The message arrived in the deep of night, a frantic pulse on a frequency Mark never liked to hear.
Mark had been up checking the repeater logs when the signal lit his screen: a short, garbled burst, then words in a voice threaded with panic. It was Mayor Lorne, breathless and raw.
“They’re here. River Division. Bridges cut. Mill’s on fire. We need—please—Libby, help now.”
The truck bay at Libby’s Hall woke like someone yanking a blanket off a sleeping town. Hank’s boots hit the floor and Marta was already packing lists. Gabriel strapped his guitar into its case and loaded a bandolier of practical tools rather than show tunes. Mark keyed frequency after frequency, triangulated the locator pings, and handed coordinates to Thane.
They moved fast. Libby’s response was no shotgun panic; it was economy of force: the town’s deputies, two pickup trucks, the flatbed stocked with crates and nets, and a single, clean plan. But Thane didn’t go alone. He sent word on the repeater in the language of packs, and from the north the answer came like thunder made of paws: Sable’s pack would ride.
By the time Libby’s convoy reached the ridge above Thompson Falls, the first fires were still wicked embers, casting orange against the river. Smoke rolled into the valley, and the smell of burned cloth and diesel sat bitter on the air. From the town came the ragged echoes of shots, muffled yells, and something that sounded like people calling each other’s names.
The River Division had not come for quiet intimidation this time. They had brought the work of a long, cruel design: men in armored vests, scrounged rifles and automatic weapons, and a practiced brutality that showed in the way they tore shutters down and set rigs to pry open lockboxes.
Thane watched them for a heartbeat from the ridge. He counted the trucks, the men, the pattern of watchpoints. He smelled the small things — the coppered tang of spent rounds, the newness of the driver’s boots. He saw two bridges already cut with chain and angle grinder, the mill’s turbines sputtering where hoses had been severed.
Then, the sound of movement behind him: not engines, but paws. Dozens of paws, a long, slow drum across leaves. Sable’s thirty came down the slope as if the earth itself had given them permission: a single, coordinated tide of muscle, sinew, and intent. They fanned out, not like a hunting party but like engineers clearing a project—precise, quiet, lethal when needed.
Hank keyed his radio in a low voice. “You hear that?”
Thane didn’t answer. His jaw set. “We’ll take the west approach,” he said to Hank and Gabriel. “You move to the bridge’s eastern side. Mark, cut their comms.” Mark nodded and tapped at his rig; a small jammer breathed its dirty light and then the convoy’s radios hiccupped and died. Confusion is an enemy’s worst weather.
They moved.
Libby’s deputies advanced with local discipline — no swagger, just practiced motion. Gabriel ran ahead a step, soft-voiced and human among the looming shapes, calling out names and giving directions with the quiet authority only a familiar face can claim. Sable’s wolves flowed like shadow between the trees. Young ferals and old guardians, all thirty, carried no banners; their work was not to be heralded. They took positions, cutting off exits and choking the raiders’ lines of retreat.
The first contact was a flash of sound and a short, ugly panic. A River Division pickup tried to plow the road, but Thane’s pack had anticipated that: a felled log, set with quick pulleys, slammed the truck sideways. Two men tumbled out, weapons flaring. Dependable, practiced hands from Libby’s deputies snatched them cold; Sable’s wolves pinned others, disarming with slick efficiency.
The raiders fired back with the cruelty of desperate men — shots that had no aim other than to push fear. Bullets cracked off metal and dirt; a wolf went down—jerking, then silent—and for a moment, the valley held its breath. That was the only immediate cost. Thane felt the flash go through him like a clench, and for a fraction of a second he saw the world narrow to a line: protect the town, end the threat.
The counterattack became a single, brutal expression. Sable’s ferals descended on the raiders’ flanks with a speed that made human reflex look slow. They struck to immobilize—ripping away triggers, crushing arms that held guns, yanking men off trucks. When a raider tried to run across a burned bridge, a guardian lurched from the side and took him down in a roll of fur and flesh that was efficient and final. Men that thought themselves invulnerable found themselves disarmed and caged by a force they’d never imagined—the combined authority of a town that would not die and a pack that would not be bought.
Thane never raised his claws unless necessary. When a man lunged at Marta’s deputy with a knife, Thane closed the distance and slammed him into wood with a strength that left the man winded and useless. Gabriel’s hands moved with surprising speed, catching a falling rifle butt and looping a strap around a raider’s wrist. Mark’s jamming device hummed, the raiders’ coordinated electronics stuttering like dying insects.
Within an hour the River Division’s scheme was rubble. Trucks sat disabled, tires slashed, engines caked with mud. There were no charismatic last stands, no romanticized brawls—only the brutal work of taking control and making it stick. When the last man’s wrists were bound and the last weapon secured, the valley finally let itself exhale.
The cost had been small for all the fury involved: a few bruised bodies, one wolf with a deep scrape along its flank, and a town that smelled of smoke and the iron taste of fear. The river ran on, clean and indifferent, as if the argument of men and wolves was a weather event that would pass.
Afterwards, when the prisoners were gathered and accounted for under Mayor Lorne’s watch, Marta walked among the captured men with a surgeon’s patience. “You won’t be killed here,” she told them in a voice that balanced justice with mercy. “You will work. You will rebuild. You will pay back what you tried to steal.”
One of the captured leaders spat at the idea of work. Thane leaned close, not cruel but not soft. “You tried to take what others need. You chose your living over theirs. Here, you repair what you broke. You clear the bridges. You mend the mill. And when you can make honest trade, you leave as people who learned something harder than the road teaches.”
Sable stood with her pack a little apart, watching the scene with eyes that had seen much and forgiven less. When Marta finished giving orders, she crossed the line and met Sable. The two alphas faced one another in a public shrug of respect: no theatrics, only the slow movement of beings who understood loss and restraint.
“You came,” Marta said. Her voice had a new note — gratitude that had earned the right to be simple. “You saved us.”
Sable dipped her head. “You lit something,” she replied. “We answered. We protect what keeps the light.”
Thane’s voice, when he spoke, was the same gravel-soft authority everyone trusted. “No more tolled roads,” he said. “No more lists. If that River Division or anyone like them moves on the valleys again, they’ll find the price is living differently.”
Hank added, practical as ever, “We’ll run patrols, share routes, and teach your men better signals.” He turned to Lorne. “You kept your mouth when it mattered. Keep doing that and you’ll keep your town.”
The night’s fury bled out into the next morning like the dregs of a storm. Libby’s contingent helped Thompson Falls salvage what they could from the burned mill and the ruined pickups. The prisoners were given work assignments: clear the bridge approaches, patch the roof of the storehouse, stack the woodpiles. It was a hard justice, and it would last longer than the temporary thrill of violence.
In the days that followed, Thompson Falls adjusted. Patrols ran along the river more often, Libby sent a small training party to help teach watch procedures, and Sable’s pack lingered long enough to loosen a knot of fear into habit. People who’d once thought wolves only as monsters began to think of them as a kind of weather—powerful and dangerous, yes, but also necessary to know and respect.
Thane sat one evening out on the rebuilt bridge, the same quiet man under a colder sky. Gabriel brought him a cup of coffee and sat beside him. “You ever think we’ll have a year without blood?” Gabriel asked, honest and a little hopeful.
Thane didn’t smile, but he let the possibility live on his face like a seed in thawing ground. “I hope so,” he said. “But hope is work. We guard it.”
Far off, the river went on turning its relentless wheel. People mended. Wolves healed. The valley remembered the night it almost bent to greed and was, instead, made firmer.
And under the pines and the floodlights, on fences and along the river path, towns whispered a new name for the combined force that had stopped the River Division: not just Libby’s pack, not just Sable’s ferals — but neighbors who kept watch, together.
The world had fallen, and some things remained ruined. But the towns had learned to stand in the same light and show the darkness the teeth that protect what matters.