Page 21 of Hot Flashes and Hexes

The scouts had retreated in formation, too coordinated for ambient chaos instinct. This one wasn’t charging because it was watching the outcome of the first two and reading the engagement. Learning or transmitting, neither was good.

Then it ran — toward the woman behind the standing stone.

She was in her early sixties, in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d taken cover behind the nearest standing stone — better than open ground, but the angle was wrong, and the creature had a clear line to her with Drayce twelve feet away.

He closed fast.

He struck the creature from the side, hard enough to send it away from the standing stone. Its claw caught his shoulder as he turned — three lines of heat raking through muscle and skin, clean and fast, a wound he registered as information before he felt it as pain. He shoved the creature over the cliff edge and heard it hit the water forty feet below.

He stayed upright by leaning hard into the basalt wall.

Breathed.

The two he’d driven back were gone — he could feel their absence in the air, the pressure easing from the ward line. The third was in the water—no further movement along the boundary.

His shoulder was bleeding. He pressed his palm against it and looked at the ward line.

The standing stones had turned phosphorescent at the rune-marks, the ward’s response to a high-activity engagement. Pale, cold, and steady.

Holding.

His wolf turned before he did.

She’s here.

He’d expected the evacuation to have cleared the cliff path. He’d been wrong.

Althea was pressed flat against the basalt about thirty feet from the engagement zone, exactly where a sensible person stops when the evacuation crowd thins and curiosity takes over. Not panic-frozen. She’d stopped because she’d decided to.

His eyes were still gold. He was aware of this. The partial shift resolved slowly — the adrenaline didn’t know the fight was over, and the wolf wasn’t ready to release the edge.

She looked into his eyes. At the ward line. At the cliff edge where the third creature had gone over.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She stood quietly, processing a large volume of new information.

His wolf went still.

Footsteps came on the path behind him. Pike came up from the lower area at an easy pace to see what had happened and whether Drayce had done it right.

Pike came around the curve and stopped.

He took in the scene: the engagement zone, the ward stones still glowing, the older woman being assisted by Deputy Corin, and Drayce with his palm pressed against his shoulder. And then he took in Althea against the cliff rock, thirty feet from where the fight had been, and his face did the thing it did when he was working through calculations he wasn’t going to say out loud yet.

He went to the older woman and the deputy instead, and Drayce — tracking him without looking, as he always tracked Pike — knew Pike was going to have a great deal to say later.

The shift had mostly reversed by the time Althea crossed the ground between them. His eyes had settled to gray. Only the wound remained, leaking more slowly.

She moved the same way she had in the town square — direct, focused on the problem in front of her. She stopped an arm’s length away.

He stepped away from the basalt wall.

His wolf didn’t like this. Not because of Althea — his wolf had no objections to her presence, to put it mildly — but because it didn’t want her near evidence that he could be damaged. The instinct ran deep and was clear-eyed about its own irrationality. He let her anyway.

Her hands went to his shoulder without preamble — not touching the wound, reading it first. She pulled his collar aside to see the full extent. Both hands steady. He could hear her pulse, still elevated, but her hands didn't tremble.

“Deep?”

“No. It’ll close.”