by Maria Vale
I nod dumbly. I guess Ti called on his way to the rental place? It would have been helpful if he’d told me that he would be talking to John.
“Good. Anyway, he says he’ll be finished by the Iron Moon.”
“What? But that’s—”
“Yes?”
“—a while,” I end lamely.
He nods, tired and distracted as he continues sorting through the sheaf of papers. He doesn’t notice when I leave.
I track Ti’s most recent movements from the access road back to the sap house, and under a couple of loose floorboards, I find the rags soaked in turpentine and lavender oil he used to cover the stench of his guns. The Beretta and the rifle are gone. But the gun he brought when he came here is still there.
I track him back to our cabin and the hastily scribbled note on our coffee table.
Wildfire… The paper in my hands shakes badly.
If you’re reading this, you’re home. And you probably already know where I’ve gone. If I’m not back the afternoon of the Iron Moon, then my father may still be alive, but he has lost his Pack of One.
I never expected to find love. I didn’t really believe in it, the way they said it would come. That it would be sudden. Inexplicable. Mystical. It wasn’t. Not for me, anyway. I fell in love with you because you took my hand and walked me there. You took me as you found me, and step by step, you walked me there.
I would never have been able to find the way by myself, but I’m here now and this is where I will stay. Always in love with you.
Tiberius
* * *
The junkyard is empty now, just a scrubbed rectangle of dirt. Leelee’s hole is gone, as are the old TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs. Our markings around the barbed wire have been disturbed as well, so several male wolves drink gallons of tea and head over to trace the perimeter once again.
I spend too much time here, pacing and waiting. There are no trees nearby to block the snow, and no animal will cross it because the edges have been marked by wolves, so it’s a pristine white parallelogram, a sterile breeding ground for my troubled imagination.
The Iron Moon is coming, and I feel the humans circling.
Even before my foray into humanity and Canada, I’d been getting tired easily. I thought it was just the sudden fullness of my life, but it’s been worse recently. I tried to say something in passing to Tristan, so it wouldn’t seem like I’d actually come to see him.
He sniffed at my ear, pushed his hand against my belly, and fingered my breasts.
I told him I wasn’t receptive and nipped him.
He dragged me to medical and hooked me up to the ultrasound. As impossible as it seems, I’m pregnant. Conception is usually so hard for us that I wouldn’t have believed it, except I’ve seen the four miniscule bodies nestled inside me.
Tristan didn’t offer me a Tic Tac.
* * *
The day of the Iron Moon, I walk back and forth along the perimeter nearest the access road, carving a dark dirt path in the snow. Every wolf coming home sends my heart racing.
But with each wolf who passes through the gate, my anxiety grows. I run for the sap house, worried about deserting my post, and then push Ti’s gun, the one that he left, into a squirrel hollow not far from the gate.
By late afternoon, I’m clinging to the chain link, praying for a glimpse of black. I beg the gate wolf to let me lock up. He looks divided, then nods and heads back to the Great Hall. He must have passed John on the way down, because it’s only a few minutes until I hear John’s boots.
He stands next to me, looking out on the quiet ice- and snow-frosted woods beyond the fence. “Maybe he got held up in traffic,” he says.
I can’t bring myself to respond with anything but a nod.
“Lock the gate before you come,” he says after a few quiet minutes. “But don’t be too long. Remember: Death and the Iron Moon wait for no wolf.”
He rubs his cheek against my head and walks back the way he’d come. I watch him leave, grateful beyond words that on this, his first real Iron Moon with Evie and his pups, he took the time to mark me again and remind me that whatever else happens, I belong.
I take my hands out of my pockets, hoping that in skin, he couldn’t smell the bitter scent of steel and gunpowder.
John is long gone, and there are only maybe thirty minutes of light left when I finally hear the sounds of tires grumbling over the snow and gravel. I rush to the gate, feeling for the latch, and then stop, listening more closely.
It’s a car, sure, but why is it moving so slowly? Ti would know to hurry. He would know that I was waiting and that the change was coming.
It’s also a layered sound: some closer, some farther away. I think—no, I know—there is more than one car. I dart back into the dark, back for the elm with the emptied knot that holds the gun. The cars turn off at the junkyard.
Doors open carefully, followed by urgent whispering. Something bangs against the doorframe, and a flashlight comes on and then quickly shuts off. These accents are strange, and the tones are alien. One voice hisses something and starts to cough.
Something heavy falls to the ground with a muffled groan and goes silent. I creep along the forest floor, keeping hidden by the understory until I am directly upwind, then I strain every nerve of my poor human senses, sieving through the smells: steel, carrion, dying lungs, the varying scents of so many humans. Two—no, three—bear the teasing trace of wild that marks them as Shifters.
Then the smell of evergreen and crushed bone and iron and salt and old leather. Tiberius is bleeding and afraid, but I’m not about to run into a herd of healthy animals armed with nothing but hope and a gun I’m not sure how to use.
Leary hisses out his instructions. One Shifter will take a group north. The other will take a group south. The third will go up the main path, all converging on the Great Hall.
“Allons-y. Commençons la chasse. Et n’oubliez pas. Tous les chiens. Meme les p’tits. Mais pas l’avorton d’argent,” Leary says before translating for the Anglophones. “We start the hunt, and remember: all the dogs. Even the little ones. But not the silver runt.”
“What about him?” says a voice.
“Chain him up before you go,” Leary says. “Chambord and I will stay here. This cold, dry air”—he hacks twice—“is not good for my lungs.”
Winter dusk is already too dark for human eyes. Leary points the flashlight, and for the first time, I see Ti. He slumps forward as they chain him to a tree. Then the man pulls on a rope, and Ti’s head jerks back. The light reflects from tiny rivulets of blood glistening below the line of a prong collar. From the steel grill across his mouth.
My tongue darts over my sharp fangs, and my body shivers with the need to tear apart the men who dared muzzle my mate.
As soon as the Shifters have taken their teams, I move silently to the little hollow behind Ti’s tree. Neither Leary nor Chambord are Shifters, so they don’t hear me or smell me, even though I am now downwind. Ti does. I know because he stiffens suddenly, and he turns his head, his nose flaring.
The closer I get, the thicker the scent of blood, until I am at his hands, shackled with a loose chain looped around the back of the tree. The smell of blood is almost overwhelming around one hand that is swollen and crusted and hangs at an odd angle.
He makes a soft, pleading sound.
“Shut up,” Leary says. “What you destroyed would have been your inheritance. You owe your father restitution. Personally”—he spits—“I would have crucified you, but August reminded me that we need your signing hand.”
Ti doesn’t make another sound as I lift the gun, plant my feet, and aim carefully. Then I pull at the trigger. Nothing happens. I try it again. There’s something about a safety? I start feeling around for it.
“Oh, Jesus fuck,” Leary snorts, his own gun at the ready. He nods to Cha
mbord. Both of them search the dark near me. “You call this a rescue party? A man who can’t even use a gun?”
Of course, he’s right. I was never meant to be a man with a gun. I move as quietly as I can around the other side of Ti’s tree, pausing for a moment, brushing silently against the warmth of his uninjured hand.
Each step I take sounds thunderously loud to me, but Leary keeps staring into the blackness where I had been until he feels something hard in his back and stiffens. The air stinks of salt and old leather as he waves Chambord off.
“Now,” I whisper tightly. “Let him go.”
The moment I speak, the scent of his fear fades, and his spine relaxes against my touch. “Well, that’s a problem,” he says coolly. “See, I don’t have the key.”
Leonora says humans fear men but not women. Which I don’t understand at all. How is it possible that they alone of all animals don’t know that there is nothing more ferocious, more deadly, more willing to die than a female protecting her own?
“You were right about the gun,” I say softly, my lips against his scruffy cheek, “but not about the other thing. I could never be a man. I am not even human.”
In a flash, I sink my wolfish teeth into his face. Not my fangs, which would only tear through. I use my carnassials, and in two slicing bites, the whole side comes off. One. Two.
Judging by the way Chambord freezes, staring at Leary’s screaming partly exposed skull, I don’t think he was told exactly what he would be hunting.
That moment’s hesitation is too long, because Tiberius does know how to use a gun, and the chain has enough play in it to let him angle the one I slipped into his “signing hand.”
I crouch over Leary, holding two fingers out like the barrel of a gun. “Bang,” I say and throw his gun far away. I don’t want to kill him. I need his screams to alert the Pack.
Reaching behind Ti’s head, I gently unfasten the muzzle, and he takes a deep cracked breath. “They’ll hear him,” he says, his lips dried and split against mine, his breath sour and bloody. “They’re going to come back. You’ve got to go.” I drop the muzzle and start to work on the prong collar. I can’t go too fast; some of the metal is still embedded in his neck and sticks as I pull at it. He just keeps whispering for me to go. As soon as it’s loosened, I carefully pull it up, raising myself on my toes to make sure I don’t scratch his eyes.
“Do you know who has the keys?”
He shakes his head. “Please, Silver.”
I put my knee on Leary’s writhing chest to hold him steady while I look for the keys. I know he said he didn’t have them, but he’s human and they lie.
He tries to say something but lacking lips and one cheek, it comes out garbled, incomprehensible.
In his jeans pockets, I find his lighter. And a set of small, square-topped keys. Leary splutters again, blood bubbling between his teeth. The keys start to shake, almost slipping through my fingers. I clutch them in both hands and stumble back to Ti.
“I can hear them. They’re coming,” he hisses. “Get out.” I steady myself against the tree as best I can, but the Iron Moon is pulling me inexorably toward wildness. My hands shiver badly, and my eyesight is failing. I scrape the key along the surface, searching for the keyhole. It sinks into something, and I turn the key. I don’t know if it was the keyhole or just air, but it doesn’t matter. I’m done: my eyes are useless, my hands misshapen. The bones in my feet fuse and lengthen, my legs contort, and as my body begins to fall, I wrap my arms around the little beings nestled in my belly.
“Silver!”
Then it’s over, and I hear nothing beyond the milky stillness. Except gunfire. Gunfire has an unnatural percussive power that hits even my changing ears like a shock wave.
A hard push against my ribs sends me falling back into the hollow. My arms and legs flop helplessly as I tumble down until something catches on my running pants. I scrabble as best I can, moving whatever muscle obeys me at that moment—a toe, a finger, my shoulder—until gravity takes over and sends me careening to the bottom of the decline. I can tell from the cold on my legs that my pants, loose around my changing body, have come off.
Shaking my head, I try to clear my ears. There are two more gunshots. Four. Finally, my ears clear and I hear humans running, surrounded by the small pandemonium of animals cowering, the crack of sapless winter branches, and the thick fall of snow dislodged from the forest canopy.
A car starts and peels off.
Struggling up the hollow sideways, I keep my two healthy legs always on the downward slope so I don’t fall back. The chain is slack at the base of the tree. Chambord, three other humans, and a Shifter lie dead. Leary is gone. So is Ti, but I can’t follow him now, because howls and gunfire and high, sharp barks are coming from the Great Hall, and then the wind brings the thin smell of accelerant.
As I near the Great Hall, I hear Adrian’s howl reverberate from the basement, followed by the high staccato sounds of the pups. I skid into a turn, running for the two spruces, one big, one small, the tip of Whiteface centered between them.
Another gunshot, and the crackle and acrid smoke of arson. My claws hit wood under the forest carpet, digging hard until I find the rope handle and pull and push. It falls with a thump to the hard ground.
Squeezing through the roots that have dug down from above, I yip as I run so the pups will know that someone’s coming. They must hear it, because their claws scrabble at the trapdoor. It would be hard for them to open from the other side, of course, but I can just push—
Except that after Ronan broke in, John had the trapdoor covered with shelving, and it won’t open wide enough, not even for the littlest. I slam my shoulders against it again and again, trying to topple the damn shelf. Adrian seems to have figured out what I’m trying to do. He barks and barks some more, and then with one more push, I hear something crash. Now when I push, the trapdoor opens a little.
The floor is covered with gory-looking puddles, but it’s just the sour cherries we put by in the summer. I can’t open the trapdoor wide, but it’s big enough. The little pups are confused and hesitate until I yip for Leelee, who trots over and bends to look into the darkness beside me. I smack her in with a twist of my head, and as soon as she lands, she barks so the others know it’s not deep. Some jump bravely, some waver, but not for long. Juveniles at the back push them in.
Then Adrian, the final juvenile, jumps in with Nils in his jaws, but Nils whines worriedly, and I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen Nyala.
I curl up tight, my good hind leg wedged high into the wood slats that keep the tunnel from collapsing. With one big shove, I push through, the hatch falling on the tip of my tail.
I remember Nyala’s smell from the First Marking, but there’s too much confusion—smoke and fire and sour cherry—and my senses are muddled. She’s too small to climb up, so I push my nose along the base of the floor, scenting her almost immediately. I stick my muzzle farther under the potato bin and yip softly, hoping she’ll come to me. Maybe because I didn’t scent-mark her at the presentation ceremony, she isn’t sure I’m Pack and holds back.
Too damn bad. I lie on my side and reach under with my paw and slap her out. She mewls in complaint, but when I grab her withers between my jaws, she does what every instinct tells her to do and goes slack. Standing with a mouth full of pup, I realize that I can’t leave by the door, and the trapdoor, blocked by the toppled shelves, is impossible to open from the inside.
Like any Pack, my eye flickers toward the moon, just an instinctual need to track the pattern of my life. But now when I do, I see not only the moon, but its light running down where the shelving struts broke through the single tiny, narrow window high in the wall.
I growl at the limp thing in my mouth, warning her, because I have to jump. Jumping requires coiling the muscles in both thighs, in both hips for a simultaneous release. I don’t have both, I only have th
e one, so when I jump, one goes off properly, the other doesn’t, and my body does a semi-spiral. Clinging with my claws, I scrabble awkwardly up the shelves.
Shoving my head through the break, I spit Nyala outside. The hole isn’t really big enough for me, but I have no choice. Glass cuts lines along the length of my body as I push my way through; still, my bones and internal organs are in one piece, so it is a flesh wound.
Another gunshot.
Terrified, Nyala creeps forward, pressing her shivering body against me as I hang my head, trying to find my balance again, before I pick her up once more and race toward the mouth of the tunnel in the forest. Gran Moira, who was hiding in the woods, joins me, keeping pace next to me. At the mouth of the tunnel, I drop Nyala and smell for the other pups. Nyala barks softly, and Nils stumbles out. Gran Moira pushes the little pup toward her brother. Laying my muzzle beside hers, I give over responsibility for our young. Gran Moira turns and snaps, herding them toward the protection of the High Pines.
Another shot.
There’s a dead human lying halfway in the water. The huge, red jerrican in one hand is leaking gas onto the ice of Home Pond. His gun is still holstered, but his throat is ravaged. A few feet away, a big, golden-brown wolf with dark gray markings lies dead, a hole in the back of her head. The Iron Moon is reflected in her open eyes, and human blood stains her mouth.
Wolves are not like humans. We do not wait for death to find us. We die hunting.
Solveig fulfilled her destiny as a wolf and her duty as an Alpha and died hunting.
My nose close to the ground, I follow the stench of steel and carrion into the woods and toward the Clearing.
A heavy footstep crunches through the snow nearby. It isn’t Ti; even wounded, he would never be that loud and clumsy. I bury myself in the snow behind a patch of dogbane and wait for the hard boots with thick treads. The hunter reeks of salt and old leather and startles when one foot sinks into the brittle undergrowth. A shot rings out from a few hundred yards, and he pivots toward it, pulling frantically at his leg, his gun trembling in his hands, like a vampire hunter with a cross, terrified that a death he doesn’t understand lurks in the dark.
