By the middle of December, the snow had settled in for good.
It came in slow, heavy falls that turned the clearing around the cabin into a white bowl and bent the lower branches of the pines until they touched the ground.
Derek and the pack treated the season the way they treated most things practically.
Paths were kept clear only where necessary.
Wood was stacked higher.
The shortwave stayed powered for the rare nights when the weather turned dangerous enough to strand someone on a distant watch.
Allison learned the new rhythms quickly.
Mornings meant shoveling the porch and the short path to the generator shed while Derek ran a wider circuit through the trees.
Afternoons were for the quiet work of living: mending, cooking, reading the few books that had accumulated on the shelf beside the fireplace.
Evenings belonged to the fire and to each other.
The deeper claim had settled into something constant and low, like the background heat of the wood stove.
She always knew, roughly, where Derek was.
When he left for the auto shop on the days the roads were passable, the awareness stretched thin but never broke.
When he returned, it folded back around her like a familiar coat.
One clear afternoon he took her farther into the territory than she had gone since the fight with the Wraith.
The woods were silent in the way only deep winter could manage: no birdsong, no insect noise, only the soft crunch of their passage and the occasional distant crack of a branch giving under the weight of snow.
Derek stopped at a high ridge that looked down over a narrow valley.
The view was all white and dark green and the hard blue of the winter sky.
“This is the northern edge,” he said.
“Beyond those far trees the next territory begins.
We don’t cross without invitation.
They don’t cross into ours.
The agreement has held since before my father’s time.”
Allison studied the line of the valley.
“Have you ever had to enforce it?”
“Twice.
Both times the other side was testing, not invading.
We made the point without blood.
That’s the preferred method.” He glanced at her, gold absent from his eyes in the bright daylight.
It didn’t care about lines.
That’s why the whole pack came when I called.”
She nodded, breath pluming in the cold.
The silver knife rode at her hip out of habit now, even though nothing in the snow felt wrong.
“Do you think it will stay gone for the full cycle?”
“I think we hurt it badly enough that it will need years to gather itself.
Maybe longer.
The territory is stronger than it was.
That matters.”
They stood together in the cold until the wind picked up and drove them back toward the cabin.
On the return walk, Derek’s gloved hand found hers, and the simple contact carried more warmth than the layers of wool and down between them.
That night the temperature dropped hard.
They banked the fire high and slept under every blanket the cabin owned, bodies fitted together so that even the deepest cold could not reach them.