Chapter 1 - The Spring (Danika)

The spring lay glazed over with ice so thin it showed the water beneath. Three pups convulsed at its edge, their small bodies jerking against the frozen ground, dark foam gathering at the corners of their mouths. Their limbs moved without rhythm, without will, paws scraping furrows in the snow that filled with meltwater and blood. A mother knelt over the smallest—her hands slick with slush, pressing snow to her child’s throat while the lips above turned the color of bruised plums. The gathered pack had formed its uneven ring, shoulders tight, voices dropping to murmurs that cut off every time Héctor Cruz shifted his weight.

I stood among them but not with them, a half-step outside the ring, where the heat of bodies ended and the wind began. My amber eyes moved between the pups and the spring, reading what the water showed: glassy, silver-bright, and deceptively clean. No oil-sheen of common poison. No disturbance in the frozen margin where something might have been poured. They all avoided eye contact as I stepped closer, including Mateo, who’d shared my patrol route since autumn, and Inés, whose child I’d carried through fever three nights prior. Their shoulders angled away as if my presence carried contamination.

Tomás moved through the crowd at Héctor’s nod, searching bags, upending packs onto the snow with the methodical panic of a man who needed to find something specific. His hands shook when he reached my worn canvas bag. He pulled out the small glass vial—the dark liquid inside viscous against all that white—and held it up where the torchlight caught it.

The murmuring stopped.

Héctor turned. His eyes moved from the vial to me without surprise or reservation, as if he’d already measured the distance between those two points and found it sufficient. He didn’t raise his voice. “The spring,” he said, in the same clipped register he used to assign patrol routes. “You poisoned it.”

“That’s not mine.”

“Your pack. Your water source.” He named the facts like he was reading from a ledger. “Three days you’ve been refusing shift calls. Three days you’ve kept your distance from the den.”

“I didn’t poison the spring.”

I looked to Tomás. His eyes dropped to the vial in his own hands, then to the snow between his boots, and nowhere near my face. The pack had begun to close in—not all of them, but enough—wolves I had run beside, killed beside, and slept back-to-back with in the border snow. They came from three sides, leaving me the spring at my back and the dark at my front.

Héctor gave the order.

The first strike caught my scarred ribs, folding me forward around the pain like a door slamming shut. I tasted blood before I felt the knee driven into my spine, arching me backward, my face hitting snow that filled my mouth with cold and iron. I forced myself upright once, blood on my teeth, my eyes finding Héctor’s through the swelling that was already narrowing my vision. I didn’t beg. 

I do not beg.

The rank marker tore from my clothing in a single gesture, held up so the whole pack saw the Cruz line burned into the leather. Then it dropped in the snow. My outer layers followed—jacket, sweater, the thermal undershirt that had been my mother’s. The cold touched my skin like a waiting hand.

They dragged me to the tree line, two of them, their grips familiar from a hundred hunts where we’d pulled down elk together. They left me on the far side of the boundary stones, naked and bleeding, where the wind scoured the ground clean, and the amber torchlight of the spring was already swallowed by black pines and distance.

I stayed on my hands and knees. My breath came in shallow pulls, each one carrying the familiar pack scents that were already fading—wet fur, woodsmoke, and the biting scent of Cruz territory marked in urine and musk. Ahead, the dark forest waited with its weight of silence.

I reached inward for the heat and the change. For the wolf that should answer, that had always answered, even unawakened, even dormant. 

I found nothing. My bones wouldn’t respond, like they were locked behind a door inside my chest, from the other side. The cold moved in without resistance, settling against my skin, then beneath it, then deeper.

The wind changed.

A sound reached me—something large. I heard the crusted snow breaking as a single massive paw pressed into it, the powder beneath compressing. 

I raised my head. 

A figure separated itself from the tree line where shadows should have been absolute. A black wolf, larger than any I had ever seen before in my life, stepped out of the dark between the pines. It stood still and watched me as I began to lose consciousness.