Chapter 13 – Aftermath and Promises
1008 Words
The ambulance took him away with the usual amount of human chaos.
Questions. Flashing lights. A paramedic trying to drag me into the back of the rig until I convinced her I wasn’t going to fall over in the next sixty seconds.
“He’s lucky,” she said, slamming the doors. “Another inch and he’d have bled out in the snow.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky.”
The sirens wailed off into the dark, swallowing the last of the headlights. The road fell quiet, just wet tire tracks and two dark stains soaking slowly into the slush.
The moment the sound faded, the forest exhaled.
Wolves ghosted back from the trees, fur and skin, moving carefully around the patch of churned‑up snow in the middle. Kari stood between Rylan and Caelan now, leg stiff, eyes still too bright.
“He lives,” Rylan said. Not a question.
“For now,” I said. “He’ll need surgery. Antibiotics. A story that doesn’t include you.”
“And Kari?” Caelan asked.
I turned to her. “You’re not walking on that,” I said, nodding at her twisted foreleg. “Not without me yelling at you the whole way. Can you shift?”
She grimaced. “It’ll hurt.”
“It’ll hurt worse if I have to reset it twice,” I said. “Now or later?”
She closed her eyes, drew a breath, and let the change roll over her. Bones lengthened, fur rippled back into skin. She came out on two legs, pale and sweating, one arm hanging at a wrong angle.
“Sit,” I ordered.
She did. I knelt, cupped her elbow, and met her eyes.
“This is going to suck,” I said.
“Do it,” she hissed.
I pulled.
The joint snapped back into place with a nauseating pop. Kari bit down on a scream, teeth grinding. Sweat broke out along her brow.
“Breathe,” I said, softer now. “You did the hard part already.”
“Not killing him,” she muttered.
“Exactly that.” I wrapped her arm, bound it tight. “We’ll brace it in camp. You’ll heal. And when some i***t starts yelling that humans aren’t worth the trouble, you can be the one who says you stood down and no one died for it.”
She gave a shaky, humorless laugh. “Elder now, am I?”
“Elders are just people who survived their bad ideas,” I said. “You’re on your way.”
When I straightened, both alphas were watching me.
“What?” I snapped.
Caelan’s gaze flicked from the human blood to Kari’s arm, then to my hands. “You could’ve let it happen,” he said quietly. “Shot wolf, mauled hunter, clean line.”
“Clean?” I scoffed. “In what universe.”
“In the old one,” Rylan said. There was no accusation in his voice. Just fact. “Hunter in our woods, wolf defends herself. End of story.”
“That story ends with more guns,” I said. “More snares. More traps strung between our throats. I’ve seen that chapter. I’m not interested in a reprint.”
They both went quiet.
Behind them, wolves shifted restlessly—Stormclaw and Moonfang, watching, listening. Waiting to see which way this would tilt.
“Tonight,” I said, raising my voice just enough to carry, “both packs stood down when you could have torn each other apart over this road. Kari walked away from a human who shot her. Two alphas didn’t use one bleeding i***t as an excuse to settle old scores.”
I met eyes, one by one. “Remember that the next time someone tells you nothing ever changes.”
Snow fell in fat, slow flakes, softening the edges of tyre ruts and blood.
“What about the snares?” Taryn asked from the back of the crowd. “Same make as the others?”
“Same pattern,” I said. “Same silver. Same hands, or someone reading from their book.”
Rylan’s jaw flexed. “So they’re still out there. Setting traps for wolves and humans both.”
“And they just watched us walk into one and refuse to bite,” Caelan said. “They’re not going to like that.”
“Good,” I said. “Let them choke on it.”
The words surprised even me. A few wolves huffed something like laughter.
I should have been shaking. I wasn’t. Some quiet, hard part of me had finally settled.
“This road isn’t just the line between your maps anymore,” I said. “Tonight it stayed clean because Moonfang and Stormclaw showed up on the same side of it. You want your pups to grow up without seeing their faces on ‘monster’ posters? This is how.”
Rylan’s eyes met Caelan’s over my head. Tired. Wary. A flicker of agreement there, whether they liked it or not.
“I’ll take Kari back to our camp,” Caelan said at last. “Rowan will want to see the leg.”
“I’ll send scouts along the road,” Rylan said. “Our side and yours. We miss one of those snares, this whole little speech is pointless.”
“Careful,” I said. “I might start thinking you’re listening to me.”
“Occasionally,” he said.
They peeled away, each taking a slice of the gathered wolves with them, packs separating like magnets reluctantly pulled apart.
I was left standing on the damp strip of asphalt, siren echo still in my ears, the ghost of two bonds humming under my skin.
The human would wake in a white room and call this a hunting accident.
The wolves would go home and, for once, call it a night without a body count.
And somewhere out there, whoever set these traps had just learned a very inconvenient thing:
Their war didn’t belong to them anymore.
- Writer
