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  “Alcohol never hurts,” Igor said, the flickering firelight turning his grin sinister. Great, now she was the one imagining things. Fucking Andrew. She would probably have nightmares, and it would be his fault.

  “If I’m going to die on this godforsaken mountain, I might as well enjoy whatever time I have left. Make it a double, Igor.”

  “Are you crazy? We drink from the bottle. Every man for himself. And maybe, every woman?”

  “No thanks. One of us should retain control of her faculties.” Nat glared at Andrew, but if he noticed, it didn’t faze him. “I am not carrying either of you tomorrow, so keep that in mind.”

  “Jesus, Nat. It’s one drink. When did you turn into such a pill? Don’t know if you got the memo, but prohibition is over.”

  “Prohibition never started here,” Igor said, to which both men guffawed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Perhaps the altitude was getting to them both.

  When the Russian returned with his bottle of hooch, hoisting it in triumph, an unearthly howl split the night. It made the hairs on the back of Nat’s neck rise, and she grabbed Andrew’s leg and squeezed it without thinking.

  “Hey!” he yelped, squirming to get away from her.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Only Igor took it in stride. “Wolves.”

  “That was no fucking wolf. I know what a wolf sounds like,” Andrew said.

  “Russian wolves, they are different.” Igor raised his hands to the sky. “My children of the night, what beautiful music they make.”

  “Beautiful music my ass.”

  Nat had to agree with Andrew. There had been nothing beautiful about that howl. It was entirely too close for comfort. “Do you think the rest of the group is all right?”

  “Sure, they are all right. They have three powerful hunters. We have just each other. And this.” Igor took a long drink from his bottle before handing it to Andrew.

  “I’m really sorry for fucking everything up, Nat.”

  She patted Andrew’s foot, the only thing that was within reach since he’d moved away from her. “You didn’t fuck up anything.”

  “I did, though. It’s my fault that we’re here while the rest of the group is having a roaring good time.” Turning the bottle over in his hands, he studied the clear liquid as if wanting to commit it to memory.

  Nat pictured the dour Vasily, Steven the pessimist, and the tension that no doubt emanated from Joe. Though the separation increased her anxiety, in a way she was glad to get a break from them. So much drama. That was what always resulted when other people got involved with her projects. “I seriously doubt that. Have you met the rest of our group?”

  Andrew laughed. “True. They’re not exactly party-hearty types.”

  “We have the party right here. I brought it with me.” Igor gestured to his bottle, which Andrew was still regarding like a museum specimen. “Drink up, my friends.”

  When Andrew passed the bottle to her, she took a long drink, the moonshine tracing a trail of fire down her throat to her belly.

  Misery loved company, after all. And she was no party pooper.

  ~ Chapter Eight ~

  Something was shaking her. Nat pried open her eyes and cried out when she saw the face looming over hers.

  “Christ, you reek. Have you been drinking?”

  Indignant, she propped herself up on her arms, glaring at the intruder. “Maybe. What are you doing here?”

  “While you guys have been having yourselves a party, we’ve been going through hell. You have to get up there, Nat.” Steven’s face was unusually pale, his lips set in a thin, white line. He looked like he’d seen his own ghost.

  “It’s not that easy. What about Andrew? If he hasn’t recovered from his altitude sickness, we can’t move him.”

  “Then leave him here.” Steven’s tone left no doubt as to what he thought of her closest friend. If her feet hadn’t been trapped in nylon, she would have kicked him. “But you’ve got to get up there right away. And bring Igor too. We could use him.”

  “I’m not abandoning Andrew. What’s going on? What time is it, anyway?” It was gloomy inside the tent, with only enough light to cast half the mountaineer’s face in shadow.

  “Not sure. I left as soon as there was enough light to ski by. Five, six? Possibly later. The sun seems to rise later here.”

  Nat felt like she’d been run over by a horse-drawn cart and dragged for a couple of miles. Her mouth tasted of paste and bile. Lovely. She didn’t doubt she reeked. The reality that Steven had taken the risk of skiing alone to their camp slowly sank in. “What happened? Is anyone hurt?”

  His presence in her tent meant that Joe hadn’t killed him, which she supposed was a relief. But had the trapper attacked someone else? “For God’s sake, Steven, this is no time to keep me in suspense. Tell me what happened.”

  “We don’t know if anyone is hurt or not. But Joe and Anubha are missing.”

  * * *

  Her ragtag little group was decidedly more ragtag this morning than they’d been the day before. Nat didn’t think any of them had drank much, certainly not enough to have had a hangover, but Igor’s Russian hooch was strong. It wasn’t doing them any favors.

  She looked at Andrew one last time, paying careful attention to his breathing. He no longer sounded breathless, and his eyes had some of their old spark back, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Lana would have insisted on giving him more recovery time, but desperation tended to blow caution out of the water. There was no way she would consider leaving him here by himself.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, Nat. I promise. Don’t worry about me. We have bigger problems right now.”

  She’d still worry about him, though. Of course she would.

  The extra weight of her pack dug into her shoulders, making it more challenging to push off. She’d divided her producer’s things between her, Steven, and Igor, hoping to ease Andrew’s burden as much as possible. Her legs, which were already screaming at her, caught fire. She moaned under her breath.

  Steven turned. “You doing all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just sore.” She wasn’t going to complain about tired muscles, not when her dearest friend might be dying from altitude sickness or worse. Please God, don’t let him die. I’ll even believe in you if you don’t let him die. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Steven shrugged. “Not much else to tell. The Canadians got into it a bit with Vasily yesterday, and sometime after that, about when everyone was getting ready to call it a night, we noticed they were missing.”

  “But—” Nat took a deep breath, forcing herself to speak slowly. Her lungs ached, and gulping the frozen air wasn’t helping. “But what do you mean, they ‘got into it a bit’? About what?”

  She couldn’t imagine anyone getting angry enough at Vasily to argue with him. For one, the man hardly spoke.

  “He wouldn’t let them set their traps. They didn’t take too kindly to that. I wasn’t real happy about it, either, to be honest. I could do with some fresh meat. This astronaut food is getting old.”

  “What do you mean, he wouldn’t let them?” Nat tried to reconcile the image of the reticent man physically restraining either of the trappers and failed. “Did he sabotage their traps?”

  “Oh no, nothing like that. If he had, it would have been him that went missing, I’m sure. But he went ballistic when he saw the traps, started screaming a bunch of stuff we didn’t understand. And unfortunately, we didn’t have Igor to translate.”

  Sound carried well in the mountains. “Wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Igor yelled up at them. “He doesn’t speak much Russian. The Mansi have their own dialect.”

  Nat took another breath of ice, her mind racing. “But Vasily speaks English. That’s one of the reasons I hired him. Didn’t he say anything you could understand?”

  “Not much. He was too upset. Something about it being someone else’s territory and
they had no right. That’s the most I got.”

  “Maybe they went to set their traps once Vasily wasn’t looking. Or went hunting. Isn’t that possible?” From what she’d seen of Anubha, the Canadian was a strong-willed woman. A woman who’d been hired for her hunting ability and survival skills. It was likely she hadn’t let the Mansi tell her what to do.

  “Sure, it’s possible, but you’d think they would have been back by morning, or at least left word with one of us. I had Lana check on them at dawn—didn’t want Joe to get the wrong idea after the other night—and it didn’t look like anyone had slept in their tent. Their sleeping bags were untouched.”

  In spite of the admittedly grim scenario, Nat felt better. Anubha and Joe were more than capable of spending a few nights in the bush. That was why she’d hired them. They were independent, and as far as she’d seen, they’d formed no close ties with Lana. Certainly not with Steven or Vasily. Maybe if she’d been there, they would have felt an obligation to let her know where they were going and when they’d return. But she could see them not giving a rat’s ass about alerting Steven.

  It was inconsiderate, at the very least. But not an emergency. Yet.

  “Why didn’t anyone call me?” she asked. It would have been a hell of a lot easier than Steven coming back for their group.

  “Everyone’s been having trouble with their phones. Either we can’t get a signal, or our batteries can’t hold a charge. I’m hoping you brought a power pack that’ll help.”

  “Yes, we’ve got four of them.” They’d brought them for the podcast, but there was no reason why she couldn’t use them to charge everyone’s phones.

  As the terrain grew increasingly difficult, even the mountaineer couldn’t spare the wind to speak any longer. Nat was grateful. She felt light-headed and had to concentrate on placing one ski after the other on the treacherous slope. There was no brainpower to spare to worry about Anubha and Joe. Trod, trod. Trod, trod. The incline was wicked enough that there were few opportunities to glide. She and Andrew had practiced the wrong things. Their training was all but useless.

  She could hear his breath becoming harsher behind her. Nightmare visions of his collapsing on the snow and not getting up this time made her entire body tremble. She struggled to find her footing. Finally, she had to stop.

  “How is he?”

  Igor had an arm around Andrew, and was half carrying her friend up the slope. Nat marveled at the Russian’s strength, as he was also burdened with most of their supplies. “We will need to rest soon. His lungs, they are not so good.”

  “We’re almost there,” Steven said, his exhalations drawing pictures in the frosty air. “Only about a half mile left.”

  Nat groaned. Perhaps a half mile was nothing to the mountaineer, but for novice skiers who were ready to collapse, it might as well have been Nepal.

  “You can do this.” Once again, his eyes seemed to look right through her. “Come up here next to me. We’ll do it together.”

  Once stopped, it took a Herculean effort to get going again, but somehow she found the strength to join Steven. He grasped her shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Just tired. I had no idea it was going to be so difficult.”

  “We’ll be there before you know it. Focus on the landscape and how beautiful it is. It will take your mind off the pain.”

  Other than a blindingly blue sky, Nat didn’t see what was so beautiful about it. Kholat Syakhl was stark and forbidding, an endless expanse of white snow and black rock beneath the peaks. Its coldness came from more than the temperature.

  It truly was No Man’s Land.

  Steven managed a steady stream of chatter, which distracted her somewhat, but also increased her resentment. How was this so easy for him? Didn’t it pose the slightest challenge? At least he didn’t ask any questions. She might have mustered up the energy to drive her ski pole through his chest if he had.

  The mountaineer was in the middle of a rant about how the 1996 Everest disaster had been preventable when something made him stop midsentence. “What the—”

  At the sound of a woman’s voice crying, “Thank God; thank God,” Nat lifted her head. It was Lana, hurrying toward them from the opposite direction. Bizarrely, she wasn’t wearing her skis. She ran over the trail in her boots, staggering and nearly falling with every step.

  Though Nat hated to even think the word in reference to another woman, the Olympian appeared to be hysterical. Lana’s hair was stringy and uncombed, her face red and streaked with tears.

  “What are you doing? I told you we’d come straight back.” Steven grasped her by the arms to keep her from falling. Clearly too upset to speak, she held him close and sobbed, her shoulders heaving.

  Igor pushed past Nat, who turned just in time to support Andrew before he fell.

  “Lana, what is wrong? What happened? Are you hurt?”

  The Russian was no more successful in getting answers, and Nat struggled under Andrew’s weight. “Steven, how much farther? I can’t hold him much longer.”

  “Not far at all.” Steven nudged the weeping woman toward Igor and rushed to help, earning serious brownie points as he lifted Andrew’s weight from Nat’s shoulders. For his part, Andrew was as malleable as a rag doll, not reacting as he was passed from one team member to another. “Igor, can you and Lana lead the way? We have to reach camp. Andrew needs to rest.”

  The Russian nodded, urging Lana forward, but she pushed away from him, stumbling off the trail and into deeper snow.

  “No. No, I’m not going back there.”

  “What are you doing?” Nat could hear the frustration in Steven’s voice, but it was obvious to her that Lana was in some kind of shock. She wasn’t thinking clearly if she thought going off trail would prove to be any kind of salvation. “Lana, we have to get back.”

  The woman stopped thrashing through the snow long enough to meet their eyes. “I can’t. There’s too much blood. So much blood.”

  ~ Chapter Nine ~

  Trepidation overwhelmed her as she reached camp, almost expecting to see everything in black and white like the famous Dyatlov photos—the tent with its torn side, half-collapsed beneath a mound of snow. Instead, the vivid nylon of Steven and Joe’s tents stood as a beacon against the whiteness, providing some welcome color. Nat was relieved to find they’d avoided the Dyatlov site entirely, pitching their tents on the other side.

  The men had managed to convince Lana to accompany them, but the woman shook so severely Nat expected her to stop at any moment and refuse to go farther.

  The camp was eerily quiet. She turned to Lana. “Where’s Vasily? Did he leave too?” If he had, she would sue his ass off. He’d been hired to help them through this, goddammit, not take off at the first sign of trouble.

  Lana gestured to the one tent made from natural materials. Heart pounding in her throat, Nat skied toward it. She didn’t see any of the blood Lana had mentioned, but what if something had happened to the Mansi? What if the man’s tent were a tomb?

  “Vasily? Vasily, are you in there?”

  She could have cried with relief when she immediately heard a shuffling within. Before long, a familiar weathered face emerged from the animal hides.

  “We need to go, Miss. We have angered them.”

  “Angered who?” For the first time, Nat noticed how frightened the man was. He shrank back inside his shelter, obviously reluctant to leave it, and was even more gaunt than she’d remembered. She wasn’t sure how it was possible for Vasily to have lost weight, but apparently he had. The man was a living shadow.

  “The ones who rule this mountain. We must leave.”

  Nat looked to where Igor and Steven were attending to Andrew and Lana, helping them to sit around the dying fire. The pile of collected branches would be enough to get the blaze going again, but more would need to be gathered before nightfall if they were to stay warm. A lot more. It would take a collective effort to keep the fire going.

  “We can’t leave. Andr
ew is ill, possibly with altitude sickness. He needs to rest for at least a few days. Lana is in shock. And Anubha and Joe are missing.”

  The man peered at her from the darkness of his tent, the naked terror in his eyes unnerving. “Not missing. Dead. It is my fault.”

  Nat thought of Steven’s account of a heated argument between Vasily and the trappers. Had it gotten even more heated after the mountaineer had left? “Did you hurt them, Vasily?”

  “No, not me. Not me. But they didn’t listen to my warning. They didn’t believe. I should have tried harder.”

  “What warning?”

  “No one can hunt on this land. It is their territory. We have no rights here.”

  She resisted the urge to seize him by the shoulders and shake him, but just barely. “Whose territory?”

  The Mansi said a word she didn’t understand, his eyes rolling around like those of a spooked horse.

  “I’m sorry; I don’t understand.”

  “The snowmen. This land belongs to the snowmen.”

  Nat shivered. From now on we know that snowmen exist. Could it be? After six decades? Clearly the Mansi wasn’t joking, but there was no way he could be referring to the same creature referenced in the Dyatlov note. She touched the man’s arm. “We can’t leave, Vasily. At least not tonight. And we need your help. Please help us get the fire going again.”

  For a moment, she thought he would refuse, but after disappearing into his shelter, Vasily returned in his heavy, fur-lined jacket, emerging to stand beside her. “If we don’t leave, they will kill us. The trappers disrespected them.”

  Vasily’s fear was contagious, his terror getting to her like a damp cold sinks into one’s bones. “There’s a chance Andrew will be well enough to leave in the morning. Do you think we’ll be okay for the night?”

  The man shrugged. “It is impossible to say. Perhaps if we leave them a peace offering, it will give us more time.”

  “Then we’ll do that. In the meantime, please help us with the fire.”