Page 7 of A Wolf for Winter

“Are they going to chip my teeth?” he asked, taking a brown lump studded with raisins, dates, and walnuts.

“Bah, they’re cookies, boy.”

“The question still stands.” He was only half teasing.

“They haven’t chipped mine yet, and she’s been trying to get rid of me for years,” James said, the soft cookie easily giving way under his teeth. “They’re great with tea.”

“Better with boilo,” Zofia said, glancing pointedly at her empty shot glass.

Chuckling, James refilled three of the four shot glasses with an apologetic, “Sorry, Allen.”

When they’d had their fill of cookies and tea (or boilo), Kalina wouldn’t hear of Allen washing the dishes. Homegrown Roots Grocers would not be late with their delivery to the Hawthornes. As Hobbles returned to Zofia’s handbag, Allen helped the tiny woman with her coat and left her to manage the headscarf as he brought the truck around to the front of the townhouse.

Zofia didn’t even wait for him to come to a complete stop before she started thumping into the street with her cane.

“Mrs. Hollyoak!” he admonished. He chuckled at her unbothered audacity.

She waved him off, peeking out between the truck and the parked car in front of it before coming around to the passenger door. Still chuckling, Allen leaned over in the cab to unlock and push open the door for her.

Then his wolf heard it. A squealing of tires.

Abandoning the door, Allen lurched upright in time to see a dark sedan barreling up the one-way street in the wrong direction. The car swerved from side to side into the cars parked along the curbs, clipping sideview mirrors and gouging doors. It wasn’t slowing down.

“Zofia!”

The passenger side door was still locked, and there was no way he could open it and haul her inside before the drunk driver reached them. There was no time for her to shuffle out of the road, either, let alone get on the sidewalk. The tiny woman yelped, plastered herself against the side of the truck in the hopes that the sedan would graze past her, and turned her face away.

Allen did the only thing he could think of to protect her. Grabbing the steering wheel and the headrest for leverage, he swung his legs out across the seat and kicked the passenger side door with all his strength. If he was very, very lucky, the driver would see the oncoming projectile and course-correct his car away from Zofia.

The door shot off the old truck and punctured the sedan’s passenger window like a thrown shield. Glass shattered, and there was another squeal of tires, a whump, and the screeching of metal as the sedan dislodged the truck door on its swerving escape down the street.

“Zofia!” he shouted again, her name repeated as a scream from Kalina as she and James burst outside.

Allen scrambled over the bench seat and dropped down into the street. He hunched over the fallen form of the caretaker. At the sight of her, his canine teeth elongated, his eyes flashing a deeper gold behind his contacts. He wanted to bolt after that sedan, chase it down like it was an elk, and tear the driver out from behind the steering wheel with his teeth. But his wolf couldn’t hear it anymore, could only hear the shallow gasps of the woman beneath him.

Her floral skirt was hiked up above her knees, a rent in her navy pantyhose revealing a long, shallow scratch from ankle to knee. The satin headscarf strangled itself around her neck. Beneath her thinning white hair, a spot swelled and darkened into a bruise on her forehead. A thin red line, which could’ve been mistaken as a loose thread from her cranberry coat, trickled wetly from the corner of Zofia’s mouth and down her cheek. Shattered window glass dappled her like lumps of rock sugar. The old woman blinked rapidly up at him, shocked.

With a deep breath, Allen calmed the wolf and became the soldier once more.

The first thing he did was snatch the velvet handbag out of the street. The crow would never forgive him if her beloved cat got squished by an oncoming car. Hobbles was already clawing the insides to get himself free, yowling in distress. Allen thumbed the brass clasp, and the orange-and-white cat wobbled out to immediately huddle in the crook of his mistress’s neck. He gave a pitiful mewl and licked her cheek.

“How are you doing, Zofia?” Allen said, unbuttoning her coat to look for more injuries. He couldn’t risk moving her until he knew her spine wasn’t broken or could confirm her insides were still very much inside her. He doubted she could even stand with her ankle swollen to the size of a sweet potato. “Sweetheart, I need you to talk to me.”

“Sweetheart?” she murmured, licking chapped lips. The endearment had jolted her awareness just as he’d intended. “Are you . . . flirting with me . . . boy?”

“Oh, Zofia,” Kalina wailed, dropping down on her knees beside her friend.

“Don’t do that,” Allen said forcefully. Kalina choked on her sob in surprise. “Get up and watch the street. The last thing we need is to be hit again before the paramedics arrive. Jim?”

“I’m on the phone with them now!”

“Zofia, can you wiggle your toes? Move your feet?” he asked, working on the buttons of her blouse. The woman preferred dark floral prints, which made looking for blood a nightmare if he didn’t strip her.

“Are you asking me to the masquerade ball?” she asked. Then she looked down at what he was doing to her clothes. “We should dance first before you take me to bed.”

His lips pursed down, suppressing his smirk. “You’re too old for me, Crow.”

“I know tricks.”