Part 3
Eli did not need the photograph to recognize Nolan Voss, but seeing the name printed on the badge made the betrayal solid enough to hold.
He stared at it until the letters blurred. Voss had not simply looked the other way. He had drawn the false route, forged Eli’s signature, opened the side gate before dawn, and sent him into Deadfall Basin like a man mailing a package he never expected to see again.
Coal’s growl faded, but the wolf kept his nose near the badge as if the plastic itself offended him.
“You smelled him here,” Eli said. “Didn’t you?”
The wolf lifted his head toward the door.
Eli slipped the badge into the inside pocket of his parka. The movement hurt enough to bring sweat to his upper lip despite the cold. He wanted to sit down and not stand up again for a very long time, but the cabin was no shelter now. It was a breadcrumb, and breadcrumbs usually meant someone intended to come back.
He searched quickly, because fear made his hands steadier than pain did. Under a broken floorboard, he found survey flags, a folded topo map, and two small sample bags marked with numbers instead of locations. Titan Ridge Materials did not appear anywhere on the papers, but they did not need to. People hiding legal work did not hide it under rotten floorboards.
The map showed a line of test pits dug just inside the wilderness boundary. One of them was less than a mile from a tributary that fed three towns downstream.
Eli folded the map and tucked it beside the badge.
A sound rose outside.
Not a shout this time. A howl.
Coal moved to the doorway, black shoulders filling the gap where the door sagged open. His ears stood high. The howl came again, far off but layered, several voices braided together across the ridge.
A pack, Eli thought. Not close enough to be a threat yet. Close enough to remind him how much blood he had left in his clothes.
Coal answered with a sound so low Eli felt it in the floorboards. It was not a full howl. It was a warning, short and contained. The distant voices quieted.
“Well,” Eli said, though his mouth had gone dry, “that’s useful.”
Coal glanced back at him, unimpressed.
The old fire lookout spur ran northeast from the cabin, then dropped toward an abandoned repeater building near Granite Creek. If they could reach the repeater, Eli might find a landline, an emergency radio, or at least a structure tight enough to keep him alive until morning. The problem was distance. In summer, he could make it in two hours. Injured, bleeding, and half-frozen, it might as well have been ten miles.
Coal stepped out into the snow and waited.
Eli looked once more at the cabin floor. The boot prints crossed from the stove to the back wall. One track bore the crooked mark of a broken heel.
Rourke had been here. Voss had been here. Maybe not together, but close enough.
Eli took the stove poker from beside the cold hearth. It was rusted, light, and nearly useless, which still made it better than nothing.
“Lead on,” he said.
The night came down hard.
Snow thickened until the trees appeared only when Eli nearly walked into them. His breath turned ragged. The world narrowed to Coal’s black shape ahead, the ache in his ribs, and the map and badge pressing against his chest like an accusation.
More than once, Eli thought he heard men behind them. Once he was sure of it: a distant engine, then the sudden cut of it, swallowed by the storm. Snowmobiles, maybe. Or his mind building monsters out of wind.
Coal never chose the obvious path. He kept them low when the trail crested, high when the drainage dipped, cutting across country with a confidence Eli could not question. The wolf avoided open slopes and paused whenever the wind shifted. Twice, he stopped so suddenly that Eli nearly stumbled into him.
The second time, Eli heard voices below.
“Tracks washed out,” someone snapped.
Rourke.
Eli sank behind a boulder, one hand over his mouth, while two headlamps bobbed through the timber below. Coal crouched beside him without a sound. One of the men swung a flashlight across the slope. The beam passed so close Eli saw ice crystals sparkle in Coal’s guard hairs.
“Forget him,” the other man said. “He’s dead either way.”
Rourke’s answer came cold. “You didn’t see the rope?”
“No.”
“Then he’s not dead until I see him.”
The lights moved on.
Eli waited until the sound faded before he let himself breathe. When he looked at Coal, the wolf’s eyes were on him, steady and fierce.
“You and me both,” Eli whispered.
They kept moving.
Near midnight, the trail crossed Granite Creek where the bridge had washed out years before. In winter, the creek froze in uneven plates over black moving water. Eli had crossed it in daylight with trekking poles and good knees. Tonight, under snow and pain, it looked like a dare made by a crueler man.
Coal went first.
The ice held beneath him, though water murmured under the surface. Halfway across, he turned back and waited with his paws spread wide. Eli stepped after him, planting the poker like a cane.
His first boot held. The second slid.
He went down on one knee. The shock traveled through his ribs like a blade. Beneath him, the ice cracked in a white star.
Coal lunged. His teeth caught the shoulder of Eli’s parka and pulled, not gently this time. Eli scrambled, boots kicking for purchase, and felt the ice collapse behind his heel just as the wolf dragged him onto the far bank.
Cold creek water splashed his pant leg. Not enough to soak him through, but enough to make survival harder.
Eli lay facedown in the snow, shaking uncontrollably.
Coal stood over him, panting once, then twice. A faint red smear marked the fur near his lower jaw where Eli’s blood had transferred from the parka. In the dim light, it made the wolf look wounded too.
“I can’t,” Eli said.
The words were small, and he hated them.
Coal lowered his head and nudged Eli’s cheek with his nose.
Not tenderly. Not exactly. The touch was cold, wet, and insistent, the same as the first shove of morning at a man who has slept too long.
Eli closed his eyes. Daniel’s face came to him as it always did, not from the funeral photograph, but from the last morning they had hiked together. Daniel had been twenty-eight, laughing at the way Eli still packed too much coffee. He had turned on the trail and said, “You know you’re not allowed to quit before I do, right?”
Eli opened his eyes.
“Fine,” he said to the wolf. “I’m up.”
The last mile took forever.
Coal did not let him stop for long. When Eli staggered, the wolf came close. When Eli drifted toward sleep while walking, Coal shoved him hard enough to make him angry, and anger proved useful. It kept heat moving through what was left of him.
At last, through the trees, Eli saw the repeater tower.
It rose from the ridge like a black skeleton, rimed with ice, its metal frame whining softly in the wind. Beneath it squatted a concrete service building with a dented steel door. The place had not been fully operational in years, but old emergency structures had saved better men than him.
Coal reached the door first and nosed the gap at the bottom. It opened inward with a shriek of frozen hinges.
Inside, the air was bitter but still. Eli stumbled across the threshold, saw a bench, old batteries, a cracked panel, and a coil of wire hanging from the wall. He took two more steps before his legs folded.
Coal caught the back of his coat and slowed the fall.
Eli landed on his side instead of his face. The badge and map crackled inside his parka. He tried to speak, but his tongue would not shape words.
The wolf dragged him away from the door, then lay across the entrance, body stretched from frame to wall.
Sometime before dawn, voices came through the storm.
“Eli Mercer!”
A woman’s voice. Hoarse. Frightened.
“Eli, if you can hear me, call out!”
Coal lifted his head. His lips drew back, not in attack yet, but warning. Eli forced his eyes open and saw headlamps cutting through the gray light outside.
“Eli!”
Sarah Keene stepped into the doorway with a flashlight raised. The beam found the black wolf first…
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