Chapter 17 Sam
SAM
“She went out where?” Hester said, staring at him. Outside the windows, snow and wind lashed at the big panes of glass. “What is the matter with her?”
“Maggie knows what she’s doing,” Sam said. Urgency gnawed at him. “And I need to help her. We have to put a search team together.”
“Look, I understand why you’re worried,” Hester said. “But I don’t think having more people running around out there, in that weather, is going to improve the situation at all. I’ll contact the mountain search and rescue service, and they’ll send a team as soon as they can.”
“By when?” Sam retorted. “Tomorrow? What if they don’t have people or equipment available?”
“It’s still better than a bunch of untrained people sprinting off in all directions in the middle of a blizzard!”
She was right, and he knew it. More people going out in the storm just meant more potential victims of hypothermia and exposure, and more lost would-be rescuers for everyone else to find.
But the one thing he did know for sure was that he couldn’t sit here and wait, knowing that Charlie and Maggie were out there somewhere.
“I’ll go,” he said.
Hester looked exasperated. “I just told you why that’s a bad idea.”
“I know. But I think I can find Charlie. Or at least I have an idea what direction to go in. I need to talk to someone else first, but can you have Mauro get one of the snowmobiles ready for me?”
“This is a bad idea,” Hester said under her breath, but she went off to talk to her husband.
The power flickered several times as Sam searched for the people he needed to find.
Most of the guests were clustered in the lobby, watching the snow fall, or in the restaurant.
Eventually he located the moose shifter family at a big table in the restaurant, sipping cocoa and chatting while snow fell outside.
Sam introduced himself as Charlie’s dad and spread out one of the lodge’s trail maps on the table. “Can you guys show me where you went skiing with Charlie the other day? She thinks she might have lost a family keepsake on the trip.”
If his detective skills were good for one thing, let it be this: finding a missing kid in a storm.
They were happy to help, and soon he had a trail map with the ski route sketched out. The snowmobiles often shared trails with the skiers, but some of the ski trails went places the snowmobile couldn’t, so he could only hope he wouldn’t have too much trouble.
He left them with his thanks and took a detour to collect Maggie’s clothes into a plastic shopping bag; she was going to need those, if he could locate her.
Hester met him in the lobby. “This way,” she said quietly, and led him to an employees-only side door.
A snowmobile was parked just outside, idling, with its headlight beam cutting through the swirling snow. Mauro joined them at the door and handed Sam a heavy coat and a pair of snow pants. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
Sam shook his head. “No, not yet. I’d rather have you guys back here in case things get worse, not out in the storm with me.
Hester’s right, the more people running around out there, the more trouble we’re going to have.
And I’ve had experience with finding lost people, if not in this kind of conditions.
Can you make a copy of this? It shows you where I’m going to be. ”
He handed Hester the map, and she took some pictures with her phone, while Sam put the outside gear over the clothes he was wearing.
“It’s going to be disorienting out there,” Mauro told him. “The snowmobile has emergency equipment to spend the night if you need it. Stop often, and if you have any doubts at all, turn back or shelter in place.”
“I will,” Sam promised, knowing he was lying. He would come back with Maggie and Charlie, or not at all.
“Anything I can do?” Mauro asked.
“You’ve been a help already. If Hester hasn’t already called S fresh snow already covered the ground in an unbroken blanket, and it swirled down in front of the machine so he could only see about fifteen feet ahead.
But that was enough to drive in. After studying the map briefly, he put it away to keep it from getting wet.
He was pretty sure he knew which way to go.
Fifteen minutes later, he was not at all sure which way to go.
He had found the first trail without difficulty. The storm was less severe under the trees, the trail still visible even where it had drifted over by the straight, open pathway that it created through the forest.
But turnoffs were hard to see, as were the smaller ski trails that crisscrossed the woods. He thought he might already have missed the turn he’d meant to take. He squinted at the map, sheltering it with his hand. It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be soon.
After contemplating the map and what he saw in front of him, he decided to go forward to the next place he could turn around.
That was easier said than done. He came to a fork that didn’t seem to be on the map.
Maybe the other branch was a ski trail, or he wasn’t where he thought he was.
He turned the way that seemed to lead him deeper into the branching ski trails.
But now he was going uphill, the trees were sparser, and the trail was getting more deeply drifted.
The machine began to have trouble getting through the drifts.
Going slow enough to keep himself oriented, he was also in danger of getting stuck.
And finally, after nearly bogging down several times, it happened.
The machine sank into a drift he couldn’t get out of.
Forward and backward were equally impossible.
Looking behind him, Sam saw with a sinking heart that the situation behind him was just as bad.
Even if he could get unstuck, he wasn’t sure if he could make his way back or even find his way back across the heavily drifted trail in this higher, more open country.
The rational, sensible thing would be to stay with the machine and wait out the storm until someone found him. Sam had spent his life doing rational, sensible things. Going onward into the storm would be reckless, senseless, foolish—the opposite of everything he had tried to achieve in his life.
But going out here in the first place was reckless, too.
He gathered from the machine what emergency gear he could easily carry, tucked the bag with Maggie’s clothes under his coat, and set out.
The walking was terrible, and he quickly realized that with the snowdrifts, it was going to be just as difficult to find the trail on foot as on the snowmobile.
He had left the helmet with the machine, reasoning that he wouldn’t need it, but now he regretted it deeply as wind screamed in his face and snow blew down his collar.
When he stopped to consult the map, his efforts only impressed on him how little he could see and how lost he was.
Sam put away the map again and stood still.
Think it through, he told himself. Aside from staying with the machine, which would have been the most sensible choice—well, next to staying in the lodge in the first place—what else could he do?
He knew that going uphill would take him higher into the mountains.
Charlie probably hadn’t done that. She, too, would be trying to stay on trails she knew.
But how could he possibly find her?
Sam closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure why he did what he did next. It was pure instinct, like a voice from the irrational side of himself that he listened to rarely. But right now, he was willing to try anything that might work.
Maggie, Charlie, are you out there?
It wasn’t like they could hear him. He had never heard of shifter telepaths. And yet, the more he concentrated, the more it seemed to him that one direction did feel better, more hopeful, than the others.
So he went that way.
He stumbled onward through the storm. He soon lost track of where he was, even to the extent he had already known.
There was nothing rational, sensible, logical about what he was doing.
But he increasingly felt as if he was following a thread of something that was very real.
Hope, faith, instinct, maybe Maggie or Charlie contacting him in some way—whatever he was doing, it seemed to be working, because out of nowhere, a large structure loomed up in front of him.
He thought at first it was the lodge. But it was completely dark. Either the power had gone out, or he was somewhere else entirely. He thought probably the latter.
Stumbling, tired and half frozen, he felt his way around the structure. Was that a door? He reached for it.
But it opened under his hands.
He staggered inside.
“Sam?” said a stunned voice.
Maggie’s voice.
It was nearly dark, but he realized there was more than one pair of hands on him. Maggie and Charlie. Somehow, against all odds, he’d found them, and they had all found this place—wherever it was.
Sam half-fell against them, and then they were holding him, holding each other. He was safe in the arms of his daughter—and his mate.