Three nights after Yaak, Libby breathed easy.
Strings of warm bulbs stitched gentle light over the square. The river mumbled to itself below the dam. Somewhere a fiddle practiced the same hopeful phrase again and again until it stopped being a loop and became an invitation. Generators hummed steady, not loud—the kind of sound people forget to be grateful for when it works.
From the ridge above town, Thane watched the pattern of it—the way people moved as if the light had taught them how to walk softer. Beside him, Gabriel perched on a split log with his knees drawn up, a tin cup steaming between clawed hands. Mark lingered nearby, hunched over a small receiver, its faint green pulse tapping a rhythm like a heartbeat trying to remember a song.
“They sleep easier now,” Gabriel said, voice low, amused, and a little tender. He took a sip and winced. “Coffee’s terrible again. Still sacred.”
“They should sleep,” Thane said. The gravel in his voice softened against the dark. “We gave them that.”
Mark’s ears angled toward the treeline. He turned a dial a hair, coaxing a clearer line out of the noise. “They’re out there,” he said without drama. “Same frequency family as Sable’s repeater. Close enough to test our range, not close enough to talk.”
Gabriel sniffed the air and grimaced. “They smell like wet fur and bad decisions.”
Thane let the night pour around them. The forest was quiet, too quiet. Not the hunted quiet of fear, but the attentive silence animals use when the world adopts a new shape. Wind combed the firs. Far below, a human laugh threaded out of the square and dissolved before it reached the ridge.
“Watching,” Thane said.
“Learning,” Mark added softly.
“Curious,” Gabriel said, turning the cup in his hands, the medallion at his throat catching a faint glint of town light like a distant star. “That’s the part that worries me.”
By morning, the square was a market of small miracles. A woman traded jars of beans for a bag of nails. Dale, grease-smeared as always, had rigged a bicycle to charge a battery and panted happily while a kid heckled his cadence. Gabriel stood with Sofia and Ben, showing them a new progression on the guitar—three chords that felt like sunlight. Thane walked the perimeter as if it were a prayer. Mark fixed a lantern’s stubborn switch for an elderly man who had outlived the world twice and intended to do it a third time.
Marta met them at the edge of Town Hall. Hank was with her, denim jacket patched with the Libby crest and a smile that lived mostly behind his eyes. Neither looked afraid. Concerned, yes. But that was different. Concern meant they knew who to bring the problem to.
Marta didn’t waste words. “People have seen shapes near the north fence,” she said. “Tall. Quiet. Nothing harmed. But several families reported it last night.”
Hank checked a small notebook. “Also found claw marks on a pine at the north line. Higher than my head. And, no offense, taller than any of you unless you were showing off with a ladder.”
Gabriel lifted a brow. “Me? Show off? I’m insulted.” He squared his shoulders a fraction higher, purely out of habit.
Thane dipped his chin once. “Not us.”
“No one thought it was,” Marta said immediately, firm as steel. There was pride and trust in her tone, not performance—memory of fences mended and raids turned away and power lines held by clawed hands while human hands tightened bolts. “You’ve done too much for anyone to doubt you. We just want to know what’s coming.”
Thane’s gaze flicked north, then back. “We’ll find out.”
“You want backup?” Hank asked, because he always would.
“We move faster alone,” Thane said. “Keep the town moving like nothing’s wrong. Don’t change the dance.”
Hank smiled from one corner of his mouth. “I’ll hum louder.”
They left at dusk. The forest under a half-moon was a world drawn in charcoal and thin light. Without jackets, the cool air threaded their fur and carried a smell like iron and pine sap and a shadow of something else—unfamiliar musk, the breath of wolves who hadn’t learned the human town’s rhythm.
Mark went quiet in a way that wasn’t fear so much as calibration. He tuned the receiver down to a whisper and let it ride in his palm, eyes on the way the green pulse fattened and thinned as they moved. Gabriel padded a half-length behind Thane, black fur ghosting against the tree trunks, posture loose and utterly ready.
The north fence appeared as a darker line in the dark: posts set with purpose, wire tensioned with more care than most churches ever got. Beyond it, the pines stood dense and tall, their patient columns broken by moon-bright slices of sky.
Thane lifted his hand, palm out. Three shapes froze just beyond the reach of the floodlights—wider at shoulder, taller than the average human, moving differently than anything but wolves who walked as men. Eyes shone amber through the boughs, reflections turned living.
They didn’t bolt. They didn’t growl. They watched.
Thane stepped forward, feet silent on needle-carpet earth, hands open at his sides. He didn’t bother with the radio. The forest was built for voices like his.
“You’re far from Yaak,” he said. Not challenge. Not welcome. Simply true.
There was a rustle. One of the figures edged closer, a young male, lean and ragged. His fur was patchy over the ribs, his breath quick. He glanced once at the lights of Libby beyond the fence—the soft, human glow that looked like a small constellation that had fallen to earth and decided to live there.
“Sable said…” he began, in a voice with edges, the words both learned and grown. “Sable said the fire lives here.”
“Fire does,” Gabriel said, and his voice slid across the clearing without snagging. “But you don’t learn fire by sticking your face in it.”
The young wolf bristled, not quite a snarl. Another stepped up, a female older by a handful of winters, her shoulders scarred in lines that told stories Gabriel didn’t want to hear. She kept her head low. “We meant no harm,” she said. Her gaze flicked toward the children’s laughter carried by wind from the square—soft, like the ghost of a bell. “We wanted to see.”
Thane took them in like tracks—how they held weight, how their shoulders sat, whether hunger or pride did the talking. They didn’t smell like a hunt. They smelled like a country winning its first slow battles with fear. Pilgrims, not raiders. Curious wolves who had stumbled onto a kind of courage they didn’t yet have names for.
“You’ve seen it,” Thane said gently, but not indulgently. “This town survives because it remembers what’s worth protecting. Not because it’s easy.”
The young male’s eyes slid to Thane’s hands, to the claws he wasn’t showing. “They live… with you?”
“Beside us,” Thane corrected. “We don’t rule them. We guard them. Because they’re ours. Because we chose it.”
The idea landed like a new scent on a gust—strange, compelling, disorienting. The young one’s mouth opened, then closed again. He looked torn between scorn and awe.
Gabriel’s voice dropped, low and quiet. “Go home. Tell Sable the light’s here and it’s watched. If you want to learn, come when the sun’s up. At the fence. You’ll talk to us first. You don’t look through windows.”
The older female’s ears dipped in acknowledgment. The young male hesitated, chin still too high.
“You’d fight your own kind for them?” he asked, the word “kind” tasting like a dare.
Thane’s growl rolled out, not loud, just inescapable, like a river deciding where the bank ends. “I’d fight anyone who threatens my pack,” he said. “Human or wolf.”
The forest listened hard. The ferals did too. There’s a frequency in certain voices that sets bone—it hummed through the clearing now. The young male’s chest rose and fell. He took a step back without quite meaning to, then another, then turned. The three melted into the trees, bodies so built for this terrain that the forest closed behind them without a ripple.
“Not hunting,” Gabriel murmured after a beat. “Just… wanting.”
Mark’s fingers flexed on the receiver. The green line slimmed as the distance widened. “Curiosity is a kind of hunger,” he said. “Sometimes a sharper one.”
Thane stood a moment longer, the fence at his back and the town at his shoulder. “It can learn,” he said, which wasn’t exactly comfort, but it wasn’t despair either.
They walked the perimeter twice more under the pale wash of moonlight. Once, a fox ghosted across the path and gave them a look like, You again?. Once, the wind shifted and brought the faint rind-sour scent of the ferals’ musk. It was old by then, going colder.
They returned to the gate at first light. Hank waited there, coffee mug in both hands, breath fogging the air in a thin ribbon.
“They gone?” he asked.
“For now,” Thane said. “Watching. Not touching.”
Hank tipped his mug in salute toward the woods. “They can look. Library opens at nine.” He looked back at Thane. “I’ll put two extra eyes on the north. Not guns. Eyes.”
“Good,” Thane said. He didn’t have to add thank you. It lived in the space between them.
Marta met them by the fountain with a notepad already full of bullet points. “We’ll adjust the watch rotation and let folks know what to expect,” she said briskly, already steering the town’s heartbeat. “No panic. No rumors. I’ll say what’s true: unfamiliar wolves are near the fence, our wolves are handling it, and we continue as normal. Anyone sees anything, they tell Hank or me. We breathe.”
Gabriel flashed her a grin. “If you were a drummer, you’d be the one who kept the band from falling apart.”
“I was a project manager,” Marta said. “Same job. Fewer claws.”
A small moment of ease unfurled in the square. A teenager jogged past with a basket of kindling. A pair of elders argued softly over whether the cabbage bed wanted more shade. Dale adjusted the angle of a solar panel and pretended not to stare at Thane like the alpha had moved a mountain with a look.
Mark peeled away to the repeater monitor he’d set up in the substation foyer. He frowned at the display, then at the little portable he wore like a second set of lungs. “Huh.”
Thane joined him. “Talk to me.”
“The Yaak signal again,” Mark said, tapping the screen. “Not just a pulse—patterned. Someone’s… pacing. Testing the link. Slower than before. Less urgent. More deliberate.” He adjusted the gain and the noise fell away like fog. The words came in block letters across the linked tablet, unhurried as a teacher writing on a board:
WE SEE YOUR LIGHT.
WE LEARN.
Gabriel leaned against the doorway, folding his arms loosely. “They’re watching the town hall feed,” he guessed. He jerked his chin toward the low-voltage line Mark had run to the meeting room. “You told me that PA system could make it to Blossom Ridge if you sweet-talked it.”
“It can,” Mark said. “Apparently it also makes a nice beacon if someone knows where to listen.”
Marta took it in without theatrics. “Then they’re not hiding. They want us to know they’re looking.”
“Or they don’t yet understand what privacy is in a place like this,” Mark said dryly. “Either way, it’s not an attack. It’s a wave hello with bad timing.”
“Which is half of Gabriel’s jokes,” Hank muttered. Gabriel gave him a wounded look he didn’t feel.
Marta nodded once, decision settling on her shoulders like a coat. “We proceed with the day. If they approach by daylight and ask properly, we talk. If not, we let our wolves handle the fence line. I’ll say in the morning notes that there’s nothing to be afraid of and three extra reasons to keep sharing casseroles.”
Thane looked at her, the kind of look that says this is why we chose you too. “Good,” he said.
That night, the square held its small ritual again. Not defiance—maintenance. Music rose: Gabriel’s guitar, Sofia’s drum, Ben’s bass finding the downbeat and staying there. Children ran in circles under the bulbs. Someone produced a battered harmonica and managed a tune that sounded like a train arriving on time.
At the fence, Thane stood with Hank and listened to the town sing itself to sleep. Mark sat cross-legged by a post, the receiver on his knee, soldering a small preamp with the kind of concentration that keeps bridges from falling down. Gabriel played until the lamp over the hall went to a softer intensity that meant “enough for the day.”
When the last chord faded, the forest breathed in. The Yaak repeater’s line flickered once—just once—and a new pair of words stepped onto the tablet’s screen as if they’d been waiting for the right moment to speak:
FIRE TEACHES.
Gabriel read it over Mark’s shoulder and huffed a laugh. “I like the poet in their machine.”
“Could be Sable,” Mark said. “Could be someone on her side who learned to type.”
“Could be the wind,” Hank offered. “Weird year.”
Thane let the words sit a while. He thought of Sable’s face, carved by wind and choices. He thought of the young male’s eyes—sharp and stubborn and not past saving. He thought of Libby’s lights and the way they had become more than electricity: a promise, a boundary, a lesson in what to guard and how to guard it.
“They didn’t come for blood,” Gabriel said quietly, as if picking up a thread he’d laid down earlier. “They came for hope. That might be more dangerous.”
“It might be safer,” Thane said. “If we show them what hope costs.”
Mark packed his tools with neat, practiced motions. “I’ll keep listening,” he said. “No calls, no replies, not yet. Just ears.”
“Good,” Thane said again. He touched the medallion at his throat, a quick press of claw to cold metal, then looked north where the trees knotted darkness into rope. “If they come again,” he said, soft as a promise, “they’ll learn what fire really means.”
He turned toward the den. Gabriel fell in at his side with an easy brush of shoulder to shoulder that lasted no longer than a heartbeat. Mark followed, the radio’s small green pulse counting steps like a metronome.
Behind them, the town settled into sleep. Beyond the fence, the forest held still, listening the way things do when the rules are changing. And high above, somewhere beyond Yaak, a lone repeater blinked to itself under a net of stars and decided to wait for morning.
The world had fallen. The pack hadn’t.
And trust—earned, kept, tested—burned bright enough to teach.