Jo said, "Boing!" again more urgently, as if it would help him understand how incredible it was to watch a creature his size bounce around like that.
He grinned at her, agreed, "Boing," and shifted to the chimera form so he could plow a path through to the sheltering tree. Jo followed along, still shaking her head and whispering, "Boing," until they reached the tree he'd found and she said, "Oh, yeah, that's perfect. That's amazing. Thank you!"
It had a heavy skirt of branches partially buried in snow, but she could tell from the angle that they started about four feetup on the trunk, making an excellent protected underskirt. "We want to keep as much of the snow in place around it as possible, because it does insulate. I've got a little shovel in the—aaaah, okay, never mind…"
The last words were because Colton had, with incredible efficiency, scooped several huge pawsful of snow aside, somehow also managing to pack the sides of the space he'd made all at the same time, so it didn't come tumbling down. Jo gaped again, then laughed as Colton returned to a very pleased-with-himself human. "Will that do?"
"I'm never wrecking a plane without you again," Jo said, meaning it as praise and then making a face at how it actually sounded.
"Thank goodness. I couldn't keep you safe if you did that." Colton's smile became quite gentle as he spoke, and Jo felt a funny flush of combined heat and half-hearted aggravation.
"I don't need anyone to keep me safe." Before he could protest, she took a deep breath and sighed it out. "But boy, it's nice. Thank you."
"Oh good. Whew. I was afraid I'd stepped in it there."
"Kind of but also not," Jo promised. "All right—oh! Er. Does your, uh, does your chimera mind if I get that thermal blanket back…?"
"Of course not. He doesn't get cold while I'm in my human form. Or not any colder than I do." Colton changed shape again and stood patiently while Jo loosened the crinkly silver blanket from around him, but patted the fleece one and left it in place.
"There you go. I'll get the fleece back later, if we need it." She crawled beneath the tree skirt to spread the thermal blanket across the thin layer of snow there, then called, "Can you hand me those bags one at a time, and carefully?"
Colton did, so carefully barely any snow got knocked loose. Jo pulled the tent out of one of them, then poked her head outfrom beneath the tree. "I'm going to set this up in here, okay? It's probably easier and less likely to dislodge a lot of extra snow if it's just one of us doing it."
"You're the boss," Colton said without a hint of sarcasm. It reminded Jo momentarily that he was in a hurry to get back to his actual boss, and his life, and his court case, but he hadn't said a single word about that since lightning had struck the plane.
He was a good man, she thought. Just a really decent person, aside from being model-handsome and also a magical shifter being. What she wouldn't give to find a guy like that who lived inherneck of the woods.
Well, for the moment they couldn't be more neck-of-the-woodsy together than this. She smiled, slid the tent out of its bag, and set it up with the awkward efficiency of knowing what she was doing, but only having a very small space to do it in. Then she unfolded all the other blankets, thermal and wool alike, onto the floor, creating as much insulation from the cold ground as possible, took her boots off, brushed away all the snow she could, and crawled inside. "Come on in!"
For a tall man, Colton Drew did an amazing job of climbing down into their little hollow, and then into the tent, without knocking much snow loose. He glanced at her as he poked his head in, saw she'd removed her boots, and paused to take his off, too, before coming all the way in. They both knocked snow off the boots, then tucked them into a corner of the tent and zipped it closed. Colton's eyes widened. "Oh. Wow, it warmed up immediately, didn't it?"
"Two bodies in a small space will do that, and all the lining on the floor helps a lot." Jo shivered anyway, more from a sudden adrenaline crash than actual cold. "Thanks for your help."
"Me? I didn't do anything!"
"You cleared a path into the underskirt in about a tenth of the time it would take me," Jo said wryly. "And also broke the snowso I could walk without exhausting myself,andcarried literally all of the gear. You did kind of a lot."
"Oh." Colton smiled. "When you put it that way…but really, since I managed to shift everything with me, carrying the gear wasn't hard at all."
"How does that even work?" Jo's voice rose with incredulity. "Does all that extra mass make you bigger? Are you normally only, like, regular-lion-sized?"
"No, I'm always huge."
Jo's mind immediately went places it shouldn't, and as if he could read her thoughts, Colton blushed and sucked his cheeks in and glanced away, trying not to grin. "I am a very big chimera," he clarified. "We all are, actually. Basically if you take a lion and a dragon and mash them together you get a big animal."
"There aredragons?"
Colton looked back with a little smile. "Not very many. There's some kind of magic involved with their creation that I don't understand."
Jo eyed him from under the brim of her winter hat, and Colton laughed. She loved his laugh: it was a big warm sound that made the tent feel cozy and comfortable. "I'm guessing that look means something like, 'oh, unlike all the other magic that you totally understand'?"
"It does mean something very like that, yes," Jo said. "Start at the beginning. How are there even shifters?"
"I don't know."
Jo sat back, fists on her hips even though she was sitting, and Colton gave her a sweet, wry smile. "I don't understand the magic, either. None of us really do. All I know is there have been shifters as long as there have been people. Most of them are much more…ordinary? Bears and tigers and lions?—"
"Oh my," Jo said, because she couldn't not, and Colton, still smiling, nodded.
