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Emma's throat was raw and ached with each freezing breath she pulled in as she urged Cisco to move through the undisturbed snowbanks faster, but the cold in her mouth was a frost compared to the solid ice she felt in her veins. She rode alone through the west side of Alexandria's cleared territory, searching for hoofprints, droplets of blood, something to tell her that they had been here. Each yard that she found nothing, no sign of life besides the birds watching her curiously from above and the ghosts of the past, she pushed her steed faster.
"Rick!" she called into the afternoon air, watching as her breath turned to a cloud before her face. "Daryl! Where are you!"
She swore she would lose her voice if she continued on like this, but that sparked match in the pit of her belly thawed any care she had for the repercussions she would face.
Emma didn't know what she would do if something had happened to them while she had been fucking around doing jack shit. They'd been fucking idiots to sit and wait out the storm - they had ridden through worse, survived much worse than a half hour of snow pouring down from the heavens. Visions like nightmares danced behind her wide eyes as her head whipped back and forth, searching for something that would give her a direction, a hope. A pair of men fallen into a cracked, frozen lake, tangled in the reins from their saddles. Bite marks in arms and hands and necks as their limbs slowly cracked with a new, undead life. Blood spilled across the snow as guns boomed and shouts echoed across the valley.
She found herself pushing back a panicked glaze that had come to rest over her eyes, temporarily blocking her vision. They had given far too much for her, favoring her life over their own, for her to repay them like this. Suddenly she was not racing through the snow any longer, calling and hollering and screaming, but back in a dank, filthy prison shivering as a man with harsh blue eyes laid a blanket from his own pack over her shoulders. Suddenly she was not pushing through the ribcages of trees, but crouched in the dirt like an animal devouring the meal placed in her hands by a man with wings stitched upon his back who would not eat again for another three days.
Emma pursed her lips as Cisco crested a small incline and chuffed out a large breath of disdain. She refused to let this happen, to let this happen on her watch, while she should have been the one watching over their backs. She swore if it did happen, if hell froze over, she would pull the flame from her very stomach and use it to set the rest of the world alight.
She yanked her reins and the horse came to a panting halt when she cast a gaze over the other side of the slope. Just down the opposite ridge was the old lake house, an old wooden structure sitting on the bank of a lake frozen over since the autumn. Technically, Alexandria had no use for it after it had been cleared, but it was a well-known spot to get away to when the noise of the town became too much or infected blocked the roads home until after dark. Emma and her boys had taken several trips there in the summers prior, stripped down to their underwear and floated in the water to cool themselves off after working since the crack of dawn.
