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“But I will blend in with the snowy surroundings.” He gave me a mischievous smile.
I laughed, then said fondly, “You never blend in, Sterling.”
He cupped my cheek with his hand and studied me for a long second. A narrow furrow formed between his brows. “Are you up to this?”
No? Not really? But I was the only one who could do it. There weren’t many options. “I’ll be fine. By the time anyone else knows I’m there, I’ll be gone. If I do get caught, I’m a female scout. I’ll get run off, but I won’t get hurt.”
“You have to take Hamid,” he said.
“That I am doing.” A human bodyguard was not a good look, but Hamid’s presence would keep a check on any tempers. I could also lie low in a motel room instead of fetching my own take-out and finding my own bush pilot, and he could ward off any human cretins. I did not want to advertise my presence in Fairbanks, and Hamid could make sure I was in and out as discreetly as possible.
I smiled at the scent of his worry. “This is politically precarious, but the FrostFur were never going to like us anyway.”
Sterling kissed me again, lingering this time. “Come back to me, Winter. Or I will come find you.”
Wait, What?
Fairbanks was exquisitely cold, and smelled of snow, pine, air. Not so many people, nor a clutter of cars and soot. I breathed in as I got off the plane but didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have. Fairbanks was dangerous. So many wolves in this part of Alaska that the city was barely neutral, and if I was spotted, it could blow everything to pieces.
Straight to the motel where I feasted on a breakfast of terrible delivery pizza and perched on a mushy hotel bed watching a sci-fi weekend movie marathon. It took a few phone calls to reach the airstrip. Finally, the wolf who ran the coffee “shop” and I had a brief conversation. Spring would meet me the next morning. Hamid needed to hurry up and find a bush pilot to take me out that way. Weather was coming in in a few days.
I’d told Hamid to make arrangements that kept my married name out of things as much as possible, and that things be discrete, but I could absolutely not travel under a fake name. I needed to keep my belly-crawling sneaking to a minimum, because it was likely the local wolves would spot me at some point.
That also meant no wandering around Fairbanks and inviting questions. All of this hinged on me not setting off alarms, and Spring not knowing about my father’s death or AmberHowl or really, much of anything. Given FrostFur’s isolation I gave myself fifty-fifty odds, and nobody needed to start making phone calls until I was long gone.
For a late lunch Hamid brought me a brown paper bag of white cartons. “I can find you healthier food, ma’am.”
“No, this is fine.” I peeled open the top carton. I’d only had take-out Chinese a few times in my life and had told Hamid to get me whatever. This seemed to be some sad strips of beef in a slimy brown sauce with reasonably fresh looking broccoli. The other carton was a spicy-smelling chicken in a reddish sauce, and the other was brown rice. More than edible.
“I’ve had difficulty finding a pilot willing to fly out to that airstrip,” he ventured.
“What kind of trouble? Weather isn’t coming in for a few days yet.” It was unseasonably clear and bright.
“Your family appears to be the problem. Plenty of pilots but once I tell them where we’re going, they’re not interested. Not even when told to name their price,” Hamid said, his tone dour.
I dug through the carton and separated the broccoli from the beef. The FrostFur weren’t the friendliest bunch. Feral wolves usually suffered humans on their territory out of necessity and no more.
“Tell me about your family.”
I fussed with my food another minute, then gave the usual party line when werewolves talked about ferals to humans. “Extreme sovereign-state isolationist types. They don’t want to live off the grid, they want to set it on fire.”
Not wholly true. Ferals like modern comforts. Indoor plumbing, hot water, and antibiotics. But prying human eyes meant more and more of us were driven farther out to have the life we wanted to lead.
“So what provokes the isolationism? Paranoia? Disapproval of government?” Hamid asked.
I worked a strip of the chewy, salty beef in my teeth. “Religion.”
“Religion,” he echoed with mild surprise.
If Hamid thought he could or should negotiate with any of the ferals, best to back him off that notion right quick. “Tell the pilots we’re not going farther than the airfield and we’ll only be there two hours, tops. They might think we’re crazy enough to want to ship into the actual camp. Trust me, I’m not that crazy.”
Hamid’s other questions went unasked, and he excused himself.
With about six hours to spare, Hamid finally located a bush pilot desperate enough to take us out to FrostFur.
Terry met us on the private side of the Fairbanks airport for the ninety minute flight. I carried four boxes of a dozen fresh doughnuts, a delicacy they wouldn’t have in the interior. Hungry wolves were grumpy wolves.
“So,” Terry said, “I guess there was a mix-up, because you don’t want to fly out that way.”
