Doranna Durgin - Survival Instinct

Unless Dave was too late, and Barret had instructed his walking wall of muscle to get rid of her.

Dave hated being too late.

Too many late-night drives hadn’t ended well. They now vied for his thoughts, from that very first dead boy-the one who’d set him on his life’s path-to last year’s young victim. Plenty of successes in between, but those weren’t what ever came to him in the darkness. They weren’t what came to him now as he raced not only to save another child, but to save his witness.

To save the woman who’d kissed him senseless in the crude confines of an old henhouse.

Dave’s leg gave a sudden cramp; he discovered his fingers crimping on the steering wheel. Too much caffeine, too much tension. Whatever Karin had used to dose him was wearing off. He’d probably be lucky if he wasn’t up for three days in the wake of all that coffee.

Then again, if he didn’t get to Karin in time, he’d be just as glad to avoid the nightmares.

Dave shook his hands out, and drove on toward dawn.

The first hints of light came as a surprise; one moment Karin stared out into darkness and the next she could see the jumble of hills across the gorge. She worked on deep-breathing exercises, those she’d taught herself in the early days. She rarely needed them anymore; she could just drop right into whatever persona the moment demanded, playing her mark with experience. Playing anyone, if it suited her. If it got her what she wanted. Needed.

Except…

It had been over a year. A year of sinking into the most convincing role she’d ever needed. Deep immersion…but only a single role. And that left her out of practice, even when it came to fooling herself. In this case, fooling herself that she wasn’t, in fact, terrified.

“I am a mountain goat,” told herself, staring out at the slowly brightening land. “Breathe deep. Ommm. Be the goat.” Not quite right, that last. She summoned up an imitation of her youngest goat. The easiest. “Beh-eh-eh,” she said into the mountain air. Yeah, that was so much better.

But she couldn’t distract herself from her situation. Straight down, just as far as she would have expected from the endless fall of her tossed stone during the night. Karin’s mouth went dry at the thought of the pure dumb luck that had landed her on this small outcrop; she had to lean her head back and swallow hard a couple of times.

All her survival skills were urban-based. Just because she’d lived on a tiny working farm for the past year didn’t mean she was ready to free-climb this cliff.

Or you could just sit here and wait to freeze to death. Or fall asleep and roll off. Or dehydrate and faint and roll off…

Didn’t seem like much of an option. She dug her fingers uselessly into the outcrop in a search for security as she slowly tipped her head back to see what lay above her.

Not quite as bad as she was expecting. More of an angle to the ground, more vegetation handholds. Of course most of it was rhododendron with shallow rhododendron roots…

Ugh. She didn’t want her life to depend on them.

Then you’ll just have to be careful.

But first things first. She wasn’t climbing this cliff with a full bladder. At least she was too frightened to feel the humiliation of peeing right out there on the exposed outcrop. But she was shivering before she got her jeans refastened-face it, she had been shivering for a long time now. It didn’t add to the security of the situation any.

Finally she stood, turning to face the cliff in tiny little steps, never taking even an inch of ground for granted. She contemplated her best path…up to the rhododendron, over to the kudzu, try to avoid the greenbrier, and then there was another, smaller ledge where she could dig her toes in and reevaluate the situation. She squinted up at the rhododendron, working up nerve. Her wrist throbbed fiercely and she’d be lucky to use it. She sure couldn’t count on it in a pinch.

Deep breath. Reach up to the stunted bush, tug and test. Breathe. Now or never…

The rhododendron held.

She made it to the kudzu.

The kudzu not only held, it offered her regular root knots. The narrow waterfall of vines-not quite suited to this elevation or it would have been a full-size blanket of growth across the hillside-had deep and sturdy roots, and the root knots sat above ground, spewing vines everywhere and most importantly giving Karin something to grab. One step at a time, always testing, her injured wrist held closely to her chest where she could feel her heart pounding even through the insulated canvas of the old army jacket. She kept her eyes on her goal, kept focused on the feel of the ground beneath tangled vines as it came through her cheap sneakers. The vines grabbed at the fingers of her work glove, and she disentangled her hand with care, pressing herself against the woody growth like a lover and taking hold with her teeth when she had to.

It can’t be this easy.

Not that it was easy in the least. Not with knowing how far and long she’d fall if she lost her grip, or the way the treetops had looked as they swooped away beneath her former perch. Idiot. Don’t think of-

Her foot slipped. She cried out, snatching at the vines with her injured arm and then crying out again when she made contact. Her foot scrabbled, got purchase, lost it again. Her world narrowed to a bright point of pain at her wrist, the emptiness beneath her searching feet, the burn of stressed muscle in her arms, the sound of her own harsh, irregular breathing…

There. There, she’d found purchase. She leaned against the vines and rock, panting, suddenly not cold at all.

Just a little farther.

Karin sighed deeply. Her face itched and she rubbed it against the vines, surprised to realize she’d scraped away a tear. She was not prone to crying.

So one whole tear slipped out. Boo-hoo. She still needed to reach that ledge. Her next step was to move sideways, abandoning the kudzu altogether and making her way over a patch of greenbrier. Great. Nature’s version of barbed wire.

On the other hand, it wasn’t likely to break on her.

Her wrist was already screaming but the choice had become a no-brainer-use it, or risk a fatal slip. She needed all the security she could get. Good thing the greenbrier thorns were so big they dug right into her gloves. Ha. Karin ground her teeth together and snarled at the thorns, gaining mere inches of ground at a time. “I laugh at your puny thorns,” she told the vines. “I sneer at-ow, crap-them. You need thorn Viagra, all of-dammit-you!”

There, finally-the next ledge was only a step away. So much smaller than her original perch, but so much closer to the top. She made herself slow down, taking the time to wait out the edge of panic that made her movements jerky and uncertain. She had to wait out a bout of the shakes-her muscles tired and flooded with fear and lactic acid both, already getting cold again. But that last step was a doozy. No way to get there without releasing both handholds to reach for the rock across from her.

So Karin breathed deeply, and she did visualizations, watching her good hand hit home in that safety over and over. Feeling the smoothness of the movement, the security of the ledge beneath her feet.

And then she simply…

Did it.

Once there she had to tip her forehead against the rock and breathe “Oh God oh God oh God” a few times. Too bad she hadn’t been a better little Catholic girl. She’d given up on church when she realized she could scam a priest as easily as anyone else. It was best if she just dealt directly with God since He was the only one she couldn’t fool. But at this moment…she’d have been happy enough for saintly intervention. The patron saint of hanging off the side of a hill by your fingernails. That’s the one she needed. Saint Bernard would do it.