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One of the cattle mooed piteously and set the others to twitching around in their makeshift corral. Cadmus stood motionless, bare-chested and ready just out of the circle of light cast by the watch fires.
He heard the same thing the oxen did. Soft pads on the hard dry ground. Three wolves not four like he’d thought earlier, less than a hundred yards away in the moonless dark.
Circling the camp. He had a silver-round chambered, but he wouldn't fire until he was sure of a kill. He slid the belt ax out, then slipped the leather loop around his left wrist and held it low. He'd get one with a bullet for sure, but that would leave the other two. He inhaled deeply and fixed the position of the group's alpha. Not enough of a location to get a bead yet, just a general direction. He growled a challenge at a pitch the normals couldn't hear.
A snuff-snuff-snuffing of rebuttal came back to him from the dark and pulled his bare flesh up in patches of gooseflesh.
Cadmus smiled to himself in anticipation of battle.
He savored the warm surge of adrenalin and said, "I am Cadmus of the Stove Bank Ursans. Come forward and we can parlay."
The alpha crept closer, using the half-buried car-hulks and other detritus of a dead world as cover.
The normals clustered somewhere behind him in the bay of what had been the garage of an old gas station. The burned-out building on the highway that headed north of the Interstate looked defensible against three or four wolves. The shell had no roof, but the walls were too high for a wolf to jump. The normals hid behind barrels and piled trash at the open side.
The makeshift corral of squared-up wagons stood forward of the stumps of broken gas pumps. Cadmus had stashed his shirt and gear there in the back of the pickup. The fires he set were at the four compass points outside their perimeter and he set the two brothers feeding those hungry flames with whatever scraps of wood could be found.
When there was no answer to his offer Cadmus said, “These normals are under my care, and if you come for them I will rip your heart from your chest." He meant no false bravado with his words, a promise, an invitation, nothing more as he stood alone, waiting in the dark.
He felt the alpha creep closer and shift partway back. Cadmus caught the metallic scent of blood as the flesh tore and reshaped.
"Leave them, Ursanthrope. We have no quarrel with you." The voice hissed from the darkness directly in front of him, but still too far to get off a clean shot.
Cadmus answered, “We can pay a toll in goat. Or steer. A full belly for their trespass."
"Their lives for the trespass. And the girl too," the not quite human shape growled in the dark.
Cadmus growled his own reply, waiting for the wolf to strike. But it didn't. He smelled the musky sweat and blood as it went back all wolf and moved off to the right. He shifted his one-handed grip on the big rifle and waited.
"Mr. Cadmus."
Poised as he was on the edge of battle, he hadn't heard the little human creep up behind. He whirled around at the sound of her voice.
Outlined by the fire, he could see she wasn't as young as he'd thought. Straight-backed and willowy tall, her helix pendant rested in the hollow between small high breasts. She was all the way into the first bloom of womanhood and smelled of health.
"Go back to the shelter, little one. This is no place for you."
"I think the wolf here is meant to distract you. The other two are around the back side. I thought you'd want to know."
"You a reader, little Harmony-girl?"
The young woman cast a sideways glance to the cracking fire. One of the new religioner women was calling for her in a fearful-shrill voice and headed this way.
Harmony looked back to Cadmus and said, "They call me an earth witch. I see the land and these wolves are like blank spots on it to me."
"Thank you, now on back. And tell the brothers to hold their shots, less they see what they shoot." And with that Cadmus left Harmony to the old woman's remonstrations while he stalked a slow circle to the opposite side of the camp in the dark.
Outside the Wire Page 8