Page 64 of Shielding Instinct

“I’m going up. You’ll be right below me. We have you tied in. Here comes another wave.”

Petra had told the team about her fears about Terry grabbing onto her. There was only the breadth in the chimney for a single person to be rescued at a time. And she was on top.

These next few moments were the most dangerous.

“Apple,” she yelled the code word her team had agreed on. She didn’t want Terry to know what was happening next.

As soon as “apple’ left her mouth, she was snatched up the chimney so fast that she thought she was Santa’s elf riding a magical trail.

Not fast enough.

Even though Terry had his own line, a drowning man would pull a loved one under. It was the nature of the beast. This beast grabbed as her feet fell from the wall and extended outward. He clutched at her ankles.

And she kicked hard.

The borrowed tennis shoes came off in Terry’s hands as Petra was dragged from his reach.

She came up hyperventilating.Holy shit!

When they got Terry to the top, Petra saw he was in worse shape than she’d imagined.

His clothes were shredded, his skin abraded. He was slick with blood.

Melissa was bent in two, screaming.

Terry didn’t even look Melissa’s way. He was going into shock. This rescue wasn’t over.

Raw-skinned and broken, he needed to be at the hospital stat.

Petra looked at the cliff and at the people who were ready and willing to help, but how could they get Terry, in his battered state, from here to up there where they had vehicles?

It wasn’t coming to her right away.

What did come was a sense of gratitude that in a crisis, all these people risked being near a turbulent sea in the service of a stranger.

Could she contrive a way for these good people to get Terry to the vehicles?

What she needed was a medevac helicopter.

No, she amended, that spray and the debris storm that came with a helicopter’s downwash might be too much for Terry.

What she needed was the Cerberus team. After Levi had saved his fiancée, they had trained how to move people on steep inclines, and they’d know just what to do in a practiced formation.

Okay, Petra admitted to herself. While all that was true, she realized she just wanted to look into Hawkeye's eyes and know that he was there with her in the crisis because that had felt really good over the last couple of days.

“Hey!” Carlos called from the cliff. “Hey! Incoming!”

Petra whipped her head seaward.

The people here on the plateau couldn’t survive another rogue wave.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Hawkeye

A teen on the cliff had his hand to his mouth yelling, “Incoming!” to let those below him know that their team had arrived.

Levi, Cooper, Mojo, and Hawkeye made out the essence of a path and took it at a speed that wasn’t entirely safe.

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