Chapter 64: Knives in the Night

The camp did not follow him out.

That was the first wrong quiet. Zariel had spent the last stretch of the night turning a hollow into wreckage, and now the lanes were just lanes again. Tents burning low. A jeep on its side with the radio still hissing. Somebody’s boot in the mud, nobody in it. The panthers and the humans who could still run had gone after their own monsters, or away from them, and they had not wasted a single backward look on the white wolf who had opened the cages.

He walked through it anyway.

Iron skin. That was the thought he kept, like a charm and a joke at the same time. If the little ones wanted a meal they could try. He had walked through a camp’s worth of rifles. He had put the elk down in a medical tent while the monitors were still beeping. He had told Roan they were changing the tides tonight, and part of him still believed it, even with someone else’s blood on his paws and Creep’s stolen camera bouncing against his ruined vest.

The other part of him kept hearing that panther shout. “Not that one!”

The mountain pass rose ahead of the hollow, a thin dirt road cut along the drop. No guardrail. Far below, a river moved white over rock, loud enough that it almost covered the way the trees were listening. Zariel took the road even though it would be a long way home.

He was halfway across the open stretch when the night showed interest in him finally.

They came out of the trees like thrown knives.

Insect-built. Void-veined. Too many legs and no patience. The first one hit his chest so hard it tried to ride him, talons hooking into what was left of his vest, body slamming against the iron of him as if he were a board it could steer. Zariel’s legs locked. He stayed upright by meanness more than balance, boots sliding in gravel, the drop yawning on his left like a second mouth. The talons struck and struck and found nothing that would open. He felt the hits. He did not feel the give.

Good, he thought, and hated how relieved the word was.

He got an arm under the thing, wrenched, and slammed it to the dirt hard enough to make the road jump. The chitin was slick and hot. It screamed in a register that did not belong in woods. He put the gun against that shell and fired point blank until the body jerked and went slack. Black fluid sprayed his white fur in a fan. It smelled like burnt copper and wet stone.

But the white wolf did not get a breath.

Two more dropped from the branches. One landed on his back. One came in low for the knees, smart enough to hunt the thing that would dump him into the river. Zariel caught the low one first and put it into a trunk so hard the wood split. The second he seized by a limb and broke it in his paws, insect shell snapping like wet timber. They screeched when they died. Ugly sound. It stayed in the trees after the bodies stopped moving, as if the forest wanted to remember.

A fourth tried the same ride-the-chest trick. He met it coming down, drove it into the road, and ended it the same way as the first. Four down. Oily black blood in his coat now, tacky, wrong-smelling, dripping off his forearms when he shook them.