by Maria Vale
After pulling on the jacket to cover as much of his body as possible, I curl around him, giving him the warmth of my body.
The moon shines down on the Clearing. This is a place for a Pack, not for a single wolf on her own, and it feels exposed and huge and empty. Not to mention damp.
A coyote creeps closer, picked out by the moon. I jump up, straddling the body with my shoulders hunched and my fur bristling so I look larger. I growl in the way John would—or Tara or Evie or Solveig or any of dominant wolves would—and hope.
The coyote hesitates and then retreats. I settle back, covering more of this man’s big body with my smaller one. As I drop my head to his broad chest, a warm sigh ripples through my fur.
I wish the loon would shut up.
Chapter 3
The dull, steady pressure against my cheeks wakes me at the same time as the yellowthroat’s high, insistent call. Widdiddy, widdiddy, widdiddy, wid. That pressure is the first sign that the Iron Moon is finished with me. My upper arm stretches and the muscles at my shoulder blades tighten, broadening my chest. As I shake out my hands, the metacarpals shrink and the forearm lengthens and the fur disappears, sucked back in, until nothing is left but a pale, almost-invisible dusting. A few loose silver hairs dance away in the breeze.
The hip with the tendon that is too short pops back into place. It hurts at first, but as I walk the Clearing, the last remnants of pain and numbness subside, and my leg moves freely again.
Despite the pain and the bum leg, no one loves being changed more than I do. I love the freedom and the crush of sounds and smells. I love the close and quiet connection to my Pack. I love the stillness of the cold Adirondack night constrained by nothing but my own fur.
I’d change back to wolf right now, if I wasn’t in such desperate need of fingers and a voice. I feel the heat emanating from the Shifter and poke around the wound. Too much of the gash is clotted by the material of his jacket, and peeling it off will reopen the wound. But still, I can’t feel new bleeding.
I need saline. And bandages and suture and antibiotic. Probably lidocaine, because humans are cowards, and Tristan says the bigger they are, the louder they scream when they see a needle. I need blankets and clothes.
“Hey. You,” I whisper.
A short breath.
“Hey! Wake up.”
One eye opens slightly, then the other.
“Runt?” he croaks and then, “Water.”
Of course he would need water. I pat at my naked hips like I might magically find a pocket with water in it. It’ll take me at least an hour to make the run to Home Pond and back, and that’s too long.
His jacket tasted like plastic and is probably waterproof. I start to pull at a sleeve; since much of the front is shredded, I just need to tear hard at the back. Holding the neck still, I continue the rip along the sleeve.
“Whatyoudoon?” he slurs, trying to move my hand.
“Getting you some water.”
He protests weakly.
“I’ll be back in a second.”
Clear Pond is big and smooth and fed by innumerable springs. Stretching out on the overhanging rock, I fill the sleeve with the clear water away from the weedy edges. It won’t hold much, but it’s the best I can do. As soon as I siphon the few ounces left into the Shifter’s cracked lips, he passes out again.
I know I have to move fast, and moving fast requires reversing the whole process I went through earlier. Taking back the pain that will shoot through my hip and leg, because even a three-legged wolf is faster than a human.
Heading from Clear Pond toward the mountains, away from the low-lying damp, I take the shortcut up through the tangled forests of young spruce and fir and paper birch. The early autumn sun is swept before dark clouds, and one of the frequent short rains starts in with its thick drops that make the bald hardpan slippery. I skitter down until I reach the mix of maple and beech behind Home Pond.
Long time ago, before the Pack was lulled into a false sense of security, an earlier generation dug a long tunnel that led from the basement of the Great Hall into the forest. In case of emergency. Gran Sigeburg told me about it, as she rambled on about a long-ago party thrown by her echelon and how all the juveniles escaped from the Alpha’s fury through the tunnel. I think the moral of her story was supposed to be that you can never escape a furious Alpha, but the tunnel was the part that stuck.
I’d found the end of the tunnel in the root cellar, but the other end was blocked. I scratched through the ferns and duff until I found it and came back with hands and an ax and hacked away the spruce root that had grown over it. Like all children, I liked the idea of sneaking and used the tunnel from time to time to get in and out of the Great Hall. Then I got older and more persnickety about spiders, and since nobody really cared where I was or when, I figured I might as well just use the damn door.
There were two spruces: one big one and a small one. If you crouch down low like I am now, the tip of Whiteface is centered between them. I scratch around in the forest litter until I feel the hollow scrape of wood.
I didn’t remember the space was so narrow, but I was smaller then and perhaps the taproots that broke through the tunnel roof were a little smaller as well. As soon as I get to the cellar, I squeeze through the light trapdoor and lay myself down, rolling my shoulders and letting the change twist through my body once more.
The doors to the storerooms in the basement are close together in the narrow hallway. As soon as I open the broad wooden door of dry storage, I hear the hum of the dehumidifiers. The open metal shelves are filled with carefully marked bins of clothes. Popping open one of the smallest ones, I find a pair of athletic pants, a Henley, and a hoodie for myself. The Shifter is huge, but so are my people. In one of the several boxes marked XXXL (and Tall), I find a pair of sweatpants, a Big & Tall flannel shirt, a bright-red sweatshirt, and a bulky anorak. Not stylish and not much, but it’ll have to do because the clothes already take up more than half of the big backpack.
Dried apples, ground corn, matches, miso, protein bars, lentils, hazelnuts. Then cooking equipment, a collapsible water carrier, a tarp. I also nab the single bedroll, a sleeping bag, and the pop-up tent the pups use when they play Human.
How do they do it? The humans, I mean. I lasted about five minutes inside the nylon sleeping bag, surrounded by that shell of polyester and silicone, before I bolted out, falling to the grass, my feet already lengthening.
Before I leave the basement, I pull the hoodie tight around my head to hide my telltale hair. I am a silver. Silvers aren’t common, but we aren’t rare either. It just means a wolf with light underfur and pale gray fur on top. In skin, their hair tends to be dark blond or light brown.
When I’m wild, one tendon stays too tight and cripples me. When I take on skin, my hair stays silver. Just so I never forget who and what I really am.
Gran Tito is up early as usual. His nose has started to fail, but I still steer clear of him as I make my way to the med station behind John’s office. Two hospital beds with bedside monitors, ventilators, a freestanding anesthesia system, ultrasound. Mobile storage units are loaded with drugs and first aid necessities. We’re strong and resistant to illness and heal quickly, but if we get injured, we can’t go to the hospital. Everything about us—our lung function, blood composition, urinalysis, resting heart rate, everything—screams alien.
Two big bottles of saline wash, gauze, erythromycin, absorbable suture, lidocaine. Electrolytes.
Someone has started the coffeemaker, which means the Pack will be up soon. Moving carefully out the front door of the Great Hall, I sling the backpack on and make a headlong rush deeper into the trees.
By the time the door closes, Home Pond is behind me.
I’ve never walked this far in my skin. I’m slow on the path and even slower when I leave it, and at least one of my two feet snags on every bush and root and r
ock and fallen tree. At Clear Pond, I heave myself into the water, panting like a hunted elk before filling up the water carrier.
The Shifter doesn’t wake up easily, even when the saline sluices over his torso and his jacket. I give him water and wait until I’m sure he’s awake to give him a tablet the size of a water bug. I add electrolytes to the rest of the water because if he gets the heaves, he’ll vomit up the antibiotic.
I cut away at the gore-glued jacket, pouring on more saline and letting it soak, while I wash my hands with chemical cleanser and pull on the gloves.
“You the bitch from last night?” he croaks.
The jacket is still sticking, so I drench it with more saline.
“I said, you the—”
What he says next silences the birds for miles. He curls into a fetal position, his teeth grinding audibly.
The torn and bloody remnants of the jacket hang slack in my hand. Wow. What happened to you? Because ripping away the remains of the jacket has exposed not only the explosion of claw marks underneath, but also the vestiges of a whole lot of other savaging. He’s got neat slices, like knife cuts, on one forearm. Three small craters at his left shoulder. I’m guessing a “hunting accident” like Sofia’s “hunting accident” from twenty moons ago, when a hunter shot her twice. It was no accident, but we continue with the fiction because the pups already have so many nightmares about humans.
But the scariest marks? They’re claw-made. Most Pack have scars of some sort, though John has asked that we avoid muzzles during fights, because gouged eyes and clawed cheeks make potential Offland employers nervous.
Still, our scars are not like this. They’re not like this tattered collar at the base of his throat. One of the tears stretches all the way through his nipple.
The worst thing is I can tell they are old and he isn’t.
“What…what wolf would do that to a child?” It’s no more than a voiceless whisper to myself. He shouldn’t have heard, but I think he may have.
“Do me the favor of losing the tragic face, runt.” His voice isn’t angry, just brusque and cold and quiet.
“Turn over,” I say and start to pour chemical cleanser into his wound. “I will not answer to ‘runt’ or ‘cur’ or ‘dog’ or ‘bitch.’ Now, if you feel like playing nice, I can give you a local. If you don’t, that’s fine too, and I’ll stitch you up raw. I’ll warn you, though: I’ve helped doctors do this, but it’ll be my first time doing it myself.”
He licks his cracked, dry lips and with one hand gestures toward the wrapped lidocaine syringe I hold in my hand. I inject it in a circle around the wound.
“You were really lucky.”
“This is lucky?”
“Well, what I mean is, something like this? There’s always gut damage. But not here. There was some hemorrhaging, but that’s already stopped.”
“I heal quickly,” he says, craning his neck to watch me cut the flat plastic container holding the suture and the needle. Starting with the muscle, I set the clamp. He lies back down and stares at me. I’m not used to being noticed, and it makes me uncomfortable. It’s one of the perks of being a subordinate wolf. As long as you do your work and don’t get in the way, nobody pays attention. Not like the dominant ranks, where someone’s always watching to see if you’re getting sloppy or slack or stupid and it might be the right time to take you down.
Hard to tell what he’s thinking. Leonora, who teaches human behavior, says humans rely on words more than “nonverbal cues,” but that we should still be careful because what humans say isn’t always what they mean. Humans convey disapproval in many ways, she says. Unfortunately, none of them are as clear and expressive as carnassials slicing through your calf.
“Can we start over?” he finally says. “What’s your name?”
“Sil,” I say, holding the skin up with the clamp for a new anchor knot. “You can call me Sil.”
“Sill? Like windowsill?”
“No, Sil like Silver.”
His hand moves up to a silver strand that worked its way loose from the messy knot at the back of my head. He has long, strong fingers, smooth dark skin, and kempt nails. Not like my own rough, pale hands crisscrossed with scars from downed hawthorn branches and weasels that didn’t want to be eaten.
“It’s short for Quicksilver. It was meant as a joke. Irony.”
“Well, Quicksilver, you can call me Ti.”
“Tie? Like tie-dye?”
“No, like Tiberius.”
“Pffft. No irony there.”
“Nope. None at all,” he says, his voice tight and fading. “Are we almost done?”
“Two down. Only four more to go.”
“You know, if it’s all the same t’you,” he slurs, “I was thinking I mi’ pass out.”
And just like that, he does.
Fever, blood loss, shock, and cold all conspire to keep him passed out through the last stitch and the bandaging. I tape the edges of the dressing. This is going to leave a big scar. Another big scar.
When I smooth out the tape, my fingers stray beyond the edge of the tape. I pull back quickly at the warmth of his skin against mine. Sitting with my arms wrapped around my legs, I prop my cheek on my knees and watch the slow up and down of his chest.
When we first became schildere, I’d asked Ronan if I could touch him when he was in skin, because lots of schildere already had and I’d been prey to so many longings. Not for Ronan, but longings nonetheless.
“Remember what Leonora said when we asked her if humans had schildere?” he asked when he’d finished laughing.
I did remember. Still do. Leonora had thought for a moment and then told us that the closest thing humans had to schildere is buddies. “Buddies,” she said, “will hold the bathroom door closed for you if the lock is broken.
That’s what we are, Ronan had said, still chortling. Buddies.
I didn’t like the word. Sounded silly and childish. I like the Old Tongue better. Schildere, a shielder.
But supposing the Shifter feels that the only thing a crippled runt is good for is holding the bathroom door closed when the lock is broken? Then what? I will have passed up my chance to touch him.
So, I do. I touch the scarred ring at the base of his neck. Those lines are thick and rough. No one cared for them, and they healed badly.
I touch the sweep of high cheekbones and soft, dark cheek that blends into what was probably once a neatly cropped beard and mustache but is now a little wild. I touch his full lips, leaning down until I catch his warm breath against my own mouth.
This man’s body is tough and sinewy, packed hard into his taut skin. My fingers tease across, down to the contours of his chest, crisscrossed with veins that give way under the gentle pressure of my fingers and muscles that don’t.
I stop at his waistband. We are always told not to smell or touch humans here, because that is considered bestial. I touch him, feeling him warm and solid and thickening through his jeans, because what am I if not a beast?
I hold tighter until a growl, like a dreaming wolf, rattles in his chest.
Covering him with the open sleeping bag, I go about shaking the pup fur out of the tent. With a good-size stone, I pound in the stakes, set up the tent, then stretch the bed pad across the top so that it can air out.
Between all the fur and the partly gnawed cheese chew, it smells like childhood.
Chapter 4
It’s dark when Tiberius wakes up. I hand him a bottle of icy spring water laced with more electrolytes and poke the embers of the fire I built close by. I add cornmeal and dried cranberries and ghee and maple sugar to the water in the pot hanging from the green aspen branch I angled into the ground.
He holds the sleeping bag tightly around himself and shivers.
“I brought you some clothes.” I toss him the four enormous things that were taking up so much spa
ce in my backpack.
He pulls on the flannel shirt and the hoodie, then puts his hand to his blood-crusted jeans and looks at me.
I cock my head.
“Well?” he says.
“Well, what?”
“A little privacy?”
“For what?”
“I was in kind of a hurry when I left.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not wearing underwear.”
“Yes?”
“I will be naked.”
“So? We are all naked when we change.”
He stares at the sweatpants in his hands, pulling at the loose ends of the waistband ties.
“Phase? Turn? Shift?” I continue. “What do you call it?”
“We call it going to the dogs. It’s something we avoid at all costs.”
“What?”
“We are not like you. We don’t run around sniffing each other’s asses and pissing on trees. We drive and talk and shoot and make money. We are human. I,” he repeats firmly, “am human.”
Dumbstruck, I turn away, giving him his stupid human privacy.
“But…but…you can change, right?”
“Hmm? Can I? Yeah. Probably.”
Probably? It never occurred to me that someone who could change wouldn’t. Every minute I’m in skin, I can’t wait to get out of it. When we are in skin, we are anfeald. Single fold: one and singular. Alone. But when we are wild, we exist beyond the limitations of our poor bodies and weak senses. We are ourselves, but we are also part of the land and the Pack. We are manigfeald, manifold and complex.
“You really have no idea what you got yourself into, do you?” I say to the fire, listening while his jeans come off in a cloud of dried blood. I can hear him hop from foot to foot.
