Lily hurried to the door and pulled it open. “Chase? What is it?”

Chase’s gaze swept over her. “A 9-1-1 call from a tourist just came in. There’s a hiker down on the West Mountain switchback trail. A couple of med students are doing CPR out there. We’re the closest.”

Lily pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and stepped into her hiking boots. “We’ll need a defibrillator and meds.”

“I’ve got a med box. And a portable defibrillator.”

Lily raced down the stairs after Chase. A few heads turned as they ran through the great room and out the door, and sprinted to the Jeep. Within thirty seconds of the time Chase had come to her door, Lily was hanging on to the grab bar as the Jeep hurtled down the mountain.

Chapter Fourteen

“Where are we going?” Lily asked as the trail they’d been bouncing along disappeared into a rock-strewn gully and Chase veered off into the adjacent woodlands. The night abruptly darkened as tall pines closed in overhead, obscuring all but a few patches of sky. The headlights skittered off tree trunks and boulders in a dizzying parade of swiftly changing shapes. If Lily hadn’t ridden with Chase before, she might have been nervous about their speed over the wild terrain—make that just short of terrified—but she didn’t have the luxury of fear. She trusted Chase, and if anything, she wanted her to go faster. She wasn’t used to being the one en route to a trauma, when seconds might matter. The medics brought the injured to her by ambulance or helicopter, most already stabilized in the field and often with a preliminary diagnosis. She had time to plan a course of action, to ready herself and her team, so the instant the patient arrived they could institute treatment.

Tonight she was literally in the dark—worse, she was out of her element. She’d run more codes in the ER halls and even the parking lot outside the hospital in the last two years than she would ever likely run again, but even then she’d had all the equipment, all the meds, and all the personnel she’d needed. All they had now was whatever Chase had in the Jeep—and why hadn’t she ever thought to ask what that might be before now—and a portable defibrillator she hoped to heaven had a fully charged battery. Her chest tightened. She hadn’t been this uncertain since her residency days, at least not until the pandemic descended without warning. But this was not then. This was Chase’s world, not hers.

As soon as the realization struck her, Lily’s apprehension dissolved. She wasn’t the expert here, Chase was. In the ER she was the team leader—tonight, in the wilderness, she was the assistant.