by Laura Taylor
Soon enough, the ritualistic greeting was over, and Nikolai shifted into human form, the rest of them taking that as their cue to do likewise.
Nikolai’s first action was to shake Feng’s hand. “My condolences,” he said without any preamble. “Eleanor will be greatly missed. May she find glory in the House of Sirius.”
“May she find glory,” Feng repeated. “And thank you. She’ll be difficult to replace.”
Nikolai paused to say something in Ukrainian to the alpha female, a woman who was much younger than Dee had expected. While in Scotland over the summer, Nikolai had told them plenty of stories about his tempestuous co-leader and how they butted heads at every opportunity, and Dee had somehow assumed the woman was around Nikolai’s own age – he must be approaching fifty, at a reasonable guess, his hair turning grey at his temples, his face weathered. But this woman looked to be in her thirties, a thick mane of dark hair flowing down her back, a lean body and well-developed muscles suggesting she could more than hold her own in a fight. Not only that, but she was far more beautiful than Dee had expected, an easy smile on her face as she stepped forward to hug Feng. She said something in Ukrainian, and it was only then that Dee realised she didn’t speak any English. Nikolai translated – she’d said Feng and his party were very welcome, and it had been a great sorrow to hear of Eleanor’s passing – and then Nikolai finally turned to Dee.
“Dee, my friend. It is so good to see you again. And your honourable boyfriend as well.” He winked at Mark, who grinned back and shook his hand. When they’d first met, the two of them hadn’t quite known what to make of each other, but at Dee’s urging, they’d got to know each other better, and both discovered that they rather liked the other.
A quick round of introductions followed and Dee learned that the alpha female’s name was Iryna. Then she had a brief moment to hug Olek and Alexei, the two other men she’d met at the Densmeet. That, too, was a bitter-sweet moment, as a third man she’d got to know, Bohdan, had been killed in a raid by the Noturatii during the gathering. After the battle, the estate had been evacuated as quickly as possible, and she’d never had the chance to say much to the two men about it. But even now, it seemed she wasn’t going to get the opportunity; neither of them spoke English, and with other, far more pressing matters to deal with, she didn’t think Nikolai was likely to just stand around and translate so they could have a proper conversation.
“I assume you want to see the pups now?” Nikolai asked, glancing at Feng.
“The sooner, the better, I think,” he agreed, so Nikolai turned to lead them across the square and towards a small house. Iryna and a few of the others followed them.
“How are they?” Dee asked, walking quickly to keep up with Nikolai, her short stature making it hard to match his longer stride. “We were told their parents were killed by poachers. Are they okay?”
“They’re doing fine,” Nikolai said with a smile. “Look at you, already worrying about things. It’s fine to be concerned, but don’t forget to enjoy being a mother as well.” He winked at her, and Dee felt herself flush. She’d barely sat still since they’d received the news, and given the suddenness of it all, she hadn’t had much chance to think about what sort of mother she would be. She didn’t want to turn into a fretful worrier who wouldn’t let her children out of her sight.
But Faeydir gave her a nudge as she picked up on Dee’s wayward emotions. They were going to have plenty of help, she reminded her, showing her an image of the entire Den gathered around a pair of pups.
“They were not harmed by the poachers,” Nikolai went on, more serious now. “We’ve been bottle-feeding them, and they eat well. We think they’re about three weeks old; their eyes are open, and they’ve begun moving around on their own.” They reached the house and he held the door open for them, then led the way down a dim hallway into a spacious and surprisingly well-lit kitchen. He stopped halfway across the room, and Dee looked past him to see...
“Oh, they’re gorgeous...” She went forward, sinking to her knees beside the makeshift bed of blankets that had been set up in the corner of the kitchen. A female wolf was lying on the blankets, two small, squirming puppies between her front paws, and she wagged her tail as they approached. The puppies themselves were little more than fuzzy balls of fur, stumpy legs working hard as they wobbled about, tiny tails attempting wagging, and Dee was instantly in love.
“Natalia has been caring for them,” Nikolai said softly from behind her. “We've been trying to get them used to human scents and to people coming and going, but they're still a lot more relaxed with a wolf around.”
“May I?” Dee asked the wolf, gesturing towards the closest pup, and Natalia wagged her tail in reply. Dee carefully picked the puppy up – it was a male, she noted in passing – while Mark crouched down beside her, seemingly awestruck by the sight of them. The puppy let out a whine, sniffing her hand curiously. At this age, wolf puppies were highly sociable, easily accepting strangers as they gradually got to know the wolves of their own pack.
“Have you thought of names for them yet?” Nikolai asked.
“Not yet,” Dee replied. “We were only told they were here yesterday.” She grinned as the pup she was holding licked her hand. “I was thinking...” She glanced uncertainly at Mark. “Maybe we could call this one Luke?”
Mark was speechless for a moment, and Dee wished she’d had time to discuss it with him beforehand. But in the rush to get here, her head had been full of other plans, questions on whether they would convert the pups right away, how they were going to behave on the flight back to England, serious conversations with Faeydir about how to discipline wolf puppies, and the subject of names had been well down the list of priorities.
Now, as she watched, she saw Mark’s face flush slightly. Luke had been one of his closest friends, killed by the Noturatii not long before Dee joined the Den, and while she intended the suggestion as a sign of respect, she wasn’t sure what Mark would think of it.
“He would have been honoured,” he said, his voice sounding tight. “Luke it is.”
“If it is not rude, could I suggest a name for the female?” Nikolai asked hesitantly. “If you prefer to choose one yourself, that's fine, of course.”
Dee glanced at Mark, who shrugged. “We’d be happy to take suggestions,” Mark told him.
“Then I would like to suggest Taya.”
One of the men watching on gasped at the mention of the name, and then Iryna said something in Ukrainian that sounded vaguely like a prayer and ended with the word ‘Sirius’. Despite the language barriers, it was clear they’d picked up on the gist of the conversation.
“It sounds like this woman was important to you,” Dee guessed.
“She was a member of our Den, up until last winter,” Nikolai explained. “She was alpha once, before she retired four years ago. A most honourable woman. Then last winter she travelled to Germany and was killed by the Noturatii. She sacrificed her life to save the two children who live in that Den. I believe it would be a fitting memorial for her.”
“Taya would be a wonderful name,” Dee said, after receiving an easy nod from Mark, and then Mark picked up the female pup, slightly smaller than her brother and shyer about exploring her surroundings.
“Hey, little Taya,” he murmured to her. “Welcome to your new family.”
Just at that moment, Faeydir decided she’d had enough of waiting, and she gave Dee an insistent nudge to change forms.
“Faeydir wants to meet them,” Dee explained quickly to Nikolai, not sure what the local protocol was with regards to shifting. Around her own Den, it was customary to announce a shift inside the house, but not so important outside.
Nikolai nodded, then said a few words to the others in Ukrainian, so Dee carefully set the newly-named Luke down and gave Faeydir the all-clear. Her shift was smooth and fast, and the pups seemed bemused, but not alarmed by the sudden change.
Faeydir’s reaction was entirely predictable. After they’d
filled in the Council’s application form to adopt children, Dee had begun doing some research. She’d learned plenty about wolf behaviour in general over the past year, but given the rarity of actually having puppies in a Den, there had been no particular lessons on that side of things. But according to the wolf biology books in the library, puppies were a cause for celebration in a wolf pack, the adults eagerly waiting for a new litter to emerge from the den where they had been born, and the entire pack working together to protect, feed and raise the pups. Faeydir’s delight was palpable as she lowered her head to sniff the male pup, licking his head, her tail wagging, and then, when he stumbled about and strayed off the edge of the blanket, she picked him up carefully in her mouth and deposited him back in his makeshift nest.
Why hadn’t Mark shifted as well, she asked Dee, seeming almost offended. How was he going to get to know his own children if he wasn’t willing to learn their smell, their taste? How would he recognise their voices with his inadequate human ears?
Humans recognised their children’s voices perfectly well, Dee told Faeydir, even as her wolf nudged Mark and let out a soft yowl to inform him of her disapproval. And overall, they identified their offspring through sight, not smell.
Mark seemed to take the hint, and he set Taya down next to her brother. He shifted a moment later and followed Faeydir’s lead, sniffing the two pups thoroughly, licking them, and giving a wolfly grin when one of them tried to chew on his jaw.
"We haven’t had much time to discuss converting them," Nikolai said, once the introductions were taken care of. "The Council told us you wish to have human children, and wolf ones as well. Quite the challenge," he mused, though there was nothing in his tone to suggest he disapproved. "Do you want to convert them here, or in England?”
“England,” Feng replied, finally giving in to the desire to bend down and stroke Taya’s ears. “Moving puppies across borders is far easier than trying to get children through. Though we haven’t quite figured out how to get them back to the plane. It’s too far for them to walk, and we can’t just carry them through the forest as humans.”
“We have some ideas,” Nikolai replied. “Olek has been working on them. Come outside and I will show you what we’ve got.” Feng headed out the door, Mark and Iryna following him, and Nikolai waited for Faeydir to move…
"Come on, my wild friend," he said gently, when it became apparent she wasn’t going anywhere. "You will have many years to get to know your puppies. But for now, ten minutes away from them will not kill you."
A whine. A huff. A parting lick. And then Faeydir finally turned and followed Nikolai back out of the house.
CHAPTER THREE
In the IT office on the second floor of the wolf shifters’ manor, Alistair typed a simple Google search into the computer as Baron and Caroline watched. “I’ve already put the word out to some of our contacts in the area. I said they’re not to announce anything uninvited, but if they get asked, they can say they saw us in either Kendal or Lancaster. Ah, here’s the map,” he said to Baron as the page loaded, a few clicks of the mouse zooming in on the region they were interested in. “Preston would be too far south of the Lakes District, I think, but there are plenty of small towns and villages to choose from where we could make some noise and get the Noturatii’s attention. Somewhere that’s far enough from here to give us some breathing room.”
“Not too much noise, though,” Baron cautioned him, taking the mouse and fiddling with the map on the screen. “The Noturatii know we’ve lured them into traps in the past. Anything too obvious is just going to make them nervous, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.”
“You did a similar thing, ten years ago, though, didn’t you?” Alistair asked. He hadn’t been a member of the Den at that point, having been recruited a couple of years after the infamous raids. “Could we use similar tactics to what you did then?”
Baron shook his head and rubbed his beard. “Times were different then. The Noturatii believed they’d all but wiped us out. They thought that signs of shifter activity meant two or three stragglers who would be an easy target. It took them a little while to figure out we weren’t going down that easy. These days, they know what we’re capable of. And they know that we know that they’re looking for us.”
“Would it be worth sticking to the larger towns?” Caroline asked from Alistair’s other side. Her short hair was mussed, as if she’d been running her fingers through it repeatedly. “More civilians around means it’s less likely they’ll actually start shooting at us if we happen to make any mistakes.” It was a valid point. For all their careful planning, mistakes in an operation as complex as this one were almost inevitable.
But Alistair shook his head. “Larger towns are safer, but if you’re going for authenticity, quiet villages are the way to go. Rumours discussed between neighbours over the back fence. We could just park ourselves in the middle of the countryside and have a howling session, but based on what Baron just said, they’re going to see straight through that. If we’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, then any snippets we feed them have to look like genuine accidents.”
Quite a crowd had gathered around the discussion by now. Caroline and Baron had decided they were well past the stage where it was worth hiding anything from their pack; it was now a widely known fact that the Noturatii were looking for them and that their estate was compromised as a result, so trying to be all hush-hush about planning a counter-attack wasn’t going to fool anyone. Besides which, more participants meant more ideas and insights, which made it more likely they’d pick up on potential problems and avoid anything going wrong.
Skip was sitting at the next computer over, wearing her usual fluorescent pink t-shirt, ready to dig up any information they needed. Andre and Silas were lurking in the background, both looking like thugs-for-hire, offering sporadic suggestions. Raniesha was sitting pertly in high heels and a short skirt, ready to give advice on explosives, in case they decided they needed to blow anything up (which was a more common occurrence than one might suppose, given who their enemies were). Kwan and Aaron were slouching in chairs behind Baron, presumably having shown up purely for the curiosity value.
“One thing I’m going to need to know here,” Alistair went on, “is what our ultimate goal is. Is it just to let the Noturatii know we’re further south than they thought, to give us some space to move, or is this more of a ‘lure and kill’ thing? Set a trap, try to take down some of the bigwigs?”
“No fights if we can avoid it,” Andre said, from where he was leaning against the back wall. “The more time goes by, the less likely we are to win one. Weapons and technology keep advancing, and from this point on, it’s a safe bet that the Noturatii are always going to be a step ahead of us on that front.”
Baron nodded. “We’ve seen from experience that even if we got really lucky and took out the entire British Division, they’d just replace them from their other offices across Europe, and we’d be back to square one. At this stage, our resources are better spent creating distractions and keeping our heads down until the Council comes up with a more long-term plan.”
“Does the Council actually have a long-term plan?” Kwan asked carefully, no doubt worried about overstepping his bounds. “I don’t mean to be rude, but the Endless War has been slowly heating up for decades, and so far, they’ve never really taken any decisive action on it.”
Alistair watched Baron as he waited for an answer... and the suddenly guarded look on Baron’s face told him everything he needed to know. So, there was something in the works, after all. Interesting.
“There is a plan,” Baron said finally. “I can’t give you any of the details yet, but they have reached a firm understanding that current strategies are not going to save us. But anything new is going to be about ten years in the making, so the most important thing we’re doing at the moment is buying time. We make a few splashes down south, get the Noturatii chasing their tails a bit, then let it all go quiet.”
&nbs
p; “Just for the sake of clarity,” Silas said from where he was pacing the room, “the only thing that is truly going to save our species is to end the war. Are you saying the Council-?”
“If their plans work out, then yes, the Endless War will be over. But that’s a mighty big ‘if’.”
A weighty silence followed. No one bothered asking what this marvellous plan was. If the Council had told Baron not to tell them, then he would take the secret to his grave. But the fact that it existed at all was the first ray of light they’d seen in the longest and darkest of nights.
“Okay,” Alistair said, pulling them back on track. “The first thing I would suggest is getting Miller out there and showing his face to a few people. So far, we only know they’ve been targeting Tank, but they’re still going to be seriously pissed off about losing Miller, so I think it’s a safe bet that tracking him down is going to be a high priority for them.”
As a journalist, Alistair’s primary role in the Den was subverting news stories – either by debunking real ones, or by creating fake ones – in order to maintain the Den’s secrecy. He wasn’t a particularly skilled warrior, though he could hold his own in an average fight, and he wasn’t a genius with technology like Skip, but when it came to understanding the way people think – and manipulating them to think something else – there was no one in the Den who was his equal. Which was why Baron and Caroline had come to him, when subtlety and subterfuge were emerging as key elements in their strategy.
“Skip, I’ll need to have a chat with you about what you found on that database you hacked a while back,” he said, thinking aloud as his mind started churning through ideas, “and Kwan and Aaron, if you’ve got a couple of hours free, I could use a hand researching the towns in that area. Let me do a little work on other things we can use,” he told them, jotting down a few details on a pad of paper. “Subtle enough that they look natural, but not so subtle that the Noturatii are going to miss them. I’ll do some digging, make some notes, and get back to you.”
