Chapter One

“I’m Just a Fae Nurse With a Fanny Pack”

Usually, when people went skydiving, they did so with parachutes strapped to their backs. In Mallory’s case, all she had was a pink fanny pack stuffed with first-aid supplies.

Put simply, she was screwed.

Her body seemed to hover in the freezing atmosphere for a few seconds before plummeting to earth in a rapid spiral, the wind rushing through her hair and ripping at her clothes, howling in her ears, and telling her what she already knew.

There was no coming back from this.

This was one emergency for which her MediPack was useless, she thought ruefully, unless she could somehow manage to create a parachute out of bandages at thirty thousand feet and falling.

She spun continually in midair, forced to take in the sight of her surroundings as she fell. She could see the plane above—or what was left of it—hurtling toward certain destruction, partially engulfed in flames. Scattered in the air, a couple of hundred feet above her, were dark specks she figured were the other passengers. As she tumbled, her gaze fell on the ground below her. It wasn’t the state of Nebraska, with buildings and roads and vehicles; it was a mountain, a behemoth of a mountain, to put it mildly. An expanse of whiteness spread before her, defined by jagged peaks and patches of forest.

Despite the panic that gripped her, Mallory somehow had the presence of mind to think that odd . Was she seeing things? She could’ve sworn they’d been flying over Nebraska.

It didn’t matter now, she told herself. Right now, her greatest priority was her survival. Survive first and assess the situation later. Nursing had taught her to cast her doubts and worries aside and face her tasks with utmost professionalism in order to save as many lives as she could. And right now, it was she who needed saving.

The howling in her ears grew louder until she thought her eardrums might burst from the pressure. The mountain rushed up to meet her at breakneck speed. In a matter of moments, she would crash into it. Snow or not, there was no surviving a fall from this height unless there was something she could do to stop it.

But what? she found herself thinking. There’s nothing I can do. I’m just a fae nurse with a stupid fanny pack.

A fae nurse.

Then, something clicked inside her head. The next thing Mallory knew, she was ripping desperately at her clothes and struggling with the tiny buttons on her shirt.

She’d never imagined stripping in midair; she’d even obsessed over the possibility of having to rip her top off to make a tourniquet or clean a wound in an emergency. Well, this was an emergency. Her life was at stake.

The earth shot up toward her, almost a blur in her vision now. Desperation surged through her body. With barely half a minute to impact, she tugged her shirt off and unfurled her wings.

Fifteen seconds left…

Mallory hadn’t flown in a long time. In her defense, she hadn’t had the chance to, what with living in a city populated predominantly by humans who, if they knew what she was, would put her on the front page of the morning paper as Vegas’s latest attraction. Still, she was glad to have the wings as an option. Too bad she couldn’t say the same about all the other people on the plane.

Ten seconds…

What happened next was almost a blur. Mallory shrieked, or at least she could have sworn she did. She flapped her wings as hard as she could against the wind. Then she crashed into the snow, and everything went dark.

***

The freezing cold gathered around the edges of her consciousness, intense enough to rouse her from the depths of oblivion, intense enough to shut down her entire body.

“Ugh…” she groaned.

An image of nurses and doctors briskly ushering a gurney down a brightly lit corridor, their faces tight with ill-disguised disgust, swam through her half-conscious mind. Mallory dared to take a closer look at the patient on the gurney. It was an unclad woman with red hair, her arms dangling down the sides of the stretcher. And spread across the white sheet, mottled with blood, were a pair of wings.

A fae woman.

“No!” Mallory cried.

Her eyelids fluttered open to a sheet of white. Her first thought was that it was the same hospital corridor she’d just seen, but as the cold bit at her skin, the details trickled into her mind, accompanied by memories that spread through her consciousness like ripples in a pond.

She’d been on a plane to Chicago…the plane had come apart in midair…she’d been flung into nothingness, doomed to plummet to the earth…and she’d landed on this mountain. This snow-covered mountain that had appeared out of nowhere.

With a grunt, she pushed herself into a kneeling position. She was alive. Opening her wings at the last minute had broken her fall, but a dull ache filled her body. She glanced around. Sure enough, she was kneeling in the snow only a few feet away from a pile of jagged rocks. She’d landed in a valley, surrounded only by snow and rocks for the first thirty feet or so. Beyond that, to her left, was a grouping of trees. Looming ahead was a large, steep, snowy hill.

Get up, she instructed herself.

Almost mechanically, she pulled herself to her feet, her wings fluttering feebly behind her. She reached for her MediPack. It was still intact, somehow unaffected by her crash landing in the snow. Good. She’d opened her wings a few moments too late, but at least she’d managed to break her fall. A second later, and she would’ve broken much more.

Questions swirled through her half-groggy mind as she continued to gaze around. Where in the world was she? The Alps? No, too much snow. Mount Everest, then? Even more unlikely. Mallory struggled to understand what she was seeing, but like the misplaced pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, nothing fit together. Hadn’t they been flying over Nebraska just before the plane came apart? Mallory didn’t need a map of the US to know that something wasn’t quite right here.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” she muttered through chattering teeth.

She shivered, and she instinctively wrapped her wings around her torso, hugging her arms to her chest. It was not enough. The biting cold was relentless. Wherever the hell she’d landed, it clearly wasn’t survivable. The crash might not have killed her, but it was only a matter of time before her surroundings finished her off.

Calm down, she told herself. Breathe.

She decided to try the five-four-three-two-one technique. “Okay, Mallory. What are five things you can see?”

She glanced around. Snow. Trees. Rocks. The sky. Her own body.

Four things she could touch? Myself. This damn snow. Not much else.

Grounding techniques like this were one of the perks of dabbling in psychiatry. If she could help others who were experiencing mental breakdowns, she could help herself.

“Come on, Mallory,” she told herself, taking a step forward. “Three things you can hear?”

She listened. She could hear the wind. It was gentler now that she wasn’t tumbling through the air from thirty thousand feet. She heard the crunch of snow beneath her feet as she walked toward the trees. The sound of rushing water indicated there was a river in the distance.

She couldn’t possibly be the only one on this mountain. There had to be others, another survivor from the accident, maybe. Or someone who lived around these parts. With any luck, she’d find someone to help her get off this mountain. It seemed like a long shot, but Mallory wasn’t in any position to be choosy about her options.

“Two things I can smell.” In this cold, it was hard to pick up any scents, but a couple wafted into her nostrils. She smelled the trees…and something—or someone—else.

“One thing I can taste,” she breathed and ran her tongue over her cracking lips.

The sky was slowly turning orange. Another shudder swept through Mallory’s body. At this rate, she’d be a frozen Popsicle before nightfall.

She continued to trudge toward the woods. At the very least, she could try to seek some shelter among the trees. Anything was better than remaining out here in the open. It was hard to tell just how high up on the mountain she’d landed, but judging from the cold, it was pretty high. Getting down to the bottom would take some time.

She clutched the MediPack. There had to be something in there that could help her. But what good would bandages and some ibuprofen do against the cold? The only thing that would’ve been of any help was the thermometer she’d forgotten, and Mallory needed no device to tell her how cold it was.

“I should have never agreed to a sabbatical,” she muttered to herself as she neared the trees. “I’m not going to make it off this mountain. I’m just a fae nurse with a fanny pack. I can’t even—”

Just then, she sensed movement!

A dark shape appeared in the corner of her vision. Her heart leaped with a mixture of relief and trepidation as she turned toward it. The mountain stretched upward as far as her eyes could see, and beyond it was nothing but pure white snow and a lone figure standing on two legs.

Scratch that, she thought. Make that six things I can see.

A bear?

No, it was a person! A man, barely forty feet away, and heading downhill toward her. So she wasn’t alone on this mountain, after all.

Thank goodness. At least I’m not going to freeze to death now.

As the man drew closer, she got a clearer view of him. He was quite tall and dressed in a dark coat and fur boots. Green eyes stared down at her as he approached, a thick brown beard shielding most of his face from view. Looking at him, Mallory couldn’t help but think he looked like a character from The Lord of the Rings .

It made no difference anyway. Whether he was headed for Mordor or was some wizard in disguise, all she cared about was getting his help to get off this mountain.

“Hey!” she called. “Hello!”

The man did not respond. He simply continued walking toward her.

Maybe he couldn’t hear her. Feeling a surge of relief and desperation, she lifted an arm and waved at him. If he were human, she’d have to explain her wings to him. Mallory didn’t particularly look forward to that, but help was help. Hopefully, he was a shifter or even a fae like her.

Fingers crossed.

“Hey!” she yelled again. “I need your help! I need to get off this mountain!”

The man drew even nearer.

Then he reached into his coat and drew something out. At first, Mallory couldn’t make out what it was, but as it caught the rays of the sinking sun, she saw the gleam of metal, and it dawned on her what the object was, and she knew then that he was not there to help her.