“More like the yeti.” She opened the door wide to reveal a two-foot-high drift. “No, reality is dangerous enough.”
She pushed snow away from the doorway, though some of it spilled in, and he stepped out after her. The howling gale softened into steady snow that was still blowing a little sideways. The light was dim, but the sun was clearly up, and he could see the field in front of the cabin. The trees began about thirty feet away, heading up a hill. One side of the meadow was baregrass, and the other side was a drift that almost came up to his head. Fortunately, the cabin’s door was facing away from the hill so that the drift stopped at the back of the cabin, which was probably why the entrance was facing this direction.
His wolf longed to shift, but he shook his head.How about we don’t show her what we are again?
“Let’s check over there,” Cat said and pointed to a particularly deep drift near the trees.
“You mean where there’s more snow than anywhere else?”
She grinned and stomped off the porch in her snowshoes, making a path for him. It was probably too much to hope that the former occupant left snowshoes for someone his size just lying around.
“People often pile wood between two trees. It’s a natural box, so they’re not flying everywhere.”
“Why not put them near the house?”
She turned back. “And give a fire even more fuel?”
“Right.”
Even in the dead of winter, people were thinking about fires. It was not a world he had ever lived in.
She hiked closer to the drift, climbing it like a hill, digging her gloves into the snow to get purchase.
“Careful!”
She ignored him, knocked some of the snow off the top, and cried out with triumph. She stood up, brandishing a chunk of firewood like a sword.
He surged toward her, fighting visions of her hauling heavy wood, and cursed as he ran straight into something hard in the snow.
He brushed it off with freezing fingers and gave his own cry of triumph as he found a rusted ax stuck into a tree stump.
“He really did leave in a hurry,” he said as he examined it.
She tensed and tossed him the wood.
“Heads up,” she said as he slammed the ax back into the stump and caught it with shifter reflexes. “Sorry,” she added when he raised an eyebrow.
“Keep them coming.”
She did until he had a good armful and then grabbed a few herself before they trekked back inside.
He was going to suggest they try to make a run for civilization, but they’d been out for less than ten minutes, and he was already freezing. Snow covered them both, clinging to eyelashes and eyebrows. It made her look like an ice fairy.
She dumped the wood by the stove and jumped around. “It’s so cold! It’s so cold!”
“Well, we can fix that now, can’t we?” he said with a laugh. She headed to the spice rack for some reason, and he bent down and wrenched open the gigantic stove to add the wood.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What?”
“You’ve never made a fire in your life, have you?”
“No?”
“Not even at coding camp?”
“We had a fire!”
