Libby woke like a cautious animal, one ear always turned toward the treeline. A mist lifted off the Kootenai, the river talking to itself as it curved past the generator building and into town. Woodsmoke threaded the air. Somewhere a hammer kept time with a bird; somewhere else, a baby cried, then quieted when someone hummed back.
Mark stood at the base of the little substation across from Town Hall, a pencil tucked behind one ear, his gray-with-white fur outlined in the morning’s cold light. A busted breaker cabinet yawned open in front of him like bad dentistry. He had a mug balanced on the cabinet lip and a schematic sketched onto brown paper with neat, patient lines.
“Okay,” he said to Marta, who stood nearby with hands buried in her flannel pockets. “Your south-block flicker wasn’t the generator. It was this antique throwing a tantrum. I swapped the capacitor and cleaned the contacts. We should be stable.”
Marta’s braid was looped like a rope crown; worry sat in the set of her shoulders, but her voice was even. “I’m going to pretend I understood half of that and just say thank you.”
Mark smiled to himself and clicked the cabinet shut with a satisfying metallic bite. “You understood the important part.”
Across the square, Gabriel tuned his battered acoustic. Two human musicians—Sofia with a hand drum and Ben with a dented bass—watched his fingers and tried to follow. Gabriel’s black fur caught the gold of the morning; his eyes were winter-light bright and mischievous.
“Okay,” Gabriel said, grinning, “let’s try it again. Don’t think. Feel. If you get lost, hit the one and look confident.”
Sofia laughed. “Is that…music theory?”
“Survival theory,” Gabriel said. He glanced over his shoulder at the square. “If the wolves can learn to fix your lights, you can learn to find the downbeat.”
Ben plucked a tentative line. It wobbled, then found its spine. Gabriel nodded, encouraging, and slid into a melody that sounded like sunlight pooling on a wooden floor: simple, stubbornly hopeful. A few townsfolk slowed to listen. A couple of kids sat cross-legged by the old fountain, faces tilted up like flowers.
Thane listened from the steps of the library-turned-hall, arms crossed, posture loose but watchful. The alpha’s brown fur carried streaks of gray at the muzzle, his eyes the color of ice that had learned to forgive spring. Beside him stood Sheriff Hank Ward in a denim jacket with a stitched Libby crest. They both watched the edges of the world while pretending to enjoy the music.
“Livestock went missing from Corbett’s place last night,” Hank said without preamble. “Goats. Fence cut, prints headed south.”
“Human?” Thane’s voice had its usual gravel, a scar turned into a tool.
“Boots,” Hank said. “Two sizes, maybe three. Spread wide like they were carrying something heavy.”
Thane looked down Main, where the road opened into a line of trucks turned market stalls and a view of the ridge beyond. “We’ll run the south trail at dark. Quiet. No blood in the square.”
“Appreciate that,” Hank said. “Some folks still flinch when you scratch.”
Thane’s mouth tugged at one corner. “I’m delicate as a feather.”
“Sure,” Hank said dryly.
Caleb crossed the square with an armful of split wood, the kind of careful, grateful posture that comes from trying to repay a debt you know you can’t. His son trailed him, dragging a stick like a banner. Anna stood near the council notice board, reading ration updates with her arms wrapped around herself though it wasn’t cold.
Gabriel ended the song with a flourish that made two teenagers clap as if they’d been sneaking applause from before the Fall. He caught the boy’s eye, waggled his brows, and exaggerated a bow; the kid blushed and hid a smile behind his knuckles.
The morning settled into work. Mark headed toward the generator building with Marta and an engineer named Dale, who wore his skepticism like a second toolbelt. Gabriel kept the square warm with jokes and chords. Thane drifted the perimeter like a tide, pausing to lift a trailer tongue that had fallen and set it with an ease that made the owner stare and then stammer thanks.
By afternoon, the sky had that washed-out clarity that means wind’s coming. Thane met Hank in the shadow of the church’s crossless steeple. They spoke in low voices while the town breathed its chores around them.
“South road watch reports dust,” Hank said, peering through a pair of binoculars whose hinges had been repaired with tape and hope. “Vehicle. One truck, maybe two, just beyond the bend.”
“Armed?”
“Can’t tell yet. But they’re not sightseeing.”
Thane keyed his Motorola to channel five. “Mark.”
Static, then Mark’s calm voice. “Go ahead.”
“We’ve got wheels coming in south. Can you give me street control and lights if we need them?”
“I can give you everything short of a Broadway premiere,” Mark said. “I pre-wired the south approach last month—steel cable anchors in the posts, ready to winch. We can pull a barrier across the road and cut the streetlights to dark. Also…that siren I swore I wasn’t going to connect.”
“The one that makes Hank’s dog bark,” Thane said.
“The very same. I can keep it quiet until you need a heartbeat to scare them.”
“Stand by,” Thane said.
He looked past Hank to the square—Gabriel talking Sofia through a rhythm, Ben grinning like a man who’d found a piece of himself under the dust. Thane’s gaze softened for half a breath, the medallion at his throat catching a stray strip of sun like a secret flashing SOS. Then he turned south.
“Get your deputies into place,” he told Hank. “Quiet, nonlethal if possible. I’ll take point on the road. Gabriel—”
“I heard,” Gabriel said, appearing at his side like a grin with claws. “I’ll walk them to the shelters and keep everybody calm.”
“Tone it down,” Thane said, deadpan. “You’re terrifying when you’re charming.”
Gabriel’s eyes lit. “You noticed.”
They moved. The town practiced quiet like a skill; people melted into doorways and behind tarps without panic’s stink. Hank’s deputies ghosted to corners. Dale, the skeptical engineer, hovered near Mark’s makeshift control board inside the substation, nervous energy sparking off him.
“Alright,” Mark said, fingers steady on two toggles and a hand-wound crank. “On my mark, we pull the cable across the south bend and kill the lights on the street. That will funnel them into the choke. Thane…”
“Already there,” Thane said over the radio, bare-pawed feet silent in the dust as he slipped along the ditch line to a position where the road doglegged between two leaning pines. The world shrank to breath, heartbeat, and the low growl of a diesel coming too fast.
The first truck nosed around the bend: a half-ton pickup with its paint scoured to primer and its windshield spidered in a way that made you wonder about the last argument it had with a tree. Three men in the cab, one in the bed holding a rifle like a promise he wasn’t ready to keep.
“Now,” Thane said.
Mark cranked. A steel cable lifted like a taught smile across the lane, anchoring in the post on the far side with a clack that felt definitive. Mark flipped another toggle; the streetlights three blocks ahead winked off, leaving the approach in a soft dusk that turned the town into shapes.
The driver swore. Braked hard. The truck’s nose dipped and slewed sideways, tires coughing dust. The second vehicle—a smaller SUV riding too close—tapped the bumper and stalled at an angle that made retreat awkward.
“Stay in the cab and we’ll talk,” Thane called, stepping into view with his hands open, claws clearly visible but at rest. His voice carried easily. “You’re inside a town’s line. Our rules.”
The rifle in the bed lifted, wavered. The man in the passenger seat yelled, “Supplies. Gas. We trade.”
“You try to take,” Thane said, not unkind. “Your approach says panic, not trade.”
A door opened. Hank swore under his breath and lifted his hand, signaling his deputies to hold.
“Stay inside,” Thane said, more command than request. He kept his posture low, nonthreatening, the hard lesson of a hundred anxious encounters in his bones.
The man in the bed clicked the rifle off safe because fear makes people dumber than hunger ever did. He didn’t aim; he just wanted to feel like he could.
“Don’t,” Thane said quietly.
Something—pride, terror, the momentum of a week’s worth of bad choices—won. The man jerked the barrel toward Thane. The crack of the shot tore the air.
For a second there was only the whiplash sound and the smell of hot metal. Thane’s body twisted, then stilled. The round caught him high in the chest. He rocked back a step like someone had punched him with a fist made of clay.
Gabriel’s growl carried down the block, low and bright as a blade.
Hank yelled, “Hold!”
Thane looked down at the hole darkening his black shirt. The pain was a hot, intimate thing, then it was something else—his body remembering what it was built for. Blood welled, then knit under skin that had learned the trick of mending faster than the world could break it.
He lifted his gaze and met the shooter’s eyes. No anger. Just an old, heavy disappointment.
“You done?” Thane asked.
The man in the bed made a sound like a word trying to remember itself. His hands shook. The rifle dipped.
On the substation steps, Dale had a clean line of sight he hadn’t asked for. He saw the hole blooming on Thane’s chest. He saw it close. He put a hand against the brick as if to steady the town itself.
“Oh,” he whispered to no one. “Oh, hell.”
Hank moved first, voice a sharp whistle. “Guns down. Hands out the window. We sort this like civilized people.”
The driver, seeing the arithmetic of the moment finally balance, raised both palms. The passenger followed, eyes locked on Thane with a kind of reverent horror. The man in the bed laid the rifle across the truck rail like a sleeping snake and held his hands high.
“Mark,” Thane said, never looking away from the truck, “bring the siren up just enough that their hearts remember how to be small.”
A soft, rising wail slipped into the air. Not loud enough to panic the town—just enough to make the hair rise on your neck and the animal in your chest sit down.
“We can talk,” Thane said. “We can trade. But you don’t point steel at Libby. Not ever.”
Minutes later, the scene unknotted like a careful braid. Hank’s deputies relieved the men of their weapons and led them to the square for a proper talk at the council table. The second vehicle rolled backward under Mark’s direction as he eased the cable down, then nudged it into a spot where it wouldn’t block anyone’s day. The town exhaled.
Gabriel passed Thane at the edge of the street and bumped his shoulder, a press of gratitude that lasted a heartbeat longer than necessary. “You good?” he said under his breath.
“Shirt’s not,” Thane said. The hole had tightened to a puckered star. “I liked this one.”
“I’ll fix it,” Gabriel teased, then sobered, eyes searching his. “You held back.”
“Had to,” Thane said. He glanced at the square where people were peeking back out. “They don’t need the full show.”
A shadow fell across them. Dale stood there, grease-stained hands empty, eyes a little too wide. He looked at Thane’s chest, then up at Thane’s face.
“I, uh,” Dale said, voice gone rough. “I saw. What you did. Or didn’t do. I—”
Thane waited, patient as weather.
Dale exhaled through his teeth. “I’ve been one of the loud ones. ‘Monsters in our streets.’” He shook his head once, hard. “If a monster stands in front of my kid and takes a bullet so my kid doesn’t have to hear that sound again… I don’t know what that makes you. But I’m damn glad you’re on our side.”
Thane nodded, the tiny bow he gave to truths he respected. “We’re on our side,” he said. “Same side.”
Dale glanced at Gabriel, who was already grinning at him like forgiveness was a joke they all got to be in on. Dale huffed a laugh, wiped his palms on his pants as if something old could be cleaned away, and walked toward the hall to offer his hands to the day’s next necessary job.
Evening slid in slow and soft. The council negotiated like civilized people. The raiders—men with hunger for logic and desperation for fire—weren’t hard. They were just hard up. They left without their rifles but with food for three days and a map of where to find a herd that wouldn’t get anyone shot. Hank insisted they leave by the south road with a deputy for escort. They nodded like men who had been surprised by mercy and needed to invent a shape for gratitude.
Later, after the square had remembered laughter again and Gabriel had played a song that made the drum sound like a heartbeat never meant to be alone, the boy from Caleb’s family approached Gabriel with a tin cup held in both hands.
“Dad says,” the boy mumbled, eyes on his shoes, “you saved us. Twice.”
Gabriel crouched, the guitar bumping his back. “Tell your dad he’s wrong,” he said softly. “We all did.”
The boy mustered the courage to look up. “Are you…afraid? Of anything?”
Gabriel thought, gaze sliding toward the edge of town where the trees gathered night. “Yeah,” he said. “Bad coffee. And forgetting the words when it matters.”
The boy smiled, small and real. “I can bring you coffee,” he said, and ran back to Caleb like he’d accomplished something giant.
Up on Blossom Ridge, Mark tightened the repeater’s mast guyline and wiped a smear of grease off the face of his portable receiver. The town’s local chatter made a bright, chaotic band on his display. Beneath it, a quieter pulse threaded a line like a fish moving under a frozen lake.
He turned the gain a fraction. The pulse resolved into three slow packets, evenly spaced. Then text scrolled in blocky letters across his spare monitor, piggybacking on a frequency Mark had coded for private pack chatter.
HELLO.
PACK.
COME NORTH.
Mark’s ears tipped toward the dark notch where the mountains swallowed the sky. He let the wind talk in the spruce for a while, counting the beats between those three words until they felt like something he could put down without dropping.
“Thane,” he said finally, keying the mic. His voice was calm, but something old and bright lived at the edges of it. “We’ve got company. Or a map.”
Thane’s reply came from the square, low and steady, a stone dropped into a clear pool. “Copy.”
Gabriel’s voice chimed in, a smile audible even over static. “What’s north, professor?”
Mark looked toward the far ridge where stars were beginning to find themselves. “We’ll find out,” he said. “Together.”
Below him, Libby glowed in small, stubborn lights—strings over doorways, lanterns on porches, the very human constellations of people who had decided to make another morning possible. In the clearing beyond the last fence, three silhouettes stood a moment longer than necessary, claws catching starlight, the leather cords at two throats cold as promises.
The world had ended. The pack hadn’t.
And the north was calling.