Chapter 34 War at the River
Shane POV
The heater in the truck cab had done enough to stop the shaking but not enough to fix anything that mattered. My right forearm throbbed in time with my pulse, and the gauze Liza had wrapped tight was soaking through in a slow, dark line that crept past the edge of the bandage toward my wrist.
Through the windshield I watched wolves gathering on both banks of the frozen river, and I knew exactly what Kurt had built.
Dominic was down there in fur, massive and dark against the churned snow, keeping his wolves between the trapped pickup and whatever was coming across the ice.
On the far bank, Kurt’s loyalists waited in a jagged row.
Some were big. All were angry. And the river between them was flat, frozen, and open.
Kurt stood on two legs well out on the ice now. Watching. Waiting for the thing he’d already planned.
The wind picked up and threw snow sideways across the debris field.
Visibility dropped to maybe forty yards, and the far bank blurred into gray shapes and moving shadows.
The radio on the truck’s dash crackled with a garbled transmission from Zeller, something about a second team, and went to static.
I got out of the truck.
The cold cut through the moment I opened the door.
Since Liza brought me down, someone had found me a thermal shirt, loose patrol pants, and a dry jacket from one of the emergency kits.
The boots were a size too small and unlaced, but they were better than bare feet on the ice. I left the blankets in the cab.
The patrol snowmobile Liza had ridden down sat near the bridge approach with the key still in it. I limped toward it, cradling my wrapped right arm against my chest, and swung my leg over the seat.
Liza appeared at the West end of the bridge. She saw me on the machine and her face went tight.
“Shane, don’t.”
“Just keeping the engine warm,” I said.
She knew I was lying. I knew she knew. Neither of us had time to argue about it because the sound from the far bank changed.
It started as a low rumble, the kind of noise that lives in the chest rather than the ears. Then it broke into individual voices, howls that overlapped and built on each other until the frozen river carried them to our side like a wave. Kurt’s wolves were moving.
They came across the ice in a rush, a ragged V aimed at the gap between the bridge and the trapped vehicles.
A dozen, maybe more. The blowing snow made counting impossible.
They ran low and fast, paws spread wide on the frozen surface, and the sound of their nails on the ice was a dry, scraping rattle that cut through the wind.
Dominic’s wolves answered. They surged forward from the snowbanks and met the leading edge of the charge with a crash I heard from the bridge.
Snarling, snapping, the heavy impact of bodies hitting bodies on hard ice.
But they were spread thin. Half of them were still positioned around the buried pickup and the last stranded travelers who hadn’t made it up the road yet.
I started the snowmobile.
My right hand wouldn’t close around the bar, but my thumb still worked. I braced the heel of that hand against the grip, pressed the throttle, and steered mostly with my left.
The machine leaped forward and hit the ice at the bottom of the bank ramp hard enough to jar my teeth.
I aimed it along the edge of the frozen river, parallel to the charging line, and opened the throttle until the engine climbed to a pitch that hurt my own ears and threw the headlight into the wall of blowing snow like a searchlight.
Wolves scattered.
The ones at the back of the charge hadn’t expected something loud, fast, and mechanical coming at them from the flank.
Three of them broke left, toward the far bank.
Two more stumbled on the ice and went down sliding.
The tight formation that Kurt had aimed at the gap between the bridge and the trucks shattered into smaller groups, and the West wolves got the half-second they needed to push the travelers already out of their vehicles behind the snowbanks and wrecked cars where nothing on four legs could reach them easily.
I cut the wheel and brought the machine around in a wide arc, the skis chattering on rough ice where the avalanche debris had frozen into the surface.
A dark wolf lunged at the sled from the right.
I swerved, clipped his shoulder with the rear track guard, and felt the impact through the handlebars. He went tumbling but got up.
On the East bank, Everett was running.
I caught him in glimpses through the snow.
He’d come off the West bridge approach and crossed to the East end, onto his own ground, and now he stood at the bridgehead with his strapped left arm and his wasted body and his borrowed clothes and shouted into the wind with everything an Alpha’s voice could carry.
“Stand down!”
The words rang across the ice. The East wolves still on their own bank checked, stumbled, looked back.
I saw three of them sit on their haunches, uncertain, caught between the command they could feel through the pack link and the momentum of the charge they’d been told to make.
Two more slowed to a trot and then stopped, milling at the edge of the ice.
But the wolves already on the river didn’t stop.
A wolf in fur understands speech. I knew that.
Every shifter knew that. But understanding and obeying are different things, and Kurt had spent weeks feeding these wolves a story about West Valley invading their territory.
They’d watched the mountain come apart and been told it was Dominic’s doing.
They had their teeth in it now, and a shouted order from an Alpha they’d already seen kneel wasn’t enough to pull them back.
Kurt shifted in the middle of the ice. His clothes tore away as his massive dark wolf came through, silvered muzzle turned toward the bridge. Toward Everett, the sick, thin man standing on the East bridgehead.
Then he charged.
Everett didn’t hesitate. He shifted in the borrowed coat and flannel, shredding both as his strapped left arm ripped free of the sling.
The change hit him hard. I heard the sound of it even over the engine, a wet grinding noise followed by the crack of joints realigning, and his wolf came through staggering.
He was smaller and leaner than Kurt, with golden fur against Kurt’s dark pelt, and he visibly favored the left shoulder that had been strapped against his chest for days.
But his teeth were bared, and he came off the East bridgehead to meet Kurt on the ice.
Their collision sent frozen chips skittering under their paws.
Dominic, in fur, hit the main charge with his whole weight.
He’d positioned himself between the attacking wolves and the buried pickup. Three East wolves came at him together, and Dominic met the biggest one head-on, clamped his jaws on the wolf’s shoulder, and threw him sideways into the second. The third got around him and headed for the trucks.
I aimed the snowmobile at that one.
The wolf saw the headlight and dodged, but I corrected and cut him off from the vehicles. He turned back toward the ice, and two of Dominic’s wolves picked him up and drove him toward the bank.
Then something hit me from the side.
A gray wolf, heavy, with a scarred muzzle, launched himself at the snowmobile’s right flank and hooked his front legs over the cowling. The machine tipped. I tried to correct with one hand, couldn’t hold it, and the sled went over on its side and dumped me skidding across the ice.
The wolf came around the overturned machine.
I shifted.
Bones shortened beneath torn flesh, and the wound stretched along my right foreleg until I bit down on my own tongue hard enough to taste blood. The borrowed patrol clothes and too-small boots split apart around me and fell away, taking the pressure wrap with them.
I rose on three legs. Tucked the wounded right forepaw against my chest. And showed the gray wolf my teeth.
He had four good legs and I had three. He circled to my bad side, going for the torn leg, and I let him come. When he lunged, I pivoted on my left hind leg and caught his foreleg as he went past. My teeth closed above the joint and tore. He yelped and spun, limping now, and came at me again.
I couldn’t trade bites head-on, not with one forepaw pulled up and my weight unbalanced on the ice.
Instead I circled behind him, kept moving, kept his focus split between me and the fight raging around Dominic.
When he committed to a charge, I slid sideways and drove him with snapping jaws toward the unstable snow piled at the river’s edge where the avalanche debris had frozen into a rough, treacherous ridge.
He hit the ridge, stumbled, went to his knees on the uneven surface. I got behind him and bit down on his flank, and he bolted for the far bank.
Through the blowing snow I caught a glimpse of Liza.
Human. Still human. She was at the buried pickup, and she had the driver out.
I saw the man stumbling up the slope behind the snowbank, and Liza pushing him with both hands toward the line of wrecked cars where the other travelers had sheltered.
The man was dazed, coughing, probably half-poisoned from his own exhaust, but he was on his feet and moving.
Liza watched him reach the snowbank. Made sure he was behind it. Then she turned, walked to the truck bed, and stripped.
She left her patrol jacket, her radio, and her base layers in the truck bed.
The scar that ran from her cheek to her throat caught the flat gray light, and my mark showed dark on the other side of her neck.
She stood naked in the wind for one breath, arms at her sides, looking at the fight on the ice and deciding where to move.
Then she shifted, and a black wolf hit the ice at a run.
I lost sight of her almost immediately. The snow thickened and the wind shifted, and the fight around the vehicles became a blur of dark shapes and bright blood on white ice. I went back to work.
Two East wolves had cornered a younger West wolf against the overturned snowmobile.
I came at them from behind, bit the nearest one’s hind leg, and pulled.
He turned on me, and the West wolf broke free and scrambled toward Dominic’s line.
The second East wolf followed me, but I was faster on three legs than he expected, and I led him into a pocket of West wolves who drove him back across the ice.
Near the bridge, Everett and Kurt were still locked together.
I saw them in flashes between gusts of wind.
Kurt had weight and health. Everett stayed upright on fury alone.
Kurt bit into his bad shoulder, the left one, and Everett didn’t fall.
He twisted, caught Kurt’s throat ruff in his teeth, and held on while Kurt thrashed and snapped.
Blood ran from both of them and froze in dark streaks on the ice beneath their paws.
A West wolf went down near me. One of Dominic’s regulars, a stocky gray-brown animal I recognized from the night patrols.
Kurt had thrown Everett off long enough to charge straight at the fallen wolf.
I caught the West wolf by the scruff and hauled him out of Kurt’s path.
My bad foreleg struck the ice as I dragged, and the wound tore wider.
The West wolf scrambled up and ran for the snowbank while Kurt wheeled back toward Everett.
My right forepaw left a red smear on the ice with every step.
Kurt broke.
I saw him disengage from Everett, spin, and run toward the fractured crust near the West bank, where the avalanche impact had sent cracks through the ice shelf. The surface there was rough, uneven, and thin over the river’s moving current.
Everett went after him.
Golden fur streaked with blood, left shoulder dropping with every stride, Everett pursued Kurt across the ice without slowing. His body was failing, but his fury kept driving him forward.
Kurt’s loyalists saw their leader running and broke off the fight. One by one and then in groups, the East wolves pulled back from Dominic’s line and followed Kurt’s trajectory across the ice. That put them on Kurt’s path west, away from the East bank and straight in behind Everett, which meant—
Shit.
From where Dominic stood on the West side of the fight, the blowing snow hid Kurt ahead of Everett and blurred the gap between Everett and the loyalists behind him.
All Dominic could see was Everett’s wolf running toward the West bank with a dozen East wolves streaming after him.
It looked like a second charge aimed at the West bank, with the East Alpha at its head.
I saw Dominic’s massive dark shape wheel toward Everett.
I tried to run. My right forepaw buckled under me, the torn muscle giving out, and I went down hard on the ice. Blood spread beneath my chest in a warm pool that steamed in the cold air. I got up. Tried again. Made it six strides before the leg folded a second time.
I couldn’t reach them.
The snow thickened between me and the two Alphas, and the last thing I saw through it was Liza.
Her black wolf breaking away from the line of trucks at a dead run, paws barely touching the ice, heading straight for the place where Dominic was about to hit Everett with everything he had.
She was faster than both of them. She had to be.
The snow closed in, and I lost them all.