Frost Bitten by Eliza Gayle

Chapter
One

    Seth
leaned over the cliff and searched to no avail for signs that someone
had slipped or fallen on the ice. The snowstorm of the season had
begun moving in before dawn and as the morning stretched into
afternoon, visibility had declined to near impossible levels. Even
his shifter senses weren’t doing much good in this shit.
    “ See
anything?” his brother yelled.
    Seth
shook his head. If the missing skier had come this way there’d
be no helping them now. The ground below was frozen solid and slick
thanks to the rock underneath. There’d be nowhere to gain
traction to stop a free fall except at the bottom of the ravine.
Hopefully they were on the wrong track.
    He
backed away slowly before turning back to his twin brother, Trent.
What he could see of him anyway. They’d both layered gear on
top of gear before they’d left their cabin this morning. Search
and Rescue frowned on their penchant for taking along as little as
possible when out searching. They could cover far more ground if they
shifted, unfortunately not everyone on the mountain today knew they
were shifters. So instead they traveled through the forest weighted
down with survival gear.
    Snow
crunched under his boots as he trudged through the often knee-deep
drifts. It’d been a while since they’d seen a storm this
rough and despite all the weather warnings, the night before a group
of daredevil college kids had hit the trails under the cover of
darkness after the access roads had been shut down.
    When
one of them had failed to return after six hours, they’d come
forward and reported him to the park service as lost on the mountain
and Seth and his team had been dispatched. He lifted his wrist and
examined his watch. That had been nearly seven long hours ago and no
one had seen more than a few faint tracks in the snow. He worried in
this weather their time was running out.
    “ Whoever
or whatever it is can’t be far. The scent is stronger here.”
    Seth
nodded. “Can’t be sure it’s the kid were looking
for though. It seems unlikely that a shifter would get lost out here
that quick.”
    “ Unless
he’s hurt. The damn storm moving in is messing with the trail.
Hard to be sure about anything.”
    They
both studied the sky. Trent was right. Much longer and the search
would have to be halted for safety reasons. He had to allow enough
time for his team to make it off the mountain and into shelter before
things got ugly. He sniffed the air. And they were about to get
damned ugly.
    “ We’re
about forty minutes past regulation,” Trent warned.
    “ Yeah,
I know. Dammit. If it was just you and I we could keep going. This
secrecy bullshit is for the birds.”
    “ Base
to Seth. Hey, Boss, can you hear me?” The squawk and the
warbled static of the hand held radio on his hip interrupted their
conversation.
    Seth
grabbed the radio and depressed the button. “Yeah. You’re
breaking up but I copy.”
    “ Awesome.”
    He
choked back the annoyance with the new intern manning the radio this
afternoon. His enthusiasm wasn’t a bad thing.
    “ We’ve
got—” The rest of his sentence gave way to pops and
hisses that made Seth wince.
    “ Say
that again. I didn’t copy.”
    “ The
missing college kid has been found. He was lost over on the North
Ridge. The other half of your team is on their way back in.”
    “ Copy
that,” Seth answered.
    Trent
whooped. “Hot damn. Now we can go the hell home.”
    North
Ridge? That was more than five miles from where they were located.
That didn’t explain the strange scent they’d picked up
the minute they’d hit the Shining Rock area. There was someone
else out here that didn’t belong.
    “ What?”
    Seth
turned to look at his brother.
    Trent
lifted one brow. “Don’t look at me like that. I know how
your brain works. We aren’t going home yet are we?”
    Seth
shook his head. “How can we? The team may have found the
missing kid but we haven’t found what we’ve been tracking
most of the