“Hello!” Cat said and started digging at the entrance.
He eyed the snow above it with trepidation and tried to pull her away.
“Careful.”
“They’re in there!”
“We could have an avalanche.”
She scoffed. “Not with that much snow. You’ve got to have a whole mass ahead of it.”
“Oh.” He put learning a lot more about avalanches on his to-do list.
“The road still isn’t open,” the guy said as he stared at his sat phone. “It’s going to be hours yet.”
One pale young girl peeked her head out, and Cat held her arms out. “Eliza? You’re okay!”
“We ran out of fuel, and we’ve been debating what to do.” The girl twisted. “I told you we should stay put.”
“We were behind a fence. No one would’ve found us!”
“But they did!”
Mateo winced as he saw the skin of her wrist between her glove and her cuff. It was white gray. He glanced at Cat. “Now, can I call a helicopter?”
He held out a hand for the sat phone, and the guy put it into his without thinking.
He dialed his home, and one of his wolves picked up with a squawk. “We thought you were dead. Well, not dead. We thought you were in a snowbank somewhere.”
“Shut up. I need a helicopter.”
“What?”
“Not for me. We’ve got sick kids. Home in on this number and location and dispatch a bird, a hospital bird.” He turned to look at the girl. “How many are you?”
“Four,” Eliza and Cat said at the same time.
“Four people.”
“Will do.”
“You should call your family, too, ma’am,” the man said. “You’re Cat Griffin, right?”
She turned to him as she helped a boy out of the hole. “How did you know that?”
“Well, you’re missing too, as it were.”
Mateo held out the phone, and she made the call. She only managed to say hello before a gaggle of women’s voices drowned her out with their joy. Mateo took a deep breath. She was a witch. Of course she had a coven. That vague fact was academic until this moment.
More people shouted as the Search and Rescue team began to arrive. He was relieved they picked a mine where someone had logged a field into the side of the mountain. The other boy who emerged wasn’t doing as well; he was delirious, his eyes whirling in his head.
“It’s Noah. I can’t wake him up!” the last boy said as they pulled him away.
Cat dove into the mine.
“Cat, no, don’t!”
Some random idiot had dug this hole in the ground in the 1800s, and no one had messed with it since, and now she was in there. He couldn’t follow as a human because his shoulders would never fit past that hole. The wolf could do it, but he couldn’t shift in front of the increasingly large crowd.
