Chapter 10: A Wall

I knelt in the gravel and didn't touch the arm.

"Look at me. Look at my face. You're okay."

He was nine and gray and trying not to cry, and failing.

"It was black," his brother sobbed behind me. "It came right at us. It didn't even slow down."

Gunnar got there before I'd finished the sentence.

He'd run from the barn. I hadn't known he could still run.

He looked at the arm.

Then he looked down the empty road.

And for one second something came off him that I'd never felt from him in my life.

It hit me in the back of the neck.

My eyes dropped to the gravel on their own.

Then it was gone, and he was kneeling beside me, taking off his belt to make a sling.

"Hospital," he said. "Now."

Pups heal like human kids until their first shift. A broken arm at nine is a broken arm.

The hospital in town was forty minutes away.

Fern came up to sit with the others.

Glory got into the truck anyway and held her brother's good hand the whole way down, telling him every bad joke she knew.

The emergency room was bright and cold and smelled like bleach.

They took him back for X-rays.

A clean break, both bones, the doctor said. He'd need it set under sedation and a cast to the shoulder. He'd stay overnight.

"Bike accident?" the doctor asked.

I looked at Gunnar.

Humans in town don't know what we are. They can't know about Silver Ridge.

"Bike accident," Gunnar said.

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