Chapter One
Present Day
A Day in the Life of a Vegetarian Snow Leopard
Julia Reel’s afternoon was going horribly. And that was before the dragon showed up.
With another burst of desperation, she took a running start, scattering snow with her paws, and shot off the ground, hurling herself at the tree with claws extended. The result was the same as always: She managed to grab hold of the tree trunk for a second before she slid back down to its base. Frustrated, she snarled at the tree.
The tree did not respond, but she was pretty sure it was laughing at her. Whiskers twitching against the cold, she glanced up at the berries dangling from overhead. The berries were half-frozen, but the sight of them alone made her stomach growl.
This is getting on my last nerve, she thought.
But it didn’t matter how hard or how many times she tried: She couldn’t seem to reach them, which made no sense. The branch was barely 15 feet high. Between her claws and natural agility, she should be able to climb the tree and reach those berries. But the tree trunk was impossible to hold onto.
Since when do snow leopards have trouble climbing trees?
Since they found themselves on strange mountains like this, that’s when.
She’d spent all afternoon and the greater part of her morning hunting for food, but it seemed to be evading her. She was starting to feel like that guy from Greek mythology, the one whose punishment was that he couldn’t eat or drink. Tantalus or something.
Her ears perked up at the sound of a twig snapping nearby. Her eyes scanned the clearing, her whiskers twitching again as the scent reached her nostrils. There was another animal nearby, a deer, most likely.
Lunch.
No, Julia. She pushed the thought aside before it could settle in her mind. No meat.
No killing was more like it.
She’d lost count of just how many weeks had passed—six or seven—since she opened her eyes and found herself lying half-buried in the snow. Julia figured she was dead and this was the afterlife, but it had taken her only minutes to rethink that. She wasn’t particularly religious, but she doubted that hell was freezing, like minus 70 degrees. If she’d somehow made it to heaven, she doubted it would be freezing either, which meant she was alive.
How she’d survived the plane crash, she had no idea. Julia remembered plummeting to her death, the mountain rushing up to meet her. But since she survived the crash, she figured she’d head down the mountain and try to find a village and report the accident.
She’d barely been traveling for an hour when she realized she would never make it, not in this cold and not in this body. The clothes she’d been wearing when she’d boarded the flight were chosen with a relaxing vacation in mind, not… this . If she kept traveling in human form, she’d end up a frozen corpse before the day was out.
Shifting had been a brilliant idea. The cold barely bothered snow leopards, not to mention she could travel a lot faster. On the mountain, she was an apex predator or close. Julia hadn’t shifted back to her human form since. But it wasn’t always easy to control the leopard’s instincts, like now.
Hunger gnawed at her insides, a stark reminder of her need to survive, but the mere thought of killing and eating another living thing was enough to make her nauseous. Over the weeks, she’d stuck with berries and nuts and drank from nearby streams. She wasn’t vegan, but no way was she sinking her teeth or claws into an animal, leaving her maw covered with blood. Maybe when hell froze over.
Oh, right. I might as well already be in hell.
Casting a final look at the berries, she turned and continued heading downhill, darting between the trees until the woods about her became a blur. Before long, she was out in the open, staring at the expanse of snow. That was all this mountain was—snow, snow, and more snow. And ice. And snow-covered rocks. Snow-covered trees.
It is a complete nightmare , she decided.
And she was starting to think she was trapped.
A cold wind brushed her flank, which added to her discomfort. Snow leopards were comfortable with the cold and the snow, but Julia was not. She felt like she’d been plunged into a horror movie.
You’re thirty-one years old, she reminded herself. You’re going to have to get over this at some point.
She knew that was true. But in a way, she was still that 15-year-old girl in the 10th grade who’d lost a part of her on that cold afternoon in January.
Laudville High had been a difficult place, more difficult when you didn’t fit in. Julia did not fit in. She’d been the nerd with only two friends who’d published the school’s newsletter, the awkward girl who not many kids noticed, the sort of girl who had crushes on people completely out of her league.
She’d figured from the start that Damon McLaurent would never even glance her way, much less consider his girlfriend. He was a year older than her and a quarterback with the Laudville Lions. Jocks on the high school football team got all the girls they wanted, and they always wanted the prettiest girls, aka the cheerleaders.
What chance could the chief editor of the Laudville Letters newsletter possibly have with someone as popular as Damon?
No wonder she’d nearly forgotten how to breathe the day she caught him staring at her in the hallway. She’d reluctantly brushed it off, figuring it was a random coincidence—maybe he’d been staring at someone else, and she’d gotten in the way.
But then it happened again and again . He’d caught her once staring at him from the stands during football practice and smiled at her.
Julia had practically run all the way home that day.
Over the next few weeks, they bumped into each other in the hallways and even chatted a little. She doubted he knew her name. He always called her Red , which she figured was because of her hair. Julia didn’t mind. Why he even bothered to talk to someone like her, she had no idea, but there was no denying how amazing it felt.
She should’ve known it was too good to be true.
It happened in the middle of January. By then, the hallways of Laudville were filled with talk about the Valentine’s Day Dance that was weeks away. She’d been hoping Damon would ask her to the dance—a fantasy she’d nursed from the first day they made eye contact. And when he offered, out of the blue, to walk home with her one day, she’d been certain her wish was coming true.
And then they decided to cross that frozen lake. However, it wasn’t as frozen as they thought.
She recalled the sound of the ice cracking beneath their feet, the roaring of water in her ears as she drowned…
By a stroke of luck, she’d been rescued and resuscitated, but by then, Damon was gone. Not dead, not discharged from the hospital she’d been rushed to. Just… gone , like he’d never even been there.
The authorities had scoured the lake for a body but had found nothing. As far as anyone was concerned, he’d somehow vanished from the face of the earth. Months passed before his family, and the police gave up on the search and declared him dead.
Julia never went to the dance, partly because she’d been stuck recovering at home until March. And in the years that followed… well, she never gave Valentine’s Day much thought. She didn’t hate Valentine’s; she just couldn’t help remembering that day in January when the guy she’d had the biggest crush on fell through the ice and never came back up.
With some effort, she brushed the thought from her mind, relying on the snow leopard’s keen senses to scan her surroundings. Besides a few animals and trees scattered about, there was no sign of life.
But people live on this mountain, she thought.
She’d been here long enough to figure that out. The campfire sites and cabins that had seen better days had been a dead giveaway, not to mention the tracks. A couple of times, she’d even thought she caught the scent of humans, but she’d given them a wide berth. The last thing they needed was a snow leopard snarling at them for help.
Or a naked redhead, she mused. Her best option was to keep heading downhill, which brought another problem to the fore: At her current pace, she should have reached the bottom of the mountain by now or at least seen it. But, besides the snow and the sky above, she’d seen nothing else. No buildings in the distance, not even the sea.
Where am I, anyway? Weren’t we flying over Nebraska just before the plane came apart?
It was just another question she could not answer, besides the fact that she was surrounded by snow when she woke up on this mountain. She figured the temperature would rise as she headed down the mountain, but no such luck.
I’ve seen some pretty weird crap as a weather reporter, she thought, slowing her pace as she navigated around a pile of boulders , but this takes the cake. This is weird, conspiracy-theory-kind-of weird. This is the sort of made-up crap you see on YouTube.
None of this should be possible. There shouldn’t be this much snow when the weather report at the airport had predicted clear skies and moderate temperatures. She certainly shouldn’t be on a mountain in the middle of nowhere when she’d been flying thousands of feet above Nebraska moments before the disaster occurred.
There was only one cause for any of this: Magic. Bloody hell. Of course .
She never was particularly fond of magic. Growing up, she was warned about magic users and the atrocities they were capable of. No doubt a magic user was behind all of this.
It’s going to get cold very soon.
Wasn’t that what the woman on the plane had said?
If Julia had fists instead of paws, she would have balled them in annoyance right now. How hadn’t she figured it out sooner? A weird-looking woman with an even weirder-looking book just happened to predict the weather and figure out Julia’s shifter nature?
But why doom an entire plane? That part made even less sense to Julia.
At any rate, she’d like to get back home. To hell with the Four Seasons Hotel. She’d take her boring, annoying job over living like this.
You’re a long way from home, she told herself. This can’t be the States.
She was just going to have to keep moving and try to survive until—
Swoop. Swoop. Swoop.
The sound came from above. It was the sound of wings, very, very large wings.
A huge, dark shadow swept over her, and Julia dared to glance up and then froze in her tracks, her eyes widening at the sight of the creature overhead.
Of course, a weird, magical place like this would have dragons in it.
The dragon had to be at least 200 feet above, but she could make it out just fine. And goodness gracious, it was massive. Julia had never seen a dragon before, at least not this close up. The sight was as impressive as it was terrifying. A long tail snaked behind the body that was as large as three buses. Wings like tarpaulins spread from its sides, and a long neck supported a horned head.
Is it just me, or… is it watching me?
The dragon circled overhead for a few seconds. And then it lunged.