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"Joanna?"
Stephen called out her name in the absolute darkness of New York after the last Ice Age. The air was bitter cold, though not nearly as bad as, say, the top of the Himalayas. He took a step further into the frigid night. Snow crunched under his boots. He took another bold step and almost banged his head on a tree branch. The Cloak of Levitation snapped at his neck, clearly irritated at being pelted with snow.
"Joanna!"
From somewhere close by, a wolf howled.
Stephen raised his hands and whispered the spell for illumination. A soft wave of Eldritch energy appeared around him, lighting the terrain. No wolves in sight, though a second howl answered the first.
He glanced down and saw no footprints in the snow. He frowned and turned one-eighty degrees to confirm his suspicions. Either snowfall over the last hours had erased Joanna's footprints, or she had never been here to begin with. But from the sounds he'd heard from the Cauldron of the Cosmos he didn't believe that.
"If you can hear me, Joanna, say something."
Stephen knew he was running out of time. He'd only been in this place for a few minutes, and already he couldn't stop shaking. He kept the Eldritch wave lit above him and calmed his mind. Another human spirit was nearby. He could feel its aura radiating vitality. He reached for an identity and felt Joanna's personality within its center. He had expected her aura to be weak, considering this environment, but instead it pulsed with strength. That surprised him. Joanna could have easily given up, decided that life was no longer worth living, but she hadn't. She was fighting to survive.
He closed his eyes and absorbed the power from her aura, focusing on its specific location…
There. About twenty feet or so, slightly to the left but almost directly in front of him.
He moved as quickly as he could, getting stuck in a snowdrift when the terrain changed to a slight incline. He shifted his stance and shook the snow from his jeans. He couldn't imagine being stuck in a place like this for hours without anything to insulate him from the cold, without a sling ring, without hope. His respect for Joanna went up several notches.
Stephen reached the place where her aura burned brightest and stood within inches of the centrum. He widened the wave of energy above him to see better, but there was nothing in front of him now but a huge evergreen tree.
"Joanna?"
A soft moan sounded from somewhere beneath him.
Stephen raised his voice and summoned a more intense spell for illumination. The forest lit up like a golden rainbow around him. He gazed at his surroundings, memorizing everything to find the source of that feminine moan. His eyes fell to a pile of coniferous tree branches that had been stacked in orderly rows, definitely manmade, to provide shelter from the falling snow.
Stephen ripped away the branches from the trunk of the giant tree in front of him, careful to aim the condensed snow on its needles away from the base of the trunk. The Cloak of Levitation shuddered against him but didn't protest. Underneath mounds of branches, many of which had collapsed under the weight of condensed snow, Joanna lay curled in a tight ball.
She wasn't moving.
"Joanna?" He knelt next to her, reaching to find a pulse. Her heartbeat was irregular and slow. Too slow.
He lifted her in his arms, careful to keep her body from hitting the branches of the trees. Her clothes were completely soaked through. Her skin felt clammy against his fingers.
"Stay with me, Joanna." It was both a plea and a mantra, broken only by Stephen summoning a spell to create a portal back inside the Sanctum.
It wasn't until Stephen had laid Joanna down on her bed in the Shangri-La room that he realized how serious her hypothermia was. Not life-threatening, but getting dangerously close by the minute. She wasn't shivering, which was a bad sign. Her skin was white, and even though she mumbled when he tried to rouse her, her words were incoherent. She wasn't in a coma, but he had to handle her carefully. He didn't want her to go into cardiac arrest.
It had been years since Stephen had received basic instruction on hypothermia. After all, most brain surgeries don't involve hypothermic patients, but he knew the signs. Her core body temperature was below ninety degrees Fahrenheit and would continue to drop as long as she remained cold. Her wet clothes should be removed immediately, but he found himself hesitating.
The Cloak of Levitation fell from his shoulders and fled out of the bedroom.
"Bring blankets!" Stephen called after it, hoping the cloak had not only heard his instructions but could actually carry the load he'd need to help her.
He took a deep breath. Then, as if transported back to his early years working at New York Hospital, Stephen began to save Joanna's life.
As he removed her wet clothes, he ran various options through his mind. There were only two. One was to undress and wrap Joanna as best he could and use a gateway to transport them both to New York Hospital. But if Christine wasn't working, he'd be dismissed by staff back to the overflow waiting room inside the E.R. like any other patron, losing critical minutes. And because he'd be carrying a hypothermic patient in the middle of summer, he'd probably be forced to fill out a police report. If Christine was working, then that created a whole different set of problems, the least of which would be an explanation. Good to see you, Christine. This is Joanna, my first potential student in the mystic arts. She and I are just friends, acquaintances really, but she got transported back in time to the end of the last ice age by another sorcerer, and I had to take her drenched clothes off before she died from hypothermia. You know how it goes. By the way, how are you? Even though he and Christine had been just friends for years now, the last thing he wanted was an awkward interlude with his ex. His only other option was to save Joanna himself.
He shivered as he worked, noting his own body temperature was far from ideal, but at least the shivering was a good sign his core was slowly returning to a normal temperature. He ignored the discomfort seeping through his damp jeans and shirt as he focused on Joanna. Every time he removed an article of her wet clothing, he immediately placed the thin velvet comforter, the heaviest blanket on the bed, around her exposed body. He worked quickly, no longer seeing Joanna as a potential student or possible lover at some point later in his timeline, but as a patient desperately in need to immediate care. He was in his element, a role he found reassuring if not invigorating. Saving a life was as natural to him as breathing.
The cloak appeared with an impressive pile of blankets as he finished peeling away the last of Joanna's drenched clothing. None of the blankets the cloak deposited on the bed was a thermal one.
"Isn't there an emergency blanket somewhere?" he asked.
The cloak hovered near the bed, completely still.
"You know, a first-aid blanket? One made to retain heat?"
The cloak lowered her collar, as if ashamed. She shook her neckline.
He grumbled as he wrapped Joanna up in the warmest blankets the cloak had dropped. "How about a blanket with an electrical cord?"
Another slight shake of her collar.
Stephen sighed. "Fine."
He considered creating a spell to warm Joanna from the inside out, but didn't dare take the risk. If her core temperature rose too rapidly, she could go into shock. A hot bath was out of the question for precisely the same reason. He settled for enchanting the temperature of the room to rise a small percentage of a degree every few minutes before removing his own shirt and jeans.
The cloak remained where she was.
He glanced over at the cloak with resignation. "Have you got a better idea?"
Another slight shake of her collar.
"Then, do you mind?"
The cloak floated out of the room as Stephen wrapped himself inside the last blanket. With another sigh, he lifted Joanna and placed her under the sheets on the bed before climbing under the covers to join her. He shook as he wrapped his arms around Joanna's freezing body.
Whenever Stephen used to watch movies or television shows illustrating this basic treatment of hypothermia, it had always made him chuckle. Writers seemed to love the trope, and overused it to try and force emotional intimacy between characters through physical contact. Why they went through all that trouble instead of just having them go out to dinner or something confounded Stephen. In real life, a healthy couple sharing bodily warmth might enjoy that kind of physical intimacy, but not in the case of hypothermia. In real life, hypothermic patients were cold and clammy, and the experience was far from erotic. In fact, as the tingling sensations burned through his extremities, the sensation of being warmed by another human being bordered on discomfort. And he had only suffered the very early stages of hypothermia. He could only imagine what Joanna would feel when she regained consciousness.
He did a quick check of Joanna's pulse. It beat slow but regular now. Another assessment found her breathing to be even. He pulled her hands against his core, flinching from the icy cold of her skin. Her fingers were sticky with sap and smelled of pine. Down by her feet, he did his best to place his legs around them, wrapping them in his warmth despite his own pain. Her hair was still damp. He removed one of his hands from the middle of her spine and placed it against the back of her head as he held her to him. Wrapping her head in a blanket would do little to hasten her recovery. The theory that the head lost up to fifty percent of body heat was a myth disproven by the medical community years ago. Every part of Joanna would need to be equally warmed, and it would take hours.
Stephen closed his eyes. He hoped he had done the right thing. If he had misjudged the severity of Joanna's hypothermia, then Stephen knew he had just made the biggest medical miscalculation of his life.