“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.
I held my icy hands to the warm air blasting from the vents for relief from the wind that howled through the open door. Even with the nearness of the last full moon, it took a while for Adam to change to his wolf. He staggered to four feet and swung his head in my direction, pinning his ears in disapproval.
Shut the door.
They weren’t really words. A werewolf’s mouth and throat aren’t shaped right for speaking. But I picked out his meaning anyway, and the bond carried his unhappiness that I’d sat shivering and wet when I could have shut the door and been toasty warm…though still wet.
“When you are done,” I told him.
He growled, but most of his attention was on the final, most painful parts of the change now. He’d blocked most of it, but I could feel the edge—like the bite of a dentist’s drill when the numbing agent wasn’t quite good enough.
It took another five minutes. Being away from the pack really had slowed his change down—or else he was saving his power in case we ran into trouble. He could have drawn from me, if he’d needed to, but he didn’t. He shook himself off at last, his fur—silver and black—blending into the storm. The Marrok’s older son, Samuel, was a white wolf. He’d have been invisible.
Adam gave the open door a pointed look.
I shut the door. Unlike a werewolf, I didn’t have supernatural healing abilities, so I put on the seat belt. When I drove the SUV over or into the side of a cliff, the seat belt might be useful.
Adam jumped the length of two cars to clear the cattle guard, which wasn’t any more pleasant to cross for a wolf than a cow. When he landed, he slid off an invisible bank. Presumably that meant that the road curved just past the cattle guard. I stopped before I got to him.
Rolling down the window, I said, “It’s not too late to drive back to Libby.”
He leaped out of the snow, shook himself off, and gave me a laughing look that displayed his many sharp white teeth. Tail sweeping the air, he crouched, shoulders nearly on the ground, and then danced off in a clear invitation to play.
“Alabama boy,” I told him. “This is winter. You don’t know what you’re messing with.”
He did, of course. He’d been born and raised in the South, but he’d spent some time in the Marrok’s pack. It had been before I was born, but it would take more than a few decades to make someone forget what real winter was like.
I could feel his laughter in our bond as I rolled the window back up and he turned to face the mountains. He threw his head back and howled, his challenge echoing through the night. When nothing answered him, he set off again, zigzagging across the road in a pattern designed to take him from one edge to the other while the SUV and I crawled along behind him.
When we left the flat ground and the road climbed in the narrow valley between two steep hills, the deep snowpack lessened, replaced by drifts I could mostly avoid. I got stuck once, but shifting into four-low got me out of it. I left the SUV downshifted; we weren’t going fast anyway.
I couldn’t see the road under my tires, but with less snow, the SUV bumped in ruts and over rocks. I was able to use the feel of the car to tell me where the road was. That was the good change. The bad change was that the wind increased and I could barely see Adam—his silver-and-black coat blended a little too well with the winter night, even though I’d turned on the SUV’s big spotlights and he was only a couple of car lengths ahead of me.
I could tell we were still winding our way through the bottom of the ravine, but any smaller visual cues were obscured by the night and the blowing snow. It felt as though we’d been traveling for hours and traversed a hundred miles. According to the SUV, we’d been driving for twenty minutes since crossing the cattle guard and had covered around three miles. I wished I’d thought to ask my helpful informant how far up this road my brother’s ranch was.
There was a very real possibility that we’d drive right past it and end up somewhere lost in the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. Adam had a sat phone, I reminded myself. If we got that lost, we could call for help. We weren’t too far from Aspen Creek, I could call—
I hit the brakes and the horn at the same time.
Adam stopped and turned to me. Driven by the need to keep him safe, I threw open the door of the SUV. I was on the road beside him when I realized I should have had Adam jump in the Sherwood-protected SUV and shut the doors instead of hopping out like an idiot. But it was too late to retreat now.
I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see him. But I could feel him, a dense mass hidden in the heart of the storm and the darkness. And the magic.
The wind stopped as if someone flipped a switch. Not the whole storm—I could hear that continuing around us. But in the ravine in which we stood, it simply stopped. All of the snow that had been whirling about fell abruptly, leaving the air crystal clear.
The sudden-fallen snow covered me, and it covered Adam in an inches-thick blanket. The amount of snow felt as though it was too much, even with as bad as the storm was. The consistency was wrong, too—it didn’t feel like snow. It was too heavy, too stiff. And I couldn’t feel any magic at all, anywhere, as if the weird snow insulated that part of my senses.
I could have laughed in the relief of it. Except that we were not alone and my feel for magic was the only way I had to understand what we might be facing.
Everything was still, the only sound the raging storm that surrounded our little pocket of calm. I stared in front of us where something huge—half again as big as the SUV—blocked the road. Like us, it was covered in the snow. Staring at it was like looking at a piece of furniture covered with a sheet—all the important details were missing. But it moved, so whatever it was, it was alive. Breathing.
Snow tickled my nose, I sneezed, and the snow blanket fell off me in unnaturally large pieces, like a clay-mold reverse of my body. When it hit the ground, it turned to powder, as if it had been normal snow all along.
Adam shook himself clear as well. I threaded my fingers into the ruff at the base of his neck. Both of us kept our attention on the mound of white.
Finally, the shape gave an avian, rattling shiver. Instead of breaking free of the thick white covering, it absorbed the snow and grew. It rose up and unfurled huge wings, oversized even for the bulk of the creature. The wings were odd, composed of giant, snowy feathers that melted and re-formed in a way that made my eyes hurt. Fully extended, the wings stretched—improbably—from one side of the ravine to the other.