Then she took off her coat.
“No, don’t!”
His wolf roared again, incensed for a different reason. She could not risk herself.
“I’ll be fine,” she said and wrapped her coat around him.
She was half his size, especially in the shoulders, and there was no way it could fit, but she didn’t try to make it. She wrapped the coat around his shoulders and knotted the coat sleeves at his chest to keep the blanket closed. There was the barest hint of a suggestion of warmth.
She took out two little squares from her backpack and snapped them before tucking them in the pockets of her jacket. He felt little twin blooms of heat against his pecs, the part of him least likely to need heat.
He scrambled for them, wanting them in his hands, but she shook her head. “They’ll burn your skin. Just keep them close. You good?”
“Yep!”
Finally, she pulled out a pair of socks and hiking shoes. He did an awkward dance to shove his giant feet into them like a pair of slippers.
She laid the snowshoes next to her skis. “Can you step up?”
He levered one foot onto the tiny platform of plastic and cloth without much hope and stood up. It immediately sank a foot into the snow as he managed to get his other foot on the other one.
He teetered, and she shouted as she put her arms around him.
His brain short-circuited, and he felt a lot warmer, which he knew was a complete fiction. The draft from below was horrifying, sneaking in places that should not freeze. He felt and probably looked like a silver popsicle.
Shift,his wolf said with images of thousands of shifts they’d done before.
It made him dizzier for a second.
The snow was blowing everywhere, especially up the blanket, but at least his shoulders were warm?
She pulled off the mask, and he said, “No, don’t!”
She jammed a thick hat on her head and pulled the mask over his.
“You need it more.”
He would never need more protection than her, but he could not make himself open the blanket to pull it off, and without the searing wind in his face, he felt like he could take a breath without screaming.
“How are you not dead?” she asked as she surveyed her creation.
“Magic,” he said.
He’d meant it as a joke, but she froze. He was now selfishly happy that her face was not masked, because he could trace surprise in the lift of her cheekbones and her delicate mouth.
“Grit,” he said. “Can we?”
She nodded once and pushed her poles off to head back down the hill. He had no idea where she’d come from. Her ski tracks were already covered in snow.
He was worried he was going to lose her as visibility dropped, but she turned on a headlamp, and he trudged toward it like the light held the secrets of the universe.
He sank a foot with every step, and the only thing good about it was that even in the snow, his legs felt warm from the exertion. He felt like a massive lumbering monster next to a butterfly as she seemed to flit over the snow.
He got flashes of images of his giant paws. With his weight spread on four feet instead of two, walking would be easier.
He ignored the beast.
Every few minutes, she shouted back words like, “You’re doing great!”
