Despite the full-blown blizzard whipping about him, Tom loved the chilled air, the snow, the wind, and the sound of it as it shook the mighty firs. Yet he wished he were curled up somewhere warm with Elizabeth, her blue-green eyes challenging him—very much alpha—while she’d pretended to be a beta. He couldn’t quit thinking about the way she had kissed him and then wanted him to go further, as if she’d hungered for more. He damn well wanted more with her. But she had been upset afterward. What had gone wrong? He should have sat down on the bed, gathered her in his arms, and flat out asked what the matter was, instead of allowing her to get away with saying that it was nothing.
She hadn’t returned one of his calls. He couldn’t figure her out. Maybe that’s why he was so hung up on her.
After a little while, the cabin he and his brothers kept in the mountains came into view. Though they were a close-knit family, sometimes having a little more privacy in a remote cabin appealed. Especially in a town like theirs, where no secrets stayed secrets for long.
Tom paused just outside the door, contemplating the meager woodpile, when the distant sound of an aircraft engine in trouble caught his ear. A sputtering, and then the engine completely cut out. Silence for a heartbeat. Then metal and tree branches ripped in discord and a muffled bang followed. He stared in the direction of the mountains hidden in the blinding snow.
No explosion, no flames shooting into the air or bleak, gray smoke curling up through the forest that he could see. Just silence.
He swore under his breath and charged into the cabin, slamming the door shut against the blizzard. He couldn’t search for survivors in the middle of a blizzard as a human. But he hated to think what would happen if he found someone still alive and they panicked when they saw him as a wolf. Still, he had no other choice if he was to locate anyone still alive.
After ditching his clothes in a rush, he stretched his arms out, his body warming with the advent of the change, accepting the transformation, and welcoming it. His muscles and bones reshaped. Fur covered his skin in a warm pelt. The double coat would protect him from the frigid elements. He raced across the floor and dove through the wolf door.
Outside, the white bleakness obscured everything in a ghostly way. Whoever had chosen to be foolhardy enough to fly in this weather was out of their mind. Rich folks flying about in expensive private jets to see the spectacular Rockies, perhaps? Probably decided on a whim to witness the snow-covered peaks. Or maybe they didn’t understand the air density at this altitude, mountain winds, navigating the ridges, the problems with radio communications, or even hypoxia, which could lead to altitude sickness up there. Or how suddenly a storm could move in.
The absence of the plane’s engine hum ground on his nerves. A number of people had survived airplane crashes in the mountains. But without a way to keep warm, the cold would kill them if the crash hadn’t.
If he found survivors who were near death, the only way he could save them was to bite them and share his lupus garou genetics. Darien would have a fit if Tom took it upon himself to make a life-or-death decision and turn a severely injured person or persons they knew nothing about.
Changing someone could prove disastrous. Some just couldn’t accept being turned. What if Darien told Tom that the new wolf was his problem if the wolf became real trouble? Tom didn’t want to save someone’s life only to have to eliminate him later if he went rogue. Not only that, but the human’s family had to be considered.
Tom focused on the sounds in the wind, trying to discern if he could hear anything in the direction that the plane had gone down. If the plane transmitted an SOS, search parties would begin combing the area, bringing more aircraft, people, media, and problems once the storm let up.
Tom dashed through the snowy woods in his wolf form. He thought he knew the general vicinity to investigate, but he sniffed the air, listening for any sounds that could direct him more precisely toward the crash site.
A sweep of metal tapped against a tree a long way off. He bounded toward the sound.
Gouges in tree trunks, broken branches, and needled twigs littering pristine snow warned of the plane’s fatal path as he continued north.
No sign of bodies or—A fresh depression in the snowbank caught his attention. He loped to the spot and peered into the indent in the snow. A gun.
The notion that the flight was way off course, carrying the crew and pleasure-seeking passengers to their deaths, became something else.
Who would have carried a gun aboard a flight? Even a private flight?
If they were government agents, the place would be crawling with rescue teams in short order.
Tom circled the area, listening. Sniffing the air, he didn’t smell any blood or humans as the wind swept through the trees. The piles of snow were stacked so high on branches that they blew over and landed with a plop. A brown hare bolted out of a pocket of snow, startling him. Then Tom spied a section of plane: the tail ripped from the body, probably by force of impact with the trees. It was tilted on its side and stuck between two partially shattered trees, grounded in the forest floor forever.
No bodies anywhere, though. No luggage, no personal effects, nothing. He twitched his ears back and forth, listening for the soft moans of human passengers who might have survived the crash, but he heard nothing new.
He continued to search, finding a seat cushion. Several hundred feet from that, he discovered a man’s mangled body, jeans ripped to shreds. He had a bearded face, shaggy blond hair, and the stare of death in his fathomless black eyes.
Tom discovered another body still belted to his seat, neck broken. Another man, maybe the navigator or copilot, was facedown in the snow. Tom nudged his nose under the man’s body and flipped him faceup. This one was packing—a knife in his belt, a gun in its holster—and his appearance was as scruffy as the other two.
Drug runners maybe? Unless the guy had been undercover, although he didn’t look like a government agent or cop type. But he looked… familiar. One of the men hassling Silva at the tavern?
Tom searched for a while longer but didn’t find anyone else. He didn’t know which situation he had feared more: finding no survivors or finding someone terribly injured.
The wind-driven snow covered everything in its path, giving the plane and its crew and passengers a cold, white burial. Deciding there was nothing else he could do, Tom bounded back the way he’d come, through the snowdrifts and past the tail of the plane embedded in the ground, intent on reaching his cabin… when he smelled blood. Coyote blood.
Elizabeth was sure she’d died and gone to hell.
Except it was far too cold for that. Pain shrieked through her head, her shoulders, back, legs. She touched her forehead and found her fingers red with blood. She didn’t think she’d broken anything, just had cuts and bruises. And just when she’d been feeling a hundred percent, too.
Beyond frustrated, she brushed her hair out of her eyes and surveyed the landscape. She couldn’t see the plane from her vantage point in a snowdrift at what looked like the bottom of a hill. The last thing she remembered was the sound of metal ripping away from the plane, but she didn’t remember the crash. She decided she must have been thrown from the tail before impact.
Her head pounded as if a jackhammer drilled into her skull, and she was freezing fast. Heat could kill a body deader than a stiff board, but cold… She knew she needed to move, but since she was walking in blizzard conditions with no visibility and no way to determine depth, she’d tumbled down a slope.
Cold, cold, cold!
As a wolf, she could protect herself from the bitter conditions. But as a human in handcuffs and dressed, she couldn’t shift.