Chapter 14 Teeth at the Line
Liza POV
The distress call came as a whisper. One word broke through the radio static: help. Then nothing. No call sign, no location, just a voice barely audible before the transmission cut out.
Ten days had passed since the hot springs.
I was running my last pass along the south boundary in the lodge truck, headlights pushing through the early mountain dark, Shane trailing me on his sled.
The hard cold had settled over the valley.
Everything metal hurt to touch. The river ran sluggish beneath ice that thickened overnight and crept farther from the banks each morning.
I keyed the radio. “South patrol, say again. Who’s transmitting?”
Dead air. Wind and static.
Shane came over the radio a moment later. “I caught that. Sounded like the riverside hut. The one they circled.”
“I’m closest.”
“Don’t go alone. I’m coming. I’m right behind you.”
Whoever had whispered into that radio was trying not to be heard, which meant something was near enough to hear them.
I killed the headlights before the last bend and coasted the truck behind a stand of pines where the road narrowed toward the river. I stepped out into air cold enough to seize in my lungs and listened.
The snowmobile whined around the bend behind me, its headlight dark. Shane coasted in beside the truck and cut the engine.
Metal shrieked in the clearing ahead as the mended chain-link gave way at its posts.
We moved through the trees on foot, staying low in the snow, Shane hanging back so he could get to the sled fast. When we reached the edge of the clearing, I counted four wolves working the fence line in the dark.
Big animals, heavy through the chest and shoulders, their breath steaming as they tore section after section free and dragged it into the drifts.
The riverside patrol hut sat beyond them with its door shut and its single window dark.
Someone was inside. The whisper had come from there.
Then I saw him.
Standing upright among the wolves, barefoot in the snow, stripped to the waist despite the cold. Thickset, gray at the temples, pale eyes catching the faint light off the river ice.
Kurt Lamb.
He stood long enough for me to be certain. He wasn’t hiding.
I rose and started into the clearing. “Kurt—”
Then he shifted.
The change took him fast, his remaining clothes splitting as his body broke apart and remade itself.
Bones cracked and reformed. His frame dropped forward onto hands that were already paws.
The wolf that replaced him was massive, with dark fur, a silvered muzzle, and the same pale eyes that had followed me as I left East Valley more than a month ago.
He shook off the torn fabric and charged toward the hut.
My wolf struck the inside of my chest.
I didn’t think about it. Didn’t calculate who was coming or how many I was facing. The worker inside that hut was one of ours, and Kurt was going through the door.
Behind me, Shane turned and ran for the sled.
I shifted.
Pain ripped through me like every bone in my body shattered and knit itself back wrong before settling right.
My patrol jacket split down the back and fell away in pieces.
My boots burst at the seams. My base layers shredded, and my radio and belt snapped free as my spine lengthened, my jaw pushed forward, and my hands curled into something built for killing.
The cold hit my new fur. I drew air through my longer muzzle.
Every scent in the clearing hit me at once.
East Valley wolves, their musk thick with aggression and the sharp chemical edge that fear puts under bravado.
Kurt’s own smell, sour sweat and something rank.
The iron bite of torn fencing. And underneath all of it, the terrified sweat of whoever was crouched behind that shut door, breathing too fast and staying silent.
I hit the nearest East wolf before he could turn on me.
We went down together in the deep snow, my teeth finding the thick fur at the back of his neck.
He twisted hard and snapped at my face, but I had the angle and I used it.
I hauled him sideways, away from the hut, and drove him into a fence post hard enough to hear something give.
He yelped and scrambled loose, limping into the dark.
I let him go because Kurt was already at the hut.
His wolf threw himself against the door. The wood cracked but held. He coiled and hit it again, and this time a hinge tore free with a screech of old metal.
The snowmobile’s headlight blazed across the clearing.
Shane came in at full throttle, the engine screaming as he aimed the beam directly at two East wolves flanking the hut’s far side.
They flinched from the glare and the noise, and Shane cut hard, spraying a wall of packed snow across their faces.
He circled back with the engine roaring, herding them, keeping them turning and blind.
I loved that reckless son of a bitch.
A deep howl rolled from the tree line behind me. I recognized Dominic’s voice before I saw him.
Dominic came out of the pines at a dead run, his dark wolf enormous against the white ground.
He crossed the clearing in four long strides and hit Kurt broadside before Kurt’s jaws could find the broken hinge again.
The impact sent both of them tumbling through the remains of the fence, and the sound that came out of Kurt was fury sharpened by surprise.
The fight between them was nothing like pack training or controlled runs.
It was vicious, tight, and ugly. Dominic outweighed Kurt, but Kurt fought dirty.
He went for the throat, then the tendons in Dominic’s forelegs, then twisted sideways and lunged for Dominic’s eyes.
Dominic caught his ear instead and tore, and Kurt’s scream vibrated through the frozen air.
I couldn’t watch. One of the East wolves had circled back toward the hut, low in the snow, heading for the gap where the broken hinge left the door hanging crooked.
I put myself between him and the entrance and snarled from somewhere deeper than my chest. The rumble shook loose snow off the hut’s roof. He hesitated.
Behind the cracked door, I heard ragged breathing.
The East wolf lunged.
We locked together in the deep snow, his teeth clamped on my shoulder while mine closed on his foreleg.
The drifts along the fence line came up past my haunches, and every pivot cost twice the effort it should have.
I wrenched sideways, felt his grip rip loose along with a patch of my fur, and then my hind leg caught on something that bit into the muscle and held.
Fence wire. Its broken end lay half-buried in the drift, curled tight around my leg. I pulled and felt it dig deeper. Blood ran hot into the snow beneath me.
I tore free, and the wire sliced through fur and muscle before it released. Pain blinded me for a heartbeat. But the East wolf was backing off, and I still had my teeth, and the hut was still behind me.
Shane had penned two wolves against the riverbank with the snowmobile. His engine revved in short, aggressive bursts, and every time one of them tried to break left, he swung the sled to cut them off. He sat upright on the seat, jacket open, eyes fixed on them.
Then the sirens started.
West Valley’s warning system cut through the night, rolling across the river and into the pines. Heads turned across the clearing. West wolves broke through the tree line and poured into the clearing with their eyes on the fight.
Kurt broke from Dominic and came for me.
I caught only pieces of what happened next. A second East wolf, one I’d lost in the chaos, came at me from the opposite side. Dominic threw himself between me and the second attacker, shielding my torn leg with his body.
Kurt’s jaws found Dominic’s exposed side.
The sound Dominic made stopped everything in me. A wet, brutal grunt of impact, followed by a tearing noise that lodged in my memory. Kurt’s upper teeth raked across Dominic’s ribs, opening a gash that steamed in the frozen air. Blood, dark and thick, ran down his flank.
Dominic staggered but didn’t fall. He drove his shoulder into Kurt’s chest, shoved him back into the snow, and held his ground while blood dripped freely into the white beneath him. West wolves closed around us. Kurt had seconds before they cut off his retreat.
Kurt lifted his bloody muzzle and looked at me. My fur was torn and my leg was bleeding, and I was still between his wolves and the worker inside.
He turned and ran.
The other East wolves followed, retreating from Shane’s headlight, Dominic’s reach, and the hut door I guarded.
They poured through the gap in the fencing they’d torn open and splashed through the shallow water at the river’s edge.
Within seconds, they were dark shapes vanishing into the trees on the far bank.
I stood in the blood-spattered snow with my hind leg throbbing and my chest heaving and watched them go.
? ? ?
Shifting back hurt worse than shifting out. The bones reset in the wrong order, and every injury that adrenaline had buried came screaming to the surface at once.
I knelt naked in the snow beside the ruined hut and tried to breathe through the pain in my left calf where the fence wire had torn a gash from my ankle to below my knee.
Cold air hit every inch of bare skin. My patrol clothes were scraps of dark fabric scattered across the clearing, beyond salvaging.
Shane killed the snowmobile’s engine and reached me before my hands stopped shaking.
He stripped off his heavy coat and wrapped it around my shoulders without letting his eyes wander, which I appreciated more than I could say in that moment.
His knuckles brushed my jaw as he drew the collar up under my chin, and he took his hands back fast.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
I tested the calf. The cut was deep but hadn’t hit bone. “Yeah. Help me up.”