Chapter 12 No Easy Rescue
Shane POV
Neil screamed when the sled hit the first rut.
I eased off the throttle and felt the machine settle, the track chewing through knee-deep powder while Liza’s weight shifted on the rescue platform behind me.
She had one gloved hand braced against the sled rail and the other pressed flat on Neil’s chest, holding him in place against the vacuum mattress.
Kristen rode behind the driver of the second snowmobile, and Marco followed on his skis in our path.
They kept well back, so only one machine was on the slope at a time.
“Talk to me,” I called back.
“He’s okay.” Liza’s voice cut through the wind. “The splint is holding. Keep it smooth.”
Smooth. On a slope where the snow could slide into a drainage ditch, in a whiteout that hid every landmark I’d memorized over a decade of running tours through these trees.
I could barely see the aspens or the service road beneath the powder.
I was driving by feel, judging the buried grade through the machine’s skis while I watched for the shapes that meant trouble.
The fallen tree came out of the white like a wall.
I killed the throttle and let the sled coast to a stop.
A mature pine had come down across the main descent, its root ball torn from the frozen earth and its crown buried in the drift on the downhill side.
No getting over it, no getting around it on the uphill edge where the terrain dropped off toward the chute.
Snow had already packed against the trunk, and the gap beneath it was full of branches sharp enough to catch a sled runner and flip everything sideways.
“Shit.” I pulled my goggles up and looked at the tree, then at the slope beyond it.
“Can we cut through?” Liza asked.
“Not with what we’re carrying.” I jerked my chin toward the narrow service cut that angled off to the right, threading between standing pines on a steeper grade.
It was a trail I’d used on snowmobiles a hundred times, tight and fast and fine when the sled was empty.
With a loaded rescue platform and an injured skier who couldn’t take a hard jolt, it was risky.
“That cut drops hard through the pines and hooks back to the main road near the mid-station. It’s rideable. ”
“How steep?”
“Steep enough that I need you watching the snow under us and telling me if you feel it move.”
Liza looked at the cut, then at Neil. His eyes were glassy, his lips blue-gray, and the emergency blanket had slipped off his left shoulder. She tucked it back and looked at me.
“Go,” she said.
I eased the machine into the service cut and felt the slope grab us immediately.
The grade pulled the sled forward faster than the engine wanted to idle, so I feathered the brake and kept the track engaged just enough to steer.
Trees closed in on both sides. Branches scraped the sled’s cowling and showered us with loose snow.
Behind me, Liza was silent, which meant she was paying attention.
The snow under the track felt dense and layered, the kind of pack that either held firm or let go all at once.
I’d run tours across terrain like this for years, reading the subtle compression beneath the machine, the way the skis bit or floated, the sound the track made when the base changed.
Right now it was holding, but the pitch was wrong for comfort, and every few seconds I felt a slight give.
“Settling,” Liza said, her voice level. “Left side, about ten feet below us. Not moving yet.”
“I feel it.”
“Don’t stop. If we sit still on this grade, the weight will load the slab.”
I kept the machine moving, slow and even, letting the track distribute our weight across as much surface as I could manage. The cut narrowed between two large pines, and the rescue platform nearly caught on a low branch before Liza ducked and pulled the rail past it.
Neil groaned but didn’t scream this time. Progress.
The slope eased as we came around the hook, and I saw the faint outline of the main service road reappearing through the trees. The grade flattened, the snow firmed up, and the whiteout thinned enough to show the dark shape of the mid-station warming hut ahead. My shoulders finally came down.
“Nice driving,” Liza said behind me.
“I’d bow, but I’m still clenching everything below the waist.”
She laughed. It was short and rough and exhausted, and it was the best sound I’d heard all day.
? ? ?
We reached the base clinic as the light was going. The clouds hadn’t broken all day, but the gray deepened toward darkness, and the snow kept falling in curtains that made the lodge lights look like smeared paint.
The clinic paramedics took Neil off our hands fast, and I stood in the slush outside the doors while Liza briefed them on his vitals.
She recited splint placement, dressing changes, circulation checks, and neurological signs without pausing, and the lead paramedic took notes without questioning her.
When she finished, she stepped back and let them work.
Her face was drawn. The cold had turned the scar along her cheek white against her reddened skin, and her eyes had that flat, used-up look that came from running on adrenaline for hours and finally stopping. She flexed her fingers inside her gloves like they’d forgotten how to uncurl.
“You need food,” I said.
“I need to see those tracks first.”
I’d been hoping she’d let it go until morning. I’d been wrong.
? ? ?
The south river run was a long, exposed stretch of boundary that followed the West bank through sparse timber before hitting the fence line. Rick had reported tracks and torn fencing from this section, and when Liza and I reached it on the snowmobile, the light was nearly gone.
I parked the machine and killed the engine. The silence that followed was the deep, padded kind where you could hear your own blood moving.
A full section of chain-link fencing had been pulled from its posts.
The mesh had been torn and peeled back, the wire twisted into ragged, angular patterns I recognized from years of watching pack wolves work boundaries during disputes.
Heavy jaws had clamped down on cold steel and pulled until the metal gave.
“Fuck,” I said quietly.
Liza crouched beside the torn section and touched the bent wire. Her eyes were on the tracks, not the fence.
Fresh snowfall had softened them, filling the individual paw prints with powder, but the line of travel was clear. Several wolves had moved in a staggered column along the fence from the south, paused at the damaged section, and continued through the gap onto West land.
I followed the tracks with my eyes. They crossed the boundary and curved through the timber toward the patrol hut that sat in a clearing near the river.
The hut was a one-room shelter with a stove and a radio, used by workers who checked the boundary fencing in bad weather.
Nobody had been in it today because the storm had pulled everyone to the resort.
“They crossed,” I said.
Liza was already moving. She followed the track line through the trees with her head down and her shoulders tight, and I fell in behind her because leaving her alone with this felt wrong in a way I couldn’t name.
The patrol hut was undamaged. The door was shut, the lock intact, and the small window showed nothing disturbed inside.
But the tracks circled the building. Several large wolves had walked a complete circuit around the hut, close enough to brush the walls, and then withdrawn back through the fence the way they’d come.
Nothing at the hut was broken or stolen.
Aside from the fence, the wolves had left only tracks in the snow.
Whoever had done it wanted the crossing found. That made the careful retreat worse than random damage.
Liza knelt beside the thickest set of tracks near the hut’s south wall and lowered her face toward the snow. For a long moment she didn’t move, just breathed, letting whatever scent remained in the disturbed powder reach her.
When she stood up, her expression had gone hard.
“Kurt.” Her voice was flat with certainty. “I lived in the same pack as that man for my entire life. That’s his scent.”
“You’re sure?”
“I could pick Kurt Lamb out of a hundred wolves in a blizzard. He was here.”
I looked at the building again. The patrol hut was nothing. A stove, a bench, a radio. No strategic value, no supplies worth taking. But it sat on West land, staffed by West workers who had nothing to do with pack disputes.
Any urge to joke had left me.
“This isn’t only about the fencing,” I said. “Rick checks this section on rotation. Any of the resort crew could have been here when they came through. Abe’s pulled hut duty more than once.”
Liza heard what I wasn’t saying. Her eyes shifted.
“Your people,” she said.
“Resort crew who want no part in pack fights. They check fencing because somebody has to, and any one of them could have been alone in this hut when a pack of East enforcers came through the wire.” Anger tightened behind my ribs as I looked at the tracks. “Kurt knows people work out here alone.”
Liza’s jaw clenched. She stared down at Kurt’s trail. Wind pushed snow across the clearing in low sheets that blurred the prints.
“Everett ordered this,” she said, but her voice caught on it, like she wanted someone to tell her she was wrong.
I’d thought about it on the ride over and again while I watched her read the tracks, identify the scent, and stand in the gathering dark with the fence torn open behind her.
Everett was an asshole, but he was also an Alpha who’d spent years away from the valley learning how to protect his public image.
Sending wolves across a boundary to intimidate resort workers was reckless enough to start a war.
“An Alpha who wanted you seized would have sent wolves straight to the lodge,” I said. “They would have come to the front gate in daylight with a formal demand. That’s how it works, and Everett knows it.”
Liza looked at me sharply.
“These wolves circled an empty hut and left,” I said. “Nobody was taken, nobody was hurt, and the only thing they broke was fencing. Whatever Everett told them to do, this doesn’t look like an order to grab you.”
Her shoulders came down half an inch.
“Kurt’s been pushing the line for years,” Liza said. “He used to say the boundary was drawn wrong.”
“I’ve heard the speech.”
“You don’t know him like I do. Kurt doesn’t freelance. He waits for permission, and then he takes it further than anyone expected.”
“Then Everett may have given permission to pressure the fence, and Kurt took it further.”
“That would fit what we found.”
“Then Dominic needs to know, and we need to figure out whether Kurt is testing the line or setting something up.” I looked at the hut one more time. “Either way, nobody checks this section alone until we sort it out.”
Liza nodded. She turned and walked back through the tracks toward the torn fence, and I followed, pulling my radio from inside my jacket. I keyed it as we walked.
“Dom. Shane. We’re at the riverside hut.”
His answer came back rough. “What did you find?”
“They crossed. Several of them came through the fence to the hut and pulled back. Liza confirmed Kurt’s scent in the tracks.” I kept my voice even. “Nothing was taken, and nobody was hurt. The hut was empty. But the crossing was deliberate.”
Silence on the radio. I could feel him thinking, and I knew what he was weighing. Dominic’s strength was restraint, knowing when to push and when to hold. But restraint had limits, and East wolves walking on West land was the kind of provocation that tested every limit he had.
“Get back to the lodge,” he said. “Both of you. We’ll deal with this tonight.”
“Copy.”
I clipped the radio and looked at Liza. She was standing at the torn fence with her back to me, staring through the gap toward the East bank. Whatever she saw there, or remembered, she kept it to herself.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re losing the light.”
? ? ?
Darkness had settled by the time we headed back.
I knew every turn of the boundary road from years of running it, but the snowmobile headlight lit only a short stretch of it.
Snow had eased to scattered flakes, and the wind had dropped, leaving the trees motionless and the air sharp enough to sting.
Liza sat behind me on the machine. Her arms came around my waist because there was nowhere else to hold on, and her grip was firm, functional, a rider anchoring herself on an unfamiliar sled.
I kept my hands on the bars.
Her weight was warm against my back, the practical lean of someone too tired to hold herself upright against the cold.
She rested her chin near my shoulder and kept it there after the trail straightened, and I caught the faintest edge of her scent beneath the exhaust and frozen air, and Dominic’s all through it.
Her arms tightened slightly as I took a curve, and her thigh pressed against the outside of mine. Heat crept up from the contact point, and my wolf stirred with a low, interested sound that I ignored because I was good at ignoring it.
I wanted her in every way a man could want a woman, and the thought of all three of us together had refused to leave me.
I drove on.
The lodge lights appeared through the trees, and I felt her shift behind me, sitting straighter, pulling her weight back to center.
The contact cooled. By the time I parked the machine near the garage, she was already swinging off the seat and standing in the snow, looking toward the main building where Dominic’s truck sat dark beside the front doors.
“Thanks,” she said. “For the driving. And for what you said about the tracks.”
“Which part?”
“The part about an Alpha sending wolves to the lodge.” She looked at me with gratitude, maybe even trust. “It was the first thing all day that let me breathe.”
“Anytime.”
She turned and walked toward the lodge. I watched her until the door closed, then I sat on the idling machine in the dark and let the engine heat rise around my legs while the snow settled on my shoulders.
Dominic would get the full report. He’d be furious, but he’d think before he acted. When he did, wolves twice his age would shut up and listen.
I killed the engine and went inside.