I pull my wrist against the knot, but it won’t yield. Even if I get loose, I don’t have the energy to outrace Tori on foot, let alone on her snow machine. There seems to be no escape, but my mind refuses to accept the inevitability of death after what I’ve already survived.

Maybe the dispatcher pinged Reynolds’s phone.

Maybe responding units are on the way.

But it’s not sirens that I hear next. It’s the recognizable chugging of a V8 engine racing down the forest road.

My frost-damaged fingers are useless. There is no untangling this knot.

A white light finds me. I blink into its source. Tori Dillon has the shotgun aimed at me again.

I spit blood onto the snow and take a few rasping breaths. My tongue is beginning to swell. Not that I have anything to say to her.

Tori’s face is contorted. It looks like a mask some ancient craftsman carved to represent the mortal sin of wrath. Her hands tremble. Her sister’s were steadier.

A vehicle door opens somewhere behind me and a man says, “Jesus!”

“No,” cries a woman with a hoarse voice.

Two new flashlights find the wrecked sled.

I don’t recognize the man, but he’s broad across the chest, with a strawberry blond beard and a mullet, and a 1911 semi-automatic holstered on his belt, which means he’s another Dillon. The hair color and the guns are the family’s field marks.

Tina, tall beneath her black coat, trains her light on an area beyond Tiff’s sled. The man bends down and is gone for what seems like a minute. When he straightens up, he has a limp form in his arms. Held that way, Tiff Dillon appears as small as a child. Something is wrong with her neck.

“What did you say?” Tori hisses.

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken. I feel her finger curling around the cold metal trigger of the Benelli. I don’t dare open my mouth again.

Instead I repeat the words to myself.

Death by misadventure.

36

I watched Felice Bazinet set off down the road into the purple twilight. She had her head bent and her hands in her pockets. The swing she’d been sitting on came to rest.

There was not a breath of air. The stillness was eerie and ominous.