Sixty One

My wolf made a sound that, in a human, would have been a laugh. It wasn't quite that. But it was the closest equivalent.

'Did she just aim the machine at him.'

'She was going to hit him.'

'A mortal girl on a motorbike was going to ram Maxwell — full shift, two hundred and thirty pounds of Black Shadow's head enforcer — head on.'

"I am aware of what she was attempting to do, yes, it was stupid and dumb, and extremely desperate."

Unfortunately she didn't get the chance to complete it. One of the flanking wolves — Daniel I think, from the angle — came in from the side, claws first. The motorbike went down. She went with it.

My jaw tightened.

As expected.

I watched Maxwell's wolves pull back — not to help her or to finish her, but to play.

That was the word for it. The deliberate circling, the strategic intervals between lunges, the way they let her get back to her feet and grab the bike again not because she'd escaped but because they were choosing to let her believe she had.

They wanted to completely crush her hopes and will before killing her.

It was, frankly, the most insulting thing I had seen all evening. I fisted my hands watching it.

Not because of any feeling I had about her at that point — this was still operational, still a calculation — but because there was something genuinely offensive about what was being done, and I had never been able to sit with offensive things without cataloguing them for later accounting.

I was going to kill them, Maxwell and those three weak wolf. The list is getting long it’s about time I rule some out.

“Let’s move out” I gave out the signal

She took the cliffs approach on the second run.

I had moved us along the ridge by then, tracking her progress, and I was in position to see it from above when she reached the edge the second time. The wolves behind her. The drop in front of her. The absolute absence, from where she was standing, of any option that didn't end in either death or capture.

I had been in positions like that. I knew what the calculus felt like when you ran it and kept arriving at the same unsatisfactory answer.

She paused for exactly one second.

"I won't die tonight! Do you hear me?" I shouted at the pack chasing me.

"I'm not your prey!" She shouted and she went.

Without hesitation or a second pause she raised the throttle and the bike screaming off the edge into twenty feet of open air.

'NOW.'

I was already moving faster but she had already dived into the water with her bike.

The river at night was a different thing than the river in daylight. In daylight it was navigable — wide, fast, but at night, with recent rain having raised it half a metre above its usual level, it was something considerably less cooperative and more dangerous.

The current ran in contradictory directions in the deep sections, and the rocks that were visible above the surface in dry season were not visible now.

None of this was information I paused to consider. I dived in at the widest, deepest point — the fastest line to where she would surface if the current took her downstream.

She had gone in hard.

Was she planning to escape or commit sucide?

The impact sound had been wrong — too solid, the kind of sound that preceded broken bones and burst eardrums — and the bike had separated from her on impact, tumbling its own direction into the dark.

I raised my head up in the river and I found the bike first. The headlight was still on, spiralling slowly down through the cloudy water in a long, lazy arc.

She'll grieve that.

The thought arrived without calculation, and I noted it the way I noted anomalies — without dwelling, just registering that fact.

Then I found her through my sharp eyes and her scent.

She was underwater and she was fighting for her life. That much was immediately clear.

Her legs were kicking in a direction that was almost correct, and her hands were searching the water with the desperate, logical method of a person who was injured and freezing and running out of time but had not yet decided to stop.

She was quite far from me as the current had pushed her away. Despite how she tried to swim her injuries was making it impossible as she was drowning

Every few seconds she changed tactic, changed angle, adapting in real time to information that was costing her lung capacity to acquire.

My wolf pushed forward.

'Get her. Now. You see what I kept on saying. You are going to make us lose her—'

I frowned at myself because Rex was wrong.

I hadn’t acted because I wanted to confirm something but now it was costing us the current was separating us badly.

Then all of a sudden the current pushed her and she hit a rock.

She that was drowning and refusing to swim anymore.

Her hand hit a rock hard with her hand, her finger tips pressed into the rock stabilising impact of her palm.

That was strange!

I watched her redirect the entire trajectory of her body based on that single point of contact, kicking upward with everything she had left.

I stopped moving maintaining my position as I watched with intense focus.

Her head broke the surface.

The sound she made when she got air was not the sound of someone who had been lucky. It was the sound of someone who had worked for it.

'Why are you just — help her.'

"Rex…Watch," I said and he went silent watching the scene that was unfolding