Chapter 2 #2
“That totally doesn’t work,” Charlie said with an eyeroll. “Like there’s going to be cell reception two feet higher in this car.” But she held it up. “Still nothing.”
“Maybe the plow will turn off the road soon,” Sam said, striving for optimism.
Charlie opened a package of cookies.
The snowplow didn’t turn off.
By the time they made it to the lodge, it was long after dark.
Sam was worried about having taken a wrong turn and even more worried about their room, and Charlie had resigned herself to her fate and slouched down in her seat to play a game on her phone, having eaten her way through two entire packages of cookies and a box of crackers and two bottles of Gatorade.
(Shifting was energy intensive, shifting plus a teenage metabolism even more so.) But at last they drove into the parking lot of the lodge, which turned out to be nearly full.
From what Fawkes had said about the lodge, and Hester and Mauro had confirmed, they catered to an all-shifter clientele in the off season.
Sam was rather nervously looking forward to it.
He and Charlie had been to the lodge once before, for Fawkes and Leah’s wedding in the fall.
But they had driven up for an overnight stay, left early the next morning, and hadn’t really had a chance to hang out with anyone or explore the area.
The drive had definitely felt a lot shorter on clear, dry roads.
Now they would have a chance to enjoy a few days in the company of their own kind.
Sam had spent Charlie’s entire life impressing the need for caution on her; being an urban shifter meant constant vigilance.
Now they were going to be in a place where they could potentially shift at any the time, anywhere.
Even Sam hadn’t been able to relax that way in a long time.
For Charlie, this would be the first opportunity in her young life to meet a lot of other shifters.
Possibly including teenage boy shifters, he thought with resignation.
And that was not to mention that he knew there was a known criminal in the lodge, whose good behavior he would be responsible for. A nonviolent criminal, which was the only circumstance in which he could imagine allowing his fourteen-year-old daughter near her, but still.
The number of cars both impressed and alarmed him. He hadn’t realized there were this many shifters in the state, let alone available for a holiday weekend in the mountains.
“There’s food here, right?” Charlie asked as he maneuvered the car into a parking space. “There’s gotta be a restaurant. I’m starving.”
“You ate your weight in Chips Ahoy and Wheat Thins on the way here,” Sam pointed out.
“I’m a growing goat. You’re lucky I didn’t eat the box.”
“Funny. Why don’t you run inside and let them know we’re here?”
Charlie bounced out of the car and dashed off toward the lodge, apparently taking “run inside” literally. Sam opened the trunk and got out Charlie’s backpack and his own suitcase.
The air was sharply chilly, the sky spangled with stars. It was very quiet. Serenity that settled over him like a calming blanket. Winter nights in the city had a special quality that Sam also loved, but this bone-deep stillness was something he had never experienced there.
Charlie came bounding back, her leaps carrying her across frozen puddles and patches of slush.
“Don’t break an ankle!” Sam called. There was a lot of snow, more than down in the valley.
He’d thought his old brown hiking shoes would be good enough, but the snow was already going over the tops.
Charlie, in her shiny silver and purple snow boots that she had successfully argued for that fall (“My feet have gone up a whole size, Dad! The other ones don’t fit!
”) was faring much better, at least when she paid attention to where she put her feet.
“There’s nobody at the front desk, Dad,” Charlie announced when she got there, her breath huffing out in little steamy puffs.
Sam handed her backpack to her. “Did you look around?”
“I wanted to tell you first.” As she slung the backpack strap over her shoulder, Charlie gazed around. “Oh, that’s pretty.” High praise coming from a teen.
Sam thought it was gorgeous. The trees around the lodge were draped in Christmas lights, a dazzling variety of colors, from multicolored ones to blue and white to golden fairy lights. It lit up the woods like a magical forest.
“Is that Orion?” Charlie asked, pointing at the sky.
“Yeah. And there’s Sirius.” He pointed higher. “The Big Dipper and the North Star.”
“Cool.”
“Come on, Galileo, let’s go check in.”
“What are we going to do if they gave our rooms away?” Charlie asked, following him closely.
“We’ll be fine. Even if we don’t get the double we booked, there’s bound to be something. Watch the ice there.”
They went up the steps to the front of the lodge. It was even later than Sam had realized. The lobby was mostly deserted, with the lights dimmed and just a few people hanging out in front of the fireplace. As Charlie had reported, there was no one at the desk.
“Hello?” Sam called. The most likely place to find someone who worked here seemed to be the group in front of the fire, which looked like a few separate couples and singles, and one man crouched in front of the fire, doing something with a poker.
Was that a real fire, with logs? It seemed to be.
“Hi, do you know if someone here could help us?”
The man with the poker looked up. “Well, I hope I can.” He jumped to his feet and set the poker aside. He had a friendly grin, a mop of dark hair, and an easy manner as he shook Sam’s hand. “Mauro. I’m the co-owner.”
“Oh right, we talked on the phone. Sam Grange. This is my daughter Charlie.”
Charlie gave a little wave.
“Sam and Charlie?” Mauro’s easy smile dropped away. “We had an overbooking situation. I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”
“We had a reservation.”
“I know, but we let rooms go at eight if the booking party hasn’t contacted us to let us know about a late check-in. Hester was supposed to call you.”
“We didn’t get it,” Sam said impatiently, annoyed with himself as much as them. “We couldn’t contact you. There was no cell reception once we got into the mountains. Is it really full already?”
“I’m sorry. We filled the room about an hour ago.”
“Dad, what are we going to do?” Charlie whispered loudly. “We can’t just drive back to the city tonight, can we?”
“We’ll be fine, hon. They’ll find somewhere to put us.” He hoped.
“I’m so sorry. This is our screw-up, and we’ll make it right. I’m sure we can find something.” Mauro flagged down a passing woman in a hotel uniform, carrying a stack of towels. “Orla, the heat’s still out in 209, isn’t it?”
“Sorry, it is. But if a single is all right, I think 230 had a cancellation earlier.”
Mauro snapped his fingers. “That’s right, it did. We do have a room open, and it’s a doozy. It’s the honeymoon suite. There’s just one bed, but we can rummage up a cot.”
“Honeymoon suite?” Charlie repeated. She glanced at her dad. “Uh ...”
“There’s nothing inappropriate about it,” Mauro explained with a grin. “It’s just a big room. Tomorrow we’ll see about finding you a double like you asked for.”
“Sound good, hon?” Sam asked her. “I mean, it beats sleeping in the car, right?”
Charlie shrugged.
“Huh, that’s weird. There are supposed to be two keys.” Mauro rummaged behind the check-in desk and held up a key with a heart-shaped head. “I’ll check with Housekeeping and see if it was misfiled. You and your daughter will have to share a key for now.”
Sam passed off the key to Charlie, who examined it with a fascinated expression. It was an old-fashioned brass key with a long barrel and several prongs at one end, and the wrought heart at the other. “This doesn’t look very secure,” was her pronouncement.
“Fated Mountain Lodge is very safe. You don’t have to worry.”
“Let me have the key back, kid,” Sam told her. “Trade you for the car keys. Go and grab our water bottles out of the car so they don’t freeze, and I’ll take our luggage up to the room.”
It would be nice if Charlie was a little more enthusiastic, but he figured that once she experienced the outdoors and the company of other shifters, his daughter would settle down a little.
Fawkes had said their surveillance target, this kleptomaniac shifter Maggie, wasn’t too much trouble; they were just there at the behest of Mauro and Hester in case anything went wrong.
And he was looking forward to seeing the honeymoon suite and finding out what it was like.
This weekend was looking up already.