“You told me to—” Calliope began to argue.
Meryam snarled at her. No words were necessary. But Calliope did not put the camera away, and Meryam knew that was right. God damn this woman for doing her bloody job.
Then she saw the way Hakan was looking at her and she remembered Feyiz.
“Hakan,” Meryam said, drowning in grief. “I’m so—”
“Can you continue?” Hakan asked, voice colder and more dangerous than the storm.
Heart breaking, Meryam took stock of herself—of her pain and what little strength she thought she could muster.
“I think so.”
“Then keep moving,” Hakan said, studying both her and Adam with revulsion. “And go quickly, before I kill you both.”
Walker had Father Cornelius pressed against the mountain. The priest had been moving slowly but surely, conserving both strength and breath. He might have been old, but he had a vitality and persistence that many people at his age could not manage. His skin had gone nearly as white as the blizzard, so pale he looked more like a cadaver than a living man, but those bushy eyebrows knitted together in determination above his goggles and he kept moving.
Until Feyiz’s body had tumbled past them. The guide’s skull had struck a rocky outcropping perhaps a dozen feet away and the loud, echoing crack had erased any doubt as to his fate. Blood smeared the snow below. Arms and legs twisted at wrong angles as he kept falling. Further below, someone screamed, days of pent-up fear and horror escaping in one, mournful wail.
Walker and his group had paused, paralyzed for a moment. He pressed Father Cornelius against the mountain, while a few feet away, Kim and Polly tried to persuade Wyn Douglas to keep going.
“Come on, love,” Polly urged. “Keep moving.”
“But what… how could it happen? Did he just fall?” Wyn asked, and then questions kept coming.
“It doesn’t matter how,” Polly replied. “We’ve got to—”
“Doesn’t matter? He’s dead! He was so kind, and now he’s—”
“Wyn, you’ve got to keep moving!” Polly snapped.
“I can’t!” Wyn shouted, as if her voice was an assault against the storm.
Kim shot a hard look at Walker, not a demand for him to intervene but a silent question: What would they do if Wyn would not move?
“We’ve got to go,” he said firmly.
His little boy waited for him back home. Yes, there was work for him to do. He had responsibilities. But he wasn’t going to die here, so far from home, with Charlie waiting for him there.
“Kim—” he began.
She didn’t need his prodding. Nudging Polly aside, she grabbed a fistful of Wyn’s jacket and tugged, forcing the archaeologist to hold on even tighter.
“What the hell are you doing?” Wyn shouted, staring at her, perhaps thinking the demon had entered her.
“Moving on without you!” Kim called over the storm’s howl. “You can keep moving, or you can stay right here. If you stay here, eventually you’ll freeze to death or you’ll fall. But there is no scenario in which you stay here and live.”
Kim started climbing down. Walker tapped Father Cornelius and they both began moving as well, one foothold, one handhold, at a time. Polly stayed with Wyn, arguing quietly for several seconds before they, too, began to move. As they passed the rocky outcropping where the snow had been stained with Feyiz’s blood—black-red in the gray gloom of the storm—nobody but Walker turned to look.
Kim made her way over to him, so that they were climbing almost side by side, close enough to hear each other’s grunting exertions.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” Kim said. “The charms are supposed to keep the demon out.”
“We don’t know,” Walker said. “Feyiz might not have worn it—”
“Or it’s just another myth! We’ve gambled our lives on a myth!”
Father Cornelius paused a moment, wheezing behind his balaclava. He craned his neck to look down at them as they continued.
“You don’t know that,” the priest rasped loudly.
“And we don’t have any other answers!” Walker snapped. “We’re committed now.”
Memories flashed through his head. Images of Charlie. He thought of Christmas mornings when Charlie was still small and theirs had still been a happy home. He wondered now why he had never caught any of them on film. Did people ever appreciate the moments they were in while they lived them? he wondered, and the wondering tore him apart.
Walker glanced up to make sure Wyn and Polly were keeping pace and saw fear in Wyn’s eyes… and Polly’s left hand clutching Wyn’s throat, squeezing.
He shouted, adrenaline searing through him. Crablike, he scrambled sideways and upward, grabbed hold of Polly’s leg. She whipped her head around and through the swirl of whiteness he saw the glint of orange in her eyes. Polly snatched up the climbing ax that hung at her hip, turned and hacked it down at him. Walker tried to defend himself with one hand but she had such grotesque strength that he had to take his other hand away from the mountain. Polly gave a high, giddy squeal and kicked at his side. Her boot thumped his ribs and then Walker was falling.
He twisted as he fell, hurling himself sideways instead of down so that he could land flat on his chest. If he’d fallen outward, begun to tumble, broken bones would be the least of it. Instead he thudded against the snow and rock, dug his fingers in, and then jabbed the toes of his boots in deep. The edges of the crampons caught. Momentum almost tipped him backward, but he pulled his feet away from the mountain again, let his hands drag, let his knees create furrows in the snow, and then he dug his feet in once more.
Walker heard his heart thumping in his ears and he gave a shout of triumph and fury. Kim and Father Cornelius were shouting at Polly from below. Shouting at Walker to make sure he was all right. Every part of him told him to keep climbing, to get away from the demon, but when he looked back up he saw Wyn trying to scrabble away, clawing at the snow, clinging to the mountain.
Polly dragged her back. Steam came from her mouth and began to mist up from her eyes, as if the demon brought its own inferno and that hell burned now inside of her.
Below, Father Cornelius had begun to pray loudly. Walker could barely see him through the blowing snow, but the old man’s rasp turned into a bellow now that he was praying, and Polly winced as if the words hurt her.
“Leave her!” Walker shouted, climbing toward them again. “In the name of God—”
The thing inside Polly did not wince this time. It laughed. “When have you ever believed in God?”
Wyn screamed, her face briefly visible as Polly wrapped an arm around her neck. The demon glanced back toward Walker, the gleaming embers of its eyes pinpricks of color in the white, churning sea of the storm.
“You have no faith, Benjamin,” it said with Polly’s lips, from behind that balaclava.
Then she wrenched Wyn’s head to one side and the whimpering ceased. The struggling halted.
“No!” Walker cried.
Polly shook her head as if in disappointment, a parent schooling a recalcitrant child. “You don’t believe in anything.”
She kicked away from the mountain face, arms wrapped tightly around Wyn’s lifeless body. Inhuman strength carried them out fifteen feet or more, and then they began to arc downward, plummeting through the storm. The other climbers screamed, watching it happen. Like a spider enshrouding its prey, Polly wrapped herself around Wyn for a moment… then sprang away from her, limbs pinwheeling as she reached for a handhold.
Polly struck, slid, rolled, and slammed into the jagged ridge of a crevice.
Wyn’s body dropped out of sight, lost in the whistling swirl of white. Walker listened, but the storm had taken them so completely that he did not even hear the impact. Nearby, someone was choking back sobs. For a moment he thought it might be Kim, but then he saw her put a hand on Father Cornelius’s back and he knew it was the priest who had begun to cry.