Feral Little Omega

1. Ember

EMBER

The wire takes my leg out from under me before I hear the snap.

That's how good a snare is supposed to be. No warning, no second chance, just the world yanked sideways and the ground coming up to meet my face.

I hit the moss hard enough to drive the air out of me, and the only sound I let escape is a short, ugly grunt I bite down on the second it starts.

Then the pain catches up, bright and white, ripping from my ankle through my gut and into the base of my skull. I taste blood where my teeth found the inside of my cheek.

I know this fucking snare.

The thought arrives before the panic does, and it's so much worse.

I twist around to look at what has me, already certain, and there it is.

Heavy fence wire, recut and retempered. Anchor seated on the outside of the catch.

My own hands shaped every inch of it two winters ago, cold-hammered against the flat rock by the creek, set when the elk were still moving through the low passes.

Then forgotten, the way you forget anything you build when there's nobody left to remind you it's there.

Six years in these mountains. Years of teeth and weather and walking away from things that wanted me dead.

And the thing that finally catches me has my own fingerprints on it.

I almost laugh. It comes out as a hiss through my teeth instead, because the wire's bitten clean through the meat above my ankle and the blood's already running warm down into my sock, steady, not spurting. I make myself note that. Steady is survivable. Steady I can work with.

Spurting would mean I'm already a dead woman kneeling in the rain talking to herself.

The edges of the world go thin and pale, the color draining out toward the corners of my vision. My pulse is loud in the wrong places.

Move, Ember.

I drag the knife from my pack. My fingers have already started going stupid with cold and blood loss, but the grip's wrapped in fishing line and electrical tape because some part of me always knew a day like this was coming.

I just pictured it with better company. Wolves.

Men. A bear, if the universe had a sense of humor about it.

Not my own damn trap.

"Don't let me down, Carl."

Carl doesn't answer because, well, Carl's a knife. But there hasn't been anyone else to talk to for a long time, and we've come to an understanding, the two of us.

I start sawing.

Wrong angle. The wire's set for a four-legged animal pulling away from the anchor-tree, not a woman folded over her own thigh.

Every cut jerks the leg. Every jerk drives the wire deeper.

After the third one I can see something pale at the bottom of the wound that I know is bone and refuse to look at directly.

I stop. Press my wrist hard against my mouth until the sound goes into skin instead of air. Sound travels in rain like this. Anything with ears can hear it. Anything with teeth can follow it home.

The release. You built a release, you paranoid disaster. So use the fucking thing.

Paranoia's kept me breathing longer than good sense ever did.

The release sits on the outside of the loop, which right now means it's pinned under my thigh, which means I have to move the leg to reach it.

I know exactly how much that's going to hurt and I do it anyway, because the alternative is lying here until something finds me.

I shift my weight. The world goes white and silent. I wait it out, breathing through my teeth, then work my left hand under my leg until I find the bent twist of wire. Pinch it. Twist.

It's slick. My hand's slick. My whole body keeps trying to shake itself apart at the seams.

I hook my nails into the release and twist until it gives.

The loop opens, not all the way, just enough to grate across bone on its way off me. That sound I will be hearing in my sleep. I drag the leg free and fold into the moss and let myself have exactly five seconds of being a person who just wants to lie down.

Then I get to work on not dying.

Belt off, one-handed. Bite the leather to thread it through the buckle.

Wrap it above the wound and cinch until my body tries to crawl out through my own pores.

Pack the cloth in. Tie it off with the torn hem of my shirt.

By the time it's done I'm shaking hard enough that the trees seem to be shaking with me.

Sorry, Dad. You always said I'd skip the maintenance.

It's the running joke I keep with a man I haven't spoken to in six years.

Malek Marlowe is almost certainly alive and well, signing other people's death warrants from a leather chair somewhere warm.

But I find it useful to picture him disappointed.

It's cheaper than therapy and I can do it anywhere.

Of course the trap that gets me is mine. Of course he turns out right about the only thing he was ever right about. Always build a way out, omega.

He wasn't talking about snares, though. He meant fire exits counted in the dark. Knives taped behind car panels. The safe combination memorized. The second-floor laundry window that was always, always left unlocked above the porch roof.

I went out that window the morning of my packmating ceremony. He taught me how to do it.

He just never thought I'd use it on him.

The thought should put a smile somewhere on my face. My mouth's gone too numb to manage it.

I roll onto my stomach and start to crawl.

Three miles uphill to the cabin. Wet brush, loose rock, roots that catch at me like they've got opinions.

The light's going amber and thin. My right leg's a dead thing I'm dragging.

But there's a stove up there. Supplies. A door that locks.

And years out here have taught me that wanting something badly enough will move you over ground that should be impossible.

I move.

Ten feet costs everything I have. Twenty costs more than that.

At thirty my arms simply quit, and I slump against a cedar root with my cheek to the wet bark, and my pulse does something I don't like, too fast and then too faint, here and then somewhere far away.

My skin's gone loose and cold and not quite mine anymore.

That's a bad sign.

The wind shifts.

That's what gets my attention, more than the cold or the swimming dark. The wind's supposed to come down the ravine from the north. That's the thing that's kept me alive out here, the simple math of it, anything north of me can't catch my scent. But it's turned. It's coming up from the river now.

Toward me.

Which means whatever's north of me already has what it needs.

Then I scent him.

Pine and gunsmoke.

My body locks before my brain gets anywhere near the word alpha.

The old part of me, the part the suppressants were supposed to keep asleep, comes awake all at once and steals the breath I couldn't spare.

It doesn't care about the blockers I bought off a twitchy beta pharmacist in Forks.

Doesn't care that the last dose ran dry days ago.

Doesn't care that I'm bleeding out in a ravine with a knife I can barely lift.

And underneath that, the deeper thing, the one that's been dead in me my whole life: somewhere down where a wolf is supposed to live, something strains toward the surface and hits the wall it always hits.

My body, smelling alpha and smelling its own blood, reaches for the shift the way any wounded shifter's would, the change that would knit the leg and put four fast legs under me and turn me into something that could survive this.

And nothing comes. Nothing ever comes. There's a wolf in me I have never once worn, locked behind something my father built and the blockers kept shut, and I learned in my first feral winter, bleeding worse than this, that no amount of need opens that door.

So I do what I have always done. I bleed the slow human way and I reach for the knife instead.

It only knows alpha, and something low in my chest catches and flares.

I hate it for that. I close my hand around Carl and roll onto my back, because if this is where it ends, I'm going to be looking up when it does.

"Easy."

Low. Male. Closer than anything should've gotten without me hearing it.

He's crouched at the edge of the moss, two arm's lengths off, hood pushed back even in the rain like he wants me to see his face.

And it's a problem, his face. Lean and weathered and unhurried, a few days of dark stubble, a mouth that looks like it knows how to keep a secret.

His eyes are the gray of an overcast sky, and the worst part, the part my body files away without asking me, is that they aren't on my face.

They're on the wire. The wound. The blood.

He's not looking at me like prey. He's looking at me like a problem he's already half-solved and means to finish.

"You did all that yourself," he says. Not a question. There's something underneath it I don't expect. Not pity. Closer to respect.

"Leave me alone."

"Can't do that. Not with you bleeding like that."

"I've handled worse."

"I believe you." And the maddening thing is that he sounds like he means it. "Doesn't change what I'm looking at."

I tighten my grip on the knife so he can see it. "I'll use this."

"I'd expect nothing less." He settles his weight without coming closer, patient as a man who's got all night and knows it. "How long have you been watching me?"

"Long enough to know you don't need watching." A beat. "Eight minutes."

Eight minutes. He watched me cut myself loose. Watched me tie off the bleed. Watched me crawl thirty feet of bad ground and nearly put my face in the dirt. Eight minutes of a man deciding what I'm worth to him.

The thought should scare me. Mostly I'm just tired, and his voice is doing something to the cold in my chest that I don't have the strength to argue with.

"You smell like Marlowe wire," he says.

Everything in me goes quiet. Not calm. I don't do calm. Just quiet, the way the woods go quiet right before something moves.