A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  Tiberius is too strong, and Thea’s heels drag through the muck and snow. I shake off the pain of my wounded body and run after them.

  “He is many things,” Tiberius says, pulling her harder, “but never human. Around the back.”

  I run beside her so she knows I’m here.

  At the glass french doors at the back of the Boathouse, Tiberius hesitates. The inside doesn’t look like it did at the start of Silver’s lying-in when everything was clean and neatly organized. The cot on the side has been raised so Tiberius can lie level with his mate. There are the packets of protein bars and nuts and high-calorie snacks that he was evidently trying to feed Silver when she was in skin during those last agonizing days.

  A bottle of vanilla Ensure spilled, and with the Iron Moon, no one is around to clean it up. There’s only the exhausted Tiberius and a skeletal silver wolf in the middle of the floor. She is licking at the tiniest excuse for a pup I’ve ever seen. It is stiff and still and clearly dead, but she won’t stop; it’s like a mania has taken hold of her. Tiberius kneels beside her and tries to extricate the pup. Tries to push her to drink water. Three surviving pups wobble against her abdomen, mewling.

  “Leave it, Wildfire. Please, leave it.” The water drips from his hair and his face and his eyes as he pleads with her, but she bares her teeth and keeps licking at the little black dot with her bone-dry tongue.

  Thea stands back, taking in Tiberius, Silver, the pups, and me. She shakes her head, takes a deep breath, then putting her gun into her pocket, hangs her jacket on a hook.

  “Can I take a look at it?” she says to Tiberius.

  “Him. He’s dead. I need Silver—”

  “I worked at a veterinary clinic for a while. I might be able to help.”

  Tiberius bristles. I growl beside Thea, but she just pats the air behind her.

  “Look, I’d love to say that I’m an expert in werewolf neonatology, but I can’t. I did, however, work at a veterinary clinic.” She grabs a clean sweatshirt from a pile of clothes. “Now, is there a suction bulb?”

  “Not werewolves,” Tiberius mutters, but he is already rummaging through medical supplies in the metal drawers.

  Silver looks at Tiberius for one delirious moment. She whimpers when Thea takes the tiny black thing in her hands but doesn’t bite her.

  Thea holds his stiff body with the head slanted down. “Where’s that bulb?”

  As soon as Tiberius hands it to her, Thea squeezes it and slides it into the pup’s mouth, where she carefully releases the pressure. The bulb slucks up something fluid. Thea squirts it onto the floor and then does it again.

  She fits her mouth over his nose and gently blows in. His tiny chest rises. Thea begins to rub him hard, too hard it seems to Silver, who snarls and tries to lift herself up. Tiberius keeps his hand on her, watching Thea with bloodshot eyes.

  Thea turns the pup over, still rubbing briskly, almost like she’s trying to get a fire started.

  “She’s got to drink,” she says, pointing her chin toward Silver.

  “I’ve been telling her that.”

  “When you talk to her…she can understand?”

  “She’s not deaf.”

  She looks at me without stopping the friction of her hands against the pup. “Can he understand too?”

  “Hmm.”

  The pup’s body seems looser now, and Thea kneels down in front of Silver. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she mutters. Then she leans in, speaking stiffly, the way humans do to foreigners or the infirm. “You have to drink,” she says. “If you don’t, they are all going to die.”

  Bleary-eyed with exhaustion, Silver still manages to curl her lip back, revealing her fangs and her irritation at being spoken to like a child. But when Tiberius holds the water to her, the thin wolf drinks.

  I pace back and forth, helpless. Shaking the sticky liquid that smells like beaver castor from my paws. Talk about useless. All these human supplements are poison to a wolf. Usually, Silver’s mate would hunt for her, but Tiberius is pathetic at hunting anything except humans…

  With a quick bow of my head, I rub my muzzle against Silver’s thin head, marking her, making her my responsibility, and sprint away.

  The Pack does not have doors with knobs. The Pack has doors with levers so no matter what form we find ourselves in, we will not be trapped inside.

  Outside, the Pack has dispersed. They’re all out running or hunting except for two wolves that Evie has set to guard the Boathouse. They ignore me. Clearly, their concern is the human with the gun.

  The overcast sky has opened up, and the retreating edge of the clouds is silvered by moonlight as it draws back like a curtain from a screen of a million stars.

  It’s like what will happen in the Homelands soon. The snow and ice will retreat like a curtain from a screen of trillium and spring beauty and leatherwood and bloodroot and vireos and warblers and kinglets and goldeneyes and grebes.

  Peepers.

  None of it is exotic or rare, but it is as much a part of me as my blood and bone. There is a reason that exiles always end up dead in a puddle of blood or vomit, or both.

  Because this is my home, I know that the best place to look for deer after the rain is the hemlock grove overshadowed by huge white pines. The soil is acid, so nothing much grows up from the thick carpet of needles. It is less chaotic here and more peaceful, and deer huddle here for protection when the rain is fierce and the hardwoods are bare. Or when they are old and sick and done. An old bull bedded down during the storm is still struggling to get up when I come upon him. It is a good death, and he does not suffer.

  Two juvenile wolves come almost immediately when I announce a fresh kill but stand back respectfully, waiting for me to carve out the big, nutritious liver. As soon as I go, they snarl and fight and gorge.

  I can’t see Thea when I return to the Boathouse—the chair is turned with its back toward the dock and the french doors. Silver is lying where I left her, her eyes closed, three pups trembling at her belly. Tiberius has his face buried in his big hands. Having three survive is miracle enough, but I feel a deep sadness for the death of that little black dot everyone was trying so hard to save.

  Then the Shifter moves his head side to side, and a skinny little tail pops up like a flag above his hands. The dot isn’t dead. He’s just tiny and blends into his father’s cropped black beard. Once Tiberius has finished marking him, he nestles the dot next to his littermates at Silver’s abdomen.

  As soon as I open the door, the chair turns around. Thea is dwarfed in this high-backed seat meant to accommodate a Pack doctor. Her mouth is open like she was going to say something, but whatever it is freezes on her lips. She looks away from me and my muzzle filled with dripping-fresh organ meat.

  The deer liver drops to the floor with a squelchy plop. I don’t try to disguise it, because nothing I do now is going to make me seem like feasible boyfriend material.

  Silver’s nose twitches and her eyes flutter open. Then Tiberius pushes it closer and she lunges at it, beyond caring that the pups are complaining.

  “Elijah?”

  I stop without facing her so she will know I hear her, but she won’t have to look at the bloody gobs on my fur.

  “I am trying,” she says.

  Chapter 36

  And I leave.

  At the spruce flats, I run for the bull carcass, in case there’s still a little meat on it, though wolves eat everything and quickly, so I don’t hold out much hope.

  A coyote call nearby means that there’s another kill with some meat on it. More coyotes gather, going silent as I pass them in the woods.

  Near a tiny stream that is only just forming from winter melt, a sable wolf with a dark saddle limps along, looking for where the little trickle of water may have pooled enough for a drink.

  Min schildere. Lada mec.

>   My shielder. Forgive me.

  Celia’s hackles are up, an instinct so she’ll look like she’s not weak, though the smell of blood advertises her coming death on the wind. Coyotes are opportunistic: they scavenge what’s left of our kills and will pick off an unprotected pup, but there is a reason we call them wulfbyrgenna. Wolf tombs.

  Celia licks at the blood dripping from her nose. We are strong, and most other times of the month, Tristan could have saved her. But an injury this bad, so close to the Iron Moon, is almost always fatal. Because when the change comes, her wound will be pulled and stretched and reopened and torn. And even if there was someone who could stitch her back up, it would all come unraveled again at the end, when she takes on skin.

  Still, if there’s nothing I can do to keep Celia alive, she will not die alone, ripped apart by carrion eaters. I snap at them, and the coyotes back away, settling in a circle just out of reach.

  There is the occasional tussle and bark, letting us know that they are still here, but mostly they are patient. I mark Celia again, then lick the wound that will not heal.

  When we were little, we slept piled one on top of one another, a belching, yawning, tumbling, complaining hillock of fur. Despite all the belching, yawning, and tumbling and complaining, there was a contentment that we’ll never know again. I curl my body around hers, trying to pull her back to that hillock, trying to give her as much of that warmth and contentment as a dying wolf can have.

  Her lungs are filling with blood. She coughs, but she can’t clear them. Her breathing changes, and she begins to pant in short uneven gasps. Celia turns to me, her eyes pleading, then she lifts her chin toward the stars, revealing the long, vulnerable column of her throat, asking me for this final service as her shielder.

  Asking me for a better death than slowly drowning in her own blood.

  I am an Alpha and her shielder, and I don’t hesitate to put my jaws on either side of her throat. It’s what we do when we can’t speak, and it means trust me. It means I see you at your most vulnerable.

  With one powerful bite, I tear through her neck. She fights, just because we are wolves and we fight to the last, but her claws barely scrape across my hide. Then she coughs and gags and shivers and stops. I hold on tight, until I am sure that the last pulse of her blood and the last beat of her heart are over.

  Even then, I can’t leave her. Instinct pulls me to clean her fur and debride her and care for her even though her body is already cooling.

  When I am done, I tell the Pack what we have lost. My howl starts low, then floats up, cracking at the middle before falling away in a muddled moan. Almost immediately, wolves respond, mourning with me the loss of one of us. The lessening of the wild in a world that already has so little of it.

  I bolt, running as hard as I can, trying to get away before the inevitable. But the coyotes were close, and they call to one another immediately. I am not far enough away before they fall on her body, snarling.

  At an edge of Home Pond, I hit the dark water that has been freed by the trickling streams heading down from the High Pines. The eroded edges break away as I let myself sink until the stiff bristles of deer blood and wolf blood dissolve from my fur.

  In the dark and cold, with my lungs starting to burn, the water closes over me like everything I have lost: Celia and Thea and John and Nils and the Great North, because the best I can hope for is exile. I sink down, down, down until the cold outside and the burning inside meet and I feel nothing.

  The moon shines through the black waters, and just like that last time at Thea’s mountain, the moon speaks to me with Gran Sigeburg’s impatient voice. What are you doing down there? Waiting for death like a human? Pffft, she barks dismissively. Wolves don’t die like that.

  Wolves die hunting.

  My legs churn frantically, pushing up through the slush just before my final breath gives out. Torquing my body this way and that, I shake off spray after spray of dark water and gray ice. Every few yards, I do it again so that by the time I get back to the Boathouse, my coat is cold but mostly dry.

  I ignore the two new guards and lie down by the front door. Silver is sleeping. The pups are too, even the tiny black dot.

  Except for a dark stain near sleeping Silver, there is no trace of the deer liver.

  The Boathouse is not winterized, and enough sound leaks out. Thea is still sitting in that big chair once occupied by Alex, but now she is talking to Tiberius.

  The Shifter doesn’t know a lot, but what he knows, he has learned from Silver, who was always Gran Sigeburg’s favorite, long after she was no longer Deemer.

  Victor has been Deemer for maybe twenty years, and all the younger echelons have learned the law from him. I learned from Gran Sigeburg, who taught law but always in the context of our legends. For Victor, those legends are pointless fiction, but for Sigeburg, those stories were what gave flesh to the bones of our law.

  “You cannot understand the law,” she said, “unless you enter the minds that created it. Stories are the keys that give you entrance.”

  So Tiberius tells Thea stories. He tells her how millennia ago, humans accepted our miraculous transformation in the way that they accepted that a caterpillar could turn into a butterfly or a tadpole could turn into a frog or an egg could turn into a bird.

  It worked well enough, until humans decided they needed a god with a plan, and that god and that plan required them to codify their thinking, to divide the world into good and not good. Things that served them were good. Even things that were innocuous—birds and butterflies and frogs—were acceptable components of this benevolent god’s plan.

  But things that did not serve them—anything wild or inedible—were not. Our transformation was the worst of both, and they could not imagine a god who would allow a man to turn into something as untamed as a wolf. Monstrum, Gran Sigeburg said, originally meant a disruption in the natural order, a sign of divine displeasure.

  Something that did not fit the plan. Something wild. Something evil.

  That’s when we became monsters, moving from the heath to the forests, hiding in the shadows.

  The emaciated runt sighs under the weight of Tiberius’s hand.

  “I look forward to meeting Silver,” Thea says. “You know, when she’s…herself again.”

  Tiberius blinks twice and rubs the bridge of his nose.

  “She is herself now. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is something they have to go through to become human again. This is who Silver is. This is her truest form.

  “That”—he points through the french doors directly at me—“is who Elijah really is.”

  He yawns. “There’s food in the refrigerator. The bathroom is through that door. You’ll be safe here. No wolf would ever disrupt a lying-in. Now, I’m going to change for bed.”

  Then Tiberius pulls off his long-sleeved T-shirt and, in one move, slides off his sweats and boxers.

  Thea turns her head, her eyes searching every whorl of the wood-paneled wall rather than look at the huge, scarred, and very naked man lying on the floor.

  I don’t think she completely grasped what he meant by “change for bed.”

  Arching his back, Tiberius triggers his shift. Thea’s eyes stay glued to the wall, her fingers touching the rough texture of the planking. At least in the beginning. But as the lengthy process continues with its stretchings and grindings and twangings, she shoots the occasional glance his way: How much longer is he going to be? Her finger taps slowly on the arm of the chair, and she cocks her head to the side as if deciding something. Finally, she swivels around, coming to a stop facing Tiberius writhing on the floor, his eyes moving around in his face, his ears changing and migrating to the top of his skull, his mouth widening until his fangs are surrounded by the frilled lips.

  His hips and shoulders constrict, his chest deepens, his feet and shins narrow—and this is all before the
fur comes.

  When he is done, the huge, black wolf circles around and around until he lies down, curled like a closing parenthesis in front of his mate and the four pups.

  Thea sits staring at the floor, her elbows on her knees. Then, with a sigh, she pushes herself up, reaching for her coat. As soon as she opens the big glass doors, one of the guard wolves growls. I snap at the wolf over my shoulder, and she barks back but doesn’t come any closer.

  “Elijah?” Thea asks, peering toward the three of us standing at attention on the dock. It’s not her fault, I tell myself. It’s not her fault that she can’t distinguish the wolf who loves her, who would do anything to feel the still surety at her core, from two utterly random females who just happen to be on rotation.

  I follow her to one of the Adirondack chairs at the end of the dock. Holding her sleeve down over her hand, she sweeps away the sludgy remains of snow and rain and folds herself up, her thighs against her chest, her arms around her shins and her cheek on her knees. She stares over Home Pond. The moon picks out the shards of snow floating across like clouds along the water.

  “It’s been,” she says, holding herself close, “a long day.”

  My only response is a chuffed breath into the cool night. Then I sink to the weathered wood, my head on my paws.

  • • •

  Over the next two days, I hunt for Silver, Thea uses the skills she learned at “the clinic,” and Tiberius tries to help her understand what we are and what we aren’t.

  But he doesn’t tell her the only thing I need him to. He doesn’t tell her to run. He doesn’t tell her to move quietly and downwind, and when the Pack discovers her, as it will, she needs to start firing. It’s a long shot and many wolves will die, but a westend does not simply walk out of the Homelands.

  Thea watches Tiberius caress Silver’s thin body through the closed window. “I just can’t do it. I can’t pet you or scratch behind your ears,” she says to me, returning to her seat at the end of the dock.