Shiver

plane continued to yaw drunkenly from side to side. Its nose seemed a little pitchy, too. Looking at Sam, he saw that she had gone utterly white. Her hands were clasped tightly together in her lap. “We’ve been hit by something and lost part of our tail. I’m going to try to take us back to the airfield. Please keep your seat belts fastened and—” The pilot broke off.
    A sudden glimmer of moonlight caused Danny to glance out the window. The Cherokee had just burst through the thick cloud cover into a clear, starry night sky. The moon was a silvery crescent floating high overhead.
    “Oh, my God!” the pilot screamed. “Pull up! Pull up!”
    That’s when Danny saw it: looming directly in front of them was a mountain.
    “Brace!” he yelled at Sam, but didn’t even have time to follow through on his own instructions before they hit.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
     

     
    S he’d survived a plane crash. That was Sam’s first dazed thought as she picked herself up out of the snow and started brushing the icy crystals from her skin and clothes. Just how it had happened she didn’t know. After Marco had screamed at her, she’d barely had time to jackknife into position—head on knees, hands on top of head—before she’d heard a loud banging on the fuselage and the plane had started shaking like a paint mixer. She’d caught glimpses of branches flying past outside the window and known they were going down, skimming through treetops on their way to the ground. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam: the sound of branches hitting the metal fuselage had come as fast and loud as machine-gun fire. Then the cabin had started breaking up and she’d screamed as she’d felt herself falling. She didn’t even remember hitting the ground, but the next thing she knew she lay sprawled in about a foot of snow.
    A major part of the fuselage was directly in front of her,lying in a large clearing that sloped downward, down the mountain, which seemed vast. Most of the passenger cabin, she realized. It was ripped open like a tin can, jagged edges exposing the twisted interior of the cabin. From where she stood, the wreckage and the path it had gouged as it landed looked like a terrible gash in a sparkling layer of snow. A searching look around found broken trees and fallen branches that marked the plane’s descent through the forest.
    Marco. Sam’s heart lodged in her throat. Was he inside the fuselage still? Stumbling toward the wreckage, surprised to find her body working and seemingly unhurt, and then in the next breath realizing, too, that the tie that had bound her hands was gone, she called his name. “Marco!”
    “Sam!” His voice came from behind her. Turning, she saw that he was walking toward her from the woods, the edge of which formed a stockade of tall pines that ended only a few yards behind her. Now that she thought about it, she could smell a heavy scent of pine in the air, along with a gasoline-y smell that she guessed must be airplane fuel. Marco was moving pretty well, fast actually, using—she had to squint to make it out—a sturdy piece of branch as a cane. She registered then that somehow he’d managed to get his hands free, too.
    The sight of him made her feel warm all over, even though, as she was just starting to realize, where they were the night was cold. A few fat flakes of snow were falling, floating down around them like swan’s down.
    “Are you hurt?” His eyes were busy checking her out even before he reached her.
    “No, I don’t think so.” Feeling like they were where she belonged, she walked right into his arms. “What about you?”
    “I’m good.” He wrapped her up in a warm embrace, and she said, “I’m so glad to see you,” because it was true, and hugged him back and lifted her head. He kissed her, a quick hard kiss that did a lot to erase the fog that still gripped her.
    “Come on,” he said, and let her go. “I want to see if I can find a gun and then we need to get the hell out of here.”
    That’s when the fear returned: she and Marco weren’t the only ones on this bleakly beautiful mountainside. Somewhere—somewhere nearby—Veith and his thugs were probably regrouping, too.
    Her heart started to pound. Casting scared glances around, she hurried toward the wreckage at Marco’s side.
    Even before they got there, he stopped to scoop something up out of the snow with a sound of satisfaction. It was a pistol, and as he straightened and snapped the slide into place and checked