The Last Wolf

by Maria Vale

  As soon as they left, Ti bent over the trash can, racked by dry heaves.

  For now, the loose dress I’ve taken to wearing is carefully folded in the unfinished hulk of the new Great Hall, next to Ti’s clothes. He sits on the warm grass, looking at the fading sun, while I nestle between his knees.

  Evie, the last out, closes the door behind her.

  My mate helps me through the change as he always does. As soon as he finishes phasing, he races me toward Clear Pond. I nip his tail, he nips my leg, and he gives me openmouthed kisses and lightly slaps my muzzle with his until we reach the big rock overhang above cold, night-dark water.

  We both fly from the rock.

  What a glorious wolf.

  Order Maria Vale’s next book in

  The Legend of All Wolves series

  A Wolf Apart

  On sale August 2018

  For more of Maria Vale’s powerful writing, unique mythology, and heartrending romance, read on for a preview of book 2 in the Legend of All Wolves series

  Available soon from Sourcebooks Casablanca

  New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author Jeaniene Frost on The Last Wolf:

  “Wonderfully unique and imaginative. I was enthralled by both the world and the characters. Sign me up for the sequel!”

  Chapter 1

  I’ve done it so often, I don’t have to think about it anymore. My hands hardly seem to belong to me as they unfasten my cuff links. A quick twist to the left, then to the right. One after the other they plink into the silver Tiffany tray beside the sink.

  The tray is engraved in flowing eighteenth-century script, an absurdity for the plastics industry.

  To Elijah Sorensson

  with Gratitude from

  Americans for Progressive Packaging

  The platinum chain links with a bar in between were another gift. This from Aldrich Halvors to mark my first day at Halvors & Trianoff, nearly twenty-three years ago. Our Alpha, Nils, had just died. Shot along with his mate. And now another bullet has taken his successor, John.

  Aldrich told me they were a reminder that no matter where we found ourselves, we were still crucial parts of the chain that bound the entire Pack.

  Halvors. His real name, his Pack name, was Aldrich Halvorsson, but he gave that up. Just like he gave up any rank within the Pack hierarchy. When he died, he was the Omicron of his echelon even though he had once been so strong. Being Offland—being away from our Adirondack territory, being in skin for twenty-seven days at a stretch—does that to you. Leaches your strength. Leaches your will. Leaches your soul.

  Aldrich had already been Offland for years when I first met him in New York City, representing the Great North Pack’s interests in a firm founded with Pack money. Lori, who was Aldrich’s assistant before she started to work for the surviving partner, now my partner, Maxim Trianoff, says that at the end, he’d become increasingly withdrawn and would stare out of the firm’s huge plate-glass windows for days at a time.

  He needed to go home.

  An hour after he stared out of that window for the last time, Maxim got a call from the police. Aldrich had wrapped his car around a lamppost on the West Side Highway. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

  Wasn’t wearing any clothes either.

  It was a simple accident, but if the coroner had gotten involved, they’d have found that the corned beef hash in the driver’s seat had been a man halfway to becoming a wolf.

  He just couldn’t wait another minute.

  Almost makes me wonder if there’s something in the HST offices. I gave two wolves a ride down to the City this moon who have been Offland as long as I have. Reena, who sits on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and her mate, Ingmar, who does something I couldn’t quite figure out for the New York Department of State, only go home for the very rare holidays. And, of course, for the Iron Moon. For those three days out of thirty, when the moon is pregnant and full and her law is Iron and the Packs have no choice but to be wild.

  Subordinate wolves in the 2nd echelon, Reena and Ingmar seem unaffected by the tearing alienation of Offland. They yacked the whole way about lawyers and restaurants and real estate and Hamilton. It was like being trapped in an enclosed space with humans for five hours. Except without that horrible smell of carrion and steel humans always have.

  I would’ve bitten them, but they’re not in my echelon.

  * * *

  I toss my shirt (Turnbull) into the dry-cleaning bag and hang my suit (Brioni) before stepping into my marble-and-copper-tile shower stall.

  My. Nothing in this apartment is mine. It was bought sight unseen from floor plans by Pack money managers who had determined that it was likely to appreciate, so when it came time for me to leave New York, the Great North would be able to net a tidy profit.

  Remember that things Offland break easily, they said, as though I hadn’t been warned repeatedly. As though the Pack hadn’t already had to pay to replace various Pixy Stix constructions that pass as furniture out here.

  Don’t do anything that will damage the resale value.

  So I’m particularly careful when I scrub off the last remnants of my change, because I’ve already had to replace the showerhead once. The shower stall may be generously sized by human standards, but by Packish standards, it’s a tight squeeze.

  Then I carefully wipe out the drain strainer, scraping the fur and leaves and prickles of my home into the trash can.

  In my bedroom, I can hit a switch that changes the floor-to-ceiling windows from opaque to transparent. And when I stand here in skin, I have unobstructed views over the East River and can watch the moonrise and calculate how long it will be before I can go home again.

  I am not like Aldrich. I did not give up my name—my Pack name—so Halvors, Sorensson & Trianoff is acid-etched on the glass doors.

  And I have not given up my position either. They’ve tried, but I am too strong and have fought too many wolves for too many years. Even the most powerful, most belligerent wolves of the Great North have begun to realize that there is no one powerful or belligerent enough to unseat me as Alpha of the 9th echelon, the age group I have controlled since we made the transition to adulthood.

  The Pack has been in turmoil since September when the badly injured Shifter came to us. All Packs hate and fear Shifters. Shifters can change, but unlike us, they don’t have to, and that single difference has allowed them to become almost human, to become as corrupt and self-serving as humans.

  The Iron Moon, those three days when we must be wild, is a sacred time for us, but like anything that is truly important, it comes with risks.

  The risk that humans will come upon us by accident and, thinking that we are æcewulfs—real wolves, Forever Wolves—kill us. The risk that Shifters, with their almost Packish senses, will come upon us on purpose and, knowing exactly what we are, kill us.

  If it had been up to me, I would have left the Shifter for the coyotes that first night, but he was half Pack, and our Alpha, John, was soft. Soft on him, soft on Quicksilver, the runt who is now his mate.

  It turned out he was a lie. He had been sent to infiltrate us, find our weaknesses, by the head of all the Shifters, August Leveraux, his father. The fact that Tiberius changed allegiances from Shifter to Pack is in his nature. In the Old Tongue, Shifters are called Hwerflic. Changeable.

  He killed many of the Shifters and humans who descended on us during the Iron Moon. I killed one. But the Great North Pack lost the Great Hall, our main gathering place. We almost lost our pups, our future. We lost four wolves, all of them highly placed, because the true meaning of leadership is sacrifice.

  At the end of this Iron Moon, we laid the stones for the wolves we lost at the Gemyndstow, the memory place: Solveig Kerensdottir, Alpha of the 14th echelon. Orion Tyldesson, Alpha of the 5th. Paula Carlsdottir, Beta of the 8th. And John Sigeburgsson,
Alpha of the Great North, the Alpha of Alphas.

  But John’s stone, like all of the others, is marked only with his name and the date of his last hunt. The Pack is a thing of hierarchies, but there is no hierarchy in death.

  The ritual was silent, as our most important rituals always are. A nod to all of those times we are wild and speechless. At the very center of the widening circle of stones are the worn ones of Ælfrida, the Alpha who dragged her unwilling Pack from the dying forests of Mercia to the New World all those centuries ago, and Seolfer, her Deemer.

  The dozen or so pups run in and out among the stones, understanding only that this place is important somehow and that every important place must be marked. So they do.

  The stones are set. There are no bodies here; those were quickly consumed by the coyotes. The wulfbyrgenna, we call them. Wolf tombs. So death has been honored and now we must get on with life.

  As we walked back toward the Great Hall, I fell in step beside Evie, John’s mate and the new Alpha. The fourth wolf I have addressed by that title.

  “Alpha, it’s time for me to come home. The 9th needs me. I have been Offland for thirty years”—it slipped out, but I quickly correct myself—“360 moons and—”

  “And we need you protecting our interests Offland more than ever.” She picks up a pup who is jumping at her ankles and rubs him against her jaw, marking him. He lies on his back offering his belly to be rubbed, but as soon as he hears another pup, he twists and turns, anxious to get back down. They are like that. They need love, but they need freedom too.

  “The Pack is vulnerable now, and no one knows better than you how to protect us from the human world. I agree with you that the 9th needs its Alpha, but it doesn’t have to be you. It is time for you to let your Shielder take primacy; Celia’s been holding the echelon together for years, and it’s time, Elijah.

  “It’s time for you to let go.”

  Long after she left, I stayed staring down into the foundation being laid on the still-blackened smoke-scented foundation of the old one. It is cavernous and complicated because we need storage and because the frost line is so deep.

  What Evie doesn’t understand is that I am blind in a maze, with only this thread to hold on to. If I let go, I will never find my way out again.

  * * *

  At 3:00 a.m., when the city that never sleeps finally does, the twenty-four-hour fitness center of my luxury condominium building is finally empty.

  That’s when I drag out the cambered power bar that I store in my hall closet. Turns out that the cheap things they have at the gym develop a permanent kink once you load on eight hundred pounds.

  Evie refused my request, and Evie is immensely powerful, but females take at least three moons to recover from lying-in. It has been only two. Meaning she will still be weak for one more moon.

  I have spent over ten thousand days Offland. That’s ten thousand days in skin. Ten thousand days without the earth of home under my paws, without the pine-scented breezes rolling down the mountainside and through my fur, without the bones of prey breaking in my powerful jaws.

  But I refuse to end up like Halvors: corned wolf hash, wrapped around a streetlight on the West Side Highway.

  One.

  I am going home.

  Two.

  I am going home.

  Three.

  I am going home.

  Four.

  I am going home.

  “What are you looking at?” I bark at the balding man staring at my overloaded bar. He stumbles backward over the threshold to the gym. The lid to his water bottle trundles across the floor. He leaves it.

  Five.

  I am going home.

  Chapter 2

  Jeans (D&G), T-shirt (Armani), jacket (Cucinelli). A quick squint in the mirror for the state of my shave. Left side, right side, lift chin. My hair is long and red-brown, though the tips are banded a darker color. Agouti is common enough for a sable wolf. Less common for corporate lawyers.

  The one time I cut it, I spent two moons fighting wolves who made fun of my crewcut hackles and a near-constant chill across my withers.

  I wonder if this was how Aldrich felt toward the end. If he felt a little sicker with every breath that came from the HVAC system. With every drink of water that tastes like chlorine. With every meal of denatured things from half a world away. With every cab that stinks of human.

  “Keep the windows open, please,” I say, leaning forward so the driver can hear.

  I wonder if he was as desperate for the hunt as I am. Did he indulge in the same pathetic stopgaps that I do?

  Nothing marks Testa but a dark-green door, a brass number, and a prime spot on the narrow New Street in a location that is convenient to the courts, City Hall, and the Financial District. There are a handful of clubs like this scattered through lower Manhattan that offer privacy, exclusivity, and smoking. Testa charges five hundred dollars for a single night’s membership; there aren’t any other kinds of membership, because the owners want to be able to refuse the man who’s already wasted and likely to be an embarrassment. The man who misbehaved last time. The man who is under investigation by the SEC.

  Men. Women—if they’re young enough, beautiful enough, trim enough, and well-dressed enough—get in for free. Members then stand them drinks.

  The lights are always low. There are no large tables, only booths with high, tufted backs to mute the sound. It’s all about giving the illusion of privacy so we can hunt our prey without distraction.

  I’ve learned that I don’t need to bother with the booths. The bar is just fine. My back is to the room, but I can see as much as I need to in the mirror behind the brightly colored bottles of gin.

  “Hey,” says a voice. The voice’s long, blond hair falls in carefully blown-out waves down either side of her lightly tanned face with perfectly regular features. Dressed in a white, backless dress with a low-draped collar showing supremely full breasts, she promises the warmth of summer in the dead of winter.

  “Hey.”

  “My drink’s a Moscow mule,” she says, swinging onto the empty seat beside me.

  I nod to the bartender and tap my glass for a refill.

  “Wow,” she says, putting her hand on my arm. “D’you play football?”

  I shake my head, then throwing my chin back, I bolt down a handful of wildly salty nuts.

  “Basketball?”

  “No. Not much for sports.”

  “Are you, like, in financial services?” she asks.

  When you’re hunting, all sorts of things happen. Without making a move, your heart starts to pound faster, your muscles tighten, your senses become razor-edged. Adrenaline-primed, you are so ready to leap that the real strength, the real power, is in holding back until the moment is absolutely right.

  It used to be like that—watching a beautiful woman, knowing that beneath the tape on her breasts, her nipples will be tightening, that she will be feeling an uncomfortable warmth.

  Or will she? I can’t really tell anymore.

  “Lawyer.”

  “Oh,” she says, a slight tinge of disappointment in her voice. Noah, one of Testa’s owners, comes over and hands me back my credit card. I lean up on one hip, retrieving my wallet. As she watches me slide in the black-and-pewter card, she brightens. “Oh,” she says. “That’s interesting. I haven’t seen you around here before.”

  “Hmm.”

  Tomas, the “mixologist,” slides me my seltzer with bitters and lime. Wolves can’t really drink. Does something awful to our livers. Tomas is discreet about my drinking habits because it’s his job to be discreet, because the ownership certainly doesn’t mind customers who don’t use the bar as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and because I tip him well.

  “Thanks, I guess,” she says, lifting her Moscow mule toward me. She slides around on her seat, scanning the r
oom, looking for someone who might be more responsive.

  “Elijah Sorensson?”

  In the mirror caught between the tall, emerald-green bottle and the square, blue bottle, the woman in white pauses as a sloppily drunk man I’m supposed to know slaps my shoulder. Pale-gray tweed jacket with black piping and a black shirt. Elaborately stitched jeans. He smells vaguely familiar. Like wild onion and rubber. I didn’t say pleasant, just familiar.

  “This man…” he slurs. “You remember, we bought Alacore? In 2015, we bought it. But the big abattoir around our neck”—I’m assuming he actually means albatross, not slaughterhouse—“was a busted-up cement plant up near…I don’t know where.”

  Now I remember. His name is Dante something. “Fort Miller,” I say.

  “I think you may be right. State says we’re goin’ to have to clean it up. For a lotta money.” He rests one foot on the rung of my stool. “I don’ remember how much, because this genius, he makes it out so that we don’t have to do shit. Says the rotting concrete is good for climate change.”

  I’m not in the mood to explain the mechanics of concrete carbonation to Dante Something from the Mergers and Acquisitions Department at LMSC. It’s part of my job. I’m very good at my job, and when I’m good at my job, I make money. Money that is used to protect another piece of land and a different wilderness up there. North.

  “Well, anyway, the thing is still rottin’ away.” He guffaws again. “Rottin’ from the inside out. Being good for the environment.” He removes his foot from my stool but doesn’t slap me again. Humans don’t. They do it once to be comradely, but there’s something about what they feel under my bespoke jacket that makes them nervous about doing it again.

  I take another drink. The woman in white stands closer, her breast pressed against my arm.

  “I haven’t seen you here either,” I say. Now I’m just going through the motions, mouthing the words to an old script. “I would certainly have remembered. No man could ever forget you.” She looks exactly like half the beautiful women in this place. The other half have dark hair.