Chapter 7
Mateo crafted four round disks out of extra clothes and tree branches.
At first, he tried to make them in the same square style as hers, until she reminded him that nature doesn’t really do squares.
The challenge of designing something that would be strong enough to hold his weight, large enough to diffuse it so he didn’t sink into the snow, and light enough to walk for a long distance was refreshing. It made his brain itch.
He solved a thousand puzzles a day. That was what the CEO job should really be called: puzzle solver.
Something went wrong, and somebody had to decide what to do about it.
But it was always other people’s problems: mostly screw-ups, cash flow, or competition.
There was something clean about pitting his strength against gravity.
They’d eaten rice and slightly crunchy beans for lunch, and then she’d immediately started on dinner. He suspected it was as much to give herself something to do as to make sure they were fed. He went back to his snowshoes, also spending more time on them than required.
She stopped every so often to poke the fire or throw on another log.
He couldn’t help thinking he was witnessing something primal, watching her make food from nothing.
He reminded himself that half his engineers were women, and this one could also survive in a blizzard, which apparently, he couldn’t, but he couldn’t shake his pleasure at the thought of her meal.
Between the smoke and the food, her scent faded, but never completely.
He still couldn’t get over how delicious she smelled or why his wolf was so drawn to a witch.
He had never heard of such a thing. Normally, the beast ignored human women.
It was barely interested in shifters, which was part of the problem.
Now he couldn’t turn his back on her for any length of time without the wolf poking at him and wanting to know she was safe.
Who are you? he wanted to ask her. Or more accurately, Who are you to me? But it was an unaskable question.
“Hey, look,” she said, leaning out the window.
It was only four, but it looked like the sun had set. There had been no sunset, not with the clouds in the sky; the light just leaked out of the world.
She opened the door and went out on the deck to look up. He followed her. The clouds were clearing, and there was a patch of brilliant stars above them.
It was bone-achingly cold. He knew it was probably just the contrast. He’d been wonderfully warm for twenty-four hours, but he couldn’t believe the temperature. His lungs hurt.
She shuddered and pushed him back inside and shut the door, wedging the box against it again.
“That is why we didn’t try to walk home today.” She rubbed her arms, and he stepped closer.
“Here, let me.” He rubbed her arms from her elbows to her shoulders vigorously. She stood quietly as his hand slowed, and they gazed at each other.
“Dinner is probably ready,” she said.
“Right.” He stepped back, and she went to pour the oatmeal into a bowl. They sat on the bed to eat.
“I suppose ground meat was too much to hope for,” he said and met her arched gaze. “This is delicious, thank you.”
“There was a can of chili, but…”
“It was out of date?”
“I don’t eat meat.”
He was unsure why he was surprised by that. “Oh, right. Sorry.”
Vague fantasies of bringing her home popped like a soap bubble.
The fact that she was a vegetarian was so far down the list of reasons why they were incompatible, it shouldn’t have mattered, but it was just such a visceral thing.
Visions of Nonna cooking up an enormous pot of meat sauce or a sizzling bistecca floated through his head.
He wasn’t sure if they were coming from him or his wolf. She would stand out like a sore thumb.
You can’t have her. You never could.
The porridge was filling and tasted good.
He helped her do the dishes and put the leftovers outside in the snow, and then they stared at each other in the increasingly dim light.
“I guess there’s nothing for it but to go to bed,” she said.
She does not mean what you think she means, he told himself sternly.
“It’s too dim to see the numbers on the cards, or I’d whoop you at poker,” he said to watch her eyes flare.
They did. “There are games you can play without counting cards. I know there are.”
“Why the hell would you want to?” he asked, genuinely trying to picture it. “What’s the point when you have even odds to win or lose?”
“I keep telling you,” she said, “you’re not playing the cards; you’re playing the other person.”
He scoffed. “Reading body language is a pseudoscience that has been debunked multiple times.”
“The best poker players in the world are going to disagree with you.”
“And that’s you, is it?” he said and immediately regretted it.
“Better than you if you take away the math brain!”
“Okay, Patchouli,” he said and sat down on the bed.
“I do not wear patchouli!”
“No, you embody patchouli.” He bit hard on his tongue to shut himself up. Antagonizing her was not what he was going for.
Fortunately, she burst out laughing.
He could barely see her in the dim light, even with shifter eyes, but she opened the stove door and the glow illuminated her face as she fed the fire. She was still smiling.
“We can probably hike out tomorrow,” she said, “if only to the road. The snowplows will be out now that it’s stopped, and we can hitch a ride into town.” She spoke to the fire, and he watched shadows dance along her cheekbones.
In the light, she looked like a woman out of time, not from the swinging sixties, but from the 1800s, a mysterious witch tending her magic.
“What’s going to happen next?” he asked, and she blinked and focused on him.
“I just told you?”
“What did you tell me?” Every thought had left his head.
She shut the stove, and he was blinded for a second.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in complete blackness.
In seconds, his eyes soaked in the dim light from the stars outside one window, but the world was still just shapes.
His wolf hated it. Was this what humans saw in the dark? No wonder they put lights everywhere.
“We hike out in the morning?” she said hesitantly.
“You haven’t used magic once.”
She chuckled. He felt more than saw her stand up and move toward him. “I have been the whole day. I’ve been getting flashes of snow, ice, and freezing. And a white light, but that’s probably something else coming.”
He frowned. “You don’t understand the visions you get?”
“Can we have this conversation in bed? It is freezing in here.”
It was far from freezing with a giant stove taking up half the room, but he wasn’t going to argue with her.
He felt something brush his thigh, and she shrieked as she tumbled into him. He ended up clutching her waist and one arm as he tried to steady her.
“Sorry! I thought you were a foot that way,” she said as she fell against him even as she tried to get away.
He flexed his fingers, and she said, “You have to let me go.”
The words landed like a blow. He knew she meant it literally, but it was also true in every other way.
Tomorrow morning, he had to let her go, leave this cabin, and disappear from her life forever.
He would go back to New York and try to find a shifter, magically rebaptized by an avalanche and renewed by a primal battle with hypothermia.
The prospect made him nauseous.
“Mateo?” she asked, quieter now, and he wrenched his hands away.
She rolled, and he heard her pulling at the covers on the bed.
He slid in after her and hissed at the frozen sheets as he settled on his side.
“I need something to gaze into to See,” she said, and for a second, he didn’t know what she was talking about and then remembered he had asked her what happens next.
“What, so you need a crystal ball?”
She laughed. “I need about a thousand, yeah.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, or something to scry into. Not every divination witch does, and not everyone prefers something clear. Some have completely made up their own thing or need nothing at all, but I’ve never understood either of those.
How can you look at muddy tea and See anything?
I’ve always needed clear things like water or a crystal.
But crystal cracks if you look at it wrong, so I have to save them up for really important questions. ”
“Do you do tarot?” he asked.
“What? No.”
There was emotion in her voice. “I’m sorry I asked?”
“No, it’s just that I know there’s a long tradition of that in Romania, but I was severed from any traditions we had before I was adopted.
My first memory is of an orphanage.” She sagged against the pillow.
“Maybe that’s why my magic is so limited?
If I’d learned more of my history or learned more tools to use, maybe I would be better at this, but I picked up a crystal ball because I first noticed visions in water, and another witch suggested that maybe crystal would work too. ”
He was horrified but knew he couldn’t say that. “That must have been, um, hard.” He cringed.
She sniffed. “It’s okay. I also maybe wouldn’t be as good as I am, I think?
Especially working for strangers. Most witches only get visions about their family, but since that was never an option, I can be of a lot more help to a lot more people.
And maybe if I’d had someone in my ear telling me it wasn’t possible, I would’ve been limited.
It’s not like we have one perfect future and the rest suck. ”
“I can see that.” He cringed again. His heart broke for her, but he could not say that, so he was pulling out all the meaningless platitudes he’d ever learned.