My teeth start to click.
We’re not going back.
Not yet.
Maybe I’ll regret that in an hour. Maybe in ten minutes. But if I take him back now, they’ll put him down harder than before, and this time, I don’t know if anyone will let him surface again.
“We need shelter,” I say. “Can you walk?”
He gets to his feet. It takes two tries. But he’s standing.
I scan the ridge. Nothing useful. Trees, rock, slope. I pick a direction that puts the ridge at our backs and start walking. He follows. His stride is uneven, his feet landing heavy on the wet ground, but he keeps pace.
His hand finds my elbow after the first ten minutes. Not grabbing. Steadying. He leans his weight on me for a few steps, his palm burning through my wet sleeve, and then rights himself. I adjust my stride to match his. We don’t speak.
I’m trying to think about what comes next, but the thoughts keep snagging on the immediate. Every snap of a branch makes me flinch. Every time his breathing hitches, I check in my peripheral vision to see if he’s shifting.
I trust what I’ve seen: the hand opening, the claws retracting, the wolf who stopped when I asked him to. But trust and certainty aren’t the same thing, and there’s a part of me that’s weighing up the danger.
He hasn’t hurt you.
In fact, it seems like what motivated him in the first place was the guard grabbing my arm. But that’s no guarantee of anything.
Downhill is faster. The tree line gives cover. If the shift takes him fully, I can’t outrun a wolf, but I can go to ground in the rock formations on the eastern slope.
I hate that I’m thinking it. I’m thinking it anyway.
The cabin appears through the trees maybe twenty minutes later. Weathered wood, nearly invisible against the pines. One room. The door hangs crooked on rusted hinges.
He keeps walking past it. Three more steps. The wolf wants distance, not shelter.
“Hey.” I stop. “We’re going in there.”
His eyes come back to me. Rain running down his face. Dark hair plastered to his cheeks and throat.
“You’re going to drop,” I say. “And when you do, I can’t carry you. That has a roof. We need it.”
He changes direction. Concession, not agreement.
Inside, the cabin is exactly what it looks like: ten feet square, bare wood floor, no glass in the window. There’s an old woodstove in the corner, rusted shut. A stack of firewood against the wall, dry enough to burn if I had anything to light it with. I don’t.
He makes it two steps past the door before his legs give out properly. One knee, then the other, then he catches himself against the wall and slides down it until his back is flat against the wood. His head tips back. His eyes close. The shift fights across his face for a few seconds—jaw thickening, teeth crowding—and then it releases, and he’s just a man. Wet, bleeding, exhausted, sitting on the floor with his hands open on his knees.
Something about the openness of those hands makes my chest tight. He’s too spent to hold them any other way.
I turn away and do a full check of the cabin. The stove is useless. The woodpile has nothing behind it. The window faces east; I can see the slope we climbed. No movement on it. Under the sill, half-buried in dust, is a rusted tin box. I pry it open. There’s a candle stub, two fishhooks, a spool of line, and a box of matches so old the heads have gone soft. I try three before one catches. The candle flares and holds.
It’s not heat. But it’s light, and right now light matters.
When I turn back, his eyes are open again. Watching me. Jaw human, claws retracted. His hands are still open on his knees.
I wedge the door closed with a loose board. Then I cross to him.
“Wrists,” I say. “Let me see.”
He lifts his hands. The strap cuts are livid, shallow, already clotting. I clean them with strips torn from my soaked shirt. He watches me work without flinching this time.
“You broke away from that vehicle,” I say, not looking up. “Ran three miles uphill carrying a grown woman.” I tie off the cloth. “Your body is going to make you pay for all of that.”
