Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Toby
I’m deep in a pleasant dream where I’m having afternoon tea with Oliver and Callum in Clarence House.
“Toby.” There is no mistaking the voice. Only one person says my name in such a posh accent. But that voice doesn’t belong in Clarence House. Because Oliver would never invite Harry Matheson into his home.
“Toby. You need to wake up.” Now, my shoulders are being shaken.
I mumble my protests as I try desperately to cling to my dream. High tea is just being served and they have éclairs.
“Toby, wake up now.” The command in the voice is unmistakable, and I snap my eyes open to find Harry crouched over me.
“What’s going on?” I croak.
“Wolves,” Harry says.
Oh, holy fuck. One single word and my stomach goes into freefall.
I scramble up, the survival blanket falling away from me.
Harry’s holding the torch, lighting up the other side of the clearing where one, two, three, four wolves are standing.
My mouth goes dry. I’ve never seen wolves outside of a zoo or the movies.
“Are they going to attack us?” I ask through numb lips.
“I don’t know. But I suggest we don’t wait around to find out.” Only Harry Matheson could say those words in a calm, collected tone as if discussing nothing more important than the proper way to brew a cup of Earl Grey.
“What should we do?” I ask.
“Climbing the tree might be a good place to start.”
The tree. The one we’re nestled against to sleep now offers more protection than just a windbreak. It’s a way to get out of range of the wolves’ snapping teeth.
Harry shines his torch up the tree. “Does it look climbable?”
“It has branches,” I reply as I haul myself onto the bottom branch. I have never been so glad for possession of opposable thumbs.
But no sooner am I safely on the first branch than the light disappears, and I’m plunged into darkness.
“Hey, I need the light to climb,” I say desperately.
“Well, I’m trying to keep the light on the carnivorous animals to deter them from turning us into their after-dinner treat,” Harry replies in a cool tone.
“If you hand the torch to me, I’ll try to shine it in their eyes while hopefully giving you enough light to climb.”
“All right.”
Harry hands me the torch, and I try to focus my shaking hand on the wolves watching us while still allowing enough of the peripheral light to shine on Harry so he can see what he’s doing.
“Oww,” I say when Harry’s foot lands on my hand.
“Well, budge over then.”
It turns out this branch isn’t big enough for two grown men to be perched on it. Besides, right now, I’m a big fan of higher. Higher is such a great concept, especially when it involves climbing out of the range of a wolf’s jump height.
I flash the light up the trunk and spot another branch about six feet above our heads.
“Think you can reach that one?” I ask.
“I can try,” Harry replies.
It turns out Harry’s tree-climbing technique is not particularly elegant. He scrambles up the trunk, his polished Oxfords slipping and sliding on the bark.
Nevertheless, he makes it to the next branch.
“Here,” he extends his hand to me.
“Please don’t let me plummet to my wolfy doom,” I say as I grab his hand, and he starts to haul me up.
“I promise to not let you go,” he says.
There’s sincerity in his voice, and I believe him. It’s funny how a week ago, I would have never trusted Harry Matheson on anything, yet I now completely trust Harry will do everything he can to keep me alive and avoid me becoming wolf kibble.
Harry’s grip is strong, his jaw clenched with determination as he pulls me up. I swing my leg over the branch in probably the least graceful move I’ve ever attempted. And that’s saying something, considering my dance moves at the last Labour Party conference.
With an undignified grunt, I manage to straddle the branch. “Well, I guess this experience tells me a career in Cirque du Soleil will never happen,” I say.
Harry huffs a small laugh, which seems to surprise him because he starts to wobble. I quickly reach out to steady him.
“I’m not letting you fall either,” I say.
“Thank you,” he says formally, an unreadable emotion in his eyes.
I rip my gaze away from him to glance below us.
The wolves are moving like gray shadows, circling the base of the tree. My grip tightens on the branch I’m holding.
I think of the comment I made to Callum when I visited him and Oliver at Clarence House.
I don’t think food scarcity and being attacked by wolves are major concerns of mine at the moment.
Oh, how the universe must be enjoying this ‘gotcha’ moment.
One of the wolves sniffs at the survival blankets we discarded at the base of the tree, and my shoulders seize. The survival blankets are so well named. They are literally essential to us surviving out here. I have an irrational fear that the wolf will bite or rip it out of maliciousness.
But then the noise of two other wolves snarling at each other distracts the curious wolf, and it lifts its head.
In the torch beam, I can see what the wolves are fighting about. One of them has dug up the leftover fish bones.
They’re fresh out of luck if they expect much reward for their scavenging, because Harry and I picked the bones clean.
“Bollocks. We should have disposed of the fish remains further away from our camp. It’s a rookie mistake,” Harry says.
“Not cleaning up the kitchen properly doesn’t usually have these kinds of consequences,” I comment.
“I should have thought it through,” Harry says.
“Harry, don’t be ridiculous.”
In the light from the torch, I can see the strain on his face. It reminds me of how he looked when the fish got off the hook.
Harry puts so much pressure on himself to get everything perfect.
But I don’t have time to worry about Harry’s psychology right now. The cold is starting to penetrate me, and my hands feel numb.
I shiver violently.
Because we’re trapped up a tree in the freezing cold with wolves circling below.
Suddenly, hysteria rises up and takes control of my mouth.
“Holy fuck, Harry, how are we going to survive this?”
“Survive what?”
“This.” I gesture wildly around us. “We can’t spend the whole night in the tree. We’ll freeze. But we can’t climb down because there are wolves.”
“I agree it’s important to prevent the wolves from consuming your corpse because they might die from all the putrid poisoning of liberal values.”
I blink at him. “What?”
“I’m just saying, I can imagine your feculent taste might be harmful to the wildlife.”
I swallow the lump of panic in my throat so I can answer him. “If we’re going to take a bet, I think the years of aristocratic inbreeding would have led to a particularly foul, gamy taste to your own flesh.”
“I’m fairly sure you’re the one who would leave a repugnant aftertaste in their mouths,” Harry retorts.
Are we really doing this? Is now, sitting in a tree with wolves circulating, the right time for us to speculate how each other would taste?
But I can’t back down from a Harry insult. And suddenly, I realize that’s the whole point.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” I say.
“What?”
“You’re deliberately antagonizing me to distract me.”
Harry’s face remains impassive. “Sure. Let’s go with that. Or else I could just be using the opportunity to point out the rancidness of Labour policies,” he says.
But I’m staring at him, my mind ticking over the last few days.
Harry has been doing this the whole time. Every time I’ve started to panic, he’s picked an argument with me.
It’s like him eating the burnt parts of the fish, claiming he prefers them when he doesn’t.
In his stiff, formal, wanker-like way, Harry Matheson is actually slightly…kind.
The thought makes my head swirl. It’s like looking at one of those optical illusions, where you’re convinced you’re looking at one thing, only to have it morph into something completely different. Then you wonder how the hell you missed what had been there the whole time.
“We need to scare the wolves off,” Harry says.
I take a deep breath, pushing the thoughts of Harry’s Pollyanna streak to the side. “Sadly, I’m all out of wolf repellent.”
“We need to think of another way,” Harry says.
“My knowledge of wolves is strictly limited to what I learned from fairytales. But as they don’t seem to be dressed up as a grandmother, and there are no little straw houses for the wolves to blow down, I’m fresh out of ideas.”
I hear what sounds like a snort from Harry.
“They are probably more scared of us than we are of them,” he says.
“There’s a pack of them.”
“We’re a pack of two,” he counters.
“Two alphas vying for control does not make a pack, Harry,” I say.
He snorts again. There was definitely something laugh-like about that snort though.
“These wolves aren’t used to people. I think if we make enough noise, we ought to be able to scare them off,” he says.
“Yo. Overgrown dogs. Go home,” I yell the words loudly, and in the pool of light from the torch, I can see the wolves startle at the unexpected noise.
They do appear quite skittish. Hope burgeons inside me.
“It’s a shame we don’t have any rocks to throw at them,” Harry says. “That might help scare them off.”
“We’re up a pine tree, Harry. We have another supply of ammunition,” I say.
And so, our next mission is collecting pinecones while up a tree. Which is definitely a more awkward method of pinecone acquisition than simply scooping them from the ground.
It involves edging along the branch with all the grace of a drunken squirrel, my fingers fumbling to grasp the elusive cones while trying not to plummet to the ground below.
When I manage to get one, I stuff it in the pocket of my blazer. I’m not quite sure becoming a makeshift pinecone grenade pouch is what the designers had in mind when they added pockets to this style of blazer.
“How are you doing?” I call to Harry.
“I’ve got a decent supply,” he replies.
I scoot back along the branch back to him. “Let’s do this.”
“All right, on the count of three,” Harry says.
I lift a pinecone, feeling the prickly scales dig into my palm.
“One, two, three!”
We begin hurling the prickly projectiles at the wolves. Our aim is surprisingly accurate, considering the dim light and our precarious perch. The first few pinecones bounce off the wolves’ backs, causing them to yelp in surprise and confusion.
“Take that, you mangy mutts,” I yell as I lob another pinecone at the nearest wolf. “Go back to the big bad woods! We’re not on the menu tonight.”
“Go on, get out of here!” Harry’s posh accent seems to have slipped into something more primal as he throws another pinecone that hits a wolf smack in the side.
We must look ridiculous, but hey, no one is around with a camera to capture our ridiculousness, so we can pretend it never happened.
But the combination of our yells and pelting them with pinecones works as a wolf repellent. The wolves begin to retreat, their tails tucked low and their ears flattened against their skulls.
“They’re leaving,” I say, my voice a mixture of triumph and surprise.
“Fire. We need fire,” Harry says urgently. “They won’t like fire.”
“Good thinking, Robin,” I say.
“I think you’re confused about who is the sidekick in this scenario,” he mutters as he scrambles down the tree.
I exit the tree after him, and Harry has already opened the survival kit and grabbed the multitool and paracord.
Fire at night is something we’ve avoided until now, but if it comes down to a choice between Kade and his friends or wolves, I’m picking the terrorists.
At least they’re human.
The wolves seemed like beings from another world. The unnaturally silent paws. Those green, unflinching eyes. Demon wolves.
I shiver again.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get the fire going soon,” Harry says, misinterpreting my shiver.
Harry and I know how to make fire now, so I hold the torch steady with one hand while helping him slowly add pine needles to the flame.
Within a few minutes, the fire is crackling away.
Harry moves to retrieve the sharpened sticks he used to cook the fish, handing one to me wordlessly, then coming to sit with me on a log by the fire, his shoulder pressing into mine.
“Wolves will be naturally afraid of fire, I’m sure,” he says.
Despite my agreement that Harry is probably correct about wolf behavior, I’m aware there’s no way sleep is happening anytime soon. Instead, I focus on building the fire up.
Even though it’s warm with the fire going, Harry doesn’t leave my side. We continue to sit shoulder to shoulder, Harry’s pressing into me like he’s drawing strength from our connection.
I feel the same way. I need the comfort of touching a person right now.
Even if it is Harry.