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was he’d seen.
    Amber followed David’s stare, turning in time only to swallow a scream. The hillside and everything on it slid towards her in the surreal stop-motion of a macabre dream sequence.
    She stared at a tree gliding towards her, not trusting that her eyes were showing her something real…until a small boulder whistled past her shoulders. Amber flinched and tried to move only to find her feet rooted to the spot by the mounds of earth growing around her ankles.
    “Run, woman!” she heard a male voice shout from somewhere above. Amber craned her neck, turning her head to search the dingy half-light for the source of the voice. “Move—now!”
    The harsh command broke her stupor, the tone leaving her no choice but to obey, and she turned away to run down the hill.
    It wasn’t David’s voice , her mind cautioned, as the rumbling tremors at her back got louder and closer. A dark shadow overtook her, blocking out the light from above as something that sounded like an express train bore down on top of her. Amber opened her mouth to scream in terror but her cries were lost in the deafening roar. Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she tried to keep moving as her feet left the ground.
    Her body slammed into something as immovable and unforgiving as a brick wall that knocked her flat onto her back and then fell on her. The hillside continued to move, piling on top of whatever had hit her. Amber opened her mouth to scream again, but she couldn’t draw even a single breath with her face pressed into a soft, pliable mass squashing the life from her.
    The deafening rumble of moving earth and the vicious snap of splintering trees faded away as the darkness closed in. The suffocating smell of crushed plants and moist earth filled her nose and mouth and pushed the air out of her lungs, and Amber knew she would die.
    A heavy object slammed into the weight holding her down and she felt as much as heard an angry groan that she was pretty sure didn’t come from her. Someone not something was holding her down. David ?
    A sudden, blinding pain at her temple drew her focus inward…and her last thought as she fell into unconsciousness, despite the screaming agony building behind her eyes, was to wonder how in the hell David had got back to her so fast.

Chapter Three
     
     
     
    The woman pinned beneath Bane passed out and stopped breathing. He cleared her mouth of leaves and dirt and helped her as best he could by blowing the last of his breath into her. Amber needed air and wouldn’t survive the pressure piled on top of them or the lack of oxygen much longer. Besides, the smell of her injuries couldn’t be ignored so easily at such close proximity. There wouldn’t be much point saving her from one grisly death in order to subject her to an even worse one. Pressing dirt against the wound stemmed the flow of blood and gave Bane some relief from its intoxicating effects. His brain began to function again as he allowed the instincts he had suppressed in order to stop himself from taking her life, to reawaken.
    Wrapping his arms around her torso, he pinned her body against his and gave the earth on top of his back a tentative push. Some of the weight pressing down into him shifted and he pushed again, harder this time, sure now that his actions wouldn’t bring more debris raining down on them as he got to his knees. With one final shove he broke through the leaves, twigs and dirt entombing them. Bane’s arm tightened its grip on Amber while the other reached out to grab at a grotesquely twisted tree root jutting out from the mud. His first attempt to wrench himself and the woman from their temporary grave did no more than drag the fallen spruce towards them.
    “God be damned!” Bane twisted the root in his hand, sending the trunk lumbering down a few feet until it smashed to a halt at the foot of a tree that had not succumbed to the shifting earth. He pulled again, succeeding this time in freeing his legs from the sucking mouth