Chapter 28: South

We left within the hour.

Cale's truck and two from the lumber yard, with thirty wolves in the backs.

My ten.

The boy on the gate and his friends.

The lumber father, who said he'd never been south and wasn't going to start being scared of it now.

Cale drove the first truck.

I sat beside him with my father's field book open on my knee, the gorge maps under the cab light.

Ten hours.

I'd made that drive twice.

Once in the back, with my orders in two halves.

Once coming home.

"You don't have to come," I'd told him in the yard.

"It's my pack's wall," he'd said. "And you're my pack's Luna."

He didn't say the rest.

He didn't have to.

Somewhere past midnight, with the pines thinning out in the headlights, he spoke without taking his eyes off the road.

"When we get there," he said, "you command."

"I know."

"I mean it. I've never held a wall. You held one six hours." His hands were tight on the wheel. "Whatever you tell me to do, I'll do it."

"Even if you hate it?"

"Especially then."

The green went gray, and then it went black.

My wolf came up under my skin at the first smell of rogue.

So did his.

I watched his eyes go gold in the dashboard light.

We came up the bald hill at dawn.

The gate was shut.

There was smoke on the north side, and the wall had a black gap in it the width of a truck.

The bald man with the burned forearm was on the gate.

He looked at me through the logs and then he opened it.

"Sergeant," he said.

His face was cut open across the forehead.

Behind him in the yard, twelve wolves were sitting against the mess hall wall with their eyes shut.

Every one of them was bleeding somewhere.

"How many came?" I asked.

"Sixty. Maybe more." He wiped blood out of his eye. "They pulled back to the gorge at first light. They'll come again at dark."

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