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“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.
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.
