by Maria Vale
“Shifter?” Tiberius asks.
“And humans both. They have burned away the trees to the north and established staging grounds all along the basin that leads to the Gin. It won’t be long before they carve away what little remains of the forest north of us.”
The westend whispers her wolf’s name, and he rubs her arm absently.
The Alpha takes a deep breath. Evie’s short tenure has been so fraught, but that has made decisiveness all the more important. “How many were there?”
“There may have been others farther north, but across our borders there were three humans and one Shifter. His name was Constantine.”
Evie’s glance toward Tiberius is met with a single nod, meaning, I presume, that he knows the man.
“You went Offland.”
“Yes, Alpha. And I got caught. I will accept any punish—”
“I am not worried about punishment, Shielder. But…this Shifter talked to you in front of the humans?”
“Two of them. They are dead.”
Thea flinches; Elijah wraps his arm around her shoulders.
“The Shifter killed them.”
Tiberius doesn’t look surprised.
“He said that August Leveraux has a proposal for the Alpha that would ‘benefit us all.’”
“I have heard August’s ‘proposal,’” Evie snaps. “Over many weeks and from many numbers. I have ignored it because this proposal would make every sacrifice we have ever made meaningless.”
She looks through the window toward the access road, her arms crossed in front of her. We wait, but she says nothing more about it, just keeps staring out at the access road, but beyond it past Home Pond, past the Great Hall, past the woods to the Clearing and the spot where John, her mate, died.
“Alpha.” I don’t like telling her this now, but Evie knows better than anyone that the Pack cannot afford weakness. “He said one other thing. He said to be sure to tell you ‘we are here now.’”
Evie takes a deep breath, steels her jaw, and turns to the little human.
“How many shots will it take you to zero in on your gun?”
The westend frowns for a moment. “Ten, Alpha.”
“So many?”
“The fire tower stands at the angle of the access road. I’d like to work out both legs.”
“Tiberius, you will help her. Come, Shielder. There’s something that needs your attention.”
As soon as she opens the door, the scent of two-score wolves wafts into the cabin. The human doesn’t notice. Tiberius pretends not to, but Elijah stomps out onto the porch, the towel fisted at his hip.
“Þa gefremminge endaþ!” he yells angrily at the invisible assembly. “Agaþ onweg.”
The show is over. Go away.
The westend says his name from inside the cabin. Elijah’s expression changes, softens, and he returns to the human he thinks he loves.
Curious wolves start to creep forward again, but Evie, who is already halfway down the hill, calls to them in the firm and stony voice of primacy.
“Your Alpha,” she says, “will have you leave the 9th’s Alpha and his mate alone.”
Evie doesn’t look at me. She knows how I feel about humans, without adding in this unnatural coupling. She must also know that some wolf will tell Victor what she said and he will use it against her.
Immediately, her wolves begin to scratch and scrabble their way down the hill and across the access road. She commands them to find the Alphas and tell them to reassure their echelons, because there will be gunfire at Homelands.
From this angle, I can still see the summit of Westdæl.
Yours.
Mine.
I need to go back.
“I should return to Westdæl, Alpha. Keep an eye—”
“I agree, but not yet. There are things that need to be taken care of here before you return.”
Evie sniffs the air as soon as we walk into the Great Hall. Without hesitating, she calls to the little crowd in the library. Victor appears with a volume in his hand, his finger holding his place in—I turn my head to the side so that I can read the title—The Elements of Crew.
Why does this irritate me so much?
Because it so blatantly disparages the Alpha’s intelligence. Because wolves, real wolves, solve their conflicts openly. In challenges or in front of the Pack. Not like this. Not hiding behind the pretense of some lupine book club.
Evie ignores this thinly disguised deceit and sends the Alphas of the 10th, 11th, and 13th away with the same message. To find their echelons and offer them reassurance when the shooting starts.
She does not send Lorcan. “Come,” she says and gestures toward her office.
I touch the lintel.
Chapter 25
“A moose was killed on Endeberg,” the Alpha says, leaning against her desk facing us. Lorcan is seated, scratching at a scab on his wrist. Whatever this is about, I don’t think he knows, but I can tell by the way he frowns that he is nervous about something.
The moose John reintroduced to our territory several years ago are doing well, but they are not self-sustaining, and Evie has continued the ban on hunting them until they are.
Then we will begin slowly. First chasing. Then rounding up. Then injuring. So that when the time comes, they will not be tamed. They will be afraid of us and run.
“A prime, healthy female.”
With that, Lorcan winces. Killing even a dying moose is a transgression because it is a breach of the Alpha’s command. But killing a healthy female is so much worse.
We are not like human trophy hunters, always looking for the best and the biggest, for no better reason than to post a picture on Facebook, without caring what the loss of leadership means to the battered herds and packs and prides left behind. This is why we call them westends, wasters.
Packs cull herds, and what is left is healthier for our hunting.
In the distance, dominant wolves call to their echelons, rounding them up so they can be warned and marked and reassured.
“The wolf who did this ate only the heart and liver. The rest, Alpha, was left for carrion.”
And that…that is the worst of all, a blatant disregard not only for her word, not only for our custom, but for the most basic law that requires we respect death by eating everything we kill.
“Tonia’s scent was found on the underside.”
Wolves scattered through the territory answer their Alphas’ calls. Soon they will be gathering around the Alpha pair, jumping about, curious at first, then needing comfort, the feeling of belonging. That ineffable connection.
Yours.
Mine.
I stare out the window toward Westdæl.
Lorcan wipes at the scrape and smears the beaded blood down his forearm. “I will see to it that she is disciplined, Alpha.”
“No, your shielder will. You have an echelon to comfort,” Evie says in a tone that makes clear that the conversation is over and he is dismissed. “See that you do it.”
Lorcan is torn, as he always is, between concern for the dignity of his position and his loathing for the more unpleasant aspects of leadership. He takes a breath, but then shuts his mouth and lowers his eyes.
“Close the door,” Evie says. She listens as he thumps through the Great Hall, listens as he calls members of the 12th who are wild to summon his echelon in the only way that can be heard throughout the territories.
“I am glad to have you watching the border, but the 12th does not do well without you.”
I say nothing.
“Tell me, why have you never challenged Lorcan for primacy of the 12th? You would win.”
I know she wants me to be Alpha. So did John before her. But being Alpha requires many things. It requires a wolf who can direct and discipline. A wolf who can protect and provide. But as
important as any of these, an Alpha must also be able to comfort.
And I know myself. I know that I have no comfort to give.
“It is better as it is.” There isn’t long before the shooting starts. “Alpha, I should get back to Westdæl. The Shifters—”
“I know what the Shifters want. They won’t move against us while there is any hope of getting it.”
She says nothing more, and it is not my place to question her when she clearly doesn’t want to talk about it.
When the first shot comes, it is distant, but not nearly distant enough. It wakes my mind and sends it running down the hallways of memory at a sprint. Pitter. Patter. Pitter. Patter.
Pity.
It’s only when the Alpha’s hand reaches for mine that I realize my teeth are clenched and I’m growling. I feel the sweat on her palm and see the tension in her shoulders and smell the salt-and-old-leather scent of fear.
I hold her hand tighter.
In front of any other wolf, it might seem like weakness on the part of two of the Great North’s strongest members. But we know. Only Evie and I have ever experienced the systematic slaughter of wolves. Only we have lost our packs to the staccato sound of gunfire. It took Shifters a matter of minutes to massacre hers. Longer to flay them and take their skins to market where they sold them for a handful of shillings.
It took the humans a few years to hunt the once-great Pack Vrangelya across our cold and barren island. But the outcome was the same. A collection of rotting, headless bodies, the heads having been turned into the authorities for the ten-dollar bounty.
It takes longer for the sixth shot. Evie turns to me and rubs her right cheek along mine. I wonder if she can smell Eyulf’s stony cold that is so clear and comforting to me. She moves her left cheek to mine. I guess not.
“They don’t know what it’s like,” she whispers against my ear. “We know, you and I, how fragile it all is. But…” She stops as another thin crack splits the air. “I would not have them live with that despair.”
Was that the eighth?
“It serves no purpose, Shielder, just as it serves no purpose to live in the past. We are more than the sum of our memories.”
For a long time, I stay where I am, buried deep in her tight black curls, breathing in her scent, the scent of an Alpha, saturated with the complexity of this land and this Pack.
The storm door bangs shut, and I draw back.
“Leave your boots here,” Tiberius says in the distance, “and hang your coat anywhere.”
“The westend is in the hall?” I whisper.
Tiberius squeezes through even this new, bigger door, carrying a large smudged piece of paper rolled in his hand. He is followed by the westend, and finally Elijah, wild still, nosing her hand like an incontinent puppy.
“The gun?” Evie asks as soon as they enter her office.
“In her cabin,” says Tiberius.
“And?”
The Shifter’s face is impassive. We all know why now: the mixture of his Pack mother and Shifter father has gifted him with the same sharp canines that his mate has. But while Silver embraces every trace of her wildness, Tiberius keeps his hidden.
Still, by the quirk of the corner of his lip and the calm expression of his eyes, I can tell he’s pleased. He pulls out the paper and unrolls a poster of an æcewulf, a real wolf. A forever wolf. It is a reddish-brown female standing in the snow, against a scrim of pine trunks. Her body is covered with crosshairs: fifty points for a headshot, thirty for her chest, ten for her belly.
NEW YORK:
LET THE HUNT BEGIN!
There are no bullet holes in any of the crosshairs. There are three scattered around her body and a larger splattered one in the air near her tail.
Then Tiberius turns the poster around. Someone used the blank expanse to draw the rough outline of a small human. Now that large explosion makes sense, because every shot is gathered in the center of the silhouette’s head.
Tiberius sticks the tip of his finger through the single hole in the figure’s chest. “I was guessing the distance,” Thea says. “But now I’ve got the drop. If it’s all right with you, Alpha, I’d like to try one more round, so that—”
“Homelands has had enough of guns for now,” Evie says before turning to the sable wolf who is rubbing his head into the human’s hand draped behind his ear and the back of his jaw. “Elijah, tell the Pack it’s over and take Thea back.”
He jumps up, twisting in midair like a pup, and when he lands with a floor-shaking thud, he is already at the door. He turns back to his human, whose laugh is deep and throaty.
My hand reaches the lintel.
Chapter 26
All echelons have problems. That’s why they have Alphas. To take care of those problems before they come to Evie’s notice. Things have to be pretty bad for the Alpha not only to notice, but to suggest that a challenge might be in order.
To find out what is going on, I need not the strongest wolf but the weakest.
Arthur is always around but never noticed. He has no skin in any of the games played by Pack. No one cares about the loyalty or advice or support of a nidling. As far as the Pack is concerned, he is invisible.
I locate his woody, slightly burned scent and follow it out of the Great Hall, past the Bathhouse, deep into the woods that divide Home Pond from the Clearing and the route further north toward Westdæl.
These are easy woods, domesticated by the comings and goings of humans, their fires and farmlands. The Great North has reused most of the stone that once marked boundaries and houses, but there is still the occasional moss-covered wall. Then I come across the dark-gray wood of Cabin 97, the one John assigned to Tiberius and Silver when they were first mated.
Kicking the toes of my boots on the single step to loosen stray mud, I press my hand to the lintel and open the door.
All of Homelands’ cabins are the same, whether they belong to the Great North’s Alpha or to the 14th Echelon’s Theta pair: small with a high-pitched roof and a sleeping loft. They smell of musty wood and smoke and the tang of creosote and the musk of wolves. Under the sleeping loft is a tiny kitchen and bath area. The main room is dominated by a big, garish sofa upholstered with orange and green leaves. A pair of large stockinged feet rests sideways on the arm.
Because pups take a while to learn how to control their tiny claws, the sound of their scratching against the floor is one of the first signs to walk carefully. A skinny tail waves excitedly from under the sofa. Another sticks out from behind the cold iron stove.
With a flicker, the tail disappears under the sofa, and its owner emerges held aloft by the long arm belonging to my nidling.
“Arthur.”
Arthur’s head pops up, followed by his shoulders. One tiny brindle pup looks at me from behind the nidling’s ear, his needle-sharp claws dug into Arthur’s head until he lifts the pup off.
“Tiberius had to do something with Thea, so I’m watching the pups while Silver hunts.”
Ah. Usually males hunt for their females until they are completely recovered from the lying-in. But Tiberius was raised human by his Shifter father. In skin, he is a lethal hunter of Shifters and humans. Wild, I doubt he could catch a dead frog.
“It’s good that you’re back, Alpha,” Arthur says.
“I’m not back. I am returning to Westdæl. I need you to tell me how things are with the 12th.”
“Me?” he asks, the smell of his anxiety rising. He won’t lie to me, but he fears Lorcan. “I…I… Perhaps you should ask the Alpha?” He bends his head down until his chin is pinned to his chest. It’s what he does when he fears he is being impertinent. One of the pups jumps on his chest facing me.
“If I had wanted to ask the Alpha, I would have asked the Alpha. But I didn’t. I am asking you.” I have neither the time nor the skill for cajoling the answer out of him.<
br />
Arthur cringes, but that pup—that tiny, still stumbling bit of fur—lunges at me. As she does, low, abbreviated growls rumble from her littermates.
Since the little brindle female, barely bigger than my palm, is clearly the dominant, I give her a real snarl, throaty and toothy, the kind of Wearg snarl that has made many a grown Pack lower their eyes and submit, but not her. She stands on Arthur’s chest, her tiny tail held high and barks.
“Oþswig, Sigeburg,” he says. Quiet, Sigeburg. The little female does not understand the words, but she understands the tone and the hand on her back. But while she quiets, she does not back down.
Arthur sets Sigeburg next to the other nurslings in the corner of the sofa, then stands in front of it, interposing his body between me and the pups. I ask again what he has heard or seen that I should know, adding “for the good of the echelon and the good of the Pack.”
Victor, he starts reluctantly, whispers about Tiberius and Evie and Silver and Elijah too. Now that the human has come back, things will get worse.
“Who does he whisper to?”
“Anyone who will listen.” Arthur is prevaricating.
“And who listens, Arthur?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I am just a nidling, Alpha,” he says.
“You are not just a nidling, Arthur. You are a wolf of the Great North, and your first responsibility is not to Lorcan or to me. Your first responsibility is to the Pack. Just like it is for every one of us.”
He takes a deep breath and, with a slight tremble to his voice, tells me. The younger echelons. The 10th, he says. The 11th and the 13th. They all listen to Victor.
“And the 12th and 14th?”
The 14th’s Alpha, Arthur says, is loyal to his own wolves and will not hear talk about Tiberius, who Victor despises, and Quicksilver, whom he hates even more because she challenges him all the time. “Not physically,” Arthur is quick to add, as though that could ever be an option. “About the law. It makes him angry.”
I don’t push Arthur about the 12th because his body is collapsing in on itself: head down, shoulders hunched, toes pointed inward, arms wrapped tight around his waist. This defeated posture tells me everything I need to know about my echelon.
