The cold weather gear he was carrying disappeared.
Jo stared. "Again."
The lion-bat-thing did the same left-to-right examination of the world, then turned back into Colton.
Carrying five bags of gear.
Jo thrust a finger at the bags. "Where did theygo?"
Colton froze again, then cautiously spread his arms and looked down at himself before huffing a quiet, relieved, "Oh. It worked. Thank God. I wasn't sure I could carry all that."
"How could you not carry it, you'rehuge! But where did theygo?"
"They…things I'm…carrying, or rather, wearing…shift with me. Usually. Just. I wasn't sure thatmuchwould. Usually it's just…my clothes…" Colton sounded unbelievably nervous and somewhat embarrassed, although Jo wasn't sure what he had to be embarrassed about. Nervous, though, that made sense, because he clearly had a great whacking huge secret that he'd just been forced to reveal to her, and he was probably worried she would murder him or turn him over to the authorities for dissection or something.
"I'm not going to murder you or turn you over to the authorities for dissection or something," she said a bit wildly. "I mean I don't see how I could anyway, you're a giant cat-lizard thing with wings and you'd just bite my head off if I tried but I'm notgoingto so it's okay?"
"A chimera. And I wouldn't. But thank you." Colton still sounded nervous, but also amused and relieved, now.
"You were carrying me," Jo said, her voice rising now. "I didn't change into…you." Her eyes widened. "Oh my God. Did I? I don't think I did. Did I get absorbed?"
"No! No, God, no! No! Clothes! Glasses! Bags! Hats! Not other people or animals or living things! Just—stuff."
Jo briefly but seriously considered fainting, but it was a snowstorm and a crash site and there was no fainting couch around, so she settled for swaying a little. "Okay. Okay, good,because that would have been a bit much. Too much. A chimera? Is that even real?"
A little silence followed, broken only by the soft muffled hush of snow falling on snow. Then Jo cleared her throat. "I mean…aren't chimeras mythological?"
The same little silence followed, although the corners of Colton's mouth were twitching now. "So the question here isn't 'how can you turn into an animal' but 'is that animal even a real thing?' That's better than I hoped for, honestly."
"Well, you—I—" Jo waved her hands in the air. "I can see it's all real! I just! You know! Chimeras!"
"Are even more unlikely than shifters in general? I can understand that, yes." He lost the fight to keep his smile tamped down, and grinned at her across the little clearing. "There aren't a lot of us. Mythological shifters, I mean."
"Are there a lot ofshifters?"
"More than you'd think." Colton glanced around, then looked back at her, still smiling. "We can talk about it as we—what? Walk out of here? Wait for help? What's the plan? I've never been lost in a plane crash before."
"Neither have I," Jo said tartly as she dug her phone out of an interior pocket. It told her what she expected it to, and she held it up to show Colton. "No bars. Coverage out here isn't great, so I'm not surprised."
He nodded, and she took a breath, looking back up the mountain toward the wreck. "There's not going to be a search team until after the weather's cleared. My last landmark was Broken Tooth. Big mountain. Jagged like a broken tooth," she explained. "But that was before the thundersnow, so we're…we're probably right on the edge of Cascade County, by now. Ilivein Cascade, for God's sake. If it was clear, I'd recognize where we are. Dammit! I'm sorry. This shouldn't have happened."
"If it was clear," Colton said gently, "it wouldn't have happened. You said thundersnow is rare, and lightning almost never strikes small planes. It was a freak accident, Jo. I don't blame you at all."
"I don't know why," Jo said furiously. "I certainly do."
Colton looked at her a long moment, then waded across the snow, and, to Jo's complete surprise, enfolded her in his arms.
CHAPTER FIVE
For a heartbeat, Colton thought he'd made a terrible mistake. One of several, starting with revealing himself as a shifter, although he hadn't seen a way out of that, and Jo Talbott seemed to be adapting to it pretty well, all things considered. But she stiffened when he drew her into a hug, and he thought maybe he'd pushed it much too far on so little acquaintance.
Only then, after the space of a breath, she shuddered and put her arms around him in turn, hanging on hard. Even in the cold and wind, she felt warm as she clung to him, although she let go after a minute and stepped back, breathing erratically. "This isn't the time for blame games anyway," she said with an obvious effort to steady her voice. "We need to find shelter, and on one hand, it's probably smart to stay near the crash site because it's biggish, but on the other, it's still snowing and if it keeps up the site could get pretty well buried. And on the third hand we could be just a few miles from a road anywa—oh!" Her eyes widened. "Can you, I don't know, fly out and see?"
Colton grimaced as his chimera let loose a wail inside his head. "Chimeras are mostly warm-weather fliers," he saidapologetically, trying to drown the beast out. "My wings get cold pretty fast."
"Oh. Oh, right, yeah. They're like bat wings, aren't they. No fur. Or feathers, I guess. Yeah, okay, dang it." She rubbed her hand over her head, knocking her hat askew before straightening it again. "Funnily enough I don't have wing-mittens in those bags. Go figure."
Wing-mittens,his chimera said with starry-eyed delight.Can I have wing-mittens?
