A sample from
Buried Warm
The last switchback was always the one that tried to kill you.
Rowan Vale leaned into it anyway, boots biting the frozen scree, the weight of her pack dragging at her shoulders like a second, sullen self. Below her the valley had already gone blue with afternoon shadow, the treeline a black smear a thousand feet down, and above her the station squatted on its shelf of rock the way it had for forty years — a low grey block of a building, its windows shuttered, its solar array furred with old snow. Empty. It was supposed to be empty. She had signed for the keys herself, in a warm office three days and one bad bus ride ago, and the man behind the desk had said nobody's been up since September, mind the ice on the north stairs, and she had thanked him and not thought about it again.
She thought about it now.
Her body had been wrong all morning, and she knew exactly why and refused, on principle, to name it. Her skin ran too hot under the shell of her jacket. Her joints ached in that low, restless, animal way, the way that meant her wolf was close to the surface and pacing, and the smallest things kept snagging at her — the creak of the pack straps, the too-loud crunch of her own footsteps, the way the cold air tasted of iron and coming weather. Pre-rut. Three, four days out, maybe less; her cycle had never kept a tidy calendar. It was the reason she'd taken this job, if she was honest, which she was trying not to be. A locked, abandoned station at nine thousand feet, one solitary week to shutter it down for the season, nobody within a day's hike in any direction. Somewhere to be alone with the thing her body was about to do to her. Somewhere the bond couldn't find her.
She crested the switchback, and the wind came down off the peaks to meet her, and it carried woodsmoke.
Rowan stopped.
She stood absolutely still on the trail with one boot half-lifted, the way prey stands, the way something that has just heard a twig snap stands, and she made herself breathe slow and even while every hair on her arms lifted. Woodsmoke. Thin and clean and unmistakable, the resinous bite of pine burned in a good draught. There was a stove going. Up there. In the empty station that nobody had been to since September.
A squatter, she told herself, already knowing it was a lie, already knowing because her wolf had gone from pacing to bolt-upright, silent, straining. A climber sheltering. A caretaker they forgot to mention. She catalogued the ordinary explanations the way you'd count exits in a burning room, fast and useless, and then the wind shifted a second time — swung round out of the north, off the ice — and under the woodsmoke it brought her the other thing.
Cedar. Snow. And beneath both of those, threaded through them like a wire through wax, the scent.
It hit her low and it hit her hard, somewhere below thought, somewhere the human part of her had no vote. Her knees actually loosened. A sound tried to come up out of her chest and she caught it behind her teeth, and her wolf lunged toward the top of the trail with a want so total, so uncomplicated, so glad, that it frightened her more than any fear could have. She had smelled it exactly once before. Six weeks ago, on a supply run, in the crowded warm chaos of the ranger depot at the trailhead — a big man across the loading dock, there and gone, and the world reorganising itself around him between one breath and the next. She hadn't even seen his face clearly. She hadn't needed to. Her blood had stood up and shouted a single word, and she had turned on her heel and walked out of that depot and had been walking away from it, one way or another, for six weeks.
And now it was up the hill from her. In the station. In the one place on the whole cold spine of the mountains she had chosen precisely because he could not possibly be there.
"No," she said, out loud, to nobody. Her breath smoked. "No, no, no."
She didn't need to see a boot-print. She didn't need to climb the last hundred feet and find the door unbarred and the stove ticking with heat. Her body already knew what her mind was scrambling to refuse: him. Kass, if she'd let herself remember the name the depot clerk had said, packless, the big quiet one who wintered rough. Her fated mate, standing between her and the only job she had, breathing woodsmoke into a sky that had no business smelling of him.
Every instinct she owned said turn around.
It would be easy. That was the terrible part — how easy. She was strong on the ice and she still had four hours of thin light; she could be back at the treeline before dark, back at the ranger hut by midnight, and she could radio in some clean professional lie about the road being unsafe, the ice unstable, the ascent aborted, and no one would question a glaciologist's read of a slope. She could walk down out of his scent and keep her distance and keep her choice, which was the only thing she had ever really fought for — the right to decide her own life instead of having it decided for her and handed over prettily wrapped and called fate. She could run. She was so good at running. She had six weeks of practice.
Rowan turned to go.
And the mountain, as if it had been waiting for exactly that, showed her the other reason she couldn't.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.