Snow lay in soft sheets over Libby, mounded along fence rails and sleeping rooftops, the town moving quieter now that winter had its say. Smoke rose straight from chimneys. You could hear things better in the cold—the clack of a latch, the squeak of packed snow, the way voices carried without haste.
Holt was on the porch again before sun-up, breath fogging, guitar in his lap. He played the little pattern Gabriel had taught him until the notes stopped buzzing and started sounding like something you could lean on. When Gabriel stepped out with a yawn and a mug, Holt’s ears shot up.
“Good?” he said.
“Good,” Gabriel said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Again.”
By noon, the quiet broke. A battered snow-sled rattled at Libby’s east gate, metal treads chattering over ice. The driver—a man blown red by wind and worry—half-stumbled, half-fell off and thrust a folded paper at Hank with shaking hands.
“Eureka,” he said, jaw clamped against the cold. “We need help. Generator failed. Water lines froze. We’ve got seventy, maybe more. The old and the little ones are—” He didn’t finish.
Hank took the paper, jaw setting. “Marta!” he called, voice carrying down Main. “Council hall. Now.”
They met in minutes—Marta, Hank, Thane, Mark, Gabriel, and a handful of people who could solve problems without raising their voices. The snow-sled driver sat on a bench clutching hot tea like it was a living thing.
“What do you have working?” Mark asked him.
“Small gas gen for the clinic,” the man said, teeth ticking. “But fuel’s low. Main diesel’s dead. We lost heat in half the homes. Water standpipes froze. We’ve been melting snow.”
“How far?” Thane said.
“North-east,” Hank answered for him. “Eureka. Roads aren’t great. Plowed some, iced over in drifts.”
Marta looked around the room like she was counting something she could see. “Alright. We go. We take space heaters, two portable gensets, pipe heaters, blankets, fuel, and food. Mark, you run power. Thane, you run security. Hank, you choose six who shoot straight and lift heavy. Gabriel, you… keep people from panicking.”
Gabriel saluted with two fingers. “I can play and talk at the same time.”
Marta’s eyes flicked to Thane. “Bring a few of Sable’s wolves if she’ll lend them. We’ll need haul power.”
Thane nodded once. “I’ll ask.”
Rime arrived with three ferals before the meeting ended, as if the trees had already passed the message. “Sable say go,” he reported, touching a paw to his chest, then to Thane. “Treat him as Alpha.”
Holt appeared behind him, already wearing his pack, eyes fixed on Thane and Gabriel as if someone might try to steal them. “Holt go,” he added.
“Of course you do,” Gabriel said, grinning despite the worry in the room. “Bring your muscles. Leave the caffeine.”
Holt looked genuinely wounded. “Why?”
“So you don’t run to Canada and back while we’re fixing pipes,” Mark said.
They rolled out inside an hour. The convoy looked like winter deciding to help itself: two trucks piled with equipment and blankets, a flatbed with fuel drums chained down, and a handful of wolves loping alongside, paws silent, breath streaming white. Holt refused the bed entirely and paced next to Thane’s door like a shadow that had opinions.
The road north was a lesson in patience. Drifts shifted where wind had its way, ice shone in the blue shade, and the trucks climbed steady through country that didn’t have to try to be beautiful. No one talked much. When they did, it was practical.
“Watch the black ice,” Mark warned over the radio. “You can’t see it until you’re on it.”
“Copy,” Hank came back. “Keep speed steady.”
At a narrow cut where rock walls leaned in close, the lead truck hit a patch that wasn’t there a second before. The back slid out, corrected, slid again. Holt put both paws against the fender without thinking and braced, claws scraping. The truck straightened like someone had grabbed its tail.
The driver looked out the window in disbelief. “Thank you!”
Holt shrugged a shoulder, as if stopping two tons with his hands were just a thing you do on Tuesdays.
By early afternoon, the roofs of Eureka showed through the falling snow—low houses capped in white, a single smokestack coughing little puffs into a sky the color of steel. They rolled through town slow, past faces peering from doorways and cracked-open curtains. The faces had the same look—tight around the eyes, the cold pinched into worry.
A woman with a wool cap and cracked knuckles met them at the community hall, breath puffing. “I’m Mayor Lillian Ames,” she said. “I appreciate you coming. We… we didn’t know who else to ask.”
“You asked the right people,” Marta said, stepping forward with a blanket already in her hands. She wrapped it around a boy at the mayor’s hip without asking. “Show us the generator. Mark?” She didn’t need to check; he was already sprawled over a folded schematic, pencil behind his ear, eyes bright.
“Diesel or gas?” he asked.
“Diesel,” Ames said. “Old co-op unit. We’ve kept it going with duct tape and prayer. Prayer ran out.”
“I’ve got tape,” Mark said. “And better than prayer.”
They moved. It was a choreography born from too many bad days and the habit of fixing things anyway. Hank put his crew where trouble might try to be. Thane posted wolves where movement mattered—corners, alleys, the supply trucks. Holt parked himself one step behind Gabriel and one step to the right of Thane, as if math could out-argue fate.
At the generator shed, Mark whistled through his teeth. “You weren’t kidding. This thing is older than my sense of humor.” He popped a panel, leaned in, and grunted. “Fuel gelled. Intake clogged. Heater coil’s toast.”
“Can you get it running?” Ames asked, the question made of hope she didn’t want to hear breaking.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “Just don’t ask me to be nice to it.” He looked over his shoulder. “Holt, Rime—those fuel drums.”
Holt and Rime carried two at a time, moving through snow like it had changed its mind about being deep. Two young men from Eureka started to grab a third drum, stopped, and stared. One whispered, “Holy hell.”
“Wolves are friends who make lights,” one of the Libby volunteers said with a grin, and kept working.
Pipe heaters went out with Hank’s crew in paired teams—one human, one feral, each with a map of the water system and a list of standpipes that had gone silent. They worked house to house, a knock, a smile, a heater strapped to a line, a promise that hot water would find its way back if it knew someone was looking.
At the shed, Mark rigged a replacement coil from parts he had no business having but did anyway, wrapped lines with heat tape, and cursed the inhumanity of people who let filters go that long. “Try it,” he called.
Thane thumbed the manual prime, waited, then hit the starter. The generator coughed like an old smoker, caught, sputtered, then roared into a sound that made people within earshot laugh out loud without meaning to.
Lights winked on in the closest buildings, one by one, each a tiny victory. In the clinic window, a nurse pressed both palms to the glass. Holt pointed with delight. “House eyes wake,” he said.
“House eyes wake,” Gabriel repeated, smiling.
They were halfway through slinging heat tape at the school’s standpipes when the accident almost happened. A drift above the alley had been undercut by earlier footsteps; when Holt and Gabriel passed beneath, the whole slab let go. Snow and crust and a chunk of old gutter came down in one sudden white rush.
Holt didn’t think. He stepped into Gabriel, braced, and took the hit across his back, the weight sloughing off as if the world had tried to test something and found it wouldn’t break. The clatter echoed. Gabriel blinked through dusting flakes, then looked at the bent gutter.
“You good?” Thane called from ten feet away, already moving.
Gabriel patted Holt’s shoulder. “Saved the guitar hand.”
Holt puffed up with open pride. “Protect Teacher.”
Thane clapped him once between the shoulders, approval with weight behind it. “Good.”
People were watching now—heads out of doorways, shapes gathered at corners. It wasn’t fear, not anymore. It was hunger for a different kind of story.
By late afternoon, the generator was humming steady, the clinic heaters were pushing back winter, and three water lines clanked and gurgled their way back to life. The sound made a woman laugh and cry at the same time, hands over her mouth. A little boy standing with her pointed at Holt’s hands and whispered, “He’s bigger than the fridge.”
Holt heard, looked at his paws, then at the boy. He crouched to make himself less of a mountain. “Strong,” he said gently. “But soft.” He turned his palm up and let the kid lay his mittened hand against it. The boy’s eyes went huge.
Mayor Ames insisted they come to the hall for stew. “You’ll freeze in the street if I don’t bribe you,” she said, voice brisk with gratitude. “Besides, you make my people braver just by being in a room.”
The hall smelled like onion and bay leaf, the sort of food that remembers how to hold you. Long tables ran the length, mismatched bowls stacked at the end, spoons clinking. People scooted to make space. Holt sat at the edge nearest the door out of habit, then thought about Sable’s words echoing through other rooms on other days—“not two only”—and shifted in, shoulder to shoulder with the Libby crew.
A child across from him stared at the line of his arm, the way the fur shifted when he lifted his spoon. “You’re… not scary,” she said, as if she had to test the thought out loud.
“Sometimes scary,” Holt admitted, managing a sheepish smile. “Not to friends.”
“Are we friends?” she asked.
Holt didn’t answer. He looked at Thane. Thane gave a small nod.
“Yes,” Holt said. “Friends.”
Gabriel came back from the far end of the hall with a grin and something in his hands. “You are not going to believe this,” he said, laying a dusty guitar case on the table. “Community center closet. Two broken chairs, a crate of old holiday banners, and this. It’s rough, but it stays in tune.”
The boy across from Holt scooted forward so fast his chair squealed. “Can you… do you… will you…?”
Holt glanced at Thane again, and then at Sable’s absence he carried in memory. He took the guitar from Gabriel like it might try to jump. It was older than the one in Libby, the finish rubbed off where other hands had learned too, but it sat into his lap like something that had met him before in a story.
He set his paw. He breathed the way Gabriel had shown him. He played the small melody that had become his name.
The hall quieted like a flock turning in air. The notes weren’t fancy, and Holt’s claws bumped once over a fret, but the sound was simple and good, and when he reached the end, he didn’t look up for approval. He let the last note hang. The boy clapped before anyone else, the small hands starting the big sound.
“You’re the strong music wolf,” someone said, not unkindly, and the room laughed with the sort of laughter that makes space, not noise.
After, stories flowed. Hank told a short one about the time a moose tried to order breakfast at the diner before the Fall. A teacher from Eureka countered with a tale about sledding on cafeteria trays, and how it had gone both very well and very wrong. Marta talked about the bridge they’d mended east of Libby and how a feral had grabbed a human by the back of the jacket and set him right on the beam when a gust came—no drama, just a fact. People leaned closer while they ate, the warmth of stew and company doing the small daily work of saving them.
When it was time to leave, Mayor Ames stood on a chair so she didn’t have to shout. “We’ll be alright now,” she said, voice thick but steady. “Because you came. Because you didn’t have to.” She hesitated. “We didn’t… I mean—” She looked at Holt and Rime and the rest. “We didn’t know wolves… worked with people. I’m sorry it took a crisis to teach us we were wrong.”
Holt shifted, uncomfortable with being looked at like weather. Rime dipped his head once, accepting without taking anything he hadn’t earned. Marta stepped up beside Ames, put a hand on her forearm, and said, “We’re all learning the same lesson.”
They loaded back into the cold with full bellies and the particular tired you get when you’ve done good and can feel it. As they filed out, the boy who had called Holt “strong music wolf” scurried up, hovering at knee height. “Mister Wolf?” he said, polite in the way you are when you’re talking to a story.
Holt crouched again. “Yes.”
The boy touched two fingers to his own chest, then to Holt’s paw. “Thank you,” he said, very seriously.
Holt blinked, then mimicked the gesture back. “Thank you.”
The generator shed hummed steady as a heartbeat as they left. Lights burned in windows, turning the snow outside golden. On the road, the convoy moved with the confidence of night work done right. Holt walked where he’d walked before—one step behind Gabriel, one step to Thane’s right—and then, remembering the lesson he’d been given, eased out to range the line, eyes forward for all of them.
“Good day,” Mark said into the wind.
“Good day,” Marta echoed, pulling her hat down.
“Good day,” Hank agreed. “Let’s make it home.”
“Play on the radio when we get back?” one of the younger ferals asked, trotting beside Gabriel.
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “We’ll send a song north. And east.”
“House eyes wake,” Holt said, glancing back at the glow of Eureka behind them.
“House eyes wake,” Gabriel said, and smiled into the dark.
They reached the ridge above Libby as the sky thought about stars. Down in the valley, their own windows looked back at them, warm and ordinary. The kind of ordinary you work hard for. The kind you defend with trucks and tools and music and the right kind of strength.
At the cabin, snow sifted under the porch light in slow silver. Holt set his paw briefly on the doorframe, then lifted it and knocked as if he were learning new rules and liked how they felt. Gabriel opened with a grin. Thane shook snow off his jacket and listened to the quiet, heavy and good.
“Tomorrow,” Gabriel said, nodding at Holt’s guitar hanging on the wall.
“Tomorrow,” Holt agreed, and then added, as if testing a word that could fit everyone, “Together.”