Four Live Rounds

With all her strength, she grabbed Fidel’s arm and shoulder and hurled him toward the east-facing window.

The springs squeaked.

Fidel screamed.

In the moonlight, she saw him pinned between the rusty jaws of the grizzly trap, his wrists caught, the teeth burrowed into his stomach, his back, and still struggling to close, the hinges creaking.

Through clenched teeth, he screamed Javier’s name.

Kalyn moved toward him, saw the pool of blood expanding within the circular boundary of the snare.

She reached down for his knife.

“Por favor,” he begged. “I can’t feel my legs.”

Kalyn smiled through her own pain. He spit at her.

“I want you to make this easy on me,” she said. “And on you. Tilt your head back. Show me your throat.”

He said something in Spanish that she didn’t understand.

“Look, I’ve got things to do. Wanna sit here? Bleed out slowly while the trap finishes its supper?”

“Dios,” he whispered. “Dios.” He couldn’t even cross himself.

Fidel stared at the ceiling and thought of a woman named Maria.

. . .

Devlin shouldered the shotgun, trying to remember what Kalyn had told her several hours ago. Kicks like hell, so lean into it. Aim at the head or below the waist. She was standing in the threshold, one foot in the room, one foot in the corridor.

Devlin aimed at the man’s head, slipped her finger into the curve of the trigger.

She squeezed.

Nothing happened.

Oh God, I didn’t pump it.

The baby screamed.

Javier glanced over his shoulder, spotted Devlin standing in the doorway.

As Will stepped out into the corridor and leveled his twelve-gauge shotgun on Javier, something rolled across the floor, between his legs.

Will was absorbing a slide show of images: Devlin struggling to pump her shotgun; Javier diving away, shielding his head; Rachael’s quizzical face as she stared at the black device that had come to rest against the toe of her left boot.

Then Will’s world exploded in a flash of brilliant, deafening light.

SEVENTY-TWO

Kalyn heard the explosion as she swiped the magazine for the Browning back from Fidel. She limped through the darkness of the first-floor corridor, desperate for some decent light to see how badly she’d been cut. It hurt terribly, particularly through her midsection, though she didn’t seem to be bleeding as profusely as before.

She stopped thirty feet from where the corridor opened into the lobby. The white wolf moved past the freestanding hearth, trotting in her direction, toward the south-wing corridor. At first, she thought it hadn’t seen her, that perhaps it was heading for the staircase, but its head was already dipped, hackles rising, and she could hear the deep, guttural rumbling in its throat—a low, malicious growl. The Browning was in the lobby, she’d left Fidel’s knife in the alcove, and there was no time to reach the only unlocked door in the vicinity—the room where she’d left her sister, unconscious.

There are weapons on the fourth floor—a shotgun and a machine pistol.

The wolf passed into the darkness of the corridor, and she turned and ran as hard as she could up the passage, every step sending a shock of agony through her abdomen.

She reached the alcove, heard the wolf panting behind her, closing the distance between them with every stride. She was telling herself she’d outrun him in the stairwell, thought for some reason he couldn’t move as quickly up the steps.

She turned into the stairwell.

The gray wolf was coming down the last flight of stairs, and it snarled when it saw her, its teeth wet in the moonlight, black with blood.

The white one was fast approaching.

She saw the window, the glass broken out, rushed over, climbed up onto the sill, glanced back, the wolves right there, yellow and pink eyes raging.

No other choice. She jumped down into the snow—a rush of cold—thinking, The front entrance is locked, but I can bang on it, get him to let me in. If I can get there, I can make it back inside. But it was a long way, the entire length of the south wing, through deep drifts.

She was practically swimming through the snow now, clumps of it falling down her collar, melting on her neck, and the wind had kicked up, blowing powder into her face like a swarm of tiny pins.

It was a bright night, with a huge moon and loads of stars, but her vision seemed to be darkening. She looked back, having already gone thirty feet out from the window, saw one of their heads emerge from the snow, the wolves fighting their way through deep powder in a movement that resembled swimming dolphins.

Will thought, I’m not dead. He sat up, unsure of how long he’d been unconscious. For a moment, he could see only a single frame of white. Someone, presumably Devlin, was calling out to him, but her voice was distant and muddled.

His vision restored—washed-out tones of lantern light and shadow, Rachael sitting up behind him, conscious and intact, her pants blackened from the close-range detonation.

Rachael asked, “Are you okay?” but his voice seemed trapped in his head.

Devlin was kneeling in front of him, and he tried to read her lips, but the disorientation stymied his effort.

Will climbed to his feet and careened into the wall.

Kalyn moved faster now, groaning with each step, focused on nothing but her legs powering through the snow. The next time she looked up, she realized she’d veered off course, away from the lodge, and was actually heading downslope toward the lake and the floatplane dock.

The wolves were still coming. She could see nothing of the white one but its eyes.

She reached the lakeshore, the moon’s reflection in the water disturbed, waves slamming into the snowy bank.

The wolves kept coming.

She looked up toward the lodge entrance, and there he was, wading toward her through the snow, a black duffel bag slung over his shoulder, a machine pistol in one hand, a Mossberg in the other.

The sound of the Beretta and the bullets ripping through the snow was lost to the wind. Kalyn only saw the wolves disappear under the snowpack, where they would remain until next June, when the snow broke and the scavengers came.

Javier stopped a few feet away, the black fabric over his right shoulder shredded by buckshot.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

Kalyn stood shivering in the cold, bracing against the wind. “Your friend had a fairly liberal interpretation of ‘don’t touch her.’ ”

“You killed him.”

She nodded.

Javier glanced back at the lodge. “Just you and me and the Innises now.”