Chapter 33 The Mountain Moves
Liza POV
The sound reached me before the silence did.
A deep, splitting crack rolled down the valley and rattled the equipment racks in the patrol base.
I was already on my feet with my phone still pressed to my ear, Shane’s last words caught between the blast and the nothing that followed.
It’s going. Then the connection dropped, and the mark at my neck burned like someone had pressed a hot coal against it.
I shoved through the patrol base door and ran into the predawn cold. The upper mountain was visible against the barely lightening sky, and I watched the whole face come apart.
The slab released in a line that raced across the open upper face, far above where the first slide had started.
It looked slow from this distance, almost gentle, the way a wave looks gentle from shore.
Then the trees started to go. I heard them snap one after another down the slope, and the slide gathered everything in its path and poured toward the river corridor.
Kurt’s people had packed those charges exactly where they’d do the most damage.
I grabbed the nearest patrol snowmobile, threw open the equipment locker, and pulled a medical kit, an emergency blanket pack, and the heaviest spare jacket I could find.
The machine started clean. I was swinging my leg over when Dominic’s truck came sliding into the parking area with Everett in the passenger seat.
Dominic was out before the truck fully stopped. His face was tight, and he pressed a hand to the fresh bandages over the reopened wound on his left side. Everett got out slower, favoring his strapped left arm, but his eyes were already on the mountain.
“Shane’s up there,” I said. “He called me. Kurt’s people stole charges from the cache and blew the upper face. Shane found half a box gone, got jumped by two wolves, took a bite through his forearm. The blast cut the call.”
Dominic’s expression didn’t change, but his hands closed into fists at his sides. “Where?”
“Near the cache, above the chute. If he got any warning at all, he’d have run for the rock shelf below it.” My voice stayed level because it had to. The mark throbbed with a dull, sick heat that told me Shane was alive but hurting. If the bond had gone cold, I would have known.
“I’m going up,” I said. “The east ridge should be clear of the slide path. You need to get down to the river road. If that debris field hit the highway, there could be people trapped.”
Dominic looked at me for one hard second. Everything he wanted to say pressed against his teeth, but he swallowed it. “Everett.”
Everett was already moving toward the truck. “I’ll ride down with you and cross at the bridge. If this lands on my pack wrong, I need to be on their side of it.”
“Get in,” Dominic said. He looked at me one more time, and his dark eyes held something I didn’t have time to answer. Then he climbed behind the wheel and pulled out, Everett with him, heading for the river road while I aimed the snowmobile uphill.
? ? ?
The east ridge service track was untouched.
The slide had run west of it, pouring through the main chute and the timber below, leaving a corridor of standing pines between me and a swath of destruction that looked like something had scraped the mountain bare.
Broken trees lay in heaps at the edges. Snow and rock and shattered wood littered the flanks.
I pushed the machine hard, following the track around the ridge contour toward the upper cache.
Below me, through breaks in the timber, I could see the river road.
Or what used to be the river road. The debris field had crossed it, a dirty white wall of packed snow, broken trees, mud, and rock stretching from the mountainside down to the river corridor.
Vehicles were caught in it. I counted two dark shapes half-buried at the edges and what looked like a third farther down, closer to the river.
The radio on my chest harness crackled, picked up half a transmission from Zeller, lost it again. The avalanche had taken out the upper repeater. I was alone.
I found the rock shelf fifteen minutes after the blast.
It jutted from the mountainside like a granite table, six or so feet above the churned snow where the slide had torn through the timber below it.
The main flow had split around it and reunited on the downhill side, leaving the shelf clear but surrounded by debris on three sides.
Curled against the cold rock with his knees drawn to his chest was Shane.
He was naked. His shredded winter clothes were scattered somewhere in the wreckage below.
His skin had gone ashen from cold, and his right forearm was a mess.
Dark blood had run from the tear and frozen in streaks down his hand and across his thigh where he’d been pressing it against his body.
Torn muscle showed through the gash even from where I stood.
But he was breathing. His ribs moved, and when I killed the engine and shouted his name, his head came up.
“Liza.” His voice was thin, stripped raw by cold and blood loss. He focused on me, and his cracked lips pulled into a faint grin even as his teeth chattered. “Took you long enough.”
I was off the machine and climbing the rock before he finished the sentence.
Up close, the cold had done almost as much damage as the bite.
His lips were blue. His fingers on the good hand had gone white at the tips.
He was shaking in deep, continuous waves that started at his core and ran outward. His body was losing heat too fast.
“Don’t move,” I said, pulling the spare patrol jacket around his shoulders. It was too small for him, but it covered his chest and back and trapped some of his remaining heat. The emergency blankets came next, two of them, one over his legs and one tucked around his torso.
His right forearm looked worse up close. I cleaned what I could with gauze from the medical kit, packed the wound, and wrapped the arm tight enough to hold the dressing in place without cutting off circulation to his fingers.
“Can you move your hand?” I asked.
Shane flexed his fingers. They all moved. The skin around his eyes tightened with pain, and he sucked air through his teeth. “Yeah. Hurts like a son of a bitch, but they work.”
“Good.” I checked his pupils, his pulse at the neck, the color returning to his good hand now that the jacket was holding some heat. He was alert, but the hypothermia needed attention fast. The bleeding had slowed under the pressure dressing.
“Shane. Tell me what happened at the cache.”
He told me how he’d found the cache box forced open, how the two wolves had emerged from the trees, and how the crash, his shift, and the fight had followed.
“I got both of them,” he said. “The dark one’s shoulder is torn open. I took a piece of the light one’s ear. They went uphill after that.”
“And then the blast.”
“Yeah.” His eyes moved to the destruction below the shelf. “Kurt’s been planning this for a while.”
Since the full moon gathering, I thought.
“Can you ride behind me?” I said.
“I can hold on with my left.”
I helped him off the rock and onto the snowmobile.
His legs worked, but barely. Every step cost him, and by the time he settled behind me on the seat, he was breathing hard through his nose.
I pulled his good arm around my waist, and he locked his grip on my jacket with fingers that shook against my ribs.
His wounded arm he held tight to his chest, wrapped in gauze and blankets.
“We’re going down,” I told him. “I’m not chasing those two up the ridge while the upper face could let loose again and you’re bleeding on the back of this machine. Shifting won’t fix that arm. It needs real treatment.”
“Wasn’t going to argue.” His forehead dropped against my shoulder, and I felt his breath through the layers on my back. The chosen mark pulsed between us, and for a second the fear I’d held in check since the phone went dead eased.
He was hurt, cold, and bleeding, but alive.
I started the engine and took us down.
? ? ?
The descent showed me the full scope of what Kurt had done.
The debris field was massive. The first slide had cut the road.
This one buried it again, from the upper tree line all the way down to the river corridor, under a churned mess of snow, broken timber, and rock.
Two cars sat half-swallowed at the near edge, their drivers already out and stumbling uphill through the snow.
A third vehicle, an older pickup, was buried past its windows near the bottom of the field, closer to the river, its engine still running, exhaust curling up through the packed debris around the cab.
I stopped at every cluster of people I found and told them the same thing.
“Get up the road toward the resort. Higher ground. Don’t cross the debris field, don’t go near the river, don’t stop moving.
” Most of them listened. A few argued until they saw Shane’s bloody arm and the look on my face, and then they moved.
The radio came back in patches as I dropped below the damaged repeater’s range and picked up the base relay.
Zeller was coordinating from the resort.
Kristen had a team moving down the west access.
Dominic’s voice came through once, clipped and controlled, confirming that three vehicles were caught on the West side and that all the drivers were accounted for except the one in the pickup near the river.
The bridge was still standing when I reached it.
The avalanche had stopped short of the span itself, but debris choked the western approach.
Packed snow and shattered pines rose in dirty heaps that blocked vehicle access and left only a narrow path on foot.
On the far side, the East bank road was clear but empty.
I parked the snowmobile and helped Shane off. He could stand, but his color was bad and the dressing on his forearm was beginning to soak through. I sat him in the cab of a West truck that someone had left running with the heater on and told him to stay put.
“I’m coming back,” I said.
“I know.” He caught my wrist with his good hand. “Be careful.”
I kissed his cold forehead, tasted salt and dried blood, and went.
Everett met me at the West end of the bridge.
He came across from the East side with his coat dusted in snow and his strapped left arm held stiff against his body.
Whatever he’d heard on the far bank had burned past anger and landed somewhere harder.
Exhaustion showed in the hollows beneath his blue eyes.
“Kurt’s telling them we did it,” he said. “The East link is saying West Valley blew the chute. That Dominic ordered the charges set to bury the road and cut the bridge approaches. That this is the first move of an invasion.”
Every word was a lie, and every word was built to sound true. Kurt had stolen the charges, packed the chute, and blown the face himself. And now he was selling the explosion as West Valley’s declaration of war.
“How many believe it?” I asked.
“Enough.” Everett’s jaw worked. “The wolves who saw me strip Kurt’s rank are confused. The ones who turned their backs are ready to fight. He’s been feeding them this for weeks, and now they can point to a blown mountainside and a buried road as proof.”
“It’s his proof,” I said. “His charges. His wolves attacked Shane at the cache.”
“I know that. You know that. But they didn’t see Kurt’s wolves attack Shane on the mountain. They see a wrecked road and hear their former Beta telling them the other pack did it.”
Shit.
He was right.
Below the bridge, the river had changed.
The bitter cold that had gripped the valley for more than a week had sealed the water completely.
Ice stretched from bank to bank, a flat gray-white surface thick enough to walk on, except along the West bank where the slide had run out onto it and left that edge cracked and heaved.
The rushing black current I remembered from the night I’d walked across the bridge was gone, buried beneath a frozen lid that turned the boundary between the two territories into open ground.
And on the East bank, they were gathering.
I saw them emerge from the tree line in ones and twos, shifted wolves moving with purpose through the snow.
They were big animals, dark and light, with the muscled bulk of experienced fighters.
They formed a loose line along the bank above the ice, facing west. Their ears lay flat, their shoulders were low, and no teeth showed yet.
Dominic’s wolves answered. They appeared along the West bank in a line of their own, spreading between the bridge approach and the last cluster of stranded vehicles.
I recognized three by their size and coloring from the night they’d answered the alarm at the riverside hut.
They held the ground between Kurt’s fighters and the wreckage where one driver was still trapped in his buried pickup.
If that man didn’t get out soon, the exhaust alone would kill him.
Now the river was frozen, and there was nothing between the two lines of wolves but flat ice and cold air.
Kurt walked out of the tree line on two legs.
He was the last one through, in no hurry at all. The notched right ear was visible even at this distance. He stopped at the edge of the ice and looked across at us.
Then he stepped onto it.
The frozen river held his weight. He stood there with one foot on the ice and the other still on his own bank. The East wolves had heard his lie first, and they were ready to act on it.
Dominic was downriver, organizing his wolves around the trapped vehicle. Everett started for the East end of the bridge, sick and strapped and human.
Before either Alpha could stop him, Kurt put his second foot on the ice.