by Maria Vale
I can’t help it. It’s not loud, but my low, warning snarl is enough to send him reaching for his gun and pointing it a few feet from my direction. My legs tighten until they spasm. If he shoots, he will miss. I will not, but it will be a mess for the Pack.
Thea moves, putting herself between Anderson and the Labrador tea.
“Put your gun away, Mr. Anderson.”
“You heard that. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
“Put your gun away now, Anderson.” With that slight change in tone and the loss of the Mr., Thea Villalobos makes something clear. She isn’t afraid or even angry. But she is in control. Anderson just doesn’t know it yet.
Then comes the sound of someone who is really not in control. Elijah clears the forest looking like he’s tripped over every branch and into every mud slick in Homelands. The roar that comes from the 9th’s Alpha as he tears toward Thea in his squelching boots is not human.
Anderson pulls down his night-vision goggles and turns toward the raging thing bearing down on him, his gun drawn.
“Don’t,” Thea says, her hand abruptly shoved into the air in my direction.
As soon as she shines her high-intensity flashlight into Anderson’s goggles, he stumbles back, blinded. Then she whips around and does the same to her furious mate, who trips and falls.
“Now, we’re all going to calm down. Mr. Anderson, your gun please.”
I slink back behind the Labrador tea.
“Elijah?” Even she must be able to smell the peculiar bitter burn of rage rolling from his skin.
“I know him,” the man says, slipping the gun back into its holster and brushing the back of his pants. “I know you. You’re the goddamn lawyer.”
“I represent the interests of the Great North LLC,” Elijah finally manages through gritted teeth. Thea keeps her body firmly planted between him and Anderson.
“That was my land over there,” Anderson says, waving in the general direction of Home Pond.
“The junkyard. Yes, I know,” says Elijah.
“Salvage! It was a salvage yard. It was a legitimate business, but you people were always complaining about some violation or another. Thought you could force me into selling it to you. Well, the joke’s on you, because the man I sold it to? You know why I sold it to that Canadian? Because he promised me that he would never let you have it. John Torrance would have paid me double, but nothing was worth as much to me as August Leveraux’s promise that he would be a thorn in your side for-fucking-ever.”
Thea coughs and hands the man back his phone. He wipes the screen against his jeans and shoves it back in his pocket.
“I’m letting you off with a warning, Mr. Anderson, but I’ve got your license and I’m going to strongly advise you—”
“Fuck off.” He slings the canvas duffel over one shoulder. “There is something going on here, and I’m not the only one interested in finding out what it is.”
Elijah takes a step forward, neck bent down, teeth bared. He can’t help it. This man is threatening his wild, and his wild responds.
“Stop,” Thea whispers, pushing her back against Elijah’s chest, pitting her frail humanity against the mountainous body of the 9th’s Alpha. “Breathe, Elijah,” she says, and finally he does. I leave the shelter of the Labrador tea and join them watching Anderson work his way to the other side of Beaver Pond.
“He has a picture.”
“What sort of picture?”
“Here.” She hands him her phone. “I took a copy when he was ranting.”
Elijah looks it over carefully, tilting it so that I can see too. Then he does exactly what she did, widening his fingers to look more closely.
“We don’t have a white wolf. Never have that I know of.”
“White?”
“Right there. The hunk of fur.” He hands the phone back to her. “There are no packs anywhere near here, so this wolf must have wandered a long way looking for sanctuary. Shielder,” he says to me, “we should look for the body.” He takes one last glimpse at the bloody mess in the snow.
“Pity,” he says.
Chapter 30
I sprint across the icy mud and dried weeds, following the smell of cold up the south slope of Westdæl. I hit the tree line and find the body, my body, the body that lost so much blood but didn’t die because I wouldn’t let him. I am surrounded by white fur, by the frantic rubbing of jaw against muzzle and soft-jawed wolf kisses. He can tell that there’s something wrong and, with his chin, pushes me down. He lies down facing me, his front leg across my shoulder. We are so close that even in the blind vortex of my change, I feel every shudder of his.
“There was a picture,” I whisper when I finally can. “So much blood. You lost so much blood.”
“Shh,” he shushes, his voice still garbled like a wolf at the end of his change.
“I wasn’t supposed to be here.” I blink frantically, trying to forget the image of blood-pitted snow. Trying to forget how arbitrary death is. How if I hadn’t gotten exasperated with the crowds around Home Pond, I would never have come here. If the helicopter hadn’t arrived, I wouldn’t have sought cover. If I hadn’t been raised cold, I would never have known he was there.
Who knows how many years it would have taken before some adventuresome juvenile found what was left of his body?
I hold out my hands, cupped tight around this precious and fragile thing that I can’t explain but I have to take care of. That I have to protect.
But even without explaining, he seems to know. He covers my hands with his own and sighs.
“You can’t always protect, Varya. Things happen in the world that are beyond even your control. Sometimes all you can do”—he gently pries apart my hands and kisses each palm—“is love.”
Dropping my head to his shoulder, I stare at one hand, half expecting to see the trace of his lips like a brand on my palm. Nothing’s there, but I need that burn, that combination of fire and ice, and press my hand to his chest, feeling for every jolt and spark and ripple under that marble skin. My mouth fits to the entry wound beneath his shoulder, while my hands touch his cabled arms. I move down his ribs with their crisscrossed musculature until, falling to my knees, I follow his hard, flat stomach down the long, hard lines of his thighs.
There are so many things that should have killed him that being shot almost seems like the least of them. The desertion of his pack, the years of wandering, the decades of not knowing what he was, but none of it did, and in the hard, yearning insistence of his cock and the smell like the bright musk of coriander, I know he is stubbornly alive.
I mark him, my cheek and jaw taking on his scent and leaving mine, and when I look up, his eyes have darkened from ice blue to storm, from summer leaves to winter needles.
He stands still, but I can tell by the slight tremor that it’s taking effort. “If I change,” he chokes out. “If I fall…”
“If you fall,” I whisper, my breath eddying across the already weeping crown, “then I will catch you.”
I let my tongue run over his head. It tastes like salt and wild mushroom. I raise my hand to his pale nipple and flick it with my finger. Almost immediately, it tightens into a sharp point and his hips jerk forward, brushing against my cheek.
“Careful.”
He steadies himself, his hand on my shoulder.
In all my dutiful couplings, I’ve never done this—never licked or nibbled or dragged my teeth across or felt the contrast between the unyielding core and the silky skin that has enough play to pull down.
And I’ve certainly never covered a cock with my mouth, feeling the throb of my wolf’s living pulse echoing the speeding of his heart.
A deep growl resonates through the chambers of my mouth and he groans, his scent sharpening, his arms and legs trembling.
I push down and pull back, without letting up. And when my arm is
tired of playing among the planes of his chest, I weigh the heaviness between his legs in my palm. Squeezing carefully, rubbing my thumb against the little seam and—
“Let me in, Varya. Take me inside you.”
I am not Homelands. I am not a territory that needs to be protected from every invader. He must feel it when he cups his hand between my legs.
The colder the land, the more passionate the thaw.
“Yours,” he says, driving into me.
“Mine.”
“Yours,” I repeat.
“Mine.”
* * *
Humans measure their time by the sun. Always so blusteringly, predictably full. We measure our time by the moon, changing minute by minute, a painful reminder of transience and passing. With each night, the moon unfurls and my chest tightens.
With each day, winter dies a little more. Eyulf doesn’t understand why I don’t want to watch the cold roll back from the land. Why I don’t want the goddamn white flowers of the serviceberry or bright-yellow coltsfoot or the tiny pink hazelnut or the trout lily or the tightly curled fiddleheads or the sprays of horsetails sprinkled with the first dew.
Why I don’t want to hear the sparrows and winter wrens and flycatchers and pewees and mergansers call out the same song across the Great North’s territory.
Listen to me.
Look at me.
Love me.
Make life with me.
The song he loves the most is wolf song. If it comes when I have words, I tell him what it means.
Human has entered Homelands.
Human has left Homelands.
Wolf injured.
Fresh kill.
And most often:
I am.
We are.
Then, too early, it comes. Rising high, it falls, and then after it surges halfway back up the register, Evie lets her call float down, disappearing as her breath gives out.
Come home.
Not yet. Please, not yet.
The sun is high in the sky, and Evie starts again.
“We’re being called home,” I whisper into his hair.
“Now?” I don’t see his face, but I feel his body stiffen. “It’s too early.”
It is early. Earlier than usual, but that’s not the way packs work. The way packs work is that the Alpha calls and you come. I see him staring at the scars at my neck.
“He won’t touch me,” I say, looking into his eyes. Eyulf covers the join of my shoulder with his hand. A callus scrapes against the muddled, faded teeth marks that Lorcan has left in my skin over the years.
It irritates me, the idea that I am marked by Lorcan. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Hmm.”
Pulling my hair to the side, I stretch out my neck. “I want you to—”
“Forget it.” He smooths my hair back down, covering my shoulder. “I’m not biting you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not making another mark on your skin.”
“And I refuse to have my past be the thing that marks me.” I hold his hand to the subtle ridges at my neck. “Wolves are physical. Our stories are written on our skin. And you are the story I want written on my body.”
He feels every ridge and indentation left by Lorcan’s teeth, his lips tight. He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hurt me, but he doesn’t like the idea of having me marked by Lorcan any more than I do. Finally, he nods.
I begin to turn over onto my hands and knees, but he stops me. “I have to turn over.”
“No,” he says, holding me tighter. “If I’m going to do this, I will not have your back to me. I want to make it clear that I see you. All of you. You say your story is written on your body. Well, I want every piece of that story. Every hard and painful thing that has brought us here. And there’s one other thing”—he shakes his hair back and bends his head to the side—“you mark me in the same way.”
He strokes my cheek. “It goes both ways, Varya, or it doesn’t happen at all.”
There is a fire that burns inside Arctic wolves. Banked, it keeps our bodies from freezing in the long nights of ice and snow. We are careful with it, though, because if it rages out of control, there is always a chance it will turn those around us to ash.
We balance on that knife’s edge between control and release. He—we—are flushed and slicked with sweat. His pale hair falls down onto his face in rivulets. His hips push until the root of him is tight against me. He is so thick inside me that I know there will never be space left for anyone else. Voiceless, I growl at him to tend the cramping need that balances between pleasure and pain. Only then does he press my head to the muscled cord above his collarbone and his own mouth over the hard, scarred join at my neck. As soon as I strike, his teeth tear into the skin at my shoulder. I am not gentle because I know the force needed to bite through the small, accumulated marks of my past.
He breaks me open, just as Evie calls again.
Chapter 31
It has fallen to the 12th and the 5th to set up the Great Hall to accommodate the Pack’s full numbers when no one is hunting. To drag out every table and every bench. I haven’t seen Evie yet, and if anyone else knows else why we’ve been called home early, they’re not saying.
“Lift it. Don’t drag it along the floor.”
“It’s very heavy,” says the 5th Echelon’s Beta mate.
“Put it down then. I’ll find someone stronger.”
I don’t say it loudly, but several more subordinate wolves in his echelon watch him with interest. He picks it up without another word and lifts it high with one hand.
Pointless posturing.
By tradition, it falls to the Year of First Shoes to set the main table, putting out hot pads and piles of mismatched plates and hillocks of cutlery. Because they are not yet comfortable with opposable thumbs, there is an almost constant noise of things dropping.
Tara signals to me from the corner. “Evie would like to talk to you,” she says as soon as I am out of earshot of the other wolves.
I scan Tara’s face, looking for some explanation. For her to correct herself, but she just nods so that I know it was no simple oversight or sloppiness on her part. Evie, Tara had said, not “the Alpha.” Would like, she said, not “would.” And she didn’t address me as Shielder.
No, Evie is asking something of Varya.
Touching the lintel, I knock on the door to the Alpha’s office. Evie answers, her finger to her lips. The answering machine beeps and she bends over, leaving some message about the Great North LLC and a board retreat to cover for the fact that with the Iron Moon coming, she will have no hands to pick up the receiver and no words to speak into it.
She hits a button and turns back to me.
“I’m taking precautions this moon. Rather than gathering in front of the Great Hall, I will be dispersing the echelons throughout the High Pines. I have also consented to have Tiberius guard the access road. Along with Elijah’s human.”
If she hadn’t asked me here as wolf to wolf, I would have said nothing, only acquiesced, but she didn’t. I am here as Varya talking to Evie. “Is that wise?” I ask. “Ælfrida warned the Pack that those who guard us in our weakness will always end up exploiting it.”
“She was thinking of the mercenaries who killed Pack Wessex. Tiberius and Thea may be outsiders, but they love their mates. Love us. I believe even Ælfrida would say it was different.”
The water drips from the rooftop in slow, steady drops down the window that looks out on Westdæl.
Sometimes all you can do is love.
“Thea Villalobos will be joining us for the last meal before the Iron Moon,” Evie says.
I suck in a breath too quickly and choke on it.
“The human didn’t ask to join us,” she says. “Elijah did. The 9th’s Alpha would break from the Pack before letting
her go. He is not asking that she be part of the Great North, just that we become used to her, know her scent and know that she will not betray us.
“I hoped you would guard over her when she is here.”
“Me? Why me? Wouldn’t an Offlander be better suited? Alpha, there must be someone else. Anyone else.”
Or just someone who hasn’t already promised to kill her, though I don’t say that part.
“Why not Elijah?”
“Elijah,” Evie says, exhaling slowly, “will kill anyone who looks at her sideways. I have no doubt he could guard her, but this is as much about protecting the Great North as it is about protecting Thea. The Pack respects you absolutely. They know you have no love of humans. That is what makes you my best option. I also know if you say you will do this, she will be safe.”
A plate falls in the hallway beyond the door.
“I’m not commanding you, Varya. I wouldn’t do that. I am only asking.”
Adult voices bellow, answered by panicky juveniles making excuses.
“The Pack is already nervous with so many outsiders.”
“Two outsiders,” she says. “There are only two.” She listens until the tinkle of broken plates being swept into a dustpan by a broom is finished. “I remember a story from my childhood,” she continues. “My Deemer told us about a wolf who had a wonderful home. The earth was soft under his feet, and the trees and sky shone bright above him. Then one day, a wolf’s head pops from among the trees. ‘What are you doing in the trees?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing in the trap?’ the tree wolf answered. Something like that. It was a long time ago. But the point was perspective.
“I think about that sometimes. I believe the outsiders understand what is precious about the Great North in a way that wolves who are born here never can. Tiberius loves this”—she waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the Clearing and the little cabin he shares with Silver and their four pups—“as much as any wolf. More. So does Elijah, who was away from it for so long. So do I, who came here frightened and alone.
