Free Chains of Fire by Christina Dodd Page B

stand all these years, it was our best chance to survive.”
    She looked up at the dark cavern of the ceiling. “I don’t think the castle is still standing.”
    “Probably not. Not all of it. No matter how strong the structure—and it had to be formidable to withstand other avalanches that have surely swept down on it—it couldn’t withstand such a large snowfield and such a maliciously placed charge.” He looked up, too. “But it’s holding its own.”
    “I guess that leaves two questions.”
    “How long will the building survive?”
    “That’s one.”
    “What’s the other?”
    “Why did the Others set a trap for us?”

Chapter 11

    E ffortlessly, as if he’d never been hurt, Samuel rose, lifting Isabelle to her feet. “We were set up. Or rather—I was set up. The Others are trying to kill me.”
    Her hackles rose at his assumption he was the target. “Don’t be so conceited. They hurt the boy to bring me to help.”
    “Maybe. I think it was simply to give urgency to the call.”
    “Oh, stop brooding.” She put her hand to her forehead. Her brain felt heavy. Her eyes hurt from keeping them open.
    “I’m not brooding. Just feeling stupid.”
    As the adrenaline rush faded, exhaustion dragged at her. She’d healed Mathis’s not-inconsiderable injuries, then restored Samuel’s ruptured disks. She didn’t have the strength to be tactful. Besides, with Samuel, tact was a waste of time. “Tell me, what else would we have done? We rescue children. From bad situations. And from the Others. That’s what we do .”
    “I should have been more cautious. I should have known they were watching me go to the bank to open the accounts.” He saw the startled expression on her face, and said, “You didn’t think of that, did you? That that’s why we’ve been buried alive?”
    “No. That didn’t occur to me. I’ve had other things on my mind.” She was so tired, she couldn’t even snap at him with any fire.
    Picking up the flashlight, he shined it around the locker room. It occupied the whole basement of the castle, with two dozen rows of lockers, half a dozen picnic tables and benches, and various changing rooms.
    The open ceiling was fourteen feet over their heads: ancient, sturdy oak beams supported on oak columns with reinforcements of modern steel that spanned from wall to wall, and steel columns spaced to support the weight of the castle above. If she didn’t know about the tons of snow that buried them, she would have thought they could walk out of here. But she had felt the blast of the avalanche, and as the flashlight played over the place the stairs had once been, a frozen waterfall of snow blocked the former entrance.
    Lockers stood in double rows up and down the large room, except close against them where the lockers had fallen and smashed open. She saw an ax in the rubble, bricks and stones, broken glass, and, incongruously, one red ski still attached to its boot.
    “Aren’t you going to ask if the accounts transferred?” he asked.
    “I never doubted you would succeed.”
    “I did succeed.” Disheveled, his formal clothes flecked with dust and snow, he looked like a corporate pirate as he mocked her with his smile. “I met with the bank president and presented our case. He refused.”
    She looked down at herself. The mink no longer looked like a hundred thousand dollars. Tiny pieces of castle clung to the fur; she shook it, brushed it, unreasonably distressed by the chaos. “So you controlled his mind and forced him to give you what you wanted.”
    “That’s right. Why do you think I was chosen to come on this mission? Who else could have done what I did?”
    “I didn’t accuse you of anything,” she said in a carefully neutral voice, but now she smoothed her gown, admiring how the resilient silk had shaken off the trauma to glisten once more.
    “Didn’t you?”
    Her Jimmy Choo stilettos hadn’t survived the night as well as the gown; they were scuffed, the right heel