Chapter Twenty-Four
NASH
The quiet after Aris's shot is the kind that has teeth.
I've spent my life reading what the wild leaves behind, and I know what this silence means. The other two wolves have vanished, but they aren't gone. A pack doesn't quit because the Alpha drops. They pull back, regroup, and wait for weakness.
"We're exposed," I say, the guide-brain taking over. "Inside. Now."
"You're bleeding," Aris says. She isn't looking at the tree line. She's looking at my leg.
I look down. The pant leg is dark from the knee to the boot. It hasn't stopped since the yard.
"It's a scratch."
"That's a lot of blood for a scratch." Her voice is not asking a question. She puts her hand on my back and steers me through the door like a woman escorting an injured animal. "Kitchen. Chair. Now."
I don't argue. We don't have time for chivalry.
She locks the front door behind us. She engages the deadbolt. She wedges a chair under the handle for good measure, and then she comes back for me, hooks my elbow, and gets me into a chair at the kitchen table without asking my permission for any of it.
The kitchen looks like a crime scene. Flour from the counter explosion covers the floor in a fine white drift. Boot prints track through it—mine, hers, a smear of blood.
"Boots off," Aris says, kneeling. "Snow pants off. I need to see."
"Aris—"
"Nash." She looks up at me. Her hands are already on my laces. "I need you upright and I need you not septic and I need you thinking. So. Boots. Off."
I get the boots off. The snow pants come down.
My base layer is soaked through on the right leg.
When she peels it up over the knee, the wound stares back at us both—a rough, ugly bite mark on the outside of my calf, two puncture holes and a tear where the wolf tried to twist the muscle out.
It isn't pumping in arterial spurts. It's bleeding the way a bad bite bleeds, sullen and steady.
"Okay," Aris says quietly. She takes a breath and lets it out slow. "Okay. That's a deep tissue tear. No arteries. You are not going to bleed out. Where's the first aid kit?"
"Cabinet under the sink. Orange bag."
She's already moving.
While she pulls the orange bag out and starts laying instruments on the towel she snapped open across the table, I try to sit up straighter.
My leg has started to throb in earnest now that the adrenaline is receding.
The pain is sharp and specific and it's a distraction I can't afford. I need to be tracking the yard.
"Talk me through it while you work," I say. "Give my head a job that isn't the pain. I still need half an ear on the yard."
"Then talk to me back. Keep talking. Where does it hurt most?"
"Outside calf. The tear."
"That tracks." She rips open a saline flush. "Nash. Hold this table. This is going to burn."
She flushes the wound.
It burns like a live coal. I hold the table. I don't make a sound. She's talking the whole time—half to me, half to herself—narrating what she's doing, the way surgeons do, so that I know she knows.
"No fabric fibers in the wound. Good. Puncture depth is about half an inch, maybe less on the top hole.
The tear is the problem. Muscle fascia is intact, that's why it isn't bleeding worse.
I'm going to close the tear with three interior sutures and a running stitch on the skin.
Then a pressure bandage. Rabies is not endemic in Alaska wolves.
Antibiotics as soon as we can raise anybody on the radio. "
"You've done this before," I say. My voice sounds far away.
"On oranges. And on rescue mutts at a clinic in Seattle before grad school, one summer I've never told anyone about." She's threading a curved needle. "I thought about being a vet before I fell in love with data. I never quite killed the reflex."
"You don't tell people."
"It's not on my CV. Nobody hires an evolutionary biologist because she can suture a calf muscle. It only annoys them." She looks up at me. Her eyes are calm. Her hands are steady. "Bite down on something. I'm going to start."
I take the wooden spoon she's holding out. I bite down on it.
She starts.
I watch her hands. These are the same hands that type grant proposals and hold wine glasses in beige hotel rooms. Right now they're smeared with my blood, moving with a competence that turns me on as much as it terrifies me.
She stitches like a woman who knows exactly what the flesh will let her do.
Interior. Interior. Interior. Then the neat running line on the skin, small precise loops, no wasted motion.
She ties off the last suture and sits back on her heels. When she wipes her forehead with the back of her arm, it leaves a streak of flour and blood across her brow.
"You'll walk," she says. Her voice trembles for the first time. "You'll limp for a couple weeks. You'll want to save this pair of snow pants because I want a receipt. Muscle will heal. You didn't lose function."
"Doc."
"Yeah?"
"Hell of a job."
She lets out a breath that has been sitting in her chest since she saw the blood. She turns her face into my knee. She's not crying. She's just breathing.
I put my hand on the back of her neck and hold her there for a second while she does it.
"Water," I say when she comes up. "You. Sugar. You're about to fall over."
"I'm not—" She stands up and immediately grabs the back of the chair. "Yeah. Okay. Sugar."
I get her seated. I get her a glass of orange juice from the jug Mags sent home with me, one-handed. I keep one hand on her shoulder while she drinks it, because her color isn't right.
"That's a real thing," she mumbles into the glass. "Adrenaline dump. God."
"You saved my life," I say. "Your body is allowed to react."
She sits with that for a minute.
Then she stands up, steadier now, and walks to the counter where the base station radio lives, and picks up the handset.
"Misty Meadows to Port Promise," she says. "Misty Meadows to any station. Over."
Hisssssss.
Static. White noise. It's not the normal background hum. It's the rhythmic popping crackle of atmospheric interference.
"Misty Meadows to Kingfisher," she tries. "Misty Meadows to Birch Bay. Rhys, copy."
Pop-hiss-crackle.
"Aurora," Aris says, looking at the window.
I lever myself up out of the chair, favoring the leg, and go to the window. The sky above the trees is beginning to glow. Green and violent purple ribbons dance across the twilight.
It's beautiful, but it's a communications killer.
"Solar flare," I mutter, watching the sky. "The magnetosphere is lit up like a Christmas tree. We're not getting a signal out on HF."
"What about the landline? Or the emergency sat line? One of them has to be working."
I lift the landline handset. Dead—no tone, not even static.
Ice takes the copper down twice a winter.
I try the emergency sat unit next, and it searches and searches and never finds the sky.
"Same storm that's lighting up the aurora," I say, setting it down.
"It scrambles the satellites too. Nothing is getting through tonight. "
"Right." She drops into a kitchen chair, heedless of the flour. "So we're alone."
"Reid's twenty miles of coastline away if he's an inch, and Rhys's dock is iced in—nothing's launching from Birch Bay.
" I lean my forehead against the cold window frame.
"Hank flies the north route tomorrow. And Finn won't miss us for days—after two weeks in the bush, he'll figure we've gone to ground on purpose. "
"So it's us," she says. "And the pack."
"And the pack," I agree.
I look out into the yard, keeping to the side of the frame.
The dead Alpha is still there, a dark lump in the snow. But beyond him, at the edge of the woods, I see eyes.
Yellow. Reflective. Watching.
"They're not leaving," I say quietly.
"Why?" Aris asks. "We killed the leader. Shouldn't they scatter?"
"They're starving. And they're angry. They've invested too much energy in this hunt. They tracked us across half this island. They took the smokehouse. They lost a member. They're not looking for a meal anymore, Aris. They're in too deep to leave. It's win or starve now, and they know it."
I turn back to the room. The house, solid as it has always felt, suddenly seems flimsy. The big front windows look like fragile sheets of ice.
"We need to board up," I say. "The downstairs windows. The glass in the doors."
"Board up?" Aris stands up. "With what?"
"Plywood. There's a stack under the porch overhang, left over from the smokehouse build. We can pull it in without leaving the porch. That, and whatever furniture we can move."
I look at her. She looks exhausted, battered, and scared. But she doesn't look broken.
"Can you hammer?" I ask.
She picks up the box of ammo from the table. She racks the bolt on the rifle, checking the chamber.
"I can hammer," she says. "I can stitch. And apparently, I can shoot."
I look at her, and I know I'm in trouble, not just with the wolves, but with her. I love her, and the math just got worse. Now I have to keep her alive through this too.
"Okay," I say. "Let's fortify the castle."
Hauling the stack in takes ten minutes of ugly choreography—Aris holding the storm door with the rifle shouldered while I drag sheets across the porch boards two at a time, both of us watching the tree line between trips. The wolves let us work. That worries me more than if they hadn't.