securely that if he hadn’t needed his hat he’d have thrown it on the ground and stomped on it. This was his fault. He’d known how nervous the buckskin was, and instead of just looping the reins around the tree branch he should have actually tied them. He’d been in such a damn hurry to get to Angie that he’d let himself get careless, and now they were in a fine mess, with her hurt and—
She hadn’t made a sound.
A chill ran through him, a chill that had nothing to do with the cold rain or the storm or even the serious situation. Surely to God the lightning current couldn’t have gone through the ground and hit her, without also hitting him. But he’d all but slammed her to the ground; there might have been a rock, she might have hit her head … Slowly, almost sick with dread at what he might see, he turned his head to look at her.
She was struggling to sit, rolling half on her side and using her hands to push herself upright. The hood of her slicker was down, her head unprotected; her dark hair was plastered against her skull and running with water, she’d been crawling over incredibly rough ground for God only knew how long, but she was moving, she was still in the game, still trying.
His stomach clenched. He’d let her down by letting the horse get away. With the horse, he’d have had her safe and dry in about an hour. Now he’d have to carry her out of here, and he had no idea how long it would take on foot to reach his camp. If he were humping a pack on fairly level ground he knew he could easily set a pace of four miles an hour, but carrying a person, in this kind of terrain? No way. He’d end up stepping off a cliff and killing both of them. With luck, they’d reach his camp by daylight, which was hours from now, hours before he could see to her ankle, hours before she could get warm and dry.
He went back to her side, back down on one knee, and helped her to a sitting position. “Are you all right?”