"Fuck," Darion muttered.
He stood with his hands on his hips and looked at the scene: the wolf sitting with the head at its feet, the headless body on the ground, and the dead hunting animal still attached to the man's left hand where the fingers had locked around it in the last reflexive grip before everything stopped.
The blood was spreading slowly into the soft earth of the treeline floor.
The wolf looked up at him.
He looked back at it.
It had saved his life. That was the plain fact of the situation, and he acknowledged it. The spear had been thrown properly, with real force, from fifteen feet. It would have surely gone through him.
The wolf had taken it instead, the spear still lodged in its flank, and had resolved the secondary problem before it became one.
He kind of owed that animal more than he could quantify.
But the man on the ground was a problem that the wolf's intervention had created while solving another one.
He thought through it quickly.
