by Maria Vale
“My mother died when I was born.” He regains his balance quickly, and cotton swishes over skin. “But she’d tried to convince my father to join the Pack. She’d told him that all you needed was to mate a lone wolf and—”
“Ohmigod. You have no idea. None. I hardly know where to start.”
I really don’t know where to start. So I start at the beginning with our first Alpha. She knew that the natural Packish resistance to outsiders would eventually breed weakness. Strength, she said, could only come from fresh bloodlines, which meant taking new wolves from disintegrated packs. Some other Packs do now, but we were the first. And we are still the strongest.
We don’t make it easy. A lone wolf can easily disrupt our carefully constructed order, so one of our wolves has to be willing to tie their fate to that of the stranger. To be the stranger’s schildere during the three months when they are considered table guests. Three Iron Moons. That’s how long they—we—have to prove ourselves worthy of the Pack.
“What’s schildere?”
“It’s… You don’t speak the Old Tongue?”
“Unless by Old Tongue you mean French, no.”
“It means…” I start, but I can’t spit out the word buddy. “‘Shielder,’” I say. “It means ‘shielder.’ But here’s the thing… The Pack isn’t going to bother even taking you as a table guest unless they’re sure you can fight. They won’t waste time on the weak or cowardly. And our fights are always wild. Fang and claw. Never in skin. Here.”
Ti stabs his spoon into his bowl. “What is this?”
“Cornmeal.”
He pokes his spoon into the cornmeal. “Any meat?”
“Are you listening? If we lose that fight, we’re out, immediately. No three months, no nothing.”
“I am listening. It’s just that I figure if I have to dress up like a wolf, I should get some meat.”
“Fine. Tomorrow. I’ll get you some tomorrow. For now, there’s cornmeal.”
“Why did you agree to do it, then?” he says after he’s taken a few bites. “If you have so much to lose?”
“Because I was going to be a nidling. Lone wolves are given to the Alphas as servants. Keeps us busy and out of trouble, but it’s as close to being nothing as you can be without actually being dead. There aren’t many. Mala was one. That’s why she ran away. Do you want this?” I offer my untouched bowl. “I’m not really hungry.”
He scrapes the bottom of his own bowl before taking mine.
“I guess I figured that one chance at living was better than a lifetime of being alive.”
I think I am going to be sick.
Late into the night, the Shifter struggles with a tent and a sleeping bag that aren’t really meant for his big body. His bangs and curses are accompanied by the slithery scraping of nylon against nylon that sets my teeth on edge. No good wolf likes to sleep in a clearing anyway, so I limp off to the edge of the woods and find a nice spot behind the bleached-out cedar stumps. I turn round and round among the dry, fragrant pine needles. Curling my muzzle on my front paws, I fluff my tail across my nose and close my eyes.
Doesn’t matter that it’s still black as night. It’s not the light that tells me to wake up. Honestly, I don’t know what does. A bird, maybe. When the temperature reaches dew point. Pull of the moon, whatever. I wake up when I’m supposed to give the Shifter his medication.
I feel the sproing in my neck, the pleasant pressure as my shoulders widen, the pain in my hips, and the ticklish rearranging of pastern and forepaw. I need fingers, because the clindamycin comes in a wolf-proof bottle that’s in the backpack on John’s rock. The same backpack that is currently being rifled through by the biggest mutant coyote I’ve ever seen.
At least that’s what I think until the wind changes and I’m hit with the stink of Baileys and kibble.
John gives exiles money so they can try to find their way to another Pack. Make a fresh start somewhere else. Preferably somewhere far, far away. Somewhere so far away that there’s no chance of coming across them scrabbling for food on top of the Alpha’s rock. But knowing Ronan, he didn’t go far, far away. He probably didn’t go any farther than the Akwesasne Casino in Hogansburg.
“What are you doing here?”
He stumbles backward and starts to snarl before he realizes who it is. He turns his back on me and continues rummaging through the backpack.
I jump up and grab the straps. “Get off,” I snap, dragging at the bag and Ronan—at least until the bit of fabric he was holding on to tears and he loses his grip. When he grabs at it again, he misses, something he wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t been drinking.
The big lunk growls and snaps at me, a fang tearing into my forearm. It’s just a scrape, but I punch him for being a fool.
He jumps at me, pushing me down, claws and pads rough against my bare skin. I’m not afraid, because while Ronan may be much bigger than I am, he’s lazy and a coward. Though now that I think about it, being straddled by a drunk, desperate, lazy coward is a bad time to be in skin.
We wolves have a sick fascination with werewolf movies. We appreciate the irony that portrays humans morphing into indiscriminate killers. We appreciate the humor of portraying the change in a way that will accommodate human prudishness: wolf men who walk around on two legs with no genitals or genitals so tiny and disproportionate that they can be disguised by a wee bit of shadow. Or others who race through forests in shredded form-fitting jeans.
We appreciate the narrative imperative of portraying the change in a way that makes no biological sense—like the guy who starts his jump as a man, and by the time his feet land, he’s all wolf. Not a second of transition time, when bones lengthen and hair changes and senses rearrange themselves, leaving you deaf and blind while your gut lurches alarmingly and—if you’ve recently ingested a lot of beaver fat—very noisily.
There was none of that in-between time when you’re half one thing and half another and nothing works together and you’re wholly vulnerable.
Just by way of saying that I can’t change and have to rely on my poor, fragile human body. I hold Ronan by the neck, to keep his reeking mouth away from me, while I feel the ground behind me with the other, searching for a rock, a stick, a—
Pop.
A crack breaks the silence. Ronan looks down in shock before falling on top of me, a long strand of drool running from the corner of his mouth.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Ronan!” I jerk my head to the side and push him away. He begins to change, so I know whatever has happened is not mortal.
“As for you…” I jump up and grab the gun from Tiberius’s hand. It twirls through the air in a graceful arc until it lands with a low plop deep in the middle of the bog.
“But—”
“If the Pack finds out that you still have that gun, then you—and me, by the way—are both gone before we’ve even begun. There are absolutely no guns allowed on the Homelands. No rifles, no handguns, no BB guns. Nothing.”
“But…”
“There’s a reason we are the oldest and largest pack in the Americas.” I check Ronan’s chest as the fur retreats and his shoulders pull into a line. There’s nothing lower down either as his attenuated feet and legs become pale calves and flabby thighs. Glad to see his cock is as slack and disinterested as ever. “Our first Alpha knew that if we depended on guns when we were in skin, we wouldn’t prepare adequately for those days when we weren’t. So. No guns. Ever.”
“He shot me?” Ronan screams as soon as his voice is back. His hands go to his back. “He had a gun and shot me!”
“Oh, calm down. I looked. He missed.”
“No he didn’t. He shot my tail!” And when he turns around, I see a deep scrape above his coccyx.
“It’s nothing, Ronan. You’ve got to be quiet. John will think it was a hunter, but if he hears you screeching, he’s going to send som
eone to investigate. Did you forget that you’re exiled?”
“I did not deserve that.”
“Yes, you did. You were drunk at your own Dæling.”
“I was not drunk. I had a couple of drinks. John’s such a damn prude.” Ronan rubs his belly. “Silver, I’m hungry. I need some food. Just a little something until my luck changes.”
“And that’s your problem, right there. Always waiting for your luck to change.” He hiccups and scents the air with 7 and 7 and chimichangas. “Oh, and thank you. That was really foul.” I wave my hand desperately in front of my nose. “Why don’t you try making your own damn luck?”
Ronan doesn’t respond except to convulse with a hacking cough.
“Don’t you dare hurl on the Alpha’s rock.” He looks at me so bleary-eyed and pathetic. “Look, there’s a warren in the higher ground above those tamaracks. Some nice, fat coneys—”
“You know hunting’s not my thing.”
“Maybe you could tell me—because I’ve never really understood—just what is your thing, Ronan?”
“My thing isn’t here. It’s in the real world.” He waves in the general direction of south. “I want to be someone who doesn’t have to pay attention to the creaky rules and creaky rulers of this tiny shithole kingdom. Elijah does it. Why not me?”
“Elijah?” Elijah Sorensson is the Pack’s lawyer and the 9th’s Alpha. John doesn’t like it, because the 9th really needs leadership that isn’t Skyped in from New York City between power lunches, but no challenger has been able to unseat him.
“Elijah,” I repeat, searching for the protein bars I stashed in the bottom pocket of the backpack, “is dragging the 9th into the mud, and he has sex with humans.”
“That’s just a rumor.”
“I’m not sure. I’ve smelled them on him. Here.” I hold up two protein bars, which Ronan promptly snatches.
“Maybe sometimes,” he says, looking straight at me, “even a human is better than what you can get here.” And with that, Ronan lopes toward the woods, blood trickling down his pale, flaccid backside, a protein bar jammed in his mouth.
“Jerk. Fortunately, you only grazed him.”
“Unfortunately.” Ti slides his hand under his sweatshirt. “If I’d been a halfway decent shot, it’d be me eating those protein bars.”
He starts to scratch at his wounded side.
“Don’t do that. You’re going to open it up again,” I say, but his hand emerges from under the shirt with a blood-flecked bandage.
“It itches.” He lifts his shirt and looks at the aster-shaped scarring perforated with stitches.
“Jeesh. You really do heal quickly.”
“I’d heal faster if I had some real food.”
* * *
I may not be the greatest hunter, but I am patient and observant. I head for that warren of fat coneys in the higher ground beyond the tamaracks. Rubbing my back on the bark of a tree downwind from the warren, I rid myself of a few excess bits of summer fur and then relax upwind.
A wolf with strategy is bad news for bunnies, and I catch two.
Batting at the foot sticking out of the sleeping bag, I wait until he shimmies out. I drop his bunny—the bigger, fatter one, mind you—in front of him before I start gnawing on my own.
“What is that?”
I look up at him under my brow. Duh.
“I hope you don’t think of that as meat.”
Of course it’s meat. And not just meat, it’s an autumn bunny, not one of those stringy early-spring bunnies, always getting stuck between your teeth.
A bone crunches between my jaws. Maybe he thinks it’s not fresh?
I nose the other one toward him, so he can see it’s still warm.
He backs away, and I wonder. Is this why Shifters have that strange, sick humany smell? Maybe they’ve become carrion eaters too?
With a dismissive scratch in his direction, I lope off, taking my breakfast with me.
“Don’t suppose you could hunt up some bacon?” he calls after me.
Chapter 5
Two bunnies are more than I really wanted, but when you kill something, you have to make that death meaningful. I take the second bunny to the pups, who would much rather fight over a still-warm bunny than a spit-covered cheese chew.
Kayla catches me holding open a small backpack, already half-filled with food.
“John knows you’ve been stealing,” Kayla says, leaning against the entrance to the basement. “They smelled you in the med station.”
“Hey, Kayla. I’ve missed you too. I’m not stealing. I’m giving Pack supplies to a potential Pack member.”
“If you’d really thought that way, you would’ve simply asked rather than sneaking.”
There’s a reason Kayla was picked to become my echelon’s lawyer.
When we first settled here, our Alpha decided that we needed specialists to help us deal with the human world. At first we had doctors and lawyers. Now we have doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, fund managers, hackers, and more lawyers. Every echelon has at least one. Lawyer, that is. But they’re all here to protect us. They work to make sure that every i is dotted, every t crossed, every p and q minded, so that we are never vulnerable.
Anyone who gets a thirty-page contract for the sale of a used coffeemaker is dealing with a Pack.
Luckily, Kayla likes me. She watches out for me. Slightly older and a lot bigger, she always set aside a rib with a bit of meat still clinging to it from the bigger kills.
“So tell me… What’s he like? The Shifter. Do they stink like humans even when they’re wild?”
“He’s still healing, so I haven’t seen him wild.” Kayla doesn’t need to know that he’s healed and all I know is that he can probably change. My stomach clenches around my bunny breakfast. “But I think…I think Shifters may have become carrion eaters. I brought him a really nice, fat bunny, and he refused to eat it.” I put a bag of pistachios in the bag. “He wanted bacon.”
“Gross,” she says, her nose wrinkled in a grimace, but she leans in closer, sniffing delicately at the air near my ear. “You’re receptive. Do you think maybe he’d cover you?”
I ignore her; she’s just being a jerk. “Do you know where those dried, marinated tempeh strips are?”
“No idea. But I’m being serious. They’re not like us. Tessa said she heard Shifters will even”—her voice drops—“cover humans.” She pulls an elastic tie from her wrist and loops it around her thick auburn hair. “I mean if they’ll cover humans, they’ll cover anything.”
Funnily enough, I do consider Kayla to be my friend.
I finally find the dried, marinated tempeh strips. The ones we use for bacon and grilled cheese sandwiches.
* * *
An otter bites down on a bullhead with a satisfying crunch. The red-edged sugar maple gives way to tamaracks that are in that especially beautiful and especially short phase between summer green and autumn gold. Even when I’m in skin, a lot of animals either run from me or go silent, because whatever I look like, I smell like something that will hunt them.
My hearing isn’t great in skin, but under the endless honking of the geese heading to that other home, I hear an unusual sound. Something big is fumbling around in the distance. I can tell it’s not running away. Bears will, when they scent us. Probably moose. We’re reintroducing them, but John says we’re not to hunt them until the population is truly self-sustaining. They’ve gotten pretty complacent, which is putting a strain on tempers and appetites across the Pack.
But the longer I listen, the more certain I am it’s not moose. I think it’s bear—and a badly injured one. Clambering up one outcropping, I take off my clothes and fold them into my backpack, then I hang it over the highest branch I can reach. I start quietly and carefully toward my prey.
If its injuries aren’t too ba
d, I will call the Pack. But if it’s as badly wounded as it sounds, I will hunt it myself.
Creeping around the bog mats near Beaver Pond is tricky. Never can be sure when you’re going to slip right in, which would alert my bear. Once I get close enough, I realize the wound must be mortal—a bolt maybe. It will be a kindness to put it out of its misery.
What bullshit. All I care about is a chance at the blood-rich chewiness of bear heart. Which I will eat all by myself before I call the Pack. If I weren’t so full, I’d eat a lung too, just because those choice bits are always long gone by the time I get to any kill.
Under cover of a laurel bush, I finally get a good glimpse of my prey across the inlet. It is the size and color of a black bear, but with the long muzzle, slim face, pointed ears, narrow torso, and tail of a wolf. His teeth shine sharp in enormous jaws. His thighs are coiled muscle above huge paws. His coat is the color of midnight and thickening beautifully, like an autumn coat should. He smells of wild and steel.
Tiberius is quite simply the most glorious wolf I have ever seen. Or would be, if he were stuffed with sawdust on a metal armature and mounted in a prettily painted diorama surrounded by glass and sticky-fingered children.
Here, he is an abomination. His legs are splayed out to the sides. His head sticks up high like a horse. His back is curved the wrong way, and his tail drags along the ground.
“Hey,” I yell. “That’s beaver water.” He looks at me with those gold-flecked obsidian eyes. “Who drinks beaver water?”
He makes some peculiar motions with his mouth before snapping his jaws shut. Then he tries to walk toward me.
His back legs move forward one at a time until they meet with his front paws. Then he hobbles forward with a kind of old-man shuffle. He stops and rewinds and begins again.
We are so toast.
The little bones in my feet start to lengthen, and I fall to the ground, my body contorting, the world fading from my consciousness, but the moment my change is over, I race around and snip at his flank to nudge one of his legs farther under him. He bats me with his head and falls straight to the ground.
