Joy to the Squirrel (Fated Mountain Lodge #3)

1. Joy

JOY

Joy liked to think of herself as a pretty good winter driver, but she was slowly realizing there were a few things she should have had in order to drive this mountain road under these conditions. Such as four wheel drive and chains.

And possibly no peanut gallery in the passenger seat.

“We’re going to die,” her passenger announced, putting one hand over her eyes and clutching the passenger-side door grip as Joy once again grimly straightened out the steering wheel after the car slipped toward the snow-filled ditch. “Let me know when we’re on a straight stretch or dead, whichever comes first.” Peeking through her fingers, she shrieked, “Look out for that tree!”

“Not helping, Leah!” Joy snapped, after instinctively wrenching the wheel the other way and nearly sending them into the opposite ditch trying to avoid a tree that was nowhere near the road. “Give me useful information or shut up.”

“I did,” her sister said, reaching for the package of cheesy snack crackers tucked into the beverage holder. At the age of twenty-two, Leah still ate as if she had the metabolism of a sugar-addled five-year-old. And she was thin as a rail on top of it.

“Screaming ‘look out’ at random intervals isn’t helpful!” Joy retorted. She slowed to a crawl, but this seemed to make things worse because now she could feel her wheels sliding sideways, and sometimes backward, on every pothole and tilt in the road. At least when they were going faster, momentum carried them over the worst parts. Now she was intensely aware of how flat the road wasn’t.

“It’s not random, it’s whenever you almost kill us,” Leah said, shoving a handful of crackers in her mouth. Muffled, she added, “Would you like some?”

“I’m trying to drive!”

“I’ll feed you.”

“Do not feed me,” Joy said, navigating carefully around a tight turn on a steep incline. “The last time you tried to do that, I hit a pothole and you almost shoved a cracker up my nose.”

“The important word in that sentence is ‘almost.’”

“No, the important word is ‘don’t.’ Stop it!” Joy almost screamed, as Leah waved a handful of crackers in front of her face and nearly obscured what little view she had out of the snow-pelted windshield. “No crackers, no driving advice! Do you want to do this?”

She could have bitten her tongue as soon as the words were out of her mouth, because Leah slouched down a little in the passenger seat. Leah couldn’t drive, at least not without hand controls that neither of the sisters could afford for the car, and she was unable to walk unassisted. Her congenitally weak legs were bent and twisted from the hips down.

“I’m sorry,” Joy said after a minute.

“Me too.” Leah looked at her sideways. “Can I still navigate?”

“You can,” Joy sighed.

It was the deal they’d always had on long drives. Joy drove, and Leah navigated, with maps or GPS or just offering suggestions. Although it sometimes crossed the line into a serious case of backseat driving, Leah really only did that when she was tense and nervous. Joy knew that her sister was as tightly wound as Joy herself in the poor driving conditions, maybe more so, because she didn’t really have the option of walking for help if they got stuck.

That being said, pesky college-age little sister or not, Leah was an adult, not a kid. There was no reason why she couldn’t make herself useful.

“You know what you could do for me,” Joy said. “Check the stuff in the backseat and make sure it’s riding okay.”

Leah promptly unfastened her seatbelt and pushed herself up in a graceful twisting motion, hanging over the backseat. Her legs were weak, but her arms were made of steel from hauling herself around on forearm crutches all day long.

“Don’t do that!” Joy yelped.

“You said to check.” Leah was dangling over the seat back. Joy heard some rustling and a clack from Leah’s crutches rattling together where they were stuffed in the backseat with all the Tupperware. “Some of it looks like it slid off into the floor when we went over one of those potholes. I can get?—”

“No! Sit down!”

To make things worse, the seat belt monitor began to BING.

“I got it,” Leah said, doubled over the backseat. “It’s those cute Christmas tree cupcakes. I don’t want them to get broken.”

“I don’t care about the cupcakes, I care about being able to drive!”

BING BING BONG BONG BONG .

“There, I got it.” Leah dropped back into her seat and flashed her sister a quick smile while fumbling over her shoulder for the seatbelt. “All your cupcakes are back where they should be, all tasty and ready to feast on when we get to—LOOK OUT!”

This was a serious scream, not one of Leah’s half-real, half-performative yelps. Joy had taken her eyes off the road to look at her sister. Now she whipped her head around just in time to see a snow-laden, dangling branch about to collide with her windshield. She wrenched the wheel and the car whipped around in a shocking sideways spin. Before Joy could remember whether you were supposed to steer into a skid or against it, she felt the front wheels tip over something and then they weren’t moving, with the front of the car pointed crookedly at snow-covered trees.

There was a moment of silence, punctuated by a couple of clatters as the Tupperware containers that Leah had just rearranged in the backseat clattered into the footwell again.

“Sorry,” Leah said in a very tiny voice.

“Me too,” Joy sighed. Now that the worst had happened, she found calm taking over. She had always kept a pretty level head in a crisis. She had to, as the eight-year-older sister who had raised Leah to young adulthood. There was no luxury for losing her head when she’d basically become a parent to a teenager when barely out of her own teens.

She put the car in reverse and tried backing up. The wheels merely spun. She didn’t dare go forward, because she sensed that there was a steep ditch right below their bumper. At least they hadn’t gone into the ditch itself, or worse, off one of the hillsides that had occasionally offered them a glimpse of what were probably gorgeous mountain views when it wasn’t snowing.

“Can I do anything?” Leah asked.

Joy knew that her sister felt her disability most strongly at times like this. With a second driver in the car, they could have had one person steer while the other pushed. But Leah could neither operate the pedals nor effectively push.

“Just let me see what we’re dealing with first.” Joy reached into the backseat for her coat.

“If we have to walk for help, I can shift and ride in your pocket,” Leah suggested.

“If it comes to that, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. See if you can get reception on your phone.”

Joy had to struggle to open the door against snow, wind, and gravity, as the car was tilting downward toward Leah’s side. When she climbed out, a blast of cold wind struck her a withering blow, and her feet sank into snow that came halfway up her shins. Shivering, Joy put on her coat and then waded around the car to stand in the swerving ruts that their abrupt spin had carved through the snow on the road.

The car was severely tilted on the road shoulder with its nose pointed into the ditch. It looked like the tires were still in contact with the ground, but fresh, loose snow was preventing them from getting enough traction to back out.

Joy made her way around to the front again. She tried standing with one leg in the ditch and pushing on the nose of the car.

Shifters were stronger than normal humans, even a squirrel shifter like Joy. But all she could do was rock the car a little.

It would be handy to have a large shift form at times like this, she thought. A bear would be great. A moose would be better.

The driver’s window rolled down, and Leah leaned out, having apparently squirmed over from the passenger seat while Joy was out of the car. “I was thinking, I could use something to push the pedals, don’t you think? I can even just lay on my front and lean down and do the pedals with one hand and keep the other one on the steering wheel. I tried it, look.”

Without waiting for an answer, she threw herself facedown across the seats and wriggled a little as she felt her way around, one hand hooked over the steering wheel and her body arced to a seeming impossible angle. One of her short, inward-twisting legs was tangled in the gearshift, apparently holding her in place.

“See?” she said, a bit muffled with her face in the seat.

“You can’t see,” Joy said, leaning in the window to stop the cold wind from stinging her face. It wasn’t much of an improvement, because most of what she could see from this perspective was her sister’s ass.

“I don’t have to drive ,” came Leah’s muffled and impatient voice, facedown with a view of the floor. “I just need to do the pedals.”

Joy honestly couldn’t think of a better solution. “All right, let’s try it, but you’re going to have to feather it very carefully so if we do get unstuck, we don’t just shoot straight across into the other—” She straightened up hastily. “Wait a minute!”

“What? What?” Leah’s voice became less muffled as she propped herself up.

“Someone’s coming.”

Headlights strobed through the falling snow. It wasn’t dark yet, but the snowy day was dim in the usual way of a cloudy afternoon, so Joy saw the lights before she heard the throb of a powerful engine.

There was probably some risk of being hit, but she ran into the road anyway. “Hi!” she shouted, waving her arms. “Hi, whoever’s there, please stop! Help!”