Chapter 2 — Wyatt: Hands in the Fire
The howl ran the length of Wyatt’s spine and set the wolf inside him pacing. He cleared the last bend of the logging road and the world narrowed to fog, rain, and the knife-bite gleam of a bone-studded grille blocking the coastal highway. Jaw-cage hounds strained against their chains, muzzles clacking like teeth trying to dream of flesh. Drones hovered in the mist like patient stars, shedding a slow glitter of silver.
He tasted that silver—bitter as a coin sucked too long—and rolled his shoulders against the urge to move before he’d counted the pieces on the board. The wolf wanted to hit the truck and chew through the hands holding the chains. Wyatt wanted what came after: everyone breathing and walking.
Between fog and headlights he found him: a thin figure in a soaked coat, hair plastered to his forehead, one hand braced on the grille. The witch’s chest still glowed faintly through the cloth, like runes cooling on iron. Wyatt’s mouth went dry for a reason that had nothing to do with fear.
“Silas,” he said—too soft for sound to carry, but the name steadied his hands.
On the cab’s far side, a Synod man in a mirrored breather stepped forward. The mask took a highway sign’s green and turned it into a moving blade of light. “Last chance,” the man said, gentle as a blanket. “Let us cut it loose and you can go.”
Wyatt dropped from his truck into the ditch, water soaking his boots, and ran low along the shoulder. He didn’t shout. A shout only gave men a chance to pull a trigger. He slid under the grille and Silas turned, surprise flaring and cooling at once, like steel quenched.
“Move,” Wyatt murmured, putting a hand on Silas’s ribs to angle him off the bone. The touch was meant to be practical. It wasn’t.
Heat shot up his arm and circled his collarbone, a ring of fire etching under skin. For an instant the world narrowed and brightened. He could hear Silas’s heart ticking inside his own chest. The wolf lunged—not for blood, but for bite and bond.
“Five,” Dex said in Wyatt’s ear, comm tinny with engine hum and that easy mockery Dex wore like armor. “Eyes up, prettyboys.”
Wyatt held his breath and rode the flare until it settled to a throb. A wet cough shook Silas’s frame under his palm; the silver dust had gone mean in his lungs. “With me,” Wyatt said, nudging him toward the ditch that wasn’t covered by the truck.
The mirrored man paced them with a priest’s patience. “The pack survives when the bond breaks,” he said, like a bedtime prayer. “Bonds hoard strength. A clean cut feeds the hungry. Mercy, wolf.”
Wyatt hated that part of him heard the offer. He remembered one winter with numbers that didn’t add up: too many mouths, too little meat. If the creed were true—if breaking the bond meant bellies full and pups safe—what wouldn’t he trade? He pictured an easier ledger. Then he pictured Silas’s ribs under his hand and the silence after a goodbye he chose. The thought curdled.
“No,” he said, and the word was easy.
Silas tried for the ditch. His ankle betrayed him. Wyatt caught him under the ribs and took the weight without thinking. Pain flashed under Wyatt’s sternum—old, familiar, mean. The rib that had never quite forgiven a winter fight gave with the wet pop of a seam tearing. He didn’t let go. He set his jaw to keep sound in, because pain wasn’t an excuse and noise was a mistake.
“You’ll tear something,” Silas rasped. Even now the shape of the words carried a music that wanted to live in Wyatt’s bones.
“Already did,” Wyatt said. “Keep moving.”
The mirrored man cocked his head, that green blade shifting with him. “You’re burning wrong,” he observed, tender as a physician. “That glow—traitor-bond. Let us take it and you’ll breathe again. Your pack will bless you.”
“Four,” Dex said, tone still light, a grin you could hear. Tires on gravel. Closer.
Wyatt angled them sideways, using the truck for cover. He reached for the witch’s sleeve to tear cloth for a bandage—fast, simple—and a wicked little current jumped his glove. Witchlight spidered up the leather and punched through into thin scar-scrim over his palms. Blister. Burst. The stink of cooked skin hit the back of his throat.
He didn’t drop the cloth. He wrapped it tight around Silas’s ribs and felt the man shudder. The wolf sang that shudder down like a soothing noise for a frightened thing.
A spark skipped from Wyatt’s burned gloves to the patch over his heart. Heat ran the embroidery; the council’s white seal on black wool scorched brown in a ring the size and shape of a bite. An elder would remember that. Tampering, Captain? You signed the log with clean hands. He could already hear it.
“Three,” Dex said. The grin bled out of his voice, replaced by a taut line. “Make me a lane.”
The drones tightened their glittering ring. Someone let the hounds off short chains, enough to taste running. They surged in a wave of slick muscle and iron.
Wyatt pushed Silas behind the fender. “Stay with the truck,” he said, and didn’t add please.
The first hound hit the chain’s end and kept coming, the iron collar turning force back into its shoulders. It slammed Wyatt’s hip hard enough to bruise. He caught it behind the head and shoulder, used its own rush to spill it into mud. The jaw-cage clacked on air.
The second slid in on the curl of chain and snapped for his knee. He pivoted and stamped. Solid. A crack under his heel. The dog yelped, a human note that turned his stomach.
“Wasteful,” the mirrored man sighed.
“Two,” Dex said. Clipped now. “Wyatt.”
The third came low, angling for tendon. Wyatt stepped wrong—stepping right needed a rib he didn’t have. Teeth scraped denim. Shock rang every joint. Darkness salted his vision’s edges. The wolf shoved hard. Up. Now.
Wyatt obeyed. He grabbed chain in blistered palm and yanked. Iron bit the dog’s neck. The cage clacked; teeth met teeth. A cloud of silver shook loose and breathed itself into him. Cold fire ran from tongue to ear and detonated there. Sound dimmed. The world went cottony, the pitch of things wrong. Hearing dropped into a tunnel. He could feel the hounds more than he could hear them.
New cost. Tactical, immediate. He shifted weight and let his eyes do the work: the angle of a shoulder, the spray of mud, Silas’s hand clamped white on the fender. Silas made a small sound—pained, bitten-off—when the third lunge hit Wyatt’s knee. A needle-sting of heat licked Wyatt’s collar ring in answer.
“One,” Dex said, voice low and steady now, the way it got when the joke was over. “Lane.”
Wyatt lifted his head and grinned, because sometimes the part of him that wasn’t a wolf and wasn’t a captain got tired of caring what men in chairs thought. The grin hurt, but he liked the shape of it. He stepped into the center of the road, squared his shoulders to the mirrored man, and let the hounds see the shift in his stance. Come on, then.
The Synod man lifted his hand. Drones pinwheeled, making a glittering halo as if the sky were taking a breath.
“Zero,” Dex said—and the world moved.
Headlights speared the fog from the side road, low and fast. Dex’s truck slid sideways into the ditch, a neat, ugly drift that threw up a sheet of muddy water. It hit the silver haze and turned to steam. The hounds leapt, confused, and Wyatt used the beat of their lost footing to hook a chain and fling the lead animal into the second. Metal rang. Bodies tangled.
“Go,” Wyatt snapped at Silas, then couldn’t help looking to see him move. He did—limping, yes, but quick, using the truck’s bulk to screen his path. Relief was a little blade between Wyatt’s ribs. He breathed around it.
The mirrored man turned toward the new truck as if intrigued by a second exhibit. “Another bond,” he mused behind glass. “Two cuts. Twice the mercy.”
“Come try,” Wyatt said, and it came out friendly.
He didn’t have to look to know the shape of his brother climbing out of the driver’s window or the sound of boots hitting wet gravel. Dex’s scent—salt, whiskey, rain—cut through the ruined smear of silver and wolf. Wyatt’s hearing fizzed and popped, then steadied at half. It would have to do.
“Fancy party,” Dex called, light again by choice, because that was what he did when the ground tilted. “We weren’t invited.”
Wyatt shifted, gave him that lane he’d asked for. Hounds regrouped; drones dipped. The mirrored man lifted two fingers, a benediction or an order.
Wyatt set his feet, burned hands up, ribs hot, ear ringing, and felt the bond thrum like a wire drawn tight between three bodies.
“Let’s end this,” he said, and when Dex’s laugh answered him, it sounded—through the dim, through the pain—like the right kind of war.
