She squinted at him. "You're notthattall, unless you mean you're going to stand on your hind legs while I balance on your head, andI'mnot that graceful. You should have chosen a circus acrobat as your mate if you wanted that kind of nonsense."
"Never," Colton said warmly, and strode across the cave to catch her in his arms and steal a kiss. "You're the most perfect woman I can imagine. I wouldn't want an acrobat."
"Except possibly in this exact situation," she said ruefully, and he snickered.
"Or I could be one. That would probably also help. I've got the pictures, and I'm taller," he said like those two things went together. "I can boost you higher. And you've got rope in those bags, I know you do because you've tied blankets onto me. So you can haul me up afterward."
"Youweighmore than I do," Jo argued. "You should pullmeup."
Colton got as far as "N—" and then an incredibly brief look of surprise crossed his face before he shifted to chimera form without warning. Jo took a startled step backward, and the chimera crossed the few steps to the hole they'd fallen through, paced back and forth a couple of times with its head tilted to eye it, and then did a straight vertical leap upward. His huge front paws caught the ground above, his back feet gave a few massive kicks, catching bits of earth for leverage, and a heartbeat later he was on the ground outside, shaking himself before shifting back to human.
After an audible pause, Jo said, "Uh. Well. Okay, then."
Colton, up top, gave a somewhat shrill laugh and called, "Apparently we were overthinking it," down to her. "My chimera would like me to say 'Humans,' to you in a tone that expresses his total disdain and exasperation for, well, humans."
"Fair," Jo said. "Fair. Okay then. Well, you went up without the bags, so let me throw a rope up and you can haul them up, and then me." She did just that, weighting one end of a rope so it would fly true, and watching Colton dance back from the edge of the hole as she threw it. The bags went up in two groups, and then she knotted herself into the rope and yelled, "Okay!"
She went up with such speed that she nearly flew above the lip of earth when she passed it. Then, lying on her belly in the snow, she looked up and rolled over as Colton's prancing chimera, clearly very pleased with itself, came to snuffle her and dance around. "I thought the other you would be pulling me up,"she said, amused. "That was much faster and more exciting than I expected. Thank you." She gave the chimera's nose a rub, and it danced around again before backing off to shift into Colton as Jo got to her feet. "All right, we need to be careful, because who knows how much of the ground has thawed here, but let's stretch the tarp over this hole, and?—"
Somewhere in that she finally looked around, and her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Colton, evidently highly attuned to her moods, stopped in the process of unrolling the tent tarp and glanced up at her in concern. "Jo?"
"This is my ranch," she said stupidly.
"Er, what?" Colton stood, looking around with her as Jo tried to get her thoughts moving again.
On one hand, any few hundred square yards of Montana ranch land looked much like any other. But about ninety yards to the west of them stood the remnants of a butte, a sort of jagged little chunk of rock that rose about twenty feet out of the landscape in a rough U shape. Inside the curve of that U, just visible from where she was standing, were chalk drawings Jo had done as a kid and then painted over again as an adult, using the red ochers that the native peoples of the land had once used. They weren't good, but they were absolutelyhers, showing her family, her airplane, and the bison that spread across their ranch.
"This is my ranch," she said again, more incredulously. She turned in a half circle, catching glimpses of what were, in fact, bison in the distance: she thought she'd seen them last night in the shadows, but it had been much too dark to realize where they actually were. "Holy shit, those cave paintings are on my ranch! Oh my God! We're in the southeast corner," she said, turning around again. "There's a creek over there, but it must be so frozen we walked right over it. Or flew, maybe. The property line is about half a mile past the butte. Colton, we're home! Wemade it home! Shit! Oh my God! Do you have signal?" She threw herself into Colton's arms for a hug, then fumbled for her phone, which was on the last dregs of its power-saving mode battery life.
There were, incredibly, two bars. She fumbled again, nearly dropping the phone as she tried to call her parents' numbers with no success, and then finally her brother's.
To her shock, he picked up on the second ring. "Jolene?"
"Josh! Josh it's me! I'm okay! We're okay! We made it to the ranch somehow we're at the butte in the southeast corner we're okay Josh! Josh! Oh my God!" She burst into tears as the signal dropped again and the call went dead, but at least she'd gotten through.
Colton enfolded her in his arms, trying his own phone before simply hugging her hard, mouth against her hair. "We're all right," he promised. "It's okay now, Jo. We made it back. You think he heard where we are?"
"I don't know!" All the stress she hadn't allowed herself to really feel burst out in a wave of sobs, and she sank to the ground with Colton's arms around her and words of reassurance being murmured into her hair. "I think so," she finally said, hoarsely. "I got 'ranch' and 'butte' out, and he'll know where I mean. Even if they just know we're on the ranch?—"
Colton nodded and held on a little tighter while she caught her breath and calmed herself. Then he murmured, "So that hole in the ground…?"
"We should still cover it," she said with a rough laugh. "Especially because the tarp is florescent orange and it'll help rescuers see us, if they come from the air. Just be careful of the ground, we don't want any more of it to give way. And we need to blot out your footprints. Paw prints."
"Wise woman." Colton smiled and hugged her again before they got up, and the next several minutes were spent laying out the tarp and stomping away giant lion paw prints. Then a buzzfilled the air and they both stepped away from the hole in the ground, hands lifted over their eyes to block the snow-bright grey of the sky as they searched for the source of the noise.
"There! Jesus, somebody's got a drone," Jo said disbelievingly. They both waved frantically as the little machine buzzed toward them, then hovered overhead, jolting back and forth like it was as excited as they were. Then it gradually lowered until Colton put out a hand for it, and it dropped into his palm.
Only then did Jo realize it had a transceiver of some kind taped to the top. She couldn't tell if the sound she made was a laugh or a sob, but she took the emitter, switched it on, and watched her phone's signal bloom.
The phone rang instantly, her parents and Josh all crowding into a video image, all three of them in tears. Jo started crying, too, and Colton took the phone so they could see her but he could speak. "Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Talbott, Josh. I'm Colton Drew, and we're okay. No frostbite, no hypothermia, just a couple of hungry tired people here, and boy are we glad to see you."
Jo wailed, "Itoldyou you should have eaten more of the energy bars," and Colton's laughter mixed with the sobs and snickers from the rest of her family. Somehow the information that a helicopter was on its way managed to be exchanged, and then Jo's phone went dead, leaving them both to collapse into the snow, hanging on to one another again.
When she'd calmed down a bit—again—a tired little giggle escaped Jo. "I just realized everybody's watching us through the drone."
"So does that mean we should start making out wildly, or not?"
Jo fell back into the snow, shouting with laughter. "Oh my God. Let's not do that to my parents. They've probably got enough strain on their hearts with us being missing for threedays and now back again. You should try to call yours," she said, suddenly realizing he hadn't. "I'm sure mine must be in touch with them already, but…"
