Chapter 1 #2
Mateo’s wolf snarled and met the threat, even as his human heaved. There would be no stopping his wolf now. They struggled in the thick snow, and Mateo braced for the taste of iron and the endless regret of a killing blow.
As his wolf launched off its back legs, the ground went out from under them. In moments, solid ground didn’t exist at all.
The roar was like nothing he’d ever heard before. The closest sound in his memory was a building he’d razed in Queens. It roared as it collapsed in on itself. It was that sound crossed with a freight train.
As the world tilted, he got a look up the slope at a solid wall of snow heading right toward him.
He’d made a fundamental error. He’d looked down at the pile of rocks and thought they’d caused this blank stretch of mountain, but they were actually a symptom, not a cause, pushed down by the snow.
Oops.
The entire world went white. There was no gravity. There was no light. There was no air. There was no up or down, no chance to brace or save himself.
In the maelstrom, his brain came up with a memory of the only time in his childhood he had gone to Coney Island, and he’d ridden the spider that had tossed him around and around in the sky so far and so fast he had thrown up a hotdog, a funnel cake, a lemonade, and a turkey leg, and almost lost control and shifted in the middle of the park.
This was worse.
And then it was over.
Snow surrounded him. It was pitch black. There was pressure on every inch of him, so he still didn’t know which way was up or down, and he was running out of air.
She had sent him here to die.
She didn’t want to save the pack; she wanted to get rid of him.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, an objective voice said that he was already hallucinating and channeling his fight-or-flight response into recrimination and conspiracy.
You’ve aced at least one calculus test in your life; you can figure this out.
What the hell did math tests have to do with surviving in the wilderness? It turned out he shouldn’t have been attending MIT. He should have been taking every wilderness survival course he could find.
He had time to worry about what this was doing to his brain. Lack of oxygen destroyed brain cells after four minutes without years of breath training. He added underwater diving as a hole in his education.
A tiny voice in his head said, Your head is smaller than the wolf’s.
In seconds, he shifted and burrowed into a ball, immediately freezing. He hadn’t realized in his fur just how cold it was. He was already seeing spots.
He had to dig, but which way was up?
He still couldn’t tell.
Gravity is still on, a passionate voice in his brain said.
He groped for a tuft of hair on his forehead and let it fall.
It hit him in the face, which meant he was facing up, right?
He wasn’t sure, but he was out of time. He started digging like mad, fingers immediately blistering.
The snow was crystal hard and already packed.
But he was shifter-strong and desperate.
His hands were slowing down. He wasn’t going to make it.
There was not enough air. His muscles burned.
All of him burned. His eyes burned. His brain burned.
He was burning in freezing snow when he stopped digging and just launched off his legs desperately upwards and sprouted like a flower from the snow and gasped.
It was the sweetest breath he had ever taken in his life.
As his head cleared, he realized he was far from out of the woods. Literally.
The snow collapsed into the hole he’d made and packed around his body, and only his head and shoulders and one arm were free. He was even colder.
He dug, but every time he pushed snow away from himself, new snow from up the hill flooded to take its place.
He looked around wildly. He had to get some leverage. He realized he was nearly at the bottom where the snow had concentrated, stopped by the rocks. It meant it was even deeper, but he was also closer to the trees.
He spared one second to see if he could see the other wolf, but there was not a tip of a tail above the snow.
Instead of trying to get up and out of the snow, he started swimming through it sideways, pushing it away from in front of him and getting it behind him.
He saw his salvation ahead of him, which was great because he couldn’t feel most of his legs.
A tree had broken and was lying on top of the snow.
With the last of his strength, he got his hand around one of the top limbs and pulled as hard as he could, slithering onto the trunk like he really was swimming in water.
“Okay, we’re good,” he muttered, waiting for the sweet bliss of warm fur.
“Oh my god, are you okay?”
He froze and looked down to see a woman standing in the trees like a backwoods miracle.
Don’t do it, he told his wolf even as his frozen, chapped fingers struggled to keep hold of the bark.
He could not shift in front of a human.
She stepped closer, and his wolf froze for an entirely different reason.
Well, the good news was he’d found the source of the incredible scent.
The bad news was that he was naked, freezing, and human in a tree in the middle of an avalanche.