Chapter Four

 

When Cora woke up again, sunlight was filtering in through the narrow entrance to their cave.

Eric stirred beside her, shifting to his side with his eyes still closed, long lashes fluttering when a ray of sun fell on his face. His hair was tousled with sleep, shining golden in the morning light.

Cora ran her fingers through the soft strands until Eric blinked his eyes open. He looked at her, and a slow, blinding smile spread over his face.

"You're real." His voice was rough with sleep.

"I am," Cora confirmed with a laugh.

She knew where he was coming from. Yesterday felt almost unreal to her, like a dream. Had all of that really happened?

Eric tipped his head against hers, nuzzling her cheek in lieu of a good morning kiss. Cora smiled, charmed. He reminded her of a big cat.

Well, that's what he was in a way, wasn't he?

Out of everything that had happened yesterday, that was still the hardest to believe. Had he really turned into a cat in front of her eyes? It felt too real to have been a dream. And yet…

"Eric…?"

She hesitated. How did you even ask something like that? Hey Eric, did you actually turn into a mountain lion, or am I having high altitude hallucinations?

Eric extracted one hand from the sleeping bag and held it up. A soft golden light enveloped his fingers, and when he crooked them, five long, dark claws emerged from the tips. He twisted his hand back and forth a few times, letting her get a good look, and then retracted the claws, as neatly as a cat. For a moment, that golden light flared again. When Cora reached out to take his hand it was fully human again, no sign left of what had just happened.

"Does that answer your question?" Eric grinned.

"How did you know that's what I was going to ask?"

He shrugged. "You were making a face. I don't know, I guess… I guess I just feel like I already know you pretty well?"

He glanced at her from under his lashes, looking shy all of a sudden.

"I guess you do."

Eric's face brightened, and she felt her own smile growing in answer to the look on his face.

God, he was gorgeous. And there was something about the way he looked at her… as if she was the only thing in the universe that mattered.

She shook herself out of her reverie. "We should get going."

They packed up their camp in silent accord. Already it felt like the most natural thing in the world to work with him, her body moving easily around his in the cramped space, as if she'd picked up some sort of sixth sense for where he was.

Outside, the weather was as perfect as one could hope for, the sun shining down out of a clear blue sky. Cora shook her head at the fickleness of the mountains. One moment a storm fit to blow them off the face of the Earth, the next this.

The snow glittered in the sunlight, a deceptively peaceful blanket. The beauty of it took her breath away, even knowing the dangers: there'd be holes and crevasses hidden beneath that layer of freshly-fallen snow. They'd have to be careful on the descent.

But Cora had been up and down the Rai Parvat often enough that the safe route was burned into her brain, and Eric seemed almost as familiar with the terrain. The snow had compacted overnight, and although they still sunk in to the ankle, at least it wasn't coming up over her knees anymore. They made quick progress down the trail, walking hand in hand.

"So how long have you been working in mountain rescue?" Cora asked.

"God, a long time. I've been helping out since I was sixteen, although I didn't start doing it as a real job until a couple years later."

"Wow. You must have a lot of stories."

"Oh, some. You do see some pretty ridiculous stuff," Eric said. He put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her in for a quick kiss, and released her with a smile. "You must get your own share of idiots, as a guide."

"Don't you know it," Cora said with a sigh. "Okay, go. Most reckless idiot you ever had to rescue."

Eric laughed. "Hmm, let me think. I guess that'd be the guy who saved the life of Betsy the armchair."
Cora looked over at him. Eric's eyes were sparkling with mischief, so she was pretty sure she'd heard that right, but— "Betsy the what?"
Eric grinned. "There was this group of Scottish tourists. And for whatever reason they'd decided to go camping on Mount Evans for their bachelor party."

"Oh no," Cora said, wincing. Drunken idiots on mountains. She'd seen her share of those, and it never ended well. She listened, one hand over her mouth, as Eric described how one of the drunken bachelors had gotten lost in the woods.

"So he stumbles around up there for what must've been at least half an hour. Ends up at the top of a gully," Eric said. "He looks down, and he sees something white and fluffy, all the way down there. Now this guy's from Scotland, where they've got sheep on every mountain. He decides it must be a sheep that fell and got stuck. And he's gonna rescue the sheep."

"No!" Cora laughed behind her hand.

Eric grinned. He took the hand that had been covering her mouth and pressed a quick kiss to her knuckles. She leaned in to kiss him for real, although the kiss turned out lopsided, both of them smiling against each other's lips.

"Keep talking, I gotta know how this ends."

"Well. The guy starts climbing down into the gully, at night, in the dark, wearing nothing but his shorts, and it's just started to rain."
"Oh God," Cora said, wincing and laughing at the same time.
"Yeah. Noble idea, terrible execution. So the walls of this gully are mostly earth, right, and with the rain it's all turning to mud, and he slips and falls and somehow manages to slide all the way down to the bottom, not a scratch on him. But there's no way he's ever getting back out on his own."
"Yikes." She could tell from the way Eric was telling the story that it wasn't going to end badly, but oh man, that could've gone wrong.
"Fortunately by this point, his friends had noticed that he hasn't come back. So they call mountain rescue, and mountain rescue calls me, and I managed to pick up his scent trail."
"Wait, you can do that?" Cora stopped and twisted around so she could look at Eric's face.
"When I'm shifted, yeah." He glanced at her from under his lashes, looking a little anxious all of a sudden. "Is that... okay?"
Cora blinked at him, startled. "What? Why wouldn't that be okay?"
"It's one of those things that non-shifters sometimes find a little creepy."

"Really? No!" It sounded incredibly convenient to her, actually.

Eric gave her hand a squeeze, looking relieved.

Cora leaned up to brush a kiss against his cheek. "I think you're wonderful," she said, low, feeling her face burn. "And the mountain lion thing's really neat."

Eric's closed his eyes for a moment, nuzzling his face against hers, drawing her into a kiss. "I'm glad," he said, his voice cracking slightly. He took a deep breath. 

"Anyway, by this time the gully is starting to flood..."
Cora listened breathlessly as Eric described how he'd managed to find the poor tourist, down in the gully, asleep on a small hillock.

"That was just about the only dry spot left down there, too," Eric said, making a face. "I was up to my stomach in mud, which, let me tell you, is even less fun as a mountain lion than it is as a human. The cat part of my brain was so mad."

"What is that like, anyway?" Cora asked. "Do you think like a cat, when you're shifted?"

But no, that couldn't really be. Eric had still recognized her, even when he'd been a mountain lion. He'd seemed to understand her, and he'd managed to communicate, too.

"I'm mostly still me, even in my mountain lion form," Eric said. "But there's definitely some cat instincts—and some instincts that only shifters have, too."

Cora was going to ask about that, but Eric looked like he regretted mentioning it; he jumped right back into his story.

"So this guy's curled up around—well, let's just say, it wasn't a sheep," Eric said with a grin. "There was this old armchair, with all the fabric worn away and the stuffing bulging out, so it's basically just a bunch of white fluff. And my poor drunk bachelor's all snuggled up to it, with an arm around the fluffiest bit. And then of course he picks that exact moment to wake up—and I'm still standing there as a mountain lion, no time to shift back before he sees me."
"Oh no," Cora said.

"Oh yes. So you have to remember he's still drunk, and by this point he's also exhausted and hypothermic, and he still hasn't even realized that that's not a sheep he's snuggling. So this guy, this wet, shivering, half-naked guy with his little pocket knife, he gets in between the sheep—the armchair—and me, he stands up in front of a huge mountain lion, and he goes—" Eric's voice shifted into a faint imitation of a Scottish accent—"Screw ya, kitty! This here's me Betsey! I saved her, I named her, you cannae have her!"
"Aww." Cora pressed a hand to her face, trying to contain a giggle. "Stupid, but brave."

"Yeah," Eric grinned. "It was kind of touching. Not as touching as it would've been if I hadn't been wet, tired, and covered in mud."

"How did you ever get him out of that gully?"

"Ran away, shifted back where he couldn't see me, called in backup. They ended up pulling both of us out with the winch from the pick-up truck. The most difficult part was getting that guy to let go of his Betsy." Eric grinned. "Thankfully, he was drunk enough the next day he just assumed he must have hallucinated the mountain lion. He was mortified when he sobered up. I got a really nice thank you card from him, actually."

Cora laughed, bumping her shoulder against his. "That's something."

Eric turned to her with a grin. "Your turn. Most obnoxious client you ever had."

"Oh God. It's been ten years, and I still want to go back in time and punch that guy."

Eric was a good listener. Cora liked watching his expressive face as she talked, the way laughter and disbelief and outrage chased each other across his features. She hadn't told this story in ages, but it was all coming back to her as she talked, and by the end they were both in stitches.

"…and at that point Tashi decided she'd had enough of his nonsense, so she went and slung him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and carried him all the way back to camp," Cora finished, and Eric braced himself on his thighs, shaking with laughter.

Cora wrapped her arms around him. Eric leaned against her, a heavy, boneless weight, his laughter vibrating through her chest. She captured his smiling mouth with hers, kissed the laughter from his lips until he stilled, his arms around her.

Finally Eric pulled back, only just enough so he could see her face, one hand still cupping the back of her neck. He'd stopped laughing. There was something serious and intent in his expression, something she couldn't let herself look at too closely; it made her heart thump harder inside her chest.

"We should get going," Cora said, forcing herself to look away from him with an enormous effort.

***

 

They reached Camp Two by noon.

A few people were working to repair the tents that had gotten damaged in the storm, but there was a group of people huddled in the center of the camp, and even from a distance Cora could recognize their body language. She'd been part of groups like this before: the inevitable discussion that sprang up whenever anything went wrong on the mountain, the argument between the people who wanted to mount a rescue mission now, and the people who wanted to wait.

Cora had never been a wait-and-see person, herself; when someone got lost in the mountains, unless they were exceptionally well-equipped, their time started to run out quickly. And in the Himalayas, even the best equipment wouldn't stand up to the brutal exposure for long.

Beside her, Eric picked up the pace. "Let's go see what happened. Looks like someone might need help."

So he'd picked up on the same things she had. And his first impulse was to go and help. Cora looked over at him, swamped with a wave of feeling that stuck like a lump in her throat. God, she barely knew him. How could she already like him this damn much?

As they came closer Cora realized that she knew some of the people in that huddled group. Tashi was easy to recognize by her bright green jacket, and that was Tenzing beside her.

A man at the back of the group looked up and noticed her and Eric approaching, and then the entire group came hurrying towards them.

Cora realized, belatedly, that some of that concern might have been for her and Eric. They'd gone missing overnight, in one of the most brutal snowstorms the Rai Parvat had seen in a while. They'd spent the night so comfortably and safely, she'd barely wasted a thought on how much worse things could have been if they hadn't gotten so lucky in their choice of camp sites.

Tashi was the first to reach them. She yanked Cora into a tight hug. "Cora! You're all right!"

"I'm fine! We're fine." Cora leaned her forehead against Tashi's for a moment. "I'm sorry if I worried you."

"Scared the hell out of me, more like." Tashi smacked her arm—not that she felt it as more than a tap, through the heavy layers of her cold weather gear—and then gave her one more hard squeeze. "You're usually so good at planning ahead. I'm not used to you not coming back when you said you will."

"We spent the night in a cave. It was safer than trying to get down through that storm."

"We?" Tasha repeated, raising one eyebrow.

"Me and, uh. Eric," Cora said. She could feel herself starting to blush, as if somehow Tashi would know just what they'd spent the night doing in their cave. And then of course that blush gave her away, or maybe it was just the fact that Tashi knew her entirely too well by now.

"Really." Tashi gave her a mischievous grin.

"Shh!" Cora hissed, uncomfortably aware of the group of curious climbers surrounding them.

"All right, all right." Tashi's face sobered. "You didn't pass anyone else on the way down?"

"No. Who's missing?"

"Carpenter and his two tourists."

Cora winced. Beside her, Eric let out a quiet curse. "Figures. Let's hope that idiot hasn't gotten himself into more trouble than he can handle."

"We were just discussing whether we should go up and look for them," Tashi said. "They went up a few hours before the two of you, so they should've been hitting Camp Three just about when the storm started. With any luck they've had the good sense to camp out overnight, in which case they should be coming back down some time in the next few hours. But I don't have a great feeling about this whole situation."

"You think we should head up, try and find them?" Eric asked.

"Is noon already. It get dark before you even get to Camp Three," Tenzing said. "They not back by tonight, we go up tomorrow at first light."

"He's not wrong," Tashi said, sounding reluctant. "If we go up now, we'd probably end up where that avalanche came down last night just when it's getting dark. Might be pretty difficult to find a safe place to camp. That's a big risk to take when we don't even know for sure they're in trouble."

Eric sighed. "They're right. I don't like to wait, but—"

"All right." Cora cast an unhappy glance towards the top of the mountain. "If we haven't heard from them by tonight, we'll meet at Basecamp tomorrow, six am sharp."

Eric tapped Tenzing on the shoulder as the rest of the group began to disperse. "How's Josh doing?"

Tenzing shrugged contemplatively. "Doctor says he's fine, is definitely stomach flu, nothing serious. Josh say, leave him alone to die."

Eric snorted. "That sounds like him. I'll have to check on him, make sure he doesn't need anything, but he'll probably just want to be left alone. He's a bear when he's sick. Cora—" he reached out, caught one of her hands in his. "Did you have any plans for the rest of the day?"

Yesterday, she'd been thinking about hiking out to the next larger village, where she could check her email, get started on organizing her next expedition. Yesterday seemed suddenly very far away. Her email would keep.

"No plans," she said, tangling her fingers with his with a smile. "What would you like to do?"

 

***

 

Cora and Eric hiked down to Kalyanpur together. Eric checked in on Josh, who looked a bit green around the nose but otherwise fine, and, as Eric had predicted, only wanted to be left alone to recover in peace.

They spent the afternoon on a long, leisurely hike, following one of the paths that led around the base of the mountain. Cora showed Eric to a hidden cave she'd found by accident years ago. Blue ice covered the walls and dripped from the ceiling in delicate columns. Sunlight glittered off the ice, reflecting in shimmering, colorful rainbows.

Cora watched as Eric's eyes went wide with wonder. A sudden wave of joy gripped her heart. She reached for him, kissing him with abandon. Eric wrapped his hands around her thighs and lifted her up against him. Cora wrapped her legs around his hips, clinging tightly. They kissed and kissed, their bodies straining towards each other.

Finally Eric broke away with a gasp, breathing hard. "Let's get back to the inn," he said, his eyes wild.

Cora nodded wordlessly. She could feel her pulse pounding between her legs. She couldn't wait to get him back to a bed.

 

***

 

They spent hours making love that night, tangled up together in Cora's narrow bed in the inn. It was… Cora didn't quite have the words for it. She'd had sex before, but she'd never had sex like this. Every touch made her burn. Every brush of Eric's skin against hers seemed to set off sparks inside her body. When he slid inside her, it felt as if they'd become a single being, as if they were connected on a level much deeper than flesh and bone.

Even when she was finally exhausted, she didn't want to let go of him. She curled up against Eric, her head pillowed on his chest. Every cell in her body seemed to sing with satisfaction. A bone-deep sense of well-being washed over her.

Eric ran his hands down her back, petting her in long, slow strokes that made her want to purr with satisfaction like a happy cat. Every time their eyes caught, they'd start smiling. Cora felt young, light, untethered, as if she could spread her arms and float away.

"We should get some sleep," she said finally, reluctantly. "It's gonna be an early morning tomorrow."

Carpenter hadn't returned. Cora had tried to push the thought away as best she could, while there was nothing she could do, but now it crept back in, chasing the quiet lassitude away.

"We'll find them," Eric said, spreading his hands warm and reassuring over her shoulder blades. "With any luck, they just got held up, and they'll be on their way down by the time we get there."

"Mm. I hope you're right." But Cora slept uneasily that night. She could feel Eric shifting beside her, restless, and knew he shared her worries.