by Zoe Chant
“I’m sure,” she said, giving Neal an impulsive hug, a little hindered by her soggy purse and wet raincoat.
He squeezed her tightly in return, and the curves of her body pressed against him made him forget the miserable trip and even the beautiful view. When she might have drawn away, he kissed her, and she wrapped her arms more tightly around his neck and kissed him in return.
Her mouth tasted like honey and promises, and her breasts beneath the crinkly raincoat were firm against his chest. Neal was tempted to peel her out of it right then and there and lay her down on the jungle floor to make love to her on the spot. But he settled for caressing her through the unwieldy garment.
“It was definitely worth it,” Mary declared with a smile, once he had released her.
“We do still have to walk back,” Neal cautioned. The rain had reduced to a faint drizzle again, and he even thought it might be clearing in one area of the foggy sky above them.
Mary winced. “The same way?”
Neal shook his head, and showed Mary where the trail switched back behind them. “It’s a little steep down here, and then we’ll be walking back along the cliffs to the resort.”
Mary looked dubious. “Along… the cliffs? Are they very high?”
Neal noticed that she was staying well away from the drop off by the waterfall. He wouldn’t be surprised if she were afraid of heights, too. “Oh, no,” he reassured her. “Twenty-five feet or so above the ocean?” They were twice that high here.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” she squeaked, and she turned to lead the way down the steep switchback. One side of the trail was tight against the path they’d just followed, and the other dropped away over the little cove. It was narrow, narrower than the last time Neal remembered walking here, and rainwater runoff was spilling down from the upper path. The earth was soft and spongy underfoot, beneath the slick surface.
It took Neal a moment to put all the warning signs together, and just as he opened his mouth to caution Mary, the trail beneath her crumbled away into nothing.
Moving as only a shifter could, Neal reached for her and pulled her back to solid ground—only to find that the ground he’d assumed solid was anything but, and then they were both falling, crashing and sliding down the side of the cliff to the jungle foliage below.
Neal, still holding onto Mary’s arm, rolled to protect her. It was a far cry from his experiences of jumping from aircraft, hindered by Mary and her handbag and distinctly missing a parachute, but he was able to turn them so that she was protected in his arms, just as they crashed into the first of the trees.
Branches whipped them across every exposed surface and snapped beneath them, jarring impact after jarring impact that Neal could only grit his teeth and weather. One against his head had him seeing stars, then another smashed against an elbow, but all he could think was that he had to keep Mary safe, at any cost.
Air was impossible to draw into lungs. Every blow drove it out again. Then there was blazing pain and he lost his brief battle with consciousness.
Chapter Seventeen
Mary left her eyes shut even after they’d at last been lying still for a long moment, catching her breath and trying to make sense of the last few crazy moments. Neal had only let her go at the very last moment, and they lay close enough together that she could hear his labored breathing.
When she finally opened her eyes, she was alarmed by how pale and still he looked as he lay in the sand, and the awkward angle of his body. She moved to sit up, and cried out in surprised pain. The arm of her raincoat was ripped open, and a broad gash beneath was oozing blood. Her shoulder felt wrenched, and when she tested the rest of her limbs, she suspected a sprained ankle, if it wasn’t actually broken. Her sides ached and she guessed she would be peppered in bruises the following day.
She glanced up at the tree they had fallen through, littered with fresh broken branches, and the cliff beyond. Shrouded in fog, it looked very high above them indeed. The scar of the mudslide they had started was darker than the rest of the rock around it.
It was a miracle that they had survived.
Neal groaned, and Mary scooted to his side just as his eyes fluttered open.
“Are you okay?” she asked, feeling ridiculous the second the words were out of her mouth.
“Are you… okay?” he asked in response, voice rough and weak.
“I’m fine,” she said, and she had to laugh a little in relief that he could speak. At no other time in her life would she have considered her current state ‘fine.’
She winced to see that all of his exposed skin had been whipped raw by the tree. Several of them qualified as gashes, bleeding freely. He lay oddly, still looking dazed, and Mary struggled to remember her first aid training.
“I’m going to look you over,” she said properly.
Neal started to try to sit up, and Mary told him sharply, “No! Let me have a look first!”
He protested less than Mary thought he should, sinking back into the sand with a low sound of pain.
Starting at his head, she found the lump at the base of his neck that was probably the cause of his dazed state. He moaned when she touched his chest, and offered, “Probably a broken rib.”
She was gentle, working her fingers down his side, but he still sucked his breath in sharply and added, “Maybe two.”
Moving his elbow made him give a hiss of pain as she examined his arms. Mary suspected a sprain. At any other time, would have been delighted for the excuse to run her fingers over the magnificent muscles, but now, she was simply concerned for him. None of the abrasions seemed major, and she moved to his chest and stomach, not finding any problems. His legs lay in odd ways, but he was able to help her move them straight, which is when Mary found the worst of his problems.
“Oh,” she said in quiet alarm.
“Hurts,” Neal admitted shortly.
“You… landed on your machete,” Mary said, moving the tool out of the way. Blood was flowing down into the sand below him. The wound was along the outside of his right hip. She didn’t think he could have nicked the artery, but the amount of blood was alarming. “I don’t know how bad it is, but Neal, you should shift.”
“Don’t ever tell me to do that!”
Mary rocked back on her ankles, not even minding the shooting pain as she did so. Neal was snarling, pulling away from her. “No, don’t move!” she said, alarmed at how the bleeding ramped up as he struggled.
His eyes were feral and filled with pain, but Mary could not let him drive her away. “You lie still,” she said, as firmly and gently as she could. “I’ll do what I can.”
Neal subsided, the wildness in his eyes fading to only agony, and Mary unclipped the machete from his belt to use it to cut away the rest of his shorts.
The injury was shallow, she was glad to find, but it was dirty and bleeding merrily, even as his other scrapes and wounds seemed to be slowing. She balanced the machete between her knees and was able to cut her shirt—the only passingly dry article of clothing between them—into a bandage, but it wouldn’t be long enough to tie around his massive leg. She could tie the arms of her raincoat around him. It had stopped raining, at least.
She knew she ought to clean the wound first. “I’m going to get water,” she said.
Neal only growled.
Her handbag had been thrown clear, and Mary limped over and dumped it unceremoniously onto the sand to find her water bottles. One was empty, but the other was nearly full. It would have to be enough - she didn’t trust the water from the waterfall, and she knew that seawater wouldn’t do. She scooped up the first aid kit, too, wishing she’d brought a larger one.
Neal made a guttural noise as she washed out the wound. She wasn’t satisfied with the way the sparse water washed out the ugly flap of skin, but short of other choices, Mary didn’t know what else to do. The little drizzle of water seemed to get out most of the grit, and Mary squeezed the two tiny packets of antibiotic onto the gash. It looked like pathe
tically little against the long slice.
She folded her shirt onto the wound and wrapped the raincoat around it, tying the arms as tight as they would go.
She stepped back. “Well, that’s hideous,” she said. “But hopefully it will do.”
Neal gave an attempt at a laugh, but it turned into a dry cough and lapsed into pained silence.
Mary completed her examination down his legs to his feet, but found nothing else of great concern.
She returned to his head, frowning. “Neal, I’m going to shift.”
“Fine,” he said shortly. “Just don’t ever ask me to.”
“You’ll heal much…”
“Don’t. Ever.”
Mary knew a losing argument when she was in one, and backed away. She took off her soggy shoes and socks, wincing as her ankle protested the activity. Her own aches and pains were back with a vengeance, and even the simple act of undressing was agony.
She looked up to catch Neal watching her with warm eyes.
“You’re beautiful,” he said in a whisper.
Mary blushed. “Oh, no. I know I’m not.” She wanted to cover herself, but something about the reverence in Neal’s eyes as he looked at her made her hesitate to do so, instead letting Neal watch as she unclipped her bra and tried to get out of her soaked pants and underwear without angering any of her worst injuries.
“How could you think that?” Neal asked her.
Mary was so surprised by the question that she answered it frankly. “Well, I’m fat.” She had to sit down to pull the legs of her pants off, her ankle too fragile to support all her weight at such an awkward angle.
He laughed at her, and it was the most encouraging sound she’d heard from him since their fall. “You are not fat, you are glorious, and I adore every curve,” he protested. “Magnolia is fat, and she is the second most beautiful woman at Shifting Sands, so your argument has no meaning at all.”
Mary had no counter for that. She couldn’t doubt his sincerity, and it pleased her more than she thought it ought to please a modern, independent woman. “My hair is limp,” she added, but it sounded as ridiculous to her ears as it did to Neal’s—she knew it was plastered to her face with rain and sweat, and she could tell by the stinging of her face when she smiled that it was as whipped with branches as Neal’s was. She gave a mock falsetto and continued merrily, “My makeup is simply ruined, and my dress! Oh, my stars, I could never go to the ball like this!”
Neal chuckled, as he was supposed to, and sobered as his ribs reminded him how much that hurt.
“Seriously though,” Mary said, “I am going to shift now, and wander around to see about how we’re going to get out of here.”
“You do,” Neal said shortly, clearly in pain.
Mary hesitated. She had never shifted in front of anyone but family before, and she felt terribly self-conscious.
Then she was thinking about grazing and leaping and sun on her flanks, and was walking forward as a deer.
Chapter Eighteen
Mary as a deer was a beautiful as she was as a human. Her brown coat was smooth and glossy, and her big ears were expressive and mobile.
She came over and touched Neal with her whiskered muzzle, then pranced away, limping only slightly.
Neal was glad when she disappeared through the brush towards the base of the waterfall, because he knew he’d done a dismal job of holding himself together in front of her, and he didn’t want to admit just how much agony he was in. The leg that had been cut was like a throbbing fire, but the pain in his chest worried him much more.
Every breath caused a stabbing pain, and there was a tightness to his chest and dizziness that Neal strongly suspected was a collapsed lung—if not fully, at least partially. They had no sort of catheter to release the pressure he was feeling, so he saw no reason to admit it to Mary. Let her keep believing it was just a few broken ribs and a concussion. He couldn’t bear to see her worry, and there was no treatment here that could fix an injury like that.
You could shift, his brain betrayed him. Deep inside, Neal could feel his red maned wolf stir.
Neal snarled and refused to think of it any further. He drew himself slowly into a sitting position, verifying with each dry cough and agonizing breath that his diagnosis was correct.
There was an old piece of driftwood that had been flung up high on the beach, and it had a root piece that was exactly the angle of an easy chair. Neal manage to drag himself over to it and prop himself into the crook, just as the deer returned and shifted seamlessly into Mary.
“You shouldn’t be moving!” she said in alarm.
Neal grunted. “Got tired of the view there. This one is better.”
The sun was fighting through the clouds and fog, and blue sky was beginning to show above the mist. Late afternoon sunlight made the little cove glow, and in truth, Neal would have been hard pressed to pick a more lovely scene. Golden-white sand in a perfect semi-circle met gentle ocean, lapping at its edges. Emerald jungle plants fringed the bottom of dark cliffs on all sides, and the waterfall they had hiked to see made a silver ribbon that fell down the cliff and crawled to the ocean like a bit of discarded Christmas wrapping on the sand.
“I’m beginning to reconsider what I said about the view being worth the hike,” Mary said. “But it does seem to be doing its best to be picturesque.”
She frowned at him and felt his forehead, and then carefully untied the raincoat. She didn’t pull off the shirt bandage, but seemed satisfied that it hadn’t soaked through with blood, and re-tied the raincoat.
“I guess we’ll want a fire,” she suggested, leaning back on her ankles without wincing. She moved more easily now, and the raw vine whips on her face had faded significantly, even more than Neal would have expected from a shifter's ability to self-heal. “And some food? I have two granola bars left.”
“Water,” Neal suggested, concentrating on not coughing. His lungs were crying for more air that he couldn’t get, and it was making him dizzy.
“I can fill the bottles at the waterfall,” Mary said dubiously. “I had a good drink as a deer, but we ought to boil it for you.”
She said it without being pointed, but Neal still winced and set his teeth, ready for a fight about shifting again.
Mary stood up and walked to where she’d left her clothing. She held up the soggy garments, clearly decided not to put them back on, and spread them on the driftwood to dry instead. The fog was burning off quickly, and the heat of the sun was drying a halo of gold from the hair that had escaped her braid.
Watching her gather up the contents of her bag and sort them neatly for inventory was a treat when she was nude, and she seemed to lack self-consciousness about it for the first time.
“The wood is too wet to use friction to start a fire,” Neal said. He didn’t think it mattered if he drank contaminated water given state of the rest of him, but building a fire would give Mary something to do. “Do you have any lenses?”
“I have sunglasses,” Mary suggested.
“No good, they have to be clear.” Neal looked at the odd selection of things. “You brought condoms?”
Mary blushed. “I thought this was going to be a romantic hike, not a death march through the rain completed by falling down a cliff,” she said tartly.
Neal laughed and gritted his teeth at the pain of it. When the wave of dizziness had passed, he explained, “We can use that to start a fire.”
Mary blinked at him. “A condom?”
“A condom full of water,” Neal added.
“This is why I like math,” Mary complained. “Math makes sense.”
Neal smiled but didn’t attempt another laugh. “I’ll show you. We’ll need dry tinder, and good kindling, and water.”
Mary stood. “I can get those.”
She scooped up the two empty bottles and the cavernous handbag. “There were some driftwood piles at the other end of the beach that might be dry in the middle. I’ll try there first.”
Nea
l lost his battle against the urge to cough and regretted it, able to do nothing but helplessly watch her walk away.
Chapter Nineteen
Mary didn’t like the Neal’s pallor, or the rattle of his dry cough, but she knew that was nothing she could treat.
The sand was getting warm beneath her bare feet, and wading through the cool stream was unexpectedly pleasant. Mary paused at the first pile of driftwood. There were probably things in the dark recesses of the wood—bitey things and maybe even venomous things. She gritted her teeth, wished she was wearing her soaked clothes, and reached in to rattle a few branches loose.
No swarms of snakes or spiders came pouring out at her, and after a moment, Mary tackled it again, pulling the wet wood off the top to reveal a dry inner cavern with an armload of good driftwood. She filled her bag, before adding some of the crunchy dry seaweed she found there, hopeful it would make good tinder. The second heap of driftwood was wet through, but there was an overhang at the end of the beach that had a pile of larger pieces. She piled her arms full of it, and only as she was returning to the stream did she realize that she hadn’t poked the pile or checked it for bugs before she picked it up.
Her skin crawled at the idea she might be carrying ants or spiders, and she dropped her armload unceremoniously by the stream. She filled both her water bottles and capped them, then gathered her wood back up more carefully, flicking a single tiny ant off with a leaf.
The fog had burned off by the time she returned to Neal with her treasures, and she was relieved to see that his driftwood prop was at least partially in the shade. He was dozing, though his face, even in sleep, was still twisted with pain.
Mary gathered up some rocks, only once biting back a shriek of terror when she disturbed the creature—she wasn’t sure what it was—which was living beneath it.
Though she suspected it wasn’t necessary, she built a fire ring with the rocks, and was pleased at how domestic and camp-like their little space looked with the addition.