Ember Scalecrown's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Garrett cleaned Ember's shoulder until the bleeding stopped. She lay in the dirt and let him work. His hands were gentle, but his rifle waited on the porch. When dawn came, he would want her gone. She had won his mercy, not his home. Her wolf den waited far in the pines, cold and bare. She was too weak to walk that far. She was too weak to guard his farm if the next wolf came. Garrett stood and looked at the torn coop wire. The rooster paced inside. The two hens huddled behind him. "They'll come back for you," he said. "Wolves always come back." He rubbed his jaw. Then he did a thing Ember did not expect. He walked to the barn wall and dragged out an old wooden crate. He filled it with straw. He set it against the farmhouse, under the porch roof, out of the wind. "You stay here," he said. "You guard the birds. I'll feed you." He set down a plate of cold meat. Ember stared at it. He was giving her a place. Not a den in the pines, but a bed by his door. She crawled to the crate and lay in the straw. It smelled of him. The big white dog came and lay beside her. It rested its head on her flank. Garrett watched them both from the doorway. Something in his hard face eased. "Two guards now," he said. He almost smiled. Then he went inside. For three days Ember healed in the straw. Garrett brought food each morning and each night. He changed the cloth on her shoulder. He talked while he worked, low and easy, about the weather and the hens and the dead father who built the farm. Ember drank in every word. She learned his voice. She learned the man. Her wound closed. Her strength came back. On the fourth night the wind carried a scent she knew and feared. Dark fur. Yellow eyes. A wolf larger than the last, circling wide beyond the fence. Ember rose from the crate. Her legs held. She was strong again, healed, fed, home. But the scent was wrong. This wolf did not hunt hens. It hunted her. It had tracked her from the pines. It knew what she was. It waited past the light with its lips drawn back. Garrett slept inside, safe, trusting his clever wolf to keep watch. Ember stood between his door and the thing in the dark. She had a warm bed now. She had his food and his gentle hands. And she had a beast at the fence that had come to drag her back to the woods, or kill her where she stood.