White. Cold, so cold! Snow everywhere…in everything. Can’t breathe! Can’t see! Can’t feel! Oh, God, don’t let me die!

Glory shuddered as her body went limp. She leaned forward and, covering her face with her hands, she began to sob. Suddenly the warmth of her room and the comfort of knowing she was safe seemed obscene in the face of what she’d just witnessed. And then as suddenly as the vision had come upon her, the knowledge followed of what she must do next.

She threw back the covers, stumbling on the tail of her nightgown as she crawled out of bed. As she flipped the switch, her bedroom was instantly bathed in the glow of a pale yellow light that gave off a false warmth.

The floor was cold beneath her bare feet as she ran down the hall to the room where her father lay sleeping. For a moment, she stood in his doorway in the dark, listening to the soft, even sound of his snore, and regretted what she was about to do. Yet ignoring her instinct was as impossible for Glory to do as denying the fact that she was a woman.

“Daddy…”

Rafe Dixon woke with a start. He’d heard that sound in his daughter’s voice a thousand times before. He rolled over in bed like a hibernating bear coming out of a sleep, and dug at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“Glory girl, what’s wrong?”

“We’ve got to go, Daddy. He’s dying…and I’ve got to help.”

Rafe groaned. He knew better than to deny what Glory was telling him, but he also knew that there was a near blizzard in force, and getting down off this mountain and into Larner’s Mill might prove deadly for them all.

“But honey…the storm.”

“We’ll make it, Daddy, but he won’t.”

The certainty in her voice was all Rafe Dixon needed to hear. He rolled out of bed with a thump and started reaching for his clothes.

“Go wake your brother,” he said.

“I’m here, Daddy. I heard.”

J.C. slipped a comforting arm across his baby sister’s shoulders and hugged her. “Was it bad, Sis?”

The look on her face was all he needed to know. He headed back down the hall to his room, calling over his shoulder as he went. “I’ll go start the truck.”

“Dress warm, girl,” Rafe growled. “It’s a bitch outside.”

Glory nodded, and flew back to her room, pulling on clothes with wild abandon. The urgency within her made her shake, but her resolve was firm.

Minutes later, they walked out of the house into a blast of snow that stung their faces, but Glory didn’t falter. As she was about to step off the porch, J.C. appeared out of nowhere and lifted her off her feet, carrying her through the snow to the waiting vehicle. She shuddered as she clung to his broad shoulders, still locked into the vision before her. And as she saw…she prayed.

“We’re not gonna make it,” the ambulance driver groaned, as he fought the steering wheel and the vehicle’s urge to slide.

“Damn it, Farley, just quit talking and drive. We have to make it! If we don’t, this fellow sure won’t.”

Luke Dennis, the emergency medical technician whose fortune it had been to be on duty this night, was up to his elbows in blood. His clothes were soaking wet, and his boots were filled to the tops with melting snow. The last thing he wanted to hear was another negative. They’d worked too long and too hard just getting this victim out of his car and up the side of the mountain to give up now.

“Come on, buddy, hang with me,” Dennis muttered, as he traded a fresh container of D5W for the one going empty on the other end of the IV.

An unceasing flow of blood ran out of the victim’s dark hair and across his face, mapping his once-handsome features with a crazy quilt of red. It was impossible to guess how many bones this man had broken, and to be honest, those were the least of Dennis’s worries. If they couldn’t get him back to the hospital in time, it was the internal injuries that would kill him.

“I see lights!” Farley shouted.

Thank God, Dennis thought, and then grabbed his patient and the stretcher, holding on to it, and to him, as the ambulance took the street corner sideways. Moments later they were at the hospital, unloading a man whose chance of a future depended upon the skills of the people awaiting him inside.

Before he was a doctor, Amos Steading had been a medic in Vietnam. When he saw Wyatt Hatfield being wheeled into his E.R., he realized he might have been practicing medicine longer than this patient had been alive. It hurt to lose a patient, but the younger ones were much harder to accept.