He slipped his arms around her waist and held her close to him as he spoke into her ear. “I love you more than I can tell you.”
“I know. I love you that much too.”
With that, he kissed her one last time and made his way out.
Forty-five minutes later, there was an announcement, and he kissed her again, amidst a chorus of music intermingled with applause and cheers.
They were supposed to turn and wave to the guests, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it yet. Instead, he clutched her hand and kissed her head as they both turned toward the scene behind them. After all, this was the one requirement he’d had of the ceremony.
She rested her head against his shoulder as they watched the sun slip below the horizon of the lake.
“Going…” she murmured with a smile in her voice. “Going…Gone.”
Chapter Fifteen
Samantha
Samantha didn’t move. Not an inch. Not a millimeter. She barely allowed herself to breathe. For hours, she sat perfectly still. Absolutely motionless. The only movement she could muster was her eyes, which scanned her surroundings, and her fingers, which held the sides of Nick’s face, her thumbs lightly grazing his cheeks and her fingertips holding the base of his chin. The connection of her hands to his face was the only thing keeping her grounded, tethering her to reality and preventing her from slipping into utter madness brought about by total isolation and darkness.
She expected her pupils to adjust to the dark at some point. But they never did.
The moon was a silver crescent sliver, and it reflected off the metal zipper of the first aid kit. Everything else was essentially varying shades of black and midnight blue.
The walls of the canyon were black; the boulder maze was slightly less black; the cavernous stretch of canyon in the opposite direction was slightly more black; the sky was like a blackish blue. So blackish that it barely qualified as blue, but against the crest of the walls it looked comparatively blue. Although that could have had something to do with the stars.
The stars were unbelievable.They were literally twinkling. Hundreds of thousands of tiny little pulsating orbs, most of them silver like the moon, but a few that she swore were every color of the rainbow.
She’d never seen anything like them. She couldn’t decide if she was on the edge of outer space or if she was staring at a mile wide sheet of deep black-blue velvet onto which someone had tossed a few handfuls of diamonds.
The longer she stared, the more she leaned toward it being the edge of outer space because outer space was cold.
And Samantha was definitely cold.
Freezing.
The oppressive heat from earlier in the day had given way to what felt like frigid temperatures. It was because of her sweat soaked tank top, she knew that. The canyon wasn’t actually on the verge of the next ice age, it just felt that way because of the sweeping gusts of wind that blasted through every few minutes, freezing her back and riddling her arms with goose bumps.
The gusts materialized with not only a brief drop in the already chilling temperature, but also a veritable symphony of howls, which added to the creepy factor. And the creepy factor, combined with the dark and the cold, was slowly dissolving Samantha’s last lingering ounces of sanity.
The wind symphony was accented by the not-so-subtle chorus of nocturnal creatures rousing from their daytime slumber. And being surrounded by nothing but stone caused every single sound to be amplified to what she perceived was a deafening level of decibels.
She’d read somewhere that when one of your senses becomes hindered, the rest are heightened, and she found this to be the case in her current predicament.
In spite of the fact that she couldn’t actually see what was going on around her, she heard everything well enough that it painted a vivid mental picture.
A scattering sound bounced across the stone floor each time the gust came. It was somewhat consistent each time she heard it so she knew it was tiny bits of gravel tumbling along like a handful of dice.
An intermittent rustle and a shake that came from the direction of one the heaps of brush. That was something crawling around in its dry, thorny branches. Maybe some kind of lizard.
A series of quick soft thumps accompanied by a quieterclick-click-click-click-clickwas something barreling from the minefield of boulders to the opposite end of the canyon. It didn’t sound like a particularly large creature. Maybe a desert hare.
Semi-distant yipping, yapping, and howling. Coyotes. She knew that. A chill shivered down her spine. She managed to avoid panicking because they sounded like they were somewhere in the desert above the canyon. She wordlessly prayed that they wouldn’t catch a faint scent of Nick’s injuries and subsequently decide to come pay a visit.
Samantha paid particular attention to noises from the direction of the cave type hole in the wall. She couldn’t identify that one. For a while, it was silent. Then came the distinctive sounds of movement.
A scraping; a scratching; a series of snorts and screeches; a medley of something that could only be described as wailing newborns that were part sheep.
It grew louder. Whatever the creatures were, they had begun exiting the cave. A steady pummel of quick scrapes and more gravel scattering while the screeches and wails continued to ricochet between the stone walls, making Samantha feel as if the creatures were closing in around her from all directions.
