by Maria Vale
“Magnus,” the Alpha grunts, “tell him.”
“He can’t, Alpha. He’s got film in his mouth.”
“Get it out. While I still have him.” She holds me so tight, my shoulder blades rub together.
Trapped between her hardness and her softness, I strain when the doctor reaches into Magnus’s mouth. Magnus whimpers as Tristan pulls out a white tab covered with blood.
“That’s it, Shifter. I needed an X-ray.” He turns his laptop around, dislodging a pile of heavy stationery embossed with TRISTAN RASMUSSON, MD, FACS, which slides to the floor.
Dr. Rasmusson clucks with annoyance, stepping over the puddled pages to retrieve a damp cloth. He gives it to Magnus, signaling for him to wipe his face.
Magnus dabs weakly at his mouth, then falls back, the white paper lining the bed crackling under him as he turns on his side, the cloth to his mouth. All the fight seeps out of me.
“Alpha?” The doctor picks up his laptop, bending his head to the other side of the room, away from Magnus’s racked body.
I pull a blue cotton blanket up to cover Magnus’s distended shoulders and his swollen joints and bony vertebrae, the guilt I feel is almost nauseating. I can’t pretend this is anyone’s fault but mine.
“Shifter?” the Alpha says.
I pull the blanket up farther, less for Magnus’s sake than to hide the unpleasant truth that having promised to protect him, I had let him become this.
“Shifter?” she says again and I head numbly to where the two of them stand over a cart with shallow drawers and a small tray of metal instruments.
Balancing the laptop next to the tray, Tristan pulls up a complicated patchwork image of black and shades of gray.
He patiently points out the flat ridge of Magnus’s teeth and the jagged roots. Then the second set of roots on top of them that are sharp and high and curving deep into the line of his upper jaw, a bare millimeter from a charcoal-gray cavity. I try to blink away the image, but I can’t.
“He’s always had toothaches,” I finally manage to say, knowing full well how inadequate it sounds.
“This is not a toothache,” the doctor says. “This is a face on the verge of disintegrating.” He closes the computer and opens one of the shallow drawers, dropping what looks like an oversize wire stripper on the paper-lined surface.
“What happened to his claws?”
“Claws? I told you. He’s never changed, so he has never had claws. He’s got some kind of genetic condition with his nails?” I can’t stop my voice from raising up in a question.
Tristan closes the drawer and holds it shut for a moment, then he turns around, arms crossed in front of him, assessing me.
“There’s nothing genetic about it. Someone wanted to stop him from changing, so they pulled out his claws until he did. Stop.”
He keeps looking at me expectantly, like he’s waiting for a denial but he knows all the facts are lined up on his side. I don’t bother. Somehow, I’ve always known. Not that his claws were pulled out, but that I’d been lying to myself, pretending that the troughs on the bare skin of his nails and the blood on that white pen I’d lent to the haunted boy in Burnaby could be explained away by a rare human ailment found on Google.
Everyone thinks—thought, they’re all dead now—that I must remember the day my mother changed. Who wouldn’t? One day, she’s the reserved, OCD but otherwise unexceptional Maxine Brody of Evergreen Terrace. Recording secretary for the baked goods committee of the Rainy River Elementary PTA. The next day, she’s a wolf the size of a VW.
I didn’t remember.
I remembered the smell of burning brownies, the homework on the floor around her, but nothing else. Nothing except for her thumbs. The way the nails grew and thickened and darkened, folding to a point. The way the digit migrated up her wrist.
Someone tore that claw out of Magnus’s living flesh.
“Tristan, give us time.”
The doctor looks at me warily, all smart-assery gone. He bolts away, his laptop clutched to his chest like a breastplate.
Something touches my hand, my skin. “Let it go.” Gentle and secure and strong. “See what you’re doing and let it go.” I don’t feel the blood itself dripping down the side of my hand or the bent and broken steel jammed into my palm.
“I didn’t do it.” I pull the long, sharp tweezers out and drop them to the tray, flexing my hand.
“I know you didn’t,” she says. “I’ve dealt with enough humans to know what a lie smells like.” She picks up the broken metal and wraps them in a paper towel.
“I didn’t even know he looked so…sick. He always wore thick clothes and… I don’t know.”
She heads over to a bin in the corner of the room. When she puts her foot on the pedal, the cover thumps against the wall, then the broken tweezers hit the bottom of the bin.
“It’s so weak,” she says, straightening out the blue paper liner on the cart. “The word ‘change.’ Makes it sound like putting on a costume.”
She rubs her shoulder.
“In the Old Tongue, the word is eftboren. It’s…” Across the room, metal scrapes on metal as Tristan draws the thin curtain around Magnus. “Again born? No, reborn. It’s why we live so long, because our bodies are constantly dying, and with each change, they are renewed. Reborn.
“Without the change, Magnus is not being reborn. Without the change, he is only dying.”
Chapter 7
Evie
I didn’t sleep much last night. I spent most of it in a desperate triangulation. How close was close enough for the Gray to get used to my scent? How close was too close? I didn’t know what might make her leave her mate’s side, the fur on her hackles high, her lips pulled back from sharp teeth.
Or worse, go Offland.
I’d immediately discounted Tristan’s suggestion that the Shifter had been responsible for what had been done to Magnus because I was the one watching him from the woods during the Iron Moon. I’d seen him stand—or rather sit—guard on the floor beside Magnus’s bed, his hands propped loose on his bent knees, staring ahead, unsure what to do with the fragile life in his care except stand guard.
Like me. I know how to deal with Pack. How do I deal with forever wolves? What will keep them here where I can at least try to stand guard?
I’ve also spent enough time Offland to know the shrill, staccato sound of hype, the sour sweet smell of a lie, the look of a short con, and the greasy taste that self-delusion leaves on the tongue. When I told the Shifter what was happening to Magnus, there was none of that. No denial or protestations, as though it wasn’t news at all. As though it was simply the confirmation of something he’d always dreaded. Now he walks silently beside me.
When the Great North bought the camp from the executors of Hiram Cheeseprunt, ruined suicide, in 1931, there had been four dormitories built to accommodate the enormous staff that Mr. Cheeseprunt required to service himself and his guests during the summer months. Three are normally used to house those Offland wolves who feel the need to sleep in skin, juveniles acting out “sleepover,” and now the motley of Shifters we are saddled with. The woods wanted the fourth so we salvaged what we could and let her have it. It is now an unstable hillock of green north of the Bathhouse.
The Shifter collapses on a lower bunk to one side and stares blankly at the distorted rectangle of late-afternoon light creeping hesitantly across the wide wooden planks.
He leans over, plucking something from the floor, and looks at it carefully before handing it to me. It’s nothing, a shirt button. We have a huge box filled with them in dry storage. Holding it to my nose, I scent past the carrion and steel to the juniper and black walnut.
“But he’s not going to die.” Half question, half statement of intent, it is the first thing he has said since we left Medical.
“No.”
He falls onto the mattress, his b
ack to me, his arms wrapped around his waist.
I slide the button into my shirt pocket.
* * *
He must have heard me from the shower because when I come through the door the next morning, he is standing in the middle of the room soaking wet, a small towel wrapped around his waist, his legs coiled like a wolf ready to pounce. He is armed curiously enough with a curry comb in one hand and a rolled-up copy of Corporate Counsel magazine in the other.
Pulling the screen door closed, I drop a pile of clothes on the desk near the front. I twirl the desk chair around and settle in facing him, my legs straddling the chair back.
“How do you know Varya’s name?”
Water drips into his eyes. He wipes at it with the back of his wrist, then holds out his impromptu arsenal.
“Do I need these?”
“Not unless your fur is matted or you have a need for alternative dispute resolution, no.”
Smiling weakly, he tosses them onto one of the low bookcases where some Offlander must have left them and holds the unraveling ends of the towel.
Tiberius said he was dangerous and he is. Tiberius was afraid he might be dangerous to the Pack, but I don’t think he is dangerous to the Pack or even to the Alpha I have become.
But when he looks at me, I am afraid for the terrified, lonely self I packed away in mothballs the night John died.
With all his hardness and sharpness, this was a man I could cut myself on.
I reach back to the desk and throw him jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. His hand shoots out to grab them, and the towel falls with a damp plop.
Like that, I think, annoyed with myself for dropping my eyes as though I were some human unnerved by nakedness. Look up, Alpha. There’s nothing special about the way the early morning light catches the water beading across his skin before it gathers into small rivulets and swirls down the muscled fissure of his chest. Nothing unusual in the way they tremble among the dark hairs at his nipples or nestle in the curled thicket gathered around skin that is dusky and veined and muscled but not in the smooth and prosaic way of that hard chest.
Shit. I wrap my arms around the sturdy wooden ladder-back as though it will shield me from the distraction and slow the pulse that beats fast and hard at my nipples and puddles warm and slow at my core.
Except when he pulls on the jeans and I see the thick brown and burgundy scars at his ankles.
“She told me,” he says, the stiff line-dried denim rasping against his skin.
It takes me a moment to remember my question.
“Here’s my problem.” A strand of hair has come loose from the band. I tuck it under and cross my arms across the back of the chair. “When she first arrived years ago, Varya Timursdottir told one wolf her name. The Great North’s Alpha. She never told anyone else. The rest of us found out eventually, but not from her. So why would she tell you? A complete stranger? A Shifter?”
He starts to pull the T-shirt over his head.
“I’m going to tell you what I told Tiberius. You’re going to have to ask her.”
Chin propped on my arms, I look toward Westdæl.
“I can’t,” I say, turning back to him. “She will never have the words to tell me.”
His head emerges slowly from the collar. “She’s dead?”
“You really do think like a human. Just because a life has no words doesn’t make it less alive. She is very much alive, but she is an æcewulf, a real wolf. A forever wolf.”
He arches his back, reaching behind to the fabric scrunched up high against his damp skin. The jeans hang low, framing the hollow of his hips and a gash of dark hair right down the middle.
“So she will never be human again?”
“She was never human, but no, she will never have thumbs or words again.”
He stands near me, bending down to follow the path of my eyes through the window, past the billowing crown hardwoods, past the sharp tops of pines toward the dawn glow of Westdæl’s bare top, home to the one other wolf who knew what it was to be an outsider, a teeterer on the edge of annihilation.
“How did it happen?” he asks in a quiet tone that almost sounds as though he wants to know. I’ve forgotten what that feels like, the give and take of conversation. John had me to talk to, but I have a Pack of worried wolves, and with them it’s all Alpha, reassure us, Alpha, decide for us, Alpha, direct us.
“The Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If she finds us in skin, she makes us wild. If she finds us wild, she makes us æcewulfas. Forever wolves. Varya became a forever wolf so that she could protect us when we were at our most vulnerable. So.” I squeeze my hand, feeling the thick scar at the base of my thumb. “I really can’t ask her.”
Plucking the towel from the floor, he shakes it out and heads to the bathroom.
“You said Shifters had done something to your pack,” he says, watching me in the reflection of the little mirror nailed above the sink.
I smooth the curve of my eyebrow.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know I don’t. You can probably guess it. Hunters. Wolves. Except, in my case, it was three Shifters and a small pack trapped by the Iron Moon. They had guns. We had teeth. Within a few minutes, my entire birth pack was dead except the pup whose scent was camouflaged in the cesspit.”
He lowers his head, hands grasping either side of the sink, one finger beating silently on the porcelain. “Three Shifters then. Three Shifters now.”
“My birth pack was tiny compared to the Great North. They had no experience of Shifters. We do.” I stretch my head to the side, trying to loosen my stiff shoulder. “I watched the three of you during the Iron Moon: Julia is weak, Cassius is a fool. You are the one Tiberius says is the most dangerous, the one who must be watched. But then why did the most guarded and careful wolf in the Great North tell you her name?”
He raises his head, looking at me in the reflection.
“Do you see my problem?”
After squeezing some toothpaste onto a toothbrush, he grimaces through a mouthful of beige foam. Looking at the tube, he spits and rinses. “Peanut butter? I don’t suppose you have some other flavor?”
“Answer the question.”
He rinses his mouth out twice more, then leans against the doorjamb, facing me. “When she first came to the compound, Varya’d been pumped with enough ketamine and fentanyl to kill a grizzly, and that’s not an exaggeration. But she would not give up. She was locked up in the basement, throwing herself against things, forcing herself to move. It was nothing but will, and the sound irritated the hell out of August, so he sent me to get her. He wanted her to make the puppies—”
“Pups.”
“Whatever. The point is he wanted to see his grandchildren.”
I’m not surprised that August wouldn’t accept that the four pups playing Bite the Ear and Chase the Tail could be his descendants. He wanted his grandchildren with fingers and words, playing Parcheesi.
“I’ve seen death come for a lot of people, but this was the first time that I’d seen someone come for death. Varya knew she was alone, drugged, outnumbered, and outgunned, but she kept coming. If I had let them kill her, I would never have another chance at finding out what was worth dying for.”
He smooths the growth bristling on his cheeks with one hand.
“Did she tell you?”
“No. But she told me her name and I feel like that was something.”
Chapter 8
Constantine
I worked a commercial trawler once. When I say “worked,” I mean “slept,” trying to keep dried crackers from fleeing the confines of my otherwise empty stomach, until the Coast Guard showed up with their sweeping powers to board any boat and the captain needed all hands to make it look like we were actually what we pretended to be.
I pinballed around the
cabin and up on the waterlogged deck. A rope was thrust into my hands and I was told to pull.
Rain whipped sideways across a deck that pitched and rolled. Visibility was nil. I stood ankle deep in flapping fish while more came flying over the front at head height.
I wake up from that dreamed memory, the deck still pitching and rolling, except there is no rain and Tiberius is standing in front of me.
“What?”
“I said, ‘We have a job.’ Here.” He tosses a towel-wrapped packet toward me. “I brought you some breakfast.
“I don’t have a job anymore, remember? Boss developed throat trouble.”
I start to peel back the towel. Whatever’s inside smells like cinnamon.
“Just get dressed. I’ve got two bodies that aren’t getting any fresher. We need to get them to Allagash before they stink up the car.”
Mmm. And butter.
“I graduated from cleanup a long time ago. Let Cassius do it.”
I lick the sugar from the top of one.
“Cassius is a conniving little shit who thinks he’s smarter than he is. I need someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“Since I’m currently unemployed, it’s good to know I’ve got something to put on my CV: ‘versed in intimidation, extermination, and efficient disposal of remains. For referrals, check with the Great North—’”
“I forgot how much humans talk,” he says, heading toward the door. “And take the sweatshirt. You’re going to need it.”
There is a navy-blue sweatshirt with frayed cuffs in the pile of clothes the Alpha left on the desk. I pick it up, feeling it soft and much washed in my hands.
“Ti, wait… Was this the Alpha’s idea? Letting me go to help you.”
“No, it was my idea and to be clear”—he pushes the red-and-black-checked wool shirt back, showing the textured handle of his gun—“no one is letting you go.”
I don’t care about the gun or being let go, but the thought that the Alpha might have seen dead bodies and that she’d told Tiberius to take the Shifter, the one with so much blood on his hands, because this is the kind of thing he’d be good at made a spot under my sternum ache.
