Chapter 10 #2
They bled upward into the smoke—then dropped, raining down like shredded cloth. One hit just beyond the salt line, shoulders driving through, jaws snapping for Wesley’s throat.
Maude didn’t have the angle or time for a pretty spell. She threw her body into his, shoving him sideways. The wolf’s teeth scissored shut on empty air.
He rolled with her, came up on one knee, and—damn him—laughed once, short and unbelieving. “You’re very strong for someone I could carry with one arm.”
“Saints, you never shut up. Hand me the branch.”
He did. She plunged the end into the flame; it came out a screaming brand. She slashed it through the wolf’s face. Fog peeled back, soot-blackened and unsteady. It snarled and leaked away.
They moved together after that because there wasn’t any other option. She handled heat and iron; he handled speed and angles and the blunt mechanics of staying alive. Twice he dragged her coat out of the snapping mist. Twice she scorched beasts off his boots.
And through it, the alpha waited. That was the worst of it.
It paced beyond the fire’s tongue, eyes two careful coals, letting the underlings tire themselves.
Trying to read the seams in their defense.
And Maude knew, with the part of her mind that still calculated under panic, that they couldn’t hold a wall forever.
The jar would give; the salt would dampen; the iron would cool.
“We need rock,” she panted. “Stone holds wards. This—” She gestured at the slab of moss under their feet. “—is soup.”
“Up there,” Wesley said, chin jerking at a shoulder of granite showing through the green thirty paces left. “We sprint. On three.”
“You’ll never make thirty paces.”
“We’ll make it together.”
“I hate that you sound so certain.”
“One,” he said, because of course he would.
“Wesley—”
“Two.”
“Fine,” she snarled, and grabbed his wrist.
“Three.”
Maude slashed the air, and the wall of fire split open, a jagged wound of light.
They ran. Pickles—long accustomed to her madness—swerved to flank them, ears pinned, head low and snaking.
Wesley’s bay plunged once, then surged forward, hooves tearing clumps of soil loose.
The wolves poured after them, fog breaking like foam around their legs.
At last, the alpha moved—uncoiling into a long, black ribbon of killing intent.
She threw the last of the iron shavings in a fan and felt the pouch go light.
She lost a step swearing. Wesley took that half-stumble on his own body.
His arm came around her waist without asking and hauled her forward.
They hit rock and skidded. The granite was slick with a skin of fern, but it was stone, and that mattered.
She slapped both palms to it and spat a ward so old she tasted blood.
Lines burned outward beneath her palms, etching a spiderweb of fire into the lichen—knot after knot, the net weaving itself bright and unyielding.
The first wolves struck it and dissolved, collapsing into water for a single offended heartbeat before misting back together on the far side.
But the far side wasn’t inside. They prowled just beyond the barrier, reforming with low growls, their shapes circling, testing.
The alpha only watched, eyes narrowing to slits, hunger sharpening in the dark.
“Keep them busy,” she said through her teeth. “I’m going to anchor it. It’ll hold better if it’s fed.”
“Fed with what?”
She looked at him, breaths quick. “Me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Move, baker.”
He didn’t move. “Let me do it with you.”
Her laugh ripped out, ragged as her breathing. “Left of me. The seam.” She pointed. “Press your palms down. Even pressure. Don’t let your pulse race.”
“My pulse is—never mind.” His palm found granite, fingers spreading. Heat rolled off him; it steadied, like laying a heavy book on a restless page. The ward’s flicker evened.
She pressed her brow to the rock. It was slick, cold, braced with the memory of mountains.
She gave it the thing the Peaks always understood: grief.
Not the immaculate version she offered polite company—oh yes, he passed in his sleep, he was old, it was time—but the feral thing.
The stubborn, ugly anger that he had left her with a shop that creaked and a town that judged and a heart full of knives.
She didn’t shape it; she let it be. And the stone took it like dry earth drinking rain.
The ward-web flared. Light spidered outward in furious lines, humming against her bones.
Maude’s body shook with the effort. Her stomach hollowed as if she’d bled half her insides into the stone.
But it was working. The wolves reeled back, hackles snapping flat.
The air changed—the scent of snow and ash blowing through the glade, as though she’d opened a door to somewhere older, colder.
A few shadows shredded outright, dissolving like paper in a storm.
The rest skulked back a pace, repelled by that raw, ancient thing grief became when someone reckless enough—or desperate enough—let it out.
She tried to push herself up, but her legs trembled uselessly beneath her. Her vision stuttered at the edges.
Wesley’s hand closed over hers. He didn’t crowd her, just fitted his palm so their fingers wrapped the little curve together. “Breathe on the count,” he said softly, not looking at her face. “In—two—three. Out—two—three.”
She wanted to snarl. She breathed.
“In—two—three.”
She hated him. She followed his count.
Her lungs steadied. The web held.
“Now,” he murmured, and together they shoved the last of her magic into the ward.
The ground jolted beneath them. The alpha flattened, black shadow pressed razor-thin, eyes gleaming red as hot coals. It surged forward anyway, aiming for the seam where ward met stone.
“Hold,” Maude rasped, throat raw.
“I’m not letting go.”
The alpha hit the seam and punched through with its muzzle. Cold slammed into the circle. Maude’s teeth clattered. Wesley dropped her hand, flung himself forward, and—idiot, absolute idiot—caught the alpha’s jaws with his forearm.
The world went white.
He didn’t make a sound. His body bowed, every muscle pulled taut in protest. Frost bloomed across his skin in a lacework sleeve where the mist touched—instant rime, glittering and lethal.
Still, he held the creature’s head in a wrestler’s lock, using the sheer solidity of his body to keep the nightmare from pushing farther in.
“Finish it,” he grated out.
Maude couldn’t let herself think about the frost gnawing at his arm, the way his skin was blooming with crystalline lace.
There was almost nothing left. No iron. No salt. She dragged a nail across her palm, hissed, and smeared a bright, human line over the place the alpha’s muzzle wanted to be.
Blood recognized truth. The web surged toward it like a tide.
The ward caught, edges gleaming like broken glass, locking the wolf’s head in a vise of old magic.
The alpha convulsed violently, shuddering between ribbon and beast, shadow and flesh.
Every shift poured more winter into Wesley’s arm.
The ice climbed higher, flowering up his veins, every tendon strung in frozen fire, starbursts glittering under his skin.
“Let go!” she shouted, the command tearing from her throat.
“If I let go, it comes through,” he ground out, jaw clenched, every word bitten between his teeth. “Do it.”
Maude slammed her bloodied palm against the wolf’s not-there skull, shoving her magic deep, up to the wrist, reckless and feral. The alpha shrieked in silence, soundless and terrible, as the web blazed brighter than fire. It didn’t break—it cut.
The wolf sheared in two, split clean down some line only magic could see, and evaporated, sucked backward through the world like smoke through a keyhole. The glade roared empty. The rest of the pack broke like mist in wind, unraveling into nothing.
“Ha,” she said, baring her teeth, pleased and vicious and only slightly unhinged.
Silence fell. Not the listening kind, but the kind that comes after a miracle or a catastrophe, when the world takes a breath and decides which way to tilt.
Wesley’s laugh came out like something broken, then repaired. “Well,” he said hoarsely, “that was terrible.”
“Agreed,” she said, equally hoarse.
He staggered. From wrist to elbow, his forearm was the sick gray of frostbite, ice etched into his veins in branching patterns like a shattered window. He cradled the arm tight against his chest, eyes pinched shut, breath pulled steady by sheer force of will.
Maude caught him by the shoulders and hauled him down to the rock. “Stupid,” she said, voice shaking. “Stupid, heroic—suicidal maniac.”
“Says the witch bleeding all over the mountainside.”
“Hush.”
She ripped open her satchel, hands moving faster than her heart.
Comfrey salve—no good. Thawing tincture—yes.
Warming draught—not for drinking; for skin.
She uncorked a vial with her teeth and poured it over the ice-tattoo.
Steam ribboned. He hissed finally, the sound she’d been waiting for and dreading, and clamped his jaw shut on the rest.
“It’ll burn,” she said, softer. “Better to burn than be dead.”
“Convenient motto for your shop.”
“Don’t speak.” She rubbed the tincture in with brisk, careful circles. The frost receded grudgingly, inch by inch, color creeping back. The branching pattern remained—faint white threads under the skin, a memory of having been almost not-alive.
She wrapped the arm in wool and laced the bandage with a whisper of heat that would hold for an hour. Then she just…sat back on her heels and looked at him. Looked at what he’d done. At the ward-web glowing like old starlight over their heads. At the cooling line of her blood.
She heard herself say the unthinkable. “Thank you.”
His eyes flicked up to hers, surprised into something unguarded. “You’re welcome,” he said, equally unadorned.
She looked away first and bent to rearrange her vials, which did not need rearranging. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“We make an excellent team,” he said after a moment, voice rough but returning to its usual shape.
“We make a functional catastrophe.”
“Semantics.”
She wanted to laugh. She did not. The ward web dimmed a fraction and steadied; the air lost its blade-edge. The forest exhaled, a little resentful, a little impressed.
Maude wiped the blood from her palm on the moss and hissed when it stung.
Wesley caught her wrist gently, with his good hand, and turned it to examine the shallow slice.
He didn’t comment, didn’t tease. He tore the clean strip from his own sleeve with his teeth and bound her hand like he’d done it a thousand times—because he had—an apprentice, a baker—burned on hot trays, taught plants and pain by a mother who knew both well.
She waited for the pull to hate him again. It didn’t come right away.
“We move when you can stand,” she said—logistics were safer than truth. “The ward will hold an hour, maybe two. After that, the wolves will be back. They always come back.”
He rolled his shoulder, tested his fingers under the wool. “My arm will work. Maybe not for pastry.”
“Tragedy.”
“Unspeakable.”
The corner of her mouth betrayed her by moving, and she scowled at the trees to punish it. The light had shifted. That was the worst of it—how the Peaks bent time into useless shapes. Afternoon had become evening without consulting her.
She rose. The world swayed once, briefly. Wesley stood too, even slower. For a moment they simply stood there, close as they had been at the mixer, closer maybe, heat and breath finding a rhythm that had everything to do with not dying.
“Wesley,” she said, which was stupid because she had nothing ready to follow his name.
“Yes, Maude.”
She swallowed. “If you ever throw your arm into a monster’s mouth again, I will turn your hair into bubble-wrap.”
Lines bracketed his eyes. “Understood.”
She picked up what was left of the salt. He gathered the reins. They didn’t talk about how hard he shook when he thought she wasn’t looking. They didn’t talk about how she had to press a fist to her sternum like she could shove the heart back in through the bone.
The forest closed behind them, the web of light receding until it was only a rumor hung in branches.
They walked in step without trying. Not because they liked each other; not because fate or magic or the Peaks had decided it, but because sometimes surviving meant matching your breath to the person beside you.
Even if he was an idiot. Even if she was impossible.
Even if the mountains listened and reached and wanted.
Maude kept her eyes forward.
The quiet crouched, attentive. But it listened to something new now, something the wolves couldn’t quite translate: two heartbeats, stubborn as iron filings, ringing like a bell through the trees.