Season of the Wolf

by Maria Vale

  Then she scrubbed her arm with her fisted hand, like she does when she’s cleaning away any trace of me, and I couldn’t.

  * * *

  As the days pass into weeks and the wolves decide that I’m not a walking casualty, that there is a chance, however slim, that I might not die in the first two minutes, they begin to whisper suggestions, making it clear that not all of the Great North sides with Poul simply because he’s one of them. Tiberius tells me to walk off the paddock several times, measuring it with my feet for the dips and rises that will tell me if I’m getting too close to the wall.

  A female from Poul’s own echelon says he twisted his left hind ankle and is still stiff.

  Järv tells me to jump in as soon as the fight between the 11th’s Gamma and Beta is over so I can take the western edge and the sun will be at my back.

  “But piss first,” Ziggy adds. “Once you’ve entered, you cannot leave until the fight is over. If you do, you are a coward and outside the protections of the law. For wolves, submitting is acceptable, but running away never is.”

  * * *

  I finally see her on the first evening of the Iron Moon. With blackfly season over, the Pack spreads out on the grass that rolls down from the Great Hall to Home Pond. The sounds of crickets and katydids meld with quiet conversation and gentle snufflings as Homeland and Offland wolves greet one another. A loon glides through the air, skimming through the purple-gold surface of Home Pond and almost, but not quite, going under. His voice is hollow as he calls to his mate.

  That’s when she leaves the Great Hall, closing the door behind her.

  After giving the traditional blessing, she sits not with us but with the 9th. She says nothing to Elijah and he doesn’t bother her. Even Cassius has the grace to keep his mouth shut while he digs divots in the grass with a stick.

  I don’t see much of her once we are changed either. People have heard about the wolf sighting, and as much as the Great North has tried to spread rumors that it is a coyote, the photograph has gone viral under the hashtags #ADKWolves and more ominously #ADKTrophies.

  I hunt with the 7th, then lope through the High Pines where the tree-darkened days meld into the bright moonlit nights, all of it infused with my own cool gladness.

  There was a birthday many years ago when I imagined I’d reached the pinnacle of happiness. I had waffles and sausages and goose and cake. My mother had given me all the crispy skin. And most of the chocolate frosting. I’d gotten all the toys I’d wanted. I was full. I was happy.

  But the next day, I was empty. The Deluxe Li’l Wizards Magic Set had trickery but no magic: hiding balls and coins in plastic compartments. The dart gun either jammed or the dart failed to achieve more than the velocity of a laden swallow and dropped a few feet in front of me. The parachute, on the other hand, never deployed and the paratrooper fell fast and hard to the ground.

  The cracklings and chocolate did a number on my intestines.

  It is, I think, what Evie was trying to tell me with the cup. Stop trying to fill up the empty spaces and shatter. Open yourself up to everything around you—the smell of the black earth under a balsam pine, the feel of moss and cold water, the motion of a breeze sliding through guard hairs and rustling through leaves.

  The only thing that’s the same is a goose, which had no cracklings but was fatty in that late summer way and delicious.

  Midafternoon of the final day, I hear Tara call the start of challenges. It takes me a while to make it down from the High Pines but I miss only two minor skirmishes. From the tussle between the 13th’s Kappa and Iota over their rank within the echelon, I trot around the largely deserted paddock, watching how wolves slash with teeth that can and do rip open faces. How they charge suddenly, banging chest to chest. How they leap to the side, leaving slavering jaws with nothing but air. How they submit.

  With each successive bout, the paddock becomes more crowded. By the time it arrives at the challenge between the 11th’s Gamma and Beta, it is very tight. I growl at wolves to give me space. I don’t need them blocking my leap into the arena. As soon as the 11th’s Gamma submits, I jump in, not even waiting for the combatants to leave. The Beta won, but as she pulls herself over the side, blood drips down her back leg and she makes it to the top of the paddock wall with trouble before dropping to the other side.

  Claiming the western end, I do everything I’ve been told to. I walk back and forth across the paddock again to feel any changes in the earth under my feet, the gouges made by wolves who fought earlier. Chuffing repeatedly, I gauge my distance from the walls by the reverberations in the air.

  More echelons descend from the woods, vying for places. The 10th has taken up its positions on the eastern end. The sun is still too high, but even so, their pupils are constricted. It won’t take long before it is right in their eyes. In Poul’s eyes.

  Elijah is behind me, snapping irritably at wolves who dare take up places he has reserved for the 9th.

  Pups run around snapping at ankles and tails, yelping excitedly at seeing so many adults together and wild. A wolf gently takes a pup by the scruff and sits it on the top of the paddock wall where it lands splay-legged before getting to its feet and strutting back and forth. Evie bares her teeth and the wolf quickly retrieves the pup, pulling him back off.

  My eyes catch hers and she looks away, but not before I’ve seen that she’s hurting. I hate myself for being the cause of it, but I am tough and prepared and I will win and he will get his fucking nose out of her ear once and for all. Please, Evie. See me. Know me. Have a little faith in me.

  Speaking of the devil, Poul leaps into the paddock on the east side. I watch him land, checking to see if his ankle is still stiff.

  I’m grateful to see the 7th crowding in at the western side, at my side, next to the 9th. Everyone is here and yet…

  Something is bothering me. Something in the vast continuum between what is seen and what I can’t put into words is wrong. I run around the paddock, trying to focus my mind on what it could be. Evie is here, so is Magnus, and Ziggy and Elijah.

  So what’s wrong?

  Evie takes her place on one side, opposite Silver. Both stand at the front so they can see everything and make sure the few laws that govern a fight like this are followed.

  Tara barks once, warning us to take our places as she will soon announce the beginning.

  Silver rubs at her head with a paw; an ear pops up.

  Gehyrað æfter stilnes. Listen to the silence.

  “Don’t just pay attention to what’s there,” Otho once said. “Pay attention to what’s missing, because the man who doesn’t bring a gun to a meeting like this has a sniper on the rooftop.”

  Racing back to where the 9th is arrayed, I jump up, my feet on the paddock wall, craning to see over all the wolfish bodies of Elijah’s echelon. I know them now; they’ve all come to watch their Alpha train the Shifter. I see them all. Elijah growls, warning me to get back down.

  I snap at him, then round the paddock, looking carefully at every side. More wolves snarl at me, sensing panic, and maybe it smells like cowardice. Like weakness. Unfortunately, I don’t have the words to tell them otherwise. To ask them: with the entire 9th here, with all of the Great North here, where the hell is Cassius?

  At that moment, Tara howls. Poul squares up. Silver stares at us, her ears straight ahead. I look at Evie one last time. Not so long ago, I would have stayed and I would have fought and I would have won for you alone, Evie. It took me a long time, but I finally understand that there is no you alone. There is you and all the multitudes you contain, or there is nothing.

  I head back to the corner, then run full out, clearing the paddock wall and landing on the backs of wolves. They part like the water, snarling and growling and stunned as I run flat out, sniffing until I locate that bitter, resentful smell, following it toward the Great Hall, then into the woods.

 
The door to my dormitory bumps in the wind. My skin chills even though it is summer and I am covered with fur. Inside, my mattress lies tipped on the floor and my pillow has been clawed open.

  I hear you swum all the way to the other side.

  Poul howls triumphant from the paddock.

  Looping deep into the woods, I break into a run, negotiating the gothic tangle of roots in the spruce, leaping over an orphaned boulder softened by bright-green moss, pushing through the thickets of low bushes with their powdered blueberries that the Pack will pick soon.

  They’ve started after me, Poul and a handful of wolves from the 10th. They don’t bother to disguise themselves or their passage, because I have forfeited and am now outside the law.

  Splashing through the slow summer streams and the pitcher-plant bogs, I follow his scent. In the bushes behind the Boathouse, I smell where Cassius must have lain hidden, changing into his skin while the wolves were distracted by my spectacle.

  When I break through the tree line, I see him, a speck across the water, his fingers wrapped around the paddle of a canoe. It won’t take long before there will be nothing left but a gentle slipstream skirting the Holm.

  Tearing along the dock, I pick up speed toward the end. Wolves at the paddock have started to notice, and just as I launch myself into the water, Evie’s stunned eyes catch mine.

  Sorry, sorry, regret and pity.

  My legs bicycle desperately, frothing water into my nose just barely clearing the surface. This is not swimming; this is speed walking with a head cold. Coughing and churning, I leave off following Cassius directly, paddling my legs as fast as I can in a direct path toward the Holm so I can run faster for that little while at least. I make land right near the spot where my hesitant hand first touched Evie.

  There is no way Evie could have seen Cassius from the paddock. I try not to think what she is imagining. I love you enough, Evie, to not love you alone. It’s never been clearer to me as I pull my bedraggled body out of the water and race after Cassius so close to getting away, carrying with him my cell phone, the Bitch of Vancouver’s number, and bad blood that has festered too long.

  I make better time running through the Holm until I reach the southern side that isn’t properly land or properly water, just weed-choked shallows with painfully sharp sedges at eye level and a thicket of buckthorn that puncture my paws.

  Cassius has slowed down, too, though. He uses the canoe paddle as a walking stick, jamming it into the sludge, then pushing against it, extracting one foot after the other.

  It’s not an easy place for humans, but it isn’t an easy place for wolves either. The ground is uneven and tricky to negotiate. It’s also hard to distinguish scents because everything is masked, camouflaged by the thick smell of decay and sphagnum. Worst of all, there is too little cover. There are a few bushes without enough leaves and no trees at all except for a couple bleached and skeletal remains.

  “Did you hear the cars?”

  He must have heard about cars somewhere and squirreled the information away. I’m not sure he can hear in that form, but I certainly can in this and know we are too close to the world of men. I try to keep low, but it doesn’t help. Cassius sees me, and as soon as he does, he moves faster. Reaching into his pocket with his free hand, he pulls out my phone and pushes the power button. I find myself praying to the moon for a dead battery, but no, because it has a max-power 18,000mAh battery, it has fifty days of standby talk time even without turning it off, and because I’d wanted to prove to Evie that I would never do anything to hurt the Great North, I’d unlocked it.

  Cassius holds my phone with his free hand and swipes at the screen with his thumb. Since he knows I’m here, I try to make up time, pushing off with my back legs, bounding over and over to try to clear the deep mud.

  A truck roars past on a distant, invisible road. It’s so catastrophically loud to me, but Cassius still doesn’t hear. Distracted by the phone, he moves more slowly. I can almost feel him searching through my contacts.

  Mud stings the thousands of tiny flesh wounds I’ve been accumulating during these weeks when I trained so hard so that I had a chance at a place in the Great North. That’s gone now. No point thinking about that now. I just have to keep slogging forward while Cassius takes floundering steps through the loin-high bog, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other tracing wide balancing loops through the air.

  He alternates between panting and yelling. I can hear the panic, but I’m having trouble making out the words.

  I bound forward again, but this time, I land in a deep sinkhole of mucky water up to my shoulders.

  And Cassius…Cassius who could have kept on, Cassius who is within earshot of the road, Cassius who could have found help from humans, turns around because he has no real purpose. He is still that same golem carved from the clay of bad blood and petty resentments, and now he sees a chance to act them out on my helpless body.

  My nose just clears the surface, blinking at Cassius silhouetted in the bright sunlight, that oar held high. He slaps the surface over and over. It hits me, too, but the bog absorbs enough of the force to protect my bones. I keep my head pressed to the side, trying to shake away the thickness enveloping my head and body and threatening to drag me down.

  With every blow, he yells his hatred of wolves, of Julia, of trees, of the Alpha, of Arthur, of Lorcan, of Elijah, of Constantine…and for the first time, I realize he has no idea who is foundering in the mud in front of him. To him, I am just another gray wolf in a pack that is full of them.

  As soon as the time for fighting begins, Otho said, the time for thinking is long over. So when my back leg finds a stone sticking out from the side, I grab the ledge with my front paws and push off with my hind paws. Scrabbling awkwardly up, I don’t bother to catch my breath but instead lunge at his leg and sink my teeth in, feeling the grinding of bone against fangs. It’s a better bite than I had for the feral pig. Cassius tries to shake me, then starts to hit at me with his paddle, but I hang on like a burr on fur in this sinkhole in a roadside bog, not because anyone told me to, but because I know I have to.

  Even when he raised the paddle high. I feel the air eddy as it starts down, then it hits my shoulder and my front legs give out, but I don’t let go.

  Cassius lashes at me with his oar, hitting again and again.

  Then I hear it, wolves coming. I had a head start and am a better swimmer, but they are still coming. This time, it isn’t Poul and his posse, howling for my blood. Cassius has never hunted with the pack, so he doesn’t know the tiny sounds they make so as to not alert prey.

  The pack is wary this close to Offland. Now even Cassius can hear the blare of the semi horn to the south, and he knows wolves won’t kill a man on the shoulder of a county road. He turns the paddle to the side and swings it down with everything he has. As the snap of the bone resonates through my head, my jaw opens because I can’t help groaning and Cassius immediately squelches away toward the road, where the first thing this shit will do is tell everyone about this forest strong and fierce and these lives that must remain unspoken.

  My front leg is useless, blood and mud thicken in my brain, buckthorn drills through my paws, but it doesn’t matter. Coiling the muscles in my hind legs, I take one last leap.

  When he falls, the open sky is reflected in his terrified eyes and finally he knows.

  “Constantine? But you’re one of—”

  And with one crushing bite, I rip out his throat.

  Because I am not one of you.

  His body flails, hands grabbing at my muddy fur, viscous bubbles turn bright red at the hole in his neck, his rasping gurgles slow then stop, and eventually, his body stills, his head falling empty-eyed to the side while his tongue lolls from his mouth, covered in blood.

  * * *

  The hours that follow are made from odd and horrible memories interrupted by excruciating pain wh
en ripped skin and broken bones are pulled apart as they find a new shape. If my voice actually functioned, I’d be screaming, but it doesn’t, so I don’t.

  I can’t see anything, hear anything, move anything, smell anything, but I am blessed with the ability to feel not only the physical pain but the even more exquisite agony of what I’ve lost. There I was, after all that work, ready to teach Poul a lesson and prove myself strong enough for the Great North, big enough for Evie, and I blew it.

  I can’t move either, not consciously anyway, but some involuntary twitch moves my body forward a little and I feel something warm. I replay Cassius’s last moments, especially his final bubbling exhalation to reassure myself that there is no way he could have survived. I’m not such a stranger to death that I would make that kind of mistake.

  Then I know who it is. Blind, I know it’s Evie. Deaf, I know it’s Evie. Unable to smell, I know it’s Evie. Dead, I would know it was Evie.

  I collapse against her, feeling pain combined with the helpless coming together of our changing bodies until finally when I take a breath, I make out granite and moss, and as always, Pack.

  “Constantine?”

  “Mmm-mmm.”

  “Can you walk?”

  I try to lift my hand against the bright early morning sun until my shoulder reminds me. Not that hand.

  The other one is hardly better.

  Evie sits beside me, her head to the side, pulling her fingers through her hair.

  “’S Cassius?” I manage to croak out.

  “Dead, yes,” she says and bends her head again, finger combing the other side. She doesn’t offer to help or anything as insulting as that, but she does watch carefully as I struggle to get up, pushing with my one working hand and my wobbly feet. She stands next to me, the still blood-smudged oar clasped under her arm, still combing her hair, pretending to ignore my flubbed first step and every flubbed step after until we reach the place where Cassius left the canoe. Evie holds it steady while I fall in. She ignores my swallowed scream as my collarbone separates. Pushing free of the mud and weeds and bushes, she paddles around the edge of the Holm.