Collecting the Debt

How many dead wolves does it take before an alpha council admits they bought the poison?

The low-tide mudflats of Slipway Seven smelled like rotten kelp, sulfur, and cheap diesel. Mist hung two feet above the slick shale, turning the red glow of Torcall’s chemical flares into smeared blood across the harbor floor. Twelve wolves in oilskin coats stood in a staggered crescent between us and the stone stairs. None of them looked like they wanted to negotiate.

At the center stood Torcall. He was six-foot-four of thick gristle and scarred tendon, holding two wide-bellied butcher cleavers by the blackened ash grips.

"Four hundred sovereigns for his left ear," I said under my breath. My boots sank three inches into the gray clay. "Do you think the warden pays extra if the cartilage is intact?"

"I think the warden will be lucky if there's enough left to weigh," Lorcuin said.

He didn't slow his stride. The heir-blade rested across his forearm, dark with cannery grease and rogue blood. He moved with that heavy, deliberate grace common to men who had never been told no by anyone who lived to brag about it.

"Six on the left flank," I said, tracking the boot prints in the mud. "Four on the high rocks. Two behind Torcall with short spears."

"You want the flank?" he asked.

"I want the coin," I said. "The flank is just in my way."

Torcall spat into the mud. The glob came up reddish-purple, stained with the same silver-rot we had just blown out of the cannery cellar. His eyes were bloodshot, pupils blown wide beneath the heavy ridge of his brow. He wasn't fully turned like the things in the drowned pens, but he had taken enough of Garbhan’s tainted draft to numb his fear.

"The heir," Torcall rasped, his voice sounding like gravel ground in a rusty bucket. "And the stray bitch from the gut. Garbhan said you’d crawl out through the drain."

"Garbhan miscalculated the masonry," I replied.

"He didn't miscalculate the tide," Torcall snarled. He raised both cleavers, the notched steel catching the flare light. "Kill the girl. Bring the prince to the pier house in pieces."

The crescent collapsed inward.

Twelve wolves surged across forty yards of slick mud. They didn't bother shifting. Shifting in coastal sludge is suicide if your paws slip on the weed, and these men were dock fighters—they trusted iron and numbers.

Lorcuin met the center like an avalanche hitting a seawall.

His first swing took the spear out of the lead raider's hands, snapping the ash shaft in half before the backswing buried four inches of high-carbon steel into the second wolf's breastbone. A guttural roar ripped from his throat, the deep alpha frequency vibrating through the soles of my wet boots. It wasn't just sound. It was raw physical dominance, heavy enough to make the two flanking guards stumble as their inner wolves locked up in panic.

I didn't have alpha command. I had gravity and a five-inch skinning knife.

Three raiders veered left to cut me off from the stair base. The first lunged with an iron boat hook, aiming for my ribs.

I didn't parry. Parrying eighty pounds of rushing muscle on wet clay only breaks your own wrists.

Instead, I dropped flat onto my hip, sliding two yards through the slick green weed beneath his thrust. As his boots skidded past my head, I drove the point of my knife through the tendon behind his left ankle.

He screamed, his knee buckling outward with a wet snap.

Before he hit the mud, I was back on my feet. My left hand snatched his collar, using his forward momentum to haul his dead weight directly into the path of the second attacker. The two collided in a tangle of limbs and wet slickers. I stepped past them, planting my boot on the fallen man’s neck, and drove the butt of my knife into the second wolf's temple.

He went limp instantly, splashing face-down into the cold tide-pool.

Two down.

Where was the third?

A rush of displaced air whistled behind my right shoulder.

I didn't turn to look. I ducked hard, throwing my center of gravity toward the mud. A butcher cleaver whistled through the empty space where my neck had been half a second prior, severing three strands of my hair.

Torcall had closed the distance without a sound. For a brute that big, he moved with the sickening lightness of a hunting spider.

"You're fast, little bitch," he grunted, swinging the second cleaver in a low horizontal sweep meant to take me at the waist.

I leaped backward, the flat of the heavy blade grazing the brass buckles of my coat. The mud fought my landing, sucking at the heels of my boots. My footing slipped two inches to the right.

He saw the stumble. His scarred lips peeled back over yellowed canines as he lunged, raising both cleavers for a downward crush that would have split an anvil.

Did he think I hadn't spent five years hunting these shoals?

Beneath the four-inch layer of gray silt lay the rusted mooring cable from the old coal barge wrecked during the winter gale of 'twenty-two. I had snagged three fishing nets on it over the years. I knew every foot of its calcified iron spine.

As Torcall drove forward, I hooked my left boot under the taut cable buried beneath the muck and yanked upward with a sharp snap of my hips.

The heavy iron cable jerked out of the mud, rising six inches above the shale.

Torcall’s charging boot caught the iron wire dead-center.

His momentum betrayed him. All two hundred and sixty pounds of him pitched forward, his balance shattering in an instant.

The cleavers wavered.

That was all the opening the sea ever gave you.

I stepped inside his guard before he could recover his center. My left elbow smashed upward into his throat, crushing his windpipe and cutting off his roar. As his head snapped back, I reversed my grip on the skinning knife and drove the blade clean through the meat of his right shoulder, pinning the nerve cluster against the bone.

His right cleaver splashed uselessly into the mud.

He swung blindly with his left fist, catching me across the cheekbone. The blow tasted like salt and iron, stars bursting across my vision, but I didn't let go of the knife. I twisted the steel ninety degrees in the wound.

Torcall shrieked, dropping to one knee in the freezing tide.

"Who paid for the northern shipment?" I asked, leaning down until my mouth was two inches from his ear. "Was it Garbhan alone, or did House Tonnaragh sign the bill?"

He spat blood into my face, his wolf thrashing behind his glazed eyes. "The council... was already bought... before you were ever born, stray."

"Wrong answer," I said.

With one clean, practiced slice of my secondary blade, I took his left ear at the base.

He roared in agony, clutching the side of his head as black blood pumped between his thick fingers. Before he could raise the second cleaver, a shadow fell over us.

Lorcuin’s heir-blade came down like an iron guillotine.

Torcall’s head rolled three feet into the kelp bed, the flare light reflecting off the dead, milky sheen of his eyes.

Silence slammed down over Slipway Seven.

The remaining four raiders on the perimeter took one look at Torcall’s headless corpse, dropped their weapons into the tide, and vanished into the fog like rats running from a drowned cellar.

Lorcuin stood over the body, his chest heaving under his shredded wool coat. Black blood dripped from the tip of his broadsword into the mud, hissing softly where it met the cold salt water. A deep cut ran along his left jawline, and his dark hair was matted with cannery grit, but his stance was rock-solid.

He looked down at the ear in my hand, then at the severed head at his boots.

"You took the coin," he muttered, wiping his blade clean on Torcall's coat.

"Four hundred sovereigns is four hundred sovereigns," I said, wrapping the bloody cartilage in a strip of oiled canvas from my inner pocket. "You ruined the coat, though. High-grade sealskin. That would have fetched thirty on the night market."

"You are impossible," he said, sheathing the heavy steel across his back with a dry scrape of leather.

"I'm self-employed," I corrected, sliding my skinning knife back into its boot sheath. "There's a distinct difference."

My cheek throbbing where Torcall had caught me, I checked my cracked digital watch. 5:12 AM.

The sky above the harbor cliffs was turning from ink-black to a bruised, cold slate gray. The morning gulls were beginning their low, mournful circles over the cannery roof, screaming at the smoke still drifting from the blasted foundation wall.

"The council convenes at sunrise," Lorcuin said, looking up at the high stone ramparts of the upper harbor. "Five-thirty in the harbor overlook hall."

"Elder Breccan will be there?"

"He never misses the morning docket," Lorcuin replied, his voice dropping into that dark, lethal gravel. "He expects Garbhan’s distillate to clear the deepwater docks before first light. He thinks he’s arriving to sign the emergency annexation order."

"Then let's not keep the old man waiting," I said.

We climbed the granite stairs of Slipway Seven side by side. Each step sent a sharp reminder through my bruised ribs, but the cold Atlantic wind off the bluffs kept my head clear. The scent of crushed cedar and salt rain drifted off Lorcuin's skin, thick and sharp in the dawn air.

My wolf didn't whine this time. She paced behind my ribs, teeth bared, matching the rhythm of the man beside me.

Ours, she growled.

Shut up, I told her. We're here for the debt.

·  ·  ·

The Harbor Overlook Hall was built on the highest granite bluff of Pier One, perched like a stone vulture above the working wharves. It was where the Tonnaragh High Council had gathered for two centuries to divide the catch, set the sovereign boundaries, and exile the wolves they deemed too inconvenient to keep.

Five years ago, I had walked out of these double oak doors with my collar torn, my blood pooling on the threshold, and the formal words of rejection echoing off the cedar rafters.

Today, nobody had invited me back.

Lorcuin didn't bother knocking. He kicked the heavy oak door with the flat of his boot.

The iron latch sheared clean off the frame. The heavy doors slammed back against the stone walls with an explosive boom that silenced the murmur of voices inside.