Page 40 of Blood & Ash

Gabriel stood over her body with his hands at his sides and his face locked down. The hellforged scar caught the lantern light. His jaw worked once. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t speak. He stood where he was and looked at the woman who had fed his pack for fifteen years and now lay dead on oak because of something that had no teeth, no scent and couldn’t be fought.

The younger wolves didn’t know what to do with their hands. A boy near the fireplace (sixteen, maybe) kept clenching and unclenching his fists. A woman with a bandage on her forearm stood with her arms crossed so tight her knuckles went white. They looked at Petra, then at each other and then at the floor because the floor was safe.

Autumn came in from the kitchen with a cloth and a basin of water. She didn’t ask permission. She set the basin on the table beside Petra’s head and washed her face. Her movements were slow and careful. The cloth moved over Petra’s closed eyes and her gray lips and the sweat-darkened hair at her temples. Nobody stopped her or helped. They watched a half-fae woman wash a dead wolf’s face under amber light, and nobody moved.

The funeral rites began at dusk. Root-tied tokens appeared at the threshold: small bundles of dried herbs and river stones wrapped with twine made from willow bark. Each bundle was different. Each one represented a wolf who had come to leave something but couldn’t stay to watch it burn. The tokens lined the stone step from one end to the other. There were twenty-three of them, one for each wolf who was still standing.

They built the pyre behind the packhouse where the land sloped toward the trees. They used dry pine and oak cut from the eastern ridge. The wood caught fast. The flames reached higher than the roof peak and threw light across the gravel yard and the faces gathered there. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the fire and the wind through the pines beyond the property line.

Gabriel didn’t give a eulogy. He stood at the edge of the firelight with his hands at his sides and his face toward the flames. Autumn stood beside him. Her hand found his and held it. Neither of them looked at each other. They looked at the fire, the woman inside it and the silence of a pack that had lost one of its own to something it couldn’t fight with teeth.

The fire burned through the night. Two wolves kept watch: rotating in shifts, adding wood when the flames dropped, standing guard over ash that wouldn’t become anything useful. By morning the pyre was a mound of gray, the tokens were gone and the packhouse kitchen smelled of nothing because nobody had cooked in it.

The sickness didn’t stop. A woman on the south patrol woke with a fever of a hundred and three. A man who had been stable for a week developed a tremor in his right hand that wouldn’t settle. The packhouse at night was a catalog of small sounds: someone coughing in the upstairs dormitory, someone else bringing water, the creak of floorboards as Gabriel moved from room to room checking foreheads with the back of his hand.

Marcus sent word through Ramsey. The counteragent work continued. The sodium thiosulfate and silver nitrate combination had held for sixty seconds. Then ninety. Then two minutes. Progress measured in heartbeats while wolves died in days.

By the end of the week, the fracture had names.

Dex stood with Gabriel. He had been there from the first night, his arms crossed, his jaw set, his questions asked and answered to his satisfaction or close enough. He patrolled the eastern boundary alone when the scheduled runner called in sick. He brought firewood up from the shed without being asked. His loyalty was quiet and absolute, and it cost him nothing to show it.

The younger wolf from the back wall (the one who had asked about Arrow having the cure right now) didn’t stand with Gabriel. He patrolled when assigned. He attended the briefings. But his eyes found the door first whenever Gabriel spoke, and the set of his shoulders said something his mouth didn’t.

Two more joined him. A woman with a close-cropped haircut who had been on Petra’s cooking rotation. A man who had carried Denny Alcott’s body from the Alcott house to the packhouse truck. They didn’t speak against Gabriel, and their silence was its own statement: they avoided his eyes and clustered near the cold fireplace during meetings.

Galen watched. He was everywhere that week: carrying water upstairs, running messages to Marcus, standing night watch over the pyre ashes when the assigned wolves needed relief. He worked harder than anyone. He spoke less. His blue eyes tracked his father through rooms, across yards and along patrol boundaries, and whatever he was measuring behind that flat gaze, he kept it to himself.

The packhouse grew colder as the week ended. The fire in the stone hearth burned lower each night. Someone kept forgetting to add wood. Or someone was choosing not to.

The smell of fever lingered in the upstairs dormitory. The kitchen stayed dark. The long table in the great hall held a fine layer of dust that nobody wiped away because wiping it meant acknowledging that Petra wasn’t coming back to do it herself.

On the seventh night, Gabriel stood at the back door with his hand on the frame and looked out at the pyre ashes. The mound was gray and settled. The wind had scattered some of it toward the trees. Nothing remained of the woman who had cracked pecans between her fingers and remembered every birthday.

He didn’t go inside. He stood at the door until his hand went numb on the wood and the cold reached through his jacket to the scars on his arm.

Autumn found him there. She didn’t speak. She stood beside him and looked at the same ashes and the same trees and the same night that held nothing useful.

Her hand found his. They stood that way until the numbness became something else and the cold became something they could ignore.

The morning after Petra’s burial, Gabriel called the pack together in the great hall. The room was colder. The fire in the stone hearth burned low, throwing more shadow than light. Wolves filed in through both doors and lined the walls like they had a week ago, but the set of their shoulders was different, tired and raw. Some of them hadn’t slept.

Gabriel stood at the head of the table. His blue eyes were flat. The hellforged scar caught what little light reached it. He hadn’t shaved. The stubble along his jaw was gray at the temples, darker through the middle. He opened his mouth to speak.

Galen was on his feet before the first word left his father’s mouth. He stood near the cold fireplace, his boots planted wide, his voice already up and carrying.

“People are dying.” The words hit the walls and came back. “Petra is dead. Denny is dead. Cole’s in Richmond with a fever that won’t break and Marcus is running tests that don’t work fast enough.” Galen’s hands came up. They were open palms rather than fists, held out like evidence. “Arrow has the cure. Right now. In vials. Sealed. He walked in here, put it on the table, and we sent it to a lab instead of using it.”

The room stilled, caught off guard that this was starting here, now, from him.

Galen took a step toward the table. His voice didn’t drop. It found its rhythm and settled into it: hot, fast, and certain, with the total conviction only an eighteen-year-old can manage.

“Pride isn’t worth Petra. It’s not worth whoever comes next. It’s not worth Cole or the woman on south patrol or the boundary runner who fell asleep against a tree.” His jaw worked. Once. Hard. “We have a medicine that works. Arrow tested it. He said so. He doesn’t lie about things like that. He doesn’t need to.”

A man near the window shifted his weight. The floorboard creaked. Nobody else moved.

Galen’s eyes found his father’s across the room. His gaze was direct and level, with no space between the look and the words that followed.

“You’re choosing your own authority over this pack’s survival.” He said it clearly, in a voice that carried to every corner of the hall, looking directly at Gabriel Andrews, alpha, his father, the man who had raised him to speak his mind and stand his ground and now stood across a scarred oak table hearing exactly what that sounded like. “That’s what this is. You would rather watch us die than give up that chair.”