Chapter 8
Ezra
The wind is wrong.
I feel it before I'm fully upright off the cot, before Isolde has finished pulling on her boots, before Hex's voice comes crackling through the handheld she grabbed on her way out the workshop door.
The wind on my face is moving east-to-west when it should still be west-to-east, and it's dry in a way that says the inversion has already broken, and somewhere across the basin a man with a prosthetic right hand has just lit a match six hours ahead of every forecast we built our plan around.
I am moving before I have finished thinking.
The wolf is already up. He came up the second the wind shifted, the second the air on my tongue tasted like tinder, the second Isolde shook me.
He is rumbling in my chest with both his attention and mine pointed in the same direction, which is east, toward the ridge above the bowl, toward the place where the eastern ignition point should have been and where we could not find it last night.
We could not find it because Creed didn't set it last night.
He set it this morning.
He hand-carried his accelerant up the eastern ridge while we slept two hours on a cot in the workshop, and he placed it where he knew I wouldn't think to look, and now he is somewhere up that ridge with his back to the rising sun and the wind at his shoulder and a long view of the compound he intends to watch burn.
I run.
Isolde runs beside me. Her radio is already up to her mouth.
"All units, this is Frost. We have ignition on the eastern ridge, repeat eastern ridge, six hours early.
Tower team, get eyes on the source. Break crews, hold your assigned cuts and do not — repeat do not — abandon line.
Della, get the families to the basement of the clubhouse and lock it.
Hex, I need wind speed and direction every ninety seconds.
" A pause. The radio crackles back at her.
She doesn't break stride. "Acknowledged. Out."
She looks at me as we run.
"Are you going in?"
"Yes."
"Bring him out alive if you can. Don't die for that."
"Understood."
"Ezra."
"Yes."
"Don't die for any of it."
I don't answer her. There isn't an answer to give that she'd believe and there isn't an answer to give that I'd believe either, so I just keep running.
We split at the clubhouse. She goes up the southern firebreak to the incident command point on the granite shelf where she'll hold the line. I go east, alone, toward the trees.
The compound is moving the way I knew it would.
Conrad is on the porch with his rifle already strapped and a hand radio at his hip, and he gives me one nod as I pass, which is the nod of a man telling me I'm cleared to do what I'm about to do.
Savage is at the break with a chainsaw and a face like granite.
Priest has the kids' line moving toward the clubhouse basement.
Casket and Spite are already up on the southern ridge with the shovels.
Jo is setting up the medic tent next to the bar.
This is what families do. We hold our pieces. We do not break.
I reach the tree line at the eastern edge of the compound, and I can smell the fire now — pine and accelerant and the bitter chemical signature that I would know anywhere because it was mine first. The fire has been burning for maybe fifteen minutes.
It's still small. It's still on the ridge.
The east-southeast wind is shoving it down the slope toward us at a rate that the breaks will handle for an hour, maybe two, but no longer.
I have an hour.
I need to find Creed in less.
I stop at the line of cedars where the trail starts up the ridge, and I take off my cut and fold it and lay it on a rock.
I take off my T-shirt. I take off my boots and my jeans.
The morning air is cold on my skin and the wolf doesn't care, the wolf has been waiting for this since the moment I scented the fire on the wind, the wolf is already moving in my chest the way he moves when he knows he's about to come out.
I let him.
The shift is fast. It's been a long time since I shifted in anger and there is no anger in this — there is only the calm, terrible clarity of going to do a thing that needs doing — but the wolf comes up smooth and clean and the bones move and the muscles re-thread and the world drops into the long colors and the deep scents and the slow heartbeat of the four-legged me.
I shake out.
I smell the fire.
I smell Creed.
He is half a mile up the ridge. He is moving northeast, away from the ignition, toward what I now realize is a secondary staging point he hid in a hollow under a deadfall where I would never have thought to check because no human would set up in the path of his own fire.
But Creed is not setting up in the path of his fire.
He has lit the ignition and he is moving lateral to it, and from his hollow he can watch the burn run down the bowl toward the compound, and he can light a second device if the first fails, and he can sit there with his prosthetic right hand on a detonator and his good left hand on a rifle and wait for someone to come up the ridge to get him.
He is expecting me.
He is expecting me to come up the ridge in human form, on the trail, with a rifle, slowly.
He is not expecting me to come at him from above, off-trail, fast, in fur.
I move.
The wolf takes the slope at an angle that no man could take.
I keep upwind. I keep low. I keep silent in the way that the wolf knows how to keep silent, which is the silence of a thing that has been a four-legged animal for fifteen thousand generations, and the fire is roaring on my right side now and the smoke is in the trees and the wolf walks through it the way he has always walked through it — the heat parts around me and the smoke does not enter my lungs the way it enters a man's lungs.
My fur smolders at the tips. My pads are hot on the rock. I do not slow.
Half a mile.
Quarter mile.
I scent him sharper now — sweat and gun oil and the cold metal of the prosthetic and the chemical scent of his accelerant on his clothes.
I am downwind of him by twenty degrees, which means his nose, if he had one like mine, would not have me yet.
He doesn't have one like mine. He hears the way humans hear, which is poorly and slowly, and the fire is loud, and he is concentrating on the burn below him through a pair of binoculars.
I come over the lip of the hollow above him.
He is sitting on a folding stool. The detonator is on the rock beside him. The rifle is across his knees. He is watching the bowl burn. His back is to me.
I take him from behind.
I do not kill him.
Conrad wants him alive and Isolde wants him alive and the families want him alive — they want the trial, they want the questions, they want him to look in the eyes of the women whose husbands and brothers and crew he killed for collateral.
I want him alive too. So I come down on him from above, fast and hard, and I hit him in the back at the base of the spine with my full weight, and he goes down off the stool with his face in the dirt and the rifle clattering away and the detonator skittering toward the lip of the hollow.
He screams.
It is the first time I have ever heard him scream and I will remember it for the rest of my life because it is the scream of a man who has spent six years building something elaborate and has just had it taken from him by an animal he did not believe in.
I put my teeth in the back of his neck. Not breaking skin. Just holding. The wolf knows how to hold a man without killing him. The wolf knows the exact pressure that says if you move I will close.
He goes still.
He is breathing hard. He is smarter than I expected because he understands, fast, what is happening. He stops fighting. He spreads his hands flat in the dirt. The prosthetic right hand is awkward in the dirt. He turns his face sideways and he says, into the ground —
"You're the shifter. The arsonist's wolf. I always wondered."
I don't answer. I'm a wolf. Wolves don't talk.
I keep my teeth in the back of his neck and I wait, and after maybe thirty seconds I hear what I'm waiting for, which is the sound of Conrad and Savage and Priest coming up the trail in human form with rifles and rope.
They saw the wolf go up. They knew to follow.
They reach the hollow and they take one look at the situation — me on top of Creed, Creed face down in the dirt, the detonator at the lip — and Savage starts laughing, a short ugly bark of a laugh that says well, that's done then.
Conrad puts his boot on the detonator.
Priest puts the rope on Creed.
I let go of the back of his neck.
I stand back.
The wolf is breathing through bared teeth and the wolf wants, very badly, to finish this — but the man inside the wolf does not, and the wolf listens to the man, the way he has always listened, the way I trained him to listen the year I came out of the fire and we made our agreement.
Creed is hauled to his feet.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
He says, "You burned me first."
The wolf doesn't have a way to say I know.
The wolf doesn't have a way to say you took six firefighters for it.
The wolf doesn't have a way to say you killed people my woman loved and now she's going to be the one who reads the charges to your face.
So the wolf just stares at him with the amber eyes and waits, and after a minute Conrad puts a hand on Creed's shoulder and turns him around and walks him down the trail.
Savage waits with me while I shift back.
He has my clothes. He brought them up. He doesn't comment on the nakedness or the steam coming off my skin or the way my hands shake a little as I pull the T-shirt over my head — the shift back always shakes me, even now, even after years of practice.
He just holds out the cut last and helps me into it and claps me once on the shoulder, hard enough to mean something.