With one hand on the pull bar, his body half on, half off the rig, Ryan called out to Finn to gun the engine. He was looking directly into Krysty’s green eyes when he saw them open wide in shock and her mouth begin to form a warning.
The impact knocked him clean off the truck, and he hit the rutted snow with rib-creaking force.
He’d left the G-12 caseless in the cab, his SIG-Sauer pistol holstered at his hip. But the long coat hampered him, tangling as he fell. His ears were filled with a ferocious snarling, his nostrils overwhelmed with the rank stench of the creature that had attacked him.
For a few moments Ryan couldn’t even see what it was. He did know that it was large and coarse-haired, and that it had curved canine teeth that snapped at his throat. Part of his brain guessed it was a big timber wolf, but most of his attention was wonderfully concentrated on fighting off the murderous bastard.
He managed to get a forearm across the beast’s neck, keeping its clashing teeth a few inches from his own face. Then it kicked, its sharp claws ripping at him, trying to spill his guts steaming into the snow. The Kenworth had gone, probably stopped some way down the slope, the others tumbling from it in a bid to rescue him. But the snow had thickened to a blizzard, dropping visibility to only a couple of yards. If he didn’t save himself, the others would be too late.
“Fireblast, you fucker!” he grunted, managing a clumsy punch that made the creature whine in pain and back off for a moment, where it crouched on its haunches, eyes glowing like living rubies.
It was a wolfone of the biggest Ryan Cawdor had ever seen.
There were burrs matted in its brindled coat, and bloody froth dripped from its reeking jaws. It stood close to four feet tall at the shoulder. Keeping his eye fixed on it, Ryan reached for his blaster, but the torn strip of leather from his coat was still tangled about the butt of the gun. He dropped his hand to the cold hilt of the eighteen-inch panga on the other hip and drew the blade in a whisper of steel.
“Come on then,” he called out, blinking in the driving snow.
The world had shrunk to a shifting circle of whiteness, barely two paces across, containing Ryan and the mutie wolf.
Ryan dropped instinctively into the classic knife-fighter’s crouch, the blade in his right hand pointed up, feet a bit apart, shuffling in at the wolf, keeping his balance, breathing lightly.
The animal continued to snarl at him, belly down in the snow, inching closer.
Ryan feinted a low cut at the wolf’s muzzle, making the beast hiss defiantly as it held its place. The ice was slippery, and Ryan edged closer carefully, watching the monster’s eyes. It was one of the things his dead brother had taught him when he was only a callow boy.
He heard Morgan’s calm, gentle voice in his head. “The eyes, little one. Always watch the eyes.”
The great timber wolf blinked at the human that dared to face it down. Then Ryan saw the signal, deep in the glowing crimson coals.
Now.
He sidestepped the baying charge, hacking at the creature’s shoulder as it brushed past him. The blade of the panga bit deep, and he felt the jar as it cracked into bone. Blood sprayed, steaming in the cold, patterning the snow around them. The wolf howled, a tearing, unearthly banshee wail that froze the blood. Then it whirled around, snapping at its own wound, and charged again.
This time Ryan stood his ground.
Meeting the rush head-on, he swung the foot and a half of blood-slick steel with all his power, as if he were trying to fell a great oak with a single blow.
The blade hit the leaping wolf’s frothing muzzle and sliced through the flesh of the animal’s upper jaw, snapping off oversized teeth and burying itself finally in the side of the creature’s skull, just below its crazed eye. The weight of the wolf pulled the panga’s hilt out of Ryan’s hands, and rolling over in the snow, the beast kicked itself to its feet again, the steel dangling from its narrow head.