The Wolf Who Saved Me Makes Other Alphas Submit. I'm Human. novel · Chapter 1 of 48
Chapter 1: The Truck With One Headlight
A friendly Alpha brings Mara coffee, a pickup runs her off the highway, and a huge black wolf saves her and tells her she owes him her life.
At nine on Friday night I was still filing an abuse report on an old man at the DSW office, and the owner of his care home walked in carrying two coffees.
His name was Dewitt Faulk, and he was an Alpha.
He was the only Alpha in town who ever said thank you to us.
"You look like you've been dragged through a hedge, Mara," he said.
"Three days in a mountain town with eight hours of sleep," I said. "Is that coffee for me?"
"It is. Real cream, not the powder."
He set it on my desk, on top of the old man's file, and I moved the cup before it could ring the paper.
"I heard you wrote up Anselm," he said. "I want you to know I'm not angry. If one of my staff hurt him, I want it found."
"Then you'll want the report to go through."
"It should. Send it Monday, when you've slept. You'll write it better."
It was kind, and it was also an offer to hold the report for two days.
My supervisor, Joanne, looked up from her desk across the room and raised one eyebrow at me.
I hit send before Dewitt had finished his cream.
"Done," I said.
"Good for you," Dewitt said. His voice stayed warm. "Drive safe. The highway's bad at night."
I carried my bag out to the lot with the coffee still hot in my hand.
A black pickup sat three spaces down from my car, pulled in nose first, and it had a cracked left headlight.
The highway out of Cinder Falls runs six miles through pine woods to my exit, and nobody drives it after nine.
The pickup was behind me by mile two.
It had one headlight, and it sat in my mirror without passing.
I slowed to forty and it slowed with me.
I sped up, and it came up on my bumper so fast that the bright half of its grille filled the back window.
"Pass me," I said out loud. "It's a straight road. Pass me."
It hit me on the left rear corner.
My car spun, and the guardrail took the passenger side, and then the car went over onto its roof and slid.
The airbag broke my nose before I knew I was upside down.
Glass was in my mouth.
My seatbelt had cut me across the chest and something in my right side was wet and hot and much too large.
I heard the pickup stop above me on the road.
A door opened. Boots came down the gravel, slow, in no hurry at all.
I tried to reach my phone and my left arm wouldn't go.
Then something very large hit the boots, and the man in them screamed.
I turned my head.
Through the cracked window I saw a wolf the size of a horse standing over the man from the truck.
It was black, with a scar through its left eyebrow, and it didn't go for his throat.
It took his arm in its jaws and threw him fifteen feet into the trees.
He ran. I heard the pickup start, and the one headlight swung away down the highway.
The wolf turned its head toward my car.
The driver's door was crushed in, and the wolf took it in its teeth and tore it off the frame.
I said, "Please."
The wolf bent down, and then a man was kneeling in the glass in front of me.
He was naked, huge, and shaking, with the same scar through his left eyebrow.
He didn't ask my name. He bit into his own wrist, hard, and held it against my mouth.
"Drink," he said. "All of it you can. Don't fight me."
It tasted like iron and woodsmoke and it was hot all the way down.
I drank.
Pain went out of me in pieces. First my chest, then my side, and then the ringing in my skull that had been there since Tuesday.
He took his wrist away.
I watched him try to stand and fail.
He got one hand on the roof of my car and stayed bent over it with his head down, breathing, for a long minute.
When he did get up, he was gray in the face and he didn't look at me.
"Sirens in four minutes," he said. "You didn't see me."
"You saved my life."
"I know what I did."
He pulled me out through the door and set me down on the gravel, carefully.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Ronan."
"I'm going to tell the police about the truck."
"Tell them about the headlight," he said. "It's the only thing that helps."
Then he gave me a look I couldn't read, and it made my stomach turn over.
"You owe me a life, Mara," he said. "I'll come and collect."
I hadn't told him my name.
I got out the pen from my cardigan pocket, because I always have one, and I wrote the first four letters of the truck's plate on my palm while I still remembered them.
By the time the ambulance came he was gone, and the road was empty.
At the hospital the doctor pressed my ribs, looked at my nose, and read my chart again.
"I don't see any injury," he said. "Your car's totaled, and you're fine. Ms. Linwood, that's not possible."
I washed my palm in the bathroom sink and copied the letters onto a paper towel, and then onto my phone.
On Monday I walked into the office early.
Joanne was already standing at my desk with her glasses in her hand.
"Mara," she said. "Anselm's file is gone from the system. Every page of it."
"I filed it Friday night. You saw."
"I know. Hearthside called an hour ago and said Mr. Fry was discharged to family over the weekend."
"He has no family."
"That's what I said," Joanne said, and she wasn't smiling.
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