CHAPTER 2 – The Wolves Were Not Hunting Him… They Were Warning Him
Nathan grabbed his flashlight and climbed beneath the cabin.
The cramped crawlspace smelled of damp earth.
At first he saw nothing.
Then the beam landed on fresh claw marks.
Long.
Deep.
Pointing toward a loose section of foundation.
He pried the boards away.
Behind them lay a narrow underground tunnel.
Impossible.
His cabin had stood there for nearly forty years.
No map mentioned a tunnel.
He crawled forward.
The passage opened into an abandoned mining shaft.
There...
He found Tyler.
Alive.
Weak.
Terrified.
The boy burst into tears.
"They're coming back..."
Nathan wrapped him in a blanket.
"Who?"
Tyler's lips trembled.
"The men."
According to Tyler, he and two friends had discovered several strangers secretly dumping barrels deep inside the abandoned mine.
When the teenagers took photos, the men chased them.
Tyler escaped underground.
His two friends disappeared.
The criminals had searched for him every night.
Nathan immediately contacted the authorities.
But before anyone arrived...
Gunshots echoed through the forest.
The cabin windows exploded.
Someone shouted outside.
"Give us the kid!"
Nathan pulled Tyler to safety.
Then...
The wolves appeared.
Not three.
Not six.
Nearly a dozen.
The pregnant she-wolf stood at the front.
Her soaked gray fur had dried into a silver coat.
She let out one deafening howl.
The forest answered.
Wolves emerged from every direction.
The armed men laughed.
Until the pack charged.
Chaos erupted.
The criminals fired wildly.
The wolves never attacked directly.
Instead, they surrounded the intruders, forcing them apart, driving them into deep snow and frozen ravines where deputies arriving minutes later arrested the exhausted men one by one.
Investigators uncovered a massive illegal toxic-waste operation hidden beneath the forest.
The missing teenagers had been witnesses.
Nathan became a national hero.
The rescued she-wolf vanished once again.
Everyone believed the story had finally ended.
They couldn't have been more wrong.
Because two weeks later...
Nathan collapsed.
Doctors discovered an aggressive blood infection.
His body was shutting down.
No one could explain why.
Except Nathan remembered one detail.
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While pulling the she-wolf from the ice...
Something sharp had sliced deeply into his arm.
