by Zoe Chant
If anyone came along to notice. They were on the Lamberts' private road.
First things first. Injury assessment was the top priority right now. Her chest ached where the seat belt was biting into her, and she guessed she was going to have bruises there. Touching her face, she felt abrasions from broken glass, and bruises on the side of her head. Her whole body felt like one big bruise. She'd really gotten knocked around as the Jeep rolled.
Beyond that, though, she didn't think there was anything seriously wrong. She tried moving her legs, rotating her ankles under the dashboard, and found that they responded normally. Her left hand felt weird; it had gotten trapped between the air bag and steering wheel. When she flexed her fingers, pain shot up her arm from the wrist. She couldn't tell if it was sprained or broken.
"Alec?" she asked. "What about you? Are you all right?"
"I ... I'll be okay."
There was an odd, breathless note in his voice. Charmian twisted around, trying to see him better. In the dim blue winter twilight, the only light inside the Jeep came from the reflected backwash of the headlights. It filled the cab with shadows and made it hard to see distinctly. The fact that they were lying mostly upside-down didn't help.
But she didn't like the way Alec was twisted in his seat. Something was wrong there.
"Don't move," she said in her no-nonsense nurse voice. Carefully she undid her seat belt, having to struggle with the buckle since her weight was on it, and half-fell onto the deflating air bag. She gasped with pain when she tried to catch herself with her left hand to keep her weight from sliding onto Alec.
"Charmian—"
"I'm okay," she panted. "I'm okay." Her estimation of the probability spread between "sprained" and "broken" swung towards "broken". We'll just have to deal with it. Not like we have a choice.
Now that she was out of the seat belt, gravity pulled her down against Alec's big, warm bulk. He stiffened when her weight pressed against him.
"Alec, after all of that about trusting me as a driver—I am so, so sorry."
"Not your fault," he said firmly. "I was there through the whole thing, remember? There was nothing you could have done. The best driver in the world couldn't have avoided that accident."
She filed that away in her head under "things to think about later". In a whole lifetime of driving in brutal Pinerock County winters, she'd never gotten into a serious accident, and now of course it happened with Alec in the car. Now that she was this close to him, she became aware of something she hadn't noticed: the heavy metallic smell of blood. Her stomach lurched.
"Alec, you're hurt, aren't you? Let me see."
"I need you to know that for me, this isn't as bad as it's going to look to you."
"Well, that's reassuring," she muttered.
Trying not to jostle him more than necessary, she leaned across him to open the glove box and get out the flashlight she kept there. As soon as she snapped it on, she gasped.
No wonder she'd been able to smell blood. The entire side of his coat was soaked with it. Swinging the flashlight beam to the shattered passenger-side winter, currently pressed into snow and brush on the downhill side of the car, she saw what had happened. The rolling vehicle had been stopped by broken brush and trees, but all those snapped-off branch ends had thrust like spears through the shattered window, and impaled Alec in the chest and side.
For an instant, she couldn't breathe. She was not a doctor, but as a certified nurse-midwife she had a nursing degree, as well as EMT training. She knew a critical medical situation when she saw it.
"Don't," Alec said. He clasped his hand over hers on the flashlight. "I'm a shifter. We're fast healers. I told you, this isn't as bad for me as it would be for you."
"It's still pretty damn bad!"
She could see he was in a lot of pain. His face was pale and drawn. Still, he had a point. A human in his situation would be wheezing for air, most likely incapable of speaking if not unconscious.
"I just need to get off it, and I'll heal."
"No!" she protested. "Alec, you can't remove an impaling object without emergency care. You'll do even more damage taking it out, and if it's compressing a blood vessel, you could bleed to death. I need to get the EMTs out here." She fumbled for her phone.
"You won't get service here. Probably not even up on the main road. I'm not just going to stay here like this."
He was right. She hadn't been able to call Mary Lambert from the road; there was no chance she'd get reception down in this ravine, and sure enough, her phone showed no bars.
"But I don't have equipment," she protested. "Not for this. I—I've got some stuff in the back, but it's not even proper EMT quality, I'm not even licensed to administer narcotics or do surgery—"
"This won't be surgery." He had to pause and pant for breath for a minute before he went on. "I'm going to need your help. I need to get these things out of me so my body can heal. If you had everything you needed, if you could do it properly, how would it be done? Tell me how."
Charmian brutally squashed her growing panic. She'd dealt with medical emergencies before, and she told herself it was no different just because it was Alec, and just because she was trapped in a crashed vehicle in the middle of a snowstorm. Think of it like having a patient go into a medical crisis during labor. You can't let your own fear become a contagion. You have to stay calm for them.
"Well, first of all, we'd cut the branches so we could get you out of the vehicle and get you flat, somewhere warm with good lighting and surgical gear, where they can be removed properly."
He was already shaking his head. "No need. And no time. Give me your hand. I'm going to pull myself off them."
"You'll bleed to death!" she protested wildly, but he was already putting his good, uphill-side arm around her for support, and she couldn't think what to do except brace herself awkwardly in the cab of the truck. She couldn't think of a way to stop him, and it seemed he was set on doing it with or without her help.
"Shifter, remember? It's hard for us to bleed out. We're pretty much designed not to."
Still, there was a slight hitch in his voice, and she didn't think it was from pain alone. He's scared too. And working hard not to show it, probably because he didn't want to scare her.
"All right," she said, her voice little more than a whisper. Gathering strength both mental and physical, she went on, "If we're doing it like this, try to lift yourself straight away from the window, toward me. You want to do the absolute minimum damage pulling them back out, all right?"
He nodded, and she could feel his body tensing against her, gathering himself for the effort.
"Alec, before you do this—are you absolutely sure you can do it without killing yourself?"
There was a brief hesitation before he answered. "Mostly sure."
"Oh, well, as long as you're mostly sure."
She put the flashlight on the dashboard and then braced her feet against the roof of the Jeep and slid her left arm, the one with the bad wrist, around his shoulders above the injured area. If she couldn't grip anything with that hand, at least she could use her own leverage to brace him. "Okay, let's go on three. You do the count."
"One," he murmured, tensing. "Two ..."
He didn't actually say Three, but she was ready, and when his body lurched toward her, she leaned back and threw her weight into pulling him up. He let out a low, ragged cry, and they both fell into the driver's side of the vehicle. Charmian clutched at the back of the driver's seat and ended up wrapping her right arm around it to keep them both from falling back onto the broken branches sticking through the window, glistening in the flashlight's beam like a field of stakes in a tiger trap.
They were tangled together, with Alec hunched in a cramped sitting position, jammed between the driver's seat and the upside-down ceiling. He wasn't a small guy. Charmian had her face tucked into his neck and wasn't quite sure how to untangle herself enough to make sure he was all right without causing them to fall back into the pa
ssenger's seat with its lethal nest of stakes thrust through the window. At least she could feel his breath huffing against the side of her face, so she knew he was still breathing.
"Alec, Alec, please say something."
"Give me ... a minute," he panted.
"I'm going to put pressure on this. We need to stop the bleeding."
Without waiting for his response, she reached into the mess in the back of the Jeep—everything she kept in the vehicle was now tumbled about the ceiling—and grabbed the first soft thing that came to hand, which turned out to be a baby blanket. She usually had a few different blankets thrown back there. It was difficult to maneuver with most of the empty space in the cab full of Alec, but she managed to get her hands under his coat. His shirt was sodden with blood, clinging to his side. Charmian shoved the wadded-up blanket into place as best she could.
After that she sat quietly for a minute or two, pressed into his lap and holding the blanket in place. Under other circumstances, this would have been nice. With Alec's blood soaking through the blanket under her hands ... not so much.
At least I'm not alone out here. Without Alec in the car, she'd have been in just as much trouble, but she would be by herself, stranded far from help.
"Stupid cow," she muttered under her breath.
Alec huffed a soft laugh that tickled her ear.
"So tell me, is anything else damaged that I should know about? Though, if being stabbed in the chest is what you consider 'fine', maybe it's not worth asking."
"Leg's a little messed up," he said after a moment.
"By which you probably mean broken in three places." This made her uncomfortably aware that she was sitting on his legs at the moment. "Am I hurting you?"
"No, it's okay. What about you?"
"My wrist is a little messed up." She had managed to find a position where she could brace the makeshift dressing with her left forearm and didn't have to use her hand quite so much.
"Broken in three places?"
"Probably just one, but one's enough. Or it might be a bad sprain. I can't exactly put it under an X-ray machine to find out." She sighed, and rested her head against Alec's shoulder. "We need a plan."
"I figure as soon as the bleeding slows a little, I'll shift and go for help."
Charmian raised her head. She'd temporarily forgotten about his ability to shift. Still ... "That's going to be one heck of a walk on a broken leg."
"I didn't say it was broken. And I'll still have three good ones."
"You don't know the area. I've been here before. I'll go."
Alec was already shaking his head. "Snow and cold won't even slow my bear down. You should stay with the Jeep and keep warm."
"In case you hadn't noticed, it's not exactly warm in the Jeep either."
"Warmer than out there. You'll get covered in snow, and the wind's nasty."
"But the exercise will keep me warm better than sitting around in here and hoping to pile enough blankets on myself to keep hypothermia at bay."
He huffed a small laugh, all he could manage while trying to breathe shallowly so as not to aggravate his side. "You really are stubborn, aren't you?"
Charmian couldn't help smiling. "It takes one to know one."
Alec snorted.
"I'll think about it," she admitted. "But, while you're waiting for your shifter healing to kick in, why don't I climb up to the road and spread some flares around? Someone might come along. I can also see if I can get cell reception up there."
"Can't hurt, I guess."
The bleeding seemed to have slowed a lot. Charmian peeled her sticky fingers away from it, took one of Alec's hands and placed it against the injury. "Here, just keep pressure on it. I wish you could lie down, but there's no easy way to manage that." She looked over her shoulder at the spiderwebbed glass of the windshield, and beyond it, the headlights illuminating the brush. They didn't seem any dimmer. "Should I turn the lights off, do you think?"
"Leave them on. They'll run for at least an hour or two just on the battery, and make the car much easier to spot."
Charmian nodded. She crawled out of his lap, between the seats into the mess in the back of the Jeep. Fortunately her dad's lessons about winter driving had soaked in, and her emergency gear was neatly stowed in sealed Rubbermaid containers—currently lying haphazardly on the roof of the Jeep, but easy to find. She stuffed some road flares in her pockets and found a warm pair of gloves and a hat, as well as another flashlight.
Getting out of the Jeep turned out to be the difficult part. The doors were blocked with snow and brush, even on the uphill side. She had to open the tailgate, shoving against snow.
"I'll be back soon, Alec, okay?"
Alec grunted acknowledgement. She could tell it bothered him, letting her go out in the storm alone. But he was sensible enough to also acknowledge that clambering around in the snow in his current condition would only make it harder to do what he needed to do later. And, she realized as she closed the back door of the Jeep behind her, he hadn't tried to warn her to be careful or ask her if she knew how to light a road flare. He might have to work on it, but he was learning to trust her as an equal partner.
You're a stronger man than you know, Alec, and not in the ways you think.
She scrubbed the blood off her hands in the snow before pulling on the gloves. Her wrist was discolored and swollen, and she wished she'd thought to wrap it while she was still in the vehicle.
Just have to be careful, I guess.
She scrambled up the hillside, following the track through the snow that the Jeep had scraped out as it slid. As she'd expected, moving kept her warm enough that the biting wind didn't bother her too badly. It hit harder when she stepped onto the road, driving down from the mountains with all the force of the winter storm behind it.
And she nearly cried when she saw how badly the snow had piled up on the road just since they'd been in the ravine. Their tracks were almost covered, and drifts had already obscured the place where they'd slid off the road. The odds of someone coming along were next to nothing—the Lamberts were the only people who lived back here, and it wasn't like neighbors would be visiting or delivery drivers would be out in this mess. Still, she would've felt better if there was at least some chance of discovery. Her cell phone, as she'd suspected, had no more reception here than at the bottom of the hill.
Mary, I hope you're doing okay with your husband and mother to help you, because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to get there in time.
She struck a road flare anyway, and planted it in the snow beside the road. In the gathering blue dusk, the hissing flare was painfully bright.
Sudden movement, looming out of the storm, made her jump. It turned out to be the cow—or, no, it was a steer, she saw, looking closer. It had the Lambert brand on its flank: part of their beef-cattle herd.
Its coat was matted with snow and it moaned plaintively at her. Beef cattle were not, in general, friendly animals—as a veterinarian's daughter, Charmian had spent much of her childhood trying not to be trampled by hostile cattle—but this particular steer was clearly sick to death of wandering around in the woods and was ready to try any port in a storm.
"You ran us off the road and now you want my help, huh?" Charmian muttered. She sighed and cautiously scratched its curly forehead. "Sorry, buddy. We've got all we can do just to get ourselves out of this mess you got us into. But I'll let the Lamberts know you're out here. They can come get you."
If she got a chance to talk to the Lamberts again. But she wasn't going to think that kind of thought.
She left the steer standing woefully in the road and clambered back down to the Jeep. There was a moment's panic when she started to lean in the driver's-side window and found Alec was no longer in the front seat; instead, he was a huddled lump in the back. Then she noticed the beam of the flashlight, partly concealed by his body, and relaxed a little. He hadn't collapsed; he was doing something back there.
She waded through the snow
to the tailgate and struggled with the frozen outside handle until Alec leaned over and opened it for her. Charmian brushed snow off her clothes and climbed in.
"Any luck?" Alec asked.
"With the phone, you mean? No. I didn't really think it'd work." She looked around at the recently disturbed mess, and saw he'd pulled everything out of her midwife to-go bag. "Hey! What are you doing?"
"Getting ready to go. I won't need clothes as a bear, but I will if I shift back, so I'm going to carry them with me."
Charmian pushed down her annoyance. There was a time and a place to get upset about someone messing with her stuff. The middle of an emergency wasn't it. "Tell me what you need me to do."
He looked up and met her eyes with his intense blue ones. "You're still set on coming with me."
"You better believe it."
"Okay then, pack up anything important enough to take with you. I can carry it as a bear, as long as there's some way to put it on me."
Which was why he'd emptied out the duffle where she kept her midwife gear; it had straps. "Won't it be hard on you carrying something like that, if you're hurt?" Charmian asked, sorting quickly through her first-aid equipment. She wasn't licensed for narcotics or other controlled substances, but painkillers and bandaging supplies might come in handy later if they ended up somewhere she could properly treat his injuries.
"Trust me, to an eight-hundred-pound bear, ten or twenty pounds of supplies doesn't matter any more than carrying a wallet."
Oh my God, I'm going to see him as a bear. It hadn't quite sunk in. She knew about shifters, as most people did. She'd seen them on TV. But she had never seen a real shifter change shape in real life.
"Which way are you planning on going?" she asked, putting her supplies in the duffle.
Alec was taking off his boots. "I was hoping you'd tell me. How close are we to the Lambert place?"
"A few miles, I think. But there's somewhere closer that we could aim for. Back down the road a mile or so, the way we came from, there's a turnoff to a hunting cabin. I don't know who uses it, but you can see it from the road—well, on days when there isn't a blizzard, anyway. We could get out of the snow, make a fire, and warm up."
