Page 23 of Echoes of Twilight (Dawn of Alaska #4)

23

B urning. His entire body was burning up. Mikhail woke with a start, his eyes flinging open to find himself staring at an ear. A rather large ear that was attached to a partially bald head and sporting a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.

Dr. Ottingford turned his head and blinked at him. “Mr. Amos, you’re awake.”

“It’s Mikhail,” he grunted, his voice corroded with sleep. “Why are you in my bedroll? And why does my back feel like it’s on fire?”

Dr. Ottingford turned over the book he’d been reading and set it facedown on his stomach. “Miss Wetherby was concerned that you were too cold. She said you needed someone to climb into your bedroll with you. And I can personally attest that when I joined you, you were quite cold and muttering gibberish.”

He’d been incoherent? Mikhail leaned back and stared at the sky, dark and gray with the threat of impending snow. He didn’t recall Bryony trying to wake him, meaning he must have been colder than he’d thought. If she hadn’t gotten Dr. Ottingford to crawl into his bedroll...

He pressed his lips together, remembering what it had been like when Livy died. He’d thought she was fine. He’d taken off her wet clothes and put her in her bedroll and wrapped her in blankets, then started building a fire while she’d gone to sleep. There hadn’t been much wood to burn, but he’d hoped the small fire would be sufficient.

Livy had looked peaceful the entire time. There’d been no sign anything was wrong, no evidence her body was slowly growing colder and colder, her life draining away with each passing minute.

When he’d tried to wake her a few hours later, he hadn’t believed what he’d found. At some point she’d stopped breathing, and he’d never even known there was a problem.

Only later, after he arrived home and spoke with the doctor in Sitka, did he learn that hypothermia slowed down the body’s heart until it eventually stopped beating. That the very first thing hypothermia did was put someone to sleep, and they would die without ever realizing what was happening.

Had that been what almost happened to him? If he was incoherent, then there was a good chance of it.

Mikhail tried to roll over, only to be greeted by the sensation of something warm and uncomfortably hard along his back. “Why does my back feel like it’s burning?”

Dr. Ottingford blinked at him through his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Ah, I suspect it’s the rocks.”

“Rocks?”

“Miss Wetherby added hot rocks to the bedroll to try to warm you faster.”

“I see.” That was probably smart of her, although when dealing with hypothermia, body heat was the best way to warm another person. As strange as it sounded, both the doctor back in Sitka and his sister Kate insisted that warming someone with hypothermia too quickly could cause a heart attack.

He looked around the campsite but didn’t see anyone else, not even Bryony. “Where is she?”

“She stalked off down the beach after rewarming your rocks.”

Mikail sat up. Or rather, he tried to sit up, but it was impossible to do so with Dr. Ottingford still lying beside him in the tight bedroll.

“Was something wrong? Why did she leave the campsite?” Surely she remembered what had nearly happened last night with the Tlingit warriors. So why would she have left camp? “Was she angry?”

Dr. Ottingford set his book on the ground beside him and slid out of the bedroll. “She didn’t go far, just down the beach a ways. See?”

He pointed down the beach, then headed to the fire and pulled on a pair of trousers spread out on the ground beside the flames. His shirt soon followed.

Mikhail stood and gathered his own clothes, then slid them on, keeping his eyes pinned to Bryony the entire time. She might be in view of the campsite, but she was still too far away. If Tlingit men came out of the forest, they could take her and disappear into the woods before he had a chance to stop them.

He threw his fur parka on over his shirt, then surveyed the rest of the beach. Dr. Wetherby was near the shoreline, crouched on the ground studying something with his magnifying glass, but the third member of the Wetherby family seemed to be missing entirely.

He grabbed his boots and tugged them on. “Where’s Heath?”

Dr. Ottingford shrugged. “I can’t rightly say. He took your rifle and stormed off after the most recent argument, saying he was going hunting.”

“Argument?”

Dr. Ottingford had been reaching for a biscuit, but he stopped short of picking it up. “Heath’s not too happy about Richard’s death. I can’t say he blames you entirely, but he certainly thinks you should have stopped Richard from falling the same way you stopped him on the mountain.”

He’d figured as much. Although Heath hadn’t said anything directly to him, the man had barely acknowledged him since they’d crossed that gorge.

He wanted to claim it wasn’t his fault, that he’d done everything he could to make that bridge as safe to cross as possible. That Richard was dead because he hadn’t listened and not for any other reason.

But what if Heath was right? What if he could have done something more? “Do you think I could have done more to prevent Richard’s death too?”

The moment the words were out, he regretted them. He was probably better off never knowing the answer to that question, because what if Dr. Ottingford did, in fact, think he’d been negligent? What if Dr. Wetherby did too? He knew Bryony didn’t, but she might be the only one.

But Dr. Ottingford was shaking his head, his eyebrows arched as though he found the question surprising. “No, not in the slightest. The rest of us all crossed safely, even with the trunk. But Richard started crossing the logs before you were ready, and then he stopped partway over the gorge. You told him to keep moving, but he didn’t. Then he lost his balance and fell. We all watched it happen.”

Mikhail pressed his eyes shut, trying to let the words soak in, trying to force himself to believe them. But what if he had rushed forward rather than inching along when he noticed that Richard had stopped? Or what if he’d been less concerned about keeping his own balance and simply moved a bit faster across the bridge in the first place? Or...

Well, he wasn’t really sure what else he could have done, but he might be missing something. All he knew was that if he’d been closer, he would have had a better chance of grabbing Richard when he started to fall.

And yet, if Richard hadn’t died, everyone would know about the gold vein.

Now the location of the vein was safe with him, and unless someone else tried to cross the canyon in the same spot, it might stay safe for decades.

“Thank you,” Mikhail finally said. “I appreciate it.”

“Dr. Wetherby feels the same way as I do about Richard’s death.” Dr. Ottingford popped part of a biscuit into his mouth. “Though make no mistake about it, he’d rather have Richard alive. He wants Bryony married to the next secretary of the interior, and he’d nearly accomplished it with Richard.”

“No. He said Bryony didn’t have to marry Richard.” Mikhail moved to the fire and poured himself some coffee from the percolator that had been nestled at the edge, close enough to the flames to stay warm. “Not after he hid the fact he’d been looking for gold all summer. Not after he pulled his gun on me.”

Dr. Ottingford took another bite of biscuit. “I know he said that a few days ago. But I suspect once everyone returned to Washington, DC, that would have changed. There are many advantages to having the secretary of the interior as your son-in-law. And if the next secretary of the interior is either a bachelor or a widower, then Atticus will marry Bryony off to him instead.”

A vision rose in Mikhail’s mind of a balding, fifty-something man with a paunchy stomach and thick glasses, and the thought made him sick. Bryony would be miserable married to a paper pusher. Why couldn’t her family understand that? “Is that part of what everyone was arguing about? Who Bryony will marry?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Mikhail took a sip of coffee, letting the bitter liquid fill his mouth and coat his throat and warm some of the cold lingering inside him. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because that poor girl is talented when it comes to science, and she deserves a husband who will make her happy. Her father... Well, I’ve known Atticus for years, and he has trouble seeing anything but his own interests. But the last thing you seem to care about is yourself. I thought you should know what his plans were for Miss Wetherby, but forgive me if I’ve overstepped. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to note a few things in my journal about the climate essays I was reading before I forget them.”

He watched as Dr. Ottingford picked up another biscuit and headed to his own bedroll, where he dug his journal from his pack. It was the longest conversation he’d ever had with the scientist. Dr. Ottingford seemed to blend into the background most of the time, but maybe that was by design.

Mikhail looked down the beach to where Bryony still sat on a solitary log, then drained the rest of his coffee, grabbed a biscuit for himself, and headed toward her.

She might not have realized it, but she’d saved his life that afternoon, and he fully intended to thank her.

And if they just so happened to discuss her father’s plans for her once she returned to Washington, DC, well, he wouldn’t complain about that either.