Season of the Wolf

by Maria Vale

  Poul makes a mistake and jabs an accusing finger first toward Tiberius, then toward Silver. She looks at it coldly, puts her popcorn on the table, and lunges forward, biting him hard with her fanged and salty teeth.

  She takes her popcorn back. Tiberius repeatedly smooths his mustache and cropped beard.

  Now Poul stands holding his finger, his face bright red and furious. There are no longer two seats together. He thumps back, banging harder against my legs and the skull of the wolf in front of him, who growls, but Poul shows teeth and the wolf lowers his head.

  He sucks at his wounded finger, staring at the door until Evie finally arrives. She’s trying to do it quietly so as not to disturb the movie, but when she turns away from the snack table, with a sweet potato puck and a glass of iced tea, her expression changes. All her wolves are watching her. Even the pups have stopped fighting. I doubt they understand the middle-school dynamics of the moment, but they recognize the possibility of a fight when they smell it.

  “Alpha.” Poul stands, blocking me from her view. “I saved you a seat.”

  I stare straight ahead, still pretending to watch the movie.

  “You are a credit to your race. Do you know how to remain so? Keep your eyes on the ground…!”

  “Alpha?” Poul says again. “He knows he has to move for you.”

  “There’s plenty of room on the floor,” she says. Lowering herself gracefully, she props her head on the hip of a wolf lying like a comma. Another wolf props her head on the Alpha’s chest, her eyes slowly rising and lowering in time with her dominant’s breath.

  Poul limps toward me, nose swelling, sucking on his finger.

  “You know she only tolerates you because you look like John,” he says without bothering to disguise his voice.

  “How would you know, Poul?” comes a voice from the back of the room.

  “Elijah told Esme who told Joelle who told me.”

  Elijah doesn’t have the words to confirm or deny but when Thea says, “I told you not to say anything,” he drops a paw over his eyes.

  Evie looks straight ahead, the iced tea raised to her mouth, her face stony. I focus on the condensation dripping to her lower lip.

  “But you’re not John,” Poul continues. “I am the Alpha of the 10th Echelon of the Great North Pack and you… You. Are. Nothing.”

  I press my palm against my fingers, and one by one, they crack.

  “I know who you are. You are the man who plotted with the noseless dog to give the Great North’s pups to August. To give your Pack and your Alpha to hunters,” I say, my eyes glued to the screen, where interestingly enough wolves are in retreat from a Shifter. “I am the man who stopped it.”

  The room freezes. Poul doesn’t breathe, and everyone in the room looks somewhere that isn’t at us.

  Evie stands stiffly, her palm extended as though she was hoping to shake hands with someone who has disappeared. Everyone, even the pups, has gone quiet, making the movie so horribly loud.

  “The accused has committed high treason against this covenant.

  “She has consorted with animals.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her. She puts her iced tea on the table, squats down to give the sweet potato to the pup. He jumps up on her knee, his skinny tail wagging furiously until she cups his little face in her hand and marks him. Then she stands and, without looking around, leaves.

  “I have saved this coven many times over.

  “You have killed your own kind!”

  “By the moon, Sigegeat, mute it!”

  The door bangs. I extract my legs, making ready to follow her, but Poul puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “Get off me.”

  “Constantine WhateverTheFuckYourNameIs. By the ancient rites and laws of our ancestors, I, Poul Ardithsson, challenge you for Cunnan-riht—”

  “Stop,” Silver says, loudly now. Authoritatively. “He is neither Pack nor table guest; he cannot be challenged for Cunnan-riht.”

  “Mæþ holmgang, then.”

  “What makes you think that if the law doesn’t allow you to challenge for fucking rights, you can challenge for honor? Your only alternative is to challenge Constantine to prove himself worthy of the Pack. But, Alpha, if you fight him and he wins, there will be a Thing and the Great North will decide on whether he brings strength to the Pack.”

  “Like there’s any chance he would win,” Poul snaps. He takes one step toward the door before Silver’s voice cuts through the room, cold and sharp.

  “The challenge, Poul Ardithsson, Alpha of the 10th Echelon of the Great North Pack, must be spoken.”

  Without turning to face me, he starts again: “Constantine WhateverTheFuckYourNameIs. By the ancient rites and laws of our ancestors and under the watchful eye of our Pack and Alpha, I, Poul Ardithsson, challenge you to prove your strength worthy of the Great North. With fang and claw, I will attend upon you the last day of this Iron Moon.”

  “Down in front,” someone yells. “You’re blocking the screen.”

  * * *

  Neither of us sticks around for the rest of the movie. Poul is long gone by the time I take a seat on the stairs.

  Finally, the film howls in triumph.

  “Lucian,” says a comically deep voice. “It is finished.”

  “No,” says another voice, softer, almost gentle. “This is just the beginning.”

  The music builds and wolves begin to straggle out in groups, in pairs, and alone. Many of them stripped down while the credits were still rolling. Like Eudemos. Hirsute and chewing on an antler, he seems half wolf already.

  “That shows there’s a practical reason for eating them,” he says to a female I think is named Eawynn. He taps his throat with a gnawed prong. “A sword through the throat didn’t do it, but if Lucian had eaten Bill Nighy, none of it would have happened.

  “Did you know he’s a scientist too?”

  Ah, Ziggy.

  “Hey, is Elijah coming out?”

  Eudemos puts his head back through the door. “Elijah, you coming?” he says and someone roars out the name of the 9th’s Alpha. “Thea’s in the bathroom.”

  “He’s coming.”

  “Maybe the vampires taste gross,” says the female. She is carrying, of course, a well-thumbed edition of Passing the New York State Bar Exam and has a pencil above her ear.

  “You do what you have to. We ate a state trooper. There is no way a vampire tastes worse than a state trooper.”

  “They’ve been dead forever,” she says and the two of them leap from the porch, landing softly and surely on the ground. “I think they’d taste like humans crossed with roadkill. And dry.”

  Even in skin, the Pack has no trouble negotiating darkness: the moon is low, there are no porch lights or path lights, only a weak nimbus from one of the windows as Ziggy packs up the AV equipment and holds forth from his trove of obscure and deluded movie trivia.

  Elijah moves much more slowly and carefully even though he is wild. Thea, who has her hand buried in the long fur at his shoulders, slides her feet cautiously forward as he pauses at the top of each step. I wait until they are safely at the bottom before approaching them.

  “Hello?” she says, turning toward me.

  “I need to talk to Elijah.”

  “You can walk with us to my cabin,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear with her free hand. “Is this about you looking like John? I knew that was going to cause trouble.”

  Elijah chuffs and scratches at the moldering leaves with his hind legs.

  “Not really. Poul wanted to make me angry. I shouldn’t have let him, but I did and now I have to fight him. I’ve fought…a lot…but never tooth and nail.”

  “I think it’s fang and claw.”

  She stumbles on a rock, but before I reach out to help her, Elijah darts forward and she stead
ies herself on his shoulders. She is a small human and he is a large wolf, but still I like them together. They add strength to each other, even if it isn’t the kind of strength the Pack understands.

  “I’m not afraid of working or fighting or getting hurt, but for the first time in my life I’m afraid of losing, because for the first time in my life, it means something. If I lose, Poul is still the strongest unmated male. Ev… The Alpha doesn’t like him, but she will not go against Pack traditions for her own sake. Not like she did for you.”

  Elijah gazes at Thea, the woman who smiles toward him but not at him because it’s too dark and she’s too human.

  “If I win,” I continue, “then at least she has a choice. I want her to choose me, but whatever else happens, Poul will no longer take it as his right to sniff around her like she’s his personal fire hydrant.”

  I know I’m talking too fast and saying too much, so I take a deep breath. “All I’m asking is to give me a chance to give her a choice.”

  Elijah moves to Thea’s front, his muzzle at her chest until she squats down. He pats his head against the underside of her chin and she lifts her head back, eyes closed while Elijah opens his enormous jaws, fitting them to either side of her vulnerable throat. She is motionless except for a few thin strands of hair that bend to the current of his breath. When he moves away, one fang traces a gentle line down until it catches on the leather braid at her collarbone.

  Then he plants himself in front of me, his head cocked, looking expectantly, though if he thinks I’m going to stick my throat between his jaws, he can go—

  He jumps up, grabbing the front of my shirt between his fangs and pulling me down. Next he rubs his muzzle against my cheek. First one side, then the other.

  “Do you understand?” Thea asks.

  “Uhhh.” I watch her pull the flashlight from her belt. “Tell me he’s saying yes.”

  “He’s saying yes.”

  “Just wanted to make sure.”

  Thea trains the bright beam on the steep hill in front of her.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She points the flashlight down.

  “If you had this all along, why didn’t you use it?”

  “Hurts their eyes,” she says, grabbing hold of a branch and pulling herself up.

  I stand at the base of the hill, watching the light and the woman and the wolf until in the middle distance, a door closes.

  Chapter 33

  Evie

  That’s why we have laws and customs in the first place.

  I drop my jeans and shirt over the back of the Adirondack chair at the end of the dock.

  Sometime, somewhere, some ancestor did a bad thing and fell in love with the wrong wolf.

  Holding my nose, I jump in, the water a frigid slap against my overheated skin. I spread my body out across the surface so the water at my back lifts me, the wind at my front caresses me. I paddle slowly toward the other side.

  I don’t know what happened to that ancestor, but probably that strong wolf found out and challenged the wrong wolf, and in the end, the wrong wolf was defeated. The difference being that was a pack challenge, and pack challenges are about submission, not death.

  This was where I made myself small so I could sink down where no one would find me, except Constantine, who found me and saved me. There was something sweet about it, the worry on his face, as though he imagined that I was the kind of wolf who might conceivably need saving.

  Why did he have to do this? I know he doesn’t like Poul, but couldn’t he have pretended to offer him the respect due him as Alpha of the 10th? I’ve put up with so much shit from Poul… Why couldn’t Constantine have done this one thing? My love always has to be so encompassing. Couldn’t he have lowered his eyes and let me keep this little love that’s all our own, just us two?

  Pulling my legs in and wrapping my arms around my knees, I make my body small again and sink deep into the water, my wolf’s metabolism letting me stay there for a long time. On my second time down, the water around me ripples around me, above me. I know who it is circling around me, just like he did when he was looking for me before.

  Breaking through the surface, I swim as best I can for the Holm. Constantine moves faster and is already there.

  “Did he challenge you?” I ask, squeezing the water from my hair.

  “Yes.”

  I shiver as the cool air of the summer evening hits my damp skin.

  “Don’t say it, Evie.”

  “You have to apologize to him.”

  He shakes his head. “I will not apologize to him.”

  “You have to apologize, Constantine. If you were Pack, you could submit. At its heart, a challenge is bravado. We are all in this together. We don’t want to destroy one another. But you are not Pack, this is not bravado, and Poul does want to destroy you. He doesn’t have to, but you embarrassed him: you called him a traitor, you made him bleed. And he will.”

  “He won’t be the first person who’s tried to kill me.”

  “Not wild. You were almost killed by a pig. Fighting wild means getting close. It means lashing at a mouth filled with more teeth than you thought existed moving at speeds you can’t see. It means fighting someone who knows what you are going to do before you do. We are hunters to our core. For us, fighting is just a hunt with fewer rules.”

  He reaches out his hand the way he has before, like when he wants to comfort me. “Don’t… Don’t touch me,” I say and pull away, rubbing my arm with my knuckles.

  “You were the one who said ‘sorry’ was a hard word for wolves. Pity and regret. Well, I don’t pity him and don’t regret what I’ve done, so how can I apologize?”

  Looking across the water, I pull at one of the strands of my hair, stretching it out long. The lights of the Great Hall are out now, wolves dispersed across Homelands, some in cabins, most among the trees.

  “I’ve never said no to a fight, Evie. I’m not going to start now. Not with him.”

  I let the strand go, watching as it pops back into a tight spiral.

  “Then he will kill you. And I will have to watch.”

  Chapter 34

  Constantine

  There’s not going to be much of me left to kill by the time Elijah is finished.

  At the end of each day, I limp back to the end of the dock, licking the blood from my fur and wondering, as Evie said I would, at the number of teeth a single wolf has. I try with my tongue to poke at my own, to figure out exactly how many there are, but it’s inexact. In the end, I only count thirty-eight or forty-two, a figure that is hundreds short of what Elijah seems to have.

  Either way, Elijah still manages to tear through my hide, and now my body is crisscrossed with wounds, both raw and healing. Aggression isn’t enough. Claws aren’t enough either. Jaws are really everything. There is a vicious immediacy to fighting wild that no amount of street skirmishing can prepare you for. There is no such thing as “arm’s length.” When Elijah rushes, I have no choice but to meet that rush with my chest. When he attacks, it is fang against fang, ringing hollow through my jaw and into my skull.

  I have tasted his saliva. I have felt his teeth and tongue against mine. He has tasted my blood.

  Rushing, jumping, confusion… Even the posturing is very, very painful.

  Then there is the change. All the cuts and bruises then stretch and tear again. Gashes in my loin become rips as my hips straighten out. Anything that managed to clot starts to bleed again.

  Still, pain is the best teacher. And I’ve become more adept and graceful. This time, I manage to whirl around on my back feet, keeping Elijah in front of me so instead of a gash on my thigh, I have one on my cheek. It hurts more, but at least it means that I wasn’t caught from behind again.

  We practice in what I had thought was a huge abandoned sandbox, though I suppose the lack of other p
layground equipment and the variety of blood spatter should have tipped me off.

  Curious wolves have started to watch. A few have even offered to spar, seeing me as a cheap date, because while there is no gain if they win against me, there is no loss either. Wolves of various levels of competence have started lining up for a practice run. I take them all on, because I learn something from each one and because I never say no to a fight.

  There is one wolf who never comes.

  Poul passes by, his teeth chittering fast like an angry squirrel, but since he has jaws like the grill of a monster truck, it’s not as funny as it should be. Elijah always stops when he is near. Maybe there are wolves who will tell him what I am like as a fighter, he says, but maybe not. Anyway, there is a world of experience that cannot be expressed by words.

  Traditionally, Elijah says, challenges are held on the last day of the Iron Moon. The subordinate wolves fight first. They tend to be more cautious and circumspect. A lot of posturing overseen only by the echelon’s Alpha. But by the time the higher ranks fight—the Alphas, Betas, Gammas—the aggressiveness increases and so does the audience.

  “Blood sells,” Elijah says, picking at something in his teeth that had earlier been attached to my foreleg and is now bleeding profusely from my bicep. “The biggest draw for a long time was when Varya fought Kieran for insulting Thea. You know him? The brindle wolf with the scar through his eye? I never understood why Varya, who had always hated humans, tore open a wolf’s face over one. Still yours… Got it.” He spits the piece of my hide out. It has a bit of fur attached. “Still yours has sex, xenophobia, and a high probability of death…so, you know, what’s not to like?”

  * * *

  There is another wolf who never comes.

  I rehearse that last time I sat with her on the Holm, watching the water streaming down from her collarbone. Picked out by the moon, it gleamed like lightning on her tawny skin, and the truth is, at that moment, I was so tortured by thirst, I would have done whatever she wanted if she would let me lick the water from her breasts, suck it from her nipples, slake myself inside her.