by Maria Vale
“You one of the new Shisters?” he says, straining to reach his tongue to his nose.
“Lukani.” I squat down beside him. “We call ourselves Lukani.”
His tongue still out, he goes back to making two loops.
“Gran Jean sayd that you don’ turn into wolfeses during the Iwon Moon?”
“That’s right.”
He tries to tie them together. “What you turn into?”
“People.”
“Peoples?” he says, losing his knot. “How’d you do that?”
“I didn’t mean we turn into people. I mean we stay people.”
He starts all over again. “An…an…an your pack? What they do?”
“Well, there isn’t really a pack, not like you have here. It’s just a bunch of people. Do you need help with that?”
“No! ’m Fist Shooos. I gotta do it mysef.” Taking both loops in one hand, he lifts the other over his head and rubs his ear against his raised shoulder.
“What’s fistshoos?”
“Fist.” He holds up one finger. “Fist.” Then he holds up another finger. “Secon.” And one more. “Turd.”
“First…?”
“Shooos.” He holds up his foot and taps at the shoe. “Whem we staht weareding skin?” He tries to enunciate but it still takes me a moment to figure out what he means.
When we start wearing skin.
He tucks the now-shod foot under his leg and starts with the other, a pink Croc with a gently gnawed toe that goes on easily. Now he rubs at his ear with his wrist, his foot shaking until he is done. Jumping up, he thunks awkwardly toward the outside door, but then stops short. He fishes for something in his pocket and returns to me, wiping an orange stick against his shirt.
“A presence,” he says, holding it out to me.
The orange stick smells salty and rich and vaguely earthy and makes my mouth water and my stomach clench. “A present? What for?”
“Because I god a pack. You only god a buncha peoples.”
Then he clumps away again, his uneven footsteps picking up speed as he heads to the door. I hear him thump down the stairs yelling, “I talged to one! I talged to one! I gave it my sheese shew!”
Staring down at my pity prize from a prepubescent werewolf, I feel the heat of eyes the color of fire and turn around.
Chapter 9
Evie
I watch Edmund through the paned windows that give onto the mudroom. Like all wolflings in this first year out of pupdom, he is awkward. I’ve seen him stretching out his fingers and circling his thumb in the air, trying to make sense of these new digits. I’ve seen him yawn wide, popping his ears, trying to make them work. I’ve seen him stick his stubby, thick tongue out, trying to lick his cheek. I’ve seen him stick his short little nose in the air, sucking in big panicky breaths that tell him not nearly enough.
I don’t know why it’s called the Year of First Shoes, when it could just as easily be called the Year of First Forks. The Year of First Pants. The Year of First Words. The Year of First Lurching on Two Legs.
The First Year of the End of Innocence.
As soon as I scent steel and carrion, my shoulders tighten and my legs coil in case the pup needs me.
Like all wolves, Edmund is curious about the newcomers and scents the Shifter’s boots. Like young, protected wolves, he doesn’t know to be afraid of humans and anyone who smells like them.
“You’re one of the Shifters?” Edmund says, staring up the long length of him.
“Lukani,” the Shifter says, squatting down. “We call ourselves Lukani.”
The Shifter folds his hands under his arm. The muscles at his back are loose as he talks softly to Edmund. Once, he extends a hand, but Edmund says no and the Shifter retreats.
When Edmund starts for the door, the Shifter stretches out his long legs, watching him disappear and return holding out his cheese chew. A present, Edmund says, because he has a pack, and the Shifter only has a bunch of people.
The Shifter stares at it for a long time after Edmund leaves, an odd look in his eyes that is both inward and absent. It’s a little chewed at one end, the cheese chew. It probably doesn’t look like much to someone who is not Pack, but they are objects of constant tussling among our pups and much prized.
I hope he doesn’t throw it away.
He slides the dry end into the pocket of the worn flannel shirt, holding it there, his hand to his heart, until something seems to call him and he turns, his eyes catching mine.
He’s a Shifter in our midst and I should be watching him, so I don’t know why I feel awkward, but I do and I start to busy myself distributing chairs. I hoist an armload of them toward the table farthest away. With a flick of my wrists, I open two at a time, settling them into place with a hollow metallic clang.
I don’t like it. It’s not like the heavy sound of our old wooden benches.
We copied the old hall as closely as possible: the fireplace, the birch-branch balustrade of the stair leading to the second floor where the pups and juveniles and grans live, the big tables that draw us together when we are in skin. The smell of fire is only slowly subsiding and the new cedar we used is still too strong. It will all gentle over time and eventually be like that other hall, thick with the scent of pine and turkey feathers and sweetgrass and deer musk and wolves.
Then there will be less to remind us of what we lost to the Shifters. Not of the hall—that’s just a thing, ultimately—but of the lives: Solveig Kerensdottir, Orion Tyldesson, Paula Carlsdottir, Celia Sorensdottir.
And John Sigeburgsson.
I miss so many things about him. As the two strongest wolves of our echelon, our mating was long assumed, but he was my friend even before and I miss that more. He was so confident in his decisions. In a way, that is what I miss most of all: the certainty born of a long line of Alphas in a pack that had been unchallenged and undisturbed for 350 years. Such certitude is harder as an outsider guiding a pack that finds itself suddenly exposed and vulnerable.
The door closes.
The floor creaks as it settles. I take a deep breath, turning to face the inevitable Alpha? that will announce whatever problem or question or need requires my position’s attention.
But the Shifter says nothing. He stands silent in front of a window that gives out onto birches charred the night the Great Hall burned. If they had not leafed, we might have cut them down, but they did and now they dapple the room in the pearl-green light of summer.
His gaze feels like a physical weight. He asks for nothing and I feel uncomfortable, like I no longer know how to deal with someone who doesn’t have a problem that needs to be signed or read or arbitrated or disciplined. So I go back to setting out the chairs. There are not as many tables out as there are for the Iron Moon Table, the one meal when the whole Pack is together and in skin, but with enough places for the two-hundred-plus Homeland wolves. I open two chairs and another two and—
“Don’t you have people to do that?” he finally asks.
“Neither.”
“Neither?”
“There are no ‘people’ here, only wolves, and I do not ‘have’ them.”
A cable tie has popped loose from the chair in my hand. I set it aside. They were never meant to be anything but a temporary solution.
“We took care of the bodies.”
“Hmm,” I say, heading over to the corner and the ridiculously ornate, glass-front china cabinet, another temporary solution that hails from Sten’s storage and before that from an earlier gilded age when the Pack first bought the Great Hall and its surrounding buildings.
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“I get enough questions without answering questions that aren’t asked.” Fishing around in the back of the leftmost shallow drawer, I extract two cable ties.
He coughs out a broken laug
h. “August would’ve expected a detailed report so that he could be sure everything had gone according to instructions.”
I thread the cable ties through the teetering joint and pull them tight. “Yes, well, wolves are not employees; an Alpha is not a boss. Tiberius would have told me if there was a problem.”
Then I set the jury-rigged chair down. It will hold a while longer, but it is time to start on something more permanent. I will tell Sten to start work on—
“Alpha,” says Soli, carrying the quarterly tax estimates due June 17.
“Alpha,” says Tara, bringing proposals for the renegotiated flight plans from Potsdam Municipal Airport.
“Alpha,” says Gran Jean, trailed by Gyta and Adam. Jean crosses her arms in front of her and says nothing because Adam is favoring his hind leg, so I already know.
“It’s the second time, Gyta.” She is young still, not even fifty moons. Pups that age are not expected to be much in skin, so we don’t have clothes that fit her. She plucks at the outsized shirt and pants held up by a bungee cord. “You will be in skin until the next moon.”
“Bwedonsaranix, Apa! Bwedonsaranix.”
“It doesn’t matter what he did,” I say, partly because I have no idea what she’s saying, partly because it genuinely doesn’t matter. We’ve been through this once before. “Wolves do not bite sleeping packmates. Wolves wake wolves up, then they bite them. Ongiet?” Gyta doesn’t reply, and her lower lip trembles.
“Do you understand?” I repeat, and this time, she nods.
“Apa?” she says plaintively, cocking her head to the side. I bend over her, touching her face, rubbing first one cheek, then the other, letting her rest in the crook of my shoulder for a moment of wordless comfort.
With a subdued bark and a whimper, the other little wolf calls for my attention too. I bend over, picking Adam up, checking his leg, and letting him bury his muzzle next to mine.
When I turn around, every place at every table has a chair, except for spaces that the Shifter is in the process of filling with the two metal chairs stenciled with UUFP on the back, a constant reminder that while these chairs might have been sufficient for Unitarian Universalists in Plattsburgh, they are not sufficient for wolves.
“Alpha?” Leonora’s voice echoes from the top of the basement stairs.
I search through my memory, trying to remember why my human behaviors teacher is wearing a long, red gown spangled with glitter like a crow’s wet dream.
Then four juveniles reach the top of the stairs behind her, looking wretched in equally outlandish finery and I realize I’d forgotten about the juveniles’ formal dinner practice.
“Leonora.”
She instructs her charges to move one of the big tables off to the side. My eyes water at the sick, sweet berry scent of the perfume she wears around her more advanced students. It’s her way of training us not to rely on scent. Two entirely different people may both smell like baby powder, but to confuse them will make the humans suspicious and that is something we cannot afford.
“Are those the female Shifter’s shoes?” I ask, nodding toward Avery, who wobbles miserably on several inches of bright-red sandal.
“She didn’t want them anymore,” Leonora says.
Avery whimpers as she stumbles by, carrying the heavy table. “They hurt, Alpha.”
“It is a flesh wound,” Leonora says gently, “and a useful lesson in the discomfort humans undergo in order to propagate the species. Get the tablecloth and don’t be smug, Adrian. You’re wearing them next.”
“But…but I thought only the females had to wear them.”
“Female humans, but as you are not human, you are next. Tablecloth.”
The two young wolves extract a length of white cloth from one of the big canvas bags we use to carry firewood and shake it free of bits of bark and dried leaves. Soon, one end of the table is covered with a linen tablecloth damasked with cabbage roses and stained with the faded remains of hunters’ blood and hunters’ wine. It is set with hunters’ crystal and hunters’ silver.
“If you’re doing candles again,” I say with a nod toward the glass holders, “make sure there is a bucket of water nearby.”
Soon, the 11th Echelon will be bringing out dinner. I can tell by the sound of clattering plates and the smell of freshly cut bread. Picking up the quarterly estimates, I fit my cold coffee cup between my fingers, then stick the awkward roll with the flight plans under the other arm. Loose pages on the inside of the roll slip out and fall to the floor.
The Shifter slips his hand under the coffee cup still sloshing in my hand.
I hold it tight, and when he bends down to try to retrieve the loose curled pages on the floor, I plant my foot firmly on top of them. The coffee sloshes as I squat down to get to them, but his hand is already there.
“Let me help.”
I stare at him for a second until I remind myself that he isn’t Pack and doesn’t know what it was like to be Alpha. To project strength every minute of every day so that when my wolves are anxious, they can always look to me and be reassured. Even when I was furious and heartsick and my body was racked from my lying-in and the Pack was faced with threats both outside and in, they could look to me and say, “Ah, well, the Alpha is picking up her own damn papers and her own damn coffee so our tiny corner of the world isn’t done yet.”
“Follow me,” I say, pulling the pages away. He lets go with a confused look.
In my office, I put everything down: cup on my desk and the flight plans next to the larger roll of schematics I set on one of the chairs earlier.
“My Gamma will help you get settled.” I spread my hand on top of the worn manila folders I need to look through.
“Alpha?” he asks.
“Hmm.” I open the shallow pencil drawer in my desk and pull out pencil, pen, eraser, and bright-pink stickies.
“I heard your name once, but I’ve forgotten.”
I jot down a quick note, scribble Sten’s name on the other side, then hand it to the Shifter.
“That wolf no longer exists. Now there is only the Alpha,” I say, leaving that name a hole in his memory.
Chapter 10
Constantine
She handed me a note written on a bright-pink sticky at the door. “Give this,” she said, “to my grandma.” I moved toward her just as she reached out her hand, but because we both moved at the same time, what had been perfectly judged becomes misjudged and her fingers scrape across my chest. She pulls her hand away, looking surprised at her fingertips fisted tight against her palm. It lasts only a second then is gone, her expression becoming closed and guarded again.
“Alpha?”
As soon as the door closes behind her, I lower myself to retrieve the pink square. It says STEN on one side. On the other, BENCHES and then words I can’t understand. I sound them out as best I can, but I know none of them are her name.
“Hey, get out of the way.”
Dazed, I look up from where I am kneeling on the floor, a pink Post-it pressed to my nose, as a werewolf comes out of the kitchen with a huge earthenware bowl that smells of garlic and lemon and thyme. Other werewolves stand impatiently behind him bearing more plates and bowls. I jump up to let the line of werewolf caterers through.
The Pack is already filling up the Main Hall. They clot around the table, a greedy crowd grabbing serving spoons and spilling food and snarling at each other. The Alpha’s office door slams open and she strides down the hall. The werewolves look at one another but they’re crowded too close together to get away.
“He, He, Wulfas!” she says, banging the hilt of her dagger against the huge table three times—thoom, thoom, thoom. Before she even fits the knife back in her sheath, a line has formed and the wolves shuffle forward, their heads bowed sheepishly.
I see Julia near the front of the line. She’s clean at least. Dressed in
running pants and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt that says I BELIEVE IN BUFFALO, even though I would lay long odds on her ability to find Buffalo on the map. When she gets to the head of the line, she stops. A woman beside her pushes a plate into her hand and points her toward the food. She hesitates again, threading the plate through her fingers, looking hesitantly over her back. The woman says something to her, and Julia starts to fill up her plate.
“Get in line or get to your table,” says a voice. Turning around, I see a woman with a whole mob of werewolves crowded behind her, waiting to get in line.
“I’m looking for the Alpha’s grandma.”
She blinks a couple of times until a man next to her elbows her with a snort. Finally, she turns around. “Hey, Sigegeat,” she says. “Shifter here says he’s looking for the Alpha’s grandma.”
Werewolves who are human start to laugh. Those who are not skitter out from under the tables, tails tucked in away from the stomping feet.
A man with rusty hair stands at another table, thumping heads as he moves between rows of laughing men and women. It isn’t until he reaches the head of the table where all the platters of food are that I get a good look at his face. He is a squat, broad man with a brownish-red beard and wild unkempt hair that obscures much of his face. Much but not enough to hide the several star-shaped scars along the top of his cheek.
“It’s Gamma, Shifter, not Grandma. I am Sigegeat Guthlacsson, Gamma of the 7th Echelon of the Great North.”
“It’s Constantine, Ziggy, not ‘Shifter.’”
One by one, the voices stop until the room goes silent and wolves run to sit down like children caught out at the end of a game of musical chairs.
“Come,” Ziggy says, pulling at my arm. He points to the table where he had been and where the Alpha quickly takes a seat, soup sloshing up the side of her bowl.
“What is—?”
“Now.” He pushes me down and lowers his head over the empty plate in front of him, his hands nervously plucking at the edges of his napkin.
Other wolves bow their heads over their plates, and even the Alpha sits, bent over, prodding at the contents.
