Chapter 3
Mateo could just see a pair of light eyes through the mask that covered her entire head. This close, the scent of musk and roses was overwhelming. He wanted to fold her into him and never let go, but he had a couple more important things to take care of first, like not freezing to death.
“I mean who?” she said. “Who are you?”
He blinked twice. “Can introductions wait until we’re anywhere else but here?”
“Right.”
His wolf, well-caged again, roared within him.
He knew that salvation lay a shift away, but that would mean leaving her, and he could not do it.
We’re going to be fine.
His clattering teeth gave lie to his reassurances, but he wrapped the space blanket around himself.
She examined him. “Hold on a sec.”
Then she took off her coat.
“No, don’t!”
His wolf roared again, incensed for a different reason. She could not risk herself.
“I’ll be fine,” she said and wrapped her coat around him.
She was half his size, especially in the shoulders, and there was no way it could fit, but she didn’t try to make it. She wrapped the coat around his shoulders and knotted the coat sleeves at his chest to keep the blanket closed. There was the barest hint of a suggestion of warmth.
She took out two little squares from her backpack and snapped them before tucking them in the pockets of her jacket. He felt little twin blooms of heat against his pecs, the part of him least likely to need heat.
He scrambled for them, wanting them in his hands, but she shook her head. “They’ll burn your skin. Just keep them close. You good?”
“Yep!”
Finally, she pulled out a pair of socks and hiking shoes. He did an awkward dance to shove his giant feet into them like a pair of slippers.
She laid the snowshoes next to her skis. “Can you step up?”
He levered one foot onto the tiny platform of plastic and cloth without much hope and stood up. It immediately sank a foot into the snow as he managed to get his other foot on the other one.
He teetered, and she shouted as she put her arms around him.
His brain short-circuited, and he felt a lot warmer, which he knew was a complete fiction. The draft from below was horrifying, sneaking in places that should not freeze. He felt and probably looked like a silver popsicle.
Shift, his wolf said with images of thousands of shifts they’d done before.
It made him dizzier for a second.
The snow was blowing everywhere, especially up the blanket, but at least his shoulders were warm?
She pulled off the mask, and he said, “No, don’t!”
She jammed a thick hat on her head and pulled the mask over his.
“You need it more.”
He would never need more protection than her, but he could not make himself open the blanket to pull it off, and without the searing wind in his face, he felt like he could take a breath without screaming.
“How are you not dead?” she asked as she surveyed her creation.
“Magic,” he said.
He’d meant it as a joke, but she froze. He was now selfishly happy that her face was not masked, because he could trace surprise in the lift of her cheekbones and her delicate mouth.
“Grit,” he said. “Can we?”
She nodded once and pushed her poles off to head back down the hill. He had no idea where she’d come from. Her ski tracks were already covered in snow.
He was worried he was going to lose her as visibility dropped, but she turned on a headlamp, and he trudged toward it like the light held the secrets of the universe.
He sank a foot with every step, and the only thing good about it was that even in the snow, his legs felt warm from the exertion. He felt like a massive lumbering monster next to a butterfly as she seemed to flit over the snow.
He got flashes of images of his giant paws. With his weight spread on four feet instead of two, walking would be easier.
He ignored the beast.
Every few minutes, she shouted back words like, “You’re doing great!”
They had the opposite effect to the one she intended, because he could hear the worry and desperation in her voice.
He hadn’t wandered that far away from civilization, right? They didn’t have that far to go. He had intended to do a loop of the town.
You didn’t know where in the hell you were going. They could be anywhere.
The wolf reared an insult.
I was talking to myself.
The wolf did not understand the distinction and insisted it knew exactly where it was.
Where is that?
The wolf shrank away, and Mateo swallowed. Even his beast didn’t think they were going to survive this.
He stopped feeling cold as he started to go numb, which relieved him for two seconds before he remembered that was what hypothermia felt like.
All he could feel were two twin dots of blazing heat on his chest. The snow got thicker, and soon he could neither hear nor see her, except for the circle of light.
He staggered into a drift, and her voice pierced the wind, “Stay awake!”
“I’m awake,” he said through gritted teeth.
“What was your favorite subject in school?” she said, staying near him this time, which he needed for reasons he didn’t want to look at too closely.
“Why?’
“Distraction.”
“With high school?”
“Favorite subject,” she insisted.
“Math.”
“Math,” she repeated like he’d mentioned cockroaches.
“Physics was okay,” he conceded.
“That is still math.”
“What was yours?”
“English literature.”
He shuddered. He wasn’t a huge fiction fan in general, though he read the occasional sci-fi novel if the author wasn’t an idiot. He could see even less point in reading fiction from long-dead authors.
“What’s your favorite book?” she asked.
He cycled through his English literature courses, trying to come up with the one that sucked the least. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“Sherlock Holmes. Okay.”
“It was hilarious!”
She blinked. “I don’t think it was a comedy? Isn’t that the one where a man was almost driven crazy by monstrous dogs?”
Right. “Hilariously good,” he said far too late, and staggered again.
“No, don’t fall asleep.”
Who could fall asleep half-naked in a blizzard?
“Do some math!” she said. “What’s 56×67?”
“3685,” he said in milliseconds. “I don’t think that’s going to keep me awake.”
“Wow, you really like math.”
“It’s just what my brain does.”
She navigated them around a tree, and he realized he shouldn’t walk near trees. They were like little snow sinks.
“Okay, what’s 1527×2547?” she asked.
That took an extra second. “3,889,269.”
“Whoa.”
“Added is 4074, subtracted is -1020, and divided is, um, .59 something. What’s your favorite book?” he asked because it seemed insanely unfair that he didn’t know.
“Oh, I could never choose!”
He stepped wrong and wrenched his knee, and she cried out.
“Top ten,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Frankenstein,” she said impulsively.
He blinked; he was expecting some Jane Austin shit. “Isn’t that the one with a monster?”
“He’s not a monster! Well, kind of. But Mary Shelley was completely brilliant. At that time, most villains were just evil, and most good people were just good, and she got into the psychology of a guy who wasn’t either.”
“Interesting,” he said, and it was, which was more than he could say for any English literature class he’d ever taken. Was he going to have to read Frankenstein?
He slogged through unexpectedly soft snow and kept going.
“What else?” she asked, panting. They were climbing now, and she didn’t have the breath for more. He desperately wanted to know the other nine books she would pick, but the wind stole his voice, and she didn’t give him any more math problems.
She got ahead of him again, until all he could see was her silhouette in the light of her flashlight.
He blinked in confusion. Wasn’t he supposed to not go toward the light?
That’s only when you’re dying, idiot.
It seemed to him very much like he was dying. Was this not what dying felt like?
He heard tinkling chimes.
Oh god, I’m hallucinating.
They came again, high, bright musical notes on the wind, though it wasn’t music. Just a cacophony.
He staggered to one knee, and she dove for him, blinding him with the light.
“You have to go on!”
“Do you hear bells?”
“Oh no, he’s delirious,” she said.
“You don’t hear them,” he said, profoundly disappointed.
“No! I don’t hear any bells.”
He shook his head, almost certain he was not hallucinating. “They’re not bells. They’re chimes.”
“Don’t go toward the light!” she said as her headlamp bobbed, and he laughed hysterically. All he could do was go toward the light.
There was a gust of wind and another cascade of notes.
He pointed to his right. “They came from the wind.”
“Don’t pay attention to the voices on the wind.”
They took a few more steps, and the tinkling notes ended with a crash. Her head jerked toward the sound.
“Wait,” she said.
“They stopped,” he said, feeling desolate.
“Is that where we are?” she asked.
He felt hope again when he heard more chimes, but much softer this time.
His brain finally put the picture together.
They were wind chimes. One had just crashed, but there was a small one still hanging.
People didn’t hang windchimes from random trees, right?
There had to be a cabin. They had to find it before the last one crashed.
She was apparently coming to the same conclusion and pointed her skis toward the sound, right into the teeth of the wind.
He followed her, finding a fresh surge of warmth somewhere within him, even though his feet were clumsy and not obeying him, and he crashed to his knees with almost every step.
If he hadn’t been a shifter, he’d have been dead in the snow a long time ago.
Only his wolf’s strength allowed him to pull the snowshoes out of the drifts.
Why hadn’t he eaten all the steaks left in the freezer before he started his little jaunt? Why hadn’t he brought some clothes along with him?
There was something else he could do. He didn’t have to suffer like this. It didn’t have to be so hard.
“This way!” She turned away from the sound, and he shook his head, desperate.
She nodded. “Sound is weird in the mountains. It’s funneling down this valley with the wind. The cabin’s this way. I know where we are.”
How could she know? There were no distinguishing marks, no trail. They were in the middle of a blizzard. He had to trust her. He had to trust her with his life.
No, salvation lay within him. This could all be over in a second.
He couldn’t remember why.
He was pretty sure he was full-on hallucinating now, because the snow was multicolored around him, and he could hear a wolf growling an inch from his ear.
He put one foot in front of the other, fell, levered back out, and did it again and again and again until they reached a flat piece of ground where there were no trees and the going was easier, because the wind had stolen away all the snow, and he was marching on solid ground.
She took off her skis and held them in both hands as she ran. Why was she running?
He ran after her, feet clumsy and slow. He was walking as much on his ankles as on the soles of his feet because he couldn’t really even control them anymore.
He fell to his hands and knees, and that was better.
And then, like a shipwreck out of the dark, a building rose within the circle of her headlamp, and they both screamed.
She jogged to the porch, staggered up snow-covered steps, and tried the door. Locked.
He made it moments after her and rammed into it.
It busted beneath his weight, and they both sprawled on the floor of a cabin. He could see a cheery bed made up in the corner, like someone just stepped out for a second.
He couldn’t get off the ground as she climbed to her feet and slammed the door.
He’d completely busted the lock, and she looked around for something to wedge against it. He pointed feebly to the bed, but she could never move it. It was the only furniture besides shelving units along two walls and a gigantic stove that took up a quarter of the room. There were no chairs.
She rummaged in the corner with shelves and pushed a box on the floor to the door and shoved it closed. The wind cut off like someone had changed the channel.
He was so hot.
Dimly, some part of his mind realized this was the next phase of hypothermia, but he couldn’t help feeling relieved.
She was talking to him. She was saying something important as she tore apart the shelves along the wall of the primitive kitchen, searching for… What? He didn’t need food.
Then she turned to the stove. Yes, he needed the stove.
Then she ran to the bed. He wanted to go to bed. What was she doing?
She pulled the quilt off of it and pushed it over him, but what would a cold piece of fabric do for a cold wolf against a cold floor?
Wolf?
He looked at the back of his hand. Why was it a hand?
He was a wolf!
Why was he freezing in his skin? What was he thinking?
The wolf within him roared in relief, and in moments, he was warm.
And she was screaming.