Page 7 of My Halloween Hunter

Nothing, not even breath.

"Or run." My voice comes out rough, rusted from years of silence. "You pick, Darcy."

I hear her swallow.

I lay the scarf back where I found it and walk out, pulling the door shut without latching it, so she has to lie up there not knowing whether I'm gone.

I wait until dawn, when she finally comes out with the scarf wrapped around her throat.

On the porch she lifts her chin and turns the thin end of the scarf over in her fingers, slowly, like she's reading what I did to it. Then she goes down the steps and takes the north path — up-slope, away from the creek and Edna's and every other living soul in this valley, toward the old growth where the trunks stand wide apart and there's nothing to hide behind and nobody to hear.

She's walking fast.

I'm out of the trees before I've had a single thought. Needles and frost and her track sharp-edged in the rime, her scent pulling at me like a rope. Four hundred metres up, where the forest opens and the light comes down in long gold bars, she stops dead in the middle of it.

"Cade," she says.

My name, out loud, in her mouth. It hits me low and hard, and my boot comes down on a branch that cracks like a rifle shot.

Her head whips toward the sound, and she runs.

Everything goes blank.

The ten years, the rules, the careful man who checks cabins and nods to Edna and never asks anybody for anything — all of it gone, and what's left is legs and lungs and her flushed face looking back at me over her shoulder.

I don't hide anymore. I go straight up the slope after her, crashing, letting her hear every bit of it, and she makes a high, breathless sound and finds more speed, her camera slamming her hip and her hair tearing loose from the knit hat.

She's fast, but I'm faster, and she knows it. She isn't running to get away. She's running so I'll come.

When she rounds a big pine, her boot skids on the frost, and I'm there. I catch her by the hips before she hits the ground, turn her and put her back to the tree, and we're both panting, and her eyes are huge and grey and locked on my face.

The kerchief's still up over my nose, black wool gone stiff with frost where my breath has been, and all she has of me is my eyes. She looks into them a long time. Then she reaches up, hooks one finger over the top edge and drags it down under my chin.

It's the first time she's seen my face. She takes her time — the beard, the scar through my eyebrow, the ink crawling up out of my collar — and her pupils blow wide and black.

"Hi," she says, out of breath.

I don't have a word left in me. I put my face in her neck and breathe her in, and she grabs my coat in both fists and pulls.

My mouth finds hers, and it isn't a kiss so much as ten years of starving. I take it deep, my tongue in her mouth and my hand in her hair dragging the knit hat off, and she bites my lip and moans and climbs me like a tree.

I get her jacket open and shove her sweater up. There's no bra under it and her tits spill into my hands, cold-pebbled, the nipples hard as frozen berries. When I thumb them she arches off the bark.

"No bra," I say. "Up a mountain. In October."

"It would be in the way."

"Of what?"

Her eyes drop to my hands on her. "Guess."

I get my mouth on her and suck one nipple hard, then the other, while her hands hold my head there and her hips work against my thigh, grinding, riding it through her leggings. I can feel the heat of her through both layers.

I drag the leggings and her underwear down to her knees, and when the frost air hits her bare thighs she gasps.

"Cold!"

"Not for long."