Chapter 18 #2
Bronc barked into the phone. “Juliet, listen. Stay at the civic center. Do not leave. Do not go home for any reason. Be sure Little Wolf. Nobody leaves the Civic Center. Everybody must stay at the Civic Center. Tell me you hear me. Good. I love you.” He hung up and kicked the dirt. “We have to go.”
We mounted up and spun around, bikes shrieking against the asphalt. The return trip was worse than the first. Every pothole, every turn, every shadow on the road was a timer ticking down.
The phone was still live. I could hear Parker running, breath sawing, her voice echoing off the empty halls. “Eli, I’m in. A few lights are on. I don’t see anyone. MADDIE! ARE YOU HERE? Let me check this one hall.”
“No, Parker. Get the fuck out.”
“I promise I will.”
I gripped the throttle until the tendons in my wrist sang. “Parker, please. Don’t do this.”
She laughed, a brittle, beautiful sound. “Just let me check real fast.”
I could hear doors opening and closing.
“I’m running down to the basement real fast.”
Come on, little bird. Just hurry.
“I’m almost there. Man, I gotta start doing some cardio.”
She was taking too long.
I could hear her in the stairwell, steps pounding.
“Thank goodness. I don’t see her. I need to just check the back room. I’m hurrying I promise.”
Her breath was coming in pants. I could feel the fear coming off of her in waves. Every mile was a razor blade. My whole body shook. Bronc was white-knuckled beside me, face set in stone. The rest of the pack was a blur in the rearview. Time stuttered, then sped up, then stopped altogether.
Parker’s voice again: “Eli?”
“Get out, Parker. Get out right now.” I could hear her on the stairs.
Her voice went soft, almost gentle. “Hey, Eli?”
“Yeah?” My heart was a grenade.
“If I don’t make it out—”
“Don’t say that.”
“—just know that I love you, okay? I always did. Tell Rocket he’s a good boy. And take care of him, okay? Tell Bronc I said sorry for what happened with Axel. Tell Juliet she makes everything better.”
My throat closed. The bike veered, gravel biting into my tires. “Parker, don’t. Stop talking and run. Hear me?”
She laughed again, softer this time. “I’m almost to the top of the stairs. And hey, it’s okay, Eli. I found you again. That’s all I ever needed.”
“Little bird, I love you. Please—”
The world blew apart.
A roar. White noise. Then nothing.
The line went dead.
I don’t remember dropping the bike. Just the taste of blood in my mouth, the crunch of gravel in my palms as I crawled back to the road.
Forty miles out, and I knew she was gone.
I screamed her name into the wind, and the sky swallowed it whole.
The bike skidded out from under me at sixty. I went down in a roar of gravel and glass, helmet slamming the guardrail, sparks everywhere. Didn’t feel it. My body had gone numb the moment Parker’s voice cut out.
I tore the helmet off and staggered to my knees. I couldn’t fill my lungs with air. The world spun, and I let it, the cold slicing through my jacket, dust caking the blood in my nose. My hands shook so bad I couldn’t make a fist.
Bronc was there in a heartbeat, boots gouging the dirt, voice low and mean. “Eli! Look at me.” He grabbed my shoulders, fingers like steel. “You don’t know she’s dead.”
I wanted to kill him, tear him apart for lying, but I had nothing left. Just the hollow rattle in my chest, the sound of my own name echoing back to me.
“She’s gone,” I said, and my voice was a stranger’s.
Bronc shook me hard enough to pop something in my neck. “We don’t quit until we see a body. She’s a fighter. You said so yourself.”
I blinked through the tears, tasted iron. “If she was in the house, it’s over.”
“Not unless you make it over,” Bronc snapped. “We go now. We don’t stop. We get her back, or we die trying.”
The words lit something inside me. Not hope, not yet, but the muscle memory of a thousand drills, the urge to move, to act, to fix what was broken even if it meant burning down the world.
I got up.
We rode hell for leather, engines screaming, the horizon a line of black smoke against the purple sky.
By the time we reached the compound, the fire had eaten the clubhouse.
It was a pile of cinder blocks and burned timber.
We met two fire trucks, a sheriff’s cruiser, and three ambulances.
The air was a goddamn furnace, thick with the smell of scorched wood, melted plastic, something sweet and awful under it all.
I jumped off the bike before it stopped rolling and ran to the smoking ruin, heart trying to punch its way out of my chest.
The clubhouse was gone.
Just gone.
Walls folded in on themselves, bricks spattered across the yard, beams twisted and snapped like matchsticks. All the windows were teeth biting at the sky. There was no roof—just open air, black and glittering with falling ash.
People everywhere. The pack had come back from the civic center. There were a few of our own EMTs, and a few lost faces I didn’t even recognize. Someone yelled, a kid maybe, but all I could hear was Parker’s voice in my ear, that last laugh, soft as a goodbye.
I staggered to the wreckage. The firefighters kept shoving me away, shouting about danger, but I kept coming. Finally, T-Bone, one of our patched-in members, appeared at my side, face streaked with soot, hands already torn up from moving debris.
He grabbed my arm and pointed. “Stairwell survived. Kinda. If she was in there…”
He didn’t finish.
I nodded, ran for the jagged hole where the stairs had been. The heat was brutal, singeing the hair off my arms, but I didn’t care. I climbed over a collapsed beam, boots slipping, hands raw. Every breath was pain. Every movement threatened to collapse what was left of the structure.
“Parker!” I yelled. “Parker, answer me! Please! Wren!”
Nothing. Just the hiss of burning insulation, the pop of distant embers.
I clawed my way down the first flight, then the second. The lower stairs were intact, sheltered by the concrete wall. That’s where the debris was thickest—an avalanche of plaster, glass, furniture, and steel. I started to dig.
My fingers bled, nails ripped off at the quick. I tore at every board, every chunk of drywall, calling her name until my throat was raw.
Someone else joined me—Papa, I think, or maybe Gunner. Together, we pulled away the junk, brick by brick, the dust so thick I couldn’t see.
Then I heard it.
A faint, rasping breath.
“Stop,” I shouted. “Everyone stop.”
Silence.
I pressed my ear to the rubble. There it was—a whisper, barely there.
“Here!” I roared, and the guys swarmed in, hands and shovels and crowbars, anything they could use. We worked like maniacs, moving a wall’s worth of garbage in minutes. Sweat blinded me, the world a tunnel of pain and noise.
Then a hand.
Small, pale, streaked black with ash.
I grabbed it, squeezed. “Parker! I’m here. I’m here.”
The hand twitched, weak as a baby bird. But it was alive.
The next few minutes were chaos. The paramedics got there fast, cut her out with a saw, dragged her tiny broken body up and into the ambulance. She was unconscious, face pale, lips split and blue. Her clothes were burned away in patches, skin raw and bleeding.
But she was breathing.
She was alive.
I climbed into the back of the ambulance with her, ignored the shouts of protest, held her hand the whole way to the hospital. I didn’t care about the blood on my shirt, the reek of smoke, the grit in my teeth. All I cared about was the steady, stubborn pulse in her wrist.
I whispered to her, over and over, “You’re alive. You’re alive. I’m here.”
I don’t remember much after that. She was taken to the pack hospital.
We were one of the fortunate packs that had actual pack medical doctors.
Thanks to Doc we also had a state-of-the-art hospital.
Wolves tend to heal faster and need doctors less often than humans, but we do need them occasionally, so having a hospital nearby is another reason Iron Valor pack is envied.
The ER was a blur of white lights, shouting, hands tearing at my clothes, patching up my cuts.
Bronc showed up, face set, arms folded. He stood by the gurney and watched, as if his will alone could keep her alive.
At some point, they let me see her.
She lay on a hospital bed, bandaged from head to toe. Her face was a mess of bruises, gauze, and tape. She looked like a corpse, but she was warm.
I sat down, took her hand, and waited.
An hour passed. Two.
Then a day went by and she still didn’t wake up.
“Please, little bird. Please come back to us. Rocket needs you. I need you.”