It took me and Ian two full days and a whole case of beer to get it all up and working, but when Nate and Arik stoodthere with their shoulders bumping and their heads practically touching as they leaned in to mutter to each other, both of them gazing up at it like the children they’d never really had the chance to be—one had me as his only parental figure, gods help him, and the other had Jonathan Hawthorne, evil warlock extraordinaire—it was more than worth it.
The pain of all my torn muscles and joints had already faded mostly away, but I didn’t get up. I actually loved sitting in the snow. The modifications made to me had warped my original polar-bear-shifter nature almost unrecognizably in some ways, but…yeah, if Nate hadn’t been there, I might have rolled around a bit.
Nate shoved his way through a few pine branches, kicked brush and snow out of the way, and finally scrubbed one hand over the back driver’s side window. He leaned down to peer inside.
And he went absolutely, rigidly still.
When he turned to look back at me over his shoulder, that rosy flush had drained away, leaving his cheeks as dead-white as someone with Nate’s olive complexion could get.
“I was wrong,” he said, voice shaking with more than the cold. “There’s kids in there. Two of them. Small ones. And I’m not sure if they’re alive.”
Chapter 2
Nate
Calder got to his feet faster than anyone that big had a right to.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, leaning down beside me and looking in the window. “There’s a fucking baby.”
“That must’ve been what the wise men said, too. Fuck.” Calder grunted something that might’ve been a laugh under other circumstances. I stared through the window at the curly-haired toddler slumped in the seat nearest me, his—his? I mean, kids all looked the same, pretty much—eyes closed and arms splayed out limply, and beyond him, at the baby-blanketed lump in a car seat.
I had to move. Every second counted.
But I stood frozen in horror like I’d never known before, and from me, that was a strong fucking statement.
If that baby wasn’t alive, I was going to lose my shit. And probably never be the same again.
Maybe neither of them was alive.
Oh, gods. My head went light and spinny, and I stumbled back a step—right into Calder’s iron bar of an arm, outstretched to catch me.
“Keep it together,” he said—and from someone else it could’ve been mean, or patronizing. But his low, rasping growl of a voice held nothing but bone-deep empathy.
I’d finally heard the story, from my mate’s cousin Jared (who also happened to be my ex andalsoalso Calder’s mate, and I really truly loved trying to explain that little daisy chain to random people who asked how I knew…literally anyone in my life), of how Calder had ended up becoming Arik’s brother/father in the first place.
And while this giant, glowing-eyed, scowling tower of terror beside me might be twenty-plus years and a million lifetimes of scary shit removed from the twelve-year-old who’d found a starving, abandoned bobcat shifter kitten crying behind a dumpster and bottle-fed the pathetic tiny creature until it thrived, I didn’t think that kind of trauma ever went away.
Gods only knew it hadn’t for me after some of the things I’d seen when I was too young, and I’d had a safe place to figuratively—not a cat or a wolf myself, thank you—lick my wounds for a couple of years now.
Kids who might be dead or dying, fuck. No one could walk away from that unscathed, but the stupid fucking gods couldn’t possibly have picked two people less likely to handle it well than us.
Christ.
“Okay,” I whispered, and tried to clear my throat. I nearly threw up from the effort. “Yeah.”
“I can see this one’s heart beating. Get him out and start warming him up. Don’t know about the baby. I’ll—go around and find out.”
Oh, thank gods. I couldn’t fucking do it. But if this one was alive, seconds counted—and all at once I could move again. I wrenched at the car door with more strength than I usually had, the grinding and screeching of bent metal nearly deafening.
The little boy’s eyes opened as I crowded into the half-open door. Clear dark brown, framed by soft eyelashes. With a look in them…I reached out with more of my senses. Now that I had the car door open they were working again. What the hell had been up with my not being able to detect their life forces when I’d tried before?
“He’s a shifter, I can feel his magic,” I said as Calder got the door open on the other side. Well, ripped it off the car and tossed it over his shoulder like I’d throw a piece of cardboard,but details. My heart was pounding nearly enough to crack my ribs as wide open as this wrecked sedan. “Is the baby, is the baby, fuck, shit, sorry, don’t repeat that,” I muttered to the toddler, as I reached in and started trying to undo his seatbelt.
“Baby’s alive,” Calder said a second later, and I nearly fainted with relief. “And she’s a shifter too. A werewolf by her scent. There’s an adult woman up front. Human. I think she’s alive, now that I can smell her. Reach up and check.”
I gave up on the seatbelt long enough to crane my neck and try to see into the front of the car, cursed again, and summoned a little ball of mage light, having to focus way too hard for something so simple. The pale lavender globe hovered up near the roof of the car, letting me see the slumped form of a person in the driver’s seat. Bending my wrist the wrong way around the headrest made me curse some more, and then I remembered I still had gloves on, and by the time I’d gotten one off, the toddler had expanded his vocabulary a whole lot more. Oops.
Finally I got bare fingers against her neck.
