A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  After she goes, I look at those photographs. How is it that I never noticed before? Never noticed that my pose is the same in every one of them: left hand in pocket, my jacket on that side caught behind my forearm. My right hand taking that of my powerful client.

  Holding my hand to my mouth, I breathe deeply the scent of Ajax and black earth, while from the office window I watch the stretch of sidewalk that gives onto Vesey.

  After a few minutes, Thea Villalobos emerges from the building. She bends down to loosen the pant leg from her boots. A little beyond her, the leashed window washer continues to work on the glass.

  In Liebling’s jumpy movie, a woman in jeans, shitkickers, and a cable-knit sweater carries nothing but a long, thick branch. Standing far back, she pokes the thin, metal trigger until it snaps. Her makeshift staff snaps on the second one. She picks up another branch and heads for the most distant one, the third.

  “Janine? Tell Albany I’m going to need an office next Wednesday.”

  Liebling waits for a little and then starts to move, whispering softly that he’s going to the third trap now, so the GPS on his phone will record that she was still on his land.

  “And, Janine? Where exactly is the Albany office?”

  Then I message Samuel, the investigator I use most often, to stop by as soon as he gets back. Two hours later, I slide him a copy of the video and a piece of paper with Robert Liebling’s name on it. “Find out everything you can about him.”

  He pauses, flipping the paper to look at the other side.

  “Yes. About her too.”

  Chapter 5

  Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 23 days

  Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 23 days

  The dry cleaner around the corner went through an overhaul and came out green. Organic, a sign now says, next to a picture of the earth in a tidy jacket. One cheerful eye is plopped in the middle of the Atlantic, the other in the middle of Europe.

  The man helping me is holding down the button on the rotating clothes hanger while looking at the ticket on my phone. Then he stops and pulls out a handful of shirts. The smell of perc is overwhelming and makes my skin prick.

  “Those aren’t mine.”

  “Yes, they are. Look.” He shows me the ticket number on my phone and on the clothes.

  “I don’t care what it says, those aren’t mine.” I hold the shirts up to my front. The shoulders are inches short of where they need to be. The cuffs a half foot.

  “You got a wife?” he asks hopefully.

  “No.”

  With a sigh, he pushes his button again.

  “I thought you were organic.”

  “We are. One hundred percent organic.”

  “Then why does it stink of perc in here?”

  “Perc’s carbon-based. That’s what it means to be organic. Carbon-based.”

  He should’ve been a lawyer. He knows that’s not what people think when they hear organic, but that’s the thing about humans—they never say what they mean.

  “There they are.” I point to the long, white tails sticking out below the hem of a jacket. As soon as they come close, he reaches up with a metal stick and pulls them down, putting them next to the other shirts that look like they belong with a boy’s First Communion suit.

  Back at home, I toss my shirts in the closet, grab a fork and a glass of water, then angle the photograph of the echelon so that the 9th will see it and know that I am always thinking about them.

  I usually set aside Saturday night to videoconference with the 9th. Talk over any problems they might be having, offer advice, make decisions. Since John’s death, I’ve been trying to make it twice a week, though it doesn’t always turn out that way because most of my weeknights are taken up with clients.

  Lorin and Francesca sign in, naked and spotted with blood.

  “Good hunting?” I ask.

  “Just a snack,” Lorin says, rubbing at the wrong place.

  Francesca throws herself on the bed and licks the dark stains from his face. Then she sticks out her tongue, trying to pick something off with her fingers. “Fur,” she says. “What are you eating?”

  I look down at the Styrofoam container blankly. Pushing the contents around, I finally remember. “Falafel.” I push some more. “Tabbouleh.”

  “I swear that’s all you ever eat.”

  I’d rather they think that I’m unimaginative than know that when I am Offland, I eat carrion and drink alcohol so that the humans will see me as a man’s man. An Alpha male. But a real Alpha, like all wolves, doesn’t eat anything he doesn’t hunt himself. Unfortunately, being a vegetarian teetotaler doesn’t fit humans’ conception of what it means to be an Alpha male.

  “There’s a halal cart down the street. It’s fast. Hey, Celia.”

  Celia, my shielder, has set her laptop outside her cabin—my cabin too, I suppose, though I’ve never stayed there. Because of the angle of the screen, I can’t quite tell what she’s doing, but her arms row steadily back and forth. If she were human, I’d have said she had a rowing machine, but Pack have no use for pretend work.

  She stops for a minute, pushing her reddish-brown hair—the same color as mine—into a band at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are like mine too, bright blue. Littermates don’t always resemble each other, but Celia and I do.

  Celia nods and keeps rowing.

  Our similarities stop at physical resemblances. Celia is whip smart but socially very awkward, and her few forays Offland have ended badly. She is happiest, I think, staying in the Homelands.

  I hope.

  The other members of the 9th sign on singly or in pairs.

  I’ve done everything I can to keep track of my echelon, but this is a difficult time, and wolves do not do well when the hierarchy is disrupted. I didn’t know that Trevor was working in the kitchen because he got injured defending his cunnan-riht to Ella and can’t go Offland until his leg heals. Dani has quit her job at the snowboard company, though she is sullen and it’s hard to tell whether she quit or was fired. Lorin and Francesca will be mated as soon as the Alpha is healthy enough to do her part.

  I didn’t remember that they had become bedfellows.

  Mostly, though, I worry about my Gamma wolves, Sarah and Adam. The first mated pair of our echelon, they are brilliant strategists, and Sarah is our best tracker.

  But Sarah doesn’t look well fed. Instead, she is gaunt and haunted. Any questions I direct toward either of them are met with surprise—as if they’d forgotten where they were—or with a noncommittal nod.

  It is only when everyone else has gone that I ask Celia.

  She stops her rowing and pushes her hair back from her forehead again, using only her bent wrist. Something metal slaps against wood. Then she starts again. “Sarah lost her pregnancy.”

  The falafel suddenly feels very dry and bulky in my mouth. I chew hurriedly before gulping down a long draft of water.

  “She was pregnant? How far along was she?”

  “Four months,” Celia says.

  “And no one thought to tell me?”

  “You know how it is. We don’t like to tell anyone,” she says, “for precisely this reason. Things go wrong.”

  “But you knew.”

  “Because someone had to make sure that Sarah’s work schedule was something she could safely do. That there was someone in authority in her echelon, in case of trouble.”

  She doesn’t say, but I understand her criticism all too well. I should have known. It’s already so hard for us to reproduce. In all the moons I’ve been Alpha, the 9th hasn’t had a single successful pregnancy.

  “When did she lose it?”

  “A week after John died,” Celia says and starts her rowing again. “Stress…”

  Her voice peters out, and she stops rowing, wiping a dull blade covered with fur.
/>
  “Is that for Lorin and Francesca?” I ask.

  “The deer we hunted during the Moon.”

  At least I was there for the hunt. Even if I am not there to scrape the deer’s hide and won’t be there when they cut the long, continuous thong and won’t be there for the Bredung, the braiding, when Lorin and Francesca are committed to the land, to the Pack, and to each other.

  That long, thin piece of leather, tanned with the oak from our trees, will represent our land. The blood of the Alpha represents the Pack. The release of the couple themselves represents the bond between the two wolves.

  My buzzer sounds—loud and high and jarring. It’s not the doorman. His buzz is softer and lower down the register. Someone is at my front door.

  “Mark Sarah for me. Tell her…tell her that her Alpha thinks about her.”

  “Shouldn’t you get that?” Celia cocks her head to the side, listening as the buzzer sounds again.

  “No. I don’t know who it is, and I don’t care. And if Sarah and Adam need anything—”

  “They do need something. They need you home.” I can tell the sound of the buzzer is getting on her nerves. Celia has spent very little time Offland. The insistent, demanding pitch of the human world is almost intolerable until you learn how to ignore it. “The Great North’s Alpha died. Our territory was invaded. There are still Shifters out there. Our echelon doesn’t need a boss. What we need is a leader, someone who will lay down their hopes, their desires, for the echelon. Someone who will be the first to hunt, the first to fight, the first to sacrifice, the first to die.

  “What we need is an Alpha.”

  Whoever was buzzing at my door is now banging at my door.

  Celia must hear it. She starts scraping more furiously.

  “Celia, I know it’s hard, but I am trying. Last moon, I asked Evie if I could come home. She refused, said the Pack needed me Offland. But the 9th can’t wait anymore, and I can’t either. So I am going to challenge her for primacy of the Great North. I will win, and then you will be the 9th’s Alpha.”

  Celia’s head pops up.

  “But the Alpha won’t be recovered from her lying-in yet. She’s not ready.”

  “The Pack cannot tolerate weakness, Celia. You know that. Evie knows it too.”

  Whoever is in the hallway has started kicking my fucking door now.

  “You better go,” Celia snaps. “Some human needs you.”

  Then the screen goes blank.

  “Dammit.” I slam my computer shut. “Coming!” I yell, tossing the remains of my falafel in the refrigerator. Alana’s frantic face stares at me through the peephole. I open the door a crack.

  “Thank god! I heard you talking in there, but you didn’t answer.” She plucks frantically at my arm. “Something’s wrong with Tarzan. He’s vomited up his liver.”

  Well, hallelujah. Closing the door carefully behind me, I follow her to her apartment. It’s about time.

  But as soon as she opens her door, I hear a high-pitched whimper. “I don’t think so. If he vomited up his liver, he’d be dead already.”

  Alana looks at me with that expectant look human women get when they want you to open a jar or kill an insect or figure out a tip or deal with vomited dog liver.

  Tarzan is indeed looking unwell next to a lumpy, purplish-brown puddle. Alana stands well back, her hand covering her lip and nose. “So, coyote meat,” I whisper to the tiny head, “had your last hunt?” He whines softly with breath that stinks of bile and sweet and dark bitterness. “Jesus, didn’t your dam ever tell you not to eat chocolate?”

  I bundle Alana and Tarzan into a cab, because that many dark-chocolate-covered cherries will kill a dog this size. Alana won’t let me go. She’s afraid he will die. She’s afraid he will vomit. She’s afraid he will be incontinent. She wraps him in a towel and gives him to me.

  “He likes you,” she pleads.

  The vet cleans out Tarzan’s stomach and gives him charcoal to absorb whatever theobromine is left in his intestines, while I sit in the waiting room pretending to read an article in Best Breeder about cleft palate in shih tzus.

  Simply being here makes me angry, because I am not where I should be. At home, helping Sarah. Reassuring her. Marking her. Hunting with her. Being an Alpha.

  The Pack has so many stresses now. Snows come later. The bats are dying out, making mosquito season hell. Rains come in torrents or not at all. Humans hunt not for food but for sport. And unlike wolves, they take the strongest animals as trophies, leaving the herd weaker.

  Then there are Shifters.

  Someone pats me on the shoulder. A nurse with a sympathetic smile. “I can tell you’re worried,” she says. “But Tarzan is going to be just fine.”

  No, he’s not. Because if I have to fuck Alana, I will rip his throat out.

  • • •

  I ended up fucking Alana, but I didn’t rip Tarzan’s throat out, because that tiny remnant of wild guided his little muzzle into the spot behind my jaw, where the scent is strong. He had just enough instinct to know that if I marked him, I was less likely to eat him.

  He whimpers after me as I creep out of Alana’s bed and head back to the gym.

  One.

  I am coming home.

  Two.

  I am coming home.

  Three.

  I am coming home.

  Chapter 6

  Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 20 days

  Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 20 days

  “Mr. Sorensson, you received two calls from Evie Kitwana. She says she’s the new CEO of Great North?”

  Janine looks at me expectantly, her fingernail tapping at the casing of the phone, because she knows that whenever Great North calls, I jump. But not this time. Celia must have told Evie that I would be challenging her for primacy of the Great North. Our laws require that I recite the ancient formula for a challenge at the next Iron Moon. They do not require me to chat about it over the phone.

  “Should I put the call through?”

  “No, I’ll take care of it when I have time.”

  My assistant leans over toward my computer, pulling up today’s schedule. A petite blond with slender hips, a cross-trained abdomen, and an overabundance of pertness: breasts, nose, lips. She is perfectly beautiful, in the cookie-cutter way of so many women now. Max warned me to stop screwing around with the office staff. I’d done my best, hunting primarily at Testa, but then Janine came…

  I couldn’t resist. It wasn’t because of the way she looks; it was because of the way she smells. She uses some kind of vanilla scent that makes me so hungry. I’m sure she thinks it smells like cookies or ice cream, but, in fact, it smells like the excretions of beavers’ castor sacs, located under their tails. They use it to mark their territory, and just a whiff will make any wolf go into salivating paroxysms of need for fresh, chewy beaver liver.

  I shake my head, trying to clear away the scent.

  Janine flailed and flubbed her way through college. After finishing—whether she graduated is unclear—she took a series of jobs under men and women she describes uniformly as “asshole sadists.” That made for a terrible résumé, but because Max knew Janine’s father from law school, she landed here. With a loft paid for by her parents, a cushy job she can’t be fired from, and the guarantee of a brilliant recommendation from the man who was stupid enough to bed her.

  Her fingers reach for a pale tendril at the nape of her updo, directing my eyes toward the tattooed tail that ends there. I know now that the tail belongs to a dragon that clings to her back and around her ribs and up, its jaws set on either side of the nipple tight like an apple seed on top of her left breast.

  “Where do you want me to make reservations?” Janine asks, pointing to my dinner date with a potential client. Her softness presses against my shoulder. My cock responds not at al
l, and my wolf curls into a ball, his muzzle buried beneath paw and tail.

  “Oak. No, make it Plank. At eight.”

  Max has largely relinquished new clients to me—and with good reason. No human understands the workings of hierarchy as well as I do.

  Admittedly, establishing your place in the Great North hierarchy is much more straightforward. Either your jaws are strong enough, your claws sharp enough, your power fierce enough, your strategy cunning enough…

  Or they’re not.

  Human hierarchy is complicated and subtle. The strength and strategy is in knowing how it works.

  At dinner, for example, I will take this man, described to me as the King of Ball Bearings, to Plank, a restaurant just starting to trend, but where I’ve already established a reputation for generosity—fairly easily, because the maître d’ was at a previously trending restaurant where I had already been established.

  Shown to a table near the fireplace with its pattern of perfectly cut logs set into the slate cladding, I will sit with my back to the door. I will not crane my head searching the crowds.

  The potential subordinate—I mean, client—comes on time, but I am already there, and with a quick look at my AP, which he won’t recognize because he has a clunky gold Rolex, he immediately starts to feel awkward.

  When I stand, I tower over him, and whether I have to or not, I bend slightly to shake his hand. Opening the button on my Hardy Amies jacket, I pull it back from my Charvet shirt. The hem of my pants breaks just so above my Berluti shoes.

  We sit, and when the sommelier comes, standing at my elbow, looking first to me, I nod indicating my subordinate-to-be. It is by my grace that he goes first. When he orders a dully predictable cabernet, I suggest instead the Côte-Rôtie, a more interesting choice. The sommelier smiles.

  Then the client orders a filet mignon because it’s the most expensive cut. I order the sirloin because it is the best.