Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
The storm raged for fourteen hours.
We huddled in the shelter while the wind screamed and the snow piled up outside. James kept me warm, his body curved around mine, his shifter metabolism running hot enough to compensate for the heat we'd lost. The feral wolf lay next to us, his shape rising and falling with shallow breaths.
I slept in fragments. Every time I drifted off, the pain in my hand yanked me back—throbbing, insistent, the flesh swelling against the bandages. James changed the dressing twice, his movements gentle, and I watched his face in the dim light and tried not to think about infection.
By morning, the storm had passed.
Fresh snow had buried everything. The world was white and silent, the sky a pale washed-out blue.
I stood in the shelter's entrance and did the math: no food, almost no water, an injured hand that needed real medical attention, and an unconscious wolf who weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds.
"We can't carry him," James said, reading my thoughts.
"No. But we can drag him."
I explained the plan—tent as a sled, poles as runners, rope harness to distribute the weight. James listened, nodded, and started taking down the tent without argument.
Building it took two hours.
The tent laid flat, sleeping pads underneath for structure, poles lashed to the bottom with paracord. It looked like exactly what it was: desperation held together with knots.
Moving the wolf was harder. Dead weight, completely limp, offering nothing as we struggled to roll him onto the fabric. James did most of the lifting. I guided with my one good hand and tried not to pass out from the pain in the other.
When we finally had him secured, we were both drenched in sweat.
"Ready?" James asked.
I looked at the wolf. At the matted fur, the visible ribs, the scars mapping a history I didn't know. Through the bond, I felt his presence—faint, distant, like hearing music from another room.
"Ready."
We shouldered the harness and started down.
The first section nearly killed us.
A steep traverse, snow-covered scree hidden beneath the white.
James's foot punched through into a gap between rocks and he went down hard, the sled's momentum dragging him sideways.
I threw myself against the rope, boots skidding, and for three horrible seconds we slid toward a drop I couldn't see the bottom of.
James's hand found a boulder. Held.
The sled stopped.
We lay there gasping, the wolf's unconscious body inches from the edge.
We moved slower after that. James breaking trail, probing with a tent pole for hidden gaps, while I controlled the sled from behind. Progress measured in feet instead of yards.
Two hours in, we hit a section too steep to traverse. The only way down was a fifteen-foot drop onto a snow shelf below.
"We lower him," I said. "You go down first, I'll feed out the rope."
"With one hand?"
"You have a better idea?"
He didn't.
James scrambled down the drop, finding footholds in the rock face. I wrapped the rope around a boulder for friction and started feeding it out, the rough fibers tearing at my palm while the sled inched toward the edge.
The wolf's weight hit the rope all at once when the sled tipped over. The force nearly ripped my arms from their sockets. I heard myself scream—pain and effort indistinguishable—and then James was shouting from below.
"I've got him! Let go!"
I let go. Collapsed against the boulder, breathing hard, my injured hand a solid block of agony.
Below me, James was already repositioning the sled for the next section.
"You okay?" he called up.
"Fine." I wasn't. But we kept moving.
The terrain eased as we descended into the treeline.
Snow shallower, ground more stable, the trees blocking the worst of the wind.
My shoulders were rubbed raw from the harness.
My hand had progressed from throbbing to genuinely frightening—the skin around the bandages hot and tight, red streaks starting to creep up my wrist.
We stopped to rest against a fallen log, and James finally said what we'd both been avoiding.
"What if he doesn't wake up?"
I'd been asking myself the same question for hours. Pushing it down, refusing to look at it directly.
"Then he doesn't wake up." The words came out flat. Tired. "And we deal with that when it happens."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have." I looked at the wolf—at my mate, whether he knew it or not. "I don't know if he's coming back. I don't know if there's anything left to come back. But I know we're not leaving him on this mountain."
James was quiet. Then he reached over and took my uninjured hand.
"When I shifted," he said slowly, "everything was chaos. Noise and fear and my body doing things I couldn't control. But through all of it, I could feel you. Like a rope in the dark. Something to hold onto."
"He's been feral for years. The rope might not be enough."
"Maybe not." He squeezed my hand. "But he has two ropes now. You and me both. That's got to count for something."
I wanted to believe him. Wasn't sure I could.
But I squeezed back, and we shouldered the harness, and we kept moving.
We hit the highway as the sun was setting.
Not the highway itself—a service road that paralleled it, rutted and overgrown but blessedly flat. The sled slid easier here, the packed snow giving way to frozen mud.
My phone found signal three miles later.
I stared at the single bar like it was a hallucination. Then I dialed Rae's number with shaking fingers.
She answered on the second ring.
"Lumi? Where the hell are you? Ivy called, she said you disappeared, Twilson is—"
"I need help." The words came out rough, exhaustion stripping away everything but essentials. "I'm on the north service road off the Denali Highway. Mile marker... I don't know. Somewhere past thirty. I have an injured hand and an unconscious feral wolf and I can't carry him any further."
Silence. Then: "A feral wolf."
"He's my mate." Saying it out loud made it real. Made it something I couldn't take back. "Mine and James's both. The bond completed when he attacked me. He's been unconscious ever since."
More silence. I could hear Rae processing—the sharp intake of breath, the questions she was choosing not to ask.
"Stay where you are," she said finally. "I'm coming. Two hours, maybe less."
"Rae—"
"Two hours. Don't move."
The line went dead.
I lowered the phone and looked at James. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't read.
"She's coming," I said.
"I heard."
"She's going to have questions. A lot of them."
"I figured." He moved to stand beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. "We'll answer them together."
Together. The word settled into my chest, warm despite the cold.
I looked at the wolf—still unconscious, still breathing, still unreachable through the bond. We'd dragged him off a mountain. Survived drops and traverses and terrain that should have stopped us. Carried him mile after mile on nothing but stubbornness and rope.
Now we just had to wait.
And hope that when he finally woke up, there was still someone in there worth saving.