Chapter 5 #2
She arranged them in a triangle and then lit a match from a container of tea and held it to the newspaper. She fed it more and more twigs and eventually put on a log.
He waited and waited, but nothing happened. The fire burned around the log as she had to feed it more and more kindling. “Did we get fireproof firewood?”
“It’s frozen and was probably wet before that. Right now, it’s drying out and defrosting. It’ll light. Physics works.”
He was about to protest that this had nothing to do with physics, but he supposed the conservation of energy did apply. Physicists mostly didn’t have to worry about how wet their source of energy was.
Finally, a cheery little flame no bigger than a candle licked up the log.
“Fire!” Cat said with her arms in the air. He just smiled.
She pulled at his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“Try it!”
“What?”
“Yell fire! We have made fire!”
“The manufacturing company that made that match made a fire.”
She wouldn’t let it go and pulled at both of his hands.
Finally, he let her lift them above his head. “Fire.”
“You would make a terrible caveman.”
He scrubbed at his jaw, now scruffy, and thought of the electric razor with four blades in his ensuite bathroom with a heated towel rack. “You have no idea.”
She grabbed a poker from a hook that he didn’t notice on the side of the stove and poked at the log until it collapsed and then fed one more from their stock.
“No wonder cave people never got anything done if they had to do this all day,” he commented and looked at their log pile, which had seemed like such a big armful.
“Oh hell no, they had it far worse. Do you know how much time that match just saved? Probably another hour, and the wood was already cut.”
He never considered a match an efficiency. Interesting.
“I’m going to get more wood,” he said and went out.
As he tramped through the snow, he thought of her snowshoes. He just needed something to redistribute his weight. He didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. They’d solved this problem a long time ago.
He grabbed the ax and hiked a little further toward the trees, trying to look for a smaller tree with flexible limbs.
It took him longer than he wanted. Everything seemed to in Colorado, but he finally returned to the cabin with an armful of branches.
When he stepped inside, his senses were assaulted not with her gorgeous, earthy smell, but with a spice cabinet unleashed. It smelled like dirt and potpourri, and not in a good way.
“What is that?” he asked, slightly horrified.
“Christmas isn’t for another month, my man,” she said, eyeing the branches.
He looked down. “I know?”
“We can’t burn any of those. Way too young, way too much smoke.”
“They’re not for burning.” He dropped them on the floor by the side of the bed. “I’m going to make snowshoes.”
“Have you ever done that before?”
He looked up at her. “No, but how hard could it be?”
“Right.”
“Can I borrow yours?”
She waved vaguely, and he picked one up from the door and then watched as she grabbed another packet of spice. He noticed there was a pot on the stove.
“Not another one!”
“I thought it would smell good and drive out the musk.”
“It smells like a hippie’s funeral in here.”
“These are just some nice warming spices.”
“Okay, Patchouli.”
She gasped in outrage. “This is not patchouli!”
“It’s just that shifters have super sensitive noses, and that is a lot.”
“Sorry, I didn’t even think.”
She took the pot off the stove and flung the contents into the snow.
“Careful!”
She came back inside and swung the door closed.
“Not to keep mentioning the wolf,” he said, and he really, really did not want to do that. “But I’m going to need food.”
In retrospect, tramping around the woods for branches was a pretty stupid waste of calories.
“No worries,” she said brightly, and then paused on her way to the kitchen. “What happens if you get too hungry?”
He clenched his teeth, not wanting to explain, but she should know. “I control who’s in charge and what form we take, but that gets harder to do when I’m hungry.”
“Got it.” She changed direction toward her backpack. She dug into it and tossed him a few bars. Then she dumped out the entire sack on the bed. “Just eat all of those.”
Her voice was casual, but he could sense her fear.
“Please take one yourself. And I don’t need all of them. I just need a normal amount of them.”
He unwrapped the first one he grabbed and bit into the chalky chocolate with relief.
“Well, at least we have plenty of water,” she muttered and went to the kitchen. She sorted through what she could find and held up a box in triumph. “Oatmeal!”
He desperately wanted to ask if there was something like beef jerky but bit his tongue.
She put the pot on the stove again, and he braced, but she didn’t head for the spices, just dug in the next box.
He wanted another bar.
“How long do you expect we’ll be here?”
She turned back to him. “Until it stops snowing.”
“What?”
“Search and Rescue won’t move until the storm has blown over, unless they know exactly where you are. It’s just not safe to go wandering. The storm could kick back up. It’ll probably blow over by tomorrow.”
He grabbed another bar.
He knew it was hunger making them taste so good, but he’d take it.
Several low-level alarms were slowly turning off.
Even last night, when she was tucked up in bed, he couldn’t distract himself from the fact that he was cold, hungry, thirsty, and hurting.
Now he was slowly warming; his blood sugar was rising, and he could smell her again and not chai tea gone wrong.
The desperate edge of survival bled away.
His fear was made worse by the fact that he didn’t know how to survive. He was completely dependent on her. He wouldn’t have ever found the wood, nor the ax to chop the wood. He would’ve probably pulled branches off the trees and stuffed them in the stove. Hell, he never would have found the stove.
He probably would have survived. He would have shifted if she hadn’t come and ridden out the storm that way. Then he remembered how cold it had gotten. Even fur was no defense from a howling blizzard, especially when he was injured and already exhausted.
But that didn’t happen. He had her instead. Watching her cook him breakfast roused something primal in him that was not polite or politically correct, and he realized he had a whole new hunger he had to control.