Sixty Two

The current had her, and she was too tired and too hurt to fight it head-on, so she didn't. She worked with it instead — angling herself, conserving, reading the water rather than battling it.

It was the right call. It wasn’t the call an experienced swimmer made, she that was panicking suddenly gain a real energy and strength all of a sudden.

She was battered and bleeding and half-drowned and she suddenly changed the table with such boost.

Something definitely had happened there.

I had been told this girl had no wolf. No power. Nothing exceptional.

But with what I just saw I was revising that assessment in real time.

The branch caught her, or she caught it — I couldn't tell anymore which was which. She pulled herself hand over hand along it with arms that had no business still functioning, clawed up the bank on sheer will, and collapsed face-first into the mud.

I came in downstream and surfaced quietly, moving to the bank twenty feet from her. Stood in the shallows and watched her I sent a signal again for my pack not to make a move for now.

She lay there for perhaps four seconds.

Then she pushed herself up.

"I'm alive," I heard her say, very quietly, to the dark.

She stood and wrapped her arms around herself — she was shaking hard, the river cold having gone into her bones — and looked back at the water. Her bike was gone and she knew it. I watched her face go through the full sequence of that loss in about three seconds: grief, reality, the deliberate decision to set it aside and move.

She named the bike. She said goodbye to it.

She turned toward the forest and took three steps.

Then she stopped.

Because she had heard what I had placed for her to hear.

My pack had done exactly what they were supposed to do. They had moved through the trees silently, on the dry ground away from the water, and positioned themselves in the arc I had mapped out before we'd ever left the compound tonight.

Thirty feet wide. A complete semicircle, one side open toward the water so she couldn't feel surrounded in the direction she'd come from.

One by one, in the way that I had found over the years tended to land with the most impact, eyes appeared in the dark. The low, ambient light of a pack in controlled readiness — not the blazing, aggressive glow of shift-mode, just the quiet, unmistakable gold and green of wolves who knew exactly where they were and exactly what they were doing there.

She saw them.

Every muscle in her body went rigid at once.

And then — I watched this very carefully — she pulled herself upright. Raised her chin. Her jaw set in a way that was at direct odds with the fact that she was bleeding from multiple wounds, wearing a ruined dress in pre-dawn cold, and had about forty-five seconds ago been drowning.

She looked afraid, well she should be. The scent made that plain — that particular sharp-edged adrenaline that fear produced in even the most composed individuals.

She was afraid yet she was standing anyway.

'