"You can't protect anyone if you're dead."
He stared at me. Tears still falling, breath still ragged, but something in his expression shifting.
"They're still there," he said. "On the mountain. I can feel it. I can—" He pressed a hand to his chest, over his heart. "There's something. An echo. I thought I was imagining it, but now that I'm— now that I can think—"
"You can feel them through the bond?"
"Not a bond. Not like us. But something. A connection. Pack connection." He looked at me with desperate hope. "They're alive. Lumi. They're still alive."
My mind was racing. Other ferals. A pack. Survivors still out there on the mountain, lost and feral and waiting for someone who never came back.
"How many?" I asked.
Cal's brow furrowed. Concentration. Pain.
"I don't— four? Five? I can't remember faces. Just... shapes. Warmth. The feeling of not being alone." His hand found mine, gripped hard. "I have to go back. I have to find them."
"Cal—"
"They've been alone all this time. Because of me. Because I got lost and never—"
"You can barely hold human form," I said gently. "You've been feral for years. Going back to that mountain right now would destroy you."
"I don't care."
"I do."
He went still.
I held his gaze. Let him see that I meant it — that his life mattered, that his recovery mattered, that I wasn't going to let him throw himself back into the wilderness and lose whatever fragile progress he'd made.
"We'll find them," I said. "I promise. But not like this. Not until you're stronger. Not until we have a plan."
"They're suffering—"
"And they've survived this long. They can survive a little longer." I touched his face again. "Let me help you. Let me do this right. If we go charging up that mountain unprepared, we won't save anyone. We'll just get ourselves killed."
Cal stared at me for a long moment. I felt the war happening inside him — the desperate need to act fighting against the truth of what I was saying.
Finally, something in him broke.
Not the bad kind of breaking. The kind that let something else in.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay."
His body sagged against mine. Exhaustion, I realized. Holding human form was costing him everything.
"Thank you," I said. "For trusting me."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh if it wasn't so tired. "You're the only thing I trust. You and the bond. Everything else is—" He shook his head. "Noise. Chaos. But you're clear. You're always clear."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I just held him.
The wolf took him back twenty minutes later.
I felt it coming — the way his body tensed, the way his breathing changed. He had enough warning to pull back, to look at me with human eyes one last time.
"I'll remember," he said. "I'll try to remember."
