Winter Lost

I moved to the midpoint in my line and waved Adam over. When the SUV stopped in front of me, bumper skimming the snow, I walked to the driver’s-side door instead of the passenger side.

Adam rolled the window down.

“We can’t follow a road we can’t see up the mountains without falling off the side of a cliff or into a creek,” I informed him, waving vaguely behind me at the path we needed to take, where, about a quarter of a mile away, the rugged foothills of the Cabinet Mountains rose. Between the blizzard and the night, they were almost invisible. “I think we need to go back to Libby and try this in the morning.”

My stomach hurt at the thought. My brother was caught in a trap, and I didn’t know when he was going to start thinking about a way to chew his foot off to get free. He was old, but I knew he wasn’t immortal.

Adam rolled the window back up, then got out of the SUV. He frowned ahead, then brushed the melting snow off the seat of my pants. He lifted me into his seat, which startled me by moving to adjust for the change in drivers without anyone pushing a button. I’d been hijacking Adam’s SUV enough that it recognized me. I needed to get my own daily driver.

“Take this.” Adam handed me his coat.

“What are you doing?”

Adam glanced up at the sky. There wasn’t anything to see, not in the middle of this storm. But Adam, his eyes already full of his wolf, knew where the moon was.

“We don’t know what we will be heading into,” I said. “My brother was on his own. The hot springs are supposed to be open now, but I don’t know if anyone actually lives there—and no one has been over this road in the time it took for more than a couple of feet of snow to fall. It makes more sense to turn around and come back in the morning.” The snow would still be here in the morning. “Maybe the spring.”

My brother would not last until spring. I wasn’t sure he would last a week.

Adam pulled his shirt off with less care than he’d used on his coat, and I could hear stitches give way. His knuckles were a little more defined when he gave me the shirt.

“Camping gear in the back of the SUV,” Adam’s wolf said. He breathed the frigid air with joy. “If we need it. I can find the road. Just follow me.”

In snow this deep, my coyote self would not sink to the ground. I could have run on top of the snow—but I couldn’t have been sure of the road. Adam’s wolf was nearly ten times heavier than a coyote and his paws were armed with large retractable claws that would dig down beneath the snow.

“We could drive back to Libby and bribe a snowplow,” I persisted.

“Spoilsport.” The wolf laughed, though Adam was still mostly human-shaped. “Don’t want to be trapped with me in a snowstorm?”

I rolled my eyes in a fashion his daughter had taught me. “Fine. When they shovel our frozen corpses out next spring, they can put ‘They thought it would be fun’ on our gravestone.” But inside, I was grateful. I needed to find Ymir’s brother and get him to release the spell on my brother—and the thought of retreat when we might be close to our goal felt like I was failing Gary.

Adam pulled off his boots without untying them. Rather than giving me his snowy boots, he tossed them over my shoulder into the back. His jeans ripped when he tried to unzip them with transforming hands now more suited to rending the flesh of his enemies than manipulating delicate things.

“I liked those jeans,” I told him sadly. “They hug your butt just right.”

He laughed again—though I knew that he had to be in a lot of pain already. “You can see my butt anytime you want, my love.”

I heaved a sigh as I took the wet shreds. “It’s not the same when you know I’m looking,” I told him, and tossed the mass over my shoulder, presumably on top of his boots. Maybe on top of my gloves, too.

I wasn’t as good at ignoring the cold as the wolves, though I did a lot better than they did in hot weather. I turned the vents toward me and activated the seat heater, but I left the door open as Adam changed. Closing the door on him felt too much like abandoning him to the storm.

Even if he had forgotten the magic that had tried to take me, I hadn’t. Adam was an Alpha werewolf, but he couldn’t feel magic like I could, even before the Soul Taker had had its way. Not that I could do much about any magic that came at us—but at least I could warn him if I felt it change.

The actual temperature wasn’t all that cold for a Montana winter. Seventeen degrees, the SUV said.

When the mountains got really cold, the skies were bright and clear because the air could hold no moisture at all. If it had been colder, every piece of fabric on me wouldn’t have been wet. I was wearing a coat, but my fall into the deep stuff had forced snow up the back of my coat.