by Zoe Chant
The only possible conclusion was that there was a mother and her baby out in the freezing night somewhere.
Jeff looked back. He’d come from that direction, and he’d been looking for anyone in trouble. He definitely hadn’t seen anyone trudging along the road with a baby.
So he turned ahead, and started running. He was going to find this woman and her baby before it was too late. There were no other options.
***
It hadn’t taken long for Leah to lose track of time. The scenery stayed the same, the road looked the same, and after a while she stopped getting colder, as though her body had quit processing the temperature. She didn’t want to stop walking or lose any focus on the road, so she didn’t bother checking her phone.
It didn’t matter how long she’d been going, after all. It just mattered that she kept going.
The wind howled around her, and she scrunched her hands up inside her gloves. Her arms and legs were freezing, but fortunately her chest, where Emily was sleeping, was still warm. She could feel the baby’s little breaths as she walked, and they gave her strength.
But she still didn’t see anyone else, or any buildings.
I can keep going, she thought fiercely. I’ll keep going forever if I have to.
She walked for what felt like hours before she took a short break, digging through her pack for a bottle of water and taking small sips. It was freezing cold against her mouth, but she couldn’t let herself get dehydrated. She knew that drinking enough water was important when you were out in the cold for a long time.
Emily stayed asleep, thank God. Probably the only thing that would make this worse was if she were screaming, wanting to nurse or get down and walk. Leah tugged Emily’s hat further down to protect more of her little head, capped her water bottle and stood up, preparing to keep walking.
The wind was the worst. It stole through any gaps in her coat and scarf and whisked heat away, and it went through her pants like they weren’t even there. The longer she walked, the more sensation it stole away, until she was numb all over.
Leah had lived in Montana her whole life and was used to harsh winters, but she’d never had to walk like this, without any knowledge of when she’d be able to stop.
The roads were winding and steep, also, and more than once Leah slipped, and had to catch herself with her hands on the snowy ground. Every time it happened, her heart leapt into her mouth at the possibility that she might not be fast enough, and fall onto her baby.
So far, so good, she told herself as she pushed up to her feet for the umpteenth time. Still upright, still walking, and Emily’s still okay. That’s all that I need.
But there was still no sign of any people.
The cold was sneaking into her bones. She kept stopping to concentrate on the feeling of Emily’s little body against her chest, making sure that her breaths were steady and even.
Leah knew she was getting dangerously tired. Starting to walk again after stopping to check on Emily or drink more water was harder and harder. More and more, Leah just wanted to sit down by the side of the road and rest. She started looking longingly at the drifts of snow by the side of the road. They seemed like soft pillows, like she could just lie down in one and sleep...
If you do that, you’ll die, she reminded herself fiercely. You need to stay alive and keep Emily safe!
Her world narrowed to the sight of her boots and the feeling of tiny baby breaths against her chest. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. One foot...
Leah blinked. She wasn’t looking at her feet anymore; she was looking at her hands.
It took her a few minutes to figure out that that was because she was on her hands and knees in the snow. Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet again and started forward.
This time, she tried counting her steps. One, two, three... But she lost track quickly. After that, there was a little while where everything was sort of gray, and when she came back to herself, she was in the snow again.
Get up, she told herself. Get up, get up!
Leah forced her leaden limbs to move, and gathered herself to stand.
She couldn’t. She just couldn’t make her legs work well enough to stand up.
Then, all of a sudden, there was motion in the corner of her eye. She looked up.
A leopard appeared out of the falling snow.
It seemed to emerge fully-formed from the snowfall, like it had just been part of the storm and materialized out of it in front of her. Its paws made no noise at all as it padded toward her, its pale gray eyes fixed on hers. Its fur was white and gray, with dark leopard spots dappling it, so that it blended seamlessly with the snowy trees around her.
It stopped in front of her, those endless eyes still fixed on hers.
“Hello,” Leah said. Her voice was almost noiseless to her ears.
The leopard moved closer, until she could feel its warm breath on her numb face. She reached out a shaking hand, and it stayed still as her gloved fingers carded through its fur.
“Please,” she said quietly. Her vision was starting to cloud over again. “Please, will you save my baby?”
The leopard’s eyes seemed to widen. Soon they were all she could see, and then the gray eclipsed everything else.
***
Jeff had run for a long time, wondering as he went if he’d somehow missed them. Had they accidentally wandered off the road into the woods? But every time he was sure he must have gone too far and passed them, he’d catch the trail of that feminine scent.
It was very, very faint. She had to be bundled up against the snow. But it was there.
In his leopard form, he could also tell that she was terrified. Her scent held hints of desperation and fear. Those hints spurred him on, driving him to find her before it was too late.
As a park ranger, Jeff had to deal with lost hikers all the time, and sometimes even young children. He always worked his hardest to get them back safe, but he knew that staying calm was the most important thing. No one was helped by anxiety and fear.
But this time was different. He didn’t know why, but he knew that this woman could not die. He would find her, and her baby, and he would keep them safe.
He kept running.
Finally, after what felt like years, he saw something. It was a shape in the road—not a walking shape, but a stationary one. As he got closer, he could see that it was a person who had fallen to their hands and knees.
He bounded forward, catching that scent again as he went. This was her.
Jeff came to a halt several feet from her, so that he wouldn’t scare her by dashing right up next to her, and approached slowly.
She looked up, and saw him.
Her eyes were a deep, dark, blue, and when they met his, he forgot what he was doing. He stared at her across several feet of whirling snow.
“Hello,” she whispered.
Hello, he thought back. He padded forward until he was close enough to touch.
She reached out and laid a hand on his fur. He shivered at the touch, at the feel of her fingers on him.
“Please,” she mouthed, her voice so soft that even his leopard’s ears could barely hear her over the howling wind. “Please, will you save my baby?”
That shocked him out of his daze, just as she started to slump to the ground. He got his leopard body under hers just in time to ease her down on her side, rather than letting her fall forward onto the baby.
Please let her be all right. If she was injured, or badly hypothermic...
But her core would be warmer than normal, he reminded himself, because of the baby.
The baby—wearing a pink hat, so probably a girl—was strapped to the woman’s chest, zipped up inside her coat. When Jeff nosed the coat open enough to check, the little girl was just blinking her eyes open, peering up at him. The little pocket of warmth inside the coat seemed to have kept her safe, although she had to be cold.
He needed to get these two somewhere warm.
&n
bsp; But where? He was hours away from his own house, and he wasn’t even in Glacier proper, but a few miles south. He was definitely too far from the nearest ranger station. It was miles even to the nearest gas station.
There was no cell phone reception out here, and he didn’t have his ranger’s radio with him. Only clothing shifted, not objects like phones or radios, and he wasn’t on official business anyway, so he’d left his behind.
But people had cabins out here in the mountains.
No one would be in any of them at this time of year, but...Jeff closed his eyes and placed himself in his mental map of the area.
The park was his territory, after all, and he knew where everyone was in his territory.
And there was a cabin not too far away.
Jeff took a step back, ready to shift so that he could lift the woman up. He’d need to be human to carry her.
Only then did he realize that he’d approached her in his leopard form. Why had he done that? Ordinarily he would shift back to human before helping anyone in trouble. No one wanted reported snow leopard sightings anywhere near here, after all.
She’d been on the verge of passing out, he reminded himself. It wasn’t likely she’d remember anything. And she hadn’t seen him shift.
Even in his human form, he had shifter strength, so he took the woman’s backpack himself and then easily lifted her in his arms. He could carry her like this as long as he had to, no problem.
Picking her up felt surprisingly intimate, considering how many clothes they were both wearing. But he could still feel the shape of her in his arms, lying against his chest. Her head rested on his shoulder, and her hair, escaping from her hat in a trail of curls, brushed his cheek. Her scent, the deeply feminine smell that he’d been following the tiniest traces of on the road, surrounded him.
The baby looked up at him from only a few inches away, now. As Jeff watched, she looked back at her mom, and then at Jeff. And then her face crumpled and she started to fuss, breaking up the strangely intimate moment.
“Hey, hey, shhhh,” Jeff said to her, as he settled them in a comfortable hold.
The baby kept fussing. He couldn’t blame her. “You’ve had a rough day,” he said as he started walking. “I’m really impressed with you. Most babies would’ve thrown in the towel a long time ago, after a day like yours.”
The baby paused for a second, then started up again, a whining little cry. Thankfully, it sounded more like I’m uncomfortable and I don’t like it than anything that might mean she was genuinely hurt or scared.
Jeff started up a hill, his boots sinking into the deep snow. “I guess you can’t talk at all yet.” It was hard to tell with only her little face to judge from, but he thought she was probably under a year old. “That’s too bad. I wish you could tell me how you and your mom ended up here. It’s dangerous to drive through the mountains in a storm like this. Why didn’t you stop when it started snowing?”
The jouncing motion of Jeff’s stride as he went up the hill seemed to calm the baby down a little. Her fussing quieted, although she was still making little whiny breaths.
“And where’s your dad?” he asked her. “Are you guys going to meet him?” He thought again of the packed car, clearly full of these two’s whole life. Maybe they were getting away from the baby’s dad.
But he hadn’t scented a man in the car, not even a faint, days-old scent. Maybe the dad wasn’t in the picture at all.
Jeff felt a swell of protectiveness in his chest, for the baby and for her mom. He had absolutely no respect for men who didn’t take responsibility for their children, and he couldn’t imagine how single mothers raised kids on their own.
He looked at the woman’s face. Now that her distractingly blue eyes were closed, he could tell that she looked tired and worn. She was pretty, even without the gorgeous eyes, but clearly exhausted.
Jeff figured that packing all of your worldly goods and your baby into your car and driving into the mountains in a snowstorm was exhausting. But that had to be nothing compared to whatever had forced her to do it in the first place.
Jeff was from a big family. His parents weren’t mates—in fact, they were both skeptical of the whole idea of shifter mates—and they hadn’t always gotten along perfectly. But they both cared about their kids more than anything, and they’d taught their children to support each other, and to make sure that when they had kids of their own, those kids were provided for.
When he tried to imagine being alone with a baby like this, no support, no help, no partner...he had no idea what it would be like.
“I’m getting you to safety,” he told the woman in his arms. “You’re going to be okay.”
As he kept walking, the baby’s eyes drifted closed, lulled by the movement. Jeff took that as a sign of trust, and quickened his pace. He’d live up to that trust. This baby wasn’t going to be out in the cold much longer.
Even if she didn’t have a dad, right now she had him, and he’d make sure she and her mom were okay.
His innate sense of direction was always trustworthy, and not too much later, the shape of the cabin emerged from the white blur that surrounded them. Jeff went up to the door and carefully laid his burden down in a snowbank while he tackled the door.
It was locked. Jeff silently apologized to the owners of the cabin and jerked the knob hard enough to break the lock, but not hard enough to break the door itself. He’d be sure to pay for it, and for whatever they used inside the cabin, but for now, the most important thing was getting these two inside.
He lifted them up again, carrying them in and shutting the door behind him with his foot. Then he surveyed the place.
It was a decent-sized cabin, with a wide main room, a big fireplace with a couch in front of it and a small store of wood, a small kitchenette, and two doors. Jeff laid the woman and her baby down on the couch and quickly checked the doors. One was a bedroom with a queen-sized bed, and the other was a bathroom. He tried the water. It sputtered for a few minutes, then ran rusty, and finally clear.
Good thing it was so early in the season. If this had been February, the pipes would probably have been frozen. The owners of the cabin must be intending to come back at least once more this year, if they hadn’t turned the water mains off just yet.
Now he had running water, a fireplace, and a roof over their heads. Good.
The first thing to do was light the fire. There were matches on the mantle, and a bit of kindling alongside the few logs stored by the fireplace. The logs were obviously meant to just tide over the cabin’s owners while they chopped more wood. They wouldn’t last long, but it would be enough to get everyone warmed up.
As he checked the chimney and set up the logs and the kindling—there was no paper to start it with, but he’d just have to make do with the smallest of the dry twigs—he made a mental to-do list.
Get the fire going. Get the woman warmed up, and hopefully woken up, and explain the situation to her. Look for the axe that had to be around here somewhere. Go out and find wood, chop enough to last them a little while. Figure out the food situation, see if there was anything in the kitchenette that they could use, check out the woman’s backpack and see if she had food in her car that he could run and get. See if the baby needed anything.
Then, once they had enough wood to stay warm, hopefully enough food to keep them going, and thankfully running water to drink, they would wait out the storm. Once it was over, Jeff could shift and run back home, get Cal and the other rangers, and they could come out with a vehicle to take the woman and her baby back to town.
Then...well, then it wouldn’t be Jeff’s problem anymore.
But he wondered what would happen to them after he got them back safe. They didn’t look like they had a lot of money, and she’d have to get her car towed and fixed up if she wanted to get wherever she was going.
That was a problem for later on, though. For now, he had a to-do list, and he was going to focus on that.
The fire was licking o
ver the kindling, and as Jeff watched, it settled in and looked like it wasn’t about to go anywhere. Satisfied, he sat back on his heels and looked over to the couch.
The woman was still asleep or unconscious, lying on her back on the couch with the baby asleep on her chest. Time to check her over.
Jeff unwound her scarf first, exposing the curve of her cheek, her parted lips, and the vulnerable line of her throat. Seeing her face fully exposed for the first time, he was struck by how beautiful she was. He wanted to see what she looked like when she was awake, her face animated with personality.
He shook himself out of his distraction, and put two fingers to the pulse in her neck. It was a little slow, but not dangerously so. Her scarf had been pulled up over her nose, and her hat was down almost to her eyes, so her face hadn’t had a chance to get frostbitten.
Next, he pulled off her gloves to check her fingers. She had two pairs of gloves on, thankfully, and it looked like she’d kept her fingers pulled into a fist inside them, so they were fine. He noticed that her hands were calloused, like she worked outside. He wondered what she did for a job—especially if she was also taking care of her baby all alone.
Finally, he tugged off her boots. She had warm socks on, but even with that, her feet showed signs of frostnip—not full-on frostbite, thankfully, but the beginnings of it. Just being inside where it was warm would help, but they’d have to treat it.
He unbuttoned her coat, and carefully undid the buckles on the baby’s carrier, lifting the sleeping baby gently off the woman’s chest.
Her eyes flew open, her breath drawing in with a gasp. “Emily!”
***
Leah was dreaming about big cats in the snow. She was holding Emily and pointing at the pale leopard that was bounding through the drifts, kicking up wide sprays of snow and obviously having a wonderful time. Emily was waving her arms and laughing.
Then the baby was snatched away. Leah started awake as Emily’s weight left her chest, reaching out without knowing what was happening. “Emily!”