Winter Lost

I got up and examined the problem. Coagulating on the bedding was a gelatinous mound roughly the mass of a large watermelon, with what looked like a few bone fragments in it. A grayish stain that might have had green overtones in better light spread around the remains where the bedding had absorbed liquid.

“I don’t think that a washing machine is going to clean that bedspread,” I said. “The obvious answer is to chuck the whole mess outside where it can freeze.”

But when I tried to open them, the windows proved to be old, fragile, and frozen shut.

“How did you stop it?” Adam asked.

“It wasn’t me,” I told him. “It was that silver spider.”

He’d been heading over to help me with the window, but stopped at my words.

“I thought the spider was an enemy,” Adam said cautiously. “Why did it save us?”

That’s right. We’d gotten into a fight before I could tell him what I knew about the spider.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “She told me to change to coyote when it had me. Apparently, it is an obligate human predator. Foiled, it went for you. When I couldn’t stop it, the spider informed me that I was to repay her efforts with information and then dropped down on the hungry ghost and turned it into goo.”

“You bargained with her?” asked Adam, and not in the tones of someone admiring their spouse’s intelligence.

“The spider isn’t fae,” I said. “She didn’t wait for my consent, just made an assumptive close like a pushy salesperson.”

I shoved again at the window—which remained stubbornly in place.

“Are you going to keep staring at my butt or help me with this window?” I had no idea where he was looking, but I was done arguing with him for the day. Distracting him from the (hopefully harmless) bargain I’d made seemed like a good idea. “I can’t get enough force at the right angle, and if I keep going, I’m going to break it. Which seems stupid given there’s a blizzard going on outside.”

He patted my bare butt with an appreciative hand and a huff of a laugh. “Let me get the bedding bundled up and ready to go. That way we don’t have to leave the window open so long.”

Thanks to a waterproof cover, the mattress had escaped being destroyed, but the bedspread and the pretty quilt were toast. In a few quick moves he had everything in a neat bundle, the goo on the inside and the waterproof cover clean-side out. He set that on the floor and had the window open in a couple of wiggles and a crack that worried me.

“It’s just the ice,” he told me. “Nothing broke, but I have to hold this up. Can you—”

I grabbed the bundle of bedding and dropped it into the snow outside.

“What about the umbrella?” I asked.

“Chuck it.”

I did.

With the remains of the dead thing outside and the window closed again, the room smelled a lot better. It would be a while before it was pleasant again, though. The radiator rattled in an effort to bring the temperature back up.

“I didn’t think ghosts left a rotting corpse behind,” Adam said.

“Me, either,” I told him. “First time for me. I was able to bite it—sort of—when it was feeding off you.”

As soon as I said it, I felt my gorge rise, though there was no lingering taste in my mouth. But. Ugh. “Excuse me while I brush my teeth.”

I returned from the bathroom and contemplated the bare mattress.

“It’s still dark out,” I said. “But it feels like morning. Are we getting up?”

“It’s seven thirty or thereabouts,” Adam agreed. “Six thirty our time. We might as well get dressed.”

We’d had about five hours of sleep. I could function on five hours, but I wasn’t going to be happy about it. Adam was a machine. If he needed to, he could go days without sleep. That didn’t have much to do with being a werewolf—werewolves need sleep like anyone else. It had to do with being Adam.

I dressed in my only clean clothes. I hadn’t packed with the idea of getting snowed in. With the power out, I thought it was unlikely that the lodge would have a functioning laundry. I picked up yesterday’s wet clothes, rinsed them off, and hung them up to dry on the towel racks, the shower rod, and a couple of chair backs. There was no saving my jeans, so I tossed the remnants into the inadequate garbage can in the bathroom.

Adam had put on his clothes and taken a seat on the mattress. He watched me with a thoughtful expression. Drat. I’d given him time to think. I smoothed out my socks so they would dry without wrinkles—something I cared nothing about.

“We should check in with the pack,” I said, and hearing my own words I was suddenly concerned with doing just that. “Let them know we made it here and see how my brother is.”

“We can’t call out,” Adam said. “My sat phone isn’t finding reception.”

I stared at him. “I thought those things picked up signal in Antarctica.”

“I suspect that something is interfering,” he said. “The storm—”

“Or the frost giant,” I said. “We’re stuck in the dark until we make it out of here.”

“Yes.” My mate looked thoughtfully at me. “And that was a good distraction—or would be if I didn’t know you better.”