Chapter 7: Smoke

The carpenter's shed was burning from the inside out.

Flames stood up through the roof. Sparks were blowing toward the stable and the inn.

Gwenna's truck slid to a stop in the gravel. I hit the ground running.

"Where are they?" I shouted. "The kids. Where are the kids?"

"Here!"

The widow was on the porch with both kids. The young couple stood beside her, and the old carpenter in his undershirt.

All of them. Every one.

My knees nearly went.

Then I heard the river splash.

Wolves were coming across the ford.

Six, eight, a dozen.

On my bank they shifted, mid-stride, and came up the yard as people, half of them in nothing but their skin.

Emrys was in front, pulling on jeans as he ran.

"Buckets in the stable," I yelled. "Pump's at the well."

He was already there.

In two minutes there was a line from the river to the shed.

Highwater wolves passing buckets hand to hand.

Gwenna at the head of it, swearing at the fire.

Emrys and I took the woodpile.

We dragged burning logs away from the stable wall with our bare hands and rolled them into the wet gravel.

The heat was enormous. My eyebrows stung.

"Your hands," he said.

"Yours too."

"Mine are used to it."

"Mine were on the Line for seven years."

He grunted, which I was learning meant he'd lost an argument.

The shed roof fell in with a groan and a gout of sparks.

After that it was just embers.

The stable held.

The inn held.

The carpenter walked up to the black ruin and stood there in his undershirt.

"My tools," he said.

It was all he'd carried across the river. Forty years of chisels and planes in a canvas roll.

The widow came down and stood next to him.

She didn't say anything.

She just put her hand on his back.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Alpha's Regret Came Too Late from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.