The storm had blown out overnight, leaving the morning sharp and rinsed. Sunlight came down the valley like something freshly forged. It caught on the river’s sheeted surface and found every nail head in Libby’s patched roofs, turning them into a constellation of practical stars.
Inside Town Hall, the lamps hummed over maps unfurled across the council table. Sheriff Hank Ward stood at one edge, finger tapping a dirt road that wandered into the green. “North logging road,” he said. “Last seen just past the switchback where the slope drops toward the old sawmill. They signed out a handcart and never brought it back.”
Marta Korrin, braid wrapped like a rope crown, looked from the map to the two grim-faced parents huddled at the door. “They were supposed to pick up scrap rails,” she said gently, confirming. “For the fence on Spruce.”
The father nodded. “They know the trail. They’ve done it with me a dozen times.” His voice cracked. “They’re good boys.”
Thane stood at the table’s other end, still as a loaded spring. His fur caught the window’s light in warm brown and steel-gray streaks; his eyes were winter-water blue. “Names,” he said, gravel voice softened just enough.
“Jesse and Rowan,” the mother said. “Rowan’s sixteen. Jesse’s fifteen. Rowan’s the careful one. Jesse…” She tried to smile. “Jesse’s the one who tries to carry everything and won’t admit when it’s too heavy.”
Gabriel leaned his hip against a chair back, guitar-less today, black fur lit in gold along the edges. “We’ll bring them home,” he said like an oath. “That’s the job.”
Mark had set his radio kit on a rolling cart and spun the portable receiver toward the window to catch cleaner sky. “I’ve got a whisper on an open channel,” he said, calm and exact. “Weak. Could be Jesse’s walkie stuck transmitting.”
Hank looked up. “Direction?”
Mark turned the dial with careful claws. On his display, a thin band shivered. “North by northeast. That puts it in the notch above the mill.” He snapped the radio’s case shut and looked at Thane. “We’ve got a breadcrumb.”
Marta’s hands tightened around the map’s edges. “Take what you need.”
Thane nodded once. “Sled stretchers. Lanterns. First-aid kit. We leave in ten.”
Hank started to speak, and Thane shook his head minutely. “We move fastest alone.”
Hank’s jaw worked. Then he exhaled. “Bring ‘em back.”
“Always,” Thane said.
They moved like they’d been made for it: three silhouettes sliding into the trees, the town falling away behind them with a last glance of hanging lights and a child laughing in the square. Thane took point, senses arranged like instruments in a practiced band—scent out front, ears keyed to crow calls, eyes drinking shadow. Gabriel ranged to his left, a faster, looser line that covered ground and circled back at intervals like a tide. Mark brought up the angle on the right, antenna high, translating static into direction.
The logging road had become two faint tracks with spruces knitting over them as if deciding the earth had waited long enough. Frost cracked softly under Gabriel’s bare pads. “Boot prints,” he murmured, pointing. “Two sets, about a day old. One heavier than the other.”
Thane crouched. The prints were long and narrow; the heavier set favored the left foot. “Rowan’s guarding his ankle,” he said. “Jesse’s taking more of the load.”
“They were hauling,” Mark added, squinting at two shallow parallel grooves in the dirt. “Cart tracks dragging slightly right.”
They moved on. The road curled around a shoulder of hill. In a low place where meltwater had turned the surface slick, a mess of scuffs and a long scrape veered uphill.
“Cart tipped,” Gabriel said, already drifting toward the slope to scan for the next sign.
A length of torn canvas snagged on a huckleberry stem fluttered at Thane’s eye level. He freed it and sniffed. Human sweat, old metal, a trace of cheap soap. No sharp rot of disease. He tied the scrap around his wrist like a marker.
“Radio spike,” Mark said, head cocked. He turned the receiver until the thin tone peaked. “Stronger. They’re close.”
The trail narrowed and broke into a scatter of old stumps and rusted equipment parts half-swallowed by moss. The sawmill sat in a shallow bowl, a jaw of collapsed roof beams and splintered rails. Wind moved in the broken teeth, making them complain. Silence piled up around that voice like drifted snow.
Gabriel lifted a hand, ears pricked forward, tail gone still. “Hear that?”
A noise threaded the quiet: a thin, fox-bone sound. Not animal. A young human trying not to cry.
Thane’s posture altered—something ancient lowering his center of gravity, something tender going bright behind his eyes. “Left,” he said, and slid toward a shack whose roof had caved in on one side.
“Rowan?” Gabriel called, tone easy as a joke, as if this were all practice for the day they’d laugh about it.
A shape moved under the fallen rafters—a boy’s face, dirt-streaked and pale, hair stuck to his forehead. “Here,” he rasped, with a swallow like gravel. “Under— under the beam. Jesse tried to— He went back for the cart—”
Thane was already lifting wood that would have required four men before the Fall. He set the beam aside, careful of splinters and angles. “Don’t move fast,” he said. “Tell me where it hurts.”
Rowan managed a crooked grin. “Ankle. And pride.”
Gabriel’s mouth curved. “Pride heals slower. Ask me how I know.” He slid an arm under Rowan’s shoulders as Thane freed his trapped foot. The ankle was swollen, an ugly purpled egg under the skin. “Mark?”
Mark had the pack open, the first-aid kit breathing neat breath smells: alcohol, gauze, elastic wrap. “Hi, Rowan. I’m the one who solves problems with tape and physics.” He splinted the ankle with a gentleness that felt like a lullaby disguised as geometry. “This will get you to the road. You’re going to hate me for twenty minutes.”
Rowan swallowed. “I can hate you later.”
“Great,” Mark said dryly. “Put it on my calendar.”
“Jesse?” Thane asked.
Rowan jerked his chin toward the yard. “He went to get the cart. He said he’d be fast.”
Gabriel and Thane moved as one. “Mark—”
“I’ve got Rowan,” Mark said. “I’ll get him ready to travel.”
They slipped through the ruin into a long open run punctuated by pylons and rails. The wind smelled wrong on the far side—musk and something like copper left too long in the rain, and beneath it an acrid undernote that wasn’t natural at all.
Jesse appeared at the far end of the yard, hauling a handcart like a penitent pulling history uphill. He saw them and waved, relief shooting across his face like a flare.
Then the trees beyond him tore and something stepped into the light that shouldn’t have been alive.
It was bear-shaped if you squinted and cursed. Too lean for a winter that had just ended. Fur patchy, skin crisscrossed with scar tissue that wasn’t the forest’s work. Its head cocked and its mouth opened on a hiss instead of a roar, as if the virus had taught it to make a new, worse sound. Eyes filmed. One foreleg was banded in shaved skin and stitches—precise, repeating Xs like math done by a careful hand.
Gabriel didn’t think. He moved. Thane was already there to meet the creature’s charge, the two wolves aligning like they’d trained for this moment all their lives. Jesse froze, white-faced, then lurched backward, dragging the cart as if it were a lifeline.
“Noise and light,” Mark’s voice came over the radio, flat with focus. “Give me thirty seconds.”
Thane stepped sideways at the last instant and shoved the thing’s shoulder with the weight of a small car, sending it pinwheeling into a pile of timbers. It came back faster than hunger, claws skittering on old rails, head low like a sick dog’s.
Gabriel broke left and leaped a saw carriage, shouting to pull it off course. “Hey, wrong buffet!” He snatched a rusted chain, whipped it across the air. The creature swatted, snarling, voice a broken steam whistle.
“Ten seconds,” Mark said. They could hear him running in their ear, the distant clank of a panel box.
Thane let the creature follow him past a leaning diesel generator half-swallowed by vines. Its casing had been pried open at some point; new wires ran to a weathered control. The alpha’s hand cupped the kill switch, claws gentle as a surgeon. He looked up long enough to catch Gabriel’s eye. Now.
Mark yanked two leads together up the slope. The generator coughed awake like an old god shocked from sleep. A bank of halogen work lights that hadn’t shone since the world ended blasted the yard white. Sound hit a second later—Mark’s cobbled siren rigged to the gen set, a screaming, pulsing wail that drilled straight through bone.
The creature reared back as if someone had thrown the moon at it. Its head shook hard, that thin hiss turning panicked. It skittered sideways, slammed into a rail post, bled noise that had learned to hurt what it didn’t understand. Thane stepped with it, keeping himself between the thing and the boys, hands open, posture big and calm as a mountain saying no.
Gabriel didn’t press. He didn’t pounce. He just made himself a moving, loud problem that never gave the creature a clean line. The lights strobed from bright to brighter; the siren wove a pattern that set the air on edge. The bear-thing spun once, twice, then bolted blind into the trees, crashing through scrub and saplings with the desperation of anything that wants less pain.
Silence came down in a ragged wave when Mark killed the siren and lights. Thane’s breath steamed in the cool shade. Gabriel’s ears rang.
Jesse had his hands on his knees, chest heaving. He looked up at Thane with shining eyes and laughed once—half sob, half apology. “You guys are… not fair.”
“Accurate,” Gabriel said, grinning, then sobering to put a hand on Jesse’s shoulder.
Thane moved to the generator’s open belly. He checked the leads, traced their path. “Nice work.”
Mark jogged down, toolbox clattering. He crouched by a scar in the dirt: a print from the creature’s paw. He put his hand beside it, not for size—he already knew—but to see how the pads compressed. Wrong. He plucked a hairsbreadth of thread from the edge of the stitched foreleg print. It stuck to his claw, glinting faintly.
Mark held it up. “Suture,” he said quietly. “Modern. Somebody sewed that thing.”
Gabriel’s ears tipped forward. “Why would anyone—”
Thane’s gaze went toward the notch in the mountains, where the pines ran together like dark water. “Experiment,” he said, voice gone flat stone. “Practice. Or bait.”
Jesse swallowed hard. “Can we go home?”
“Yes,” Thane said, gentle again, and that was the truth that mattered in this moment.
They made a stretcher from the cart, lashed Rowan down with straps and jokes. Jesse walked beside his brother with his hand on the wooden rail like he had found the exact job his body could do and was going to do it perfectly. Mark scouted the way that let the most gravity help and the fewest rocks argue. Gabriel kept up a nonsense commentary to drown the echo of the siren—“That stump looks at me funny; I don’t trust it”—until Rowan, drugged on endorphins and relief, snorted a laugh and dozed.
At the first view of Libby through the trees, Jesse’s shoulders sagged as if the town’s roofs were magnetized and had clicked his bones back where they belonged. The square was already stirring when the three wolves came in with the boys: doors opening, faces at windows, a ripple of movement toward the center like a town remembering the choreography of gratitude.
Marta met them at the fountain, eyes bright with all the things she wouldn’t let fall. “You did it.”
“We always do it,” Gabriel said, but he said it kindly.
The parents broke into motion then—hands covering mouths, knees giving way, then the rush forward. The mother’s hands found Rowan’s face; the father’s found Jesse’s shoulders. There was the messy, holy noise of reunion—the good sound, the one that means the world still knows how to place its weight on what matters.
Hank stood off to one side with his arms crossed and his mouth doing something complicated that would only be called a smile if you were feeling generous. “Council’s in ten,” he said out of the side of his mouth to Thane. “We’ll debrief, set escorts on the north road, put a hold on unsupervised runs.”
Thane nodded, but his eyes drifted to Mark, who was already at the council door with a small cloth-wrapped thing in his hand.
They filed into the hall that still smelled faintly of paper and dust and hope. People took their places around the table. Dale, the grease-stained engineer who had watched Thane heal in the street, sat upright and listened like a student who didn’t want to miss anything.
Mark set the cloth bundle down and unfolded it, revealing a short length of surgical suture—clean, synthetic, unmistakable. “We drove something off,” he said, voice even. “It looked like a bear altered by illness or exposure. But this—this wasn’t nature. This was hands. Somebody shaved its leg and sewed a wound with modern technique.”
Silence leaned in.
Marta’s voice was steady, but a vein of iron ran through it. “Are there people north?”
“There are…things north,” Mark said carefully. He lifted his portable, the little screen tracing its line of green. “And the signal.” He turned the volume up. A faint pulse threaded the room, tapping along the edge of hearing. Then blocky letters scrolled across the linked tablet in a slow rhythm:
COME NORTH.
BRING FIRE.
“What does that even mean?” Dale asked, half defiant, half afraid.
“Light,” Mark said. “Heat. Power. Or,” he added, eyes flicking to Thane, “courage.”
Gabriel leaned back in his chair, expression caught between a joke and a prayer. “I’m partial to the last one. Fire we’ve got. Courage—” He glanced at Thane’s profile and smiled, small, private. “We’re stocked.”
Marta exhaled, setting her palms flat on the table. “We don’t move lightly,” she said. “But we also don’t hide. Not anymore. Tonight we celebrate that two boys are home. Tomorrow we plan.”
She looked at the parents, at the boys, at the room full of people who had decided that community was an act you did daily with your one good life. “And we set new rules for the north road,” she finished. “No more runs without a wolf.”
The room hummed with agreement. Somebody started clapping—awkward, off-beat—and then others joined until the sound was a warm, imperfect wave. Gabriel winced theatrically at the rhythm and then laughed into it. Thane did not smile, but his shoulders let the applause rest on them without complaint.
Outside, night climbed the mountain shoulders. The town’s string lights clicked on one by one like stars that had agreed to work part-time.
Later, when the square had thinned to pairs and whispers and the music had trailed off into the kind of silence that isn’t empty but full, the three wolves walked to the edge of the fence and looked north. The air smelled of damp earth and cut wood. Far off, something barked once and went quiet.
Gabriel leaned close enough that his shoulder brushed Thane’s for just a breath longer than an accident. “We’re finally theirs,” he murmured.
Thane’s gaze stayed on the dark notch where the peaks made a doorway. “Not yet,” he said, voice low. “But they’re ours.”
Mark adjusted the strap of his radio bag and watched the pulse dance along his display, regular now, patient as a heartbeat. He thought of the stitched leg, of hands that had done a careful, terrible thing. He thought of the word fire and all the ways it could be meant.
“North then,” he said softly.
“North,” Thane agreed.
They stood there a while longer, three shadows with claws that caught starlight, two medallions cold against fur, and the promise of a road that would ask everything and give back something like meaning. The world had fallen. The pack hadn’t.
And somewhere in that dark, something or someone was asking for a meeting by the oldest terms there were: bring light. Bring heat. Bring who you are when the wind takes your name.
They turned for home to sleep, to sharpen, to plan. Morning would come. It always did.
