by Maria Vale
We start to talk. My subordinate is eager to impress me with his importance, to tell me all the amazing ways in which the world runs on ball bearings. On his ball bearings, in particular. I wait until he is finished and ask him an intricate question about counterfeiting and patent law, so that he knows that I have already gone far beyond his palaver and know why he needs me.
The switch takes place. Suddenly, I am no longer trying to get him as a client. He is trying to get me as a lawyer. He will have already started to scan the room, looking for any powerful person to bolster his standing. He finds one and nods to him. I don’t turn my attention from the client. I do not court power; power courts me.
He takes out his cell phone. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to take this.” He does it to prove that he is a busy man and much needed.
I nod, giving my permission. But I keep my phone off. It is a tool for my convenience. I am at no man’s beck and call.
While he talks, a woman I’ve had walks past with another man. She gives me a small smile. I lower my head for one almost unnoticeable second, and her body softens in response. Another woman, one I haven’t had, lifts her eyes to mine, her lids lowered. My eyes linger on her a little longer than necessary. She pushes her hair behind her ear, then pulls her hand back, letting it slide down her jaw toward her lower lip.
The subordinate notices everything, and if I’ve done it right, he will do anything to be in this world, my world.
With a twist of my jaws, he is down and I am Alpha.
At the end of dinner, I shake his hand and thank him. Noblesse oblige and all that. I watch until he is safely out of the restaurant and then head toward the back. There, I lock the door of the shiny-bright restaurant bathroom with its orchids and bowl of river rocks. I stick my finger down my throat and tickle my uvula until both wine and sirloin, alcohol and carrion, are purged.
I am so sick of this world. My world.
• • •
It takes me a long time to fall asleep. Stripping down to nothing, I curl on top of my big bed, staring out the window at the moon—unless the moon isn’t there, in which case I stare at the East River, trying to find a bit of it that is not garishly lit by the Manhattan Bridge.
I don’t sleep well in skin. Haven’t been able to for years or maybe ever, but it’s been getting worse. I’ve started having dreams now. Dreams in which I start the change, but it takes so long.
In this dream, I’ve stayed late at HST, so late that the Iron Moon comes, but this time, only my legs change. I stay there waiting, pretending to work with my human hands clicking stupidly and endlessly at my keyboard while my bent wolf legs dangle hidden beneath my big desk. I smile and wave as each person in the office leaves. Making excuses about the Makropulos case, which isn’t a case at all.
Once everyone is gone, I drop to the plush carpet and scurry away on my human knuckles and my lupine feet.
Breathless and panicky, I wake up and grab my sweats and sneakers. I run downstairs.
“Can I get you a cab, Mr. Sorensson?” asks the doorman.
“It’s all right, I’m having trouble sleeping. Thought I’d go for a run.”
His eyes flicker to the empty darkness outside. “Be careful out there.”
“I will, Mohammad. Thank you.”
I follow the rumble of the cement under my feet toward the place where the air smells less of ocean and more of river.
At the 1 train, I swipe my card. A man in a frayed, black puffer coat with two wheelie bags is lying in one corner, his head cushioned on an overstuffed Babies “R” Us bag. He lifts one eyelid to see if I’m likely to tell him he has to move along.
I shake my head and turn away. I am the least of his worries.
Penn Station is quiet, though even now, it’s not empty and there are more than enough police. Still, I’ve done this before and know my audience. Moving like a drunk bridge-and-tunnel partier, I head to the very end of platform 16, leaning heavily against the wall until I’m sure no one is watching. Then, with a quick turn, I sprint down the narrow metal stairs at the end, prancing carefully across the tracks. Another few feet, and I’m safely at the walled-off remains of the old tunnel that served as mail access to the trains. Beside one crumbling part of the wall, I drag out two concrete blocks and wriggle in.
Now comes the dangerous part.
There is no law more deeply held by Pack than the one against changing Offland. It is felasynnig, an Old Tongue word that doesn’t really translate because it combines both criminality and immorality. Not everything that is immoral is illegal, and not everything that is illegal is immoral, but something that is felasynnig is the worst of both.
I’ve taken every precaution I can to not be seen, but if Evie ever found out I’d changed here in the heart of New York City surrounded by millions of humans, she would have no choice but to condemn me to a Slitung, a flesh tearing.
Still, I’d rather be torn apart as a wolf than to face life trapped in skin.
Shoving my clothes and wallet into my bag, I lie down on the dusty tile. My fading wolf lifts his head, hobbling slowly to his feet.
Wolves have different ways of starting the change. Some roll their shoulders, some arch their backs, some bend deep into their haunches. I stretch both arms in front of me with my palms flat, my wrists extending as far as they can go. Then my other self, my real self, takes over, and I relax into it. Muscles lengthen or contract, and bones do the same, bending in new ways. Organs move. I am blind and deaf as my features rearrange. I am immobilized as my bones and muscles shift. My skin goes numb as the sad coating of hair is replaced by thick fur. Or vice versa.
And unlike the werewolves of fiction, I am completely and utterly helpless.
When the change is over, it takes me a moment before I can bear to look at my front legs, to make sure that they are, in fact, paws and not the hands of my dream. The relief is almost a physical thing.
I tried once before to change in my locked bathroom, but a caged wolf is no kind of wolf at all. This may be a poor substitute for my forest, but in this world, the steel beams are my trees, the tracks are my rivers, the sirens are my birdsong, the distant rumble of trains is my bellowing moose.
And the rats are my prey.
A big rat, nearly as large as Tarzan, scurries in the dark. The big ones make for the best hunting, not just because they have the most flesh on them, but because they have been smart enough to avoid rat poison and are fast enough to avoid trains.
Leaping across the tracks, I chase after him, weaving in and out of the beams and splashing through the fetid puddles. Before he goes somewhere I can’t follow, I jerk forward, clamping onto him and pulling him back out. As he tries to race away, my claws scritch along the ground, banging into an old plastic bucket. I grab his tail and throw him into the air and catch him on the way down. Then I let him escape and take after him again.
It is not a good kill, John, but this is what happens when you domesticate a wolf. You pervert him.
I savor every bit of the chase and every last gout of warm blood and every delicately crunchy bone.
Then I head back to my hole in the cinder block as despondent as always. A slow rat smelling of almond and carbolic crosses my path. I give it wide berth. Poisoned rats won’t kill me, but they do tend to cause bloat.
• • •
“Good run, Mr. Sorensson?” asks the night porter.
“It was fine, Saul. Thanks.”
As I wait for the elevator, Saul starts the floor polisher again and follows my dusty footprints as far as the elevator.
Chapter 7
Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 16 days
Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 16 days
Like the HST office in New York and the one in Washington, the Albany office is based on hierarchies. The large corner offices have tinted plate-glass windows and huge desks of w
ood recovered from old barns or railroad ties. There is usually a large painting of either ragged spots in neutrals or bright scribbles. They are painted to order by a consortium of artists who all started off with big dreams but now make works that are the right size, the right color, and not representational, because representation will always offend somebody.
There are smaller offices and conference rooms arrayed alongside the windows. This is the part of the office that clients see. It is spare and antiseptically clean.
As in New York, the other side of reception is the messy heart of the place, a warren of cubicles for the paralegals, legal assistants, legal secretaries, and more support staff.
Patrick Holding, the head of the Albany office, runs out of his corner office, rolling down his sleeves. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days and offers a thin, sweaty hand that feels like shellfish but smells like cruller mixed with salt and old leather, the scent of fear. Usually, I leave the lobbying side of our business to Maxim, who has long experience in dealing with politicians and has a stronger constitution for it. My sudden appearance has Patrick worried.
I’ve got to wash my hand.
Whoever had to move out of the corner office that I will occupy for the day has removed every trace. It is clean and well lit, and the windows face in the general direction of the Empire State Plaza and the Corning Tower. The office is grimly empty. No one would believe that this was a place that I’d visited often or ever.
I need a coffee cup, some pointless files, a volume of session laws, anything to make it look like I haven’t come up here because of Thea Villalobos. That I haven’t made the three-and-a-half-hour drive because, for the first time in years, I remember what it’s like to be hungry. What it is to want.
As with Halvors, Sorensson & Trianoff in New York, the only thing I’m going to find in this part of the office is a bell jar filled with seashells or a piece of driftwood impaled on a bronze base or distilled water from some Pacific Island. It all reeks of linen fresh room spray.
To make my office look like someone actually uses it requires going to the bullpen.
“A client of mine should be coming in half an hour,” I tell the receptionist. “Make sure she is sent in.”
The bullpen here is just like the one in New York, and the first thing that hits me is the stink of microwave ovens coated with fake butter and coffee makers where the last inch of coffee is constantly burning.
“Steroids,” someone whispers. “S’gotta be. I mean, nobody gets to be that big without—”
I thump around a little and cough. Leonora always told us that we had to make more noise than we do at home so that the dull Offland ears can hear us coming. They still don’t hear and continue right on with their conversation about steroids.
I always hear things I’m not meant to hear. I don’t really care about the speculation about whether I take steroids. It is, after all, preferable to the speculation as to whether I’m a werewolf. It’s just the way the conversation inevitably progresses.
“You know what happens with steroids,” another voice continues. “They make your dick shrivel up like a peanut.”
This time, I cough louder and lean over the top of the cubicle, looking down at a young man in the process of indicating the size of my sex by wiggling the top joint of his little finger against his thumb.
The man’s face immediately turns a shimmering gray, and he begins to scratch at the offending joint as though he’s erasing it. Men who had been standing around him now inch away, their smiles fading. But I don’t see them or hear what they’re saying, because behind them is a picture of a wolf standing in the snow, against a scrim of pine trunks.
It looks exactly like Sarah. It isn’t, of course. It’s a forever wolf, but it’s a female with the same reddish-brown coloring and the same dark-gray saddle, the same pale point on the tip of her tail.
And someone…someone has covered her body with crosshairs.
Fifty points for a head shot.
Thirty for her chest.
Ten for her empty belly.
The cubicle wall crashes on either side of me, and as I step over it, the little humans run and trip, skipping away from the destruction.
NEW YORK:
LET THE HUNT BEGIN!
I cover Sarah’s belly with my hand and then tear down the picture of my sad wolf.
“What the fuck is this?” I shove the picture at the shimmering gray man who is hardly half my size and doesn’t know that I couldn’t give less of a crap about his peanut crack.
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He blubs twice more, a stranded guppy.
“Answer me!” My face is against his, spit hitting his face. The insides of his pants turn dark, and the air stinks of ammonia.
In the suddenly silent bullpen, tiny heads peek around padded half walls and then dodge back down.
Patrick appears, plucking nervously at my sleeve, showing me a foam dart gun. The stink of salt and old leather becomes almost unbearable while he jabbers something incomprehensible about clients.
The dart gun in my hand hits the window, and I stand up straight, looking over the cubicle walls. There are at least four of these huge posters of Sarah, of my brokenhearted wolf, on the walls.
“I want every one of those”—I point to where two guys are busily tearing their own copies down—“and every one of these”—I pick up the crushed remains of the dart gun—“and every one of you in the conference room in three minutes.”
“But…” say several voices, including the thin one at my elbow.
“Anyone who is late is fired.”
Patrick raises his hands and opens his mouth, but I stop him before he can find his voice.
“I represent two-thirds of the partners of this firm, so don’t think for a second that Max can do anything for you.”
Holding the poster to my chest, my teeth tighten around a feral howl building in my throat.
“Mr. Sorensson? Your—”
I ignore the receptionist and slam open the glass door, heading toward the biggest conference room.
Two associates and a handful of paralegals have already claimed the room with their piles of papers and boxes. With a quick jerk, I lift one end of the table, sending the papers and boxes and pencils and tablets scattering to the floor.
“What do you know about this?” I clip the ǣcewulf to the board.
“It’s from the New York State Predator Hunters Association.” An associate who has just filed in with everyone else starts to rattle on quickly. Apologetically. “They’re a small client. We’re helping them find a sponsor in the legislature for a bill delisting wolves,” he yammers on. “Get them off the endangered species—”
“There are no wolves in New York. New York slaughtered its wolves over a century ago.”
“This guy says he was out hunting a couple of months ago and saw some big, white wolf. Wants to make some money as a hunting guide. Maybe aerial…”
One wolf. That’s all it takes for the humans to go apeshit. He keeps talking, but I don’t hear anything else he says. Nothing terrifies us like the planes that sometimes sweep low over the Homelands. The Pack Nunavut was destroyed by hunters in the sky they were powerless to escape.
Why is it that humans are so eager to hunt forever wolves, the only species that ever befriended them?
God, what a mistake that was.
“No one,” I say, taking off my jacket. “No one will sponsor that bill.”
“Actually, I have a senator in Brooklyn who—”
“No one will sponsor that bill, because no one in this office will eat, drink, sleep, or piss until the legislature is locked up.”
So it starts. I have the office manager find out exactly how much we have been paid by the NYSPHA and send a legal secretary on the four-hour drive with a personal check.
Then we get
a color-coded image with the names of 213 state legislators projected on the white board. I want a check mark next to every single name. Assistants and other junior staff take those with a strong record of conservation voting. Patrick starts to protest, his voice shaky until the plaster wall behind him crumbles under my hand and onto his shoulder.
I handle the trickiest ones myself, including the Brooklyn senator who irritably shoots down my politely phrased query about his potential support. I don’t say anything more. Just tell him to give my best to Becca, his wife. And to Amirai, the young man he’s been screwing in the back of his Impala every Thursday for the past eight years.
The handset is suddenly muffled. “Daddy’s on the phone!”
“Damn you to hell,” he says, and then after a long pause during which I don’t say anything, he mumbles a muted “Fine” and hangs up.
I might not much like lobbying. Doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it.
It takes time, but by the end of the afternoon, every name is crossed off. Most were easy. Some saw it as a way of calling in favors; others had to be convinced. In the end, this issue that nobody in the office or the legislature gave a damn about is dead and cremated and its ashes mixed into cement and sunk to the bottom of the Hudson.
When Patrick leaves the conference room, he shakes his head in disbelief over the wasted man-hours and the squandered leverage, but I really don’t give a fuck what the humans think. By the time I am alone again, the light is a low amber rim against the skyline. I lean back against the edge of the table, my legs splayed in front of me.
The place is a mess of coffee cups and ramen and popcorn and pizza. Donuts. A vegetable platter that no one touched. I stare at the floor. I want to tell her, tell Sarah, that it’s going to be okay. That she and Adam will have another chance. That things will get easier, and some day, her Alpha will carry her into the Meeting House for her lying-in and the 9th will celebrate its first live births.
I want to tell my Pack that I love them. That just because I’m not there doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them and working for them.
