Chapter 2
SAM
“Parkour!!”
The cry echoed down the mountainside, ringing through the clear, cold air of a stunning winter day.
The sky was sapphire blue above steep peaks and pine trees covered in snow.
On this particular stretch of road, the hillside had been blasted to make a steep road cut, revealing a cross section of cliff that was raggedly patched with snow and cascades of ice from hidden springs.
Beneath a chill but diamond-brilliant midwinter sun, all that snow and ice was dazzling.
Sam had pulled over at the request of the one person he could never refuse, and now his SUV sat on the shoulder of the road, winter tires sunk in the snow, engine pinging quietly as it cooled.
Sam stood with his hands shoved in the pockets of his winter coat, wishing he’d thought to grab the knit cap from the backseat as he squinted up the cliff through his aviator shades.
“You sure about this, Charlie?” he called up.
“Yes, Dad,” the exasperated female voice echoed back down. “I’ve got this. I’ve done this a million times.”
“Never on anything this steep, though.”
“Bombs away!” was the only answer, and a moment later, a bundle of clothing tied together in a pink and silver girl’s coat came bouncing down the hillside. Sam sighed and scooped it up. Now she was naked in the below-freezing winter cold, so she’d better be right about this.
A moment later, she came into view, bouncing weightlessly from one ledge to the next.
His daughter was a leggy teenage mountain goat.
Her coat was white and fluffy as a sheep’s, except for occasional patches of gray where her baby fur was still shedding.
She was graceful and wild and shockingly fast, switching from rock to rock, from protruding ledge to clump of brush, with speed that dazzled him.
Then, in one awful instant, she hit a patch of ice and her foot skidded.
For an instant, her body twisted in midair, forty feet above the road. Sam caught himself in the act of taking a panicked step forward. Like he could do anything; his shift form would break a leg if it tried even a fraction of the things Charlie was doing. He couldn’t help her. He could only watch.
But she caught herself with flexible teenage grace, bounced off another ledge, and hurtled down the last stretch of the cliff in a weightless series of bounds. She hit the snow, leaped to the middle of the road as momentum carried her onward, and shifted back with one last delighted bounce.
“Did you see me! Did you see!”
“Everyone’s going to see you,” Sam said, tossing the bundle of clothes to her.
Charlie caught it; she had stellar hand-eye coordination, even as a human. “Brr! Cold!” She hopped from one bare foot to the other as she hastily shook out her coat and wrapped it around herself. “Did you take pictures, Dad?”
“What do you mean, take pictures? I was too busy holding your clothes and worrying about you breaking your neck.”
“Some super-sleuth you are!” Charlie declared, balancing on one foot as she tried to get her other bare foot into a boot without dropping the rest of her clothes.
“Could you get out of the middle of the road, please? I think I hear a car coming.”
“Spoilsport.” Charlie dashed across the road and threw open the back door of the SUV.
Muttering a litany of “Cold, cold, cold!” she flung herself into the backseat and pulled her clothes in after her.
There was some squirming and an occasional upthrust skinny arm or the flash of a flowered legging as she got dressed.
Sam strolled in a leisurely way back to the SUV as the low, distant rumble down the road became more audible. He knocked on the door. More squirming and then the window rolled down halfway. “What, Dad?”
“There’s definitely a vehicle coming. Sounds big. Are you decent?”
The squirming became more frantic. Meanwhile, a set of flashing yellow and blue lights appeared over the brow of the hill below them. By the time Charlie had finished dressing, the source of the rumbling engine pulled up alongside them. It was a snowplow, and it ground its way to a stop.
“You folks all right?” the operator called down from the cab.
“We’re fine!” Sam shouted up to him. “My daughter’s had a wardrobe malfunction, that’s all. We’ll be back on the road in a minute.”
“Dad!” came a yelp of deeply offended teenage dignity.
The snowplow operator waved, Sam waved back, and it lowered its blade and ground its way off with a deep scraping sound. They’d be following that the rest of the way, it looked like, Sam thought; just what this trip needed, another delay.
“Dad! What did you say that for? What do you think he thought, that I pooped my pants or something?”
“The best cover story is vague, yet implies it’s something that no one wants to ask questions about.”
“You’re so embarrassing.”
Sam decided to change the subject. “Just tell me you didn’t lose your mom’s necklace up there.”
“Good freaking grief on toast. I took it off before I got out of the car.” Charlie tangled her fingers in a sparkly chain and held it up. “See? Still got it.”
“Good job. If you’re done getting dressed, let’s get back on the road.” Sam checked his phone and tried, once more, to text the lodge and let them know that he and Charlie might be late. Once more, the mountains blocked reception and the text returned a sad failure message.
Charlie hopped into the front seat. “Let’s go, let’s go. Since you didn’t take pictures of me, I don’t even have anything for Instagram.”
“You were going to put pictures of your shift form on Instagram?”
“No, I was going to post pictures of a mountain goat I happened to see on the hills above the road. But now that’s not going to happen, so let’s go freeze to death in the middle of nowhere or whatever.”
Like she hadn’t just been running around naked in the snow. Sam suspected that for all her performative complaining about spending Christmas at the mountain lodge, his athletic, outdoorsy daughter was going to love it.
Even if there were way too many cliffs near the lodge for her to parkour down.
“Listen,” he said as he started the SUV.
“I’m fine with you doing what you just did with supervision.
” Well, fine wasn’t the word he’d use, but it wasn’t like he could stop her if she really wanted to, and having her do it with him watching was the lesser of two evils.
“But keep in mind we’re pretty far from civilization, and these mountains can be treacherous in ways you don’t expect.
Cell service is pretty spotty out here too.
So tell me before you go anywhere. And you’re gonna need the parental sign-off before you do anything like what you just did, okay? ”
“Way to turn this vacation into a joyless time-suck, Dad.”
“Didn’t I just let you run down a cliff naked?”
“Well ... okay.” She didn’t really have a good rebuttal for that. “But you always want to make rules for everything, and plan everything, and sometimes life just has to happen, you know?”
Sam felt a twinge that he knew was irrational.
This was the same thing as Charlie arguing that she definitely needed to stay up past her bedtime when she was younger, and he knew it.
You had to have rules and preparation in order to run a successful business while also single-parenting a kid, and he managed to do both very well, thanks.
He also knew that any attempt to engage with her arguments would just make her double down, so he said, “When we get there, we’ll ask about ski trails and see if we can find somewhere nice for you to parkour around on.
” He reached across to nudge her. “Hey, maybe there will be other mountain goat shifters, so you’ll have someone to parkour with. ”
Charlie brightened. “That’s right, it’s all shifters there, isn’t it?” She looked ahead curiously, then frowned as the cloud of snow raised by the plow came into view ahead, and Sam hit the brakes to slow down. “I hope we’re not stuck behind a snowplow the whole way.”
It soon became clear that they were definitely stuck behind the snowplow.
Sam slowed to a crawl, trying to keep well back.
He looked up at the sun, which would soon disappear behind the mountains.
Winter days were short. He had told the lodge they would be there for check-in at three, but it was already past that.
They’d taken forever to get going (the problem with traveling with a teenager, no matter how meticulously he arranged things beforehand), and the roads were much worse than he had expected, so he’d driven carefully to avoid the risk of sliding or getting stuck.
Now they were going ten miles an hour, tops.
Sam reached into the drink holder and extracted his phone. “Could you see if we’ve got reception yet? I need to call the lodge and let them know we’re going to be late.”
“I don’t have bars.” Charlie was idly fiddling with the chain of her necklace with one hand and looking at her phone with the other.
Playing with the necklace was a nervous habit of hers when she was stressed; she worked the chain back and forth through her fingers.
Sam had told her a hundred times not to do it so much, because if she wasn’t careful, she was going to break it.
But he’d finally given up. She was old enough to know better, and if she ended up losing the one truly valuable thing she had of her mom’s, there was nothing he could do about it.
“Well, try my phone anyway; it’s a newer model and might have better reception.” Sam dangled it at her. “If we don’t let them know we’re late—”
“Bad things will happen. Doom. Apocalypse.”
“The information packet said they won’t hold the rooms past eight p.m. without prior approval if there are guests waiting. And we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Charlie dutifully checked both phones and shook her head. “No luck. Emergency calls only, Dad. I don’t think this is a qualifying emergency.”
“Hold it up.”