Chapter 20 Twenty

Chapter 20 Twenty
Elara's POV

I did not stop to think.

Thinking was for the rare moments you had the time to waste, waiting between one thing and then the next, and the frozen lake permitted no such luxury. Draven had punched through the first Feral, and the last five were already reconvening, formation breaking apart and reforming around the new focus in a fluidly agile manner that suggested they were being trained more than simply let loose.

I pushed with my back legs and lunged forward, colliding into the closest Feral from the side.

The impact threw both of us forward on the hard-packed ice, my claws finding no real purchase on the frozen surface as I used that momentum instead of resisting it, allowing the slide to carry us into wayward trajectory of the Feral itself, and using its weight against it like my father had taught me to use size before I was old enough to shift myself, leverage over force, angle over power.

The Feral went down.

By the time it regained its feet I was back upright, the ice slippery beneath me, each stride requiring that constant micro-adjusting of a wolf learning a surface instant by passing instant.

Draven was already shredding through the Ferals with the kind of precise efficiency, while he’d kill one of them, another would probably decide it wanted to take a bite out of him and given that even in my altered state, I had never seen anything longer than ten feet long except for maybe a pack wolf… Draven was shaped on an entirely different scale and cam style; if his camp was known for anything at all, it was their no-wasted movement doctrine; there was zero freaking about beyond twitchy emotionless grunts who punched far below their weight class. Just clean and total, and absolutely effective.

His two wolves fell upon the rest of the Ferals with a joint precision born of partners who had run situations like this before, not perfectly matched in ability but matched in intent, each one covering the hole that was left by the other without needing to say a word about it.

I monitored the entirety of it while remaining mobilized, as halting on open ice within Ferals proximity was singularly a non-survivable option.

One of the Ferals broke from the engagement and angled toward me specifically, and I registered in the way my wolf registered things when we fought, below language and below thought that it wasn’t moving like the other ones. The others were fighting. This one was targeted. There was something different about the quality of its attention, focused and specific, like the way a wolf walks once it’s been assigned a particular target or released into a general scenario.

It came at me fast and low.

I let it approach closer than was comfortable, waited for that moment in its lunge when the trajectory is set and cannot be corrected, and dropped my shoulder and turned beneath it. The Feral skidded over me and on the ice under it, I kicked and was on it before it had completed sliding.

It still went under me.

I held it there for a breath then released and stepped back.

Across the lake Draven had dropped two of the Ferals and the rest were pulling back, not scrambling in that disorganized way wolves do when they lose their nerve but retreating with as much coordination as they had arrived, putting distance between themselves in a formation that made it look like they were withdrawing to a position rather than simply running.

The lake went quiet.

My breath came in great clouds in the cold air. My paws were numb from the ice, cold working through my pads steadily and insistently as I felt the particular deep ache of muscles pushed past their comfortable range, the good clean burn of a body asked for everything it had and having given it.

Out of the corner of my eye, Draven melted back into his human form.

I shifted a moment later.

The cold hit my skin right away, the temperature of the lake several degrees lower than what it’d been in the forest and I wrapped my arms around me and stood in the white open space up on the surface of the frozen lake and stared at the tree line where I saw that the Ferals had vanished.

Organized withdrawal.

Someone was running them.

That idea had come during the fight and was now sitting in the front of my brain, all at once, with that sense you have about information feeling as if it might sculpt-shape every other piece of your knowledge around it. Feral wolves did not organize. Feral wolves didn’t run coordinated scouting parties or carry out flanking formations, or fall back in formation if the engagement turned against them. “Feral wolves” was exactly what the name implied. Feral.

These were not.

These were weapons.

I turned that around in my head slowly while I detected my breath coming a little more even and the cold ever-so-slowly penetrating finger tips and Draven's two wolves behind me on the ice shifted back and said nothing, as they read this quality of silence correctly.

Draven made his way over to me on the ice.

He was unhurried. But steady on the frozen surface in a way that suggested he’d gotten so used to cold country that ice beneath his feet no longer registered as something he had to think about. He halted a few feet away and fixed me with the look he’d had on him that very morning in the gray dawn, direct and tired and something beneath both of those things that I did not yet have precision enough to name.

I looked back at him.

He had not traveled to the settlement.

So, as of this moment, the column now was four miles north and moving under whatever cover his remaining wolves could offer, and Draven stood on a frozen lake in the dead zone because he had turned back when he should have pressed on. I didn’t know when he made that decision. I had no idea how it had been calculated.

Some guy running a plan that nobody wanted you in on wasn’t likely to put himself between the plan and a pack of organized Ferals for someone he’d known less than three days.

When I told Selene, I knew what she would say about that.

I knew I was going to tell her either way.

"The column," I said.

"Moving fast," he said. “They’ll get to the settlement before we will now.” He paused. "We need to move. The Ferals retreated, but they did not retreat far.”

I looked at the tree line.

"They are not feral," I said.

He held my gaze.

"No," he said. "They are not."

The word settled in the space between us with the quiet weight of a confirmation rather than a revelation, which meant he’d known this before today, had been carrying this particular piece of information around while we were still operating under the assumption that what we were dealing with was hunger and instinct, as opposed to organization and intent.

I bit back the follow-up question for a beat.

There would be time for it. We had to go first and the lake was a kill zone and it wasn’t too close and I could feel cold washing through me like gasoline in an engine that’s about to seriously problem itself in its earliest twenties if we didn’t get into cover of the forest.

I began walking north across the ice.

He fell into step beside me.

Above us the sky was the pale washed white of a winter morning that had exhausted all its drama in the storm and had nothing to give but clean emptiness, indifference, and ahead in front of us the pine line waited dark and dense and full of whatever it was waiting to reveal to you next.

My wolf northward looked and did not turn back.

Neither did I.