Chapter 9 #2
She rotated around and closed her eyes, and he felt tingling through him. Was that her magic? Could he sense it? Why couldn’t he sense any other witch’s magic?
“The fire has gone out. They’re even colder, but they don’t want to go out to get wood. They don’t know the blizzard’s over. It’s so weird. You said they’re in a silver mine, but it’s like a cave. The walls are all rough.”
He wished he could talk to her. Wolves could talk mind to mind.
It sounded like an old silver mine. No kid could sneak into the new shafts that modern equipment could dig, but these hills were littered with claims by people who blasted into the rock for a couple hundred feet, realized mining wasn’t that easy, and abandoned them.
They were often marked with rusted-out tin cans or buckets, which was an archaeologist’s dream and a tetanus nightmare.
He tried to think it really hard to her, like he would to another wolf, but he didn’t hold out hope.
She froze. “Argent picked the site of an old mine. Come on.”
He forced the wolf after her. It was walking more normally as it began to trust the physics of snowshoes. He contemplated her realization. Had she heard him or just jumped to the same conclusion he had?
They hiked away from the cabin up into the hills. Mateo wished the clouds would dissipate, because this was probably spectacular in the sunshine. Weirdly, he felt nostalgic for a place he’d only spent a couple of days, some of them fighting for his life.
They hiked for over an hour, though the wolf’s conception of time was pretty squishy, and he had no idea how far they were actually traveling.
The beast grew confident with its snowshoes, and it showed increasing interest in the world around them, especially because the forest came alive as the rest of the animal kingdom started digging out.
Neither he nor the wolf could really fathom this much wildness.
It made him ache for his beast, who was not tame but had nevertheless lost whatever wildness it had in the endless grid of the city.
Mateo didn’t know how he was going to get back on a plane at the end of the week and bring his wolf back to that. On the other hand, taking even this long away was absurd, and he could not rip his life apart for a witch.
She walked through the forest like she was born to it, automatically finding the firmest snow as it collected between trees from the direction of the wind, but avoiding the pits on the other side of each tree that sucked in feet.
Even though she consulted no GPS or map, she guided them surely with occasional glances at the cloud-filled sky.
They would hear the occasional rev of an engine or the shout of Search and Rescue teams, but every time he flicked an ear toward them, sure someone would come upon them, she would shake her head.
“Over a mile away.” Sound echoed weirdly around them, distorting distances and direction.
It was only when she stopped and his wolf almost ran into her, that he realized his wolf had happily been following her since they left the cabin. It was an alpha wolf; it didn’t follow anyone.
Who was this girl?
“We’re almost there,” she said, and proceeded with more caution as they came upon a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire on top.
The wolf almost gave up and let him shift. It did not do fences, especially not ones with barbed wire.
“This is why I hate magic sometimes,” Cat muttered.
He twisted around and cocked an ear at her.
She flinched. “I forgot you can hear everything. I just mean, when I left home intent on shaking some sense into them, the visions left out a blizzard and the need for bolt cutters.”
He shook his head vehemently, noticing the slight fizzle to the air along the wires.
He loped along the fence to look for a fuse box or something like it.
“I suppose we could do your trick with the dangling tree.”
His wolf immediately roared to volunteer.
We are not climbing a tree, he told the beast firmly. Visions of shifting, shimmying naked up pine trees that had remarkably smooth trunks for at least ten to fifteen feet, and then dangling on a limb to jump over an electric fence into god knew what…
We are not climbing a tree.
The wolf shook its head sadly, and Cat sighed. “No, I don’t suppose that would work. But we need to hurry.”
He nodded once and led her to a hut in the snow attached to the fence.
“We could call the company. But who knows where they actually live? They don’t mine here.”
This is going to hurt, he told himself, and his wolf whined.
Not you. Me.
He flowed back into his human form, trying to keep his weight even on the discs. He levered up gracefully but staggered off one of them and ended up barefoot deep in snow in the searing cold air.
“Told you,” he said.
“Oh, my god!” she said and rushed forward, pulling clothes out of the backpack.
Who the hell invented skin? What a ridiculous choice to go through life with. How did humans ever take over the Earth with this wimpy barrier?
He pulled on layer after layer and knew it would help eventually, but right now it was just adding freezing cloth to freezing skin. And somewhere, kids had put up with this for two days.
He stepped toward the abandoned guard hut and looked for a panel. He found what he was looking for on the back outside wall of the hut. He staggered toward it as snow poured into his borrowed boots. Clothes were the best solution they had to the whole skin problem, but they were also stupid.
He levered open the electrical panel.
“What are you doing?”
He examined the system. He had hoped for a simple on and off switch like a normal overflow in an apartment building or something, but no, they had to have a computer.
He cracked his knuckles. “Turning off the electricity.”
“Electricity!”
His fingers danced over the touchscreen, and he had to keep blowing on them because the screen stopped registering them as they got too cold.
Who decided this was the system for a silver mine in the mountains of Colorado? Even the owner of the mine would have trouble controlling his own security panel.
“How are you…”
“Almost there,” he said, dipping into the operating system to find the override codes.
“So when you said you worked in computer security…”
“I do.”
“What you actually mean is that you hack computers, right?”
He grinned at her. “Every good computer security expert is a hacker. You have to be better than the ones trying to get in.”
“I guess I’m glad you use your powers for good?”
He paused for a second and turned toward her. “You know I do, right?”
All of my powers.
“I’m beginning to figure that out.”
He turned back to the panel. “Besides, this isn’t really hacking. This is just running some diagnostics. The ability to override the alarm is usually built into the systems if you find the right––”
He hit the emergency override button, and there was a noticeable clunk from inside the guardhouse. He grinned and grabbed the fence.
“No, don’t!” she shouted, but nothing happened.
He turned back to the panel. “Unfortunately, there’s not a similar override for the gate, so…”
He examined where the fence was attached to the guardhouse and pulled on the first chain links nailed into the side of the wall until the fence peeled open like a sardine can.
Finally, he went back to the emergency panel to do the thing he really should have done first. He’d used the legitimate programming to cut off the electricity, but he wanted someone to know where they were. He reconnected the fence, which lit off every alarm it had since it was sitting in the snow.
“Come on,” he said, and helped her negotiate through the gap. On two legs, his little discs were completely inadequate, so he staggered after her.
They looked around; it wasn’t any different from the forest on the other side of the fence with sporadic pine trees draped in snow. They kept going until they reached a bit of logged ground with another hut at the edge.
She pivoted in a circle. “It wouldn’t be here. There’s no place to hide here. They’re in the ground.”
She took one uncertain step, caught the edge of her other snowshoe, and crashed into his chest. He put his arms around her, feeling the first shred of warmth since he’d changed forms. She gasped and opened her eyes but saw nothing.
He could feel the magic. He knew he had turned the fence off, but it felt like he was getting electrocuted.
She immediately turned toward the edge of the field and pointed a trembling finger. “There.”
They scrambled toward the edge when a voice said, “Freeze!”
Mateo was so happy he hadn’t changed back.
He lifted his arms carefully, knowing what law enforcement saw when they looked at him, but Cat just turned and growled. “So now you come.”
“Don’t move.”
“How did you know we were here?”
“Every alarm and the place is going off,” the man said. “There’s a huge cavalcade on the way.”
“Good!” Cat said. “The kids are here.”
“The missing teens? Where?”
“Over there,” Cat said and stepped toward the edge of the clearing.
Mateo was torn between going after her and turning back to the guy. “Do you have a satellite phone?”
“Of course.”
“Can I have it?”
“You’re going to be charged with trespassing, my dude, no!”
Mateo sighed. “We set off the alarms to get you to come save these kids. Just follow her.”
The man’s limbs were moving before his brain could protest, which was most humans’ reaction to an alpha werewolf, and it was just enough of a concession to keep Mateo sane and in his skin as he followed Cat, too.
She unerringly headed straight for the only hill within the fenceline. They’d built mostly on a flat spot between mountains, but the fence climbed up a little bit, and sure enough, there was a hole in the ground.
“Hello!” she shouted.
After an endless, heartbreaking pause, a feeble voice cried out, “Hello?”
“Hello!” Cat said and started digging at the entrance.
He eyed the snow above it with trepidation and tried to pull her away.
“Careful.”
“They’re in there!”
“We could have an avalanche.”
She scoffed. “Not with that much snow. You’ve got to have a whole mass ahead of it.”
“Oh.” He put learning a lot more about avalanches on his to-do list.
“The road still isn’t open,” the guy said as he stared at his sat phone. “It’s going to be hours yet.”
One pale young girl peeked her head out, and Cat held her arms out. “Eliza? You’re okay!”
“We ran out of fuel, and we’ve been debating what to do.” The girl twisted. “I told you we should stay put.”
“We were behind a fence. No one would’ve found us!”
“But they did!”
Mateo winced as he saw the skin of her wrist between her glove and her cuff. It was white gray. He glanced at Cat. “Now, can I call a helicopter?”
He held out a hand for the sat phone, and the guy put it into his without thinking.
He dialed his home, and one of his wolves picked up with a squawk. “We thought you were dead. Well, not dead. We thought you were in a snowbank somewhere.”
“Shut up. I need a helicopter.”
“What?”
“Not for me. We’ve got sick kids. Home in on this number and location and dispatch a bird, a hospital bird.” He turned to look at the girl. “How many are you?”
“Four,” Eliza and Cat said at the same time.
“Four people.”
“Will do.”
“You should call your family, too, ma’am,” the man said. “You’re Cat Griffin, right?”
She turned to him as she helped a boy out of the hole. “How did you know that?”
“Well, you’re missing too, as it were.”
Mateo held out the phone, and she made the call. She only managed to say hello before a gaggle of women’s voices drowned her out with their joy. Mateo took a deep breath. She was a witch. Of course she had a coven. That vague fact was academic until this moment.
More people shouted as the Search and Rescue team began to arrive. He was relieved they picked a mine where someone had logged a field into the side of the mountain. The other boy who emerged wasn’t doing as well; he was delirious, his eyes whirling in his head.
“It’s Noah. I can’t wake him up!” the last boy said as they pulled him away.
Cat dove into the mine.
“Cat, no, don’t!”
Some random idiot had dug this hole in the ground in the 1800s, and no one had messed with it since, and now she was in there. He couldn’t follow as a human because his shoulders would never fit past that hole. The wolf could do it, but he couldn’t shift in front of the increasingly large crowd.
Every sense was shrieking, and he was on the edge of shifting for five minutes until she backed out, heaving an unconscious kid, who looked the worst of all of them; his nose and face were blue in the cold.
When Mateo heard blades in the sky above, he pulled her to him and kissed her hard on the lips before dashing away to land the helicopters.