Snow came before the light. It fell thick and sideways, carried by a wind that pressed against the pines and hissed along the wire at the east gate. The world was quiet the way a held breath is quiet. In that hush, a low diesel idle trembled through the square—generators warm and ready, lights kept low behind canvas and blankets so the town glowed but did not shine.
Thane moved along the inside of the wall with Holt and Rime shadowing him, his breath ribboning pale in the cold. The bandage was gone; the wound beneath had knitted into a hard ache that spoke up when he turned too fast. He kept his movements small and deliberate. He had promised rest. Rest could come when Glendive’s men had learned to hate the snow.
Hank’s voice came soft over the Motorola on Thane’s shoulder. “East ridge. Movement.”
“How many?” Thane said.
A beat of wind across the mic. “At least two trucks. Snowmobiles behind. Can’t see numbers in this soup.”
“Positions,” Thane said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
The town changed shape under the order. Men slipped into the angled shadows of barricades—stacked timbers, old cars with their bellies full of sand, fencing spiked with rebar. Wolves moved to the flanks: Kira to the north run, Rime with Thane at center, Holt pacing at his right like a fired shot in his bones waiting for a target. Up on the water tower, two spotters settled into the lee with binoculars under canvas, rifles laid across their laps. On the ridge behind the generator building, a pair of borrowed hunting rifles rested in human hands; their owners breathed with the patience of people who had learned to wait for the right kind of shot.
Mark’s voice cut through on a private channel Thane shared with him and Gabriel. “Powerhouse sealed. Transfer switch is hot. If they breach the yard, I can kill it in under a second.”
“Copy,” Thane said. “Keep eyes on the substation.”
“Already on it. Gabriel’s with me at the tower. We’ll squawk intel to Hank’s line.”
From the tower’s shadow, Gabriel clicked once to confirm. Thane could almost see him there without turning his head: black fur dusted white, headset cord looped out of the way of claws, jaw set, eyes quick. He would be wanting to be at Thane’s shoulder. He would stay where he was told until the line bent.
The woods east of town took a slow breath. Snow offered its only answer: a thickening curtain that made the treeline feel closer and farther at the same time. Then, under it—a new sound, thin at first, then growing: the high whine of two-stroke engines fighting powder.
Hank: “They’re in the cut. Eighteen… twenty? No, more.”
Another voice—Cal from the rooftop on Main—cut in, tight. “Truck lights. Low beams, covered. They think we can’t count.”
“We can,” Thane said. “Let them keep thinking otherwise.”
Steel teeth of homemade caltrops lay under the new snow thirty yards past the east barricade. Between them and the wall, the street had been watered and salted to make an evil glaze beneath the powder. The first snowmobile hit that glass like a skater missing a step and skidded sideways into a drift with a soft, surprised thump. The second shot past it with a rider’s whoop that died as he found the caltrops and the machine lurched, track flapping, rubber shredded to ribbons. The whoop turned into a string of words that steamed and vanished.
A figure on foot broke from the trees at a run, weapon in both hands, posture cocky. He didn’t see Kira until she was on him, a gray streak that came out of the plow line and folded him into the snow with one smooth, silent motion. His rifle spun away; Kira’s paw planted on his throat and stayed there with the implacable weight of a quiet promise. She looked up, eyes bright, waiting for the next shape to be foolish.
“Hold,” Thane said into the radio. “Do not chase. Make them come to you.”
The trucks nosed out of the trees then—old box bodies with welded plate bolted to grills and doors, hoods strapped down with ratchet webbing, windshields half-blanked in sheet steel. They came slow, tires in chains, pushing a bow wave of snow. Figures flanked them in faded winter camouflage and mismatched coats, one with a scarf across his face patterned like a flag from a world that had forgotten him. The lead truck stopped short at the caltrops, engine grumbling. A man with a crowbar jumped down, cursed, and started to sweep the snow in clumsy arcs.
Thane watched the man’s breath. It feathered in steady puffs like a metronome. Calm. Not a scout, then—hired muscle doing what he’d been told.
“Let them see the wall,” Hank whispered on the net, awe threaded through the anger like a second braid. “Let them count wrong.”
They saw only what they were meant to see: men with rifles behind logs and cars, no muzzle flash yet, no wolves. The first truck edged forward, chains clacking. It found the caltrops despite the crowbar man’s work. One front tire hissed and squatted. The driver forced the wheel, trying to bully physics, and the truck slid sideways into the second lane where a snowmobile slammed its brake and slewed right into the bumper, the rider pinwheeling into the powder with a yell that cut off when he hit.
“Now,” Thane said.
The two rifles on the ridge cracked with the flat authority of men who didn’t intend to shoot twice. Both shots took front tires. The trucks sagged, nose low, chains grinding against the roadbed, sparks hard and brief in the snowy half-light. From the top of the water tower, a third crack—a careful pop from a .223 Marlin—and the crowbar man grabbed his shoulder and went to one knee, astonished at being stopped with so little drama.
The raiders answered with noise. Automatic fire stitched the barricade, chewing splinters off the log face, ricochets hissing in high metallic squeals. The wall held. The men behind it did too. They fired back in deliberate beats, aiming for legs when they could, center mass when they couldn’t. The snow turned to a soft mist where bullets cut through it. Thane smelled cordite and truck exhaust and the metallic, sharp penny of fresh blood.
“Left sled trying to flank,” Cal called. “Fast.”
“Holt,” Thane said without looking away from the cut. He didn’t have to finish the sentence.
The big wolf vaulted the wall like it was a curb. He hit the ice-glazed street in a controlled slide, claws engraving it with four clean lines, then sprinted along the inside of the barricade until the flanking sled came into view between two storefronts. The rider saw him too late. Holt went low at the last instant and lifted, catching the sled’s front with both paws. Momentum did the rest—machine tipped, rider launched, the whole tangle flipping end over end until it sledded to a stop in a fountain of snow two storefronts down. Holt was already on his feet again, scanning for the next threat, breath pulsing in big steady clouds.
“Good,” Thane breathed. “Back in.”
Holt bounded up the plowed ramp and dropped behind the wall again, grinning without meaning to. He looked at Thane like a dog looks at a man who has shown him a job and given him permission to love it.
A round pinged off the steel plate Thane had ordered welded over the gap between two cars. A second struck the plate a handspan to the right. Thane’s hackles stood. Those two hits were not wild. They were the careful tap-tap of someone learning a distance.
“Sniper,” he said.
The word changed the air. People got small behind their cover; heads tucked; rifles settled a fraction lower. On the ridge, one of Hank’s spotters rolled, slow and smooth, to put his glass on the treeline just east of the trucks. “Can’t see the glint,” he whispered. “Too much weather.”
“They’ll try for the tower,” Mark said on the control channel, sudden and certain. “If they take comms, they can fake a panic.”
Gabriel’s voice, low: “I’m on the stairs. Anyone touches that ladder, I make him regret the climb.”
“Keep your head down,” Thane said.
“Define down,” Gabriel said, because he couldn’t help himself. Thane almost smiled and then didn’t when another ping-smack rang off the plate near his shoulder.
“Plate’s saving lives,” Hank muttered. “Good call.”
Noise built and broke and built again. The raiders tried to rush the caltrops, got tangled in their own bad footing, and fell back, dragging bodies by their armpits, swearing in tight, ugly lines that steamed white and vanished. One of the snowmobiles looped wide right through a back lot and made for a narrow side lane that led to the square. Rime was gone before the radio warned it. He reappeared in the lane as a gray refusal and braced his feet, then did a neat small step left at the last instant so the sled scraped the barricade and lost all its speed in a screaming hiss. The rider tumbled, rolled, scrambled for his gun, and saw Rime’s eyes before he found it. He put his hands up without being told. Rime pointed him toward the wall with a tilt of his muzzle that was somehow patient and dangerous at once.
From the trees, a deeper sound—an engine with weight—came on in a lazy, awful push. The third truck. It was wider, plates welded along its flanks in rough shingles, a steel wedge bolted to its front like the prow of a crude ship. It took the caltrops at a crawl, the wedges throwing them aside with a sound like someone flicking bottle caps into a basin, and nosed down the center lane toward the barricade.
“Backline ready,” Hank said, breath scraping in the speaker. “Rope!”
Four men popped up behind the second barricade layer with a coil of thick line across their forearms. They threw it just ahead of the wedge as it came on and ducked as it hit; the rope snapped tight around the bumper and bit into the ice. On an open road, it would have dragged free. Here, with ice underfoot and slope pitched just enough toward the square, the truck’s chains skittered without purchase. The engine bellowed. The bumper bit the rope deeper. The truck stopped moving.
“Left side!” Cal shouted. “Sleds!”
Three sleds broke from the tree line in a shallow V. This time their riders were not cocky; they lay low, guns tight to their chests, tracks tearing sharp black curves in the white field. Holt’s growl built again. Thane’s hand came up without thinking. “Wait… wait…”
The lead sled hit the hidden trench at speed. It wasn’t deep—just enough to change a machine’s mind. The nose dropped; the tail lifted; the rider sawed and swore and went out into the drift in a flurry of limbs and steel. The two behind swerved, one to each side, and found Kira and a volunteer with a hay fork waiting. The volunteer planted his feet and stuck the fork in the snow. The sled rammed the steel and died with a cracking sound like a snapped shin. Kira took the rider’s legs with a sweep and he folded neatly.
The air filled with the ugly music of small war: men yelling to each other over wind, the slap of boots on frozen gravel, the dry shock of rifles, the collective inhale when a shot hit metal inches from a face and rang that face like a bell. The big truck moaned again and shuddered when Hank’s men rolled a fuel barrel down from the second barricade and pinned it against the wedge with gravity and rope, then backed away fast.
“Don’t light it,” Thane said. “We’ll need that fire later if we’re cold and not dead.”
Hank laughed in spite of himself, a harsh jag he didn’t bother to hide.
The sniper found the rhythm again. A shot clipped a bolt head on the plate and ricocheted with a scream, hot metal biting Holt’s cheek. He didn’t flinch, but his eyes flared and pinned on the dark notion of the shooter like a wolf smelling lightning. Thane put his paw on Holt’s forearm without looking. “Not your hunt,” he said. “Not yet.”
On the tower, Gabriel counted silently between the careful pings until he could feel the shooter’s breath in the cadence. When the next pause came, he leaned out just enough to snap off a single burst at a strip of darker trees along the cut. Snow hopped. A man swore in a new place, surprised by a sting along a cheek he hadn’t intended to risk. “Found you,” Gabriel murmured, and the sniper’s rhythm broke.
A horn sounded then—two low, long notes from the north perimeter, answered by a single short blast from the west. Hank turned toward the sound and then toward Thane because that was the shape of things now.
“False probe,” Thane said. “They’re testing the other gates. Keep your men on the east. If we break here, the rest won’t matter.”
“Copy.”
The east gate held. The trucks didn’t get past the rope. The men on foot didn’t get past the caltrops and the ice and the wolves they couldn’t see until the last second. They fell back in clumps, ducking into the cut to huddle and point, to reassess whatever Garrick Voss had told them about the ease of taking a small town in winter. Thane breathed and let the ache in his shoulder be a boundary, a reminder to keep moving but not to lunge.
“Movement behind the third truck,” Cal said from the roof. “Bigger group.”
Thane lifted his muzzle and smelled men and oil and the particular hot stink of fear-sweat. “They’ll push again,” he said. “They think numbers make a road.”
“They might,” Hank said.
“They won’t,” Thane said.
The bigger group came all at once, a clumsy wave forced forward by the idea that momentum is a weapon. They fanned into the street, boots skidding on the glaze, guns up, breath ragged. Holt bristled so hard his fur snapped with static. Rime leaned forward in that odd, weightless way he had, all intent and no wasted motion. Kira rolled her shoulders and licked blood from a knuckle, calm as a metronome.
Thane lifted his radio. “On me,” he said, and went over the wall.
He hit the ice like it was dry August dirt. He cut left, claws biting, and came up under the barrel of a man too surprised to shoot. Thane took the gun out of his hands like a parent takes a stick from a child and put the man down with the economy that comes from never confusing speed with hurry. Holt passed him on the right as a black blur, knocked two men into a snowbank with one shoulder, turned and came back low across the front of another’s legs so the man folded and slid into the barricade face-first. Rime ghosted the far edge, all silent sharpness; the men who saw him didn’t understand why they were on the ground until they noticed their hands were empty and their elbows hurt and that the wolf’s eyes had been very close and very still and then gone again.
Human rifles from the wall coughed rhythm into the noise. Shots were measured, not panicked. Thane heard Hank somewhere behind him telling men to breathe, to wait for the beat, to count their rounds. He heard Mark on the net, calm as a metronome, calling battery levels at the powerhouse like those numbers mattered as much as blood. He heard Gabriel on the tower laugh once because he couldn’t help it when a raider tried the ladder and got a clawed foot in the face for his trouble.
The wave stalled inches from the barricade. The front men did what men do when they meet a thing that won’t move: they tried to be brave. The second line did what second lines do when they see the first line meet teeth: they tried to be in a different job. Boots slipped. A man fell and took two with him. Someone yelled “pull back!” and no one wanted to be the first to obey.
The trees at the far side of the cut swayed once in a wind that wasn’t wind.
Thane, panting now and not caring if anyone heard it, lifted his head at a new scent: clean frost, pine, and wolf in a way that had nothing to do with his own pack. He saw shapes in the snow-line where no shapes should be. He smiled without showing teeth.
A sound rolled across the field that was not a human sound. It wasn’t a scream or a shout. It was a note older than town squares and radios, a long, braided thing that lifted the hairs on the necks of men who had never believed in old stories and made those stories real in one held heartbeat.
The raiders looked right where they should have looked: at the treeline.
Then the forest itself moved — thirty shapes dusted in white bursting through the snow, howling vengeance.