Page 4 of An Avalanche Hero Christmas

There was no coming back from this.

This was one emergency for which her MediPack was useless, she thought ruefully, unless she could somehow manage to create a parachute out of bandages at thirty thousand feet and falling.

She spun continually in midair, forced to take in the sight of her surroundings as she fell. She could see the plane above—or what was left of it—hurtling toward certain destruction, partially engulfed in flames. Scattered in the air, a couple of hundred feet above her, were dark specks she figured were the other passengers. As she tumbled, her gaze fell on the ground below her. It wasn’t the state of Nebraska, with buildings and roads and vehicles; it was a mountain, a behemoth of a mountain, to put it mildly. An expanse of whiteness spread before her, defined by jagged peaks and patches of forest.

Despite the panic that gripped her, Mallory somehow had the presence of mind to think that odd.Was she seeing things? She could’ve sworn they’d been flying over Nebraska.

It didn’t matter now, she told herself. Right now, her greatest priority was her survival. Survive first and assess the situation later. Nursing had taught her to cast her doubts and worries aside and face her tasks with utmost professionalism in order tosave as many lives as she could. And right now, it was she who needed saving.

The howling in her ears grew louder until she thought her eardrums might burst from the pressure. The mountain rushed up to meet her at breakneck speed. In a matter of moments, she would crash into it. Snow or not, there was no surviving a fall from this height unless there was something she could do to stop it.

But what?she found herself thinking.There’s nothing I can do. I’m just a fae nurse with a stupid fanny pack.

A fae nurse.

Then, something clicked inside her head. The next thing Mallory knew, she was ripping desperately at her clothes and struggling with the tiny buttons on her shirt.

She’d never imagined stripping in midair; she’d even obsessed over the possibility of having to rip her top off to make a tourniquet or clean a wound in an emergency. Well, thiswasan emergency. Her life was at stake.

The earth shot up toward her, almost a blur in her vision now. Desperation surged through her body. With barely half a minute to impact, she tugged her shirt off and unfurled her wings.

Fifteen seconds left…

Mallory hadn’t flown in a long time. In her defense, she hadn’t had the chance to, what with living in a city populated predominantly by humans who, if they knew what she was, would put her on the front page of the morning paper as Vegas’s latest attraction. Still, she was glad to have the wings as an option. Too bad she couldn’t say the same about all the other people on the plane.

Ten seconds…

What happened next was almost a blur. Mallory shrieked, or at least she could have sworn she did. She flapped her wings ashard as she could against the wind. Then she crashed into the snow, and everything went dark.

***

The freezing cold gathered around the edges of her consciousness, intense enough to rouse her from the depths of oblivion, intense enough to shut down her entire body.

“Ugh…” she groaned.

An image of nurses and doctors briskly ushering a gurney down a brightly lit corridor, their faces tight with ill-disguised disgust, swam through her half-conscious mind. Mallory dared to take a closer look at the patient on the gurney. It was an unclad woman with red hair, her arms dangling down the sides of the stretcher. And spread across the white sheet, mottled with blood, were a pair of wings.

A fae woman.

“No!” Mallory cried.

Her eyelids fluttered open to a sheet of white. Her first thought was that it was the same hospital corridor she’d just seen, but as the cold bit at her skin, the details trickled into her mind, accompanied by memories that spread through her consciousness like ripples in a pond.

She’d been on a plane to Chicago…the plane had come apart in midair…she’d been flung into nothingness, doomed to plummet to the earth…and she’d landed on this mountain. This snow-covered mountain that had appeared out of nowhere.

With a grunt, she pushed herself into a kneeling position. She was alive. Opening her wings at the last minute had broken her fall, but a dull ache filled her body. She glanced around. Sure enough, she was kneeling in the snow only a few feet away from a pile of jagged rocks. She’d landed in a valley, surrounded only by snow and rocks for the first thirty feet or so. Beyond that, to her left, was a grouping of trees. Looming ahead was a large, steep, snowy hill.

Get up,she instructed herself.

Almost mechanically, she pulled herself to her feet, her wings fluttering feebly behind her. She reached for her MediPack. It was still intact, somehow unaffected by her crash landing in the snow. Good. She’d opened her wings a few moments too late, but at least she’d managed to break her fall. A second later, and she would’ve broken much more.

Questions swirled through her half-groggy mind as she continued to gaze around. Where in the world was she? The Alps? No, too much snow. Mount Everest, then? Even more unlikely. Mallory struggled to understand what she was seeing, but like the misplaced pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, nothing fit together. Hadn’t they been flying over Nebraska just before the plane came apart? Mallory didn’t need a map of the US to know that something wasn’t quite right here.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” she muttered through chattering teeth.

She shivered, and she instinctively wrapped her wings around her torso, hugging her arms to her chest. It was not enough. The biting cold was relentless. Wherever the hell she’d landed, it clearly wasn’t survivable. The crash might not have killed her, but it was only a matter of time before her surroundings finished her off.

Calm down,she told herself.Breathe.

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