It soon became clear that they were definitely stuck behind the snowplow.
Sam slowed to a crawl, trying to keep well back. He looked up at the sun, which would soon disappear behind the mountains. Winter days were short. He had told the lodge they would be there for check-in at three, but it was already past that. They’d taken forever to get going (the problem with travelingwith a teenager, no matter how meticulously he arranged things beforehand), and the roads were much worse than he had expected, so he’d driven carefully to avoid the risk of sliding or getting stuck.
Now they were going ten miles an hour, tops.
Sam reached into the drink holder and extracted his phone. “Could you see if we’ve got reception yet? I need to call the lodge and let them know we’re going to be late.”
“I don’t have bars.” Charlie was idly fiddling with the chain of her necklace with one hand and looking at her phone with the other.
Playing with the necklace was a nervous habit of hers when she was stressed; she worked the chain back and forth through her fingers. Sam had told her a hundred times not to do it so much, because if she wasn’t careful, she was going to break it. But he’d finally given up. She was old enough to know better, and if she ended up losing the one truly valuable thing she had of her mom’s, there was nothing he could do about it.
“Well, try my phone anyway; it’s a newer model and might have better reception.” Sam dangled it at her. “If we don’t let them know we’re late?—”
“Bad things will happen. Doom. Apocalypse.”
“The information packet said they won’t hold the rooms past eight p.m. without prior approval if there are guests waiting. And we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Charlie dutifully checked both phones and shook her head. “No luck. Emergency calls only, Dad. I don’t think this is a qualifying emergency.”
“Hold it up.”
“That totally doesn’t work,” Charlie said with an eyeroll. “Like there’s going to be cell reception two feet higher in this car.” But she held it up. “Still nothing.”
“Maybe the plow will turn off the road soon,” Sam said, striving for optimism.
Charlie opened a package of cookies.
The snowplow didn’t turn off.
By the time they made it to the lodge, it was long after dark. Sam was worried about having taken a wrong turn and even more worried about their room, and Charlie had resigned herself to her fate and slouched down in her seat to play a game on her phone, having eaten her way through two entire packages of cookies and a box of crackers and two bottles of Gatorade. (Shifting was energy intensive, shifting plus a teenage metabolism even more so.) But at last they drove into the parking lot of the lodge, which turned out to be nearly full.
From what Fawkes had said about the lodge, and Hester and Mauro had confirmed, they catered to an all-shifter clientele in the off season. Sam was rather nervously looking forward to it. He and Charlie had been to the lodge once before, for Fawkes and Leah’s wedding in the fall. But they had driven up for an overnight stay, left early the next morning, and hadn’t really had a chance to hang out with anyone or explore the area.
The drive had definitely felt a lot shorter on clear, dry roads.
Now they would have a chance to enjoy a few days in the company of their own kind. Sam had spent Charlie’s entire life impressing the need for caution on her; being an urban shifter meant constant vigilance. Now they were going to be in a place where they could potentially shift at any the time, anywhere. Even Sam hadn’t been able to relax that way in a long time. For Charlie, this would be the first opportunity in her young life to meet a lot of other shifters.
Possibly including teenage boy shifters, he thought with resignation.
And that was not to mention that he knew there was a known criminal in the lodge, whose good behavior he would be responsible for. A nonviolent criminal, which was the only circumstance in which he could imagine allowing his fourteen-year-old daughter near her, but still.
The number of cars both impressed and alarmed him. He hadn’t realized there were this many shifters in the state, let alone available for a holiday weekend in the mountains.
“There’s food here, right?” Charlie asked as he maneuvered the car into a parking space. “There’s gotta be a restaurant. I’m starving.”
“You ate your weight in Chips Ahoy and Wheat Thins on the way here,” Sam pointed out.
“I’m a growing goat. You’re lucky I didn’t eat the box.”
“Funny. Why don’t you run inside and let them know we’re here?”
Charlie bounced out of the car and dashed off toward the lodge, apparently taking “run inside” literally. Sam opened the trunk and got out Charlie’s backpack and his own suitcase.
The air was sharply chilly, the sky spangled with stars. It was very quiet. Serenity that settled over him like a calming blanket. Winter nights in the city had a special quality that Sam also loved, but this bone-deep stillness was something he had never experienced there.
Charlie came bounding back, her leaps carrying her across frozen puddles and patches of slush. “Don’t break an ankle!” Sam called. There was a lot of snow, more than down in the valley. He’d thought his old brown hiking shoes would be good enough, but the snow was already going over the tops. Charlie, in her shiny silver and purple snow boots that she had successfully argued for that fall (“My feet have gone up a whole size, Dad! Theother ones don’t fit!”) was faring much better, at least when she paid attention to where she put her feet.
“There’s nobody at the front desk, Dad,” Charlie announced when she got there, her breath huffing out in little steamy puffs.
