Chapter 5
He was drowning in roses, and he never wanted to smell anything else again. She was perfect in his arms, the lithe, long lines of her slotting against him like she was made for him. He never wanted to leave this bed.
He also knew he was going to have to, and soon.
The morning light filtering through the one intact window was still far dimmer than it should have been.
Snow was still falling, but the gale-force winds had died off in the early hours of the morning.
It was insanely cold in the cabin, possibly more frigid than the night before.
Maybe that was because some of him was warm, but every breath hurt his lungs.
He could shift again, but she would stay exposed and in trouble, so they had to get a fire going.
Hunger was also becoming a deep, insistent drum in the background of all of his thoughts.
It was dangerous for a shifter to get this hungry.
She opened her eyes, and he met her blue gaze. In the dim of the cabin, it seemed to be the most intense color in his life. He hadn’t even sensed she had woken. He also never wanted to move again.
“Good morning,” she said, looking flushed and smiling, like they’d had a much more fun night than they did. He wished it were true. His own reaction to her surprised him, starting with that smell.
The smile faltered, and he quickly said, “Good morning.”
She shivered and burrowed into him. “We didn’t freeze to death.”
He blinked. “Were you worried about that?”
She shrugged. “I mean, not once we found the cabin, but depending on the weather…”
“I could have shifted.”
“No! It’s okay,” she said sharply and then forced a smile. “It’s okay.”
He hated to see her fear. “My wolf will never harm you. Not a single hair on your head.”
She burst out in hysterical laughter and then buried her face in the pillow. He wasn’t the best at people, but this was an odd reaction.
“That, um, wasn’t a joke?” he said.
“No. It’s the opposite of a joke, exactly and completely the total opposite,” she told the pillow.
“So can I ask why you’re laughing? Are you laughing?”
He wanted to pull her close again, but he didn’t have that right.
“You do know wolves killed witches for like, centuries, right? We have a whole treaty about it.”
He collapsed onto his pillow and stared up at the logs of the ceiling, amazed that there was no snow drifting onto them, given the quality of construction of this place. He had genuinely forgotten the entire history of shifters and witches.
“Does anyone know why?” he asked the ceiling.
She propped herself up on one elbow and finally looked at him again, her black hair a wild spill of silk against the sheets and his shoulder. He longed to run his hands through it.
“Why what?” she asked.
“Why the war started? Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I’m Cat.”
“Mateo,” he said as he started laughing.
“Why is that funny?”
“A cat and a wolf lay together in a storm.”
Cats and wolves never mixed. He didn’t know why that made him feel unaccountably depressed.
She licked her lips, and he couldn’t take it. Was she doing this on purpose? He didn’t think she was.
“Is it colder in here?” she asked, looking around, which also pulled her face away from him. He didn’t know if it was deliberate.
“Yes. Can we burn the shelves now?” he asked.
“We can’t burn someone else’s furniture! There has to be a woodpile around here somewhere.”
“So now we can go outside?”
She looked out the window. “Yeah.”
“But last night we couldn’t.”
She looked at him. “You were never a Boy Scout? Or, you know, spent time where there’s weather?”
“New York has weather! And I went to coding camp.”
She smirked and cleared her throat. “Coding camp? Like computers? You really do like math.”
For a second, he couldn’t fathom how she knew, before he remembered vague and desperate calculating in the snow. “Codes aren’t math. I mean, they are, but mostly they’re logic. If this—then this. Your whole computer is running off of if/then statements.”
“Hm, that’s not that different from what I do. I mean, it’s completely different, but that’s what my magic looks for, too.”
She’d lost him entirely. “You code with magic?”
“Oh, hell no.” She laughed, and he wondered what was funny again. He loved the “Is this a joke?” game so much.
“So do you use magic for your computer?” he asked, lost.
“I can barely type. Computers hate me.”
“Computers cannot hate. They don’t reason. They do exactly what you tell them to do.”
“Metaphorically speaking,” she said and dove back under the covers as she shouted, “So cold!”
“We have to leave the bed to fix that.”
She poked the tip of her nose out. “With my magic, I See into the future and ask: if this is happening, then what?”
He curled up all the way. “You look into the future.”
“I’m a divination witch.”
“It is impossible.”
She smirked. “You turn into a wolf, and you’re telling me a glimpse of tomorrow is impossible?”
“I just don’t know how it would work.” It broke his brain to think there could be any definitive glimpse of something that hadn’t happened yet.
“I can see only a couple of weeks. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen next year; it’s too far away. Things already have to be in motion for me to see how they play out.”
“But you do see.”
“I definitely See.”
He wanted to ask a dozen more questions. Was she ever wrong? Could she misinterpret? Did she see things and not understand, or did she always know what they meant? Was it like a movie or a metaphor?
He bit his tongue. He knew from experience that most people did not, in fact, enjoy interrogation as a form of casual conversation.
He took a deep breath. “So, leaving the bed?”
“Boots first,” she said as she launched out of bed. “Boots and then wood and then fire and then food.”
His wolf wrenched for the reins, ready to hunt, but he forced it down.
“Are you okay?” she asked when she saw him still frozen in bed.
“I’m fine.” He was in the woods with a beautiful woman and not dead in an avalanche. That felt really amazing. He leaped out of bed. “So cold!”
“I know!”
He retrieved the boots he’d found in a drawer the night before, along with a winter coat.
As he pulled them on, he looked around. “What do you think happened to this guy?”
She froze. “I think he had to leave,” she said with deceptive casualness.
“Did you know him?”
“Not well,” she said, and he knew there was a story in that sentence, but she was already heading for the door.
She opened it an inch and peered out.
“Terrified of Bigfoot?” he asked.
“More like the yeti.” She opened the door wide to reveal a two-foot-high drift. “No, reality is dangerous enough.”
She pushed snow away from the doorway, though some of it spilled in, and he stepped out after her.
The howling gale softened into steady snow that was still blowing a little sideways.
The light was dim, but the sun was clearly up, and he could see the field in front of the cabin.
The trees began about thirty feet away, heading up a hill.
One side of the meadow was bare grass, and the other side was a drift that almost came up to his head.
Fortunately, the cabin’s door was facing away from the hill so that the drift stopped at the back of the cabin, which was probably why the entrance was facing this direction.
His wolf longed to shift, but he shook his head. How about we don’t show her what we are again?
“Let’s check over there,” Cat said and pointed to a particularly deep drift near the trees.
“You mean where there’s more snow than anywhere else?”
She grinned and stomped off the porch in her snowshoes, making a path for him. It was probably too much to hope that the former occupant left snowshoes for someone his size just lying around.
“People often pile wood between two trees. It’s a natural box, so they’re not flying everywhere.”
“Why not put them near the house?”
She turned back. “And give a fire even more fuel?”
“Right.”
Even in the dead of winter, people were thinking about fires. It was not a world he had ever lived in.
She hiked closer to the drift, climbing it like a hill, digging her gloves into the snow to get purchase.
“Careful!”
She ignored him, knocked some of the snow off the top, and cried out with triumph. She stood up, brandishing a chunk of firewood like a sword.
He surged toward her, fighting visions of her hauling heavy wood, and cursed as he ran straight into something hard in the snow.
He brushed it off with freezing fingers and gave his own cry of triumph as he found a rusted ax stuck into a tree stump.
“He really did leave in a hurry,” he said as he examined it.
She tensed and tossed him the wood.
“Heads up,” she said as he slammed the ax back into the stump and caught it with shifter reflexes. “Sorry,” she added when he raised an eyebrow.
“Keep them coming.”
She did until he had a good armful and then grabbed a few herself before they trekked back inside.
He was going to suggest they try to make a run for civilization, but they’d been out for less than ten minutes, and he was already freezing. Snow covered them both, clinging to eyelashes and eyebrows. It made her look like an ice fairy.
She dumped the wood by the stove and jumped around. “It’s so cold! It’s so cold!”
“Well, we can fix that now, can’t we?” he said with a laugh. She headed to the spice rack for some reason, and he bent down and wrenched open the gigantic stove to add the wood.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What?”
“You’ve never made a fire in your life, have you?”
“No?”
“Not even at coding camp?”
“We had a fire!”
She crossed her arms with a grin.
He hunched. “It had a button in the fireplace in the main room.”
She cackled and scooted next to him. She took out the wood he’d added, then looked around with a grimace. She snapped her fingers and grabbed what he thought was a giant pot from under one counter. When she opened it, he saw a collection of newspapers and twigs.