Chapter 20: The Bridge

I was in the water before I knew I'd moved.

It was knee-deep and bitterly cold, and the current dragged at my jeans.

Ewan shouted my name behind me, and I did not stop.

Corbin lay on his side with his face half under.

I got both hands in his collar and hauled his head up into the air.

He coughed.

His eyes were open and dark, and there was blood on his teeth.

"Don't," he said. "Annie. Get out."

"Shut up."

I got my arm under his shoulders.

He weighed more than I could lift, and I dragged him anyway, step by step, toward the bank.

Tobias came splashing out to take his other side.

Behind us the Black Pine Alpha wiped the blade on his thigh, sighed, and finally pulled off his shirt.

His body ran together and rearranged, and where the old man had stood a huge gray-black wolf stood, shoulders level with a horse's.

On the far bank forty throats opened, and the howl rolled across the water.

Ewan went past me in the water.

He shifted halfway across the stream, between one step and the next.

The sandy gray wolf with the dark stripe down his back met the old Alpha in the middle of the ford.

They hit each other hard enough that I felt it in my teeth.

Redwood's wolves broke from the bank all at once.

I laid Corbin on the gravel, and Tobias tore a sleeve into a pad and pressed it hard to the wound under his ribs.

"Hold that," Tobias told me. "Hold it hard."

I leaned my whole weight on my hands.

His blood came up warm between my fingers, and he looked at me with a face I couldn't read.

"The baby," he said.

"Is fine."

"Then go."

"I'm not going anywhere until the healer gets here."

The Redwood healer was running down the bank with his white coat flying.

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