Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 112

**Blake**

I don’t remember crossing the yard. One second, I’m standing in the training circle with my hands still half-curled from sparring. Next, I’m wrenching my car door open so hard it nearly comes off in my hand. Gravel spits under my boots, and someone yells my name behind me. I don’t stop to look. The engine turns over rough and loud, and the second it catches, I slam it into gear, tyres tearing at the gravel as the back end fishtails before I straighten it out. My knuckles are white around the wheel. My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching it.

Every second that passes is another second she is in there without me. The road stretches black under the headlights, houses and fences blurring past, and I push the car harder than I should, harder than I ever would if this were anything else, because all I can feel through the bond is pressure building around her in waves.

I can feel the fractures before I see the diner. The split-second surges of hunger and violence. The gathering force before a strike lands. It lashes at me from ahead in jagged bursts, twenty different points of it, maybe more, all circling the one steady thread that is Charlotte. It gets under my skin, crawls through my blood. By the time the diner comes into view, my pulse is beating so hard it feels violent.

The parking lot is chaos. Patrol is already in it, bodies moving through the spill of the diner lights and the dark around them, trying to hold a line, but there are rogues everywhere, pressing in. The front window of the diner is gone. Glass catches my headlights and throws it back. The car hits the lot too fast, tyres screaming over the bitumen as I wrench the wheel toward the thickest part of the pack. One rogue turns too late and disappears under the wheels. Another rolls across the bonnet and slams off the side. The car fishtails, jerks, skids crooked to a stop, and I’m out of it before the engine cuts.

The whole place is wrecked as I charge inside. Tables are on their sides. Chairs are broken underfoot. Glass, coffee, and blood shine across the tiles under the front lights. Terry is at the shattered window with a patrol wolf, both of them driving rogues back as more bodies shove through the frame and spill into the room. Shanti moves low and fast between the counter and the booths, twisting out from under reaching hands, driving one rogue back with her shoulder before snapping at another that lunges too close. She forces them apart for half a second, plants her feet, lifts her head, and drags in a breath—a rogue slams into her from the side before the sound can leave her throat.

She hits the floor hard, scrambles, comes back up on all fours, and turns into the next attack with her teeth bared and fury running through the bond. Another rogue grabs for her shoulder, jerks back the second his skin meets her fur, and howls in pain, but even that only buys her a moment. She shoves him off, backs up again, chest pulling wide for another breath, and a second body crashes into her path before the howl can form.

She needs space and time to call them back. One rogue charges straight at her, and I catch him around the middle, lift him clean off the ground, and drive him through the edge of an overturned table hard. Another turns toward me from the counter, mouth open, hands already shifting, and I meet him with a shove that sends him skidding across the tiles into the legs of a booth. Charlotte is up again. Shanti’s chest expands. Her head lifts, and a rogue comes at her from the front, but I am already there in a heartbeat.

My hand closes around his throat, and I slam him backward into the broken wall where the window used to be. Glass crunches under my boots, as he claws at my wrist. I throw him outside without looking where he lands, because I can feel two more coming before they get to her. One from the kitchen. One from the front. I turn into the first, drive my elbow into his jaw, pivot, and plant my foot in the second one’s chest as he launches through the frame. He folds around the hit and goes down, taking another one with him. “Now,” I roar.

The word rips out of me and cracks through the room louder than it should. Three rogues nearest me flinch at the sound, their bodies hitching for a fraction of a second before they move again. Charlotte backs toward the centre of the diner. I step forward and hold the space between them and her. Every time one of them moves to lunge, I am already there. Every time one of them turns their head toward her, I feel it before the rest of them follow and meet it halfway.

The whole diner narrows to movement and impact and the hot, ugly pressure under my skin that tells me where they are about to strike before they do. I hear Terry somewhere to my right, snarling deep and rough as he holds the front line. I hear the scrape of claws on tile, the crack of wood breaking, the wet sound of somebody hitting the floor too hard. Outside, gunfire cuts through the lot in short, sharp bursts. Her father is still out there. Patrol is still fighting. The whole night has split open around us. And in the middle of it, Charlotte finally gets one clean second.

Shanti plants herself. Her head rises. Her chest opens. A rogue launches from the side just as the first note starts to leave her throat, and I meet him so hard his body folds around the blow before he ever gets close enough to touch her. Another tries to force through the front gap, and Terry catches him at the same moment I drive the next one back with both hands and all the new, brutal strength still settling into my bones. Then Shanti howls.

The sound rolls through the diner deep and full and impossibly steady, pushing through, and filling every inch of the room until the rogues nearest her stagger under it. One drops to his knees with both hands clamped over his ears. Another stumbles into a table and stares around like he’s just woken up in the wrong life. A third goes still right in front of me, his breathing ragged, his whole body shaking as the rage starts to tear loose from him. I feel it happen. The moment the fight breaks, something human starts clawing its way back up.

And standing there in the wreck of the diner with my chest heaving and blood on my hands and Charlotte’s howl moving through everything, I understand exactly what the book meant. She calls them back, and I am supposed to hold the line so she can.