Caroline
Afon is up off the blanket and into his boots before I can even sit up, the Remington at the ready is in his hands. He's at the edge of the camp, head cocked, listening to the sound.
"Stay here," he tells me without looking back. "Stay low. Wolf, with me."
Then he's gone into the trees, Wolf bounding along at his heel, both of them swallowed by the white.
I pull the flannel back on with shaking hands and get my pants hiked up.
My ankle throbs but I barely feel it. I crouch behind the duffel and try to make myself as small as humanly possible.
The engine sound rises and falls. One snowmobile, maybe two.
They're not close yet. But they're not far, either.
And then a tinny little beep pierces the air.
It's a sound I've never heard before. A flat, electronic warble, muffled, coming from inside Afon's jacket where he dropped it by the blanket.
I freeze. It rings again.
I know instantly what it is.
I shouldn't touch it. It's his. Whatever's on that phone, it's the thing he's been hiding from me this whole time, and he'd rather bleed for it than fill me in.
But when it rings a third time…
… well, at that point, I have no choice.
I lunge for the jacket, dig through the pocket, and pull it out. I don't think before I press Accept. "Hello?"
There's a pause on the other end. A long one. When the man speaks, his voice is deep, even, and very, very calm. "This is not Afon."
"No. No, it's—" My heart is going so fast I can barely speak. "Who is this?"
"I think the better question," the man replies, "is who are you, and why are you answering Afon Satyrin's phone?"
"My name is Caroline. Caroline Oglethorpe. I'm—" I look toward the trees where Afon disappeared. "I'm with him. We're in trouble. We need help."
The pause this time is shorter. "Oglethorpe," he repeats. "Bill and Susan's girl."
"Yes." My breath catches. "You knew my parents?"
"I knew of them," he says cryptically. "My name is Lukas Lazarev. Afon used to work for me. He has my number for one reason and one reason only, which is that he is in the kind of trouble he can't get out of alone. Tell me what's happening."
I almost laugh. Lukas Lazarev. The man Afon wouldn't call. The cavalry Afon would rather die than summon.
"There are men hunting us," I explain as fast as I can.
"Viktor Reznik. He rebuilt something called the Lastochka and now, he wants Afon dead.
They abducted me, they burned Afon's cabin, they've been chasing us for days.
We're in the mountains above Pike Hollow and I think they found us.
I can hear the snowmobiles. Afon went to look. Please—"
"Stop." His voice doesn't rise but it cuts through my panic anyway. "Listen to me carefully. Where exactly are you?"
"I don't know exactly. North of Pike Hollow. In the woods off the road by the church."
"Reznik," he murmurs. "Blyat'. I'm sending men now. They'll be in Pike Hollow by nightfall."
"Nightfall?" I squeak out. The engines are louder now. "We don't have until nightfall."
"Then you need to get out of those woods and into town. Find people and stay near them. Reznik won't move on a crowd—"
A rifle shot cracks through the trees, startling me so bad that I drop the phone. It lands in the snow. I scramble for it, get it back to my ear. "They're shooting. I have to go. I have to find him—"
"Do not go toward the gunfire, Caroline. Stay where—"
I end the call. I shove the phone in my pocket and I run.
I know it's stupid. Afon told me to stay down. But there's a man out there who jumped in front of bullets for me, who said I was made for him and only him, and I am not going to crouch behind a duffel bag while somebody shoots at him.
I crash through the snow toward the sound, branches whipping at my face. The trees thin. I come out at the top of a small rise and there he is, thirty yards off, down behind a fallen log, the Remington against his shoulder.
He turns his head. He sees me.
Our eyes lock.
His mouth opens. He's about to scream at me to get down, get back, get away—
And then the world explodes.
They come out of the trees on three sides.
I don't even understand how. From nowhere, there are suddenly men everywhere, four of them, five, ten dark shapes against the snow with guns up.
They were waiting. The snowmobiles were never the real threat.
The snowmobiles were the noise that pulled us out of hiding so the rest of them could close the net.
The first shot misses me by a foot. I feel it more than hear it, a hard punch of air past my cheek.
"DOWN!" Afon roars.
I drop. I hit the snow hard and the cold shock of it spears through me, snatching my breath away.
Afon pivots. He's fast in a way I've never seen, not even in the bunkhouse.
The Remington barks once and a man on the left goes down.
He racks it and fires again and a second man spins and folds.
He's moving the whole time, never still, putting the fallen log between himself and the others, drawing their fire away from me.
It works. They're all looking at him now.
A man comes around the far side of the log. Afon doesn't see him. He's blind on that side, the wounded side, his attention riveted on the two shooters to his front. The man raises a pistol, lines it up on the back of Afon's head, and I open my mouth to scream a warning that won't come fast enough—
Wolf hits the man at a dead run.
He comes out of nowhere, a hundred and twenty pounds of black and tan, and he takes the man down by the arm, jaws clamped, his whole body twisting to drag the shooter off his feet.
The pistol fires wild into the trees. The man screams and beats at Wolf's head, but Wolf doesn't let go.
He hauls and shakes and pulls the man down into the snow, away from Afon's blind side.
The second shooter turns.
I see it happen slow, like the world dropped into syrup. The man swings his rifle off Afon. He points it at Wolf. The Rottweiler has the first man down in the snow, jaws locked, shaking him senseless. He doesn't see it coming.
"NO!" I scream.
The shot cracks.
Wolf yelps. It's a sound I've never heard him make. He lets go of the man's arm and stumbles sideways in the snow. Red blooms across his shoulder, dark against the black fur.
Then he tumbles down.
"Wolf!"
Hearing me scream, Afon spins around at the sound and puts the second shooter down with one round through the chest.
Afon doesn't stop there. He moves through the rest of them fast. One shot, then another. A man tries to run and Afon drops him before he makes the trees. Then it's quiet, except for the wind and Wolf's labored breathing.
I'm on my hands and knees, crawling toward the dog. "Wolf. Wolf, hey, buddy, look at me."
Afon arrives there a second later. He drops to his knees in the red snow on the other side of Wolf and puts his hand on the dog's heaving side.
"He's breathing," Afon says. "Shoulder. Through the meat, maybe."
"Maybe?" I'm crying. "What do you mean, maybe?"
"Let me look."
The dog is down in the snow now, panting on his side. There's red shining bright against the white near his hindquarters. He lifts his head and looks at Afon and his tail moves once, weakly, thumping the snow.
I have never seen Afon's face do what it does now. Every wall he's ever built, every inch of concrete, is gone. He crumbles in the snow beside the dog and rests both hands on him, as he lets loose a single, broken sob.
"No," he says. "No, no, you stupid, brave idiot."
A snowmobile whine. Closer.
Afon's head snaps up. The fixed, hunted look comes back, but it's cracked now, broken down the middle.
"They're regrouping," he says. "More will be coming. We can't stay."
"We can't move him—"
"We're not fucking leaving my dog." His voice doesn't allow for argument. He gets one arm under Wolf, gathers him up against his chest, and the dog whimpers but goes limp and trusting in his embrace. "Get our stuff. As much as you can carry. Now."
I run back to the camp to grab the duffel, the blanket, the binoculars. The phone's still in my pocket. When I get back, Afon is on his feet with Wolf cradled to his chest and blood soaking into his sweater, his and the dog's both, and he's looking down the slope toward the road.
"There." He nods east. "One of them must have come in by truck. Had to. They didn't haul this many men here on snowmobiles." He starts moving, fast, down the rise. "Stay behind me. If we find the truck, we'll take it."
We slip through the trees. I can hear the snowmobiles behind us, two of them now, circling, looking. Afon doesn't run a straight line. He weaves, uses the forest as cover, keeps us off the open ground. Wolf is silent in his arms except for a thin, terrible panting.
Then I see what we're looking for. Down at the tree line where the woods meet the road is a pickup, dark blue, dusted with snow, the driver's door hanging open like somebody left it in a hurry.
"There!" I gasp.
"I see it."
We break from the trees. Afon goes around to the passenger side and lays Wolf across the bench seat, gentle as anything, then says, "Hold him. Keep pressure on the wound, hard as you can, both hands."
I climb in. I arrange Wolf's head in my lap and my hands on the wound. When I press, the heat of his blood comes up through my fingers. He looks up at me and I make myself smile at him.
"You're okay," I tell him. "You big goof. You're okay."
Afon slams the door and goes around. The keys are in the ignition, thank God, so he cranks it and the engine catches. He throws it into reverse, backs it hard onto the road, then drops it into drive and we go.
As soon as we start to accelerate, a snowmobile bursts from the trees behind us.
A man on the back of it raises a gun. Afon doesn't slow down.
He keeps the gas pedal flat-out down the snow-packed road, taking the curves at a suicidal speed.
Little by little the snowmobile falls back.
It can't match us on the open road. A shot pings off the tailgate. Then another, wide.
Then nothing.
We come around a bend and the trees close behind us. They're gone.
None of us says anything for a long time. There's just the engine, and the heater clicking on. Thank God, there's also still Wolf's breathing under my hands.
"He took that bullet for you," I say finally. "Wolf…"
"I know." Afon's hands are tight on the wheel. He won't look away from the road. "I know what he did."
"He's going to be okay, right?"
"The wound's high. Missed anything vital, I think. He's losing blood but it's not pumping, it's seeping. That's good. That's something." He swallows. "He needs a vet, though. A real one. Soon."
"Where?" I keep pressing on the injury as Wolf groans and shifts. "Where do we go? You said town isn't safe."
The truck eats up the road, snow flying up on both sides.
I watch his face in profile, the beard, the broken nose, the star at his throat, all of it set hard.
"There's a man," he says slowly. "One man with the kind of reach that can shut all of this down in a single night.
Reznik, the whole Lastochka, handled. A man who could have a vet and a doctor and twenty guns waiting wherever I tell him to put them. "
I gulp. "Lukas Lazarev."
His head turns my direction just a fraction. "How do you know that name?"
"The phone rang, while you were gone, back at the camp. I answered it," I explain in a halting rush. "It was him. Lukas. He knew my parents' names. He said that he's already moving men, that they'll be in Pike Hollow by nightfall—"
"You talked to him?"
I feel the guilt come up hot in my throat like vomit. "I didn't know who he was, Afon, I just answered—I'm sorry—"
He shakes his head. "Don't apologize. You did right." His knuckles are white on the wheel. "I've spent two weeks doing everything in my power not to make that call. I should've known it would happen sooner rather than later."
"Why?"
The road climbs, then drops. Wolf shudders under my hands and I press harder.
"Because the price of help from Lukas Lazarev is the rest of your life," Afon explains in a grim rasp.
"I paid fifteen years of mine to that man already.
I swore I'd die in those mountains before I'd owe him another minute.
" He exhales, long and slow. His thumb finds the bronze ring and strokes the metal.
The dog whimpers. Afon glances down at the blood on my hands, the blood on the seat, the gray creeping into the dog's gums, and I watch the decision finish itself in his eyes.
"But Wolf took a bullet for me," he continues. "And I can't keep you safe out here anymore. Not from this. So." He sets his jaw and nods. "We go to Lukas. I'll owe him whatever he wants, and that's fine, so long as you keep breathing—and this idiot dog does, too."
I don't know what to say. So I reach across Wolf with one bloody hand and I find Afon's where it rests on the gearshift, and I cover it, ring and all.
"Then call him," I say. "He's waiting."
Afon takes the phone from my pocket with his free hand, never letting go of mine, never taking his eyes off the road. He stares at the screen for a long moment, that single saved number, the thing he's been running from this whole time. His thumb hovers.
Then he presses it.
It rings once. Twice. Wolf's breathing flutters in my lap and I press down and whisper to him to hold on, hold on, we're going somewhere safe.
Beep. The line connects.
"It's me," Afon growls. "I need to ask a favor."