by Maria Vale
“That’s enough, Ti.” I hold out my hands to his, to see the flayed meat at his knuckles. I start to pick out a few odd splinters. “So your father bought that land. So what? It’s not like he’s going to drill on five acres.”
He tightens for a second as I pull on one last splinter buried deep in the valley between the last two knuckles. As soon as I spit it out, I close my lips gently over his shredded skin and let my tongue swirl gently across it.
Ti has changed. He doesn’t say anything now, just lets me. He pushes my hair back with his undamaged hand.
“He was sending me a message.”
“Hmm?” I ask, my mouth otherwise occupied.
“That’s why he bought that land. To send me a message.” He sits on the sofa, pulling me after him. I curl my knees up on either side of his hips and lean my head on his chest, listening to his wolfish heart. “Somehow, my father has seen the Trust. Must know that it can only be altered by a unanimous decision of the Pack. But what makes a Pack? That’s what Leary was saying. Legally, it’s still a Pack even if there’s only one.”
I lift my head. Only one? Only one wolf? No wolf would betray the Pack. Maybe he’s thinking Tiberius?
“You would be the Pack of one?” I almost laugh. I know my mate well enough now to realize he has no love for his father. “Why would he think you’d do anything for him?”
“He doesn’t think. He knows. You missed the true meaning of that performance. You weren’t supposed to understand it. It was meant for me alone. I’m the one who knows that Leary always smokes Marlboro Red. Always. It was no mistake that this one time, he was smoking Marlboro Silver. And when he said…” Ti props his chin on my head. “When he said, ‘This kind burns real nice,’ he was threatening you. I broke his jaw for pointing his finger at you. And because I didn’t kill him then, my father knows how to control me now.”
Licking my teeth, I still taste Tiberius’s blood, rich and bittersweet on my tongue.
In England, right before our founding Alpha left, they say one of the greatest Packs was destroyed. It had been wealthy and powerful with scores of strong wolves. But one Iron Moon, Shifters and humans came on them during the change and bludgeoned them. Shot them. Cut off their heads and hung them from the branches of the great oaks, their blood soaking into their land.
Now all I can see is our trees festooned with the sightless heads of our wolves. Our land soaked with our blood.
“Where are you going, Wildfire?”
I hadn’t realized that my hand was on the door handle. “Hunting. I need to hunt. I need to think.”
“I’ll work this out. You know that, right? It’s all going to be fine.”
“I know, min coren. It’s all going to be fine.” I reach up to slide my cheek against his. He holds me tight, rocking me, reluctant to let go.
At the Great Hall, I take four prepaid charge cards and the ID Tara gave me last time I went Offland.
In the basement, I grab food and clothes and fit it all in the neon-green daypack with a logo that reads, god help me, Hound for Glory.
One by one, I close the doors tightly behind me: the warped ledge and brace door to dry storage, the heavy double doors to the Great Hall, the storm doors to the foyer.
I start for the ends of the earth. Once I’m there, I will change and wait for the Iron Moon to pull me over the edge of wildness. Then I will be an æcewulf. A real wolf. A forever wolf. And August Leveraux will have lost any control he has over Tiberius or the Great North Pack.
I am ready.
Chapter 30
I was so not ready.
Wiping the bile from my mouth, I wait for another chunk to come up. I can tell from the taste that it’s still more of William Dunn Crawley’s sclerotic liver. The intestine is the worst, though: slimy and filled with fat and decay, it is a meter of carrion sausage that almost killed me going down and is trying to do it again coming back up.
I made it across the Canadian border before shifting to skin. Then I did my best to make my way disguised as human. At first, I did well: I caught a bus to Montreal and a train to Winnipeg, but once I was there, things started to fall apart.
Another section of intestine comes up. I try to keep my throat open wide and pull at it with my hands.
While I was waiting for the train to Hay River in the Northwest Territories, someone stole my daypack, leaving me with no money, no tickets, and no change of clothes. No way I was going to make it all the way from Winnipeg to Great Bear Lake on three legs before the snows made the route impassable, so I’d started the long walk along Highway 16, hoping some kind stranger would give me a ride to Saskatoon. Edmonton, even.
A stranger did give me a ride, but he wasn’t kind, and because I killed him, I had to eat him. I did it in his car, which was very tight and awkward, but there were no trees by that section of the highway, and anyone seeing a wolf eating a man along the Yellowhead Highway would have shot me dead.
Does it count as eating a man if you can’t keep him down?
I didn’t hear footsteps, but hands are suddenly on my hair. I flail at them. That’s what William Dunn Crawley did. He held my hair with one hand, his other hand on that bowie knife. My muscles twitch now like they did then, my anger rising.
But I don’t think I can do it. Eat another man.
These hands are different, though. They don’t push me anywhere. They comfort me, one hand smoothing my hair away from my sweating face, the other stroking the back of my neck.
“Shh, Wildfire.”
I had explained to William Dunn Crawley—I saw his license when I stripped down the body—that I wasn’t receptive, and he still insisted on pushing my head down on his naked cock. He seemed shocked when I ate it, but really, what did he think was going to happen?
I manage to get another bit of Crawley fat out before I crawl away from the mess. Ti holds out a bottle of icy water.
“We need to go now,” he says and lifts me up, kissing my sweat- and blood- and bile-smeared face. “Someone is going to check on the car soon.” I look up blearily at the scrubbed, gray, empty Manitoba vastness and doubt it.
Then I smell the burning plastic, and when I lean back against the headrest of his rental car, I see the tall plume of black smoke.
“Do you need to stop again?”
I wave my hand frantically, and Ti stops. Even with the windows open and the cold, fresh air, we haven’t been able to get more than twenty kilometers without pulling over to let me purge.
Each time, he squats next to me, making sure I don’t tumble over and murmuring words of encouragement. He doesn’t say anything else. Nothing about why I ran or how he tracked me or anything. Not that I could answer.
When I finish, I crawl away and curl onto my side. Each time, Ti pokes through the steaming meat with one of the takeout chopsticks he has stuffed in the glove compartment. I don’t know what he’s looking for, maybe to see if I’ve finally gotten around to vomiting up my own guts.
“There it is.” He jams the chopstick into the pile and pulls out William Dunn Crawley’s chewed and partially digested penis. He throws it to the road.
He cleans me up as best he can with rough brown towels that still smell like roadside bathrooms and herds me back into the car. This time, he fastens the seat belt and pulls it tight. “Hold on,” he says before hitting the gas. He jerks the steering wheel, pulls on the hand brake, and the wheels spin.
Leaning my head on the cold window, I watch the smear of flesh on the asphalt retreat in the side mirror. It is all that’s left of William Dunn Crawley.
Tiberius drives into the night with his hands clutched around the steering wheel, his teeth grinding together. “Stay here,” he says when he finally unlocks his jaw at a motel near Portage la Prairie. After getting the keys from the night manager, he pops the trunk and hands me my daypack. I don’t know where he found it, but I’m gue
ssing—from the blood that stains the neon-green black—that he took it from someone who hesitated before giving it up.
“Shower?” he asks.
“Toothbrush?” I reply.
He rummages through my daypack.
I’m in the middle of washing my hair for the second time when he comes back in. I miss our “dog shampoo,” but I’m not in a position to complain that the shampoo smells like disinfectant.
Ti stands stiff, staring at my back, my toothbrush upright in his hand like the lance of a palace guard.
I know what he’s looking at because it hurts like hell, and when I crane my neck, the view in the mirror doesn’t look much better. The bowie knife slid along my back, peeling away the skin and revealing the ribs, but like Tristan says, if it doesn’t shatter bone or damage internal organs…
“It’s just a flesh wound.”
The bathroom door closes softly, but the outer door slams so loudly, I swear the cinder-block wall starts to crack.
He doesn’t come back into the little bathroom while I brush and re-brush my teeth and finally rub against them with the rough towel until my fangs squeak.
The room is small, with a double bed and a single dull lamp with a plastic shade bearing a bumpy, mottled spot from a too-strong bulb. There’s a Bible next to it. Ti sits completely still, a pair of scissors, a big roll of gauze, and a tube of antibiotic beside him. He pats the bed.
“Hold your hair up,” he commands. “No, both hands.”
When I have both hands above my head, Ti fits the flap of skin back in place. Next, he gently layers on antibiotic and folds a piece of gauze over it.
He wraps his arms around me, holding one end of the roll under my breasts, and binds it slowly around my rib cage until the roll is done. He ties the ends firmly and helps me into a T-shirt (Paul Smith’s Bobcats) that drags to my knees.
I sit next to him, but Ti doesn’t say anything, just stares at the floor until finally I say his name. He looks up, startled, and keels over, pulling one of the thin pillows to his face and howling furiously.
Someone bangs on the wall behind the bed and makes the painting of evening pine tree shiver in its plastic frame. “Hey, asshole, keep it down.”
Lying on my good side, my whole side, I try to pull away the pillow.
“You weren’t outside,” he chokes out. “And you didn’t come back from hunting. I tracked you as far as the stream near the sap house. I walked south and then north along the banks, but you never got out.”
“It hits a bog a few miles up. There’s another stream to the east.”
He shakes his head and starts to crumble. I doubt he’s slept since I left the Homelands. “I remembered what you said about musk ox and going someplace where there are no people and turning wild forever. I picked up your scent on a westbound platform of the Gare Centrale in Montreal and then again in Union Station in Winnipeg. I got distracted by your backpack, but I finally tracked you to the Yellowhead Highway, and then I didn’t anymore, because someone”—his voice drops so low that I strain to hear—“someone had picked you up.
“You were running away from me,” he starts softly, but with each word, his voice rises again. “And someone picked you up along the fucking Highway of Tears.”
The volume of those last words bothers our neighbor again, but Ti is not his normal unflappable self and thrusts his fist through the plasterboard. He grabs something, then gives it a sharp pull. It hits the wall with a sloppy thud and a whimper.
Ti crams that painting of the evening pines with its plastic frame into the hole.
I slip into bed, lying on my good side, and lift the blankets for him. He crawls close and pulls me closer. I put my head on his shoulder, and he lifts my leg across his thighs. He carefully shapes my hair into a channel across the black plain of his chest. It reminds him, he says, stroking the silver course of my hair, of the moon on Home Pond.
“I can deal with my father, with anything else, but not with that. Promise me, Silver. I will never trap you. I know what happens when you try to break a wolf, but promise me that you’ll never run from me again.”
I’m about to say that I’m a wolf, and we don’t make promises because we say what we mean, but in the needy, jumpy heartbeat against my cheek, I start to think that when I was balancing my love for my Pack against my love for Tiberius, I hadn’t considered this third love that wasn’t mine but was his.
The only vow I know is an ancient one that Gran Sigeburg said came from long-dead wolves who lived in the long-vanished forests of Mercia. It’s what I whisper now to my own worried and worn-out wolf.
“Mid min clawum ond fængtoþ wille ic scieldan þé. Mid min flæsc wille ic retan þé. Mid min fyrhþ wille ic gehamian þé.”
“What does it mean?” he whispers into my hair.
“With my claw and fang will I shield you. With my flesh will I comfort you. With my soul will I make you a home.”
And in the flimsy bed in the cinder-block and particleboard room of the motel off the highway near Portage la Prairie, my Shifter love cries.
* * *
In the morning, the radiator cranks up, and I wake to the smell of overheated plastic wafting through the vents. It smelled like William Dunn Crawley’s car. I struggle up from under the covers, but Ti’s arm is on my hair. I don’t like that either, because it feels like William Dunn Crawley’s hand.
I pull my hair out from under Ti’s arm and stare at the ceiling of variegated white squares set in metal struts. Loading my toothbrush, I open the blind onto the back parking lot, the one that doesn’t face onto the walkway, and brush my teeth.
Ti hears me and heads into the bathroom, then sits on the bed, rubbing his face and his scalp with his big hands. He jumps a little when I kneel down in front of him and begin to pull down his shorts.
“What are you doing?” he says, clutching the waistband.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“Just wait, Silver. I think…what with everything, I don’t think this is what you really need.”
“Actually, it’s exactly what I need. A man did something that I didn’t like. I killed him and ate him and purged him and washed him off and brushed and spat and rinsed and repeated, but it’s not enough. In my mind, I still feel his hand in my hair, I still smell his scent, I still taste his body.
“I don’t want him in my mind. I want you.”
He shakes his head. “I—”
“Ti, please. If you want to help me, don’t tell me what I need. Do what I need.”
Finally, he releases his shorts and leans back, one hand covering his forehead. I can feel the tension as I strip him, but oh god, the relief as I slide between his dark, ropy thighs, so different from Crawley’s pale, flaccid legs.
I take Ti’s hand and move it to my head. He refuses at first, but I coax him, and he holds my hair so carefully, following the motion of my head as gently as a thistle seed on the breeze. I breathe out and breathe in the smell of crumbling wood and musk coming from the narrow thicket of black curls. Ti’s reluctant sex grows harder under my tongue. Ti’s twinned weights tighten as I hold them carefully and firmly in my palm. The drop that glistens like amber in the low morning light tastes like salt and smoke and Ti. Ti’s hips tighten and tremble as he tries to hold back. Ti’s solid arms lift me carefully onto his lap. It’s Ti’s voice that whispers to me before he sweeps the hair back from the cord of my neck and takes it between his sharp teeth.
It is Tiberius whose every iron inch slides thickly into me.
It is Tiberius who splinters me, his body straining to give me everything he has, and by the time he has emptied himself inside me—rich and hot and smelling like crushed bone and evergreen—I can’t even remember that fat shit’s name.
Chapter 31
It’s been nearly four days since I snuck across the border somewhere north of Perry Mil
ls Road. And except for the unpleasant interval needed to eat someone, I’ve been in skin.
As a wolf, the world is filled with cues: the dry crack of a branch under the weight of snow, the smell of fungi, a quiet rustle of a nest that once housed a sapsucker and now a squirrel in a tree that is dead and not just for the winter.
As a human, the world is filled with commands: YIELD, DO NOT PASS, WATCH FOR CHILDREN, KEEP CANADA CLEAN, IT’S CHOCOLATE TIME AT TIM HORTONS.
In skin, my mind is being dulled by the constant onslaught of headlights of cars coming west from Montreal, by the deadening drone of our tires on blacktop.
“You’re going to scratch yourself raw,” Ti says somewhere east of wherever it was we were before. “I think it’s best if I drop you off at the edge of Homelands first and then return the car.”
An hour later, he drops me off at the border of our territory. He gets out and crouches beside me and says something that starts with “Remember…” but it’s too late. I’ve already started to change. I’ll have to ask him when he comes home. I tumble down a decline, dislodging damp needles. At the bottom, my still-useless and contorting body lands against a spruce. Soft snow sifts down, cooling my half-furred skin. I want to scream at the relief of it, which of course I can’t.
Instead, I run, sniffing the markings of my pack, and struggle to make my way through the thick snow, which is especially hard with only three legs. I’ve just dislodged a redpoll when a perimeter wolf emits a sharp huff, a kind of witheringly dry cough. It’s what we do when we don’t have words and need to say Alpha first; cavorting later.
* * *
John raises his eyebrow at my damp hair, still-grubby nails, and motley collection of oversize, yellow-and-purple Saxons athletic gear. “Tiberius asked if you could come with him to settle his affairs Offland, but you should have asked too, Quicksilver.”
“I-I… You talked to him?”
He waves me off as he picks up his Rolodex and a sheaf of papers. “He called. Said you did well at first, but that he didn’t think you could last much longer in skin.” John’s eyes narrow skeptically. “So you didn’t change for nearly four days?”
