Page 89 of Crosscurrent

He rolled her over on the ice, clearing her face.

Gabe was close enough now to watch it move through the man's whole body. The hands stopping. The small backward rock of his weight. His head came up, sweeping the area, the exact thing a trained man does in the half second he understands the dead man in his arms has a woman's face.

Feld pushed the wet hair off her cheek.

A Neptune operative had Cara's face in his two hands and knew this wasn’t the target. It wasn’t Owen. The last card they had, and a stranger's mercy had just turned it face-up on the ice.

Every name in Ray's notebook. Every person the man had died to hide. All of them back on the board now.

And the man was still crouched over Cara, who couldn't lift a hand, coughing up the sea, blind with cold, finished, while a Neptune operative knelt above her with all the time in the world and every reason to use it.

He was going to kill her. Gabe knew it the way you know a thing in a nightmare, with no way to stop it and no way to look away.

Something tore loose in his chest, a rage with no floor under it. He heaved at the ice. He screamed at his own dead legs, screamed something across the ten yards with no words in it, and the water held him and the cold held him and his ruined hands found nothing. The weapon under his suit might as well have been a thousand miles off — too far, the angle wrong, Cara in the line of it. He could do nothing but watch a stranger fold down over the only thing in the world that mattered to him, and brace for the hands to close.

But Feld didn't finish her. He didn't drag her toward the snowmobile. He didn't do one single thing an enemy does with a helpless enemy. He crouched over her in the sinking red light, looking down into her face.

Then Wade's snowcat came over the rise with every light blazing and the throttle wide open. Feld's head snapped toward it. He let go of Cara and came up off the ice, racing toward the snowmobile, and tore away across the flat, the engine winding higher and thinner until the wind swallowed it.

Gabe got an arm over the ice rim and tried to pull himself out, but the cold had it all now, his legs, his hands, the deep middle of him where his lungs had stopped wanting to work. He clawed anyway. He got a knee up onto the ice. It slid out from under him.

Wade's snowcat slid to a stop just beyond her in a spray of ice while Gabe knelt in the shallows shaking too hard to reach her.

She lay where Feld left her, small and dark and still in the gold light.

They had done everything right.

And the one decent thing in the whole frozen night, an enemy who wouldn't let a bear take her, had just destroyed all of it.

36

The sea had come alive against her.

One instant Cara had been face down, drifting on the current, struggling to breathe as inconspicuously as possible through the rebreather, the next the whole watery world heaved like an ocean wave and a wall of cold muscle rose up beside her, vast and streaming. The stink of it hit her like a slap, wet and rank and animal. Every chained-down instinct in her body tore loose at once.

She thrashed. The mouthpiece tore from her teeth and the sea flooded in. She clawed for the surface and found it and lost it, went under, came up, beat at the water with arms that barely answered. Somewhere there was a man with a phone, and a plan every one of them had bled for, and she had just torn it to pieces, and she could not make herself care.

Everything in her screamed to get away from the beast beside her. The thing that had kept her alive her whole life, the stillness, the control, the lie held past all reason, was gone. There was only the most elemental part of her left, screaming at her bones to live.

She got a hand on the lip of the ice, but the bear's wake tore her off it. She went down into the black again, the cold closing over her head like a fist, and clawed back up into air she couldn't hold, into a world gone all roar and dark and the white-yellow bulk of the thing turning, turning, coming around for her.

Lord, please. Not like this. Please⁠—

She didn't finish it. There was no breath left, and no time, and nothing to finish it with.

Red light split the dark. Then a roar and a wash of heat and the cold mass beside her was gone.

Then hands.

Hard hands hauled her out of the water by the collar of Owen’s coat, dragging her over an edge of ice that scraped the last breath out of her and flipping her onto her back.

Air. Real air, raw and burning. A face loomed above her, a stranger's face, close, doing something to her mouth, to her chest. And then he disappeared. The ice was under her cheek. She shook so hard the whole world stuttered.

Then Wade was there.

She knew him by the size of him, the bulk of him dropping down beside her on the ice, his voice gone rough and wrecked, saying her name. "I've got you. I've got you, Cara." And then another shape staggered up out of the dark on the far side of her and went down hard onto his knees, soaked, shaking, gray, his hands already reaching for her face even though they worked no better than her own.

Gabe.