by Maria Vale
The route back up to Norþdæl is harder though. Water undercuts the soil, leaving what looks like solid ground but is really just a ledge of soft dirt resting on air. As I scrabble up the slick side, a large ledge gives way, sending me plummeting down, showing uneven flashes of dark-gray and light-gray fur that don’t stop until I hit a fallen tree hard enough to push every last bit of air from my lungs.
When did the truck stop?
A door opens with a squeak, and a heavy body jumps to the damp ground. There is a moment of silence, and a shot slaps the granite face right above me.
Another truck goes silent, and a few shards of the rock shower down onto my fur and into my face. Burrowing deeper into the ground, I pull my body in as small and tight and still as I can.
“Sam! What’re you doing?” The voice yells to be heard over the one remaining truck still grinding in the distance.
“Saw something. Over there.”
“He’s gonna know you got a gun.”
“He’s all the way back at the road. No way he can hear, so unless you tell him.”
Another shot sounds louder than the first because it’s closer. More stone chips erupt behind me.
“Jesus, Sam.” This other voice sounds nervous. “There’s nothing there.”
“Yeah, there is. Just you wait. Saw it move. I’m going to make it move again.”
No, you’re not. The stone here is too slick for me to run fast. The slope is too steep for me to zigzag the way we have to when we’re trying to avoid bullets. I have no choice but—
Something cuts through the air above me, so fast that the humans don’t react, don’t make a sound until the man’s wrist collapses with a sickening crunch between Eyulf’s jaws. The gun thuds to the earth, and then the westend falls to the ground, screaming.
The human next to him lurches for the gun, but both Eyulf and I lunge at the same time. He stumbles back, and Eyulf rears above him, bloodstained and furious.
I throw myself between the two, and Eyulf’s jaw glances against my shoulder. With my jaws wide, I scrape at his muzzle. A warning that doesn’t stop him, because he doesn’t believe that I will protect this human until I bite down on his lower jaw and hold it fast.
He’s not Pack. He doesn’t know what it means to have a territory. A wanderer will make a mess of things, then pick up and go. We can’t just pick up and leave. This is Homelands. It was created by hundreds of years and thousands of wolf-hours. If the humans kill me, it’s a trophy on their wall. If we kill them, they will come and destroy this final fragile sanctuary.
A heavy door slams behind us. “Willis. Sam,” says a new voice, drawing closer. “What exactly are you doing?” With each step he takes, the scents sort themselves out. I let go of Eyulf’s jaw and stand beside him. My wolf doesn’t know what a Shifter is, and he looks confused as he tries to understand what this thing is that smells like carrion and steel mixed with the wilder fragrance of reeds and water’s edge.
He may not know what a Shifter is, but he knows it’s not human.
My first real Shifter is as tall as Tiberius, but gaunt and nothing like the giant thing of my nightmares. I know he’s full-grown because his black beard is flecked with gray. If he lived someplace with sun, his skin would probably be bronze, but he clearly doesn’t and it is khaki instead.
The ancestor we shared with Shifters endowed their descendants with senses and size. But unlike Pack, who have spent the intervening centuries breeding to power, they have come to rely on power they can carry in their pockets. He picks up the gun from the mud.
“Sam thought—” says the human who isn’t screaming and must be Willis.
“What did I say about guns?” the Shifter interrupts.
“They’re fucking wolves. Shoot them.”
He turns to me. “I’m presuming you did not attack him?”
I lift my lip over one canine, the wolfish equivalent of a rolled eye.
“Are you crazy, Constantine?” Willis whispers. “Just shoot them.”
“Willis, take Sam to my car. We’ll get him to the hospital as soon as I am finished here.”
I have to agree with Willis. Are you crazy? What the hell is he doing talking to me? In front of a westend? I look at him out of the corner of my eye, but I will not acknowledge him further. Evie already let Elijah Sorensson’s human live. We cannot afford another human who knows.
“Mr. Leveraux,” he continues, playing idly with the safety of the gun, “has a proposal. So far, your Alpha has refused to discuss it with him. But she doesn’t have a choice anymore. We are here now. Tell her that.”
He heads back to the car and the two men struggling to get in. I check on the driver of the third truck. Encased in headphones, the cab of his truck, and the noise of his engine, he has noticed nothing. He continues to scoop up branches and put them on the fire.
We don’t rush back up the slick, eroded mountainside, because we can’t. Part of the way up, the door slams. A little farther, the engine starts. Farther still, a gun fires twice in quick succession.
That’s why Constantine spoke to us so openly.
As far as he was concerned, these humans were already dead.
It’s only when we are almost at the crest that the third yellow truck stops. The driver jumps down into the mud, pulls out his earbuds, and circles around, wondering when he became alone.
Chapter 23
“There were gunshots,” Eyulf says as I clean out the reopened wound with a rag dipped in the last of the Seagram’s. “They could have hurt you.”
“Still, you shouldn’t have followed me. You could have killed them. Turn over? Wolves don’t reveal themselves to humans, and they certainly don’t kill them unless it is a matter of the life or death.”
He turns onto his belly, and I start to pick out more embedded forest litter.
“But it was a matter of life or death,” he says. “They were shooting at you.”
“The life or death of the Pack. A single wolf means nothing.”
I pluck out several bits of fur.
And a beetle wing.
“It does mean something. You mean something. You mean something to me.”
And small stones.
And a single pine needle.
“I have to tell the Pack.”
“Are you listening to me?” He turns quickly, his hands on either side of my face.
“Your leg is—”
“Fine. My leg is fine. I could leave now and be no worse off. It’s what I do. A new place. Another page in my book. Except I would be worse off because now I know what’s here and what I want but don’t have.”
I stare down at the collection nested in my palm—stone, fur, wing, needle. Tesserae in the mosaic of the Great North. Of Homelands.
What have I done? Wolves are raised with uncompromising loyalty to Pack, to land and to our wild. Even our exiles would never betray our existence, but Eyulf was not raised like we are.
“You can’t tell anyone about the Pack.” My voice sounds panicked. Not at all like the Alpha command I’d intended. “You can’t—”
“I wasn’t talking about the Pack, Varya. That’s where your mind always goes, but not mine. I was talking about you.”
He bends down, looking me in the eye. How could anyone think his eyes were a curse? Blue and green. The promise of heaven and earth.
“I’m talking about you,” he says again.
He moves his hand to my hair and sweeps it back, touching my neck gently. He leans close. “You said before that another wolf’s mark had to be offered. That it meant they are responsible for each other. That they belong together. I want to belong. But not to the Pack. I want to belong to you.”
His thumb moves across my cheek and moves until his jaw almost touches mine, and then he stops. Waiting for me to say no or simply move away. I move closer, partly b
ecause I feel woozy and partly because this is what I want. I have only taken the Alpha’s mark, the mark that binds me to the entire Pack, but now…now I want this single scent, this single wolf, this single belonging.
Eyulf takes a deep breath and rubs his cheek along mine. “Is this how you do it?”
I feel everything: the coolness of his skin and the sharpness of his cheekbones and the cool eddy as he sucks in my scent and the warm current as he sighs.
Yes. That is how you do it. This—I turn my head so more of my skin touches his—this is how you do it.
He nuzzles closer, the damp softness of his lips against the spot where jaw joins neck, and I feel the promise of it all.
Then he whispers in my ear.
* * *
The weight is heavy on two legs, and the ground is uneven and cold and covered with rigid twigs that puncture and scrape my bare soles.
It’s good, I think. The distraction. Reminding me always of the harsh realities of Pack life. Surviving means strength to strength and power to power. It does not accommodate the coming together of two scarred and lonely wolves.
* * *
“Yours,” he said.
“Mine.”
* * *
In one leap, I make it to the top of the stairs leading up to the Great Hall. How long has it been since I was here last? Already there are claw marks on the wood.
The wood of the lock rail is splitting on the storm door. Too many heavy-handed wolves slamming in and out, and Sten, the wolf in charge of carpentry, has too much to do, and anyway, he will be replacing the storm door with screen doors in time for blackfly season.
The foyer is crowded with boots and chew toys, and the hook-lined headboard walls are festooned with clothes waiting until their wearers have skin and need them again.
The heavy main door, like all doors in the Great North, has a levered handle so that wolves can enter and leave at will, whether they are wild or in skin, but some of the wolves are not careful and have left claw marks on this wood too. The base of the little swinging door constructed for the pups is darkened by the near-constant comings and goings of the Pack’s youngest.
My hand reaches for the lintel of the thick frame before pushing through to the fragrant hall.
It is quiet. Most of the Pack will be working on the thousand things required to provide for our two forms. But someone is here. I hear the voices. Teresa, the 11th’s Alpha, sticks her head out from the door next to Evie’s office. She turns away, calling into the library.
“Lorcan. Your shielder is back.”
Of all the places in the Great Hall that remind me of last winter’s loss, the library is the most haunted. The books burned fast and thoroughly, and unlike the Pack documents, we didn’t have a safe with the originals somewhere else. All records are gone, too, leaving only the memories of individual wolves. A chipped brown clipboard hangs on the door with a pencil tied to red-and-white baker’s string, so the Pack can write down what books they want and what books they remember having and Gran Jean can replenish the library with the books that shaped the minds of the Great North.
The big room is filled mostly with empty shelves, with a few books scattered to hold the places for absent volumes.
“Shielder,” says Victor, leaning against one of the few shelves that actually does have books.
“Deemer.” I lower my eyes.
Lorcan cranes his neck around the end of one of the empty stacks. A moment later, he tosses his flannel shirt to me. He gives it to me not because I might be uncomfortable, but because all these years later, the sight of my naked body still makes him uncomfortable.
“I’m looking for the Alpha.” I thread my arms through and roll up the sleeves. It annoys me to have Lorcan’s smell on my body. I keep the fabric well away from my face, so it won’t muddy the Arctic fragrance.
Victor exchanges glances with the wolves I can’t see, but I can smell the warm, damp scent well enough. Dominants of some of the younger echelons. The 10th, the 13th. All the youngest echelons are represented here except for the 14th.
“She is with Elijah’s human.”
“The westend is back?”
“Not only is she back,” Lorcan says. “She has taken over as the environmental conservation officer for the county. She is living”—he stops as though waiting for the drama of his next statement to build—“in the cabin next to the fire tower.”
“Our fire tower?” I ask, even though it isn’t ours. It is just across the border, but it dominates the bend in the access road.
“And Elijah?”
“He’s there now,” says Victor. “With the Shifter. And the Alpha.”
“So you said.” He is looking at me carefully. He knows I don’t believe the westend should have been allowed to live, let alone walk away from here as a human who knows.
He is gauging my reaction to the news of our Alpha’s meeting.
“She went alone,” he adds, emphasizing alone to make sure I understand that Evie doesn’t mean to kill the woman.
“My shielder understands,” Lorcan says, but Victor ignores him and keeps looking at me.
The only thing I care about is the safety and order of the Pack, and I am always careful to give the Deemer the respect that is due his office. But he is not speaking as Deemer. He is not speaking about the law. This is just Victor, a wolf faced with changes he does not like. He is saying something to me, asking me to side with him against our Alpha.
And in my mind, I hear Silver’s voice.
“He is wrohtgeorn, Alpha.”
He is strife-eager.
I don’t answer either Victor or Lorcan. They share glances, and Victor heads back to the table where he’d been sitting.
I smooth out the spines of books that had been misaligned by his shoulder.
Chapter 24
I haven’t worn shoes since I’ve been at the perimeter, but my soles are raw following my frantic run from Westdæl. Now, the socks and work boots feel stiff and alien, like they did when I was introduced to them my first year with the Great North.
The access road is bordered on one side—the Pack’s side—by a thick tangle of woods. With the exception of the time before the Iron Moon, when we all gather at Home Pond for the change, it is patrolled by a half-dozen wolves. On the other side is a steep incline. The incline is also ours, but Offland starts at the brow of the hill, where there is an old wooden fire tower built before the Pack bought this land. It has been deserted for years, but it looms over the access road at the point where it turns, burrowing deeper into the wild.
It is the last reminder of the world of humans.
Mostly, the Great North relies on the crowded tangle of its forests to dissuade casual wanderers, but at the head of the access road, where the ground is level and clear, they have installed a tall chain-link fence that extends deep into the woods. During the Iron Moon, if someone wants to hunt our land, they’ll be dragging their kill over a mile through nearly impassable terrain to get back to their illegally parked cars.
Along the side of the hill leading to the fire tower, a dozen or more wild Pack lurk downwind and out of sight of the cabin windows. They avoid looking at me as I pass.
“Does the Alpha know you’re here?”
Every last one of them backs away sheepishly. They were not in an aggressive posture, simply curious. Still, I doubt Evie meant for such a large contingent of wolves to be listening in on her conversation.
When I open the door to the little cabin, the 9th Echelon’s Alpha looks irritated. For some reason, he has a towel around his waist. The human has a sheet wrapped around her like a toga. The cabin smells of sex.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Elijah barks. “Didn’t Leonora teach any of you about knocking?”
He really does talk like a human.
“Alpha,” I say, knocking loudly on the
door.
Evie looks up from a little table holding a mud-colored canvas case on a table stenciled with the name H. Villalobos in big, red letters.
“Is it urgent?” Evie asks.
“I will wait.”
“Just give me a minute.” Evie turns back to the human. “Tiberius already has a gun. I can’t allow another one on Homelands.”
“It would never be on Homelands,” the westend says. “It will be in this cabin, except during the beginning and end of the Iron Moon. During the changes. When you are…vulnerable. Then I would take it to the fire tower.”
“You say you haven’t used it for five years?” Tiberius looks up from the window where he is examining the long gun. “It’s in pretty good shape.”
“I just cleaned it,” the human says. “Need to zero it though.”
“She needs to check the sights,” Tiberius says to Evie. “But to do that, she’ll have to fire it.”
“Not here,” Evie says.
I have walked into the middle of a conversation, not that it’s hard to figure out. The human is offering to guard us during those times when the whole Pack is deaf, blind, mute, and helpless. When we are a turbid mess of changing bone and skin and fur.
The Alpha knows that guns are the beginning of a slippery slope. Tiberius has one. Now there will be another, maybe not on Homelands, but close enough.
“Alpha,” I begin softly because it is not up to me to tell the eavesdropping wolves in the woods why I came down from Westdæl. “It is urgent. What I have to tell you.”
I hesitate for a moment but then switch to the Old Tongue so the Shifter and the human will not know about the trucks and the fires and the Shifter. Evie stops me.
“Saga gean,” she says. “On westendspræce.”
Tell it again. In human tongue.
I hesitate.
“How long do you think this will remain a secret from the Pack, Shielder?” she says, her black eyes holding mine firmly. “And I need Tiberius to know.”
Dropping my eyes to my Alpha’s clavicle, I repeat what I’d told her about the men, the trucks, and the Shifter at our northern border.
