Chapter 22 – Training Day
1422 Words
Riverside’s yard smelled like sweat, rubber, and a faint hint of river mist the wind had dragged in. To Lupa, it smelled like normal.
After days of med bays and glowing screens and ghosts in ravines, normal felt like a luxury.
“Are you sure about this?” Jorin asked, arms folded, watching her from the edge of the mat.
“No,” Lupa said, tightening her brace. “But if one more person tells me to sit still, I’m going to bite someone, and I like most of you.”
“That’s debatable,” Kess called from the fence, where she sat cross‑legged with a notebook labeled VERY SERIOUS PATROL NOTES. “But for the record, I support the biting.”
Nyla bounced on the balls of her feet in front of Lupa, ponytail swishing, eyes bright and nervous. “You sure you don’t want to go easy on me? You’re still—”
“If you say ‘injured,’ I’m assigning you extra laps,” Lupa warned.
Nyla clamped her mouth shut, then couldn’t help the grin that escaped. “Right. No mercy. Got it.”
The yard hummed with movement. A couple of young wolves ran drills with Lysa near the far wall. Bren leaned against a post, ostensibly there to “observe cooperative training protocols,” actually there because Everwood had learned that wherever Lupa went, interesting things had a habit of happening.
Lupa shook out her hands, testing the pull of her side. It ached, but it held.
“Okay,” she said to Nyla. “We’re not doing full contact. This is about reacting, not proving who can hit harder. Scenario one: alley, low light. I’m the thing you don’t want on top of you. Your goals?”
“Don’t freeze,” Nyla recited. “Don’t get separated. Don’t try to solo something that needs a pack.”
“Good.” Lupa stepped closer, lowering her voice. “And if I go down?”
“You don’t,” Nyla said fiercely.
“Hypothetically.”
Nyla swallowed. “If you go down, I don’t throw myself on top of you like a heroic i***t. I call it in, drag you if I safely can, and keep my head. Because losing two wolves is worse than losing one.”
“There you go,” Lupa said. Pride warmed something under her ribs. “Ready?”
Nyla nodded.
They circled.
Lupa let Nyla move first: a cautious feint, then a jab. Lupa blocked, twisted, made the girl overextend just enough to feel it.
“Breathe,” she said. “Don’t let your shoulders creep up— you’re not a turtle.”
“Wish I had a shell,” Nyla puffed.
“Shells crack. Footwork doesn’t. Again.”
They moved faster. Not quite a fight, not quite a dance. Lupa could feel Nyla thinking — in her steps, her gaze, the way she checked their imaginary corners. The girl was raw, but she learned. And she watched Lupa the way pups watched the older wolves they intended to become. That knowledge was both a weight and a strange, buoyant thing.
“Good,” Jorin called. “Nyla, stop staring at her hands. Center mass.”
“Center,” Nyla echoed, correcting.
Lupa pushed her a little harder, letting her taste losing ground, then find it again. A twist here, a trip there — just enough to keep the lesson sharp, not enough to bruise.
She misjudged.
On a pivot, pain lanced her side, sharp and sudden. Her breath caught; her guard dropped a fraction.
Nyla saw it. Her eyes widened. Her next move stuttered.
Lupa forced herself to follow through, sweeping Nyla’s leg. The girl hit the mat with a grunt.
“Lesson two,” Lupa said through her teeth. “Enemy pain is not your cue to hesitate. It’s your cue to win faster.”
“You’re not the enemy,” Nyla protested, sitting up, cheeks flushed.
“I might be,” Lupa said. “If I’m compromised. If something in my head isn’t just me.”
That landed. Nyla’s face fell, then sobered.
“That’s not—” She bit it back, then tried again. “If that happens, we… we protect you from yourself. Right?”
Silence rippled outward from them. Even the kids at the far end of the yard glanced over.
Lupa sat back on her heels, catching her breath. “If that happens,” she said carefully, “you get out of range and let people with more scars handle it. You don’t try to save me by offering yourself up.”
Nyla’s throat worked. “But if—”
“Nyla.” Jorin’s voice was gentler than usual. “She’s right.”
The girl looked between them, eyes bright. “You all would do it for me.”
“Yes,” Lupa said. “Because we’re older and stupider. That’s our job.”
A ragged laugh went through the onlookers. It eased something tight in the air.
Bren stepped closer, expression unreadable. “She’s not wrong,” he said to Nyla. “About you not being the hero. Yet. That’s our curse.”
Nyla scrubbed at her face. “I don’t like this rule.”
“Me either,” Lupa said. “But we both follow it.”
Nyla took a breath, then nodded. “Okay. One day I get to be the stupid older one.”
“One day,” Lupa agreed. “Preferably with fewer monsters.”
She pushed to her feet, ignoring her side’s complaint, and offered Nyla a hand up. When the girl took it, Lupa yanked her forward into a quick, fierce hug.
“You did good,” she murmured into her hair. “You saw an opening. You checked your corners. You asked the hard question. That’s three wins in one session.”
Nyla’s answer was a muffled, suspiciously wet noise.
Kess hopped down from the fence, clapping. “Group feelings break over, everyone back to punching things you’re allowed to punch,” she called. “We’ve got trauma and biceps to build.”
As the yard resumed its rhythm, Alder’s scent brushed the edge of Lupa’s awareness. She turned to see him leaning in the doorway to the building, one shoulder braced against the frame, watching.
“How long have you been lurking?” she asked as he approached.
“Long enough to hear you forbid heroic self‑sacrifice,” he said. “Strong stance, considering your track record.”
“Do as I say,” she said, “not as I launch myself at biologically inaccurate nightmares.”
He stepped onto the mat, eyes flicking to her hand where it had pressed briefly to her side.
“How bad?” he asked quietly.
“Manageable,” she said. “It only screams when I forget I’m not invincible.”
He hummed. “Progress.”
They stood there a moment, taking in the sight of their wolves — young and old, city and forest — moving through drills under a sky that had, for once, decided not to drop anything on them.
“This,” Alder said, nodding toward the yard, “is why we’re doing all the rest.”
“Paper cuts and circles and politics,” Lupa said.
“And deals with monsters who want to go home,” he added.
Her gaze drifted to Nyla, laughing as Kess demonstrated an exaggeratedly bad stance, and further, to Bren correcting a kid’s elbow with unexpected patience.
“Yeah,” Lupa said softly. “This.”
On the far edge of her mind, something thin and quiet watched with her. Not quite longing. Not quite resentment.
They get to grow up, Iven’s echo murmured, distant. We didn’t.
No, she agreed. But they get to, because we didn’t.
A pause.
Make sure they don’t forget that, he said.
“I won’t,” she murmured, half to herself, half to the ghost in her bones.
“What?” Alder asked.
“Just agreeing with my internal committee,” she said. “They’re very demanding.”
He smiled, small and real. “Good. They fit right in.”
The river hissed somewhere beyond the concrete, the forest breathed beyond that, and for a fleeting moment, with pack moving around her and alphas at her back and a monster listening instead of lunging, Lupa felt something she hadn’t in a long time.
Not peace. Not yet.
But the shape of a future where it might be possible.
- Writer
