Chapter Six The Pass
Chapter Six: The Pass
The car is loaded.
My mother is already in the back seat, her good shawl folded over her lap, the small bag with her three chosen things tucked at her feet.
I reach for the door handle.
"Gideon."
My father's voice comes from the steps behind us, and something in my chest drops before I've finished turning. He descends with two of his senior men at his flanks and his eyes find Gideon.
"There's a clause in the joint mining agreement that needs both signatures before close of business. Core territorial provisions."
The courtesy in his voice is the polished kind, the kind he uses when the decision has already been made. "It won't take long."
He glances at the car. At me, through the window.
"Lysandra is taking her mother to soak in a hot spring. There's no reason a Pack Alpha needs to escort them for that."
The realization hits the way cold water hits: all at once, no build-up.
He planned this.
Not a delay. A separation. The moment Gideon is inside that building, the men my father has arranged as our escort stop being decoration and become something else entirely.
I move before I decide to.
My hand finds Gideon's sleeve and closes around it, and the grip is harder than I mean it to be. I feel my own knuckle press against the bone of his wrist.
He turns and looks down at me, and whatever is in my face makes something shift in his.
He steps away from my father, half a step, and draws me with him. His arm comes around me, easy, the automatic comfort.
He lowers his head to my ear.
"The extraction team is already positioned at the pass." His voice is barely sound. "Once you clear the mountain range, they move. Your father's men won't be able to do anything about it at that point."
A pause. "Don't be afraid. I'll finish here and come to you."
He squeezes my arm once.
Then he lets go, and turns back toward my father, and the front door of the estate opens to receive them both.
I stand in the driveway with my hand still half-raised.
Something is wrong. I don't know what it is and I don't have anything to put it on, which means it isn't useful, which means I put it down.
I get into the car.
***
The mountain road takes over from the estate road without ceremony. The asphalt narrows, the guardrails appear, and the drop on the left side of the car becomes something you can feel rather than see.
I make myself breathe. We're almost there. Once we cross this mountain Gideon's people will be waiting on the other side.
My mother's hand is in mine. Her grip is stronger than it should be for how thin her fingers have gotten.
I count the vehicles in our convoy through the rear windshield. Four cars. My father's men, my father's agenda, wearing my father's face of concern.
The car rounds the first of the steep bends.
The driver's foot goes to the brake.
Nothing happens.
I watch him do it again — the full press, the leg rigid, the body bracing — and the car does not slow. It accelerates into the curve, and he grabs the wheel with both hands and wrenches it, and the tires scream against the road, and then there is no more road.
The guardrail gives way like paper.
The drop opens up beneath us and the car tips forward into it, and the world rotates, and my body makes the decision my mind hasn't caught up to yet — I tear the seatbelt free and I throw myself across the seat.
I get my arms around my mother and I pull her into me, her face against my chest, my back to the door, my body between her and whatever comes next.
The sky is below us. The valley is very far down and coming up very fast.
Something hits the car.
Not the ground. Something that hits from the side, from the cliff face, something that arrives at speed and does not stop and does not give way.
I feel the impact through the car's frame like a sound through bone. The vector of our fall twists, wrenches sideways, and the clean plummet becomes a scrape along the rock face instead.
Through the shattered window I see it for less than a second.
A wolf. Black, huge, the kind of size that doesn't look real until it's right there.
It is below us. Its back is pressed against the car, all four legs driving into the cliff face behind it, body wedged between metal and rock like something that decided it was a wall.
The muscles across its shoulders are shaking. Not from effort. From what effort costs.
It is not howling. It is making the sound of something absorbing force it was not built to absorb, and it is not moving, and it is not letting go.
The car swings. Catches. A stand of thick pines on a narrow ledge forty feet below the road takes the front of the vehicle, the rocks take the back, and we stop.
We stop.
The silence is very loud.
The smell of fuel and metal and something burning finds me before anything else does.
I am on the roof of the car, which is now the floor. My mother is beneath me. I cannot tell — I cannot tell yet — and the not knowing is a pressure behind my eyes that I refuse to let become anything yet.
The door does not open. The door is no longer shaped like a door.
Then it is gone.
The metal tears from the outside in one motion. The sound of it is enormous and wrong. Light comes in along with cold mountain air. Arms reach in. Two of them, steady and deliberate. They close around me and lift.
The chest I am lifted against is not soft. It does not accommodate.
It takes my weight the way stone takes weight, without shifting, and the arms are already resettling me carefully by the time I register that I am outside the car.
I am outside the car.
The smell reaches me then. Not Gideon's scent — not the cedar-and-amber that means safety in the body's shorthand, not the warmth I know.
This is something colder. Cleaner. The smell of wind off high ground and under that, blood.
This is not Gideon.
I know it the way you know things in that state. Not through thought. Through the body. The animal recognizing what the mind is too damaged to process.
It doesn't matter.
I get my hand against his chest. My fingers won't close properly but I press them in anyway, skin against skin, and I look up at the outline of a face I cannot focus on, and I use the last thing I have.
"Please." The word tears on the way out. "My mother. Please save my mother."
The body holding me goes absolutely rigid.
Then, carefully, I am lowered. With the kind of care something powerful uses when it chooses restraint.
Grass under my back. The sky above, tilted wrong, the trees at an angle they shouldn't be.
The dark shape rises. Turns. Moves without hesitation back toward the wreckage, back toward the smoke and the fuel smell and the car that is still groaning against the rocks.
The darkness comes for me before he reaches it.