Keep Her Safe From Me

The wind came off the ridge in sheets, and the hiker's blood soaked through my jacket before I reached the first switchback.

I had him over my shoulder in a fireman's carry, his good arm hooked around my neck, his bad leg dangling. His name was Peter. He had told me that much before the pain took the rest of his words. Forty-two years old, a schoolteacher from Ohio, in Colorado for a week of hiking he had saved for three years to afford. His boot had found a patch of ice where the trail narrowed above a two hundred foot drop, and the rest was gravity and rock.

The radio had gone dead six minutes into the climb. I knew the trail by feel now, by the shape of the snow under my boots and the way the pines leaned away from the wind. My fingers had stopped hurting somewhere around the last ridge, which was a bad sign I did not have time to think about.

Ash stirred in my chest. He had been silent for most of the climb, watching through my eyes, and now he pressed forward with a low, uneasy growl.

Something is wrong, he said. Not the man. Something below.

I did not answer him. I had learned to keep my mouth shut around my own wolf.

The ambulance was parked where the access road ended, a red and white shape smeared by the falling snow. Two paramedics were wrestling a stretcher out of the back, and a woman in a dark green jacket stood between them with her hands already gloved, her hair pulled back, her face turned up toward the trail.

I saw her before she saw me. That was the first thing. The second thing was the scent.

It hit me at thirty yards, carried on a gust that should have brought me nothing but pine and diesel. Snow, cold and clean. Antiseptic, sharp and faintly sweet. Coffee gone stale in a paper cup. And under all of it, something warm and living that made my knees slow down without asking my permission.

Ash stood up in my chest, every hair on him bristling, and he made a sound I had not heard from him in two years.

There, he said. That one.

I knew what he meant. I had heard older wolves describe it, and I had always filed it away with the other stories they told around the pack house fire. The scent that finds you. The one the moon picks out of a whole world of people and sets in front of you.

I kept walking. There was a man bleeding on my shoulder. Whatever the moon had decided could wait.

"Bring him here," the woman called. Her voice cut through the wind without effort. "Stretcher, now."

I laid Peter down as gently as I could. He groaned, and his hand caught at my sleeve.

"Don't leave," he said.

"I'm not going anywhere," I told him, and I meant it, and I hated how easily the lie sat in my mouth when I realized she was watching me.

She crouched on the other side of the stretcher and put two fingers against Peter's throat. Up close her eyes were green, a shade darker than the pines, and there was a small white line at the corner of her mouth where she had been biting her lip. She smelled of snow and antiseptic and that warm thing underneath, and my hands, which had not shaken on the cliff, shook now.

"Pulse is fast and thin," she said to the paramedics. "Get the tourniquet above the knee. I need a line in his left arm and I need it now."

One of the paramedics, a heavyset man named Dale who had ridden with me twice before, leaned in. "Doctor, his leg is a mess. We should get him to the hospital before we start."

"He won't make the hospital if we don't stop the bleeding here," she said. No heat in it. Just the flat certainty of someone who had done this before. "Tourniquet."

I pulled my gloves off with my teeth and put my hands where she pointed. The wound ran from Peter's knee to the middle of his shin, a deep tear where the rock had opened him up. I pressed down on the artery above it and felt the blood push back against my palm, warm and insistent.

She looked at my hands and then at me, and something in her face changed.

"You came down that trail with him on your back," she said.

"Yes."

"The trail's been closed since noon. The station said no one was going up."

"Someone had to."

She held my eyes for a moment longer than the situation required. Then she turned back to Peter and started giving orders again, and the world narrowed to blood and gauze and the sound of the wind.

We worked for eleven minutes. I know because I counted, the way I count things when the ground feels unsteady. At some point she put her bare hand over mine to show me where to press, and the touch went through me like a struck wire. Her fingers were cold and steady, and where her skin met mine there was a small bright shock that had nothing to do with static.

She felt it. I saw her blink and draw her hand back half an inch. She did not say anything. She looked at my face, at my eyes, for a beat too long, and then she went back to work as if nothing had happened.

Ash had gone very still.

Mine, he said.

No, I told him.

"Get him in the bus," she said at last, and the paramedics lifted Peter onto the stretcher and slid him inside. She stripped her gloves off and dropped them in the red bag, and her hands were shaking now, just slightly, the way hands shake after the adrenaline leaves.

She turned to me. "You're coming too. Your fingers are the color of a fish belly and you have a cut on your forehead you haven't noticed."

"I'm fine."

"You're hypothermic and you're bleeding. Get in the bus."

I looked at the ambulance, at the red lights turning the snow pink, and every instinct in me said to walk away up the trail and not look back. The mate bond was a pack law matter. A human who got close to a wolf got hurt, and I had already hurt enough people by standing too near them.

"Doctor," I said, "what's your name?"

"Clara," she said. "Clara Reyes. Get in the bus, Elias."

I had not told her my name. It was stitched on my jacket, I realized, in the same white letters as the station logo. Of course it was.

I got in the bus.

She worked on Peter the whole way down, and I sat on the bench across from her with a foil blanket around my shoulders, watching her hands. The ambulance swayed, and the sirens were loud, and at one point she reached into her jacket pocket for a pen and something small and silver came out with it and fell on the floor.

I picked it up before she could. It was a vial. A small glass vial with a gray stopper and a smear of dark red inside, and a handwritten label that read No. 4, Ridge, 11/02.

She took it from my fingers, and her face did not change, and she slid it back into her pocket.

"It's nothing," she said. "Old sample."

She went back to Peter. I sat with my back against the wall of the bus and listened to the tires hiss through the slush and did not ask her what kind of sample needed to be kept in a jacket pocket.

But I knew what I had seen on that label. I knew the ridge, and I knew the date, and I knew what had been found up there three weeks ago, because I had been the one to report it to the pack and to the sheriff both.

Ash's ears had gone flat.

She kept it, he said. She kept the blood.

The ambulance turned into the hospital lot, and Clara looked up at me across Peter's stretcher, and her green eyes held a question she had not asked yet.

I should have gotten out at the door and walked away. Instead I stayed where I was, and that was the first mistake of the rest of my life.