Chapter 32 Cut Lines
Shane POV
The last two machines checked clean.
I ran my hands along the undercarriage of each one in the glow of the garage’s lone strip light, feeling for loosened bolts, scored brake lines, anything that shouldn’t be there. Nothing. Whatever Kurt had planned for the upper mountain, he hadn’t touched the fleet. That was something.
I pulled on my heaviest layers when the eastern sky began to pale, with the garage heater ticking behind me and the smell of Liza still on my skin.
Her scent mixed with engine grease and cold rubber, and the combination hit me somewhere private every time I breathed.
The chosen mark at her neck pulsed faintly through our bond even now, a low hum of belonging beneath my ribs.
I zipped my shell jacket to the throat, pulled goggles up onto my helmet, and swung a leg over the sled I’d repaired with Everett.
The new steering arm tracked true when I tested it.
The tank was full. My radio was clipped to my chest harness.
I shoved a patrol emergency kit into the rear rack and strapped it down.
Outside, the snow had stopped. The last stars were fading above the ridge, and the cold bit through my gloves before I’d cleared the garage bay.
The digital thermometer on the garage wall read something I didn’t want to think about.
My breath came out in fat white clouds that the headlight turned solid.
I took the tour route at speed because I could have ridden it blind.
The machine’s track chewed through fresh powder and found the packed base underneath, and the engine noise bounced off the pines and came back flat in the still air.
There was no wind and no animal sound, and even the branches stood still.
The cut rope appeared in my headlight beam right where Dominic said it would be. Orange nylon, sliced clean and curled back against the snow. I slowed but didn’t stop. The next closure was gone entirely, both posts yanked out of the snowpack and tossed downhill.
Past the pulled posts, the route narrowed and steepened.
I dropped my speed and watched the tree shadows for movement.
Fresh powder softened the old track depressions, but Kurt’s sour thread of sweat still wound through the trees.
Other East scents crossed and recrossed his trail.
He’d come through here with company. The question was what they’d left behind.
The equipment cache sat in a shallow depression beneath a rock overhang at the top of the chute.
Three steel boxes bolted to a concrete pad, padlocked and marked with orange hazard tape.
The resort stored avalanche control charges there, along with fuse igniters, hand charges, and the smaller stuff patrol used for routine work.
Patrol supervisors kept the keys. Nobody else should have been inside those boxes.
I killed the engine and sat in the silence for a full minute, listening. Wind across the upper ridge. The faint tick of cooling metal. Nothing else.
The middle box had been forced. Someone had pried the hasp off with a bar or a heavy rock, bending the steel lid upward until the lock popped free. I shone my headlamp inside and counted.
Half the charges were gone.
I said something I wouldn’t have wanted Zeller to hear.
The exposed bend in the hasp shone bright beneath my headlamp.
A skim of last night’s snow lay inside the box.
While we’d been watching the bridge and the lodge and Everett’s slow recovery, Kurt’s people had walked up here and taken enough explosive to blow the whole face loose.
The other two boxes were intact. I checked their locks, checked the fuse kit, checked the hand charges.
All there. Whoever did this had known exactly which box to hit and exactly what they wanted from it.
The cut lines below had only been their way in.
The loaded slope had done the rest, keeping patrol away around the clock while Kurt’s people put the stolen charges to use.
I reached for my radio.
The first wolf came out of the trees on my left.
He was big, dark-furred, and moving fast across the snow with his head low and his ears flat.
The second emerged from behind the rock overhang itself, lighter-colored, rangy, already angling to cut off my downhill line.
Neither was Kurt. But the dark one carried Kurt’s scent thick on his fur.
They’d slept or shifted close together recently.
Kurt might be out of sight, but these were his wolves.
I dropped the radio and hit the ignition.
The engine caught, and I slammed the throttle open as the dark wolf launched himself at the machine’s left side.
His jaws snapped shut on air where my leg had been a half second earlier.
I wrenched the handlebars right and drove between two pines so close that bark scraped both sides of the cowling.
The wolves split behind me. The dark wolf went left, and the lighter wolf went right, both running hard through the trees. They were trying to flank me and push me into the open where they could take me from both sides.
I cut between another pair of trees that the machine barely fit through. The wolves couldn’t follow that line without going single file, and neither wanted to be the one behind. I heard snarling as they nearly collided, and I used the half second to gain ground downhill.
The lighter wolf was faster. He came up on my right through a gap in the pines and matched my speed, running parallel at maybe ten feet. His eyes flashed green in my headlight. Young, strong, and still moving easily.
I juked left, then hard right, trying to lose him in the timber. The skis chattered over exposed rock beneath the snow, and the rear end kicked sideways. I corrected, overcorrected, felt the machine start to tip.
The dark wolf hit the rear rack.
His weight slammed the back end down and his claws scrabbled on the cargo platform, finding purchase on the strapped emergency kit. I felt the whole machine lurch as he dragged himself forward. His teeth found my right forearm through my jacket sleeve and bit down.
Pain tore up my arm like someone had shoved a hot wire from wrist to elbow. I heard my own voice, loud and raw, before I registered that I was shouting. Blood ran hot inside my sleeve and met the cold air where his teeth had punched through the fabric.
I threw the handlebars left and drove the machine sideways into a snowbank at full speed.
The impact launched me over the handlebars. The wolf on the rear rack went the other direction, tumbling into deep powder with a pained yelp. The sled buried its nose in the bank and rolled onto its side, engine screaming, track spinning uselessly against packed snow.
I hit the ground rolling and came up on my knees in chest-deep powder.
My right arm hung at my side. Blood leaked from my forearm through the torn jacket in dark lines that the starlight turned black.
The lighter wolf was already circling back through the trees, and the dark one was pulling himself free of the snowbank with his pale eyes fixed on me.
There was no time and nothing to fight with but what I was.
I caught the zipper of my jacket left-handed. The dark wolf lunged before I could pull it down. I let the shift take me.
The change wrenched the wounded arm into a new shape while my winter clothes split around me. When I landed on four paws, scraps of fabric hung from my fur and a ragged tear bled through the muscle above my right forepaw. I held that leg close to my chest.
The dark wolf came at me first.
He was bigger than me, heavier through the chest, but he expected a wounded animal that would run.
I didn’t run. I planted my hind legs in the packed snow beneath the powder and met him head-on, catching the side of his neck in my jaws as he lunged past. My teeth sank through fur and found the thick muscle of his shoulder.
I bit down until I felt something give, and he screamed, a high, awful sound that bounced off the rock overhang and echoed down the slope.
I released and spun. The lighter wolf was coming from behind, aiming low for my injured leg. I dodged left, stumbled on the bad foreleg, and caught his ear as he passed. My teeth tore it before he twisted free. He yelped and overshot into the snowbank where the sled lay overturned.
Blood on the snow. Mine and theirs. The dark wolf was favoring his right shoulder now, and the lighter one shook his head, scattering red droplets from his torn ear.
They circled me, but the aggression had thinned.
I was supposed to be easy. A Beta alone on a broken machine, surprised and outnumbered.
They hadn’t expected a fight that cost them.
I bared my teeth and held my ground. If they came at me again, one of them wasn’t leaving the mountain.
They looked at each other. Then both wolves turned and retreated uphill, moving fast through the trees toward the ridge.
I watched until their shadows disappeared into the timber, then shifted back.
The cold was immediate and total. I stood naked and bloody in snow up to my thighs, what was left of my clothes scattered across ten yards of churned powder.
The emergency kit.
I stumbled to the overturned sled and clawed the straps open with my good hand.
My right arm was worse in human form, the tear running from my inner forearm halfway to my elbow, deep enough to see the dark red of muscle beneath the skin.
Blood dripped steadily onto the white snow and melted small holes where it landed.
Emergency blanket first. The silver Mylar crinkled as I tore the packet open with my teeth and wrapped it around my shoulders and torso. It gave me little warmth, but it stopped the wind from taking whatever heat I had left.
My phone had been in my jacket’s inner pocket. I found the jacket ten feet from the machine, shredded along every seam where the shift had destroyed it, and pulled the phone free. The screen was cracked but lit up when I pressed the button.
I called Liza.
She answered on the second ring. Her voice came through sharp and awake, already running scenarios in her head.
“Shane?”
“Charges are gone from the upper cache,” I said. My voice was steady, but my teeth were starting to click together. “Half the box. Kurt’s people took them. Two wolves jumped me at the site. I’m okay, but one got my arm—”
“How bad?”
“Forearm. It’s bleeding but I can move my fingers.
” I flexed them to prove it to myself. Pain lanced up my arm and I swallowed a sound she didn’t need to hear.
“Liza, listen. We stayed off this face because it was loaded and dangerous, and they had it to themselves. If they packed those charges into the chute—”
A sharp, percussive crack from above split the predawn silence like a rifle shot, followed by a deeper report and the sound of something very large breaking loose. I’d heard the same noise at a controlled blast on a training slope, and I knew what it meant before the first chunk of snow moved.
“Shane?” Liza’s voice went thin and hard. “Shane.”
“Blast on the upper face,” I said. “It’s going.”
The slope above me fractured. I could see it in the gray predawn light, a dark line running horizontally across the snowfield above the tree line, widening as the slab separated from the mountain beneath it.
The crack spread in both directions faster than anything that size should move, and then the whole face began to slide.
I dropped the phone. The emergency blanket tore free from my shoulders as I turned and ran.
The rock shelf was forty yards downhill and to my right, a granite ledge jutting out from the mountainside above a stand of heavy timber. I’d passed it on every patrol run and never given it much thought. Now it was the only solid thing between me and the moving mountain.
I ran naked through thigh-deep snow with my right arm clamped against my chest and blood painting my side. Behind me, a deep, grinding hiss swelled as snow and rock and broken timber accelerated downhill through the trees.
The first debris hit the timber above me. Trunks snapped under the force. The air pressure changed, and wind from the slide’s front edge hit my back hard enough to shove me forward.
The shelf waited ahead, gray rock against white snow. I lunged for it as the avalanche tore through the trees behind me and rushed toward the river road and the boundary below.