Northern Lights Read Free Page B

over.
    As he stood, half thinking it could be over, half wishing it would be, a figure stepped into frame. It wore red—bright and bold—that seemed to leap out of that colorless scene and thrum movement into it.
    Those movements were definite and brisk. Life with a mission, movement with purpose. Quick, competent strides over the white that left the shadow of footprints in the snow.
    I was here. I'm alive and I was here.
    He couldn't tell if it was a man or woman, or a child, but there was something about the slash of color, the confidence of the gait, that caught his eye and interest.
    As if sensing observation, the figure stopped, looked up.
    Nate had the impression of white and black again. White face, black hair. But even that was blurred with the dark and the distance.
    There was a long moment of stillness, of silence. Then the figure began to walk again, striding toward The Lodge, and disappearing from view.
    Nate yanked the drapes over the glass, stepped away from the window.
    After a moment's debate, he dragged his cases off the bed, left them dumped, unpacked, on the floor. He stripped down, ignored the chill of the room against his naked skin, and crawled under the mountain of blankets the way a bear crawls into his winter cave.
    He lay there, a man of thirty-two with a thick, disordered mass of chestnut hair that waved around a long, thin face gone lax with exhaustion and a despair that blurred eyes of smoky gray. Under a day's worth of stubble, his skin was pale with the drag of fatigue. Though the food had eased the rawness in his belly, his system remained sluggish, like that of a man who couldn't quite shake off a debilitating flu.
    He wished Barbie—Charlene—had brought up a bottle instead of the coffee. He wasn't much of a drinker, which he figured is what had saved him from spiraling into alcoholism along with everything else. Still, a couple of good belts would help turn off his brain and let him sleep.
    He could hear the wind now. It hadn't been there before, but it was moaning at the windows. With it, he heard the building creak and the sound of his own breathing.
    Three lonely sounds only more lonely as a trio.
    Tune them out, he told himself. Tune them all out.
    He'd get a couple hours' sleep, he thought. Then he'd shower off the travel grime, pump himself full of coffee.
    After that, he'd decide what the hell he was going to do.
    He turned off the light so the room plunged into the dark. Within seconds, so did he.

 
     
     
    TWO
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    THE DARK SURROUNDED HIM, sucked at him like mud when the dream shoved him out of sleep. His breath whooshed out as he broke the surface, floundered his way to the air. His skin was clammy with sweat as he fought his way clear of blankets.
    The scent in the air was unfamiliar—cedar, stale coffee, some underlying tone of lemon. Then he remembered he wasn't in his Baltimore apartment.
    He'd gone crazy, and he was in Alaska.
    The luminous dial of the bedside clock read five forty-eight.
    So he'd gotten some sleep before the dream had chased him back to reality.
    It was always dark in the dream, too. Black night, pale, dirty rain. The smell of cordite and blood.
    Jesus, Nate, Jesus. I'm hit.
    Cold rain streaming down his face, warm blood oozing through his fingers. His blood, and Jack's blood.
    He hadn't been able to stop the blood from oozing any more than he'd been able to stop the rain from streaming. They were both beyond him and, in that Baltimore alley, had washed away what had been left of him.
    Should've been me, he thought. Not Jack. He should've been home with his wife, with his kids, and it should've been me dying in a filthy alley in the filthy rain.
    But he'd gotten off with a bullet in the leg, and a second, in-and-out punch in the side just above the waist, just enough to take him down, slow him down, so Jack had gone in first.
    Seconds, small mistakes, and a good man was dead.
    He had to live with it. He'd considered ending his