My father stands beside me on the torn-up field, both of us bleeding, both of us breathing hard. He’s favouring his left side where a rogue caught him across the ribs, but he’s upright, and his eyes are on the ridge where the last of the rogues disappeared.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder. The injured one. The weight of it hurts, and I let it stay.
“Both of us,” he says quietly.
“Both of us.”
Something moves in his expression. Not pride, exactly. The look of a man seeing his son stand beside him and realising, finally, that standing beside isn’t the same as standing behind.
“Go,” he says. “Get that shoulder looked at. We’ll handle the rest.”
I shift and run. There is only one place I want to be, and only one scent in the world that matters. The forest blurs around me. Dark, cold, familiar. My wolf stretches into the sprint with a joy that has nothing todo with the fight. Everything to do with what’s waiting at the end of it.
The cottage lights are on. I shift at the gate and knock on the door.
It opens before my hand drops.
Phoebe looks at me. She sees the blood, the torn shoulder, the reopened gashes across my ribs, and her expression does that thing it does when her vet brain and her heart are fighting for control.
“Is it over?” she asks.
“It’s over. They won’t come back.”
“You’re bleeding everywhere. Get inside.”
She pulls me through the door. Sits me at the kitchen table. Goes for her medical kit with the focused efficiency of a woman who’s been waiting for something to do with her hands for the last hour. She cleans the wounds. I watch her work. Her hands are steady. The cottage settles around us, quiet, safe.
“I know a good vet,” I say.
“Shut up,” she says, but she’s smiling. “Hold still. This one’s deep.”
I hold still. She works. The cottage settles around us, still and quiet, and I’m home.
Chapter 31
In the Aftermath
Phoebe
I’m halfwaythrough stitching Roan’s shoulder when he tells me the others are hurt too.
Not stitching, exactly. The wound is already closing, the accelerated healing doing its work beneath my hands, but the muscle is shredded deep enough that proper cleaning matters regardless of how fast the tissue knits. I’ve been working in focused silence for ten minutes, gauze and antiseptic and the steady routine of wound care that keeps my hands from shaking and my mind from replaying the howls that split the evening air an hour ago.
“Lewis took a bad hit to his foreleg,” Roan says. He’s sitting very still, letting me work, but his voice carries the tight quality of someone cataloguingdamage. “Jack’s shoulder is deep. One of the younger wolves, Jamie, went down hard. He was unconscious when I left the field.”
My hands pause on the gauze. “Where are they?”
“The main house. The pack takes casualties there. It’s set up for it.”
“I need to see them.”
“Phoebe, you don’t have to.”
“Jamie was unconscious. That means a potential head injury. Who’s monitoring him?”
“Whoever’s available. We don’t exactly have a?—”
“A doctor. No. You have a vet.” I tape the last piece of gauze over his ribs, where the old wounds have reopened along the same lines as the forest fight. The scarred male targeted them deliberately. I file that fact away for later. “Get up. We’re going.”
