by Maria Vale
She pushes her lank dark-blond hair back from her pinched, sallow face. “Long enough to wonder if he actually knows what to do.”
Ti looks up at me with a bleak expression and frantically pats the spot next to him.
I shake my head. “No, thanks. Too hot.”
He glares at me and pounds the seat again, slowly and deliberately. With meaning. I’m not sure what’s up, but I take the seat, shielding him from Caitlin’s pockmarked ass. It’s not really pockmarked, but her body bears the remnants of not one, but three run-ins with porcupines. She wears the scars proudly, emblems of her perseverance and tolerance for pain in her quest to eat porcupine. I have always thought that even one encounter with a porcupine is an emblem of congenital idiocy and have simply settled for raccoon.
Then again, she’s a Beta and I’m not.
With an exaggerated sigh, she swings around, sitting next to me, and dries her armpits with her towel. “You’re his schildere. Explain things, will you? Because now look,” she says, pointing to the clock with her sharp chin as she towels off between her legs. “I’ve got to get to work, and I don’t have time.
“Silver,” she says, taking her leave, her hand already on the door. “Shifter.”
He creeps toward the door, his finger to his lips, his ear pressed to the cedar until he is satisfied that she is well and truly gone.
“Okay,” he hisses. “What the hell was that?”
“She was presenting, Ti. You were supposed to cover her. The Pack knows what you did for Leelee, so now Caitlin sees you as a potential bedfellow, and I bet she won’t be the last. She’s a good herder; you should be flattered.”
“I’m not flattered. I’m fucking queasy.” He rubs his chest. “And what about you? Why aren’t you my ‘bedfellow’?”
“Me? It is way too hot in here. I don’t know how you can stand it.” I move back down to the floor as close to the slightly cooler bit of air by the door as I can. “I don’t have anything to do with it.” I start to pour ladles of water over my head. “I’m not your bedfellow. I’m just your shielder.”
“You’re not just my shielder. If sex doesn’t make you a bedfellow, what does?”
“But it’s not just about sex. Shielders have sex all the time. Being bedfellows is more like a trial mating.”
“Like being engaged?”
“I don’t remember. When you’re engaged, do you have to fight others who might want to cover your engagee?”
“That’d be fiancée. And generally, no.”
“Look, it was only a matter of time before you were approached by a viable female.” I catch Ti’s hand before he pours more water on the rocks. “Don’t do that. I can’t take any more.”
“Quit it with the ‘viable female,’ will you? Supposing I don’t want to screw the herder with the strongest thighs?”
“What you want has nothing to do with anything.” I pull myself up and grab the door handle. “We are not human. It is not about we want. It’s about the strongest wolves breeding still stronger ones. You are powerful and smart and have these…these weirdly amazing senses, and if you don’t mate with your equal, we would consider it a waste of seed.”
The door closes behind me, and the cool air cushions me. I don’t really want to have this conversation. And I certainly don’t want to have it while my blood boils to vapor in my veins.
I bend forward, my forehead and hand on the chilly tile, the shower’s cold water carrying the heat from my head down the shallow canal of my spine.
Then through the blasts of cool water, I feel new heat. The heat of Ti’s body. The heat of Ti’s hand as it covers mine, his fingers sliding between mine. The heat of his chest pressed to my back. The heat of that solid length that makes my hips buck against him. “Is that what you want? For me to screw Katherine?”
“Caitlin. I told you it doesn’t matter what I want. It—”
“Bullshit,” he whispers, his rough chin chafing the skin between neck and ear. “You took on a complete stranger, a Shifter, no less, because you didn’t want to be a cog in the Pack. What was it you said? One chance at living was better than a lifetime of simply being alive? That’s what you wanted.”
When he tilts his hips, I feel him more insistent against my ass.
“So I’m asking you now, Wildfire, a simple yes-or-no question.”
He moves gently against me like he knows the torture of these tiny brushes. Like he knows how to use every part of his body—the soft scrape of the ridged scar; the jab of the tight nipple; the tingle of those few, very few, tightly curled hairs; the soft caress of his sloping navel—to sharpen my senses and make me feel him more intensely.
“Do you want me?”
The voices of generations of Pack echo around my skull, yelling incoherently about Tradition and Law and Survival and Strength and Will and Sacrifice. But there is another voice too. It is small and hesitant, but it is clear and it is mine, and that voice says:
“Yes.”
“So take what you want.” He bends his legs on either side of mine, and his erection slips between my thighs. “Just make sure it’s me, because I sure as hell want you.”
He hisses as my hips punch against him. I feel him growing harder and thicker still between my clenched thighs. My hand reaches back toward him, but he turns me around, the cold water now running down our fronts, and he lifts me up, his big body between my legs. In two steps, he props my ass on the teak table and pushes me back against the slats. “Relax,” he says, holding me down with one firm hand on my chest. He bends over me, his mouth finding the promontory of my hip bone and swirling it with his tongue before angling featherlight kisses down my pelvis.
He buries his nose between my thighs and breathes in deeply, the roughness of his trim beard pricking my thighs. The bristling of the rough fringe above his lip chafes my sex—followed by the long, firm, silky strokes of his tongue—and the rich combination of being abraded and soothed takes me higher and higher. My body shudders, and I don’t remember the last time I breathed. Ti stretches my legs wider and makes a seal with his lips, pulling insistently until my body contracts. When his tongue pushes in, I fall apart with a million little screams that only I can hear.
“Open for me,” he says, his voice raw and his hands hard on my still-rigid legs. “Let me in.”
And I do. Lying on my back, I let him in because that’s what I want.
* * *
I was right that Caitlin wasn’t going to be the only one to set her sights on Ti. Hilda flagged him as we walked toward the Great Hall. He seemed oblivious to her invitation, though. I don’t bother to point it out to him, because if he doesn’t understand what it means when a female moves her tail to the side and shoots him a come-hither look along her flank, it’s not my job to tell him.
He understands Selena’s intent perfectly well, because she wiggles her Lycra-covered ass against him as he picks up his plate and utensils. He looks to me for help, but I just shrug.
We have an old saying: a strong wolf with a weak bedfellow is as good as single. As shielders, we are free to cover whomever we want. But if I were his bedfellow, I’d be expected to fight off challengers for rights to Ti’s body. I mean, he’d be expected to fight off challengers for rights to my body too, but let’s be realistic.
And Selena? She’s a mean fighter who took out Gideon’s left eye two years back. Seeing as she has no fuzzy balls, I don’t like my chances.
Then just as he’s straddling the bench, holding his loaded plate and glass, Tecia reaches across to put her hand firmly on his crotch.
Ti starts, sending the water in his glass flying.
“That does it,” he says, dropping his plate onto the table and stomping over to John.
I watch nervously as Ti whispers close to John. John signals first to Victor, our Deemer, then calls for one of the juveniles to fetch Leonora. I get up, b
ecause whatever else happens, I am still Ti’s shielder.
John shakes his head as I walk toward them. Ti pats the air softly with one hand. Wait.
“He washed up pretty nice,” says Tecia as I take my place again.
I stick my fork halfheartedly into a plate of pickled something with feta.
“I mean that carrion stench when he first showed up”—she sticks out her tongue and makes a soft gagging noise—“it was almost human.”
My stomach has tightened and my throat has too, and the food simply will not go down.
“The steel, though… Is it noticeable when he covers?”
Maybe it’s because my heart feels big and painfully hard.
“I’m thinking maybe if I spray him with a good coat of Skunk-Off and leave him in the sun for a—”
“Will you just shut up?”
Ever the teacher, Leonora teeters up to John on high heels that make her almost as tall as our Alpha. She drops her blood stick back into her handbag, closing it with a snap as she smacks her lips.
I can’t hear what’s going on. Ti says something to the three of them. There’s some gesticulating and nodding. Ti cradles his zipper. Everyone looks at Tecia. There’s some more talking, more gesticulating, and more sage nodding. Everyone looks at me. I wave.
Leonora says something and touches the braid around her neck. John nods. But Victor strokes his beard and says something that makes Ti’s control slip a little, because his voice grows louder as he says “…not be put out to stud.”
John signals, and Tecia swings her legs free of the bench. “No,” says John, shaking his head. “Quicksilver.”
“Because viable females have started presenting themselves,” John says, “Tiberius has asked to be formally declared your bedfellow.”
“But you know what they say: ‘A strong wolf—’”
“‘With a weak bedfellow is as good as single,’” interrupts John. “Yes, we all know that bit of old wisdom. It is true that under normal circumstances, you would not be able to defend your cunnan-riht, but Tiberius is asking that you be released from any obligation to defend your rights to his services.”
At the phrase rights to his services, Ti scratches his eyebrow, a gesture that I’ve come to believe means he has found something amusing.
“Is that even legal?” I ask.
“Turns out it’s custom, not law.” Victor gives a reluctant nod. “We’ve never had a guest who was not raised Pack, but Victor agrees that while we can expect Tiberius to follow Pack laws, we cannot withhold Pack rights and expect him to follow our customs.”
John turns to the Pack. He has barely finished announcing that Ti and I will be bedfellows when Selena pushes away from the table, using her current bedfellow’s shoulder. She stalks toward me, her eyes narrowed, ready for a fight.
“Selena,” John says. “I wasn’t finished.”
Then Victor details the “special circumstances” that preclude challenges and Selena returns to the now tight-faced Maximilian.
Finally, Victor straightens his back and pulls himself up to his full height. With a stern gaze, he looks over the assembled wolves, and in the portentous voice he uses for all pronouncements in the Old Tongue, he delivers the traditional blessing:
Eadig hæmed.
Happy fucking.
Chapter 17
All I need is a quick check of the sky to tell me I have only five days before the Iron Moon. Though there is, of course, an app for it.
In five days, Pack members who work or study in Vermont, New Hampshire, Downstate, or Canada will all come home, because no one is allowed to change Offland.
Everything that requires hands and voices must be done before sundown on Thursday. John rotates through a long list of plausible excuses he leaves on the outgoing message explaining why he is “unable to take your call at this time,” without saying anything about the difficulty of picking up a phone with claws and the impossibility of speaking.
Supplies are inventoried, and lists are made for the Iron Moon Table, when the moon is finished with us and the whole Pack is together and in skin and we are able to converse and conduct Pack business. Ti and I are repairing the roof on one of the dormitories for Offlanders who might need a night at home in their skins before or after the Iron Moon.
Since Ti doesn’t truly understand what it means to have a Pack or a territory, which I still find just so sad, I try to explain exactly what an Offlander is.
“Some Packs still rely on isolation to protect them. The Nunavut Pack does. Of course, the Siberian Taiga Pack, but who knows how much longer they’ll be able to do that? Ready for the lathing?” Ti holds out his hand as I pass along the thin strip of wood. “Our first Alpha insisted that we learn and adapt to human ways, so nearly half of our wolves live Offland at any given time.”
“Doing what?”
“Students. Others work to protect the Pack’s interests as fund managers. We have a whole bunch of lawyers.”
“I thought Victor was your lawyer,” Ti says through the nail clenched tight in the corner of his mouth.
“Victor’s our Deemer. He deals only with Pack law. The others work within the human legal system. They’re the ones who maintain the Trust that protects us. Well, mostly Elijah Sorensson, the 9th’s Alpha. He’s been in charge of it ever since I can remember. Can I have some nails?
“Ti?” He is crouched on one knee, staring into the forest. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’m fine. Here.” He passes me a box of nails. “How about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, I mean, have you ever lived Offland?”
“No.” I set the lathing carefully in place.
I know he’s looking at me.
“Have you ever been Offland?”
I hammer a little too hard, and the lathing splits.
“Silver. Have you ever been Offland?”
“The Homelands are big,” I say a little defensively. “And there’s lots to do…”
He jumps down from the roof before I can even get to the ladder.
“…here.”
I run after him, skipping every third step, trying to keep up. “Where do you think you’re going?”
He doesn’t say anything, just grips his stupid hammer tighter. He steps over the little stream that separates the dormitories, heading straight to Cabin One.
“Ti!” I hiss. “This is his home and Evie’s… Evie is very nervous around Shifters, and you can’t just walk in—and certainly not carrying this.” I grab the hammer, but Ti keeps going. My heels scrape long tracks in the cold, damp ground.
He doesn’t let go until he starts rapping on the door of the Alpha cabin. I let fly the hammer, and it hits the shallow water with a dull splash, just as Evie peers through the crack of the door. I lower my eyes.
“What do you want, Shifter?” asks Evie, lengthening the consonant blend so it sounds positively venomous. Shhhifter.
“I need to talk to John.”
Her mouth tightens. “Get away from my house,” she snaps and slams the door.
But before it closes, Ti pushes his work boot against the frame and keeps it open a tiny chink. “Can I ask… What have I ever done to you?”
“It’s not what you have done,” she spits out, a single hate-filled eye visible through the crack. “It’s what you will do. The others, they know about Shifters. But I’ve actually known them. Shifters are a lie from the moment they draw their first breath. And you… You’re worse than any of them. Pretending you’re human when it’s convenient. Pretending you’re Pack when it’s not. You can lie to the world. But the second I know you’re lying to us, I will tear your goddamn throat out.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that Evie’s nervous around Shifters. Maybe I should’ve been honest and told him she hates them.
“Evie?” John come
s running. He walks up to his mate and whispers for a moment; she whispers back angrily. He shakes his head and then comes out, pulling the door closed behind him.
Maybe he saw us approach the cabin or heard Evie’s voice from the Great Hall. Whatever happened, John hadn’t bothered to put on his boots before he ran over. He sits heavily on the steps.
“You wanted something?”
“She’s never been Offland?” Ti asks.
“I told him not to come,” I blurt out.
“How about we try one at a time,” John says, peeling off muddy, gray ragg socks with burgundy heels.
“Silver has never been Offland?”
John looks at me, and I shrug. He shrugs and hangs his socks over the low railing. “Don’t think so. Pack go Offland when they’re needed.”
“So she hasn’t gone because she’s not needed?”
“Ti!” I whisper urgently and pull at his waistband. That is no way to talk to your Alpha.
John puts his hands on his knees and then stands, descending a single step so that he is face-to-face with Ti, their noses almost touching. “Before you judge us, Tiberius, let me put this in terms a human would understand. Silver is my brother’s child. My brother’s only child. I loved my brother. He lived a great Alpha. And he died a great Alpha, dragging this”—here he points to me—“tiny, deformed, frozen thing halfway across the Great North with a hole in his chest.
“I brought her home so she could be marked by her Pack and die on her land. But she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t die. And in defiance of every law and tradition, I kept that broken-up pup in my pocket. I fed her with a dropper until her eyes opened. Three wolves fought me, because they took it as a sign of weakness in a new Alpha. And we cannot coddle weakness.”
“But if she’s your brother’s only child, don’t you owe her something more than this?”
“You really are a human, aren’t you? That’s all they ever think about: What they’re owed. Their rights. Never about what they owe. Never their responsibilities.”
Lana, a tiny nursling who lives next door, has heard the commotion and stumbles toward John, looking for comfort. He scoops her up, and she rolls over onto her back, her head twisted to the side, staring at us from the protection of the Alpha’s arms. Next year, she will leave her family’s cabin and go to the children’s quarters so she can be with her echelon. Pack ties must always take precedence over family.
