Caius
We came through the badlands dark like weather with teeth.
I’d caught the trail at the logging spur, where the machines had waited, and after that it was mine. This is the one thing I have never joked about. Ground speaks. It told me eight men, one truck riding heavy, turning north and east into the broken country, and I ran the line of it through the dark with Zephyr and Lucien flanking me and forty Nightbane wolves behind us like a gray flood.
Her fury led us the last mile. We didn’t even need the ground by then. She was burning down that thread like a signal fire, steady, alive, furious, and each of us held our piece of it and ran.
Then the thread flared white, pain, her pain, a blow, and the night went red at the edges, and Zephyr made a sound I will never describe to anyone,
