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"I bought six donuts."

"You have been carrying six donuts around this entire time and saying nothing."

"I was waiting for a good moment."

I'm laughing when they come out of the orchard.

Four creatures. No fog, no rot in the air, no warning at all. They come across the gravel fast and low with their mouths splitting wide, and one of them is bigger through the shoulders and slower than the rest, and I know that shape. I've seen that shape standing in a line on Gage's grass.

Gage is already moving.

He gets between me and the creatures, and his clothes rip into pieces as his shift takes him in the middle of a stride the way it never does when I'm watching. Bone and dark and then there's a wolf the size of a pony hitting the first one broadside.

Two seconds later and he's got it apart.

Then the other three go around him.

They're ugly but not stupid. The big one takes his back leg and drags, the second one comes over the top, and the third goes for his throat. And my enormous impossible wolf who has never once lost anything in front of me, goes down under all three of them.

He makes a raw sound that I’ve never heard.

There’s no gate here to throw. There's no salt, there's no fire. There's a truck and Gage bleeding on the gravel.

So I put my hand out.

I don't reach for a ward. There isn't one out here, and I don't need theirs.

I draw one.

I take the line I want and I lay it down across the gravel like snapping a sheet over a bed, right through the middle of that pile.

Then I shut it.

My ears pop. Every window in the back of the mansion goes at once. All along the second floor, glass raining down onto the kitchen steps, and the three of them are gone between one blink and the next. No smoke. No dissolving. Just an empty stretch of gravel with wet spots on it.

Gage is on my side of the line.

Of course he is. I put the line where I needed it.

I get him into the truck by doing several things I'm sure I'll feel tomorrow.

He shifts back somewhere around the tailgate, which isn’t a mercy, because a wolf that size can deal with an injury that a man that size can’t. The bite in his shoulder goes deeper than I want to look at, and the one across his thigh is worse. The blood coming out of both is too dark and it's smoking a little where it hits the gravel. But he's naked so there's the bright side.

"Salt," he says. His voice is wrecked. "Glove box."

"Since when is there salt in your glove box?"

"Since Wednesday."

“I’m going to have to find a blanket since you are going commando again.”

He looks at me and raises that right eyebrow again and he is definitely hiding a smile behind that pain.

“Do what you gotta do.”

I find a blanket in the back and I try not to stare as I lay it over him. I help get him seated comfortably in the front seat and then I pour the salt in. He hisses through his teeth and takes hold of the door frame. The metal bends under his fingers.

Behind us, people are coming out of the mansion's front doors on the other side, shouting about the windows.