Chapter 30 - Wolfson
Sixteen months ago
The Fall
The hills of shivers and shadows recede until nothing remains but the edge and the ache.
And Frankie’s shout.
“Wolf!” She races toward me like a flare in the dark. Too loud. Too bright.
“Stop screaming.” My voice is flat. Final. It doesn’t belong to me. “The entire Arctic can hear you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Already told you.”
“No.” She scans the polar night, searching for me in the shadows. “You didn’t tell me you were leaving.”
“We have all these talks, but you haven’t heard a thing.”
But she does hear me. The problem is she can’t hear the dead parts inside me.
“You’re standing on the edge of the cliff for the same reason I stood there two months ago.” She moves closer. “Leo talked me down that day, and I’m so fucking grateful.”
Sure, she is. She’s also terrified, freezing, starving, and facing a looming, excruciating death.
“The idiot should’ve let you jump.” The lie is easier to swallow than the thing breaking the bones in my chest.
“You don’t mean that.”
“We’re murderers.”
Oh, she hates that truth and comes at me with her flapping, frantic kindness, throwing words like lifelines, trying to talk me off the ledge. Begging, bargaining, and making promises about bright futures.
She says all the right things and nails every line that used to latch onto me, but the hooks don’t catch anymore. I’m done talking. Done hurting. Done feeling. I’m just done.
“I want to die.” Like a coward, I aim the pistol at the space between her ribs. “In my heart, I’m already dead. I need you with me. We can finally be together.”
Her eyes dart to my finger on the trigger. “Wait! Please, I don’t want to die. Not like this.”
I would never hurt her. She knows that.
“I love you.” It’s small, true, and entirely useless. It’s the last honest thing I have to give.
Training the gun away from her, I pull the trigger. The shot cracks, and white-hot pain detonates up my arm. Kody’s voice cuts through the shocking, blinding agony, and I look down at the arrow sticking out of my bicep.
He shot me. He actually fucking shot me.
Leo emerges from the dark with a rifle as Kody reloads another bolt.
It all arranges into neat geometry—Frankie in front, them at angles of protection, me the loose thing in the middle.
“You’re choosing her over your own brother?” I spit at them, dizzy with blood loss and shame.
“No, they’re not,” Frankie cries as Kody shouts, “Yes,” and that one word, that final truth, makes me instantly, violently sick.
Sick with envy. Sick with wrath. Sick with all the deadly sins.
I drop the gun, spread my arms like Christ on the cross, and step back. I’m hellborn and hell-raised, and so I let hell pull me back in.
The fall is a slow burn of moments I want to forget. A collapse of memory and regrets. The wind strips breath from my mouth. My stomach climbs into my throat. My whole life becomes a long, mournful note on the saxophone.
Will they miss me? The thought is lame and painfully human. But the answer is omnipotent.
Yes.
Yes, they’ll fucking miss me, and they’ll suffer for this.
In a tunnel of wind that’s mine to die in, something inside me startles awake. Not heroism. Not courage. It’s a single godawful thought.
I can’t let them drag my body from the river. I can’t throw them a corpse and call it escape. Picturing Frankie and my brothers sifting through pieces of scattered bone and organs… That’s the too-late image that changes my mind.
Mid-fall, I do the only thing I can. I flinch, twist, and fling my one good arm, grabbing for anything that isn’t final.
My fingers connect with snow and brittle birch. The knot of shrubby branches juts from the cliff like a splintered handshake. I grip it, and the wood bites back, shredding my palm and splitting my nails.
It takes half my weight in one impossible, creaking complaint. Then it takes the rest. I hang by an arm between vertigo and salvation, my breath a ratchet of pain.
Beneath my dangling feet, the glacial river awaits, spitting and churning. A massive tooth of stone juts out of the rapids. That’s where my head would have been if I’d kept going.
It’s only a matter of time before my fingers slip. But I’m ready for it.
I shove off with a strength that’s more will than muscle and swing like a pendulum, using the branch as a fulcrum to alter trajectory.
Wind slaps my face. Snow punches my cheeks. I twist my hips mid-air and aim my body in a desperate prayer.
Roll. Absorb. Don’t splatter on impact.
I shoulder the angle and hit the icy current. My wounded arm slams into rocks. My ribs eat the vibration, and for a second so precise I can measure it, I think, Holy shit, I stuck that fucking landing.
Then the river peels open its snarling, fanged jaw and sucks me down its throat.
The undercurrent grabs my legs, dragging me beneath the surface as the world shifts sideways, spinning and pulling me at breakneck speeds far away from Hoss.
Ice chunks bash my face as I claw for a rock, a root, anything to stop the ruthless rolling. The arrow in my arm wrenches and catches on debris like a barbaric anchor.
The choice is ugly and instant. I curl my fingers around the bolt’s shaft and yank. My bicep screams, and blood sprays across the water. Vicious, fiery pain stabs up my arm, obliterating tendon and muscle.
No time for shock. My lungs demand air. For endless miles, I paddle my limbs with a panic born of instinct. Agony flares with each stroke as I choke on the brutal, shredding pain of slowly drowning.
The whitewater rapids sweep me farther and farther from the hills with violent urgency, smacking me around with the force of a god-shaped hand, and siphoning the last drop of heat from my pores.
It’s a cold so vast it isn’t cold. It’s a breath, the final one, before the body quits fighting.
My vision edges with colorless static. Every movement becomes heavier than the one before. My lungs burn for breath I can’t coax.
When the river falls silent, death answers.
The Resurrection
I wake in the dark with a gasp.
Pain. It’s everywhere. In my lungs. In my teeth. In the roots of my filthy hair. But it’s a language I understand. It tells me I’m alive.
Unless pain exists in the afterlife. In that case, I’m fucked.
The river crashes nearby, close enough to lap at my legs. But the ground beneath me is solid.
Lying on my back, I try to shift my body, but it’s too heavy. My limbs stick to the riverbank like slabs of cement. Nothing moves. Not a shiver.
Not good.
When the shivering stops, that’s the real silence. I must be dead.
I can’t feel my balls.
Oh, fuck. What if I have frostbite on my dick? Will I lose it for eternity?
I’ve died and gone to cold hell in a handbasket.
Except there’s no handbasket, and I’ve lost my dick.
I stare into the void. Is this it? This is what the end feels like? I traded twenty-three years of emptiness for a dickless eternity of more emptiness?
That’s on brand.
A shape moves above me, cutting the blackness of afterlife into a silhouette. At first, it’s nothing but a lighter dark. Then my eyes adjust, taking in the outline of a man.
White hair. No, blond. Feathered tufts of it fall from beneath a white, fur-lined hood.
He wears white all over, from the long, goose-down parka and immaculate gloves to the tailored snow pants.
Not a smudge of dirt on his hiking boots.
And that knitted white scarf? It won’t survive a day in this climate.
Did he slide down from heaven on a rainbow? Or just materialize out of the ether?
His face is the kind that glows in the stain-glass windows of an old church, perfect bone structure, backlit by a halo of light. His coat billows around him like a ceremonial robe as he holds out his hands in a peace offering.
“Are you God?” I rasp past cracked lips.
“Yes.”
“Is this a social visit? Or are you on the clock?”
“I’m always working.”
“Answering prayers?”
“Sometimes I save lives. Sometimes I end them.” He sweeps his gaze to the river and returns to me. “Today, I’m your savior.”
“I thought you’d be bigger.”
“I thought you’d be more grateful.”
“No, really. I pictured less clothes. Maybe a tunic. Definitely sandals. But the snow pants are a solid choice. Nobody wants frostbitten nuts. Do you even feel the cold?”
“Do you?” He rips open my coat, exposing my river-soaked chest to the bitter wind. “You’re lucky to be here.”
Lucky? I don’t think so. I fought tooth and nail to get here, and now I want to go back. It’s becoming harder to form words and straighten my thoughts. None of this makes sense.
“You’re hypothermic.” A clinical melody sings through his voice as he rezips my coat. “We need to raise your core temperature. You’re losing heat.”
He talks like a doctor, like a minister, like a man with a plan.
Then he reaches for something, and for a second, I think he’s taking my picture.
A bright flash follows, and I close my eyes against it. More clicks. More flashes. Definitely a camera.
Is he cataloging a miracle? Or documenting a death?
He pulls a thermal blanket from somewhere behind him and kneels like a man in church, tucking the material under my shoulders and ribs.
I can’t lift my head. Or my arms. Opening my eyes is a struggle. “Am I dead?”
“You were.” He carefully removes his gloves, finger by finger, and touches my throat, checking my pulse. “You rose from the dead because of me. I raised you up by my mercy. My miracle. Remember that.”
Warmth blooms as his hands move over me with certainty, quick rubs across my shoulders, tucking the blanket tight, coaxing my limbs into stabbing pins and needles.
If I’m not dead, then… “Where are we?”
“The Brooks Range.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the heart of Alaska’s Arctic region.” He eyes my bloodstained sleeve and turns away to dig through a bag.
Alaska. I always wondered where we live. Now I know.
How far did the river take me from Hoss? Miles, if I had to guess, which equates to weeks this time of year. Too far to hike back.
Too far to be found by my brothers anytime soon. But they will come for me as long as I stay here, find shelter, and stay hydrated.
Should I tell the Almighty One about my stranded family? If he’s truly the Lord of All, wouldn’t he already know?
The breathing, pulsing, still very much alive instinct behind my ribs clenches. Not with hope. More like alarm.
He tapes and packs around the hole in my arm with sterile hands, iodine wipes, and folded gauze. Amid the pain, I focus on the wrongness in his practiced patience, on the carefulness that aims to own the moment. He’s too clean by miles.
If he’s God, couldn’t he just heal my wound with the touch of a shimmering, magical finger?
If he’s not God, what is he? A bush pilot? Off-grid trapper? Seasonal operator?
Except men who belong out here don’t have soft, manicured hands. They don’t wear knitted scarves and take pictures. And they sure as fuck don’t fold their gloves like clergy.
“Who are you?”
“Dr. Rhett Howell. And you, Wolfson Strakh, are mine. This will help with shock.” He moves a small vial into view.
I know the look on a man’s face when he wants to control a thing that refuses to be controlled. I see that look now as he plunges a syringe into the vial.
“Don’t.” I try to push him away, but the river stole my thunder.
“This is for you.” He leans close, breath warm and terribly calm. “To make you comfortable. To revive you fully.”
A wild, hungry thing snarls in my gut, and it’s far meaner than a doctor with a syringe. But before I can unsheathe its teeth and rip off his face, the needle enters my skin.
“Sleep now,” he purrs.
The cold curls into my chest and closes like a fist. I try to scream, but my voice is a bubble that pops.
My eyes slide closed on the quiet, awful certainty that I escaped one nightmare only to wake in a new one.