The thing that flooded into her mind then almost made her lose her grip on Luke’s fur, with deliberate care she lowered her hands to pillow his head in the snow.
“No,” she whispered hoarsely. “No—I can’t.” Her body began to shiver in reaction, a glaze of denial blurring her vision. Luke lifted his head, slowly, painfully, to regard her. “I can’t…” Luke’s head dropped back into the snow and his eyes closed as if in surrender.
Joey stared at Luke and felt as if her mind and heart were being torn apart bit by inevitable bit. With shaking hands she unzipped her parka and pulled her outer shirttail from under her sweater, she used her small knife to tear strips from it, enough to bandage his hurts. Her fingers were clumsy, her efforts painfully inadequate. The bullet wounds had almost stopped bleeding, but she bound them up as best she could and stroked his head while the resolve built within her and the weight of conviction settled into her bones.
She closed her eyes, feeling the blood rushing through her veins and arteries, the workings of muscle and sinew, the flow of cold air into her lungs. What passed through her mind then was nothing so clear as conscious thought. Raw need compelled her. To save Luke.
She looked down at him once more. “You told me once,” she said softly, “that I had to hang on. Now I’m telling you.” Bending down so close that her tears moistened the pale fur of his cheek, she clutched at his mane. “You said, ‘I won’t let you leave me,’ remember? Well, it works both ways, Luke. It works both ways.” She heard his shuddering sigh, saw his eyelids flicker without opening, and knew he heard her.
With grim haste Joey stripped away the parka and sweaters and shirts one by one, peeled off trousers and underclothes and boots until she stood naked in the cold. The snowflakes were like kisses on her skin, for a moment she felt nothing, and then the cold was gone. Utterly gone, as if she stood before a roaring fire. Her body went up like kindling in the heat, burst into flame and burned until the roar of the conflagration drowned out her cries of shock and pain.
When it was over, when the fire had settled again to embers, the world had shifted into an alien place. It bombarded her altered senses from every side. Instinct rescued her when her mind could not. She cried out to Luke a final time, hearing the thin wail of her voice, and began to run.
“Good God, Joey!” Allan Collier’s voice came from a great distance as she fell into his arms. Medicinal smells assaulted her, filling her sensitive nostrils with their stink, she leaned heavily against the doctor as he pulled her in from the doorway. Her feet nearly gave out from under her, unable to accommodate the shift in balance from four legs to two. Collier was the only certainty in a world that spun and wheeled about her.
She was distantly aware of voices talking, exclaiming over her; she dropped into the chair Collier guided her to and tried to reorder her overloaded senses. Someone threw a blanket over her shivering body. The vinyl of the chair was icy cold under her bare rump, that, more than anything else, broke through. She blinked rapidly to clear her vision.
Collier was there, holding something hot and liquid up to her mouth. She sipped it, nearly choked at the taste, and managed to swallow, Collier made meaningless noises of approval and made her drink more. The heat of it stilled the helpless shivers. Blinking again, Joey felt the beginnings of focus and of returning sanity.
“Luke,” she forced out at last. “Luke… ” It was hard, nearly impossible to make the words come. She floundered desperately and flailed out with clumsy hands, pushing the blanket from her shoulders. With growing urgency she sought Collier’s eyes as he moved around her to pull the blanket back up.
He stopped at last and crouched before her, taking her hands in his. They felt icy cold on her burning skin. “Tell me, Joey. As best you can.” His voice was an anchor of calm reason.