Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,2

staying out of town overnight. Snow? Oh no. If she got snowed in here, it’d be all Why didn’t you dig the car out yourself? and Why didn’t you take wing when the snow started?

Of course, that was a relatively best-case scenario. Worst case, she froze to death out here. She didn’t want to even imagine her relatives’ reaction to that.

What sort of a Belgrave freezes to death?

She straightened her shoulders. “I didn’t think you’d appreciate port slushies,” she murmured, rehearsing what she might say to her grandfather later. “You can’t think I’d have chosen to drive back, in these conditions?”

That was barely even a lie. It was hardly choosing when the alternative was three generations of Belgraves tutting over her pathetic human corpse.

She got out her phone again and compared the real map to the incorrect one from earlier, and her hazy recollection of the turns she’d taken. Biting back a sigh over the certainty that a real Belgrave would have perfect recollection, she tried to figure out where she actually was.

If only—

She shook her head sharply. There was no time for if onlys, here or in the rest of her life.

How would she manage this if she were comparing the map against, say, her boss’s directions? She wouldn’t trust Mr. Petrakis’s memory, for a start. She would assume he’d gotten himself turned around at least once, and that whenever the GPS instructions and the road in front of him hadn’t matched up, he would have taken the closest option and blamed the map for being wrong…

…Which wasn’t too different to what she had done herself, she realized. The GPS had sometimes told her to turn left where no left turn existed, or continue straight off the edge of a cliff, and she’d mentally edited the instructions: waiting for the next left, no matter how much further along it was, and so on.

Which, if she was figuring this right, meant that she was somewhere around…

The middle of nowhere.

“Oh good—” she began and cut herself off with an irritated huff. It was obvious to anyone that the situation wasn’t good. And it wasn’t as though there was anyone around she had to impress.

It wasn’t the utter middle of nowhere. Just deeper into the mountains than she had expected. She’d somehow managed to miss Pine Valley entirely. But it was only a few hours’ drive away, if she was right about where she actually was. She might even make it back before midnight.

She didn’t think the words ‘time to slink back home with my non-existent tail between my legs,’ but it was a near thing.

The car grumbled as she pulled onto the road again. First things first, she needed to turn around—but she couldn’t do that here. She’d have to keep going and keep an eye out for a wider bit in the road, where she wasn’t going to risk turning into a tree or snow-covered rocky outcrop as she tried to three-point-turn her way around.

The snow became thicker as the road climbed up the mountain. Once, when the trees opened up on the downhill side of the road, she thought she caught a glimpse of warm lights that might be Pine Valley. At least it was in the direction she’d decided Pine Valley was in, which she decided to take as reassuring.

Something like another light flickered through the trees above as she navigated a particularly sharp and narrow turn. A house, she wondered? Who would choose to stay this deep in the middle of nowhere? Even shifters, careful to keep their magical natures secret, would surely choose the warmth and camaraderie of a town filled with their kind over such solitude.

The car thudded over a hidden rock and she bit her lip, the light forgotten.

At no point did the road widen—if she’d come across another vehicle, after she’d died of shock she would have had a difficult time figuring out how they were meant to pass one another—but after a few more bends and another tempting glimpse of the glow of street lights far below, she found what looked like a stopping area on the side of the road. It was covered in pristine white snow, and she heaved a sigh of relief. The snow on the road itself had been getting deeper, and she didn’t want to drive any further up the mountain than was necessary. If she got stuck…

She shook her head. She couldn’t get stuck, because if she got stuck, she would have to be rescued, and