Will sat, bundled in his huge parka, on the small observation boat, shivering as he watched both the water and the monitors. He had been stationed in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska for two months, since late August. Last year, a pod of orca whales had forgone their usual winter migration and stayed there in the cold waters. Will had a grant to find out why.

As their boat rocked in the nearly-calm sea, he watched more ice float by, but no orcas. He began to wonder why he couldn’t have chosen to study animals in warmer weather. Sure, he was a shifter, and he could handle the cold better than some, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

The rest of his small team of four didn’t seem very happy about it, either. Tracy and Grey were playing chess while Roger slept, but even in his sleep Roger tossed and turned, slowly freezing as they waited in the frigid ocean.

Just then, a whale call came through on their monitor. Will tried not to jump.

He scooped the headphones from the computer and pressed them to his ears, listening with intent concentration. It was definitely an orca, rather than any other kind of whale, but was it one of theirs?

They weren’t there to study all orcas, just this one specific pod. However, it was cold enough that any orca still in these waters was recorded as part of their notes. Modern science still wasn’t clear on where, exactly, most orcas went during the winter months. There were many hypotheses, but little hard data, and that was why Will and his team wanted to make sure they were ahead of the trend.

They weren’t out to prove any particular theory. Will was a research biologist. He wanted useful and accurate information regarding the majestic animals.

Tracy was already over at another screen, checking their trackers. They had three out of the five members of the pod tagged, and their satellite would, with luck, pick up the location of this one.

“It’s one of ours,” Will said, and Tracy confirmed that minutes later.

“It’s Venus,” she said, referring to a mother orca that had been tagged over a year ago.

That piqued Grey’s interest and the older man looked up from the chessboard, then stood and looked out over the water. He roused Roger on his way past the bed. The work they did involved a lot of waiting and a few intense bursts of excitement. They all wanted to be awake for those.

“Is the calf with her?” Grey asked, trying to spot the orcas in the water.

Tracy read out the coordinates of Venus, making recordings at the same time, and Will continued to listen, focused.

There were a few intense moments of quiet, and then Will grinned wide.

“Hey! Cupid!”

The young orca breached the water in a playful display for all of them, and they let out a cheer of excitement. Grey snapped photos and Roger grabbed Will, hugging him tight.

“We found them, buddy. It’s gonna be a good winter.”

Will grinned at his best friend. “Merry Christmas, Roger.”

Cupid had been born in early spring and was no longer truly a calf, but he was the youngest of the pod and the newest arrival that year. Roger had been the one to name him, lovesick and heartbroken about being away from his girlfriend all spring. “Even on Valentine’s day!” he had exclaimed.

When they had found the beautiful mother orca and her calf, it had been a joyous day. Any orca birth was, for a conservationist. At the same time, with any wild birth, there was a silent hope that the young whale would make it.

That night, the crew celebrated the return of the prodigal son. A calf surviving the summer meant good things for the pod, and it meant new research opportunities for the team. They had found their autumn grounds, and they would be able to see what new hunting techniques the calf had learned over its summer.

There were three distinct types of orca whales in the North Pacific Ocean. Transient orcas, the type Will was studying, were skilled hunters who roamed in pods of two to seven, and were regularly seen to take down seals, porpoises, and even baleen whales. Recently, studies had shown these orcas stored their food, dragging large whale calf carcasses across miles of ocean to munch on the frozen meat later.

Will found the behavior, particularly in the icy Aleutian Islands, fascinating.

The three types of orcas had shown not only behavioral and cultural differences, but genetic differences, and they didn’t appear to interbreed at all. The working hypothesis was that they were actually on their way to evolving into separate subspecies. Will wanted to know if the calf had learned the unique hunt-and-store method from his mother, or if this hunting behavior was somehow genetic. He wasn’t sure he’d ever know for sure, but whatever information they could get, he would take.

POP! The champagne bottle burst open and they poured bubbly gold into camping mugs. Their mugs slammed together in a toast.

“To science,” Tracy said with a smile.

“To nature,” Will added.

Grey smirked. “To mothers,” he said.

“To Cupid!” Roger cried righteously, and they all laughed and drank.

A soft beeping started on one of their monitors, and Tracy went over to look.

“Huh,” she said softly. “Just a weather warning. Storm coming in. Do you want to try to find port, Will?”

Will went over to look and shook his head.

“We’d never make it back in time, anyway. And we’ll lose our whales. We’ll just have to ride this one out.”

They had been through storms in their boat before; the Bering Sea was notorious this time of year for storms and freezing weather. It didn’t seem like anything out of the usual. They’d make it.

* * *

Only a few miles west, Captain Logan Harris ordered his crew to batten down. He could smell the storm coming, and he knew it would be a nasty one. The captain ran a king crab fishing vessel. The dangerous seasonal work brought wealth and excitement for the alpha, and left plenty of time during the rest of the year for him to travel and enjoy his earnings. But when a storm like that rolled in, Logan was all business.

Most of the crew did what they were supposed to be doing. But he noticed, as he observed his crew from the wheelhouse, that their greenhorn stood still, staring at the incoming storm; the worst one they’d seen yet.

Their deck boss was busy, and they were anchored, so he left the wheelhouse and went down there. Freezing water sprayed into his face the moment he hit the deck.

Logan clapped the boy on the shoulder hard and looked into his eyes.

“What is it, son?” he asked Oliver seriously, in a thick New Zealand accent.

The boy was shaking in his boots, but Logan made it clear to all the greenhorns that if they couldn’t take the seas with a strong back and a brave heart, they wouldn’t be invited back.

“Nothing, Captain, sir,” Oliver said, straightening his posture.

Logan was glad to see him picking himself up by his bootstraps, but he knew that the fear was still in his heart, and he didn’t want that to spread to the rest of his crew.

“Aegis! You’re in charge of Oliver. See he’s put to work until this storm ends.”

“Aye, Captain,” Aegis, an experienced deckhand, answered.

He was still in the middle of tying down their crabbing pots, but Logan knew that the man's word was good.

“Do what you’re told and you will make it through,” Logan promised Oliver.

The boy nodded.

“Aye, Captain,” he agreed, and then Aegis called for him.

Many men lost their lives to king crab fishing. It was more perilous than most could fully understand, unless they’d been on a boat in the Bering Sea during the cold season. Logan had only ever lost one crew member, but he found that the thing that came closest to killing his men—more than the cold, the sea, the heavy steel equipment, or even the sleep deprivation—was fear.

Fear could make a man feel cold before the cold even really hit. Fear could steal the breath from a strong and healthy crew member and turn them into a shriveled shell. Logan’s job was to warm his men’s hearts when he couldn’t warm their bodies. He had to keep them just a bit reckless. He needed his men brave and ready for anything.

It was the only way to survive.

* * *

The storm hit hard, rain first, pelting Will’s small boat with vicious barbs of wet ice. Then the wind sped up, sweeping huge waves over their boat, blowing ocean debris on deck. Thunder rolled and the lightning was bright in the sky, not far from their teetering life raft, which was what the boat had become.

Will began to doubt they could make it through the storm without capsizing. There had already been a few close calls with huge waves flooding the deck, and the freezing temperatures were starting to mess with their equipment.

He saw the doubt in the rest of his crew’s eyes, too, as they huddled for warmth.

Another wave, bigger than the last, rocked the whole boat, and Will made his way over to the radio. They needed help.

* * *

Logan made his way back up to the wheelhouse, and saw that there was a distress signal blinking on his dash. He listened in on the radio, his face serious.

The fact was, he ran a commercial vessel, not a rescue crew. They were only minimally equipped and they didn’t have much space aboard for anything but crab. But they were the closest for hundreds of miles. Only other crabbing vessels were around, and they certainly weren’t coming to this little boat’s rescue. In this weather, even the Coast Guard wasn’t likely to make it out in time.

If they didn’t go, they could be sentencing these people to death.

They wouldn’t make 100 knots in this weather, but they could get there. He pulled the anchor and told the crew to find some place to hold on.

* * *

It all happened so fast. First, a window blew as ocean debris flew right through it, and water poured in through the porthole. Then, as the boat began to fill and sink, an enormous wave washed over the boat and rolled it into the water. They were upside down, in the black, freezing Bering Sea, trapped inside the tiny boat.

The freezing cold hit Will’s body like a knife. He was a shifter, and the cold wouldn’t kill him easily, but he still had the same reaction that all mammals had when they met icy temperatures like that - shock.

Fighting to hold his breath when his body desperately wanted to hyperventilate, Will tried to move his aching muscles through the freezing water to find a way out before they all drowned.

When he found air, he realized that in the rush of shock and adrenaline he had shifted into his wolf form. His thick coat kept him warm and he swam better that way, so he didn’t try to shift back. He looked around, paddling frantically, trying to see if any of the rest of his crew had survived.

That was when he saw Tracy. Clinging to a life jacket that wasn’t actually on her body, she gasped and trembled as the cold water consumed her fragile human body.

Will swam over, and Tracy was so panicked that she didn’t care that he was a wolf. She clung to him, climbed onto his back, and he paddled, trying just to keep her above the water, to keep them both afloat as the storm raged on.

The water was still so rough, and it washed over them, freezing Tracy further. She didn’t speak, she barely moved, she just clung to Will’s fur. Will could only hope that someone had received their distress signal.

He thought about what he knew about the human body. Tracy wasn’t a thin woman, and that was good; his own supernatural heat and her natural body fat would keep her warmer than not. But they were in the Bering Sea, in October. They couldn’t possibly have more than fifteen minutes.

Her breath was hot on his ear, so he focused on it. The biggest danger in cold water was drowning, he knew that from their training, and she wasn’t drowning.

Roger. Grey.

He almost stopped breathing when he thought of them. They must have been trapped in the boat, or swallowed water, or…

He couldn’t. Not now. He wanted to cry and scream like he never had before, but he had a human on his back, a human to keep alive.

Will tried to count how long they were out there, shivering, freezing, paddling in the storm. He lost track, his eyes starting to slip closed, his breathing slowed. He wouldn’t die, but his body attempted to shut down, to make keeping warm easier on him.

The ship came into view not a moment too soon.

A loud horn and bright spotlights made Will lift his head, and he looked up at the big commercial vessel, with wide, terrified eyes, a soaked dog with a frozen girl on his back. He howled in relief.