Chapter 21: The Fish House

At ten to noon I drove out the gravel track to the point alone, the way he wanted.

The old Rask fish house sat on the rocks at the very end.

It was a long gray shingled shed with a smokehouse chimney, a sagging dock and a newer cinder-block room on the back.

Somebody's pickup was parked beside it.

A man was leaning on the tailgate, smoking.

I knew him, and from the way he looked at my thigh pocket, he knew me.

I kept my hands where he could see them.

"You came alone," he said.

"You told me to."

He flicked the cigarette into the gravel and walked around me once, slowly, breathing in.

I let him.

Tove had told me my first week: wolves can smell fear and want, but never a lie.

"Well?" he said.

"I won't be in his bed on the thirtieth," I said. "I'll be on a bus out of Duluth by sundown."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I'll be on the bus," I said. "Now where's Arne?"

"Safe."

"That's not an answer."

He grinned at me.

"Mr. Rask said to tell you the old man cried for his girl half the night," he said. "He thought that was funny."

"So did I."

Behind him, the cinder-block room was humming.

A compressor.

A walk-in cooler was running full blast on an abandoned fish house in October.

A fresh orange extension cord snaked in under its door.

I looked at the cord.

He saw me look.

His grin went away.

Out in the birches behind the shed, a wolf howled once.

The man spun toward the sound.

That was all the time Vidar needed.

The black wolf came off the rocks below the dock.

He hit the man from behind and drove him face-down into the gravel, his jaws locked across the back of his neck.

He didn't bite down.

He just held him there.

The fish-house door banged open and two more of Torvald's men came out, already shifting, gray fur spilling over their arms.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.