"Direwolf," Alexei said softly. "Young."
"Mother?" Elias asked.
"Dead," Zubair replied, and the word fell with the calm of a fact, not the weight of a judgment. "We probably killed her."
Lachlan eased the bucket away from the pup with his boot and spoke in the voice he used for clients who brought their first child to the gym. "Hey, little thing," he said. "It's all right. No one is going to hurt you."
Sera slipped one glove off with her teeth and held out her bare hand, palm down.
The cold did not trouble her, but she let her hand tremble anyway so the pup could smell something that looked like effort.
The pup took a cautious breath and then another. It pushed its nose forward a few centimeters and then stopped.
Its belly trembled from the strain of holding still. The thick fur at its shoulders was matted, and there were lines of old dried milk across the soft fur of its chest where it had tried to feed too long after it should have been weaned.
