Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [114]
A chill ran up her spine and she hunched down just a bit, and paddled just a little faster. The short scraggly trees cast dense shadows across the water, and she thought of a movie she’d seen when she was younger, where the trees moved. Several times she thought she saw movement beyond the pines that grew along the water’s edge.
“Shit, I am spooking myself,” she said aloud.
She paddled on to the place where a pin oak, struck by lightning the summer before, had cracked in half, and she let out a sigh of relief. The lake was three-quarters of a mile to the left. She could make it. She would make it.
As she made her way into the turn, her nose caught a whiff of something.
“Smoke,” she whispered, looking into the night on every side to see where the smoke was coming from, but as yet there was no sign of flames.
Fires were so common here, but there’d been no storm tonight to set one off. There could be campers, but they were unusual in the middle of the week, this time of the year. She sat stock-still, her eyes combing the darkness for light where there should be no light, and movement where all should be still. There was nothing.
She heard him only a split second before he leapt at her from the right, from the bank of the stream and the stand of thick laurel where he’d waited while she puzzled over the scent of smoke.
“You bitch,” he cursed as the canoe tipped from side to side. “You think I’d let you get away with that?”
He’d landed slightly behind her, and straddled the side of the canoe. Kendra tried to turn quickly to swing at him with the paddle, but he grabbed hold of it and wrestled with her a long minute for its control. She slid from the canoe as it was forced on its side and slapped her head as she fell. Dazed, she sought purchase on the sandy bottom of the stream. She felt his hands, strong and angry, grab the back of her head and force it underwater. Turning her head slightly, she bit into the only part of him she could reach, the soft skin at his ankle.
Howling, he let go of her, and she rose from beneath the surface long enough to gasp a breath before being dunked back under again. She fought and sputtered, her flailing arms trying to reach him, but her struggle only served to deplete her strength.
She felt as if they’d been fighting forever, but eventually her will begin to wane, her energy flowing from her like blood from a deep wound. Inside her head she heard a horrific buzz, and saw great bursts of pearlescent light. The fight forgotten, she turned to it, was drawn into it, her hands floating weightlessly in the tea-colored water.
Chapter
Twenty-two
It was dark and still and the air smelled of rotting wood. Coughing and tossing up water, Kendra lay facedown on the ground, desperate to take that first breath. Her back hunched as her lungs spasmed. She couldn’t see five inches from her face. She hadn’t been really certain whether she was waking in this world or the next until something crawled across her arm and she flinched.
The night, deep and quiet, pressed around her and she shivered, cold and alone, in an unknown place. The first fingers of fear began to wrap around her as pain, raw and silent, rippled across the back of her head. Brain fuzzy and limbs numb, she struggled to focus, to orient herself to time and location, to remember where she had been before the world had crashed down upon her.
Hadn’t she been on her way to another place, a place of light?
Whatever had brought her back, into the dark, she was not, at that moment, particularly happy about it.
“Well, I’d say we were just about even now,” a voice said, and she opened her eyes, trying to focus.
Not so alone, after all.
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
“Because I’m not done with you yet.”
He sat six feet away from her, his back leaning against the side