Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Colton had said they would talk about the whole shifter thing as they walked along, but that was before they'd realized he would make a good snowplow.
That was okay, though: it gave her time to get used to the idea.
And heaven knew it was better to think about Colton being a shifter than it was to think about the fact that she'd wrecked her damn plane.
Of course, that made her look over her shoulder toward the crash site. She couldn't see it any more: the snow hadn't stopped coming down, and the wind was probably spreading any remaining smoke across the mountains. Flying in this weather had been stupid.
Except she was a good pilot and not inclined to take stupid risks.
Jo sighed and rubbed a hand over her face.
The conditions had changed while they were in the air.
It happened. And thundersnow happened rarely enough that not expecting it wasn't a failure on her part. It had just been incredibly bad luck.
A tiny smile crept over the corner of her mouth, though, as she watched Colton's fleece-wrapped chimera butt striding along ahead of her.
The crash had been incredibly bad luck, and also possibly the best and most amazing thing that had ever happened to her, because now she knew there were chimeras in the world.
People who could shift back and forth from humans to animals! To fantastic beasts! Who knew!
Every once in a while Colton turned his big fluffy lion head back to make sure she was doing okay.
Jo gave him a thumbs-up when he did, and marched along behind him feeling remarkably light and happy for somebody who'd just wrecked her plane.
She had no idea how she was going to deal with that financially, but right now getting out of the mountains and finding shelter was more important.
The sun was going down and the wind was picking up, which wasn't a great combination.
If Colton didn't have those thin bat wings she might have thought just curling up with him as a ginormous cat-beast would be a viable way to spend a frozen winter night, but she didn't want his wings or tail getting frostbitten, so they needed another option.
Every once in a while she checked her phone for signal, with about as much success as she expected. The mountains didn't have good signal at the best of times.
They made it down the rest of the mountainside before Colton stopped, shook snow from his mane, and shifted back to human. It made Jo's breath catch just seeing it: it looked so effortless and quick that she sort of felt like she should be able to do it herself.
"It's getting dark," Colton said a little worriedly. "We should make camp before it does. I just don't know how we're going to set up enough protection from this kind of weather. This isn't my field of expertise."
"Lucky for us it's kind of mine." As Colton's eyebrows rose, Jo made a face.
"Not really, but flying small planes means you should have at least some practice at handling emergencies on your own.
I do have a tent in the survival gear," Jo promised.
"It's a hell of a lot better than nothing. If we can dig in beneath a tree—"
There were plenty of evergreens around, though a lot of them were scraggly little messes, or huge towering things whose branches didn't start for thirty feet up.
She'd been keeping an eye out as they worked their way down the mountain, hoping for a batch of white spruces, which often had branches close to the ground, Christmas-tree-style.
Those made good shelters, because snow often only drifted beneath the lowest branches, making a naturally protected space.
She hadn't seen any that looked worth stopping for, though, and even now, the pickings were slim.
"Hold on." Colton shifted back to his chimera form almost at the same time he spoke, and just casually leaped over the nearest trees.
Jo's jaw fell open as he bounced around, briefly visible through the snow as he cleared treetops, then disappearing among them again. She started going boing! boing! boing! mentally every time she saw him bounce up, then whispered it until he bounced back to her and startled a squeak out of her.
"Found one," he said triumphantly as he shifted back to human. "I'll clear a path for you."
"That was. You. Boing!"
"Oh." Colton looked shyly pleased. "Yeah. That was nothing compared to when my wings are free, but it did the job."
Jo said, "Boing!" again more urgently, as if it would help him understand how incredible it was to watch a creature his size bounce around like that.
He grinned at her, agreed, "Boing," and shifted to the chimera form so he could plow a path through to the sheltering tree. Jo followed along, still shaking her head and whispering, "Boing," until they reached the tree he'd found and she said, "Oh, yeah, that's perfect. That's amazing. Thank you!"
It had a heavy skirt of branches partially buried in snow, but she could tell from the angle that they started about four feet up on the trunk, making an excellent protected underskirt.
"We want to keep as much of the snow in place around it as possible, because it does insulate.
I've got a little shovel in the—aaaah, okay, never mind… "
The last words were because Colton had, with incredible efficiency, scooped several huge pawsful of snow aside, somehow also managing to pack the sides of the space he'd made all at the same time, so it didn't come tumbling down.
Jo gaped again, then laughed as Colton returned to a very pleased-with-himself human. "Will that do?"
"I'm never wrecking a plane without you again," Jo said, meaning it as praise and then making a face at how it actually sounded.
"Thank goodness. I couldn't keep you safe if you did that." Colton's smile became quite gentle as he spoke, and Jo felt a funny flush of combined heat and half-hearted aggravation.
"I don't need anyone to keep me safe." Before he could protest, she took a deep breath and sighed it out. "But boy, it's nice. Thank you."
"Oh good. Whew. I was afraid I'd stepped in it there."
"Kind of but also not," Jo promised. "All right—oh! Er. Does your, uh, does your chimera mind if I get that thermal blanket back…?"
"Of course not. He doesn't get cold while I'm in my human form. Or not any colder than I do." Colton changed shape again and stood patiently while Jo loosened the crinkly silver blanket from around him, but patted the fleece one and left it in place.
"There you go. I'll get the fleece back later, if we need it." She crawled beneath the tree skirt to spread the thermal blanket across the thin layer of snow there, then called, "Can you hand me those bags one at a time, and carefully?"
Colton did, so carefully barely any snow got knocked loose. Jo pulled the tent out of one of them, then poked her head out from beneath the tree. "I'm going to set this up in here, okay? It's probably easier and less likely to dislodge a lot of extra snow if it's just one of us doing it."
"You're the boss," Colton said without a hint of sarcasm. It reminded Jo momentarily that he was in a hurry to get back to his actual boss, and his life, and his court case, but he hadn't said a single word about that since lightning had struck the plane.
He was a good man, she thought. Just a really decent person, aside from being model-handsome and also a magical shifter being. What she wouldn't give to find a guy like that who lived in her neck of the woods.
Well, for the moment they couldn't be more neck-of-the-woodsy together than this.
She smiled, slid the tent out of its bag, and set it up with the awkward efficiency of knowing what she was doing, but only having a very small space to do it in.
Then she unfolded all the other blankets, thermal and wool alike, onto the floor, creating as much insulation from the cold ground as possible, took her boots off, brushed away all the snow she could, and crawled inside. "Come on in!"
For a tall man, Colton Drew did an amazing job of climbing down into their little hollow, and then into the tent, without knocking much snow loose.
He glanced at her as he poked his head in, saw she'd removed her boots, and paused to take his off, too, before coming all the way in.
They both knocked snow off the boots, then tucked them into a corner of the tent and zipped it closed.
Colton's eyes widened. "Oh. Wow, it warmed up immediately, didn't it? "
"Two bodies in a small space will do that, and all the lining on the floor helps a lot." Jo shivered anyway, more from a sudden adrenaline crash than actual cold. "Thanks for your help."
"Me? I didn't do anything!"
"You cleared a path into the underskirt in about a tenth of the time it would take me," Jo said wryly. "And also broke the snow so I could walk without exhausting myself, and carried literally all of the gear. You did kind of a lot."
"Oh." Colton smiled. "When you put it that way…but really, since I managed to shift everything with me, carrying the gear wasn't hard at all."
"How does that even work?" Jo's voice rose with incredulity. "Does all that extra mass make you bigger? Are you normally only, like, regular-lion-sized?"
"No, I'm always huge."
Jo's mind immediately went places it shouldn't, and as if he could read her thoughts, Colton blushed and sucked his cheeks in and glanced away, trying not to grin.
"I am a very big chimera," he clarified.
"We all are, actually. Basically if you take a lion and a dragon and mash them together you get a big animal. "
"There are dragons?"
Colton looked back with a little smile. "Not very many. There's some kind of magic involved with their creation that I don't understand."
Jo eyed him from under the brim of her winter hat, and Colton laughed. She loved his laugh: it was a big warm sound that made the tent feel cozy and comfortable. "I'm guessing that look means something like, 'oh, unlike all the other magic that you totally understand'?"
"It does mean something very like that, yes," Jo said. "Start at the beginning. How are there even shifters?"
"I don't know."
Jo sat back, fists on her hips even though she was sitting, and Colton gave her a sweet, wry smile.
"I don't understand the magic, either. None of us really do.
All I know is there have been shifters as long as there have been people.
Most of them are much more…ordinary? Bears and tigers and lions—"
"Oh my," Jo said, because she couldn't not, and Colton, still smiling, nodded.
"Exactly. Chimera shifters are much rarer, and things like drag—"
"Wait, so what exactly is a chimera? I mean, I've seen you, obviously, you half cat-bat creature you, but…?"
"Technically a chimera is any mix of two or more species of shifter," Colton murmured, extending his hands and flexing his gloved fingers like he was a big cat. "It gets more complicated than that, though."
Jo gestured around the tent. "I'm not going anywhere. Lay it on me!"
"Hah! Yeah, I guess we're not. Right, okay, so technically griffins and pegasi and manticores and sphinx and a bunch of others are chimeras, because they're all mixes of two or more animals."
"Pegasi? Is that supposed to be the plural for pegasuses?
Which, never mind that, do you mean pegasuses are real too?
Oh my God!" Jo fell over on her side and kicked her feet a little, unable to contain her inner twelve year old girl's glee.
"Okay! Okay I'm better now, go on." She sat up again as Colton beamed at her like she was the most wonderful person he'd ever met.
"I'm glad you're taking this so well. I wasn't sure what you'd think."
"I think it's nuts and amazing. So why are we focusing on the technicality here?"
"Because although all of those others are technically chimeras, too, my particular type of chimera is called a chimera.
There are dragon-type chimeras and goat-type chimeras.
I'm a dragon-type, but which one you are is just a roll of the dice.
I've got three siblings who are goat-types.
They have wings, too, but they're furry instead of leathery and their hind ends are goats instead of lions. "
That, Jo thought, might be too much. She sat up again, staring at Colton and trying to process that. Eventually she got as far as, "…how…?" but ended up shaking her head. "Okay, no, never mind. I'm just going to roll with it. Goat types and dragon types."
"You think you're confused now," he said cheerfully. "Manticores are also cat-dragon shifters, except they don't have wings and are about half the size of chimeras and very sensitive about it. But they can talk," he said almost grumpily. "Even in their shifted form. Most shifters can't."
"Wow. Wow. Okay. Wow. This is going to take some time to remember everything. Why are you telling me all this? These must be like state secrets, in shifter terms."
Colton hesitated like he wasn't sure of what he should say, but then smiled. "They are, but I know I can trust you."
"You'd better hope so," Jo said cheerfully as her stomach gave a sudden rumble.
"I mean, you can, but yeah. Wow. Okay, food.
I don't exactly have steak dinners in the emergency rations, but…
" She opened another bag, pulled out a handful of energy bars, and then froze a moment, staring into the bag.
Then she checked another and then the last, growing slightly more frantic as she searched.
Finally, heart racing and a blush climbing up her cheeks, she had to turn back to Colton, whose expression had become concerned.
Her ears burned as she mumbled, "We may have a small problem. "
"What? There's not enough food? You keep it, that's fine—"
"No, I've got a ton of ration bars. It's not the food. It's that there's only—" Her ears burned so hot she had to take her hat off and put her face in her hands as she mumbled, "There's only one sleeping bag."