“I just had to get out of there, Brad,” a female voice said. Two sets of footsteps crunched through the mat of fallen pine needles. “And this made a good excuse.”
“I don’t blame you, Nicola, but maybe we’d better head back,” a man responded. “The snow’s getting heavier.”
“I was so sure our old playhouse was around here. But things change in the woods, and there’s so much new growth after that old forest fire awhile back. I haven’t been up here in years.”
“I’d love to see it, but we better try some other day. It’s really coming down.” He laughed a little. “Getting lost in a blizzard wouldn’t make your family like me any better.”
“They like you fine,” the woman said, too quickly. Then she sighed.
In spite of his mission, Joey found that his natural tendency to seek out lovers in trouble was drawing him to these two. He had planned to slink away, but instead he slunk along behind, ghosting through the snow.
“I’m really sorry about them,” the woman was saying. “They just come on strong. Even my mom means well. They’ll come around.”
“Your aunt seems nice.”
“Aunt Doris is great. She’s a lot more chill than the rest of the family. We’ve always been close.”
Doris! This woman was related to Doris! Joey couldn’t turn back now. He zigzagged under bushes and shrubs, staying just out of sight.
“I can ask her about the playhouse,” Nicola went on. “I bet she remembers where it was. Grandpa built it for her and my mom when they were little.”
The lights of the house gleamed warm and golden through the snow. It was difficult to judge distances in these mountains; Joey had scoped this house out from the top of the slope, but he hadn’t realized he was so close to it.
Hand in hand, Nicola and Brad crunched across the snow to the back door. All of Joey’s instincts urged him to follow—not just his mate-bond sense, but also his fox’s inherent tendency to smooth the path for troubled lovers. There were troubled lovers in that house; he could sense it. And Doris was in there.
But he could not expose her to danger.
He hesitated at the edge of the woods, in an agony of indecision. The door opened and closed, and Nicola and Brad vanished inside. Through the lighted windows, he could see indistinc
t shapes moving around.
Finally, Joey managed to master his instincts. He could not risk Doris; that was the thing he knew beyond all else. And mythic shifter senses told him that a storm was coming. They couldn’t drive back to town before it hit, even in the Jeep. He and his companions needed to find somewhere to go to ground before the blizzard came down like the breath of winter itself.
He whisked around and vanished whisper-quiet into the snow.
… just a little too late to see the back door open, so that a bundled-up Doris could step out into the softly falling snow.
TEN
DORIS
Joey?
Doris didn’t know why she’d almost expected to see him as she walked through the snow to the edge of the yard. It somehow felt as if he’d been here a moment ago. But that was silly, of course.
When she and Sylvia had been little girls, they’d looked for animal tracks in the fresh snow. Why, there were some fox tracks, already half-covered by the gently settling blanket of new snow. Doris crouched down to look at them, and smiled as she straightened up, already feeling more peaceful.
It was just so tense in that house. When she’d left, Nicola, Sylvia, and her mother had just started in on another argument about Brad, while poor Brad lurked in the other room. Mom had decided (again) that Isidor would make a better match for Nicola than Brad, in spite of Nicola and Doris telling her firmly (again) that Isador was gay. At that point Doris had had enough.
Nicola and Brad had just come back from looking for the old playhouse and failed to find it. That had given Doris a perfect excuse to duck out of the ever-growing tension in the house before things really erupted.
“I’ll go look for the playhouse!” she’d exclaimed, and grabbed her coat as she ducked out the door.
She looked back from the edge of the woods, worried that someone might try to follow her, but apparently they were too busy with their argument to even notice she was gone.
At this rate, Doris thought as she proceeded into the woods, every person in the house was going to take a turn looking for the playhouse just to get away from everyone else.
She loved her family, but they were just so … much.