Saban Wolf smelled the dead before he saw them. Bone rot carried on the wind between the black pines, and he lowered his head close to the frost. He was a wolf, and he wanted the pack. The old alpha had told him the rule plain: clear the skeletons walking these cold woods, and the hunters would follow him. Fail, and another wolf would take the honor. Saban had run three nights without sleep to reach this clearing first. He could hear the skeletons now, dry joints clicking, feet dragging over ice. Six of them, maybe seven, moving through the trees toward the frozen creek where the pack drank. He broke from cover at a full run. The first skeleton turned, and Saban hit it shoulder-first, snapping the spine under his weight. His claws raked through the ribcage of the next one and scattered bones across the snow. He bit down on a skull and crushed it. A third grabbed for his throat with cold fingers, and he tore its arm off and shook the bones loose from his teeth. Then the trees above him came alive. A swarm of bats poured down from the branches, wings snapping, small faces sharp in the moonlight. They had been feeding on the skeletons, he understood, or nesting in their empty skulls, and now they wheeled around him in a screaming cloud. Saban ducked his head, snapped at the air, and kept killing. He worked through the last three skeletons while bats clawed at his ears. When the final skull cracked under his paw, the swarm lifted and vanished back into the dark pines. Saban stood alone in a field of broken bone, his muzzle bleeding, his breath white. He had done what the old alpha demanded. But the bats had come from somewhere, and something in these woods was raising the dead. The pack would want to know what. Tomorrow he would answer for the kill, and he would ask for his place at the front.

Saban did not go to the pack at dawn. He went back into the trees to find whatever had raised the dead. The bat smell led him east, past the frozen creek, into a hollow where the pines grew thin. A boy stood there in torn jeans and heavy boots, gray-skinned, jaw hanging loose. Blood crusted his shirt. He was not alive, and he was not a skeleton either. Saban lowered his head and growled. The dead boy lifted a hand and the pines above him shook. No bats came. Saban understood then. The skeletons had been this one's work. Every walking bone in these woods had crawled up because the dead boy called them. Saban had killed them all last night. He had left this one with nothing to raise. The dead boy's white eyes fixed on him, and his loose mouth worked around a word Saban could not hear. Then he came. He moved faster than a corpse should. Saban lunged for the throat and missed. Cold fingers caught his ear and tore. Teeth closed on his shoulder and ground down to the bone. Saban twisted, threw the body off, and drove in again. He got the arm this time and cracked it at the elbow. The dead boy did not slow. He raked his nails across Saban's belly and opened it. Saban felt the heat leave him. His back legs folded. He bit once more, weakly, at the ruined jeans. The dead boy, Marcus Graves by the look of the name stitched inside the collar, bent down and closed his teeth on Saban's neck. Saban's blood ran into the frost. He thought of the old alpha waiting at the creek, and of the wolves who would drink there tomorrow without an alpha to lead them. Then the cold pines went dark, and Saban Wolf did not rise again.