Chapter 81: SHOW HER
The fire was going down into the root by the time he reached it.
The crew had gone. He saw it in the ash before he was halfway to the den. Five sets of prints headed back down the cut path. Close together. None of them stopping to look behind.
They had come to wrap her and carry her out. She burned the den down around herself instead.
Nothing left to take until the root burned out. Tomorrow. Maybe the day after. The tracker searches his wolf for half a day. Then he comes back. Then he finds the knife wound.
The heat hit him at thirty paces. He walked into it anyway.
His right arm hung. He had no feeling in it past the elbow, and the fingers would not close when he told them to. Inside his coat, Nyx lay against his ribs without a flicker of warmth in it.
The smoke went up his collar. It got into his eyes. He did not wipe them.
What was left of the den was a black cage. The roots had burned down to their bones. They stood open to the morning where the roof had fallen in. Heat came off them in waves he could feel through his boots.
The two pups were in the hollow at the bottom. The fire had tried to devour them and failed. The cold had done it an hour ago and left them curled against each other.
He looked once.
They had been small enough that she carried them in her jaw. One had its paws tucked under its chin. The other had its face pushed into the first one’s shoulder.
They had barely had a chance to live. They died in their sleep while their mother cried for help every night.
Aiden’s heart stuttered. He did not look again. He stood at the edge. He made himself keep standing there. Walking away would have meant it was finished.
It was not finished. He would not let it finish like that.
Twenty paces behind him, the third pup still lay where the mother had left it in the sun.
Miasma had gone quiet on the kit bag. No glow at all. She had not made a sound since the trees.
The system chose that moment.
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[ DETOXIFICATION — COMPLETE ]
Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)
Stage: whole-body purge concluded. No further contamination detected. Final tissue cleared.
Lifespan returned: +1.0 Years
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 22.0 Years ]
Body fully detoxified.
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Twenty-two years.
Two months ago, a physician had given him a year, and he had made soup with it.
Twenty-two years, standing over a hole with two dead pups in it. And none of them can change this.
The mother came out of the smoke.
He never heard her. The roots cracked as they cooled. He only knew because the smoke moved wrong on his left.
Then she walked out.
Low. Whole. The patches on her flanks were empty of warmth. No ember. No colour. The only light on her was her teeth.
He had four strides to decide.
She’s not hunting. She’s got nowhere to put the pain.
Miasma did not rise.
She lay on his shoulder, head leaned out toward the wolf. Still pointing. Still watching. A soft glow in her green eyes.
Nyx did not stir in his coat. It only trembled against him, small and shallow.
The knife stayed in his boot.
Aiden sat down.
He sat in the ash. He put both hands open on his knees. He took his eyes off the mother. He put them on the black root. A stare is a promise, and he had none to make.
Stand up, and she sees a threat.
Run, and she sees prey.
So I sit.
He heard her come. Four strides, then two.
The mother took him off his knees and onto his back. Her whole weight pressed on his chest. The air went out of him. His head went into the ash. The kit bag went sideways off his hip.
Her teeth closed on his throat.
Not through. Around. He felt the edge settle against the skin on both sides and stop.
He waited for heat.
There was none.
Nothing came off her at all. A wolf had her jaws on his throat, and she was as cold as the Snow Wolf he had killed an hour ago. The only warm thing near him was his own blood, loud in his ears.
You had one thing left: the strength to fight. And you spent it protecting two bodies that were already gone.
The mother was shaking. All of her.
Her breath came down onto his face in fast, shallow pulls. He could not tell where hers stopped and his started.
Then she cried.
The sound broke around her teeth, low and cracked in the middle. It went through her ribs into his chest.
He had heard it thin across the camp on the first night. He had heard it close at the stakes with the boy beside him.
He had never heard it from underneath.
She cried with her teeth around his throat. The water ran off her muzzle and down his neck, into his collar. Neither of them moved.
He lay with his dead arm out in the ash. His good hand rested open on the ground beside it. He looked past her head at the grey sky.
The teeth did not close.
The boy promised not to come out for me. He’ll keep his promise. And he’ll carry it...
The mother’s shaking got worse.
Her legs went first. He felt them fold, one at a time, until she was no longer standing over him. She was lying on him, her jaw still locked on his throat, her teeth in the only thing she could reach on that ground. She could not make herself finish it. She could not let go either.
You don’t know what to do with me.
I don’t know what to do with you either.
He turned his head.
Slow. Half an inch at a time, under the teeth, until he could see past her shoulder into the hollow. To the two small bodies.
His eyes clouded before he decided anything. The water ran back into his hair. The ash drank it.
There were three of you in that den. Yesterday you carried the smallest into the sun. You kept pushing it after the light. The light was already gone.
Even with a wolf’s teeth at his neck, Miasma had not moved. Now she did.
She crossed the ash by his head and stopped between him and the hollow, in front of the wolf with her spines down.
She sat under those jaws and held the wolf’s orange eyes.
Then the green pulse came from her back. Low and slow and steady. Moon on wet stone.
She turned and put the light into the hollow.
The teeth came off Aiden’s throat.
The green light reached a body’s length and stopped. The two small shapes were past its edge, in the dark.
Miasma pushed. Aiden felt it down the bond, a pull like a hand closing on nothing. The glow flickered but did not move one inch further.
What are you doing?
Miasma pushed again. The green guttered at the edges and held where it was.
The wolf watched the light fail.
Every night since the first cry, you pointed toward that slope. I thought you were after vesperian relics. You were answering her.
She pushed a third time. Her limbs trembled, her ribs moved too fast. Yet nothing. Yet she wouldn’t give up.
Aiden lay under the wolf’s teeth and watched his beast run out of everything she had.
Before his hand reached her, before the thought to stop her even formed, the system fired.
He read it once.
He read it twice, because the first time his eyes went over without taking the letters.
Twenty-two years.
And not one honest thing to buy with them right now.
He said it to the burned root. Not to the wolf. Low, with no weight on it. He had always said the costly things that way.
"Do it," he said. "All of it. Show her."