24 Sloane #2
He’d washed the worst of the blood off his face and it made the exhaustion underneath look worse, not better.
He stopped over us and for one second he just looked—at Finn folded down over my stomach, at my hands in his hair, at the two of us tangled in the ash.
Something crossed his face that I couldn’t name.
Then it closed, and the Founding Alpha stood where the man had been.
“On your feet if you can be,” Reed said. “Both of you.”
Finn rose first, and pulled me up after.
I stood on my bad leg with his arm around my waist taking the weight.
Everyone gathered—Brann with Wren, Levi propped against Genny, Tommy still stuck half-shifted with Kaia’s hand fisted in his fur, Santos and Nell, Maren and her scorched witches, the battered ranks of the Fireline Pack who’d walked out of the tree line alive.
The whole reconstituted quorum, and the underground that had bled for it, standing in the ash.
“The bird’s twelve minutes out,” Reed said. “Tommy’s air-attack contacts pulled a heavy helitack transport off a fire detail two ridges over. It’ll get us east.” He let that land. “It’ll get some of us east.”
I felt Finn’s arm go tight around me.
“Here’s the shape of it, and I’m only saying it once.
” Reed’s voice didn’t rise. It never had to.
“Every mated pair stays. Brann, Wren. Santos, Nell. Levi, Genny. Tommy, Kaia. Finn, Sloane.” His eyes moved down the line of us and rested, for a beat too long, on the curve of my stomach, on Wren’s, on all the ones who weren’t showing yet.
“You are carrying the future. You do not get on that chopper. You go deep into pack territory, into the oldest packhouses in our territory, and hold this ground. You protect the lights inside you, and you rebuild the thing they burned down tonight. That’s an order, and it’s not one I’ll hear argued. ”
Nobody argued.
That was the thing that undid me—nobody argued.
Brann’s jaw worked once and he pulled Wren tighter and said nothing.
Levi looked at the ash and swallowed whatever was in his throat.
These were the strongest people I’d ever known and they stood in the ruin of their home and took the order because it was the right one, and the cost of it was written on every single face.
“The rest of you come with me.” Reed turned to the unmated wolves, to the boundary fighters, to Maren.
“We are going to the desert, and we are going to stop Severance from happening. We are going to bring Avaline and Mia, and all our wolves, home.” His ruined hand closed into a fist. “Twelve hours. We’ve done more with less tonight. ”
Maren stepped up beside him without being asked, chalk stub in her fist, and it was answer enough.
Brann crossed to Reed.
He gripped his Alpha’s forearm the old way, wrist to wrist, and Reed gripped back, and the two of them held it a beat longer than the gesture called for.
Neither of them said the thing that was on both their faces, which was that this might be the last time.
Brann’s other hand came up and gripped the back of Reed’s neck, a brother’s goodbye, and then he let go and stepped back to Wren before his face could do anything he didn’t want the pack to see.
Finn let go of my waist.
He crossed to Reed on legs that still barely held him and he clasped his Alpha’s forearm. Reed looked down at the gray dead marks under his hand—at the Executioner who wasn’t one anymore—and something passed between them that had no words in it.
“You did the thing tonight I could never order you to do,” Reed said, low. “I won’t forget it. The pack won’t forget it.”
“Bring them home.” Finn’s voice came out even. “That’s all the thanks I want. Bring your mate and your sister home and burn Severance to the ground.”
The sound came up out of the west, low and heavy, a thrum I felt in the fillings of my teeth before I understood it as twin rotors.
The black smoke over the crater tore sideways as the downwash hit it.
The transport breached the ridge—huge and battered, wearing Forest Service colors and smelling of aviation fuel and old retardant.
Maren went first, the rest of the Lodestone witches came behind her, a ragged line of them. Then the Fireline Pack’s unmated wolves, less Beto and Wade. A dozen wolves, towering and bloodied, moving with the disciplined efficiency of a hotshot crew boarding for a fire jump.
Reed was the last.
He stopped and turned back, and the downwash tore at him. He looked out over all of us—the mated pairs—and I watched his eyes catch the moonlight and go wrong.
Reed’s eyes flooded with something I had never seen on a living wolf, black on black, a depth with no bottom in it, like obsidian, but lit from within by an orange flame.
He didn’t say anything. Then he turned and the transport sealed behind him with a hydraulic shriek, and hauled itself up off the ruined ground in a last blinding storm of ash, banking hard to the southeast, into the dark, toward the California desert.
The roar climbed, and thinned, and faded.
And then it was gone, and the clearing was silent, and there were so few of us left standing in it.
Finn’s arms came around me from behind.
He folded himself against my back the way I’d held him against the cold an hour ago, his chin on my hair, his hands crossing low over my stomach, over the pup. I covered his hands with mine and leaned back into all of it. We stood together in the smoking ruin of our home under the moon.
We’d lived. The marks were ash and the packhouse was a crater and more than half our family was flying into a war we couldn’t follow them into, and we’d lived, and there was a heartbeat coming under our joined hands that hadn’t started yet but would.
“They’ll make it,” Finn said into my hair. It wasn’t quite a question.
I watched the last dark speck of the transport vanish where the mountains met the stars.