A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

Someone knocks on the glass wall of the conference room and points toward the door. Toward Thea who is standing there, wearing a dark-olive button-down shirt that drapes, soft and yielding, over her tight curves. Black jeans. Backpack slung across one shoulder. Her anorak over her other arm.

  I stare at her for a minute. I had forgotten. The first woman in a long time that I didn’t want to forget, but I did.

  “Ms. Villalobos, I—”

  “Thea.”

  “Thea. I don’t know what to say. Except I lost track of time.” I look at my watch for the first time since I went into the bullpen. “You…you weren’t here the whole day, were you?”

  “More or less. Got drinkable coffee for some of the associates a couple of hours ago.”

  Patting my jacket pocket, I extract my tie. “Jesus, I’m so sorry—”

  “For what? I’d taken the day off.”

  “But to waste it hanging around here—”

  “It wasn’t a waste.” She leans against the table just a few inches away. “How often do you get to see someone with real power move heaven and hell for something they care about?”

  Sliding the tie back and forth a couple of times until I like where it sits on my neck, I tie the knot with a practiced hand.

  “Don’t get carried away. This is just what HST does. Partly anyway. We’re lobbyists.” I look at my reflection in the window. “It’s how we make money.”

  “Really? You make money by firing clients and threatening lawmakers until you’ve undone everything the client wanted? If wolves had any clout or money, I’d say you were working for them.”

  In the reflection of the window, I tweak the dimple under my half Windsor. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. This conversation is creeping uncomfortably close to the truth. I need to get it back on script. I roll down my sleeves, check the fold of the cuffs, and pull the chain cuff links from my shirt pocket.

  “Look, let me make this up to you.” I thread one platinum cuff link through the left cuff. “There’s a restaurant nearby.” I thread the other platinum chain through my right cuff. “A chef from the City. Downstaters swear by it.”

  “Well.” Her voice is suddenly cooler. “That’s certainly high praise.”

  I pull on my jacket, making sure the seams are seated snugly on my shoulders. “Good. Then let me get my coat.”

  “I was being facetious. There’s pizza in the staff room. Not to mention a completely untouched vegetable platter here.” She picks up a green pepper slice. “Okay, so not completely untouched.”

  “Please, Thea, I’m not going to let you eat cold pizza. I forgot our appointment. And no man should ever forget you.” I hold her gaze for two fractions of a second over the norm, and then I lean in to sweep her hair back from her face. “Your skin is so soft.” I sigh, making sure that my breath caresses her ear. “You should never wear anything but silk.”

  She bites into the green pepper. “And there he is again.”

  I turn quickly to the glass wall looking onto the hallway to see which subordinate is getting in the way of my seduction. “Who?”

  “Just a pompous ass. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Did someone insult you? Did—”

  “Like I said, don’t worry about it.”

  I pull my shirtsleeves one last time so they emerge just a centimeter from my jacket sleeves. “I’ll get my coat and meet you in reception.”

  Ten minutes later, standing alone in the lobby, I look at my watch. The receptionist is packing up her bag, getting ready to go. I ask if she saw my client.

  “Tall woman?”

  I nod.

  “Long, black hair?”

  I nod again, faster.

  “Carrying a pizza?”

  Chapter 8

  A runner in iridescent, beaded, dove satin digs into my skin while I peel off my socks in the “Royal Suite” that the office manager at HST arranged for me. Why would a hotel in Albany have a Royal Suite? Everything is tasteful gray: ash walls, graphite headboard, pearl bedspread, gunmetal rug with a vaguely oriental pattern.

  I’d asked specifically for a California king, because I was sure I’d need it.

  Pack courtship is a very straightforward affair. It starts with a deep breath to see if a wolf is receptive. If not, the courtship is over. If yes, the next step depends on whether said wolf has a bedfellow or merely a shielder. If there is no bedfellow, then the female presents, the male covers, and everyone hopes for the best.

  If there is a bedfellow, then you must fight. Lose, and the courtship is over. Win, and the female presents, the male covers, and everyone hopes for the best.

  No one messes around with mated wolves.

  I think about the pretty young woman with the short gauze shift over a tight, black underdress. She smiled at me as I walked past, making it clear she was receptive, but just the thought of her naked body beneath mine makes the traitor in my pants sag glumly.

  I’ve never really worried about whether a human has someone already. Technically, Alana has Luca, not that it makes any difference to me. Why should it bother me if Thea has someone else? Why should I care if she’s eating my cold pizza with him? If she’s tossing the box aside and kicking off her mud-covered boots and sliding out of her jeans, and he’s grasping her ass like a Japanese pear, lifting her above his…

  And of course, now, now, my balls tighten and my cock hardens into a lead pipe. I drag myself wearily into the shower. Elijah Sorensson with the lead pipe in the bathroom. I turn on the water and bend my left arm against the wall, my right hand fisted, trying to remember when there was pleasure, not just release.

  When it’s over, I collapse onto the bed covered by nothing but a damp towel and that itchy, jeweled runner over my feet.

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when I wake bolt upright from another dream, the panic thudding in my ears, my arms aching. My breath comes in broken gasps, and I am drenched in sweat.

  My wrists feel like they’re about to break.

  It was so real, this dream. I was trying to change. But no matter how hard I pushed and stretched, all I could see were my manicured and clean hands with their masculine but not bestial smattering of hair emerging from the perfectly starched cuffs: French, with cuff links made of platinum chains. I must have been trying to change even in my sleep, or my wrists wouldn’t hurt so much.

  But nothing happened. What if my wild is dead, and I’m trapped in skin?

  Pulling the still-damp towel around my waist, I look through the plate-glass windows over the buildings of Albany to the black strand of the Hudson. If I follow it south, it will take me back to New York.

  North, the Hudson will take me through many twists and turns to Lake Tear of the Clouds on the southwest slope of Mount Marcy. On a clear day, you can see Mount Marcy from the mountains of home. It would take me only a few hours to get there, and then I could change and run and hunt. My heart aches for it—my body too—but this is not the time to talk to Evie. I have nothing to say until I officially announce my challenge.

  • • •

  There’s an Alpha way of saying things. It’s not rude, just firm, as though the outcome is already decided. Usually backed with that slight tone of menace that makes compliance seem mandatory.

  And then there’s the money, of course.

  The pimply valet slides another twenty into his pocket and lets me into the garage so I can retrieve my Land Rover. I can live with having some teenager shrug off my eccentricity, but I cannot abide the thought of driving for hours with the stench of human in my car.

  I know all the routes through the underpopulated Upstate. Most of them, at least. After all, I’ve made the drive up and back once a month for the better part of three decades. And when the usual route through Gurn Spring, Gansevoort, and Glens Falls got too dull, I took the route that skirts Lake Desola
tion before turning north to Hope.

  Or west to Arietta.

  The car slews on the damp asphalt. At the off-ramp, I find a small, boarded-up white building on a patch of flat snow. Maybe it was a gas station years ago. Or maybe with a little paint, it becomes a farm stand, servicing summer tourists.

  It takes me a second to find the video Liebling took. After I key in the GPS coordinates, my phone calculates directions to Liebling’s property. I’m guessing that Thea lives somewhere nearby, because how far would she walk with only a cable-knit sweater in an Adirondack winter?

  In the empty darkness, I race down two-lane roads, then travel slower down country lanes, and bump as far as I can along rough, stone-strewn paths, until I dead-end near a farmhouse. No humans have lived there for a long time—that much I can tell, even in skin. Still, someone must have mowed here last fall, and that’s enough humanity to make me nervous.

  Tucked behind the farmhouse, my car gets colder and colder, my hands tight on the wheel, my eyes on the thin, waning crescent above the forested hills.

  Then I take off my seat belt.

  Chapter 9

  On the floor of the passenger seat, I set my shoes with the socks carefully tucked into each. I drape my jacket across the back of the passenger seat with cuff links and tie inside the pockets. Shirt glowing brightly over the top. Then I fold my pants on top of my shoes. My boxer briefs come last, lying on top of my pants.

  The cold is a relief on my naked body. The shivering has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with my fear that I will stretch out my wrists and nothing will happen. What happens if my wolf has been so poisoned that he can no longer struggle up?

  What is the point of living, if all you are is human?

  Sitting on the cold damp ground, I awkwardly hold my wrists out in front of me. Nothing happens. I press harder, pushing toward the dark hills, waiting for the faint, buzzing electricity of my wild to take over. I look back to the road, in case someone comes.

  I try again. In the dim light, all I can see are my manicured and clean hands with their masculine but not bestial smattering of hair.

  My wild has to be all right, doesn’t he? The universe can’t be that pathetic. It couldn’t allow the holiest thing about me to die with no more warning than a dream about French cuffs.

  Could it?

  I try again and again. I try different things—twisting my shoulders and tightening my haunches—but nothing lights the spark. In the back of my mind, I keep worrying that the human who mowed this land in the autumn will come back and find me sitting naked on the damp ground and ask what I’m doing.

  Yoga, I suppose.

  The moon’s path hovers over the prickly heights of the pine trees on the ridge above me. It shines down expectantly.

  Well? she asks.

  Well, what? I’m trying as hard as I can. But suppose a human comes and sees me mid-change. What then?

  Strangely enough, the moon speaks to me with Gran Sigeburg’s impatient voice. Why do you worry so much about humans? she says in that same snappish tone. They are like blackfly, an irritation whose season the earth will survive. Must survive. You are something else. You are wild. The wild and the earth are intertwined, one and eternal.

  This time, I lay myself belly down, stretching out my arms and legs so that more of my skin touches the damp ground, so that my face is buried in it, so that the cool breeze caresses my back and shoulders, so that my fingers can dig into the muck, so that I feel the heartbeat throbbing deep in the soil. My consciousness grows beyond the me of this poor form, and I am bombarded by the smell of moldering autumn cuttings, the scrabbling of small claws on rough bark, and my fingers reach deep into the cold where life waits patiently to begin again.

  This time, when I press the heels of my palms out, power rushes in. My body coils and my skin tingles and my head tilts back as the muscles contract and lengthen. My mouth waters, and my tongue stretches out across teeth that grow and thin from my jaw. As my eyes and ears and throat contort, I am blind and deaf and speechless and immobile.

  Eventually, consciousness, real consciousness enters into me. The cold is no longer cold. The dark is no longer dark, and the emptiness is full. I remember that I am a link in the chain of the world.

  Pack used to like open spaces, back when we earned the name heath-wanderers, before we realized that open spaces meant a clear shot. Now we really prefer the shadowy and protective embrace of the woods. But that ancestral longing to race at full speed is still there, and I can’t help but charge across the shaved bowl of grass, jumping into the air and twisting mid-leap only to twist again, and coming back on legs that are already churning at the grass.

  I run back and forth across this bit of land until a distant car horn pulls me to my senses and I sprint for the forest.

  The woods here are not like the Homelands. We have been expanding out from the plot of land we bought in 1668, and the whole of our territory is marked in the way of wolves. It may look trackless to humans, but to us, it is a rich web of greetings and warnings and signposts.

  The paths through this forest smell like polyurethane and steel-toed boots and Cheetos. No wolf has been here for over a hundred years, and the things that have thrived in their absence have lost all sense of perspective.

  In an attempt to restore some perspective, I eat two of them.

  Loping back and forth through the woods, I search for Thea’s scent until I find an unmarked track with fresh tire prints. At the end is a tiny cabin, maybe an old fire watch cabin, though there’s no lookout tower nearby.

  Thea’s scent calls to me, unlike the two other scents here. One belongs to a man who uses her front door and smells like sex. The other belongs to one who circles her cabin but never goes in.

  Thea is not here. Her car is, but the engine is cold. She left recently on foot, and her tracks lead around the back—past the cistern and the propane tank and the tarp-covered compost and several cords of firewood—into the trees. I do not smell the circling man, the man who doesn’t use the front door, here.

  I follow her for a mile or so until the path hits a trail and the trail hits a trailhead. There are people there with trucks and lights too bright for my eyes. Guns. It’s a staging ground. A lot of people wearing acid-yellow jerseys saying CASART: Central Adirondacks Search and Rescue Team. I sniff the air for Thea. She was here, but she isn’t anymore, so I trace a wide circle until I find her tracks again, but this time, she’s not alone. Now she is with the man who enters through the front door.

  “Do we really have to talk about this now?” she says.

  “Well, when is going to be a good time?”

  Thea says nothing. He’s a bulky man, this front-door man in the sheriff’s T-shirt. From the smell of things, he is a moderate drinker and an immoderate consumer of saturated fats.

  “Thea,” he says, a plea in his voice. THEEE-ah. “We have a good thing here.”

  “I know we do. I just don’t understand why you want to change it.”

  “Not change it. Grow it. I’m not like Lee. I’m not going to try to get you to move to town with me. But there are things we could do to make your cabin more…just more. Put in a TV and a sofa? That’d be nice, right? A real refrigerator. You’ve got to have a refrigerator. I mean, you can’t live like this forever.”

  She doesn’t respond at first. Just pulls tight on the straps of her backpack.

  There’s a hoarse voice echoing up ahead. It belongs to a man, human and fiercely frightened. But neither Thea nor Front-Door Man can hear.

  “I’ve been through this before. You want more, but what you want more of, I don’t have. You already want me to go out more. You want me to see people, to entertain and be an audience, and I’m not good at that. Any of it.”

  Why can’t they hurry up? This man is screaming. He’s so close and so…unwell.

  And who is
this Timmy he keeps yelling for?

  “You know…” He pretends to laugh. Ha-ha. You won’t believe this. “Lee said you were a sociopath. Hold up, babe. I’ve got a stone—ow—right at my heel.”

  Thea waits patiently while Front-Door Man holds on to her arm and digs around with his finger. “Got it,” he says, pulling his low boot back up.

  “A sociopath lacks a conscience. I didn’t go to his nephew’s christening, and he thinks I don’t have a conscience? He didn’t want to go either, but the difference between us is he did it and fumed for weeks after. Look, I’ve never made a secret of it. I like to be alone. I need to be alone. I like you, but—” She stops suddenly. “Shh.”

  “‘I like you.’ I like you? We’ve been together for a year, and all I get is—”

  “Doug,” she snaps. “Just listen.”

  Doug listens and finally—finally—hears. I chuff out a long breath, because the man was driving me nuts, all that screaming for Timmy. They move faster but still cautious over the rough terrain, calling out. The owner of the desperate voice holds his forearm up to his eyes, shielding himself from the bright lights.

  “Are you the police? Have you seen Timmy?” he asks. His voice is hoarse from screaming. “Have you seen my son?”

  “Mr. Fanning?” Doug holds out his hand. “Doug Glenn, sheriff’s department. Your son’s fine. He’s waiting for you at the trailhead.”

  “Oh, thank you, God,” the man says, his voice shivering. “Thank you, God.” He is too lightly dressed for a human in this time when the woods are trying to decide between winter and spring. Between the two of them, winter always wins.

  “I don’t know what happened, but he wandered off. He’s never wandered off before.”

  Doug radios the staging ground to tell them they’ve found Mr. Fanning, while Thea quietly unhitches her backpack. She gives him a bottle of water, shakes out a down jacket wrapped tight in a little bag, hands him gloves, a hat. Then helps him put on a headlamp.

  She offers him a bar of something, but he pushes it away.