The spring after the hard winter ran like clear water through Libby’s streets. The schoolhouse bell sounded in the mornings, children’s shouts ran ahead of them like birds, and the market had found a steady rhythm—bread that Holt declared “not deadly,” jars of preserved fruit, repaired tools traded hand to hand. Kade drew chalk lessons on the school’s back wall—how to read tracks, how to tell the age of scat—and Gabriel tuned the radio in City Hall that powered the speakers in the square, letting old music breathe through town like a remembered language. Rime liked to lean on the front post and watch the noon crowd, amber-gold eyes softer than his shoulders admitted.
Thane walked the square after breakfast, checking edges the way he always had—gate latches sound, generator hum clean. He moved quiet and unhurried, a familiar gravity in a place that had learned it could relax again without forgetting who made that possible.
By midmorning, the breeze shifted. It carried sweat, pine, and the sharp salt of a body running longer than it should. Kade smelled it first and lifted his chin toward the south road. “Runner,” he said. “Solo.”
Rime was already stepping off the porch. “Smell thin,” he said. “Hurt some.”
“Mark,” Thane called, turning. “Open the gate.”
Mark jogged from the nearby generator shed, wiped his hands, and swung the east gate inward. The figure that came through looked like every long road in a man’s body—dust from boot to hair, a coat torn under one arm, hands red from cold mornings and tight grips. He saw the wolves and staggered once, then straightened—respect mixed with fear, not quite sure which one would do.
“Town of Libby?” he asked, voice raw.
“You found it,” Thane said, stepping forward. “I’m Thane.”
The man’s eyes flicked over the pack—claws, fur, the calm lines of bodies that knew their work—and then back to Thane’s muzzle as if he’d been warned there would be an Alpha to recognize. “Name’s Ellis Cartwright,” he said. “From Thompson Falls.”
Holt edged forward, huge and trying not to be. “Food,” he said, gently. “Come.” He looked to Thane, who nodded once.
Rime had already eased Ellis under one arm with a quiet “Is okay,” and steered him toward the cabin. Gabriel passed Thane without a word, hand already on the coffee pot. Kade watched the road again for shadows that did not show, then fell in behind with easy caution. Varro—always counting edges—stayed where he was just long enough to map the strangers’ posture, then followed too.
Inside the great room, Holt set a bowl of stew on the table like it was a treaty. “Sit,” he said. “Eat slow.” Rime set a cup of water at Ellis’s right hand and a heel of bread on the left because he had learned over months how humans reached when they were exhausted. Holt hovered, vibrating with a protective pride he pretended not to feel. “Is good,” he added, as though absolving Ellis in advance if he cried when the heat hit his stomach.
Ellis ate the way a man does when he has been empty for too long—three quick bites that almost hurt, then a breath, then slower, trembling with the shock of kindness. He kept watching Thane between mouthfuls, as if the story he carried had weight that would only stay put once the Alpha held it.
When he could speak without choking, he did. “Word traveled down the valley,” he said. “About a place where wolves and people live together. Where no one goes hungry and nobody gets shot if they ask for help.”
Holt’s mouth twitched at “nobody gets shot,” old anger and new humor warring in the same corner of his face. Rime’s ears angled, listening.
Ellis kept going, voice steadying. “We… heard you were real. I ran to see if the stories were true.”
“They are,” Thane said. “Tell me what you need.”
Ellis looked at the table—at the clean bowl, at the second ladle Holt pretended not to have ready—and salved pride with a swallow. “Thompson Falls got hit twice before the thaw,” he said. “Not ragged bandits. Organized.” He lifted his right hand to show a scar healing under dirt. “They knew what to take—solar panels, inverters, charge controllers, tool stock, seed. Food, of course. They took from us, then swung west and came back up from the south. Said they’d be back when our gardens were in.” The last words came bitter, like he hated the shape they made in his mouth.
Rime went still in the way only wolves do—everything quiet, listening in layers.
“Eight men,” Ellis continued. “At least. And… two wolves with them. Not like you.”
Ellis grimaced. “Mean. Trained to it. One of them killed Mr. Paxton.” His eyes flashed. “He was old. Never hurt nobody.” He cleared his throat, choked it back. “People say the wolves are from farther north. The men talk like they answer to someone. A name I keep hearing is…” He shook his head, unsure. “Tarrik. Does that… mean anything?”
The great room exhaled the way a live thing does when a old scar is touched.
Varro’s eyes went to Thane, then to Kade. Kade’s shoulders, always calm, coiled an inch. Gabriel’s gaze hardened; his hands relaxed on the tin pot so they would not turn fists by accident. Holt’s ears flattened, then came back up; Rime’s rumble settled into something like a quiet engine.
Thane’s voice stayed very level. “It means we are listening closely.”
Ellis swallowed, seeing he had stepped onto something deeper than a simple list of thieves. “I… came because we heard about your town. About… kindness.” He looked ashamed of the last word, like it felt silly when held up against hunger. “But also about strength.”
“You did right,” Thane said. He set his hand—claws and all—lightly on the table once. “Eat. Then rest an hour. Marta will call a meeting.”
Holt brightened. “Meeting good,” he said, as if meetings were opportunities to lift heavy objects. “I bring more stew.” He hovered, then added, softer, “You safe. We fix.”
Ellis looked at him with something like surprised gratitude. “Thank you,” he said.
Holt nodded, and if his tail thumped once against the chair, no one was cruel enough to remark on it.
The town hall meeting room had seen everything—planning sessions lit by a single lantern, scared crowds during the Black Winter beginning, a wedding with bread and handpainted flowers. Today it held townsfolk on benches, the pack watching from the back and sides, Marta at the front with Thane to her left. Ellis stood near the table, hat in his hands, until he realized no one expected a performance for his suffering; he sank gratefully into a chair Holt guided him to.
Marta opened cleanly. “We are going to hear, then discuss, then decide—swiftly and with care.” She nodded to Ellis. “Tell them what you told us.”
Ellis did, shorter now, edited by hunger and the need to be believed. He described the raiders’ first pass, the second, the method. He described the wolves. He said the name again—Tarrik—and watched the wolves react like they had bitten metal.
When he finished, Marta folded her hands. “All right,” she said. “We have to decide whether to send help. The floor is open.”
An older woman, Mrs. Renner from the school, stood first. “I say yes,” she said. “If someone had run to us last winter and found an empty gate, what would that have made us?”
A man who had lost two fingers to frostbite a year ago stood next. “I say caution,” he said. “We have children now in that school. We are just finding our feet. We could be marching our defenders into a trap. Maybe this is bait.”
“Could be,” Mark said, evenly. “That is why we do not march. We plan.”
A younger woman squeezed her hands together. “I am not against helping,” she said. “I just… remember the weeks when we ate half and told the kids they were full. We finally have extra. If we give it away and the raiders come here while our pack is gone—” She did not finish.
Rime’s voice came soft from the back. “Sable watch.” He did not stand. He did not need to. “Her wolves keep hurt away if we go.”
Holt nodded vigorously. “Sable good. Scary,” he added, fondly. “She make bad men not like here.”
A farmer Thane trusted—Hank’s brother—scratched his beard. “It is not just food,” he said. “Those men took panels. If they get a taste for that, they will keep taking. If we push them back now, maybe it spares us later.”
Varro raised a hand slightly, as if to say he would speak if asked and remain quiet if not. Marta gave him a nod.
“I learned a long time ago that there are two ways to fight thieves,” Varro said. “You can chase them town to town, always a step behind, or you can cut the rope they pull on.” He tapped the table lightly with one clawed finger—he had learned that sound helped human ears. “These raiders are organized. That means they have a camp that feels safe. That is their rope. We should find it and make it unsafe.”
“Kill them?” someone asked, shaky.
Varro did not so much as blink. “No,” he said. “Not unless we must. Remove capacity. Take back what was stolen. Make a story out of it that travels farther than bullets.”
Marta looked at Thane.
Thane breathed once, in and out. He wanted to look at his pack for the pleasure of it—Varro’s calm, Kade’s steady eyes, Rime’s quiet watching, Holt’s charged presence, Gabriel’s ready patience, Mark’s engineer’s mind—but he kept his gaze on the room. These were the faces that had trusted wolves with their children in the street.
“We built this town on a simple promise,” Thane said. “We would be strong without cruelty and merciful without being fools. We would not take by force what could be shared. We would not close our gate to someone who asked for help.” He let the words settle. “If we turn away now because it is difficult, then everything we built is just wood.”
The room listened. Even the anxious looks, even the fear, were leaning toward him.
“We will plan,” Thane continued. “We will keep Libby safe while we go. We will not empty our stores. We will take what can be spared and bring back what was taken from them.” He turned his head slightly to Marta. “Call Sable.”
Marta smiled, relief and resolve sharing the angle of her mouth. “Phones it is,” she said. “Still a miracle.”
—
The line to the Northern Ferals ran across country like a new kind of river—copper on poles where it could, line on fence where it had to. At City Hall, the old AT&T Definity hummed like a cat that had found a radiator. Marta lifted the handset of Line 6 and dialed the code Mark had written in grease pencil on the console.
On the second ring, a voice answered. Calm, direct, lightly accented by snow. “Sable.”
“Marta,” she said. “We need a small favor. Thane would like to speak.”
Thane took the handset. It was still new for him, this talking over wire. He had learned to pause for the click of the trunk; he had learned not to nod at the air. “Sable,” he said.
“Thane,” came the reply. “Your voice travels. Good.”
“We had a runner,” Thane said. “From Thompson Falls. Raiders from the south. Organized. Two wolves with them.”
A small, sharp silence. “Wolves?” Sable asked. “South wolves.”
He did not make it a question. “No,” Thane said. “Tarrik.”
Sable’s exhale was precise. “He burns own pack to feel warm,” she said. “Will burn others. I send wolves to your gate. We watch your town while you go. No cost.”
“Thank you,” Thane said.
“Do not thank,” Sable replied. “Is what pack do.” A beat. “You call if cut deep.”
“I will,” Thane said.
She added, dry as bone and twice as warm, “Tell Holt not feed all bread to my wolves.”
“I will lie to him,” Thane said, a faint smile alive in the words.
“Good,” Sable said. “We come before dark.”
The line clicked gently when she ended the call. Thane looked at Marta; Marta looked at him. The thing between them was an agreement older than phone wire—two leaders sharing weight.
“We leave at first light.”
Preparation in Libby moved like a song that had been practiced into muscle. Mark and Gabriel ran quick inventory—what panels could be spared without dimming the school, which inverters had parts in common with the ones most towns used before the Fall, what spools of copper they could untangle from stored piles. “Two charge controllers,” Mark said. “Three if we get creative with heat sinks.” Gabriel scribbled notes, bartering a school lesson later for a set of cable lugs now. “We’ll keep one to teach with,” he said. “They’ll need to know how to fix it after we drive away.”
Holt and Rime loaded food—bags of flour, dried beans, smoked meat, jars that clinked like hope. “Not all,” Rime reminded Holt when enthusiasm got bigger than the truck bed. “Leave some.”
“Leave plenty,” Holt said. He frowned at a sack, then muscled it into place with absurd gentleness. “We bring fix, not make hungry.”
Kade laid maps on the cabin table. Ellis traced the route with a thick finger, marking where trees leaned in to kiss the road, which gullies held water in spring, where the shoulder slumped. “Old rockslide here,” he said. “Slow you if you’re heavy.”
“Not heavy,” Kade said mildly, already thinking alternate lines through the hills if needed.
Varro walked the perimeter of the square with a notebook. He checked watch positions, verified signal whistles, and wrote out a simple instruction sheet for Sable’s wolves in clean block letters. He wrote for their eyes, not his—short lines, no frills: Two on east ridge. One at the school. Rotate every hour. He would show them and say it aloud in case reading wasn’t their habit. He left blank space under each task for a paw mark so they could own it.
By late afternoon, the flatbed in front of the cabin looked like a catalog of survival—tool crates, sealed food barrels, tarped bundles of panels, spare belts, a spool of heavy cable, even a box of school slates and chalk that Jana insisted were “for the children, because they will need to concentrate on something that isn’t fear.” Holt strapped it all down with a care that would have surprised anyone who didn’t know him. Rime checked every knot.
Just before sunset, the northern line announced itself—white shapes between trees, then Sable herself stepping into the square, posture easy, eyes bright. She had brought six: two seniors, three steady hunters, one young one who looked like he had chased a rabbit and caught it once and would live on that victory until he was old.
Sable met Thane at the gate. No ceremony, no wasted words. “We hold,” she said. “You go.”
“Guard the school,” Thane said. “The generator, too.”
“School first,” she said. “Always.”
He gave Varro’s sheet. She read it, eyes flicking quickly, then folded it once and tucked it into the webbing of a harness a scavenger had given her last winter, a gesture that made Varro smile without showing his teeth. “You did not have to write,” she said to him. “But is good.”
When the last rope was checked and the last water skin filled, Thane stepped up onto the flatbed, claws clicking on steel. He looked at his pack. “We move quiet,” he said. “We treat their fear like glass—strong in sheets, fragile at the edges. We leave nothing behind that makes us ashamed to look Sable in the eye later.”
“Good rule,” Gabriel said, climbing onto the bench seat.
“Good rule,” Holt echoed, delighted. He leaned down to the young northern wolf and pressed a loaf into his hands. “Bread.” He lowered his voice to a confiding whisper that was anything but subtle. “Is not deadly.”
They left at dawn, the truck rolling south with a sound like a promise on tires.
Thompson Falls lay folded between river and trees, smaller than Libby, its buildings shabbier by a generation even before someone had kicked them. As the flatbed eased into the main street, people came to doors and porches and did not wave. They stared—first at the truck, then at the wolves stepping off the bed with clawed feet and steady faces. Fear moved among them like a gray dog looking for its owner.
Ellis slid off the back and lifted both hands. “They’re here to help,” he said. “They’re the ones I told you about.”
A woman in a denim jacket and a worry face stepped forward from Town Hall. “I’m Nora,” she said. “On the council.” She looked like a person whose body had been taxed by every hard winter and was negotiating with herself over whether to be angry or grateful now.
Thane nodded. “Thane Conriocht,” he said. “This is my pack.” He named them, human and wolf alike. He did not apologize for who they were. He did not ask permission to be useful.
Nora’s eyes stuck on claws and ears and muscle and then moved off them like a person choosing not to stare at a scar. “We have coffee,” she offered. “And questions.”
“Both,” Thane said, with the hint of a smile. “We brought answers and tools.”
Inside Town Hall the damage showed in small, humiliating ways: a door re-hung crooked because the right hinge had been broken by the raiders, a patch on the window made from an old campaign sign, a map on the wall with thumbtacks marking places that felt dangerous now. A few men and women sat around a table. The tired man at the back had a bandage under his shirt. The air tasted like old fear and fresh resolve.
Nora opened without formality. “They hit fast,” she said. “Two times. First pass took panels and two grain bins. Second time they came for food, and they knew where we kept the good tools. Like they had watched us.” She glanced at Ellis, not unkindly. “The wolves with them… were worse than the men.”
“We held the line,” another council member said. “We were not cowards. But when the big one came—” He looked away. “Paxton went to stop him and…” He shook his head. “We could not stop him.”
Thane’s voice was calm enough to settle air. “We are sorry for your loss,” he said. “We are here to get back what can be gotten and make sure they do not return.”
“We do not want a war,” Nora said quickly, desperate to get that on record in the history of herself. “We want… peace.”
“So do we,” Gabriel said. “This is how we keep it.”
Mark had already started jotting a materials list with neat engineer’s handwriting. “Your remaining array is what?” he asked. “Twelve panels on your library roof? Any spares?”
“A few,” Nora said. “Old ones. Repaired twice.”
“We brought two good controllers,” Mark said. “We can get your refrigeration stable in a day, two at most.”
“And water?” Kade asked, eyes scanning the room, the windows, the street beyond without appearing to. “Your pump?”
“Hand,” someone said, embarrassed.
“We can do better,” Kade said. He drew a quick diagram for a simple small-head wheel they could build with scrap. “Give us a day to salvage.”
Nora’s gaze softened. She looked at Ellis and then back to Thane. “Thank you,” she said, and meant it.
Thane nodded. “Mark, Gabriel—take inventory. Make a list of what is needed. Kade, Rime—scout. Edges, trails, and the south road.” He turned to Holt and Varro. “Security.”
Holt grinned—teeth, happy. Varro’s eyes warmed by a degree. “We will walk the line,” Varro said. Then, without a trace of irony, he turned to Holt and said, “Look intimidating.”
Holt brightened, delighted to be officially assigned something he was born to do. “Can do,” he said. He rolled his shoulders and grew two inches taller on the spot.
Rime touched Kade’s arm, and the two of them eased back out into the street and were gone without fuss, the way quiet wolves vanish: downwind and between glances, reading dust and scent and bent grass that other eyes write off as weather.
They found the camp in midafternoon—ten miles south, tucked behind a stand of fir that hid it from the road but not from noses that had learned the arithmetic of smoke. Rime tasted the air and split it the way he split a knot—patiently. He pointed with his chin. “Eight men,” he said. “Two wolves.”
Kade lay next to him on the ridge and raised his binoculars just enough to read the details. The camp was tidy in a way that made both their hackles lift. Stolen goods were stacked in rows—panels here, bins there, a canvas-covered table of tools and wire spools. There was a habit to it, a method that meant they had done this before and planned to do it again. The eight men moved like they had chores. The two wolves were center-ring: one big and scarred, the other lean and watchful. The big one’s laugh made Kade’s fingers tighten on the binoculars before he could talk himself calm.
Rime’s head tilted. He did not need glasses to name the big one. He knew the smell of cruelty as well as anyone in the valley. “Tarrik,” he said, low.
Kade exhaled slowly through his teeth. “And the last of Iron Ridge with him.” The shape of the smaller wolf’s shoulders was enough to confirm it, a memory neither of them liked.
They backed away from the ridge as a team—two bodies rehearsed into one motion—and took a long loop around a shallow swale to cover their tracks. On the return, Kade pointed out the patrol lines—where the men looked and did not look, where a wolf would likely circle at night, where the trees could cover a silent approach. Rime tasted the ground and named the wind’s usual hours. Between them, a map wrote itself in the shared space their bodies made.
At Thompson Falls, Varro met them at the edge of town without appearing to have moved all day. “Well?” he asked.
Kade’s voice was dark. “Organized,” he said. “And worse than we hoped.”
“Name,” Rime said, looking at Thane over Varro’s shoulder. “Tarrik.”
The word hit the room like a dropped tool. Holt showed his teeth, then controlled it. Gabriel’s jaw set. Mark slid his pencil behind his ear without looking away from the parts list he was making for the pump—he was listening and he was working; both were true.
Thane did not let his voice sharpen. “Tell me,” he said.
Kade did—numbers, positions, how the stacks were labeled (he hated that part most), where the wolves slept, which way the morning light would fall across the clearing. Rime added the wind: “North this morning. Tomorrow swing west. Smell better for us then.”
Varro’s eyes were already drawing lines across the ground. “We can end this,” he said. “Without turning the camp into a bonfire.”
Holt frowned, disappointed only in that last condition for a blink, then nodded vigorously. “Scare better,” he said. “Story goes farther.”
“We will take back what they took, break what lets them come back, and leave them alive enough to tell why they stopped,” Thane said. He looked at Nora. “We will need a room and a table.”
“Council room,” Nora said, pointing. “Use it like you live here.”
“Tonight we plan,” Thane said to his pack. “Tomorrow we move.”
He paused and let his eyes find each of them in turn—Mark, already thinking in amps and connectors; Gabriel, seeing shadows and how to move through them with sound and without; Kade, map in hand and the patience of stone under his feet; Rime, quiet engine; Holt, big and bright and ready to be a wall; Varro, drawing the rope that needed cutting. He felt the familiar lift of being surrounded by exactly the right wolves, the right men, the right town showing the right kind of fear.
“Do not be careless,” he said. “Do not be cruel. Do not let them make us into what we teach against.”
Rime nodded once. Holt thumped his chest with a fist, then, embarrassed at the noise, tried to pretend he had been swatting a fly. Gabriel smiled sideways. Kade’s mouth tightened in a way that meant his mind was working on angles. Varro bent over the table and began to sketch.
Night collected outside Town Hall. In the distance, the river worked its patient math. Nora came in once with candles and left without speaking, as if interrupting a prayer. Ellis hovered by the door, ready to run messages or lift something heavy or, if told to, simply stand on the porch and believe in what he had set in motion.
When the plan was inked and repeated aloud twice—once by Varro with cool precision, once by Thane with a kind of quiet that carried farther than any shout—Thane looked at the faces around the table and then at the map that held so much more than lines.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We go take back the morning.”
Outside, the lamps along the street guttered in the wind and then steadied. In the hills south of town, a man laughed in a camp he thought was safe, and a big wolf grinned with teeth that had seen too much. The night watched both places and waited to see which story would carry farthest when the sun came up.