They had the opposite effect to the one she intended, because he could hear the worry and desperation in her voice.
He hadn’t wandered that far away from civilization, right? They didn’t have that far to go. He had intended to do a loop of the town.
You didn’t know where in the hell you were going.They could be anywhere.
The wolf reared an insult.
I was talking to myself.
The wolf did not understand the distinction and insisted it knew exactly where it was.
Where is that?
The wolf shrank away, and Mateo swallowed. Even his beast didn’t think they were going to survive this.
He stopped feeling cold as he started to go numb, which relieved him for two seconds before he remembered that was what hypothermia felt like. All he could feel were two twin dots of blazing heat on his chest. The snow got thicker, and soon he could neither hear nor see her, except for the circle of light.
He staggered into a drift, and her voice pierced the wind, “Stay awake!”
“I’m awake,” he said through gritted teeth.
“What was your favorite subject in school?” she said, staying near him this time, which he needed for reasons he didn’t want to look at too closely.
“Why?’
“Distraction.”
“With high school?”
“Favorite subject,” she insisted.
“Math.”
“Math,” she repeated like he’d mentioned cockroaches.
“Physics was okay,” he conceded.
“That is still math.”
“What was yours?”
“English literature.”
He shuddered. He wasn’t a huge fiction fan in general, though he read the occasional sci-fi novel if the author wasn’t an idiot. He could see even less point in reading fiction from long-dead authors.
“What’s your favorite book?” she asked.
He cycled through his English literature courses, trying to come up with the one that sucked the least. “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“Sherlock Holmes. Okay.”
“It was hilarious!”
She blinked. “I don’t think it was a comedy? Isn’t that the one where a man was almost driven crazy by monstrous dogs?”
Right. “Hilariouslygood,” he said far too late, and staggered again.
“No, don’t fall asleep.”
