I wondered what his name was.
The leader ranged up and down the line, checking on everyone, making decisions with sharp gestures that sent wolves peeling off to scout or adjust course. He fascinated me in a different way. All predator grace and coiled danger, but with an intelligence in those amber eyes that suggested he missed nothing. When he'd looked at me during one of his passes, assessing, I'd felt like he was cataloguing every weakness, every capability, measuring whether we were worth the trouble we represented.
I had no idea what conclusion he'd reached.
Nathan trudged ahead of me, his shoulders hunched against the wind. Megan walked beside him, never straying from his side. I wondered how she’d felt about his submission to the other alpha. He might not have had a choice, but there was a small, bitter part of me that resented him for not fighting harder to save us. If these people hadn’t shown up, I didn’t want to think where we would be now. Enslaved, or maybe even dead. Like Stephen.
The thought kept hitting me in waves like my brain couldn't quite process it. Stephen with his terrible jokes and his quiet competence and his fierce loyalty. The memory of watching him being swept away by the river, helpless, unable to do anything but scream his name into the storm. It was hard not to spiral when exhaustion made everything feel impossible. When my leg throbbed with every step and my chest ached from breathing frozen air and the landscape around us looked wrong in ways I couldn't articulate. Too wild. Too untamed. Toonew.We'd stepped back into a world that existed before humans learned to reshape nature to their will. We were in the ice age. Actually, genuinely in the past, surrounded by people who had never seen wheels or electricity, and animals that had been extinct for millennia. A world so harsh it would kill us within days if we were left alone out here. The reality of it kept sliding off my exhausted brain, too big to comprehend.
I stumbled over a hidden root and barely caught myself, my injured leg buckling. One of the younger wolves caught my elbow instantly, steadying me with easy strength. He said something in their language, his tone concerned, and I just nodded because what else could I do? He didn't let go until I was stable again, then moved back to his position in the line with a small gesture that might have meantbe careful.
They keep helping us. Why do they keep helping us?
I didn't know how to process that kind of unearned kindness. These wolves owed us nothing. Had every reason to leave us to die in the forest. But instead they'd fought for us, loaded us up with their supplies, and now were hauling us toward safety without asking for anything in return. Maybe they were just... good people, the kind who helped because it was the right thing to do, not because they wanted something.
The concept felt foreign, but when I looked up and caught the healer watching me, making sure I was ok, something inmy chest cracked a little. His appearance was a little daunting, lean muscle and a hardness that had helped him survive in this wild place, but his expression was gentle, concerned even. Like my wellbeing actually mattered to him. A warmth bloomed inside my chest, and I looked away quickly, my face heating despite the cold. This was not the place to finally find another man attractive, but after a few hours, I admitted to myself that I couldn't stop noticing him. The breadth of his shoulders as he moved through the forest. The quiet competence in every gesture. The way other wolves sought him out for reassurance or guidance, like he was someone they trusted implicitly. The way he kept looking at me.
Stop it. You can't do this. You’re too broken.
My bond was shattered beyond repair by Nathan's rejection, a cold void in my chest that nothing could fill. The idea that I could feelanythingfor anyone else was absurd.
By the time we finally stopped the light was fading to twilight and the temperature was dropping even further. I was shaking with exhaustion and cold, and my leg had gone from throbbing to a steady, vicious burn. My hands were numb and not for the first time I wished for the gloves that had been left in my tent. I’d dragged myself out in the storm, pausing only to put on my boots and my jacket over my travel trousers and thermal vest. I needed more layers, but they were gone, swept away by the rising river and the vicious wind. My face felt frozen, my lips cracked and bleeding from the cold air. But we'd made it. We were alive.
As the wolves began setting up camp with practiced efficiency, I sank down onto the cold ground and watched. They were fast. That was the first thing that struck me through the fog of exhaustion. No wasted movement, no deliberation, no standing around debating who should do what. They simply moved, each wolf falling into a role as naturally as breathing.
Two of them scouted the immediate area. There was a shallow hollow in the hillside where an overhang of rock created a natural shelter from the wind. It wasn't a cave exactly, more like a deep alcove carved by centuries of weather, but it was big enough for all of us and the rock face would block the worst of the wind. Within minutes, they'd cleared the ground of loose stones and debris. Others were already unrolling hides, stretching them between wooden poles they'd lashed together from branches, creating low lean-to shelters that angled away from the wind. The leather was thick and dark, stiff with age and use, stitched together with sinew in tight, even seams.
The fire came next. One of the younger wolves built it with an efficiency that would have made a survival instructor weep. A base of dried moss and bark shavings, then kindling, then larger pieces of wood, all arranged with architectural precision. He struck sparks from a piece of flint against what looked like iron pyrite, and within moments the tinder caught. He blew on it gently, coaxing the flame, feeding it with patient expertise until it grew and steadied and began throwing real heat and light across the hollow and sending sparks spiralling upward into the darkening sky.
I watched those sparks rise and disappear into nothing, and thought about how our camp had looked. Our camp had been neat. Organized. Colour-coded stuffed sacks and vacuum-sealed meals and LED lanterns that charged off solar panels that obviously didn't work here. We'd had Gore-Tex and titanium tent poles and a portable water filtration system that weighed less than a bag of sugar. All of it designed by engineers in climate-controlled offices, tested in labs, optimized for weight and efficiency.
All of it gone now.
They'd laid Dev down near the fire, four wolves working together to transfer him from the stretcher to a thick pile of furswith barely a jostle. He was grey-faced with pain and exhaustion, his splinted leg elevated on a rolled hide, but he was alive. Nathan and Megan had collapsed nearby, Nathan still clutching that branch like a weapon even though no one here had shown us any hostility since the fight with the other pack, the ones who'd wanted to take us prisoner. I shivered and shoved that thought away before it could take root. We were safe now. Probably.
Around us, the wolves moved through the camp with casual confidence, speaking in low voices in that liquid, incomprehensible language. Most were in human form now, dressed in leather and furs, though I'd watched several shift from wolf to human during the journey with a fluidity that still made my head spin. One wolf remained in animal form and trotted off into the darkness, scouting, maybe, or keeping watch.
I sat near the fire near Dev because I didn't know where else to go. The heat felt glorious against my frozen skin, but it also made me acutely aware of how filthy I was. Caked in mud, blood-soaked, my hair a tangled disaster, I must look insane to these people.
I looked across the fire to the big man who’d set Dev's leg, watching him with interest. He was crouched beside one of the hide bundles, sorting through supplies with methodical care. Even kneeling, he looked massive, broad through the shoulders and chest, built like he could haul twice his weight without straining. His chestnut brown hair caught the firelight, and his close cropped beard was the same colour. There was no hint of grey, and his skin was browned by the sun, but smooth. I guessed he was maybe late twenties, early thirties at the most. His hands moved with a sureness that reminded me of surgeons I'd watched during my training—that same unhurried precision, that same quiet authority. But where the surgeons I'd known had been clinical, detached, sterile in every sense of the word, thisman radiated something warmer. He touched each item like he knew its purpose intimately, like every pouch and bundle was an extension of himself.
He glanced up, as if sensing my attention, and our eyes met across the fire.
I looked away immediately, heat flooding my face despite the cold. Brilliant, Ellie. Get caught gawking at the prehistoric bear-man like he's an exhibit at the Natural History Museum. Very dignified. Except museums didn't make your pulse quicken, and exhibits didn't have warm brown eyes that crinkled slightly at the corners when they looked at you.
But when I risked another glance a moment later, he wasn't looking at me with annoyance or suspicion. His expression was... I didn't have a word for it. Warm, maybe. Patient. Like he'd expected me to look and didn't mind that I had.
My stomach did something complicated that I blamed entirely on hunger. What was wrong with me? Stephen was dead, Dev was injured, we were stranded twenty-five thousand years from home with no supplies and no plan, and I was staring at a strange man like a teenager with a crush.
The guilt was sharp and immediate. I didn't deserve to notice the breadth of someone's shoulders when my friend's body lay unburied in a river valley behind us. I didn't deserve to feel anything warm or good or hopeful when everything had gone so catastrophically wrong.
I turned my attention to Dev instead. "How are you doing?"
"Brilliant," he said, his voice thin and strained. "Living the dream. Time travel. Cave men. Broken leg. Everything I ever wanted."
The joke landed weakly, but I smiled anyway because he needed me to. His face was drawn tight with pain, the kind he was trying to hide and failing.
"Dev, seriously. Are you—"
