Epilogue
EPILOGUE
“Snow!” Doreen rolled out of bed, put her bare feet on the cabin floorboards and pulled them back with a wince as her toes curled with cold. But the sight of fat snowflakes drifting down past the window thrilled her. She slipped away from her warm nest under the covers, leaving Wick stirring sleepily, and pulled a soft, knitted blanket off the back of a chair to wrap around herself as she padded over to the window.
The weather had been hinting at snow for the last couple of weeks, as the white caps on the mountains crept lower with every cool, drizzly day. Whenever the sky cleared, the sun was warm but a sharp chill gripped the air, and more than once Doreen had awakened to frost in the yard of the cabin.
But this was it: the real thing, the first snow. The gray dawn light had a muted quality, reflected from a fine white layer blanketing the yard. Doreen didn’t even care that it was chilly enough in the cabin to see her breath. She stood gazing out until Wick joined her, barefoot and tousled in nothing but a pair of boxers. He put an arm around her and kissed her ear.
“You know, when I was a kid, we had a tradition,” he said, his voice a low rumble as she leaned against him. “When we had a snow day, Dad would let us sleep in and then make pancakes for Andy and me. What do you say to a breakfast of pancakes with homemade blackberry jam?”
Doreen’s stomach answered for her with a loud gurgle. She laughed. “I think the troops have spoken. Let me get the fire stirred up.”
Over the last month she had developed a deft hand with the wood stove, and she soon had the fire crackling merrily, filling the cabin with warmth to drive out the winter chill. Wick heated an old-fashioned iron griddle, and soon they were sitting down to stacks of golden pancakes, drenched in maple syrup, butter, and generous spoonfuls of jam from the small sealed jars that Wick kept in a set of crates in the cabin’s root cellar.
The root cellar had come as a surprise to Doreen. There was a trap door at the foot of the bed, and dug-out cold storage down a flight of steps. There was a winter’s supply of food down there: canned goods, sacks of potatoes and carrots and flour, boxes of crackers and coffee and tea.
She had helped Wick process some of it. He grew potatoes and a few other things in a garden on the sunny side of the valley, and now all of that was tucked away in the root cellar to keep them comfortably fed through the winter. With a good stock of durable supplies laid in, they would only need occasional trips to town for milk, butter, fresh fruit, and other perishables.
The cabin was slightly crowded now with her things and Wick’s, but Wick was already talking about building an addition—a sunny breakfast room that would give them both space to spread out their projects during the long winter.
After breakfast, Doreen put on her new snow boots and winter coat, acquired on her last trip to pack up the rest of her stuff and close out the apartment lease. Wick accompanied her, and they walked around the edge of the pond, checking that the electricity-generating equipment wasn’t icing up. Doreen paused to examine a set of tracks in the snow made by some sort of small creature, stitching their way across the pristine white carpet.
“Probably a squirrel,” Wick said, taking a look.
“Do you have any books on animal tracks?” Rather than stretching before her with the promise of tedium, a quiet snowed-in winter sounded lovely to her right now—full of opportunities to learn new things and ample time for all the projects she had been putting off.
“No, but we can order some.” Wick glanced up at the sky, where the clouds were breaking up, the sun showing in streaks of blue. “Weren’t we going up to the lodge this afternoon?”
“That’s right, Hester and Mauro wanted me to take a look at their snow vehicles before the freeze locks down.” The lodge had a snowmobile and a small tracked vehicle in one of its outbuildings, neither of them used in years since it had been closed in the winter for the past couple of seasons. “Can we even get up there? If the road is hard to drive in the rain, I imagine it’s terrifying when it freezes up.”
“We could walk or ski if you want the exercise, but we can also go the long way.”
Wick paused to throw a set of chains behind the truck’s seat—“In case we run into trouble”—and then they rumbled out of the yard, with the truck’s big engine blasting hot air from the vents. The “long way” was another logging track out of the valley, but this one went down instead of up, and joined the main road a little farther down the mountain. From there, it was a couple of turns to the road up to the lodge. The result was over an hour’s drive, slower under the current conditions, and Doreen could see why Wick normally preferred to take the shortcut when it was navigable.
By the time they got to the lodge, it was early afternoon and the snow was beginning to melt in the warm sun. When Doreen stepped down from the truck’s running board, she heard the soft plop of snow sliding off the pine trees around the lodge.
“Hello the lodge!” Wick called, swinging out of the driver’s side.
“Hello yourselves!” Mauro declared cheerfully, appearing from the direction of the woodshed. “I appreciate you coming up, although you didn’t have to. Rule number one of living in the mountains, Doreen, you might as well know—nobody’s going to blame you for a weather-related delay.”
“That’s fine. It was a beautiful drive with all the snow on the trees.” Doreen rubbed her hands together. “Show me the patient.” Remembering that Wick would have nothing to do, she turned to him. “You don’t have to stay. If you want to go back to the cabin, I can walk down, or spend the night at the lodge.”
Wick grinned, the once-rare expression sitting easily on his face. “I’ve got plenty to do here. I’m sure Mauro wouldn’t mind an extra pair of hands for clearing snow or working on the remodel project.”
“Are you kidding? If you want me to put you to work, all you have to do is say the word.” Mauro slapped him on the shoulder. “Let me show you to the equipment shed, Doreen, and then we’ll see what we can do to stop this lazy bum from lounging around the place. Hester is making molasses gingerbread cookies, by the way, in case you wanted something to look forward to afterwards.”
“Lazy bums still get cookies?” Wick asked with a spark of mischief in his eyes.
“They do if they work hard until then.”
“Don’t listen to him!” Hester called from the porch, appearing with a bundle of wood in her arms. “Cookies for all!” She vanished into the lodge.
Doreen spent a pleasant couple of hours with the lodge’s winter vehicles, cleaning and lubricating and tuning them up. A radio played in the shed, but she turned it low so that she could listen to the more appealing soundtrack of Mauro and Wick chatting and cheerfully crap-talking each other as they moved around doing outside chores.
They had vanished by the time she emerged from the shed, wiping her greasy hands on a shop towel. The snow was melting, to her regret, but dark clouds looming around the white-capped mountain peaks suggested that this was a temporary reprieve rather than a complete reversal of the weather.
The lodge smelled wonderfully of gingerbread and spices. Doreen found Hester reading by the window in the lounge, a plate of cookies and a glass of milk at her elbow, with a fire crackling in the big fieldstone fireplace.
“Save me from myself,” Hester said cheerfully, pushing the plate toward Doreen. “If you’d like milk, I can grab you a glass.”
“I would love it, but I can get it myself. Just tell me where to look.”
She was back from the kitchen shortly with a tall glass of milk, a perfect accompaniment to the warm, rich, meltingly soft cookies. Doreen curled her legs up on the couch in front of the windows.
“How are you settling in at Wick’s cabin?” Hester asked. “Dreading winter yet?”
“No, I’m looking forward to it. I have to say the timing was good on moving the last of my things up from my apartment last week, though. I wouldn’t want to try to navigate the roads right now, especially in the Camaro.” Her beloved muscle car was spending the winter tarped and tucked into a back corner of one of the lodge’s outbuildings. Come spring, she looked forward to putting it through its paces on the mountain roads, but for now, the truck was enough for both of them.
“And the cabin is working out fine. We were a little worried about getting everything to fit, but Wick is a master of tucking things into small spaces and making it look intentional. We’re talking about adding another room when the weather’s nice again, but honestly, right now I just want to den up for the winter. It must be my inner badger,” she added thoughtfully. “I’ve never been so aware of it before.”
“Mauro says that in some people, finding your mate can bring your inner animal out more strongly.” Hester thoughtfully toyed with a cookie before taking a bite. “It might have been that way with me a little bit. I grew up with human foster parents, so I never knew many shifters before moving here.”
“I’m half,” Doreen volunteered. “Shifter mom, human dad. It’s so wonderful to have a place that I can just be myself.”
“That’s our dream for this place, mine and Mauro’s. We’re still working on the details, but eventually we want this to be a place where all shifters can be free and safe, in a beautiful wild setting where our animals can be as free as we are.”
Doreen laughed. “That sounds like it should go on your website. Maybe minus the shifter part.”
Hester smiled back. “We’re hoping to be open again by Christmas. In fact, I think we might gear up for a big grand-reopening Christmas party.” Her pretty, round face grew more serious. “I’m glad you’ve decided to join us. I hope you’ll be happy here.”
“I think I can guarantee it.” Doreen twisted around as the door opened, and—as if summoned by her thoughts—Wick came in, stamping snow off his boots with Mauro behind him.
“Something smells amazing,” Mauro said. He leaned over the back of the couch to kiss Hester’s cheek. “Oh, it must be you.”
“I think it’s the cookies, but you can have some of those too,” Hester said archly. “Are you two staying for dinner?”
Doreen glanced at Wick, who had paused somewhat guiltily with a handful of cookies.
“We can if you want to,” Wick said. “But I think we probably ought to hit the road before dark, if we don’t intend to stay the night. It’s gonna be an ice rink out there when things freeze up, and it’s looking like more snow before morning.”
Doreen felt thrilled to her core at the thought of waking up to more falling snow, with Wick warm beside her and blankets piled on them in their own bed. “I think we’ll have some more cookies and head out, then. Honestly I don’t think I’ll be hungry for hours, the way I’ve been stuffing myself.”
But she still managed to pack away a few more cookies, and they left an hour or so later in a pink-and-gold winter evening with a plate of cookies for the road and promises for both households to visit each other for dinner in the near future.
They drove the long way back, with Doreen curled up on the seat, tired and happy. The sun had set when they pulled into the yard of the cabin, sunset’s colors still fading from the sky and the snow clouds beginning to smother the mountain.
“Definitely gonna snow before morning,” Wick said as they climbed down from the truck. “And this one might stick.”
“I can’t wait,” Doreen breathed. She inhaled deeply, smelling woodsmoke and the crisp scent of autumn leaves and the sharp, clear smell of the snow.
Already, it smelled like home.