by Maria Vale
I dump the shards in the trash.
“Always hated that cup,” I say, sliding brush and dustpan back under the sink.
Chapter 14
Constantine
I hate that she had to walk me back to the dormitory like one more thing she has to take care of.
“Someone will pick you up in the morning,” she says, and when she turns away, I almost call after her. I would except I can’t bear to hear another querying “Alpha?” even if it’s in my own voice.
She walks off without hesitating through the dark and the trees, and I wonder how she can possibly see where she’s going.
“Humans think that what is seen is all that is. That what is spoken is all that is said. But wolves know that life happens in the crowded spaces between what is seen and what is spoken.”
I turn on the lights and then turn them off again. Without the lights, the shadow of a moon-framed tree still seeps through and sways back and forth across the floor. I walk across the dark room, trying to feel the way the floor settles, listen to the echoes of wind against the walls, smell the rhythm of slightly musty bedding interrupted by the scent of slightly musty pine needles on the forest floor.
Taste the new toothpaste the Alpha promised.
Ah. Liver.
I rinse my mouth and brush again with water, then look at the dark silhouette of my head in the mirror.
Someone will pick you up in the morning.
That was what Drusilla said to her brother the day she left. She’d stood in the doorway, everything about her stiff and perfect as she held her compact and outlined her mouth in dark red. Her hand shook, and her lower lip sprouted a bloodred barb. She didn’t bother wiping it away.
Behind her, the driver waited with her suitcases. She was leaving but she gave Otho one day to choose. His sister or August.
The next morning, Drusilla’s driver came to fetch him, but Otho stayed with August. It was his only choice. Still, he had seen something in his sister’s face that made him afraid. Over the years, Otho had made himself a master of situational awareness, though he died in the end by his sister’s hand.
People who don’t know think situational awareness means being aware of everything, which is just bullshit. It’s a total focus on things that matter—cover points, ambush positions, escape routes, weapons of opportunity, the stress tolerance of men—and a complete filtering out of things that don’t.
The problem is, Homelands is nothing but the things that don’t matter. Rocks and trees and birds and mud and bushes and weeds and things that slither between the bushes and weeds.
Wolves know that life happens in the crowded spaces between what is seen.
Closing the door behind me, I step out into the forest stark and grim and all the things I cannot see.
* * *
“I was supposed to pick you up from the dormitory.”
“As you can see, I found my way here.”
I don’t tell Ziggy how much time I spent wandering around completely and utterly lost before finding my way back to the cabin or that I woke up to the sound of a bird that sounded like a rusty swing—Whe-heee. Whe-heee. Whe-heee—and spent the next hour finding my way to the Great Hall, a walk that has taken ten minutes when accompanied by the Alpha.
“So,” he says, sitting next to me, dropping a plate piled high with green eggs. “I got to ask you: Do you know Leo Fafard?”
Ziggy turns out to be very talkative for a wolf. He is also desperately curious and desperately clueless about Offlands, which includes every place that is not the Great North’s territory. In Ziggy’s impaired imaginings, Offlands is about the size of Delaware, populated entirely by a quirky subsection of celebrity.
“Should I?”
“He was the star of WolfCop,” he says.
“So you’re saying he’s an actor.”
“I’m saying he was the star of WolfCop,” he repeats with an excess of emphasis.
“I met Idris Elba in the bathroom at Citizen in Toronto.”
“Unh-unh,” he says and continues to push his green eggs onto a fork with a piece of dark bread.
“And Meryl Streep in Croatia.”
He looks thoughtfully into the distance. One eye has a deformed iris and a cloudy pupil and I’m guessing is blind.
“Who are they?”
“Actual actors.”
“Never heard of them. What have they been in?”
I spread apple butter on the thick buttered pancakes.
This meal, I discover from the chatty starstruck werewolf, is called Day Meat. There is one other meal called Evening Meat. In between, there are beavers, muskrats, voles (woodland and red-backed), lemmings, woodchucks.
In other words, breakfast, dinner, and rodents.
“So you’re telling me that neither Evening Meat nor Day Meat have any meat at all?”
“You mean carrion?” Ziggy says.
“Not carrion. Meat. Like bacon. I’d kill for some bacon.” I break open a hot biscuit and slather it with blueberry jam. “You do see the irony here.”
“No, I don’t. You may call old flesh you haven’t hunted ‘meat’ but we call it carrion.”
The Alpha’s voice precedes her down the hall. She is accompanied by two men. One in a suit walks beside her with a tablet. She listens for a moment before signing the tablet with her finger. Another man—tall, with a stringy, dark-blond beard that he combs repeatedly with his fingers—leans into the back of her neck, his nose under her hair.
As I turn away, feeling suddenly irritable, Ziggy rustles the paper, positioning it in front of his whole eye.
“What happened to your face?” I ask, circling one finger around my own eye and cheekbone. “Looks like you were hit with a 12 gauge.”
“It wasn’t a 12 gauge; it was a 12 pointer. And it really—”
“Oh, by the moon, Sigegeat,” a woman groans from the table behind us.
“He asked,” Ziggy snaps. “As I was saying, that deer”—he hesitates again like a carnival barker sizing up the crowd—“really bucked up my eye.”
A combination of groans and growls circulates around the room, and I find myself laughing at Ziggy’s high hopes for such a low joke.
“See, he likes it,” Ziggy says, “and he knows Idris Alba and somebody else famous.” He raises his chin dismissively at the rest of the room before turning to me and muttering that “Wolves have no sense of humor.”
“Sigegeat,” says the Alpha.
Every eye and ear turns toward her, standing at the coffee urn. It’s bad enough that a hundred wolves watch everything she does and everything she says, but now she has Stringy Beard sniffing her personal space like a dog at a fire hydrant.
She makes a motion with her hand like a hammer striking a nail, though when she pulls back her fist with the imaginary hammer, she punches Stringy Beard in the cheek.
Then she turns to pour herself coffee with the trace of a grim smile.
Something about the hammer made Ziggy take off, and for a man with one eye and no depth perception, he is fucking fast. No matter how often I tell him to slow down, he doesn’t until my heel slides down a moss-covered rock and I twist my ankle in the stones gathered at the base of a meandering stream.
“Who was that with the Alpha?” I ask when he comes back to get me.
“I don’t know. There’s always someone with the Alpha.”
“It was a big guy with curly, dark-blond hair and a stringy beard.”
“I don’t know. What does he smell like?”
“How the hell should I know what he smells like? He’s got curly, dark-blond hair and a stringy beard and he had his nose stuck in the Alpha’s neck the entire morning.”
“S’gotta be Poul, Alpha of the 10th Echelon. Can’t you move any faster?”
“No, I can’t. And why did Poul, Alpha
of the 10th Echelon, have his nose stuck in her neck the entire morning?”
“He does it all the time,” he says, motioning to me to get moving. “He’s checking to see if she’s receptive.”
“What do you mean ‘receptive’?”
“For cunnan. Fucking.”
I’d watched Poul follow her to the coffee urn, so close that he stepped on her heel. She’d done nothing, just leaned against a table and pulled up the sock bunched at her ankle. Still, her mouth was tight and her eyes hard, and she looked nothing like last night when I saw something, an openness, even a hint of recklessness.
“And does she want him?”
“‘Want’ has nothing to do with it. It’ll be many moons before she’ll be fertile again, but whenever it happens”—he waits for me to clear a toppled tree—“she will take him because strong wolves mate with strong wolves to make stronger wolves. Almost there,” he says, pointing to a gap in the trees.
“What’s the point of being Alpha if you don’t get to do what you want?”
“The point, Shifter, is that when the Alpha speaks, the Pack follow immediately, not just because she’s strong but because she has the willingness to sacrifice. Wolves have to know that their Alphas won’t go letting what they want get in the way of what the Great North needs.”
The clearing opens onto a long, low hall with a patchwork peaked roof of gray and beige shingles.
“I hope Sten hasn’t locked the door,” Ziggy says, and I try to remember where I heard that name.
This place is less like a workshop than a cathedral to wood. Light streams in from clerestory windows tucked high under the eaves and at either gabled end. Instead of pews, there are workbenches with massive vises. Instead of featuring stained glass and ex-votos, the walls are decorated with collections of wood and metal tools, carefully curated into things that cut, things that bang, things that carve, and things that smooth. The altar wall is built-in pigeonhole storage filled with rolled papers.
And officiating over it is Sten.
I have never seen Sten—never heard any description of him. All I know is the fear in Tiberius’s voice and that is enough. The Great North are enormous, but the man who thumps toward us is a giant even among them. He wears what I can only imagine is an XXXXL and TALL that still strains across his chest. Carhartts that had been golden brown but are faded to beige and splotched with wood stain and teak oil. His hair is powdered with sawdust, and he smells like creosote and linseed.
He is carrying two hammers. One is a mallet that looks like a mailbox atop a flagpole but is made out of wood and bears the scars of many banged things.
The other is the cross peen hammer I’d used to crush teeth. This he holds in front of him like a crosier.
But you’re going to tell Sten about the hammer.
The other wolves move back while Sten stalks toward me, twirling the mailbox around like an ancient wrathful god of mead and/or smiting.
“Swines tord,” says Ziggy and steps away.
With a sigh, I stand back, watching Sten come. Dominant leg. Patterns. The range of his swing and the drop at the end of it. Wasted energy. The catch in his left shoulder. Then I remember the little piece of pink paper that, in all the confusion, I’d forgotten to give to Ziggy. I pat at my jeans before finding it in my breast pocket.
Sten stops in front of me, bending his head to look at the pink note sticking to my finger. His mallet drops to the floor with a thud; it stands by itself, handle upright. Sten takes the note from me, caressing it tenderly with his thumb, then he turns the paper and reads it. Ziggy looks over his arm, angling his head so he can see it with his one whole eye.
Sten’s anger deflates like air from a slashed inner tube. He sniffs the note, then slides it into his chest pocket, patting it reverently.
“Door,” he says, in his first word of the day.
A wolf hurries over to slide a thick bolt into steel brackets, a blunt and impassable blockage.
Sten heads back, putting the offending cross peen hammer in its place on the wall and swinging his cudgel. He rummages through the pigeonholes.
“What did it say?” I ask Ziggy.
“You didn’t read it?”
“I did, but except for the word ‘benches,’ I didn’t understand anything.”
“Henh,” he says with a curious nod that could have meant anything. “She wrote ‘Genog med bitli,’” he says with a chuckle. “Means ‘Enough with the hammer.’”
Sten returns with a roll of paper and sets it on a huge pile of two-by-fours at the front. He swings his mallet in a fast arc that ends in a dainty tap on the paper, then says what I discover will be his last word of the day: “Bench.”
Within seconds, the wolves are gathered around the two-by-fours, rolling out the piece of paper. One runs to get pencils from a container; another levels and tape measures. I watch them, heads together, drawing calculations and angles on the wood.
I keep looking toward Sten, waiting for… I’m not sure what I’m waiting for, but more. I’m used to August, who gave very long and very detailed directions toward an outcome only he knew. Take this duffel to this place at this time. Do not talk to anyone. An iced-mocha metallic Lincoln Continental will be parked on the southwest corner. A man with the tattoo of a raven’s claw on his cheek and a black Tom Selleck mustache will be at the northeast corner. If he is not there already, do not wait. If he is there with anyone else, kill the other person or people but keep the duffel bag.
Sten is like Bizarro August. He wants an outcome that is “bench.” The materials and blueprint and tools are there; the rest is up to us.
Ziggy points me to the bucksaw across from another wolf who introduces herself as Kristin, the Delta mate. I have never used a saw, not on wood at least, but how hard can it be?
As soon as the two-by-four slides into place, I notice the blood spatter. Now that is firmly within my field of expertise. I can tell the difference between arterial spray, expirated spatter, transfer patterns. How blood that’s been loosed by a pool cue looks as opposed to blood from a knife wound.
“You do know what that is?” I point out the various browned smudges and drops.
Ziggy jots something down on the wood’s edge. “What I know is that it is good sturdy wood—” He uses his pencil to tap a two-by-four with each word. Good [tap] sturdy [tap] wood [tap]. “And that with enough time, the asses of wolves will erase the blood of their hunters.”
As soon as he tightens the clamp keeping the wood in place, Kristin pulls the bucksaw and I stumble forward, stirring up a light sprinkling of sawdust. She waits, her eyebrow raised, for me to regain my footing, and I pull back hard.
The saw sticks until Kristin unsticks it. I’m doing something wrong because whenever I pull, it sticks. Eventually, the piece doesn’t so much fall off as gives up, tearing at an awkward angle.
Kristin calls for another wolf.
With a sigh and a pitying look, Ziggy hands me some already-cut pieces and tells me to hammer them together like so.
The nail bends with the first blow.
“Not so hard,” says the wolf at the next bench.
I yank it back out with the claw and start again. I was good at my job. I manipulated markets, altered outcomes of elections, imported large quantities of goods without interference, took lives that no one imagined could be taken. I fucking made the world safer for cabba—
I did it! I look around to see if anyone notices how smooth and even and secure this nail is, but no one else is paying attention. I’ll show them that I can make bench. Not just bench, but a bench that is sturdy enough and strong enough to support even the lead weight of the Great North.
Time seems to speed by, though without my phone, I can’t be sure. Then Sten heads to the door, puts his cudgel head down on the floor, and proceeds to strip down to his unabashed hairy nakedness, hanging his clothes fr
om the top of the handle.
Within seconds, the rest of the wolves have followed him outside, leaving me alone except for clothes hanging haphazardly from hooks or dropped to the floor. When they come back, they are as naked as when they left except for the odd bits of fur or sap. One of them snaps at another, and blood flows from the cartilage of his ear. Kristin interrupts her discussion of the mouth feel of summer mink to lick it clean, then rubs her face against him.
Dressed and back at the worktable next to me, Ziggy burps. “Goose,” he says, punching his chest.
Days pass this way, marked by benches and belches. Each day, they get better—the benches, that is; the belches have already reached their pinnacle—until one day when they are all out at lunch. I have been working on this particular bench slowly for two days, making sure that it is sturdy and steady. I hand plane the grain ends, then burnish them with 320 grit sandpaper until the whole thing is smooth. Into its underside, I burn a fish with an open caudal fin that is supposed to be an α.
At the end of each day, we march our benches back to the Great Hall, ready for wolfish asses to scour bloodstains away, until like cockroaches and tardigrades, the benches outlive us all.
Today nobody notices that I put mine at the head of the 7th’s table like a throne for the Alpha on the odd occasion when she does finally sit.
Chapter 15
Evie
So far I haven’t heard the sound the perimeter wolves warned me about. The machines came for two days, they said, then disappeared again. We hoped they were gone for good, but when they showed up last night, Leonora theorized that they had been celebrating the weekend, the two days out of every seven that humans put aside for mischief.
If that is true, she says, then they should return tonight as well.
The lawyers are not optimistic. It’s not our land, they say, and since our land is “unimproved,” nothing that lives here has any legal right to complain.
Not the frogs at Clear Pond, or the beavers or the deer or the coyotes or the big horned owl or the little saw-whet. Not the rabbits loudly warning one another about the presence of wolflings.
