Chapter 18: Human Town

Stellan looked at the truck for a long time.

"I'm not your Alpha," he said.

"We know," the man said. "We were there."

"Jarrett will have your hides for this."

"Jarrett's asleep." He hauled a box of saline off the tailgate and held it out. "Where do you want it?"

The three of them unloaded until two in the morning.

They hung the barn door properly while Stellan held the flashlight and wasn't allowed to touch anything.

Then they drove back down to the valley with their lights off.

They came back three nights later with a generator.

Then with a second-hand X-ray machine from a vet in the next county.

Then with two more wolves, and a woman who'd been a pharmacy tech at the hospital for nine years and had quit the day after the trial.

"I'm not working for a man who throws out old ladies," she said, and took over Lucille's tack room.

Lucille let her.

That was how I knew she was serious.

On the ninth day of our exile, a pickup came up the county road at sixty and skidded into the yard sideways.

It wasn't a wolf's truck.

Two teenage boys jumped out of the cab, white as paper.

In the bed was their father, a human rancher from the place across the road.

His left leg was under a blanket, and the blanket was red from the knee down.

"Tractor rolled," the older boy said. "On the slope. The hospital's forty minutes and he's going gray."

"Get him on the table," I said.

Four strays had him off the truck before I finished saying it.

His thigh had been crushed against a fence post when the tractor went over.

The bone was broken in two places and the big artery behind the knee was torn.

He had maybe twenty minutes of blood left in him.

I put a tourniquet on above the knee and leaned on it with my whole weight.

"Lucille."

"I've got the tray."

The rancher grabbed my wrist.

He was a big weathered man with a gray crew cut, and he looked at me with frightened blue eyes.

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