Page 67 of Winter Lost

When Adam stood up, I knew we’d be doing it, too. I was a shapeshifter—nakedness didn’t bother me. All of my reluctance was temperature-based.

Adam frowned at me. “Are your clothes still wet, Mercy?”

There was a bite in his voice that I ignored.

“What happens after we are all toasty and have to get up and run for cover?” I asked, fumbling with the zipper of my coat.

“You can run pretty fast,” Adam said. “I noticed that when I was courting you.”

His words were teasing, but his mouth was tight as he brushed aside my hands, which were being pretty fumbly. Sitting out here talking had made me colder than I had realized. My jeans wanted to cling—and Adam ripped them down both outside seams.

“Hey,” I protested, stepping out of the pile of rags that used to be my pants. “You werewolves might destroy clothes on a daily basis because they get in your way, but I’ve had those jeans for years. They have good pockets.”

I expected him to make some quip like the ones I’d made when he’d ripped his own jeans.

Instead, he said, “You need to warm up, and they were in the way of that.” He picked me up and pulled my boots off. One sock came off with the boot, but the other one stayed on.

His voice was biting when he said, “Before God, Mercy. Were you going to wait until your toes fell off?”

I took a good look at my bare foot. “That’s not—”

I was still wearing my T-shirt, bra, underwear, and one sock when he strode to one of the steaming tubs and dropped me in. When my cold extremities hit the hot water, I made a sound I wasn’t proud of and instinctively tried to hop out. He put his hands on my shoulders and kept me there. Only when I quit struggling did he start to take off his own clothes so he could climb in, too.

“—not frostbite.” I completed my sentence once my brain was functioning past the pain. “Which is good, because you aren’t supposed to stick frostbitten toes in boiling water.”

My toes ached all the way up to my knees, and I bounced my legs, trying to defer the familiar pain of flesh warming up to normal temperature, while I struggled to remove the last of my wet clothing with fingers that burned from the sudden warm-up. The utter agony of the process told me that Adam’s diagnosis of frostbite hadn’t been that far off.

He was right to be angry. I’d been stupid. I knew better than to stay wet in this kind of cold. I wasn’t a werewolf or vampire, and I couldn’t judge my endurance by theirs.

He should have been angry at me—but he wasn’t. He was angry at himself. I’d scared Adam. He counted on me to take care of myself, to draw boundaries with him and the pack so neither of them put me in a situation I couldn’t handle.

The hot tub Adam had chosen could have fit maybe eight people comfortably, more if they were good friends. It had enough space that we three predators could share it for a time. Elyna had climbed into the far side sometime when I wasn’t paying attention. Adam climbed in next to me.

“You,” he said, “warm up a bit while I tell our new friend what we’re doing here.”

I sank lower in the water, closed my eyes, and drifted for a moment. The ache of my feet and hands subsided as Adam’s voice rumbled beside me.

Elyna’s voice got a little shrill now and then. She knew what frost giants were, but not that they weren’t figments of Norse mythology. It is always an uncomfortable adjustment when the rules of the world get rewritten over the course of a conversation. But Elyna’s problems weren’t mine.

When he finished speaking, we all soaked for a little more and listened to the hissing as the storm met the waters of the lake.

“There’s a piano here,” Elyna said, “and one of the staff members has a guitar she’s learning to play. But I haven’t heard any harp music. Do you know what it looks like?”

“He said we’d know it when we saw it,” I offered. “Silver with blue gemstone inlay. Not crystallized stone, but turquoise shaped to fit. A pair of wolves on the ends of the arms—or yoke.”

I had a sudden thought and sat up a little straighter before ducking back down to keep my shoulders in the water. “He called it a harp. But now that I think about his description, it sounds more like a lyre”—I made a yoke shape with my hands and then a straight horizontal line across the imaginary top—“than a harp.” I swooped my hands in the graceful fall a harp makes as the strings vary from the deep-toned long strings to the shorter, higher-pitched ones.

“A woman’s face at the base,” Adam added, “with gemstone eyes.”

“I’ll ask Jack,” she said. “He’s not…reliable about things like that. But it would be stupid not to put in a request.”

“Tell us about the people trapped here with us,” Adam said.

—

About twenty minutes later, wrapped in the big fluffy robes and carrying our wet and frozen clothes, including the rags left of my jeans, Adam and I made our way back to our room.

Adam had chosen one on the corner of the first floor. It had windows on the north and the west walls, and shared only one wall with another room—and that room was empty. The windows were original to the lodge, which meant that the room was a little breezy, though the hot spring–fed radiator had no trouble keeping it plenty warm.

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