Author: Thane Page 4 of 9

Snow melted slowly under dark boughs where winter still clung in stubborn white commas. The northern trees stood quiet, their trunks black with old rain, their branches heavy with silence. Wind ran like a thin blade through the needles. A crow rattled, then shut up, because something bigger than crows was moving.

He moved as things that live through storms move. Gray and black fur, coat hacked with old scars that crossed and tangled like a map of fights survived. His paws landed soft. His shoulders rolled like a cat’s and a soldier’s at once. Eyes the yellow of frost-light through whiskey glass, unreadable and alive. He had learned the North: how not to snap a twig. How to drink air like a tracker drinks water. How to be present without being seen.

He followed the sound of river on rock, and the scent of wolves who were not his. It was curiosity, not hunger, that drew him south. Curiosity and a long ache that no winter could ever put out.

The first voice he heard was not a voice but a low warning carried through wet wind. A click of teeth. The whisper of weight shifting on frost-brittle needles.

He stopped. Lifted his head. Hands open, claws clean and visible. Empty posture — the universal language.

“I do not want trouble,” he said into trees. His English was nearly perfect, with a roundness in the vowels that hinted at someplace far and cold. “I am only looking.”

Silence — exactly long enough to load a spring.

Then the woods unfolded: three wolves ghosted out from lichen-gray trunks. One was young and wiry with a white stripe up his nose. Another was broad through chest and hips, ear torn to a ragged flag. The third was as still as a winter stump until he moved — and then he moved too fast. A loop of rope whistled. It snapped the stranger’s wrists in one fluid bite.

The stranger did not fight. When they twisted the rope, he exhaled once, a hard breath through teeth. He lowered his head. He had learned that compliance could be a weapon if nothing else was.

“Intruder,” said the broad one, voice thick with the feral cadence. “Camp close. Not safe, you.”

“I know words,” the stranger replied quietly. “I know rules. I did not mean to trespass. I will go.”

“Too late,” said the still one. “Sable decide.”

They took him with crossed ropes, a long lead around his waist, and a stick jammed behind his elbows to keep his shoulders caged. It was not the worst way he had ever been brought anywhere. He walked without anger. He counted trees.

The Northern Feral camp held winter like a lung holds air. A ring of pines. Smoke strands. Hides stretched on lines. Steel on stone. The sound of hands working cord. Half a dozen wolves looked up as the prisoner entered, eyes narrowing as they smelled stranger on the wind.

Sable stepped out of shadow hard enough to make the fire hiss. White fur, cold eyes. Authority like gravity. She wore no ornament but intention.

“Bring,” she said without lift in tone. “Tie.”

They fastened him to two pines with knots that looked dumb and were actually clever. One loop high, one low, tension split so he could not torque free without skinning his wrists to bone. He tested once — because he was thorough, not because he doubted — and then stood quiet again.

Sable looked him over like he was a knife she planned to use or break.

“Name,” she said.

“Kade,” he replied, holding her gaze.

“Lie, maybe,” she said.

“It is mine whether you believe it or not.”

The ferals bristled. The white-stripe-nose pup stepped closer, eager to impress. “Why here?” he demanded. “You spy? You steal? You look for weak?”

“I came to see what lies beyond the next ridge,” Kade answered, calm threads showing because his hands could not. “I have not eaten your meat. I have not touched your things. I have taken only air.”

Sable tilted her head. “From far. Smell north on you. Past our north. Pack?”

“Not anymore,” he said. The words cost something. He swallowed them clean. “I walk alone.”

“Mmm.” Sable’s eyes drifted to his scars. “Old fights. Not dead. Means smart. Or lucky.” Her voice hardened. “Or scout.”

Kade’s jaw flexed. “If I were a scout, I would have turned when I scented you.”

“Not good enough.”

What followed was not a beating. Not at first. It was the long, slow test of patience: questions cut short, silence stretched until it creaked, water offered and then pulled away until he asked and still did not get it. Ropes cinched, untied, cinched again to test his control. He gave nothing that was not asked for. He kept his truth guarded but visible. He learned the small things about them in return.

A younger wolf watched all this. His name was Fenn. His eyes carried softness the world had not yet burned away. When Kade spoke a sentence with proper tense and good cadence, Fenn stopped moving. He heard the new wolf speak English like someone who learned it from intention, not survival.

Fenn’s ears flattened slightly.

Sable was angry. She wanted to protect her pack at all costs. If she believed Kade was a spy or scout, she would order the kill.

Fenn ran.

He left camp at a sprint, not looking back. He took the direct route through the woods, down the cracked game trail, across the deadfall, lungs burning. He ran until the smell of pine and cold water gave way to woodsmoke and copper — to the scent of Libby’s cabin.

He collided with the porch rail and gasped for breath.

“Thane,” he managed. “Sable… caught one. Lone wolf. From far north. Speak like you. Good. Very good. Pack treat… rough. Think spy. Think steal. Sable maybe…” He made a quick knife gesture across the throat, then flinched from his own hand. “Kill.”

Inside, Thane looked up from a messy coil of copper wire on his workbench. Rime leaned at the doorframe. Holt pretended to be stretching. Gabriel sat with his guitar in his lap, paused mid-tune. Mark stood staring at a map, but his ears were tuned sharply toward Fenn.

The moment was still, like a coiled spring deciding its direction.

Thane rose. Gravel voice calm. “Where?”

“Camp,” Fenn said, pointing north.

Thane nodded once.

---

They didn’t take the truck.

No roads. No engines. Just breath, balance, and shared urgency. They ran the back trails, paws and claws finding ancient paths between frozen roots.

Rime led at first, setting a pace that shamed deer. Holt’s breathing came in calm huffs. Gabriel moved like sound itself — every step placed with musician’s rhythm. Mark ran steady, body designed for logistics not loping. Fenn kept a half-step ahead, guiding them on the most direct route his instincts would allow. Thane kept to the front or beside him, scanning the path, heavy voice razor-focused whenever he called a shift in slope or danger in ice.

Pines flickered. Snow spindrift filled small silver thoughts around their ankles. They ran through the valley where wild still meant freedom — and responsibility.

The Northern camp smelled the group long before eyes caught motion, which was intentional. Scent equals respect in the wild. They slowed near the perimeter, gliding through the old game cut where Sable’s sentries kept watch.

Sable emerged before the first word.

“Thane,” she greeted, and though her voice was flat, the tone under it carried trust strong as seasoned rope.

“Sable,” Thane returned, with an incline of his head. “We bring good legs and empty hands.”

“Always,” she replied, a flick of humor glancing beneath hard eyes. “Old friend. Come see. Much to show.”

The pleasantries lasted just long enough to carry their weight. Her wolves offered cups of boiled snow. Rime and Holt drank without appearing thirsty. Fenn hovered behind them like a new tree desperate to prove its roots. Gabriel smiled and bowed slightly — his version of a compliment. Mark gave silent nods to those who respected him from prior winter visits.

Then Sable gestured silently — and walked Thane aside.

What she showed him was Kade.

The lone wolf still stood bound between two pines, ropes cutting against fur and dried blood, though not into flesh. He had not been beaten, but neither had he been treated with softness. The marks on his arms and shoulders said interrogation by feral standards.

Sable watched Thane’s reaction closely.

“Found near river,” she said in her clipped rhythm. “Smell far north. Past our hunt. Alone. Answers clean. Too clean, maybe. Speaks like book — not like us.”

Kade met Thane’s eyes. He held what was left of his dignity in stillness, yellow stare alert, jaw tense.

Thane approached with cautious calm.

“What do you call yourself?” he asked.

“Kade,” he answered, voice low.

“Where from?”

“North of your north,” Kade said. “I crossed three rivers and the bones of a town without a name I knew. I left a pack I could no longer follow.”

“Why not?” Thane asked with no challenge in tone — just the quiet requirement of story.

“Because their Alpha believed fear traveled farther than kindness,” Kade said, eyes drifting once to Sable. “He was almost right.”

The truth of the words hung between them like frost-air.

Thane stepped back. Sable moved closer.

“Danger,” she said. “Or liar. Or both. I do not risk stupid with camp or pups. Safety means steel and claw.”

Thane held her gaze, tone even. “I will not ask you to risk the pack.”

He nodded toward Kade. “But I am asking you to trust me.”

Sable’s eyes narrowed — not in anger, but in calculation. She trusted Thane because he never waxed poetic when a blade would do. She knew what it meant for him to lay the cost on his own back.

“Say more,” she said.

“Release him to me,” Thane said. “He comes south, lives under my roof, under my oath. If he harms anyone, I pay.”

Quiet as a glacier settled over the crowd. Even the pup with the white nose stripe went silent.

Sable tapped the scar on her forearm — the one she earned beside Thane moving a generator across the snow last year.

“Trust given,” she said. “Few times. Given to you… more than few.” A slow inhale. “You keep it? You pay — not with talk?”

“With the whole of me,” Thane said, gravel steady.

A pause as ancient as winter.

Sable nodded once.

She turned, walked straight up to Kade, and said aloud:

“You belong to him now. If he says you are good. Then you are good — as far as him. You try hurt my pack, my den… I take that trust back in pieces.”

Kade did not pretend the words didn’t hit him hard. He bent his head. No submission — but agreement. Respect.

Thane untied the ropes with Rime and Holt assisting — slow, respectful, no violence left in the knots. They returned Kade’s belongings: a weather-worn pack, tin cup, knife with a well-kept edge, good cord. Not rifled through — just moved aside.

Gabriel lingered off to the side, arms crossed, eyeing the north-wolf the way a song studies a stranger for rhythm.

Once unbound, Kade bowed his head slightly toward Sable.

“If I cross your map again,” he said, “it will be with his permission.”

Sable’s eyes thinned. A sliver of approval, buried deep.

---

They left without delay.

The six wolves — Thane, Rime, Holt, Gabriel, Mark, and Kade — ran south as the clouds pulled from the horizon. Snow squeaked under paws, heartbeat and breath in unified rhythm.

At the creek, Holt waded deeper than necessary, laughing like a controlled avalanche. Gabriel caught a swinging branch, steadying it so Kade wouldn’t take it to the face. Mark matched Kade’s stride for the last incline, offering silent respect.

By the time the cabin came into view, dusk had stilled the world into indigo.

From inside spilled lamplight — warm, steady.

Kade stood in the doorway, shoulders settled like a wolf who had forgotten what a safe room looked like.

“Sit,” Thane said, voice level.

“Eat,” Rime added, already ladling stew from the iron pot.

Holt handed out bowls as if dealing justice. Gabriel tore bread like the gentlest criminal in all of Montana. Mark portioned meat with the fairness of a man raised to revere balance.

Kade ate slowly, moderately — the way an honest man does when his body is starving but his pride still counts.

The silence was a rule none of them needed explained.

When the bowls were less than half, more than empty, Thane finally asked:

“What are you, Kade? Not your name. Your oath.”

Kade took a breath. The answer came raw.

“I am the one who stands on an edge and refuses to push,” he said. “The one who has not found a fire that feels like home yet, but who keeps his hands warm with the embers anyway.”

Gabriel nodded softly. “You’re in the right place, then.”

Mark leaned forward. “What do you need from us tonight?”

Kade paused, eyes landing quietly on the corner near the bookshelf.

“A corner,” he said. “And a chance to prove I won’t wreck it.”

“Sleep,” Thane said. “We will talk in the morning.”

Rime nodded. Holt grinned and thumped the table.

Holt fetched a spare bedroll for Kade. “Wall’s warm,” he said. “Safe. You close. We guard. Pack.”

Kade took the roll. For a heartbeat, something in him eased — the hard, inward watchfulness dropped just a fraction. A crack showed in the soldier-mask he’d worn for years, and in its place, a flicker of simple, unguarded humanity crossed his face.

He set down his pack, then removed his skinning knife. He placed it on the table between them.

Handle first. Blade still.

“I am yours to judge,” he said quietly.

Thane picked it up. A good knife. A solid one. He rotated it once — and placed it back on the table.

“You keep it,” he said. “Knives teach trust faster than words.”

Something in Kade’s jaw loosened.

The rest of the night was slow comfort:

Rime made tea. Gabriel hummed a three-note song and then put the guitar away. Holt checked the porch for snow threats and came back smelling like pines and iron.

There were no questions about Kade’s old pack. Not tonight. There was only fire, soup, and shared room-air.

Eventually, Thane stood, opened the door. Cold night greeted him with the kind of honesty only winter can give.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We set rules. We show you the town — and the town you. For now…” He turned down the lamp. “You are in my den. You are under my oath.”

“Understood,” Kade said.

He unrolled the bedroll by the wall. Leaned against wood and breathed.

For a long time, he didn’t sleep. Then — when even the stove had gone to creaks and light quiet — a breath left him. Not in pain. Not in preparation.

In relief.

And the cabin held it like a true winter shelter.

Six wolves in one room.
A knife on the table.
Trust walking carefully across the floor.

The stove ticked. The night listened.
And the far north finally rested its feet.

The sun rose slow and pale, like even it needed an extra hour under the blanket. The storm was gone. The smoke, the ice, the howls in the night — all blown clean away. In their place: the kind of stillness that carried meaning instead of fear.

It was the kind of morning Libby cherished.

A morning for rebuilding. For breathing. For looking out at the world and deciding — again — to make it better.

Sara Halliday zipped her coat to the chin and stood at the end of Main Street, snow crunching under her Keen boots. From a distance, she could see them — Thane, Rime, and Holt — starting early, as always. Three wolves, three different energies: Thane’s calm command, Rime’s quiet alertness, and Holt’s good-natured thunder.

She inhaled deep and headed toward them.

“Alright,” Thane said, tapping the clipboard with a knuckle. “Sara, you’re with us today. If you want to really understand how we work, today’s the day. We fix, we shovel, we talk, we listen. That’s the Libby way.”

Sara grinned, blowing out breath in the cold. “After the past couple of days? Conversation and shovels don’t sound so bad.”

“Sara strong? We see. Pry bar will tell.” Holt said, shoulders already piled with lumber. His smile was faint but real.

Sara walked alongside them as they trudged to the old collapsed carport outside the library, a mound of roof and timber under a thick crust of snow. Rime was the first to step forward. Without speaking, he reached for the timber edge and tested it with his claw.

Sara watched him closely. “He’s checking for strain, isn’t he?”

Thane nodded. “Rime knows what he’s doing. Bad timber can snap wrong and hurt somebody.”

“I can relate,” she said lightly.

Holt snorted. “Timber not so bad. Longer to forgive than wolves, though.”

Rime lifted a panel carefully, stripping snow loose and revealing the broken spine of the roof underneath. Sara noted the fluidity, the muscle under the fur, movements so practiced it almost looked choreographed.

“You all seem… in your element,” she said after a while.

“Storms don’t clean up after themselves. That’s our job.” Thane said. “It’s just the rhythm of things.”

Gabriel and Mark weren’t far — they were out behind the radio tower, a feral wolf named Ash and a bigger one called Fenn packing the last of the old solar batteries onto a sled. Gabriel stood poised on a frozen ledge of the generator shed, tapping metal with a wrench while Mark checked a continuity meter.

“You ever think,” Gabriel said, “that all this used to be complicated?”

Mark didn’t look up. “It’s still complicated. We just don’t write manuals for it anymore.”

“Hmm. Fair. But now I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to rewire things. ‘Unity in lawlessness,’ if you squint hard enough.”

“You do not obey old law,” Ash said proudly, claws tapping on the wood. “But you obey signal. Signal is strongest law.”

Fenn grunted approval. “Signal is pack howl. Long howl. No borders.”

Gabriel looked at Mark in mock seriousness. “We need to make that the new KLMR motto.”

Mark rolled his eyes but couldn’t help smiling. “You’re incorrigible.”

“Spell that?”

“Look it up in the dictionary you burned to stay warm last winter.”

Fenn’s ears perked. “What mean incorrigi-bull?”

“It means Gabriel,” Mark said.

Ash let out a chuckle, jaw hanging, tongue peeking out.

“You say new words. Is good,” Fenn added. “Words make brains big.”

“Oh.” Mark nodded thoughtfully. “Well your brain must be huge by now, Holt.”

“Not Holt,” Fenn corrected. “Fenn.” And then, to Mark: “You small brain, yes.”

Mark gave Gabriel an I-told-you-so look. Gabriel was eating it up.

Back at the carport, Sara knelt beside Rime and watched him gently lift a bent metal pole. She noticed something different in the way he worked: his hands were shaped to destroy, to hunt — but his movements were meant for rebuilding.

“You’re… gentler than I thought you’d be,” she said carefully.

Rime glanced up.

“Strong does not mean break things,” he said.

Thane smiled at that. “Strong means knowing when not to.”

Sara nodded slowly. “That’s not what I learned in school.”

“Then school wrong,” Holt said.

“Just about everything?” she laughed.

“Mostly.”

They worked in silence a while. Then Sara broke it:

“Thane… can I ask something?”

“Ask.”

“You all talk about instinct,” she said. “What does that mean for you? Is instinct a voice? A feeling? A law? All of the above?”

Thane rested an arm on the lumber pile. “Instinct is everything you know without thinking. When the world ends, instinct’s what’s left.”

“Is it always right?”

“No. But it’s always honest.”

Sara nodded, eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“Humans feel instinct, too,” she said. “We just bury it under language and expectation.”

“Dig it out,” Holt said. “Good muscle to build.”

Rime gave a soft grunt of agreement. “Too many bones left in ground,” he murmured. “Not enough dug up.”

Sara didn’t fully understand. But eventually — she would.

Brent didn’t show up until noon.

He walked with an air of silent apology, not hunched but softened. He found Thane first, clearing slush around the Justice Center with Rime.

“I don’t want to sit around,” Brent said. “Let me help. I’m… better when I help.”

Thane studied him for a breath. Brent’s hands were bare, his coat half-zipped — this was not bravado, just exhaustion trying to move forward.

Thane looked to Rime. The quiet wolf nodded, once.

“Start on the east awning,” Thane said. “It lost half its supports in the storm. Fix that, you fix leaks. Fix leaks, you fix morale.”

Brent gave a short nod and headed off toward the tools.

Rime watched him go. Then he met Thane’s gaze.

“Trust not fast. You tie it. Knot by knot,” he said.

Thane nodded. “It takes time to build.”

Back at the library site, Sara was finishing up her notes on the carport rebuild — she’d drawn a precise sketch of the new timber layout, labeling each joint. Holt stared at the diagram like it was a wild animal.

“How many words it need,” he asked, “to say ‘beam go here’?”

“As many as it takes not to crush somebody,” she quipped.

Holt grunted. “Fair.”

Rime leaned in close, pointing at the little diagram.

“That is north?” he asked.

“Correct,” Sara said.

“That why beam angry,” Rime muttered.

“Why?”

“Wind. Finds weakness first. Wind: smart hunter.”

Sara smirked at that. “You’re not wrong.”

Holt stood up, rolling his shoulders. “Walk first. Then build.”

“We just spent the morning hauling lumber,” Thane reminded him.

“Hah,” Holt said. “That was breakfast.”

After lunch, the four came together in the big square — Thane, Sara, Rime, and Holt — to reset for the next task. The wind had settled, and the snow had gone from sharp ice to soft, packable fluff. It felt like the world had decided this was a good day to laugh a little.

Sara had been quiet through lunch. Not tired — just watching.

After a moment, she finally said the thing on her mind.

“Can I ask another question?”

“You can ask all you want,” Thane said.

“Do you ever regret what you’ve become?”

The wolves paused.

Instinct doesn’t get emotional often. But you could feel all three pause — Rime blinked slow, Holt’s tail stopped, Thane breathed strong and steady.

“Regret,” Thane said at last, “is about paths not walked.”

He looked out toward the mountains — cold, alive, unmoving.

“Instinct says… this is where we were meant to walk.”

Sara nodded slowly, processing.

“And what about humanity?”

Thane glanced sideways. “We didn’t lose ours. We just stopped needing it for permission.”

And then it was time for something different.

Holt hefted a plank over his shoulder and called out to Gabriel and Mark, who were digging out the town stage in the square so Gabriel could broadcast live that night.

Holt stomped over toward Gabriel and Mark, who were wrestling a frozen coil of stage cable out of a snowbank.

“You need lift?” Holt offered.

“We always need lift,” Mark said, “just not lift-and-crush.”

Gabriel grinned. “Last time Holt handled speakers, the speakers lost.”

Holt blinked slowly. “Speakers weak. Not my fault.”

Ash padded in behind Holt, curious nose twitching. “This for loud box?” he asked, poking the cable gently with a claw.

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, “this one makes music and announcements.”

Fenn arrived with a snow-dusted amp head in his jaws, dropped it proudly by Mark’s paw.

“Found box,” Fenn said. “Not humming. Is safe.”

“Don’t chew that,” Mark said.

“Not food,” Fenn replied seriously. “Tastes like nothing.”

Gabriel laughed. “That’s because it’s full of wires and copper.”

“Copper good?” Holt asked.

“For music, yeah,” Gabriel said. “Not for chewing.”

Holt shrugged. “Wolves not chew music.”

“You should do announcements sometime,” Mark joked. “Holt gives the weather.”

Holt considered, ears twitching. “Snow. Cold. End report.”

Sara snorted into her scarf as she passed, trying not to laugh.

Evening settled in with a pink burn along the mountains. One by one, lanterns lit up under the falling dark, and the sound of shovels gave way to feet on wood. Work paused, and in its place came the quiet, satisfied murmur of a community that had built something real together.

Brent walked back through the square, wiping dust off his coat. Sara sat beside Thane, watching the wolf at rest. Holt was having a quiet arm-wrestle with Ash, doing his best to make it last longer than one second. Rime, as usual, sat perched, watching the world with the patience of old earth.

“Today felt good,” Sara said.

“Good days aren’t rare,” Thane replied. “Just easy to miss.”

“You don’t miss them.”

“No,” he said. “Because wolves live in them.”

Sara let that sit in her chest a while.

“You all rebuilt more than a carport today,” she said.

Thane nodded. “Fixing things fixes people. Same rules.”

Marta stepped out of the town hall with a thermos in hand and gave a quick whistle — just enough to get the attention of everyone in the square.

“No alerts. No surprises,” she called. “Feels like a first in months.”

Hank appeared behind her, rubbing his shoulder. “If anyone needs dinner, we’ve still got chili going in the hall. Bring a bowl. Or a bucket. Holt, I know you heard that.”

Holt’s ears perked up instantly. “Bucket good,” he said.

Gabriel laughed. “That’s our signal then.”

Sara let her gaze sweep over the scene — laughter, steam in the air, wolves lounging near lanterns.

“I thought I understood what community was,” she said. “I was wrong.”

Thane nodded. “Good people. Strong hearts. That’s all it needs.”

The last of the storm melted slow in the morning sun, dripping from the pines like a long sigh. Snow still clung to the streets in pale banks, but here and there shingles peeked through, roofs once again remembering their old shapes. Smoke curled from chimneys. Snowmen leaned. Someone had finally put a scarf around the statue in the square, and no one knew whether it was Holt, a kid, or one of the night owls from the tavern.

It was a day for chores. A day for digging paths and clearing the solar panels. Thane’s breath made soft fog as he walked down Main Street, nodding to a handful of early risers already at work: Hank and Marta patching a fence, Gabriel lugging cables out of the radio station, Mark kneeling near a junction box in the snow, cheeks rosy and muttering cheerful profanity about “moisture-induced voltage loss.”

Then the figures appeared — first shadows, then forms.

Three humans, heads down, trudging through what had been sled-packed paths the day before. A fourth shape, smaller, was being carried — slumped over the tallest man’s back. The wind tugged at their clothes, peeling edges, rattling them like lost scarecrows.

Thane stopped mid-step. Eyes narrowed, not in suspicion but in recognition — recognition of the weary rhythm of people who’d been walking too long without hope. Not raiders. Not scouts. Survivors. And close to collapsing.

Marta saw them next. Her breath caught, just for a moment. She lifted a hand.

“Hold up. Don’t run yet.”

Gabriel stepped beside Thane, arms folded, watching the strangers close the gap into town.

The tall man dropped to his knees first. The girl slid off his back, landing awkwardly in a drift but was gently pulled upright by the woman beside him — older, with a lined face and eyes that were clear and direct. She raised a cloth as a flag. Not surrender. Not plea. Just presence.

“We saw the lights,” she said quietly, breath fogged in the cold. “We weren’t sure it was real.”

Thane took one slow step forward, arms to his sides. The rest of the pack fanned out behind him in practiced calm — Holt, Rime, Gabriel, Mark — silent, steady, visible because trust was something you prove.

“You’re in Libby,” Thane said. No challenge. Just fact.

The tall man, still on his knees, scowled at the wolves. His eyes hit Holt first — massive, flannel-wrapped, paws as big as plates. The man recoiled.

“You’ve got wolves walking around with people?” he asked, voice cracking from exhaustion and something deeper — fear, or maybe anger wearing fear’s coat for now.

Thane’s answer came slow, sure, ancient.

“We’re not walking around with people,” he said. “We’re home.”

They were taken to the old church basement for assessment. The heat was good there — gas stove still ran clean off the tank they’d salvaged months back, and the concrete walls held warmth in ways that made huddled humans sigh with gratitude.

The woman introduced herself as Sara Halliday. Biologist. Former wildlife captain. “Used to track wolves,” she said lightly to Thane. “Didn’t expect to meet them like this.”

Her niece, Mimi, sat beside her with a shivering blanket-wrapped kind of quiet. Seventeen. Eyes ringed, hair tangled. Every so often, she pressed an old cassette player to her ear — a cracked walkman. Music leaking through blown speakers. She didn’t speak much.

The tall man didn’t give a name for a long time. When he finally did, it came like something pried loose.

“Brent,” he said. Just Brent.

His gaze never left Holt.

That night, the pack gathered privately in the cabin. Snow lit by moonlight outside the windows. Sable leaned in a corner, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, arms folded — watching, calculating. Rime sat cross-legged on the floor, sharpening a blade with slow, meditative strokes. Holt lay on his stomach, tail slack but eyes troubled.

Thane stirred a pot absently, testing the broth.

Gabriel lounged by the woodstove, guitar on his lap even when he wasn’t playing. “Brent looked at Holt like Holt was gonna tear the town apart,” he said. “And Holt hasn’t torn anything apart in… what, a week?”

Holt grumbled. “Was table. Was accident.”

“Still haven’t fixed the leg,” Mark added. Then, gently, “There’s something else in him. Something old. And it’s tied to wolves.”

“Fear scratches the door,” Thane said. “Anger breaks it.”

The next day came crisp as dry paper. Blue sky stretched wide, bright enough to blind. Brent and Sara stayed close to town hall, helping sort tools in silence. Mimi met Gabriel, finally, after he noticed her old cassette player and called across the room: “You got tunes?”

She blinked, nodded, and played her favorite tape through little headphones. It was grainy — the sort of mixtape dads made for daughters in a world that no longer existed. Gabriel just nodded, respectful. “You wanna go on the radio with that later?” he asked. Mimi didn’t answer, but the ghost of a smile passed her lips.

Near midday, kids hollered in the square. Wolves sprinted. Snow packed under paws. The “snow scavenger hunt” was happening — a leftover idea from last night’s final council chat. Sable was managing the route. Holt played “treat hider” with gusto. Rime played overseer, keeping little ones from burying their mittens too deep.

Kids adored it. Wolves thrived in it. Humans watched with the same stunned fondness they’d had during the blizzard.

And then Brent saw it.

Little Tommy Westbrook — red hat, lopsided grin — had climbed onto Holt’s back, hands buried in Holt’s ruff, while Holt shuffled through the snow on all fours, gently growling and pretending to be a “snow bear.” Tommy howled. Holt howled. The sky howled.

Something inside Brent cracked like thaw ice.

He stormed toward them, drawing a knife from his belt — quick, practiced, reflex. “Get that THING away from him!” he screamed. “Wolves tear, they KILL—”

Sable moved first, then Thane — but neither made it before Holt flinched back, tail tucked, eyes wide in apology he didn’t even have words for. The kid slid off Holt’s back and into the snow, confused.

Brent shoved past. Grabbed Tommy’s coat and yanked him back. The knife flashed.

Rime stepped forward.

No snarl. No speed. Just presence.

He walked directly into Brent’s line of sight. Then — he sat down. Big paws on frozen ground. Back straight. Ears neutral. Tail still.

Brent’s eyes shook. His hand trembled. Knife quivered.

And then it fell — clattering onto the ice-crusted snow between them.

Brent didn’t back away. His knees simply… gave out.

“I buried my son,” he said — not to Rime, not to Thane, not to God or ghosts — just into the cold. “He was ten. We were tracking. Wolves came out of the trees. I— I couldn’t—”

He broke.

Winter quiet held every word.

Holt looked at Thane, tears forming at the edges of his fur — Holt, who could carry a motorcycle, felt too heavy to move.

Rime reached out his paw. Just one. Slow. Stopped a foot away.

Did not touch. Only offered.

Brent bowed his head.

Brent stayed there for a long time, kneeling in the snow with the cold brushing his lungs and the truth finally too heavy to hold alone. Nobody moved until he did — not Thane, not Sable, not Rime, not even Holt. If Brent had lashed out again, if the pain had folded back into fear, the pack would’ve reacted as one. But instead, he just… breathed. His hand found the space over his chest like he wasn’t sure his heart was still there.

When he finally stood, he didn’t look at Holt, or the kid, or the knife on the ground. He looked at Thane — and for the first time, his eyes asked a question instead of delivering a threat.

Thane nodded once. Not approval. Not absolution. Just a quiet promise: You’re still in this town. You still matter. We don’t finish on the worst moment.

Sable got the boy moving again, calm and quiet. Holt got to his feet by inches, the way gentle giants do when they’re afraid they’ll crush the wrong thing. Rime flicked his tail once, just to reassure himself that this was real — that presence had done more than teeth ever could.

Mark arrived from the edge of the square, toolbox still in hand, and looked between Brent and Thane. He didn’t ask. He just fell in behind Sara as she led Brent away from the frost and toward shelter.

Thane watched them go, arms still loose at his sides. He didn’t speak for a long time. He just let the wind blow through the gap between what happened and what still could happen.

Only once the door of the church shut behind the three survivors did Thane finally turn, catching every eye that had seen. Gabriel’s. Rime’s. Holt’s still-wet ones.

“We handle it tonight,” Thane said quietly. “Nobody carries this alone.”

The pack nodded. One by one, the square eased back into motion — not the same motion as before, but a slower, steadier one. Because the work wasn’t just digging out from storms anymore. It was digging out from each other.

That night, things moved slow. Sara held Brent’s hand in the basement room. Mimi clutched her cassette player like a lifeline. Rime went back to the cabin, sat by the fire, and sharpened nothing.

Thane found him there.

“He does not see us. Only teeth. Thinks we took his cub.” Rime said, eyes fixed on the coals.

“You sat with him,” Thane said softly.

Rime blinked once. “Pain talks. Needs ears. Wolves… know that.”

The next morning, Brent walked up to Holt by the sawmill. Sunlight sharp on the frost. Holt froze mid-step, holding a toolbox.

Brent didn’t speak at first. Just… held out the knife. Not like a threat. Not like a test. Hilt first.

Holt blinked. Massive chest rising slow.

“For a long time,” Brent said, voice low, “this was for things I didn’t want to understand. Things I thought I needed to fight.” He paused. “I’m sorry I pointed it at you.”

Holt placed his paw — not on the blade, but on Brent’s hand — and closed it back up.

“Keep,” he said. “Use right. Not wrong.”

Brent nodded — eyes wet, jaw set. He put the knife away. This time, not like armor. More like remembering.

Sara found Thane at the river. Snowmelt ran under a sheet of glass, slow and sure. She stood beside him, hands in pockets.

“You know what’s strange about all this?” she said. “Back when the world was alive, I spent my career trying to convince people wolves were worth trusting. Now I get to learn the same lesson all over again.” She smiled faintly. “Maybe I wasn’t teaching anything. Maybe I was practicing.”

Thane gave her the same look he’d given people across battle lines and firelight, when they finally started to see.

“Trust isn’t a thing you build once,” he said. “It’s a tool you sharpen.”

Mimi kept her headphones off that afternoon. Instead, Gabriel invited her onto KLMR. Together, they queued up her father’s mixtape — crackles and all.

They played the tape through the airwaves into the valley.

Soft guitar. Old world voice. Scratch of plastic. The recorded words:
“To my girl—don’t stop loving the loud things. They mean you’re alive.”

Mimi cried.

Gabriel sat beside her and played quietly along. No applause. No chatter. Just letting the ghosts sing.

Thane didn’t want Brent alone with that much pain, not after what the day had held. So he sent Rime to the church, to sit quiet watch without staring.

Rime slipped out onto the steps, leaning against a pillar, quiet as earth.

Brent joined him a while later — not scared this time. Just tired.

They stood like that in silence until Brent said, “What do you do when your head won’t let go?”

Rime’s ears flicked once. He exhaled, slow.

“Breathe. Let pass through. If stays, make room.”

Brent nodded.

A wolf and a hunter. Standing side by side, not understanding each other—and not needing to, right then.

Sara and Mimi stayed. Brent stayed, too — though he still stepped around Sable like she was fire in wolf skin.

But he said Thane’s name without shaking. And walked unarmed in the square.

And once — just once — he reached up and clapped Holt’s shoulder as he passed.

Holt didn’t look back. Just smiled into the wind.

Snow swallowed sound the way sleep swallows a long night. For a while, the whole valley just breathed—no engines, no axes, no boots on gravel—only drift and hush and the soft tick of heat.

Thane woke to coffee and quiet laughter.

Gabriel was already at the stove with a kettle, humming nonsense to the steam. Mark sat cross-legged by the woodbox, sharpening a hatchet with careful, even strokes. Holt sprawled belly-down on the braided rug, chin on his crossed paws like an obedient bear forcing himself not to leap up and sprint into the yard. The tip of his tail gave him away; it thumped the floor in steady, helpless pulses.

Rime was the window silhouette again: still, alert, wearing the flannel pajama pants he had fallen asleep in, because once he decided something was comfortable, civilization could not pry it off him.

Sable slept on the couch under the “vintage grandma-core” quilt. She had shifted sometime in the night so her back rested against the armrest and one knee hung over the edge like she had never once apologized for taking space. Frost melt had dried from her fur; she looked less like a blade and more like a living thing that had finally remembered the luxury of warmth.

Thane eased up from his spot by the hearth and stretched until joints popped in a satisfyingly honest way. Gabriel poured coffee into chipped mugs and slid Thane’s across the table with a grin.

“Morning, Alpha. Forecast calls for sledding, terrible singing, and an 80% chance of Holt eating his own body weight in waffles.”

Holt didn’t lift his head. “I do ninety percent.”

Mark inspected the edge on the hatchet and set it aside. “We’ll need to sweep the porch every hour just to get out the door. Snow’s waist-deep. Pretty as a postcard. Useless as a doorstop.”

Sable’s eyes opened, yellow and calm. She listened for a beat before speaking, voice low.

“Storm rests. Day for joy.”

Her cadence did something to the room—like someone set a stake through the center and everything steadied around it. Thane nodded.

“Joy it is.”

They ate like a pack that had earned it: waffles, bacon, fruit that Gabriel had somehow tucked away like a magician, toast (Holt clutched the plate like holy relics), and enough coffee to convince even the snow to move aside.

Outside, the valley glittered under fresh sun. The town below was a collection of sugar-dust roofs and tiny drifting figures already arranging sleds and shovels and improvised snow games. Smoke climbed straight up from chimneys into air so cold it was glass. On a nearby pine bough, a pair of chickadees argued about something important and tiny.

They stepped into it as a unit—Thane first to test the steps, Gabriel behind him with a coil of rope and a battered plastic sled, Mark shouldering a shovel, Rime silent and attentive, Holt practically vibrating with stored thunder, and Sable closing the door with a sure, gentle motion that said the cabin was safe and would be there when the day ended.

On the hill behind Main Street, Libby had become a festival.

Kids whooped down the slope on saucers and trash-can lids. Wolves belly-slid after them, long and sleek and laughing, if laughter had ever worn fangs. A rope tow did not exist, but a long line of willing hands did: humans and wolves both hauling each other back up like a living pulley system. Someone had dragged an old grill into a snow-cleared half-circle and was cooking pancakes outdoors, flipping them with a flourish that drew cheers. The piano that had appeared last night reappeared at the edge of the square; its top was dusted with frost and its owner wore two scarves and determination.

Marta stood near the base of the hill, hat pulled down to her eyebrows, shouting for order and getting exactly none. When she saw Thane, she lifted an arm and waved him over through the sea of winter chaos.

“Thane!” she called, cheeks flushed with cold and victory. “We’ve got cocoa at City Hall, soup in the church basement, pancakes and coffee here, and Hank swears he can build a jump if you say it’s legal.”

Hank, a few yards away, was packing snow with a sled and the raw joy of a ten-year-old in a sixty-year-old body. He looked up hopefully.

Thane laughed. “If the jump stands, let it stand.”

“Mayor says it’s legal!” Hank yelled, as if Thane were the mayor and not the Alpha. Then he went back to compressing snow like his pension depended on it.

Sable paused beside Thane, taking it in: wolves tangled playfully with children, humans tugging on wolves’ paws to teach them how to lace borrowed skates, a teenager trying to explain snowball rules to a feral who insisted everything was hunting if you believed hard enough.

“Good,” Sable said softly. “World could be this more.”

Thane angled her a look. “We’re making it so.”

Holt had already found the line for the hill and inserted himself behind two eight-year-olds who accepted him with the solemn authority of children hosting a dignitary. “You gotta tuck, big guy,” one of them said, patting Holt’s shoulder. “Like a burrito.”

Holt nodded vigorously. “I will be burrito.”

Rime drifted to the edge of the crowd like a shadow and crouched to watch a toddler stamp wolf-prints into drift after drift, then carefully stamp his tiny boot beside each one to compare sizes. The toddler looked up, dazzled. Rime obligingly set his paw in fresh snow so the kid could make another comparison, then—without ceremony—held out a thermos cup. The toddler took it two-handed and slurped cocoa with the reverence due a sacred rite.

Mark, who rarely missed a chance to fix something, made a slow lap and returned with a tray of mugs. “Stove’s holding. Panels are sipping sun through the glare. If we keep the town’s loads low, we can keep lights on tonight without touching the generator.”

Marta tipped her mug toward him. “You’re my favorite kind of wizard, Mark.”

Gabriel had found the piano. Of course he had. He brushed frost off the keys with one sleeve and played a cheery, clumsy march until circulation returned to his fingertips. Then he shifted into something warmer, a run of chords that sounded like sun slanting through window glass. A few wolves gathered, heads tilted. A couple of humans hummed along. Holt, halfway up the hill, heard the first bars and threw both arms up like a stadium crowd, nearly wiping out the trio behind him. Sable watched Gabriel with that curious, careful look she saved for things she had decided to respect.

“Music travels far,” she said. “Like howl. Less teeth, same truth.”

Gabriel grinned. “House specialty.”

The jump—such as it was—stood. Hank got a test pilot in the form of a feral named Pike, all white fur and reckless optimism. Pike howled down the slope, hit the lip, and flew. He landed in a spray of powder and a peel of laughter so big the trees shook. Two humans followed, then three wolves together, then a cluster of teenagers who biffed it so spectacularly that half the hill tumbled down after them like dominoes, cackling.

Sable’s mouth twitched. “Fools,” she said, and her tone made it a blessing.

The day became a parade of small scenes that stacked together like warm quilts.

At the grill, a woman named Ellie discovered that wolves preferred their pancakes barely cooked on the inside and crisped hard on the outside. “Charred moons,” Holt called them, mouth full. Ellie snorted and gave him two more.

Inside City Hall, a posse of knitters armed an entire battalion of wolves with scarves, hats, and mismatched mittens. The sight of a gray-muzzled feral named Bracken looking at his own reflection in a window—blue scarf wrapped three times around his neck, eyes shining like someone had crowned him—put a lump in Thane’s throat he didn’t bother to swallow.

In the church basement, soup kettles took turns on the big burners, and someone discovered wolves could chop vegetables faster than anyone had ever seen if you put a wooden cutting board under their claws and promised them the first bowl.

On Main Street, two teenage girls attempted a “howl clinic.” The wolves were patient. The result was catastrophic. Everyone adored it.

Midday, KLMR-FM came alive with a bright guitar riff that slid over the square like sunlight. The generator at the station had been tested last week; Mark’s patchwork wiring still held. Thane glanced toward the distant roof line where their antenna poked up like a stubborn reed and felt the old familiar spark in his chest.

Gabriel leaned toward the microphone they’d rigged on the piano. “To anyone listening beyond our valley,” he said, voice warm and amused, “today is a snow day. If you can hear us, know we’re safe and ridiculous out here. And if you can’t hear us… well, then we’re just talking to ourselves, which we’re very good at.”

Laughter rolled. Sable looked at the speaker hung by the door, then at Thane.

“Radio still miracle,” she said. “Howl that never tires.”

“Perfect description,” Thane said. “You may have a show.”

“Will not,” she said dryly.

Holt finally got his turn with the sled. The two eight-year-old coaches had appointed themselves handlers. They tucked him like a burrito, counted down, and shoved. Holt shot forward with a roar, hit the jump, and for one breathtaking moment looked like a flying house. He landed with shocking grace, skidded to a dramatic stop, stood up, and raised the sled over his head.

“Burrito flies!” he bellowed.

The crowd lost its mind.

He trotted back up the hill and gifted the sled to one of the kids with ceremony. “For courage,” he said softly, serious now. The boy blinked hard to keep from exploding.

Rime, who had avoided every invitation to slide or jump, allowed one of the knitters to adjust his scarf and then let a little girl paint his claws with glittery blue polish using a brush the size of a twig. He stared at the snow while she worked, stoic, and did not flinch. When she held up his hand to admire her art, he nodded once and said, “Good work.” She beamed like sunrise.

Marta drifted over to Thane with a clipboard she didn’t actually need. “You know,” she said, “when I said open your homes, I didn’t plan on opening my freezer and discovering a wolf defrosting a bag of peas by sitting on it.”

Thane kept his face straight. “Efficient.”

“Delightful,” she corrected, and bumped her shoulder against his arm. “Thank you for trusting us with your family.”

Thane met her eyes. “Thank you for claiming them as yours.”

She swallowed, then looked away to watch a cluster of seniors teaching a feral how to knit with oversized needles. “They make us brave, the wolves,” she said. “We make them soft. It is a good trade.”

Sable passed by then, and Marta stopped her with a touch to the forearm. Sable stilled—wariness, habit—but Marta only lifted the end of Sable’s scarf (cream, with a single red stripe; someone had chosen well) and adjusted it like a grandmother.

“There,” Marta said, satisfied. “Fits.”

Sable held her stillness a fraction too long, then inclined her head. “Thanks,” she said. One word. It landed like a stone thrown in a pond—ripples that would keep moving for hours.

Afternoon light leaned toward gold. Shadows lengthened. The hill, packed into a polished track by a hundred passes, gleamed like a silver chute. Breath fog thickened. Hands sought pockets. Wolves sought other wolves and began to cluster toward their own.

Thane found a moment with Sable at the top of the slope where the view ran from the first row of pines all the way to the river, now smothered under white.

“You heading back tonight?” he asked.

She weighed the air. Snow hissed softly, a whisper of new flakes. “Yes. Camp waits. Food there. Some shelter rebuild. We go slow.”

“I’ll send you with what we can spare,” Thane said. “Blankets, dried meat, hand warmers, a radio if you finally admit you like them.”

“Not like,” Sable said. “Respect.” Her mouth ticked. “Will not carry radio. Rime will just teach birds to answer it.”

Thane watched Rime below, surrounded by small humans, looking both imprisoned and deeply content. “He would.”

They began to make rounds—goodbyes that didn’t feel like endings.

At the grill, Ellie stuffed three paper-wrapped charred moons into a wool backpack and pointed a spatula at Sable. “You bring this bag back next time. I’ll know if you don’t.”

Sable looked down at the bundle like someone had handed her a crown. “Will bring back clean,” she said. “Promise.”

In the church basement, the soup crew handed out jars. In City Hall, the knitting posse gifted two more scarves and a pair of mittens that would only fit Holt’s thumbs, which made him so happy he announced he was going to wear them on his ears. The knitters nearly fainted from delight.

By the piano, Gabriel finished a bright little tune and leaned the mic toward Thane. Thane kept it short, voice steady over the square and the radio both.

“Libby,” he said, “thank you for the day. For the warmth. For showing the valley what it looks like when a town becomes a den. We’ll be on air through the evening while our friends travel, in case anyone needs a voice to follow home.”

Applause moved through the crowd, not loud—nothing was loud in this much snow—but sincere, like clap-clap-clap traveling hand to hand.

Hank and two deputies had already broken trail north with shovels and old cross-country skis, marking hazards with bright cloth strips tied to willow branches. The route out of town wasn’t easy, but it was clear enough now: along the ridge, past the frozen aspen grove, then into the narrow cut the river had left over years of patient insistence.

At the edge of town, the Northern Ferals gathered—thirty wolves in mismatched scarves, borrowed mittens, and woven hats that would be recounted with laughter for years. Packs were shouldered, paths were checked, and farewells began.

Rime and Holt stood together beside Thane, Gabriel, and Mark. They weren’t part of the departing line. They weren’t wearing packs. They belonged here—home. Holt held a mug of cocoa and a half-eaten waffle like the world’s most content boulder; Rime stood upright in his glittered claw-wraps, scarf neat and composed.

Sable paused before them. She scanned the group, then turned to her two former guardians.

“You stay,” she said simply.

It wasn’t question or command. It was acknowledgment.

Holt straightened and placed a paw over his chest. “Den is here,” he rumbled.

Rime inclined his head slowly. “Will honor both packs.”

Sable pressed her brow briefly to Holt’s, then Rime’s, in the oldest sign of feral respect—no words, just presence, breath, and memory.

Thane stepped closer. “They’re family,” he said. “This den will always shelter yours too.”

Sable’s eyes softened for a heartbeat. “Know that,” she said. “Carry peace into storms.”

Then she turned, and her pack followed.

Sable stepped forward and raised her chin. Her voice carried without strain.

“Libby. We came because storm bigger than pride. Found… more.” She searched for the words that fit tight to bone. “Found welcome. Learned heat of houses. Learned taste of charred moon. Learned… being seen.” She looked at Marta, then at Thane. “Will not forget. Pack remembers warmth longer than cold.”

Marta blinked too fast. “Come back for no reason at all,” she said. “You don’t need a storm.”

Sable’s mouth softened. “Will do.”

They set off as dusk settled in like steady breath over the snow. The first stretch was full of quiet reassurances, nudged packs, calls to keep formation. Then the trail found rhythm — footsteps hush, breath becoming cloud, the soft whisper of snow against fur.

Thane, Gabriel, and Mark stood with Holt and Rime, watching in silence until the figures vanished into the white — until color and motion and wild memory turned into the soft shimmer of snowpack beneath a muted sky.

Marta sighed beside them, hands in her coat. “Feels like sending cousins home after the holidays.”

Holt chuckled. “Except we get stay with cool side.”

Rime nodded once, the faintest smile at the edge of his eyes. “We keep the den standing.”

Thane clapped Rime’s shoulder softly and said, “Always.”

They walked back into town together. Lights were snapping on behind frosted windows. Someone dragged the piano inside at last. The grill hissed its final hiss and slept. The jump sagged under its own legend.

In the cabin, they shook off snow and made a last run of cocoa. Holt’s mittens-on-ears did not survive the doorjamb, which sent him into a five-minute eulogy that ended only when Gabriel made him laugh by playing the saddest funeral dirge ever written for a pair of wool lumps.

Rime—home again—picked up a broom without a word and swept melted snow into a neat line for Mark to scoop with a dustpan. Sable’s scarf was folded and set by the door for next time. Thane hung the extra blankets near the stove to dry and stood a moment with his hands on the back of the chair, head bowed in the kind of gratitude that does not need to be spoken to be true.

Later, when the light had thinned to cobalt and the valley held its breath again, Gabriel turned the radio down to a murmur and flicked the string of lanterns around the room. Warm amber halos pooled on the floor and walls.

“Tomorrow will be chores,” Mark said, practical as ever. “Plowing, roof checks, maybe a run to the generator to chip ice.”

“Tomorrow will be that,” Thane agreed. “Tonight was this.”

Holt, already half asleep on the rug, mumbled, “Burrito flies,” and snored like distant thunder.

Rime tugged his blanket into neat lines around his shoulders and gave Thane a long, small look that said I saw everything; I filed it where it matters.

The wind moved across the ridge like a hand smoothing a bedspread. Somewhere far off, a wolf made a single call and then fell silent, as if to check the valley’s pulse. It beat steady.

Thane closed his eyes and listened to the house breathe, to the town breathe, to the long, slow inhale of a winter that had decided, just for now, to be kind.

The day would end with the ferals threading the last pines, with scarves catching moonlight, with birds settling on cold branches and tucking their heads under wings. It would end with Sable stepping into the clearing above her camp and smelling a home remade by hands that had learned something in Libby—about blankets and kettles and the patience to build again.

It would end with a radio fading into static and with a valley full of people and wolves who, when they woke tomorrow, would reach for shovels and brooms and each other because that was the way forward.

But before all that, in the comfortable hush after laughter, Thane spoke into the quiet without turning, like a promise more than a statement.

“Any storm,” he said, “and they know where to run.”

“Here,” Gabriel answered, soft and sure.

“Here,” Mark agreed.

The stove ticked as it cooled. Snow slid in slow sheets from the roof. Somewhere, unseen, the river under its white skin kept moving.

The night held. The den did too. And for once, the world outside matched the one within: cold, bright, honest, and full.

The air tasted strange before the storm.

Not just cold. Not just the usual brittle bite of winter. There was something heavy in it—thick, electric, like a string wound too tight and waiting to snap. Even the pines whispered it in their needles as the wind brushed by: danger.

Thane stood outside the cabin on the ridge, fur bristling as he scanned the north. The sky—once a quiet silver—had turned a mottled bruise. Low, swollen clouds dragged their bellies across the treeline. Snow began as nothing more than a soft drift, but already the flakes were large, wet, too eager. The kind that meant business.

Behind him, inside the warmth of the cabin, the fire crackled and the light danced across wooden walls that told stories of a thousand quiet moments between pack and people. Mark’s voice drifted from the back room where he was checking the charge on the deep-cycle batteries, his methodical hum the counterpoint to Gale Force Nine brewing outside.

Gabriel strummed the same four chords on the couch, mind elsewhere, hand running slowly through his salt-black hair as if coaxing the melody loose from something stuck just under the skin.

Rime stood sentinel at the window—his quiet silhouette a familiar one these days. He was still new to “indoor life,” but he’d taken to protecting even the mundane rhythms of the den like a religion.

And Holt… well, Holt was flat on his back by the wood stove, all paws and contented sighs, enjoying “the art of thawing.” That was what he called it. The big goof had no idea how to do anything halfway.

Thane stepped back inside and shut the door with a firm motion of his paw. Gabriel stopped playing and looked over.

“You feel it too?”

Thane nodded slowly. “It’s not a storm. It’s a message.”

Mark emerged carrying the portable solar monitor, headset around his neck, flannel shirt sleeves rolled up. “Forecast said minor flurries. But I get the feeling Mother Nature forgot to read the forecast.”

Rime’s ears flicked, nose turning to the wind. He didn’t speak, but his shoulders tensed in the way they did when something was wrong.

Holt, ever the late arrival, blinked up at the window just in time for the world to disappear in a sudden white blast. Snow hit like someone had turned on a firehose.

“Whoa…” he said breathlessly. “That’s not snow. That’s a trap.”

Within seconds, visibility dropped to almost nothing.

And then—the knock.

Not gentle. Not polite.

It was a pounding of paw against wood, forceful, determined. A rhythm that said we’re here, let us in, no time for words.

Thane was at the door in two strides and threw it open without caution.

Sable stood there, more storm than wolf. Her fur was packed with windblown ice and her shoulders carried snow like armor. Behind her, through the swirling wall of blizzard, came more shapes—shadow-wolves emerging from white nothing, one after another until the cabin porch and surrounding yard were teeming with Northern Ferals.

They didn’t whine. They didn’t plead. They didn’t explain.

Sable simply met Thane’s eyes.

“We come,” she said. “Storm took everything.”

Thane didn’t move for a heartbeat. He didn’t need to. His voice, casual but iron-solid, was already ahead of the moment.

“The cabin is yours,” he said. “We stand together.”

Rime was there first, already guiding the first few ferals inside, clearing them space by the stove, fetching extra quilts, helping them shake the ice from their paws. Holt went full big-brother mode, dragging armfuls of blankets and letting wolves bigger than him lean against his shoulder like exhausted pups.

Gabriel lit up like someone just handed him a gift. “Snow day with thirty wolves?” he said brightly. “Hell. Yes.”

Mark ducked into the pantry and came out with powdered cocoa, cans of chili, jars of honey, and three loaves of bread. “Gonna need a bigger pot,” he muttered, already mentally scaling up recipes.

And Sable…

Sable finally took one long inhale. For the first time, her posture faltered—not from weakness, but from permission. For once in this world, she didn’t have to stay standing. She could rest.

“Sit,” Thane said softly, holding out a mug.

She hesitated, then did just that.

---

It didn’t take long for word to reach Libby.

Between the storm, the frequency of Northern pack sightings, and the shared instinct of care woven deep into every human who’d stayed since the Fall—the arrival of the Ferals was less of a surprise and more of a moment already waiting to happen.

By dusk, Mayor Marta was outside in the gale, soaked coat and all, rallying townsfolk with the same fire she used to manage food distribution and road repairs.

“Every house with heat—open your door! Blankets, clothing, stew—get it moving! NO ONE sleeps cold in Libby tonight!”

Deputies fanned out through the streets, shouting the news through cupped hands. Hank waved people toward his own house without even glancing back (his wife was already pushing furniture aside to set blankets on the floor). Kids poured outside in mismatched boots, pointing and cheering as the wolves staggered down Main Street like living storms who’d surrendered their fierceness at the sight of a warm porch.

Humans didn’t ask ANY questions. They just acted.

“Hey, big fella, you got claws, but do you drink tea?”

“Hold still, let me get the ice out of your tail, you’re freezing!”

Before long, the homes of Libby—little post-war cabins and patched-up craftsman houses alike—were filled floor-to-attic with wolves. Wolves by the kitchen counters. Wolves by the firesides. Wolves using couches as dens. Wolves wrapped in mismatched, oversized flannel pajamas from long-forgotten closets.

The storm… just became background noise.

Inside, there was LIFE.

---

The cabin itself transformed into a sanctuary inside a sanctuary.

While Libby’s streets glowed from candles and makeshift lanterns, the ridge cabin roared with heat from the wood stove. Sable, Rime, and Holt joined Thane, Gabriel, and Mark in what might as well have been the most unexpected holiday family gathering in the history of wolves—or humanity.

Gabriel taught Holt how to play blackjack with a deck of cards they found under the couch cushions. Every time Holt lost, he slammed the table dramatically and insisted the deck had sabotaged him. Every time he won, he strutted like a viking who’d just conquered Canada.

When Rime lost his round, he just arched an eyebrow with quiet disdain, then took three mugs of cocoa, climbed onto the armchair, and watched the chaos like it was dinner theater.

Sable, meanwhile, had commandeered one end of the couch and—only after some heavy persuasion—wrapped herself in a quilt Mark described as “vintage grandma-core.” She tolerated it for approximately twelve minutes before one of the corners slipped down her shoulder, and Holt nearly shrieked with joy.

“We got her to wear a BLANKET-COAT,” Holt announced. “Write it down. HISTORY. Someone carve this on a tree.”

Sable growled… half-heartedly.

And Thane?

He floated.

Not that he’d admit it, but seeing his cabin alive, packed with wolves safe from the cold, sawdust on the floor, laughter in the rafters, the faint tinkling of Mark’s tools on the workbench and sugary scent of Gabriel’s mystery cocoa concoction—it was like watching the bones of his pack finally warm again. Every fracture, every bruise from battles past, every moment of exhaustion—they all got a little lighter.

The blizzard roared on the roof.

Nobody cared.

After dinner (which was more like a food riot), the cabin settled.

Thane sat by the fire with Sable beside him, sharing quiet in the way only leaders knew how—no words, just warmth and survival well-earned. Holt curled up at their clawed feet like a massive, slightly humming pillow. Rime sprawled on his back in front of the stove, flannel-covered legs sticking straight up like an overturned beetle. That didn’t stop him from sipping cocoa.

Mark fell asleep in his chair surrounded by blankets, solar schematics still on his lap.

Gabriel leaned against the table, guitar in his hands, playing soft chords, half-lullaby, half-wolf-song.

And for the first time in a long time, the den didn’t feel like a place holding back the world.

It felt like the world.

---

Meanwhile, in Libby…

Two wolves learned how to use a toaster. It didn’t go well. Or rather—it went too well.

Once they figured out how to drop the bread in and push the lever, toast became the most celebrated invention since fire. Wolves made toast for everyone. They buttered it. They put it in their pockets. They stacked it. They debated the ideal crunchy-to-soft ratio.

Mayor Marta nearly cried from laughing when Deputy Glenn tried to explain that they didn’t actually need to butter both sides or toast each piece six times. (He lost that argument. Wolves love commitment.)

Elsewhere, a group of older ferals gathered around a space heater that made a soft ticking noise when it cycled. They tapped it experimentally. They tapped each other. They started a rhythm. That rhythm spread—thumps, claws on wood, quiet howls in rising harmony. The humans joined in by tapping mugs and rocking chairs.

By the time the storm hit its peak, somebody had rolled out the town piano, and two wolves were trying to learn how to duet. A toddler followed one of them into the hallway, tugging a tail with reverence and laughter.

Nobody was scared. Nobody was alone.

It turned out that being trapped indoors—together—was less about healing trauma and more about making a fort out of every pillow in sight and singing until your lungs hurt.

The snow kept falling. Hard enough to bury trucks and build temporary igloos. Hard enough to shut down the trails and freeze the river solid.

But within every house, windows fogged and hearts thudded with more warmth than the entire power grid of western Montana used to hold.

---

Morning brought quiet.

The kind where snowdrifts stretch like unbroken quilts across the land, and sound is only what you make yourself.

Wolves stretched. Humans yawned. Coffee brewed. Someone found waffles. More toast was made.

And when Gabriel and Holt stumbled to the porch, arms full of snow gear to go “sledding like maniacs,” what followed looked like an oil painting your grandmother might have owned if she believed in werewolves:

Wolves belly-sliding down the hill behind Main Street, howling with glee.

An elderly woman sipping tea from her porch, watching like she’d waited her whole life for this.

Two teenagers debating whether Holt was heavier than the sled.

Kids buried in wolf fur as they built misshapen snowmen.

And outside the cabin, Rime showed Sable how to make snow angels—then calmly walked away before she could gnash her teeth at the adorable indignity.

Thane watched from the ridge. Fur brushed with powder, arms crossed loosely. Gabriel sidled up and took in the sight.

“You ever think we’d get this?” Gabriel said softly.

Thane pulled in a long breath—filled with pine, quiet, and something sweeter underneath.

“No,” he admitted. “But I hoped.”

The storm would fade.

The snow would melt.

The wolves would go home.

But something had lodged deeper now—like a spark that refused to die just because the night did.

The humans of Libby, hearth-lit and fearless, had done more than offer shelter.

They’d said, without a single word of ceremony:

You are family here.

And the wolves? They hadn’t just sought shelter.

They’d brought joy.

They’d brought warmth.

They’d brought life.

For the rest of their lives, when the wind rose in this valley, someone would remember the sound not of fear—

—but of laughter echoing through the storm.

The wind howled at the valley, but the valley didn’t howl back—not because it was afraid, but because it was full.

The Humvee’s engine talked low to itself, a steady bass under the winter morning, while the square yawned awake into colorless light. Frost had drawn fine white veins across the windshield; when Thane dragged a claw over the glass, it squeaked like a bird in a far tree. He stood with his paw on the open door, breath fogging, looking at the way the machine sat like an animal waiting for a command. A year ago, he would have called this a dream—a ridiculous one at that. Today it was a tool, and the day felt ready to be used.

Gabriel trotted across the square with his guitar case banging his hip, hair salted with powder-fine snow. “Gorgeous,” he said, like the Humvee had made itself pretty to be admired.

“Ugly,” Thane said, fondly. “Honest about it.”

Mark came at a brisk walk, backpack slung and tablet wedged into a side pocket, muttering to himself. “If we find anything with windings, I’m adopting it,” he said by way of hello. “Don’t let Holt lick the battery terminals.”

“I not lick,” Holt announced, materializing a step behind Gabriel. “Maybe tap.”

Rime followed him through the cold with the quiet of a shadow. He cocked his head at the Humvee and then at Thane. “You happy,” he said, matter-of-fact.

“Close enough,” Thane said. He tipped his muzzle toward the road. “Mount up.”

Marta intercepted them before they climbed in, scarf tucked under her chin, eyes sharp with the kind of worry that likes to pretend it’s just business. “Half-day out, half-day back?” she asked.

“If we don’t get curious,” Thane said.

“You will,” she said, and then she smiled, unhelpfully. “Bring me something I can call a miracle at a town hall. And bring yourselves back with it.”

Thane dipped his head, then slid into the driver’s seat. The engine thumped when he turned the key and settled into a purr. Gabriel clambered into the back and immediately popped the latches on the guitar case; Holt folded himself beside him with reverence, pillow across his knees like a ceremonial offering. Rime took the other rear seat and glanced out the window for a long beat, cataloguing the morning. Mark shut his door with the clean satisfaction of a man who appreciates a piece of metal that does exactly what it says it will do.

They rolled out under a sky the color of pewter. Pines shouldered the road like quiet sentries; drifts stacked themselves in unhelpful places. The Humvee hulked over them with the patience of a big animal that knows it can go wherever it wants so long as it keeps its heart slow. Inside the cab, the heater breathed, and Gabriel began to teach Holt a warm-up pattern that sounded suspiciously like the backbone of a carol if you squinted your ears.

“Thumb keeps pulse,” Gabriel said. “Down-up, soft. Fingers do the words on top. Don’t overthink it.”

“Overthink?” Holt frowned down at his paws. “Think… medium.”

“That’s the sweet spot,” Gabriel said. “Less bear, more breeze.”

Rime watched them for a while and then angled his gaze back out to the trees. “Road good,” he said to Thane, to the day, to himself.

“For now,” Thane said, and when Holt nailed a clean change between chords a few minutes later, he allowed himself the smallest smile. “Breeze,” he said.

Holt brightened so hard it was a wonder he didn’t fog the windows alone.

By noon they found the place Thane remembered from the old maps: a low, recessed shape in the pine roots, half-buried in winter and bureaucracy. The bunker door had paint that used to be green and a keypad that used to matter. Mark breathed on his fingers, rolled his shoulders, and made short work of the lock with a piece of wire and a laugh that sounded like a man asked to do his favorite trick.

“After you,” he said, like a maître d’.

The air inside was cold in its bones. Their breath made little planets in front of their mouths. The light from their headlamps walked out across stamped concrete and rows of crates with labels that had been confident once. Holt padded abreast of Thane, nostrils flaring; Rime moved a step off the line, eyes bouncing between shadows, unconcerned but unwilling to be surprised just to keep the day interesting. Somewhere far back, something small skittered and then reconsidered its priorities.

They opened the first crates like patient thieves. It was the ordinary gold of survival: gauze, alcohol, IV tubing in sealed plastic that cracked a little at the edges but held true; MREs in brown packets that made Holt’s ears perk with a fascination he knew he should be ashamed of. Mark found a generator frame under a tarp and knelt with delighted profanity, hands already mapping its failures. “Brushes we can replace,” he said. “Stator’s sound. The governor will need a prayer and a shim. I can make this hum if I give it a reason to live.”

“Doc Frankenstein,” Gabriel said, crouching beside him to rub dust away from a plate. “Bring it back, maestro.”

Rime crouched at a crate full of coats that had never known a child’s back. He touched a sleeve with two fingers, the way you touch something asleep. “Small,” he murmured. “Warm.”

Thane’s beam caught a stenciled warning across a long, wide lid, the kind of aggression only paperwork could love: FOR INCINERATION. OPERATION: BRIGHTER WINTER. PRIORITY CODE: BURN. NO RELEASE. He said nothing for a beat, listening to the way those words felt in his chest, and then put his paw to the pry bar anyway.

The lid went up with a long, reluctant sigh.

Inside, the smell hit: wood, cardboard, paper glue, new fabric with that tiny sweetness old stores used to put in the air in December. Everything was tucked and wrapped and labeled for hands that had never gotten the chance to undo them. A plush wolf with stitched eyes looked up at Thane as if to ask what took so long. There were puzzles and picture books. Trucks with bright wheels. Dolls with hair so smooth it seemed to shine in the beam of his lamp. Coats with tags that promised warmth and sizes printed in cheerful circles. Little, necessary things that said we remembered you.

“They were going to burn it,” Gabriel said, voice thin around the edges, as if it didn’t quite fit in his throat.

“Not today,” Thane answered.

Rime reached in and lifted a small box like it might break from the memory of being touched. He turned it in his paws with enormous care; it was a music box in painted tin, with winter stamped into its sides—a tiny cabin, a handful of stars, a tree that wore its own light. He wound it two clicks and then stopped, as if fearful of using up the song all at once.

Holt picked up a bright toy helicopter by its tail and blinked at its rotors. “Metal bug,” he said with absolute certainty. “For fly?”

“For pretend,” Gabriel said, a smile fighting its way into his voice. “You spin it like this. Makes a sound. That sound is joy.”

“Joy loud?” Holt asked.

“Louder than snow,” Gabriel said.

“Two more,” Rime said, pointing his chin deeper into the row. They opened the crate beside it and watched a room with no heat warm itself: glass ornaments cushioned in tissue like eggs waiting for a spring they didn’t believe in; tinsel and garland that made Holt’s eyes go wide with greedy disbelief until he lifted a loop and promptly got half of himself wrapped in silver. A spool of cord with plugs. A coil of lights with bulbs still intact, daring time to make them fail and time failing back. At the bottom, rolled in careful brown paper, a banner in gold letters that read WINTER BRIGHT: LET THE LIGHT REMIND US.

Gabriel eased a snow globe out of its nest and shook it gently. Flake went white over a tiny church and a little hill. The globe made a sound that wasn’t a sound when the glitter settled. “I can hear it,” he said, as if embarrassed. “Even if it’s not—listen.”

They did. It was just silence in a jar. But it felt like something small standing on its toes.

“Load it,” Thane said. “All of it.”

They did. The Humvee swallowed hope with a good appetite, boxes passed paw to paw. At the door, Mark paused with the banner tube tucked into his armpit and said, “We could do something stupid with this.”

“Like remember,” Thane said.

“Exactly that,” Mark said, and grinned.

On the way back, the road looked like it had been set out just to be driven by something wide and patient. The Humvee rode a little lower and felt more like a promise than a truck. Holt leaned against the window and breathed cloud onto the glass, then drew a star with one claw. Rime took the wheel for a stretch and drove like a wolf listening through his paws to a story told by a steering column. Gabriel put the music box on his knee and wound it only when Holm’s tail thumped and the back seat needed that little thread of sound to tie its two wolves to the rest of the world.

They crested the ridge above Libby with the sun folding itself into the mountain, and the town looked like a painting that a careful hand had left unfinished so that the last light could complete it. The Humvee rumbled into the square and shut off with a sigh. People turned because machines are still a novelty you don’t get used to, and then people stayed because they saw the way Thane climbed down holding something that wasn’t a weapon and was heavier than any gun he could have brought.

Marta took three steps forward and stopped, the snow globe cupped in both hands before Thane even thought about offering it. “What… is… all of this?” she asked around the ache in her voice.

“Christmas,” Mark said. “And a little revenge. On despair.”

Holt lifted a crate like a hero in a mural. “Shiny rope,” he announced with priestly authority. “Not food. For tree.”

“You found decorations,” someone breathed. “You found — toys?”

“We found what they meant to give,” Thane said. “We’re going to hand it out like we were meant to all along.”

Marta looked down at the snow globe, shook it once, and watched the white fall. “Tonight,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Lights tonight.”

“Tonight,” Thane agreed.

The square turned into a beehive that knew exactly how to build honey. Ladders went up. Nails were found in cans that had been hiding them for the moment that deserved them. Wire was stretched and checked and stretched again until Mark nodded like a man who has made a deal with electricity and didn’t want to offend. Wolves climbed what humans couldn’t without ropes, claws sure on cold bark, garland looped over shoulders like captured serpents. Holt got tinsel on his muzzle and refused to accept it wasn’t a crown regardless of the evidence. “Alpha,” he told Thane solemnly, with an extra loop around one ear, “you look,” and Thane looked and said, “Regal,” because Holt was and because the word would make him twice as careful with little hands around him.

Rime took a coil of lights and disappeared up the courthouse spruce, moving with a caution that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with being watched by a dozen kids with their hearts in their throats. When he clawed his way back down, soft applause erupted, instantaneous and honest. He dipped his muzzle and allowed it to hit him. A little girl with an oversized knitted hat stood very straight and asked, “Can I thank you?” He crouched so he could hear her and endured a hug that glued glitter to his fur with the calm of a mountain accepting the weather.

Gabriel tuned the guitar on the courthouse steps and played the skeleton of a song people recognized from before, just the bones and the warmth. When a kid shouted, “Play the snow one!” he laughed. “I don’t know the snow one,” he said. “I know the light one.” He played that, and somehow it sounded like a street under lanterns, and Holt kept time soft on the wood with one claw, so proud of his restraint that he had to look away to keep from spoiling it by smiling too much.

Marta moved like the wind through all of it, issuing directions that sounded like favors and being obeyed as if she had insisted. Hank supervised the placement of fire pits like they were building an outpost, which they were, just against cold instead of men. Someone invented hot cider again with cloves that had survived in a jar under a grandmother’s bed for a decade; someone else had hoarded sugar for a day that felt like this and now burned it into a sweetness that made the air remember holidays even if your bones didn’t.

By the time the light truly went, the square glowed with an expectancy that made people straighten their coats, comb their hair with their fingers, stare upward as if the stars were shy and needed coaxing. Marta stood on the city hall steps with the snow globe in her hand. She didn’t make a speech. She let the quiet lay down first like a blanket so no noise would shiver. “We did good,” she said simply, voice steady. “A hard year. A real one. We made it together. Tonight we get a little of it back.” She looked at Thane, did not nod, did not need to. He stepped to the breakers they had wired into something Mark swore was safe because it had to be, and he put his paw to the handle. For a breath, all you could hear was the sound of people holding breath. Then he threw the switch.

Light stitched itself across the eaves and leaped into the branches and ran the length of garland and found every glass bulb and set it alight. The building wore gold; the trees wore colors that made ordinary adjectives feel embarrassed. A sound rose out of the crowd that started as a gasp and turned without instruction into laughter. Somewhere, someone clapped twice and then couldn’t stop, and the whole square found hands to use. Children made the noise of a small flock being let out of a coop. The wolves stood like they were being sung to.

Thane stood with the pack at the foot of the steps and let his chest loosen around a feeling he’d forgotten the shape of. He looked sideways and caught Rime’s profile, calm as always but with a softness at the mouth that would have passed for something else if you didn’t know him. Holt stared up, mouth open, tail measuring the moment without his permission. Gabriel closed his eyes and let the guitar hum under his palm as if it had a purr.

“Now,” Marta called, not loudly but with the voice of a bell that knows it will be answered. “Make our town small again.”

They opened the first toy crate like a ritual and lined little people up in something that felt like fairness even before it was enforced. No elbows, no tears. Names said out loud. Things placed in hands. A boy palmed a red truck and forgot to breathe. A girl looked at a doll with hair the color of a summer fruit and asked, “For me?” and Marta said, “Yes,” and that was the only word required. Gloves and hats went around necks and into sleeves. Picture books found laps. A tin top spun on the courthouse steps and made a sound like a cricket remembering a warm field.

Holt found himself hip-deep in children without anyone having to direct them there. He held garland ends while very serious six-year-olds arranged it and then allowed himself to be tugged obligingly two inches left and three inches back until the geometry satisfied their new committee. “Not food,” he told a small boy who was gnawing on tinsel, and the boy nodded solemnly and removed it from his mouth and then immediately tried to feed it to Holt as a test of spiritual consistency. Holt accepted the offering, pretended to eat it, and returned it with a conspiratorial wink. “Sparkle string,” he said. “Tree proud.”

Rime sat on a low stone wall with a cup of cider in his paws and allowed a rotation of gratitude to affix itself to him. Children hugged him around the middle and the knee. A grandmother pressed his paw between both of hers and said “Thank you,” in a voice that suggested she was thanking him for living more than for climbing. He did not flinch. The decorations chimed in his tail where someone had placed a tiny bell on purpose; every time he shifted, it rang one small note, and a toddler laughed like the world cracked just to let the sound out.

Gabriel played with the restraint of a man who knows the song is not about him tonight. He let carols be bones and left all the meat to the voices of people who remembered enough words to pretend. When Holt tried to harmonize and failed spectacularly with joy, Gabriel interpolated a counterline that turned the failure into a joke musical enough to pass for a plan. He did not refuse the second cup of cider, but he did not forget which packmate should not be offered any if they wanted the garlands to remain in their proper dimension.

Mark, who had done unromantic mathematics all afternoon and then asked electricity to please be kind, stood by the breakers and watched the way the lights held. He looked tired. He also looked like a man who had given a gift with his hands and received something unaccountably bigger back.

Thane moved through it all the way a river moves through its bed: not owning any of it, shaping it by being there. He took time with a boy who had lost his father last spring and was now holding a book like it had come from that man’s pocket. He lifted a girl onto his shoulder so she could hang an ornament higher than anyone else could reach. He touched Holt’s shoulder once, passing, and Holt turned his head quickly so that only Thane could see the wet at the corner of his eye, then looked away. Rime met Thane’s eyes when they both happened to turn at the same time and, without words, acknowledged the miracle of seeing human joy up close without it flinching from fangs.

At some point, someone from Spokane on the other end of the line called City Hall because there were wires for that now, and Marta stood with the handset under her chin, laughing. “Yes,” she said into the old world, “they’re beautiful. We used your coffee as fuel. Yes, yes, send more beans. Trade you for cookies if you don’t burn them.” She walked out into the square with the phone still to her ear and the cord trailing like an umbilical and waved it around so Whitefish and Kalispell could hear the shrieks and clamoring. “It sounds like life,” she told whatever mayor had claimed the line. “You should come see.”

Later, as the cold bit kinder and stone held heat from the fires, as the last toy found the last small hand that had not expected it and the last cup of cider steamed into a grateful mouth, Gabriel elbowed Thane lightly and tipped his head at the Humvee parked like a beast that had brought back prey. “You realize I’m calling this Santa Claws and the North Pack Express on air,” he said.

“Of course you are,” Thane said.

“Don’t fight it,” Gabriel said. “Let it be destiny.”

“Fine,” Thane said. “Destiny can have one stupid name.”

“Says the wolf with a humvee,” Gabriel said, and grinned such that Thane had to pretend he wasn’t smiling back.

Holt relaxed on the stones near the biggest fire and put his pillow under his head with ceremonial respect. “Good run,” he declared to the stars, which were out now in handfuls behind the light. “Good day. World… brighter.” His eyelids drooped; he rallied, set his claws gently on the guitar body where Gabriel leaned it, and whispered, “I keep watch,” and was asleep before anyone could remind him that watches are usually done with eyes.

Rime set his cup down and moved to stand beside Thane. The bell on his tail chimed once. He didn’t look at Thane when he spoke. “We do this again,” he said. “Next cold. Next year.”

“Every year,” Thane said, low, as if trying not to wake the part of the night that wants to keep promises straight. “We carve it in.”

“Carve in light,” Rime said, testing the words, liking them.

Thane looked out over the square. The banner—WINTER BRIGHT: LET THE LIGHT REMIND US—hung over the courthouse doors and breathed a little in the barely-there wind. Children chased each other with ribbons tied to their wrists, and an elder from Eureka sang a verse of something old in a voice that knew exactly where it had been all its life. The wolves had found their places outside the circles and kept the edges safe, which is to say they were allowed to be at the center without effort. People’s faces flushed from heat and relief and the simple act of being seen as someone worth giving a toy to.

In the spaces between the lights, in the parts of the night the bulbs didn’t reach, you could hear the sound of the river under the ice. You could hear the radio towers ticking as they cooled against the sky. You could hear, if you were built for it, the small heartbeat of a town that had learned how to live again in the middle of a winter that once promised only survival.

Thane placed his paw on Rime’s shoulder and left it there a second longer than custom. Rime didn’t move away. “We keep them warm,” Thane said.

“We keep them,” Rime answered.

They stood there like that while Holt dreamed loud little snoring noises into his pillow and Gabriel quietly retuned a string by ear and Mark took a long breath that pushed the tired out of his bones and Marta, on a whim, reached up and added a single glass star to the arch above the door because there was room for one more.

Snow began to fall—fine, gentle, as if the sky approved and didn’t want to disturb the scene it had come to bless. The flakes caught the light and fell through color, gold to red to green to blue, and for a long time no one felt the cold on their fur or their faces because what they had built was warmer than any fire.

When Thane finally took his paw from Rime’s shoulder and moved toward the steps to help bank the fires, he felt it—the tiny weight at the bottom of his chest that sometimes came when the pack had done something good enough to last. He thought, not for the first time, that if there were any justice in the world, this was the world that would have come first. Since it hadn’t, they were building it now, with garland and wire and a truck someone had tried to use for fear and they had made into a sleigh.

On the edge of the square, the Humvee ticked as its metal cooled, making a sound like laughter had learned to be shy. A child, not yet ready for sleep, pattered up to it and put a mittened hand on its door as if to thank it personally. “Good truck,” the child announced to no one and everyone, then sprinted back to the light.

The banner breathed again, and the town breathed with it, and the wolves and the people were a single shape under winter, and the light did what it promised and reminded them—of before, of now, of after—until the firebeds went to ember and the last carol faded into something even quieter, and the night, satisfied, let them keep what they had made.

The cabin breathed like a sleeping animal, warm and even, the kind of quiet that happens when snow has argued the world into slowing down. Thane woke to the crack of expanding timber and the gentle clatter of Gabriel testing strings; a handful of notes wandered the hallway like curious ghosts. From the room beside Thane’s, a deep contented groan and the whisper of a pillow being adopted as a sacred object said Holt had discovered comfort. Then a snort, a grumble, and Rime’s steady voice, patient as a river: “Pillow stays. Head here. Not whole wolf.”

“Is good,” Holt muttered, mouth muffled by cotton. “Cloud for face.”

“Bed for body,” Rime countered, unbudging. “Use bed.”

“Bed too soft,” Holt said, resolute. “Turn muscles to cheese.”

Rime’s sigh had seasons in it. “Soft not weak. Smart.” The mattress creaked as he adjusted, a quiet declaration that he would be the wolf who understood furniture for both of them.

Thane padded into the kitchen, claws soft against wood, and found Mark at the table with a battered tablet, stylus hovering while he frowned at notes only he could love. Backup power figures, wire routing, margin scribbles that looked like a cross between music and engineering. The coffee pot burbled like a friendly swamp monster. Next to it sat the abandoned guitar case; Gabriel had already tuned up and moved on, playing in the open space by the map wall where they sometimes put pins and sometimes put memories.

“You’re up early,” Thane said.

Mark didn’t look up. “Power budget says if we add one more thing to the City Hall array, we need to add a panel in the south group or else we’ll brown-out the Sheriff’s Office.”

Gabriel strummed a quick, wicked riff and then slid into something Holt could follow. Holt, who had taken to guitar like a bear to honey and was only slightly less sticky about it, shuffled in moments later carrying his pillow like a trophy. He dropped to the floor beside Gabriel with the gravitas of a knight kneeling for instruction.

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “Same pattern. Count it in.”

Holt’s tongue poked out as he concentrated. “One… two… three… go.” His big paws worked the strings with surprising grace, striking the rhythm Gabriel had drilled into him over weeks of laughter and scolding. The notes were simple, and that made them perfect. He looked up, bright-eyed, when he nailed a change.

“Nice,” Gabriel said. “Again, and then we’ll add the tag.”

They played the pattern twice through, Gabriel layering a soft melody in the measure breaks like he was sewing confidence into the seams of Holt’s hands. Rime leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed, not smiling but very obviously smiling. Thane poured coffee for himself and for Gabriel and had the unwise thought of leaving the pot within Holt’s reach.

Holt noticed the steam. The pillow was immediately demoted from religious artifact to foot-wrangling tool. “Is coffee time?” he asked.

“Uh—” Gabriel began.

“Yes,” Thane said, because the universe gets bored if you don’t give it a chance to be funny. “One cup.”

Holt took “one cup” the way a river takes a bend: quickly and with committed enthusiasm. He sipped, blinked, then made a noise that was not entirely legal. “Strong,” he said reverently, and then, very fast, “More?”

“One cup,” Rime repeated, stern.

“Maybe… cup and half,” Holt negotiated.

Mark, without looking up: “If he gets a cup and a half, I’m sleeping in the truck.”

They compromised on one cup and a smell, which turned out to be worse, because Holt inhaled the steam like a prayer and then began to hum, and then to chatter, and then to discover that his claws could tap a remarkably tight rhythm on the table edge. Gabriel matched him for two bars and then surrendered, laughing. Rime slid into the chair beside Thane, content to watch caffeinated chaos like an art installation.

The handheld radio on the shelf snapped to life with a crackle and the gate guard’s voice, crisp through static. “City Hall to cabin, copy? We need you at south gate. Repeat, south gate. Situation… unusual.”

Thane was already standing. “Copy. En route.” He clicked the radio off, met three sets of eyes—two wired, one calm. “South gate. Something odd.”

“Odd like raider odd, or odd like someone gifted us a dead deer?” Mark asked, already packing the tablet into its sleeve.

“Odd like the voice didn’t want to say it on an open channel,” Thane said.

Holt was at the door before anyone else, tail high, pillow forgotten on the floor like a molted skin. Rime touched Thane’s shoulder as they moved, a wordless check: ready? Always. Gabriel tucked the guitar into its stand and pulled on his coat, eyes already gone flinty. The pack stepped into the morning and left the cabin steaming gently behind them like it had just told them a secret.

Snow squeaked underfoot as they crossed the town. People moved out of their way with nods that said both we’re safe and be careful, two sentiments that used to fight and now held hands. By the time they reached the south gate, Hank’s deputies had already formed a quiet line on the inside, rifles at low ready. The guards on the wall looked like men who’d forgotten how to blink.

Outside the gate, three green Humvees idled in a neat row on the frozen road, paint sun-faded but still the color of authority. Twelve men in camouflage stood beside them in formation, boots planted, rifles slung. Not scavenger-chic—uniforms. The lead man wore a staff sergeant’s rank on his sleeve and an expression like someone who had practiced being obeyed in a mirror.

“Looks official,” Gabriel murmured. He didn’t mean it as praise.

The gate opened partway. Thane stepped out with Rime and Holt flanking, Gabriel and Mark just behind. The cold made the Humvee exhaust hang in the air like a boundary. The twelve men tracked the wolves with their eyes, and the wolves watched their hands.

The staff sergeant stepped forward, hand lifted to a brow in a sharp salute. “Staff Sergeant Patrick Tully,” he said. “United States Air Force. We’re from the recommissioned Malmstrom base in Great Falls, representing the reconstituted United States government. We’re here to inspect this community, assess compliance, and restore you to federal order.” His voice was practiced. His boots were too clean.

Thane let him finish. Then: “You’re not Air Force.”

A ripple went down the line of uniforms. Tully’s jaw twitched. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Thane said. His voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be. “You raided a dead base for clothes and vehicles. You’re wearing a story you think people want to believe.”

Tully gave a short laugh with too many edges. “We’re bringing the United States back online, son. You going to stand in the way of your own country?”

“Show me your comms,” Thane said. “Your base station. Your secure frequencies. Your chain of command. Show me a single working credential that isn’t sewn to your shirt. Or—” he tilted his head “—tell me the truth.”

Tully’s eyes slid for just a second. Rime saw the lie the way a wolf sees a rabbit that thinks it is grass. Holt rocked slightly forward on his clawed toes, energy gathering like a storm. Mark stood with his hands in his coat pockets and the patience of a bomb tech.

Tully tried again. “We’re the authority here. Open the gates. We’ll speak to your mayor. We’ll get your little town registered and compliant.”

“Registered with what?” Gabriel asked, tone flat as a lake under ice. “Your imagination?”

“Son—” Tully started.

“Don’t,” Gabriel said. The single syllable carried a promise that had nothing to do with mercy.

Thane didn’t move closer, but somehow the space shortened anyway. “This town is under our protection,” he said. “We trade with four cities. We’ve rebuilt a phone network across the valley. We are not a ‘little town’ and we don’t kneel to your costumes. So—one more time. Truth, or leave.”

Something in Tully snapped. Maybe it was the way the wolves didn’t blink. Maybe it was how nobody on the wall scrambled to obey him. Maybe it was the bone-deep insult of power meeting the one thing it couldn’t digest: indifference.

“You’re obstructing a federal operation,” he said, raising his rifle.

Holt’s growl came out of the earth.

“Put that down,” Mark said, voice neutral. “You don’t have the right. That kind of thinking is what ruined the old world.”

Tully flipped the selector with a practiced thumb and fired a three-round burst into Thane’s chest at point-blank range.

The sound slammed the air. Snow jumped in place. Thane rocked back a half step, more from the kinetic shock than pain. Heat flared under his fur; three bright bullet wounds scorched through his jacket and into his chest—but the fire of impact faded almost as fast as it came. His body knitted itself back together in seconds, sealing torn skin and expelling flattened lead slugs with a slow, huffing exhale. A faint smoke curled from the holes in his shirt as he stood up straighter, expression unreadable. He inhaled once. Exhaled. Lifted his gaze, steady and unbroken.

Holt arrived before the echo did.

He hit Tully like a landslide wearing a body, jaws clamping the sergeant’s throat with surgical restraint that only looked like murder if you didn’t understand love. Tully’s rifle clattered onto the ice and skidded under a Humvee. The other eleven men froze. The ones closest to Holt didn’t even breathe.

“Next one that moves,” Gabriel said, not shouting, barely speaking, “dies.” —and every word came with a flash of fangs and the flex of claws at his side, ready to tear through the next threat without hesitation. The air around him seemed to grow sharper, colder, like winter itself had picked a side and was glaring from behind his eyes. His voice held the same calm finality as a locked door.

Rime was already there, one paw on Thane’s shoulder, the other steady at his elbow. He didn’t ask if Thane was fine; he set him back onto his heels with a certainty that said he had never doubted it. His gaze flicked to Holt, gauging tension, measuring the exact second a whisper would matter more than a shout.

On the wall above, Hank’s men had their rifles trained but didn’t fire. Hank’s voice carried from the gate, controlled and ready. “Hold the line.”

Tully tried to swallow and found his windpipe owned by another creature. Holt’s teeth pressed enough to promise an ending. Tully’s hands trembled like he wanted to push the jaws away and knew how that story would end.

Thane stepped past Rime. He put a paw on Holt’s shoulder, weight there, warmth there. “I’m fine, Holt,” he said softly, close enough that only Holt could really hear. “I’m okay.”

Holt’s whole body vibrated with the need to rip and the need to obey. He cut a glance at Thane’s chest, saw the torn fabric and the unbroken breath, and a muffled sound came out of him that had too many vowels to be language. “He—shot,” he said, each word separate, like stones. “Not again.”

“I know,” Thane said. “I know. Let him up.”

Holt didn’t move for a heartbeat. Then, like releasing a held earthquake, he backed off the offender and stepped away, every muscle still coiled, every molecule still a threat. Tully coughed and dragged air into a throat that had just met the shortlist of its future.

Thane faced him. He didn’t raise his voice; his canines did that for him. “Care to try again,” he said, each word precise, “but with the truth?” He let a sliver of tooth show. A small one. The kind that makes men remember they are meat.

Tully’s composure cracked down the middle. He looked left at his line and saw in their eyes exactly how much faith they had left. The youngest of them—barely more than a kid, with a private’s single stripe hung on by hope—looked sick. His rifle hung low and wrong, like he’d never wanted to lift it in the first place.

“We—” Tully started. He stopped. Tried again. “Malmstrom’s dead. The whole base. We… we found the motor pool. The armory was picked clean ten winters ago. We took what was left. People listen when you say ‘United States.’ They open doors. They give. They don’t shoot.”

“They also don’t ask questions,” Mark said, mild as math. “You forged the uniform and expected to inherit obedience. That’s not law. That’s theft—of trust.”

“We kept order,” Tully said weakly.

“You kept fear,” Gabriel said. “Different animal.”

The young private swallowed. “I thought it was real,” he blurted, as if confession might save the part of him that still believed. “I wanted it to be real. My dad—he was—he always said if the flag flew again, we’d be okay.”

Thane looked at him. The kid’s hands shook so hard the rifle barrel shivered. He seemed smaller inside the uniform now that it had been named a costume. “The flag can fly,” Thane said, gentler than anyone expected. “But you don’t get to raise it over lies.”

Marta had arrived at the gate, breath frosting, eyes taking in every angle. Hank stepped out with her, posture of a man who would like this to end without graves.

Tully saw the mayor and latched onto an old instinct. “Ma’am,” he started, “we—”

“Stop,” Marta said. She didn’t shout. She didn’t need to. Her voice had municipal gravity. “You came here dressed in the last good story people remember and tried to make it a leash. That won’t fly in this valley.”

“We can leave,” Tully said quickly. “We’ll leave. No trouble.”

“You’ll drop your weapons,” Hank said like a stone hitting clay.

The eleven rifles hit the ice with a clatter like hail. The hum of the Humvees idled on, oblivious.

Thane studied Tully. He considered the road that had brought them all to this place—the dead base, the stitched patches, the long hunger for order, the cheap trick of wearing it. He considered Holt’s tremble, Rime’s stillness, Gabriel’s claws, Mark’s unflinching logic, the kid’s eyes that had never learned how to counterfeit.

“You should be ashamed,” he said softly, which landed harder than any roar. “You took the shape of hope and tried to bend it into fear. People are building something here. You don’t get to break it just because you scavenged a uniform.”

Tully’s shoulders sagged. “We’ll go,” he said.

“You’ll go now,” Thane said. “All of you. Slowly. No sudden moves.”

They began to back toward the Humvees, hands raised. The young private lingered a second, met Thane’s eyes, and in his face was a thank you he didn’t have the language for. Then he followed the others.

Thane let them get almost to the vehicles. Then: “One thing.”

They froze. Holt’s head snapped up, delighted at the possibility of complications. Rime made a tiny sound between a chuckle and a warning that only Thane could hear.

“I’ve always wanted a Humvee,” Thane said, as calm as a breeze. “One of those is now mine.”

Every face turned to him with the same expression—Is he serious?—and then realized of course he was, just in the exact way that meant nobody had to die.

Tully swallowed. “Take the last one,” he said, voice small. “Keys are in it.”

Holt’s grin could have lit a runway. “We get truck,” he whispered to Rime, joy trying very hard to be a secret.

“Alpha gets truck,” Rime corrected, but his eyes warmed.

Mark stepped forward, practical to the end. “Spare tires, tool kit, the jack, and any fuel cans in the back,” he said. “You don’t get to leave with the good bits after scaring a town.”

Tully nodded quickly. “Take them. Take all of it.”

Gabriel stood easy. “And your radio,” he added. “If it’s just a shell, fine. If it’s not, we’ll find out.”

They stripped the last Humvee with clinical efficiency, but without cruelty. Holt lifted two fuel cans in one paw and did not pretend not to enjoy it. Rime took the radio set and handed it to Mark, who cradled it like a newborn he fully intended to take apart. Thane climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key; the engine rolled and settled into a bass note that felt like success.

Tully and his men clambered into the remaining vehicles, smaller now in their green skins. The young private paused, looked back once more, and then climbed into the passenger seat like a person getting into a story that would not be his forever.

“Drive slow,” Hank said. “And don’t come back dressed as anything else.”

They left at a speed that honored the fact that some wolves can run faster than cars. The snow swallowed their sound. The road took their tires like the world was erasing them.

Silence gathered at the gate, then broke into the small sounds of breath and relief. Gabriel exhaled slowly, the last inch of winter leaving his shoulders. He turned to Thane. “So. You going to let Holt drive it or make him beg for a month?”

Holt’s eyes got very large. “Drive?”

“No,” Rime said instantly, with the authority of someone who has seen the future and chosen mercy.

Marta stepped to Thane, looked at the three torn holes in his jacket, then up into his face. “You keep getting harder to kill,” she said.

“Or people keep getting worse at it,” Thane replied, which made Hank snort despite himself.

Mark thumped the radio against his palm, already thinking in circuits. “If this has any life, I’ll get it talking to City Hall,” he said.

Holt drifted in close, eyes searching Thane’s chest again like reassurance needed a second round. “You good?” he asked, low, almost shy around the edges.

Thane set his paw on Holt’s forearm. “I’m good,” he said. “You did right.”

Holt beamed. “I hold throat very gentle,” he said, proud as if he’d written a poem.

“You did,” Thane said, letting himself smile. “It was… perfect.”

Rime gave Holt a single approving nod, which for Rime might as well have been fireworks. “Next time,” he added, “less coffee.”

Holt looked offended. “Coffee make me strong.”

“Coffee make you hurricane,” Rime corrected. “Town not need storm every morning.”

Gabriel slung an arm around Holt’s shoulders, steering him back toward the gate. “C’mon, hurricane. You owe me ten minutes of clean strums without vibrating.”

“I can do,” Holt said, instantly solemn. Then, unable to help himself, “Maybe coffee first.”

“No,” three voices said at once—Rime, Mark, Thane—and Holt laughed so hard he had to lean on Gabriel for balance.

They brought the Humvee inside to a scatter of cheers from people who pretended they weren’t cheering for a vehicle and absolutely were. Children swarmed it like it was a dinosaur that agreed to be petted. Hank took charge of disarming and cataloging the surrendered rifles with the care he reserved for things that could ruin a good day. Marta put a hand on the hood and looked almost mischievous. “I’m not riding in the back,” she said.

“You can have shotgun,” Thane said. “Holt can… not drive.”

“Alpha cruel,” Holt lamented, to general delight.

By the time the gate closed, the morning had stepped into afternoon. The world hadn’t ended. It had been reminded what it was becoming. The cabin would be warm when they got back. The guitar would be waiting. The pillow would be exactly where Holt left it, which meant on the kitchen floor for someone to step on and swear about.

Thane stood for a moment at the gate, breathing the cold, letting his heart find its slow pace again. Rime took his usual place at Thane’s shoulder without asking. They watched the empty road together, not suspicious, just attentive.

“You saw it,” Thane said quietly.

“Yes,” Rime said. He didn’t mean the bullets.

“They’ll come again,” Thane said. He didn’t mean those men.

“Yes,” Rime said again. “Different costumes.”

Thane nodded. “We’ll be here.”

Rime tipped his muzzle up slightly, scenting the air. “Pack strong,” he said. “Town strong. Not bow.”

“Never,” Thane said.

They turned back toward home. Behind them, the Humvee’s engine ticked as it cooled, sounding for all the world like laughter finally remembering how to be easy. The snow gave under their claws the way it always did, and the town breathed around them, and inside the breathing was a certainty that had nothing to do with uniforms and everything to do with the way a door opens when you knock like you belong.

At the cabin, Gabriel would scratch out a new riff for the day, and Holt would try to play it and succeed on the third attempt and claim it was the first, and Rime would pretend not to care while caring more than anyone, and Mark would find a way to make a dead radio talk in a language older than wires. Thane would hang his torn jacket in the same place he always did and stitch the holes no one was watching. And in the space between breath and laughter, they would all understand the lesson without anyone having to speak it:

The world can dress up as power and try to make you kneel.

But a real pack?

It stands.

It teaches.

It does not bow.

The morning they left for Glendive, Libby woke colder than it had all winter, but the cold felt right — sharp, purposeful, ready. The convoy lined up outside the east gate in a formation nobody had commanded, but everyone seemed to understand. Trucks loaded with goods — sacks of flour from Kalispell, preserved fruit from Spokane, jerky and smoked meat from Whitefish, medical supplies from Libby, and handmade cloth from Eureka — all arranged like gifts instead of spoils.

Thirty-three wolves walked among the humans. Libby’s pack. Sable’s northern ferals. They moved with an easy, unimaginable quiet — all calm muscle and intent, their breath ghosting in white plumes that vanished in morning light. The townsfolk hardly looked twice anymore. Wolves belonged here.

Thane stood beside the first truck as Hank did his final checks, the same way he would before leading a group of deputies out of town back when “civilization” still meant lights on at every house. Beside Thane were Holt and Rime, both standing straight and serious, ready, flanking him like sentinels carved from fur and frost.

Marta came up to them with a rolled map tucked under her arm and that soft steel in her eyes. “I’ve seen a lot of plans in my life,” she said, “but I don’t think even the old world ever dreamed of something like this.”

Thane nodded once. “You don’t conquer the world by force,” he said. “You shock it by being better.”

Marta smiled, small and real. “Ready?”

He didn’t have to answer. Across the snow, the convoy of five human-driven trucks, one wagon pulled by horses from Eureka, and an entire pack of wolves on foot began to move as though one heart beat in all of them. They weren’t marching. They were arriving.

---

News traveled fast in the ruins. Before the convoy even reached Glendive’s outskirts, the town already knew something was coming. Children were pulled inside. Doors shut. Guns were loaded. From atop the walls, frightened faces stared as the column drew closer — humans, wolves, carts and trucks, white breath and bright colors, a moving circle of life instead of death.

Thane watched the town gates as they came into view — no guards on the ground, only trembling rifles up high. No one shouted warnings. Nobody opened fire. Because they remembered. They remembered the wolves in the dark. They remembered not dying.

The convoy stopped fifty yards from the gate. The quiet roar of idling engines fell to silence. Even the wind seemed to hold still.

Thane stepped forward. Holt and Rime flanked him — closer than ever before. They didn’t growl. Didn’t snarl. They simply stood with him — unshakable, like they had been born for this moment.

Then the gates cracked. Slowly. Uneasily.

A man stepped out — older than Thane remembered Voss looked, hair thinner, fear cutting the angle of his shoulders. Beside him were a handful of townsfolk, half trying to look brave, half looking like they’d rather dissolve into ghost stories.

“You’ve… come back,” the man said.

Thane nodded. “Not to do what you’re afraid of,” he replied. “To show you what’s possible.”

Nobody moved.

Marta came around the first truck then, coat buttoned up tight, hands visible at her sides, face free of any threat but full of authority. “Mayor,” she said calmly. “You’re the one they chose?”

“They… we… voted him in,” one of the other townsfolk said quietly.

Thane’s voice didn’t shift. “Garrick Voss, town caretaker and orchestrator of Black Winter.”

Voss blinked, confused at the absence of blood. “You’re not here to—”

“We’re here to trade,” Thane said. “And to extend a promise. This is not a cleansing. It’s a chance.”

Behind him, the truck tarps came down in a wave — revealing the goods. Clean, good things. Things nobody takes from the weak anymore, because the weak don’t stand alone.

Whitefish’s mayor raised a jar. “Sugar beets,” he said. “You’ve never tasted anything like this.”

Kalispell raised a sack. “Flour. Soft as pre-fall. And enough to feed fifty families.”

Eureka’s cloth workers held up bolts of dyed fabric. “Colors,” they said, smiling. “You get tired of brown and gray.”

Spokane’s envoy stepped forward last, a crate of sealed cans and a ceramic jar in hand. “Coffee,” he said. “Hard to make. Impossible to fake.”

Everything was visible. Everything offered. No chains. No threats. No deception.

Voss stared at the food. At the wolves. At the quiet, endless strength standing in snowdrift and wind. “Why… why are you doing this?” he asked, voice cracked.

“Because what you take,” Thane said, stepping closer, “dies. What you trade — stays alive.”

Voss’s jaw tightened. “I threatened your town. Sent raiders. Shot you! And now you want to sell me sugar?”

Thane’s voice never shifted. “No. We don’t sell you anything.” He stepped aside, motioned to the goods. “You trade us something you can spare. You get something you truly need. The valley grows because we stop acting like hunger is power.”

Silence. Voss’s hands shook. “And if we… don’t?”

Thane didn’t raise his voice. He just looked at him — steady and unblinking. “Look behind me,” he said.

Voss did.

Hundreds of eyes met his — human and wolf and everything in between. Not hostile. Not hungry. Just there. Unmoved. Unafraid.

“No one wants to meet the thing that ends them,” Thane said. “But I’d rather meet the thing that saves us instead.”

Holt shifted beside him, slow and easy, like a mountain reminding people it is still there. Rime’s gaze narrowed, not dangerous, but final. Voss understood.

Slowly, he raised a hand and gestured to the townsfolk behind him. “Bring… what we have,” he said.

And for the first time in years — Glendive walked out of its own fear.

---

The next three hours didn’t feel real.

Glendive’s people came forward with bundles of leather straps and simple tools. Clay jars of early winter honey. Salvaged steel parts. Things they had — things nobody else did — and the trade began in careful, trembling handfuls.

No one cheated.

No one schemed.

And townsfolk who hid in their houses at the first sight of a wolf… now stood in front of one and watched in awe as a young feral from Sable’s pack spun a bolt of cloth in the snow, delighted by the color. A group of children approached Gabriel to pet his tail, and he let them — laughing when they gasped at the thickness of his fur. Rime stood completely still as a blacksmith compared the edge of a claw to the sharpness of forged iron. Sable herself walked the quiet margin of the square, neither smiling nor scowling — just observing, like a queen deciding if the place before her would survive the winter.

And Holt? He found a crate of grain spirit, shook it once, and shouted, “Marta! This true trade! Make city happy!”

Marta burst into laughter so forceful she scared a pigeon off the roof of the old library.

Even Voss, though wary, couldn’t pretend he wasn’t stunned. Every few minutes, he glanced at Thane. Not with hatred.

With shock.

With a kind of newborn respect.

At sunset, Grendell, the oldest woman in Glendive, stood up on a crate and addressed the whole gathering in a voice made of years and iron: “I should be afraid. But I’m not. Because this…” — she gestured at the shared crowd — “…is what we were supposed to be before we forgot how.”

And the valley — for one long minute — believed her.

---

As dusk thinned into blue ice, the convoy loaded up again, lighter in goods but denser in something that couldn’t be carried — change. Glendive watched from its gates, still unsure, but no longer frozen in fear. For the first time in a long time, a town that survived by taking… was now willing to build by giving.

Thane looked at Voss one last time before stepping into the truck. “You trade with respect,” he said softly. “You stay alive. And if the past comes back?”

He jerks his chin toward Rime, who looks at Voss without blinking.

“Then the wolves come walking again.”

Voss didn’t argue. Only nodded.

“Understood.”

And with that — the convoy pulled away.

Wolves and humans.

Side by side.

A new kind of army.

One built on food, mercy, and steel that knows when not to cut.

---

In the truck, as the snowy highway pulled away behind them, Marta exhaled, long and slow.

“We really did it,” she said. “One more town. One less wound.”

Thane stared out at the dark road, eyes catching the reflection of stars. “Little by little,” he murmured.

From the back of the truck, Holt raised his arm in triumph. “We teach trade!” he shouted.

Rime, quiet behind him, nodded once. “And we teach fear,” he added.

Thane smiled at that.

“Both are useful.”

The convoy howled — some in voice, some in spirit — and the sound carried on the cold night air, rolling past fence posts and empty highway signs, sweeping over abandoned farmland and frozen riverbanks.

Somewhere behind them — in the stillness of Glendive — a child repeated the sound from a rooftop and smiled.

Because no matter who you were, or where you stood — every soul who heard it understood exactly what it meant:

There is a new world now.

And it travels in packs.

Eureka woke slowly into a day that felt like it had been promised long before anyone dared to name it. Frost held to the edges of every roof, bright as ground glass, and the square steamed with early cooking fires and breath. A dozen canvas awnings went up along the brick lanes—some new, some stitched from old tarps, some quilted from blanket scraps. People strung bunting made of torn shirts and ribbon, a pale carnival in a world that had learned to love whatever color it could find. Music stumbled into existence as someone tried a fiddle, laughing when the bow squeaked, then finding the note again and holding it.

The convoy from Libby rolled in just as the sun hit the courthouse clock, trucks emptying into a ripple of greetings and waving hands. Thane climbed down first. The brick under his claws felt familiar; Eureka always smelled faintly like sawdust and hearth smoke, a town that used wood to mean home. Gabriel hopped out with his guitar already slung and picked three warm notes to say hello. Holt was right behind him, tail going like a metronome rescued from a fire, and Rime shadowed Thane’s left shoulder with the same calm, contained focus he carried into patrols, only softened now by the sight of so many unguarded faces.

Marta stepped from the cab, cheeks bright in the cold, and the Eureka mayor—Franklin with the clean coat and the comfortable laugh—came forward to hug her like siblings.
“You brought the spark,” he said, grinning over her shoulder at the arriving column.

“We brought the flame,” Marta said. “You lit the field.”

“Flatterer,” Franklin replied, but his eyes shone. He clapped Thane’s arm with the ease of a man who’d learned the right place to touch a wolf. “You too. We saved you a spot.”

Thane’s mouth tipped into a small smile. “I don’t sit much.”

“Then stand where the soup is thickest,” Franklin said. “You look like you eat like a bear.”

“Only when Holt cooks,” Gabriel said.

Holt overheard and barked a laugh. “I cook good. Burn little.”

“Little?” Rime said, deadpan.

“Medium little,” Holt corrected gravely, which got two nearby kids to giggle until they fell against each other.

Whitefish rolled up a few minutes later, Henry Braddock waving out a window like a man trying to greet the entire town at once. Kalispell came in more quietly—a long-bed truck with sides built from reclaimed picket fences, loaded high with burlap sacks that smelled like grain and something sweeter. A handful of Spokane folk arrived near noon, late on purpose and sheepish about it, carrying a crate stenciled with a tidy black coffee cup that made Gabriel look like he had discovered a religion.

“Diplomatic tribute,” their driver said, shivering and proud. “From the mayor. He says to consider it a sin tax on his jokes.”

“Paid in full,” Marta said, and the man looked relieved in a way that said his humor didn’t travel as far as the coffee.

Before long the square felt full without feeling crowded. Tables appeared with the logic of real community—no one directed, but everything found place. Kalispell’s baker, a woman with ringlets falling out of a scarf, started kneading dough in a big wooden trough with the quiet satisfaction of someone who could turn hunger into bread by pure force of will. She glanced up at Holt, who watched with intense concentration, head tilted like a dog listening to an unfamiliar instrument.

“You want to try, big fella?” she asked.

Holt considered the dough, then his own paws. “I… try gentle.”

“Gentle is the trick,” she said, stepping aside. “No punching.”

He set his hands into the dough with monstrous care, shoulders tight with the effort of not being what his body wanted to be—strong, fast, decisive. The dough dimpled. He pressed, folded, pressed, tongue poking from the corner of his mouth in absolute focus. The baker watched. “Good. Now pull, and fold again.”

Holt pulled. He folded. He succeeded. He grinned over his shoulder at Rime as if he’d just lifted a car. Then, carried by joy, he forgot himself and put too much shoulder into the next push. Flour rose like a blizzard, white dust fountaining up to coat Holt head to toe. The baker got hit in the face. Two kids shrieked with laughter. Gabriel choked on air and fell to a knee, cackling.

Holt froze, a statue of a wolf made of baking mistakes. “I ruin bread,” he said, horrified.

“You made it exciting,” the baker coughed, eyes watering as she wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “We’ll call it… mountain bread.”

Rime leaned in close and blew at Holt’s muzzle, sending a fresh cloud into the air. “Better,” he said, perfectly straight.

Holt sneezed, then started laughing too, huge and relieved. “I knead good. Gentle good. Sometimes storm.”

“Sometimes storm,” Rime agreed.

Sable arrived without fanfare, because of course she did. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next she sat like a white piece of winter on a bench near the fire. People had begun to recognize the shape of her presence in a place—less a body than a gravity. Children drifted toward her like things pulled by a planet; their parents watched with the mingled fear and wonder of a world still learning new physics.

The first brave kid, a girl with a hat too big for her head and a pom on top like a signal flare, held out a hand full of something. “Do you want a… uh… cran-raisins?”

“Dried fruit,” her brother stage-whispered.

Sable eyed the offering as if it were a creature barely worth the hunt. Still, she took one, placed it in her mouth, and chewed. She blinked once.
“Very small,” she said.

The girl nodded solemnly. “We made them in our oven.”

Sable nodded back, thoughtful in a way that made the other wolves lean closer. “Small food should not need so much chewing,” she said. “Too many teeth for that little.”

Two more kids found their courage and sat at her feet, telling her stories about wolves they had drawn—wolves with capes, wolves with schoolbooks, wolves riding bicycles with training wheels because in their minds there was no such thing as a wolf who couldn’t be trained if it wanted. Sable listened with the attention she reserved for threats and the hunt, head cocked. Sometimes she smiled without moving her mouth; you could see it in the way her eyes warmed like an ember under ash.

At the square’s center, someone had hoisted a banner between two lamp poles that read FESTIVAL in letters cut out from a dozen different fabrics, some of them glittering in ways the pre-Fall world would have called tacky and the post-Fall world called miracle. Above it, like a crown, a string of tin stars made from old cans turned in the fire so they caught light like they wanted to be something more precious and, in their way, were.

Music tried a few approaches and then found itself. A street player from Eureka brought a fiddle and set a tune running like a clean creek; Gabriel found him with a grin and slid a counter-melody under it, picking with his left hand while his right kept a rhythm on the guitar body, claws rattling wood like a train. Where the fiddle went high, Gabriel went low; where the guitar wanted to be pretty, the fiddle steered it into something with dirt under its nails. A Kalispell boy with a drum made from an old bucket and a deerhide tried to join, and after three bars of chaos, they fell into each other like they’d practiced for years. People clapped without being led. Rime’s ear flicked in time, the smallest tell, and Thane watched a smile touch the corner of his mouth like a secret.

Marta moved through it all with the ease of the person everyone expects to have a plan and the humor to let that plan be interrupted by seventeen better ideas. She accepted a wreath of woven grasses from a Whitefish grandmother and put it over her own scarf like royalty with a sense of humor. She got cornered by a choir of three teenagers who had been practicing harmonies in a root cellar and decided now, right now, was the time to debut a song about the phone lines; the rhymes landed like a drunk on a porch, but the joy was right on pitch, and when they ended with a three-part “thank you,” Marta bowed to them with the seriousness of an audience in a grand hall.

Hank worked like a man off duty, which meant he supervised the potato fire with the intensity of a smuggler and spent twenty minutes in a heated argument with two small boys about whether a stick was a sword or a fishing pole. He compromised by awarding it the rank of a “sword that can fish,” which created a new problem he refused to own.

Mark found the century-old dynamo the Eureka tinkers used to run the string of lights over the square and spent a happy half-hour elbow-deep in it with two new friends, muttering about brushes and bearings like other people mutter about soup recipes. When the lights fluttered and then steadied into a brighter glow—just enough to paint the crowd in a soft, even warmth—a cheer rose as if someone had just told the world it could stay up late.

Rime stood near Thane’s shoulder, relaxed but vigilant in the way only a wolf can be when the scent of laughter sits on top of the old scent of danger. A pack of children crept up on him, torn between wanting to touch and wanting to not be caught touching. The bravest reached out and dangled a small string of tin stars, the same kind that hung over the banner.

“For tail?” she asked, eyes huge.

Rime looked down at her, then at the stars, then at Thane.

“Up to you,” Thane said, voice low.

Rime crouched, a slow lowering that brought him level with the child. “Gentle,” he said.

She tied the string to a tuft high on his tail with fingers that shook from excitement. Another child added a ribbon that might once have been part of a dress. A third tucked a feather in, trembling solemnly. Rime stood carefully, testing the weight. The decorations chimed softly when he moved.

“You look like a holiday,” Gabriel said around a grin.

Rime blinked with the calm of someone who has crossed too many rivers to worry about getting his feet wet. “I am festival,” he said.

“Yes,” Thane said, warmth in his voice. “You are.”

A phone rang somewhere inside City Hall, the soft, insistent tone of a life regained. Heads turned. The ring was picked up, and a moment later Franklin’s assistant stepped to the doorway and shouted with theatrical glee, “Spokane says they want next year’s festival!”

A cheer went up—Eureka loved being a host, but loving it meant knowing you could hand it away like a gift and still keep the joy. “Tell Spokane we’ll bring flour,” the baker yelled, holding up her hands, white to the elbow.

“Tell Spokane I bring… calm kneading,” Holt added, without convincing anyone.

“Tell Spokane we bring wolves,” a Whitefish boy shouted, like he was announcing a parade.

“Tell Spokane we bring jokes,” a man from Spokane called from the edge of the square, lifting the coffee crate and shrugging. “But we’ll pay the fine again.”

Marta laughed. “Tell Spokane we heard you,” she said, and the assistant went to the phone to pass it along, a human relay in a chain that felt unbroken for the first time in living memory.

The afternoon fattened into something golden. Games started without anyone deciding to start them. Arm-wrestling happened on a barrel between Hank and a Kalispell mechanic with forearms like braided cable; the match went long enough to draw a crowd and end in a draw when a small child climbed into Hank’s lap and declared herself the referee who had to go pee now. Rime explained, with profound seriousness, the difference between a road and a trail to a group of Whitefish teens who nodded like acolytes. Sable let a toddler touch her muzzle and didn’t even flick an ear when the child announced to everyone in the exact tone of revelation, “She warm.”

As the sun slid down and the lamps gave the square a theatrical glow, Gabriel took the center with the fiddle player. He started a melody that felt like walking home and watching your breath in front of you; the fiddle answered with a rope of notes that sounded like a hill at dusk. Holt, perched on a barrel to keep from knocking anyone over, kept time with one claw on wood, expression so serious you’d think he was holding the whole song together by will.

“Sing something,” someone called, and Gabriel did—not a showoff song, but a small one, the kind that fits between conversations and holds them instead of drowning them. He sang about good trouble and honest work, about copper that remembered, about claws that didn’t always need to be sharp. People hummed along where they could, clapped where they couldn’t, and when he finished, no one shouted or whooped. They just breathed out like a room being right-sized.

Thane drifted to the edge of the square, where the light faded into the comfortable dark. Rime followed. They watched together, saying nothing, the two of them stitched to the scene by threads that had nothing to do with duty and everything to do with belonging. After a while, Thane said, “This is what it was for.”

Rime nodded, slow. “We learn,” he said. “They learn. All pack.”

“All pack,” Thane echoed.

Sable joined them without sound. She stood with her hands behind her back, eyes on the crowd, jaw set in that familiar line that meant she was happy and would never admit it. “You make noise,” she said softly.

“Good noise,” Thane said.

“Good,” Sable agreed. “Not fear.”

“No fear,” Rime said, and the way he said it made Thane’s chest loosen, a knot finally undone.

Holt barreled into them then, caught by momentum he had no desire to resist, flour still in creases of his fur like accidental war paint. “I win bread,” he announced, which was not precisely true, but close enough that the baker across the square gave him a thumbs-up that he took to be a medal.

“You win patience,” Rime said, deadpan.

“Harder,” Holt agreed.

Franklin climbed onto a crate and clapped until the nearest conversations hit pause. “Friends,” he called, voice warm with cider and something sweeter. “I don’t have speeches. I have soup. But I want to say this: when the world fell, I thought we’d spend the rest of our lives alone. I thought we’d talk in small rooms and pretend that was enough. And now look.”

He swept a hand at the square. “Look at us. Wolves and humans, laughing like it’s legal. Whitefish, Kalispell, Spokane, Libby, Eureka—five towns if you count my mother-in-law’s opinion, which you should not. We did this. Not by force. By food. By wire. By will.”

He raised a mug. “To the world. May it keep getting bigger. And to our wolves—may you always eat first and never have to eat alone.”

Mugs rose. Hands lifted. A howl started from the far side of the square—one of Sable’s younger wolves, unable to help himself—and another joined, and then Holt, of course, and then Rime, and then without deciding to do it, Thane tipped his head and let a note out that carried clean across the square and into the edges of the dark, the kind of sound that turns a crowd into a single thing. The humans didn’t howl—they laughed, they clapped, they stood under it like a warm rain. Sable didn’t look at anyone, but her throat moved with the shape of it, and for a heartbeat the entire valley seemed to align on one long breath out.

Later, after the light had gone soft and the fires had burned down to beds of bright coals, after the last coffee had been poured and the last loaf torn apart by a dozen careful hands, after a Spokane envoy promised to send up more beans because Gabriel had convinced them that coffee could be a foreign policy, the square settled into the kind of tired that means contentment. People packed what needed packing and left what could be left for morning. Children slept on shoulders. A teen leaned against a lamppost, listening to nothing like it was a soundtrack.

Thane walked a slow circle, because he always did, not out of suspicion but habit honed into care. Rime paced the counterpoint. They met by the courthouse steps, where the town’s single working clock ticked into the new hour with quiet dignity.

“Good day,” Rime said.

“Good day,” Thane agreed. He looked back over the square—Sable sitting with a cluster of elders, Holt now earnestly guarding the last loaf like a knight, Marta taking a final phone call on the long line to tell someone in Whitefish that yes, everyone was fed and yes, we will bring you the recipe, and no, you cannot patent the word ‘wolfbread.’ “We should do this again.”

“We will,” Rime said, unblinking certainty.

“You two always working?” Sable asked, appearing at Thane’s elbow without moving through space like other people.

“We’re resting,” Thane said.

“You two ever stop?” Sable asked, appearing at Thane’s elbow like she’d stepped out of the air.

“We’re resting,” Thane said.

“You make rest look like plan,” she said, mouth twitching just a little.

“We leave for Glendive soon,” Thane answered, voice low — not breaking the quiet, just marking what’s ahead.

“They’ll think it’s an army,” Rime said.

“It is,” Sable said. “Army of trade.” After a beat, she added, “Bring coffee.”

“We will,” Thane said.

They stood there a little longer, three silhouettes at the edge of a square that had decided to belong to joy tonight. When they finally peeled off toward their bedrolls and borrowed blankets, the last thing they heard before the soft churn of sleep was a phone ringing in the City Hall office—one ring only, then a voice, soft and laughing, answering across a line that used to mean nothing and now meant everything.

Somewhere, in a place where voices get kept when they are done being flesh for the day, the valley spoke back to itself. And it was enough.

The trail north was still soft with snow, packed only by wolf paws and the occasional truck tire. The forest had grown quiet with winter—branches bowed low under their weight, the sky a silver lid over the endless white. Libby was far behind now, its steady hum and warmth fading into memory as Thane’s truck wound up the ridge road toward the Northern Ferals’ camp.

Marta sat bundled in the passenger seat, chin on her gloved hand, watching frost etch the corners of the glass. “You know,” she said, “I’ve had a lot of invitations in my life. Not many written in claw marks on birch bark.”

Thane smirked. “Sable has a way with stationery.”

Hank’s voice crackled from the truck behind them over the CB handset wedged in the dash. “You sure this road’s meant for vehicles, Thane? I just heard my suspension cry for help.”

“She built that road herself,” Thane said, pressing the talk button. “Don’t insult her engineering.”

“Noted,” Hank said, though his voice came through with a good-natured huff. “Wouldn’t want to get on the lady’s bad side.”

“She doesn’t have a bad side,” Marta murmured. “She is the side.”

Thane grinned. “That’s accurate.”

The trees broke open into a clearing ringed with snow-coated pines. Smoke curled from a cluster of lean-to cabins and one long fire pit that burned steady even in the cold. Wolves moved through the light like living shadows, fur flashing white, gray, or brown in the flicker. Sable stood at the edge of the firelight, white fur ghost-bright against the dusk. She waited without moving, the way only she could—stillness that wasn’t stiffness, power without noise.

Rime’s eyes moved across the camp, watching, then back to Sable. “She wait.”

“She always does,” Thane said, and walked forward between them. The wolves parted to let him through, curious eyes following the human guests but no hostility behind them—just the quiet wonder of familiarity grown from battle, from shared blood and trust.

Sable’s gaze flicked over Holt and Rime’s protective stances. “You bring guards now?” she asked, her tone even, a hint of humor hidden under the frost.

“They came with the truck,” Thane chuckled.

Her eyes softened by a fraction. “It appears they came for you.”

“Old habits,” he said.

Her muzzle tilted slightly, the faintest smirk pulling at one corner of her mouth—a rare sight. “Holt. Rime.”

Both straightened instinctively.

She looked them over, head tilting. “You forget who you guard?”

They froze. Holt blinked, caught between confusion and horror. “We—no—”

Rime’s ears flattened halfway. “We protect—Libby Alpha,” he said carefully, but it sounded defensive even to him.

Sable’s gaze lingered. Then, unexpectedly, she chuckled—an actual sound, light and low, the kind of laugh no one had ever heard from her before. Every wolf in the clearing went still.

Sable stepped closer to Thane and folded her arms. “You two like pups who swallowed rocks.” Her voice carried a note of dry amusement now. “It suits you. Perhaps I give you as gift.”

Rime’s head snapped up, startled. Holt blinked, then grinned wide. “Gift? We gift?”

“Given,” Sable corrected, almost indulgent.

Thane tried not to laugh. “That’s a dangerous thing to offer.”

“Then take good care,” Sable said. “They are strong wolves. Loyal. Slightly stupid.”

Rime gave a quiet exhale somewhere between relief and embarrassment. Holt nudged him with an elbow. “Told you she like us.”

“She tolerate us,” Rime said.

“Close enough.”

The laughter that rolled through the wolves around them wasn’t cruel—it was warm, alive, the kind that could only exist when a pack was whole.

Marta stepped forward with Hank beside her. “Mayor Sable,” she said, inclining her head in respectful imitation of wolf custom.

Sable gave a shallow bow. “Mayor Marta.”

Hank grinned. “Nice to formally meet the infamous northern Alpha.”

“You live,” she said. “Then rumors fail.”

He blinked. “I—well, yes, ma’am, I live.”

“Then rumor says you talk too much,” she said, tone bone-dry.

Marta’s laugh rang clear as the firelight flickered higher. “She’s got you pegged already, Hank.”

Sable’s faintest smile returned, and she gestured to the long pit fire. “Come. Warm. Eat.”

The evening opened slowly, like old friends easing back into conversation after a long silence. Logs cracked and sent sparks up to join the stars. The ferals had laid out their meal on a line of flat stones—thick cuts of elk, venison, and mountain goat sizzling near the edges of the fire, all served rare as instinct demanded. The smell was wild and rich, smoke and blood and pine resin.

Marta accepted her portion with polite hesitation before giving in completely. “I’ve had worse,” she said through a smile, wiping her mouth.

Hank nodded appreciatively. “Tastes better than the MREs we used to get on patrol.”

Gabriel chuckled. “That’s because it’s not freeze-dried death.”

Rime tore into his cut of meat beside Thane, then looked over. “Not death,” he said, serious. “Life.”

“Exactly,” Thane said. “You understand.”

Sable sat across the fire, quiet as always, but her gaze softened as she watched the circle—wolves and humans eating together, no walls, no ranks, no tension. Even the hardest of her pack, the ones who had once hissed at Libby’s name, seemed at peace.

She finally spoke, low and even. “Strange night. No fear. No walls. Packs share fire.”

“That’s how it should be,” Marta said gently.

“Was not always,” Sable said. “But now… maybe always again.”

Thane nodded slowly. “You’ve built something worth keeping. So have we.” He poked at the fire with a stick, the sparks dancing up like copper stars. “And maybe now we build together.”

Rime leaned close, voice just above the fire’s crackle. “She trust you more now.”

“I trust her too,” Thane said.

After they ate, the fire settled into its low, rhythmic pulse, painting every muzzle in shades of amber and gold. The wolves stretched out, comfortable, bellies full. Marta sat wrapped in a blanket that one of the ferals had wordlessly draped around her shoulders. She looked at Thane. “You mentioned wanting to talk to her about something?”

Thane nodded, eyes catching the flames. “A phone line.”

Sable’s ears turned toward him. “Explain.”

“We’ve reconnected the valley,” Thane said. “Libby to Spokane, Eureka, Kalispell, Whitefish. I want to put a line up here, too. For safety. If anything ever happens, or if you ever need help.”

She considered that, silent long enough for the fire to snap twice. “Phones. Your wires. Human talk in metal.”

“Yes. But this one’s for wolves too.”

Sable tilted her head, measuring the words. “How?”

“I’ll bring a small system,” Thane said. “Powered by solar, like the others. Just one phone. It doesn’t have to ring often. But when it does, it will mean something important. A way to reach us—no runners, no days of waiting.”

Sable’s eyes reflected the firelight like molten glass. “Good idea,” she said simply. “Do it.”

Marta smiled. “You’ll be part of the network, Sable. Part of the valley’s voice.”

Sable’s gaze softened slightly. “We already voice,” she said. “Now we also listen.”

Hank raised his mug. “Cheers to that.”

Even Sable gave a small nod of amusement at the strange human ritual, though she didn’t imitate it.

Thane stood after a moment, brushing snow from his fur. Around the fire, twenty-three wolves turned their eyes toward him, each one a survivor of something that should’ve ended them. “I wanted to say something,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the night. “Libby is alive because of you. The people there, my pack, my friends—they breathe today because you fought beside us. You didn’t have to. You could’ve stayed hidden. But you came.”

He looked around at them—faces he knew, some he didn’t, all part of the same pulse. “You bled with us, hunted with us, and trusted us. There’s no greater gift than that. You’ve earned your peace, every one of you.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was reverent. Even the fire seemed to quiet itself.

Thane tipped his muzzle up and howled. It wasn’t a battle cry this time—it was gratitude, pride, belonging. The note carried across the camp, low and rising, until it caught in the throats of every wolf there. Sable joined in second, her tone fierce and clear. Holt followed, then Rime, then the rest.

The sound rolled through the trees and across the frozen river, deep enough to shake snow from the branches. Marta and Hank stood close together, eyes wide at the sheer power of it. The howl wasn’t just noise; it was language, pure and ancient, spoken by something older than words.

When it faded, the forest listened for a long time afterward, as if it had been waiting for that sound all along.

Sable looked at Thane through the settling quiet. “World hears that,” she said softly. “Knows peace again.”

He nodded. “That’s the point.”

The night stretched easy from there, the conversation flowing like a slow river. Wolves traded stories of hunts and strange finds in the old world’s ruins. Gabriel laughed until he choked when Holt tried to explain the human concept of “movie popcorn” based entirely on a bag he’d once seen explode in a store’s microwave section before the Fall.

Marta and Sable sat together near the fire, talking about leadership. “You lead from instinct,” Marta said. “I lead from reason. But maybe they’re the same thing, if you listen hard enough.”

Sable’s eyes glimmered faintly. “Different roads. Same hunt.”

Rime lay near Thane, silent but content. His eyes half-closed, his breathing deep and slow. Holt, sprawled across a log like a bear cub, muttered something about needing “bigger logs for big wolves,” earning a snort of laughter from nearby ferals.

By the time the moon lifted over the treeline, the camp had gone quiet again. The fire burned low, its coals red as heartbeats. Thane looked around the circle—Sable’s wolves resting in peace, his own pack beside him, humans asleep near the warmth.

The world wasn’t fixed. It never would be. But for one night, it didn’t need fixing. It just needed to exist exactly as it was—whole, scarred, alive, and together.

Sable caught his gaze from across the fire. She didn’t smile, not exactly, but her eyes said everything words couldn’t.

For once, Thane didn’t need to answer aloud.

The night carried the sound of steady breath and distant embers cracking—small, ordinary miracles that meant survival.

Tomorrow would bring roads to patch, wires to test, food to gather. But tonight, the fire between packs burned bright enough for them all.

And in that light, the valley finally felt like home.