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One

I wasn’t thinking about dying. I wasn’t thinking much at all, this being one of those nights when a man didn’t want to listen to the noise in his head. I’d turned the radio up loud in an effort to drown out any stray thoughts, but that may have been a mistake.

Damned country music. Every other song was about loving and losing. So why did I keep listening to it?

I grimaced and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. The wipers were slapping sleet along with rain from the wind-shield, and the wind was blowing hard. But I knew this road almost as well as I knew my own street. And I’d lived there all my life.

All my life…forty years now. Most of those years I hadn’t lived in the big old house alone, but I was alone there now. Forty years old and alone.

And getting dumber instead of smarter, apparently. I scowled at the strip of highway pinned by my truck’s headlights. Why had I let Sorenson talk me into hanging around for a drink after we shook on the deal? I wasn’t a complete idiot, though. Despite Sorenson’s good-ol’-boy bonhomie, I’d limited myself to a single drink.

“Come on, have another one,” the resort owner had urged. “On the house.” He’d tried to make out that the weather wasn’t a problem. We hadn’t even had a freeze yet.

Yet being the operative word. I’d held on to tact by the skin of my teeth—the man was a jerk, but he was the jerk who’d just agreed to use my company for a major renovation job.

“Hey, a man your size ought to be able to handle his liquor. You don’t want me to think you’re a wimp, right? Might start wondering if you’re man enough for the job.”

I’d just looked at him, bored beyond courtesy. “Anyone who has to drink to prove he’s a man isn’t one.”

I snorted, remembering that conversation. Yeah, I was some kind of man, all right. The stupid kind. The temperature was hovering just above freezing, visibility sucked, I had to be at a site at seven-thirty tomorrow morning and here I was, winding my way down a mountain road at ten minutes before midnight.

A sharp turn loomed. No shoulder along here. I took my foot off the accelerator and tapped the brakes. I intended to creep around that turn like an old man with palsy—an attitude reinforced when I saw the sign about guard-rail damage.

I hit ice halfway through.

My wheels were cut to the left, but me and half a ton of pickup kept sliding forward. The tops of a couple of pines whipped around in the wind behind the guard rails. Their roots would be thirty or forty feet below the parts I could see and beyond their roots would be a whole lot more down. I turned into the skid, then almost immediately straightened the wheel.

It worked. The rear end skated around a bit, but I’d reclaimed control. I rounded the treacherous curve, safe and sound. And through the murk of rain and sleet saw a long black whip snapping through the air. Straight at me.

A power cable. Live.

If I’d had time to think, I might have risked it. Or maybe not. The truck was grounded, but the cable might have busted my windshield and smacked me in the face with 13,600 volts. But there wasn’t time then for thought, or even fear. Just action. I jerked the wheel left and hit the brakes.

Big mistake.

The truck began to spin, slick as greased Teflon. I yanked my foot off the brakes. The power cable reached the end of its arc a foot short of my bumper. I steered into the spin, more than willing to turn all the way around and head back the way I’d come.

The damned truck just kept sliding sideways.

The guard rails. I hadn’t seen any damage. Maybe—

The rear of the truck thudded up against them. And stopped. The front slewed around. Jolted. And kept on going.

Even then I didn’t think about dying. Didn’t think at all, just flung the door open, responding to the screaming need to get out of there. But it was too late, too late to do anything but topple with the truck as it went over the edge and flipped.

Metal screeched. I turned into an object trying to bounce off the crumpling trap of the truck’s cab. It was as if the darkness itself pummeled me with a giant’s fist, and then a hard blow on my head—then silence. Stillness. I lay beneath a whole mountain of hurt listening to someone moan.

That irritated me. What business did this bozo have moaning when I was the one with the mountain on me? I opened my mouth to tell him to shut up. The moaning stopped.

Something in that cause-and-effect sequence woke a few brain cells. That had been me moaning, and I was…I was…in my truck. Only I was hanging at a funny angle.

I blinked. My right eyelid felt gummy. Slowly I put together the pressure across my pelvis and chest, the glow of the dash lights and the stillness. The nose of the truck was pointed down, but the pitch wasn’t too steep.

I was alive. And I was hurt.

How bad? I couldn’t tell. The pain itself addled me, made it hard to think. But my head…yeah, I remembered getting hit there. Instinctively I lifted my hand to see what touch could tell me. My shoulder exploded. Pain nearly sucked me down. I lay draped over my seat belt and shoulder harness and panted.

Okay, obviously my shoulder was hurt, too. Pretty bad.

Over the soft sound of rain I heard a creaking sound. A prickle of alarm made me lift my head. And rap it against something.

It didn’t take long for me to run out of breath for cursing. Or to figure out the problem: the roof of the truck was caved in. I couldn’t straighten my head.

My breath came faster. Slowly I turned my head to the right. Shards of glass glittered on the seat beside me. I couldn’t see outside because light turned the starred surface of the glass opaque.

How about that. The headlights were still on. I looked to the left.

The door was bashed in.

Deep breaths, I told myself. Panic won’t help. I wiggled the fingers on my left hand, then cautiously moved that arm. All right so far. With equal care I shifted my legs. Okay, good. I had three out of four limbs operational. I’d survived a tumble down a mountain and I was hurt, but I was alive, dammit. And I wasn’t trapped. I could get out.

Getting out was a bitch.

The buckle to the seat belt was slippery and wet, but I got it undone, then needed to get my breath. Which was ridiculous, of course, but…my jeans were soaked. My jacket, too. And beneath the jacket my shirt stuck to me, warm and wet.

An awful lot of my blood was outside of me instead of inside.

That scared me. I reached for the door handle. My first tug didn’t do a damned thing.

Fear hit, sweeping everything else out of the way. Pain didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting out. I jerked on the handle as hard as I could, throwing my weight against it.

Metal shrieked. The door swung open and I fell out. I managed to thrust one leg out to catch myself, but the jolt as my foot hit the ground set off a charge in my shoulder that toppled my whole system.

I didn’t black out. Quite. But for a while there was nothing but a red, roaring monster eating my thoughts before they could form. Eventually I noticed how cold and wet the ground was. It was a lot colder out here than in the truck. Wetter, too. Maybe getting out hadn’t been such a great move, but I was here now. What came next?

The road. I had to get to the road. Not much traffic this time of night, but sooner or later that downed power line would attract attention.

Dragging myself to a sitting position left me clammy, but I made it and looked up the way the truck and I had come. Only I couldn’t see the road. Too dark, and the rain didn’t help. How far had I fallen?

I fought back a wave of despair. I knew where the road was—up. So that’s where I would go.

First I used my left hand to tuck my right one into the pocket of my jacket. There were trees, mostly pines. Not much in the way of underbrush, and the truck’s passage had cleared a path through what did exist. Good. In a battle between me and a clump of weeds right then, the weeds would win.

Standing was out, so hand-and-knees it was. I started moving.

Gwen had once told me that women forget how much childbirth hurts. She made a joke of it, saying that was how nature tricked them into a repeat performance. I didn’t understand then. I’d heard women swapping war stories, and it seemed to me they remembered labor pretty well.

Now I know what she meant. I remember that I hurt. Every inch up that slope equaled a yard or two of pain. But the pain itself isn’t there anymore, just the imprint it left behind.

When you hurt enough, you lose hold of past and future. Like a baby or a beast, all you have is right now. I lost the knack of connecting all those nows in the usual way, like beads on a string. So some beads got lost. Others stayed stuck inside me, like a splinter the flesh has grown up around.

One of the beads that got stuck was the moment my truck finished falling.

I hadn’t thought about what halted the truck’s fall. Maybe that knowledge had squirmed around underneath, and that’s why the creaking sound had alarmed me, why I’d been so frantic to get out. The second I heard that sharp, wooden crack, I knew what it meant. I craned my head to look behind me.

Branches snapped. Glass broke, and the headlights went out at last. A tangled mass of truck and tree, their shapes merged by darkness and disaster, toppled slowly, then crashed its way down the mountain. I blinked, swaying on my knees and one good hand like a suspension bridge in the wind.

That had been a damned fine truck.

I didn’t mourn for long, though. I wasn’t holding on to thoughts too well by then—they blew through my mind like smoke. But I had a good grip on purpose.

Up. I had to keep going up.

I remember being racked with shudders as the cold worked its way inside. At some point the shuddering stopped, but by then I was too far gone to realize what a bad sign that was. I remember thinking about Zach, but that isn’t tied to any one moment. Thoughts of my son are woven through all the memory bits, like the rocks. They were everywhere, too.

I remember the angel.

That part has a beginning, a middle and an end, beads lined up neatly in order. It was the warmth that called me back. It wormed its way deep inside and tugged at me, made me notice it. And with that noticing came a thought, sluggish but complete: the warmth was real. I knew that because I started shivering again, and shivering—any movement—hurt.

I blinked open my eyes.

It wasn’t her face that gave me the idea she was an angel. She was beautiful, but more exotic than angelic with her flat, wide cheekbones and tilty eyes. Her mouth was downright lush. But she had to be an angel. She was glowing.

Deeply disappointed, I croaked, “I’m dead, then.”

Those full lips twitched. “No, not at all.” She had a smooth sort of voice, sweet and thick like honey. And a Southern accent, which struck me as odd for an angel. “You’re going to be fine.”

That seemed unlikely, but even less likely things were happening right before my eyes. “You’re glowing.”

“I have a flashlight.”

“No, it’s you.”

“You’re imagining things. In fact, I suspect you imagined this whole conversation.” She touched my forehead. The delicate bracelet on her wrist brushed my skin, its tiny jewels winking at me. “Now, don’t be wasting all I’ve spent on you. Go back to sleep.”

I wanted to argue, but my eyes obeyed her instead of me and drifted shut. I floated away on a warm tide.

“Color’s bad. Rapid respiration.”

Male voices. Hands messing with me. Where was my angel?

“Nail beds are white, but it’s damned cold and he’s been here awhile.”

“Distal pulse?”

“Can’t find it.”

I knew that voice. “Pete,” I said, or thought I did. It came out a groan. I made a huge effort and opened my eyes. Pete Aguilar’s face hovered over mine. Pete used to raise hell with my brother Charlie, but that was a long time ago. High school stuff. These days he…I blinked, trying to think of why Pete would be holding my hand.

“You with us?” He squeezed my shoulder—the left one, thank God. “Hang in there, buddy.”

Oh, yeah. “Paramedic.”

“That’s right. Me and Joe are going to take care of you. Where do you hurt?”

Everywhere. I felt sick, dizzy, scared. “Where is she?”

“I need to know where you hurt, Ben.”

“Shoulder. Head. I want…” I tried to sit up, but didn’t accomplish much.

“Whoa. Stay still, or you’ll open up that shoulder again.”

“Dammit, I want to know—”

“I’m right here.” That was her voice—close, but not as close as she had been. “Lie still and let them help you.”

It’s not as if I had a choice. Pete or the other man tipped me on my side. I would have belted him if I’d been able to move. As it was, I barely had the breath to curse them once they settled me on my back again.

There was something between me and the mud now. A stretcher, I guess.

“You’re a lucky man,” Pete told me cheerfully.

Damned idiot always had been too happy for good sense. Just like Charlie. “Not lucky…fall off mountain.”

“But if you’re going to fall off one, it’s nice to do it just before someone with paramedic training happens along. She kept you going until we got here.”

Not an angel. A paramedic. No, wait—paramedics don’t glow.

A thought slipped in amidst my confusion. “Tell them…power line down. Dangerous.”

“One of Highpoint’s finest is keeping on eye on things until a crew arrives. Now, we’ve got to get you up to the ambulance where we can give you some oxygen, get a drip going. You’ll feel better then.”

The other man had been busy with straps. The one he fastened around my chest pulled on my shoulder. I was just getting my breath back when Pete said, “Ready? On the count of three. One…two—”

They lifted. I guess there was no way to do that without jarring me. I managed to hang on to the ragged edge of consciousness—mainly out of fear, I’ll admit. I wasn’t sure I’d wake up again.

I weigh about 220. They couldn’t just carry me and the stretcher. They had to let the front end roll where it could, lifting it only when they had no choice. The downhill end, though, had to be lifted pretty much all the time. Pete took that end. He was a husky man, nearly as big as me, but that slope defeated him. After a few nearly vertical yards he tripped or slipped and set his end down suddenly. And hard.

I heard myself cry out. It took everything I had to fight off the black, greasy wave. Then I heard her voice. She was arguing with them.

She won the argument. While I was busy breathing, she took over at the head of the stretcher, leaving the downhill end to the two men. Not that I figured this out at the time. Then, I was only aware of pain. The need to stay conscious. And that she was near enough to touch me again, because she did.

“Stubborn man,” she whispered. Her hand was warm on my cheek, so warm. Almost hot. That heat seemed to push me right out of myself. I lost my grip on consciousness and tumbled off into the darkness.