by Maria Vale
Cassius, the big one, falls on the table holding plates of food meant to fuel the Alphas who are missing the Iron Moon Table. He takes the lids from chafing dishes filled with eggs and barley soup and curd-cheese pastries and scones and my own favorite: hasty pudding with cream and the end of last year’s preserved gooseberries.
Probably looking for carrion, like Tiberius did when he first came. He complained steadfastly about the lack of meat until Silver explained that meat was what a wolf hunted and devoured still warm from snout to tail. Carrion, she said with no little disgust, was vacuum-packed roadkill.
Finally, he chooses something. Eggy cakes by the smell of it. Julia takes a small bowl of strawberries. She shows it first to Cassius, who raises a dewclaw. No, not dewclaw. Thumb. He raises his thumb. I bend my own against my fingers, reminding myself of the feel of its opposability.
Leonora, the Great North’s human behaviors teacher, arrives late. Something about the sick one, Magnus, attracts her attention, but before she can get closer, Constantine pivots, making his body a shield against her. He seems to have only two modes: striking or coiled to strike.
Now Leonora cups her hand to her face. Sniffing at it with a worried expression, she looks toward me, her mouth open.
“Alpha?” says Cassius, and Leonora immediately forgets her question. Cassius’s voice is now smooth and healed. The Pack looks to me for guidance, but with a quick dip of my eyes, I tell them to wait. Wolves are watchers first.
The Shifter brushes the crumbs first from his mouth and chest, then from his hands. He combs his fingers through his hair, then holds his hand out to Elijah Sorensson, Alpha of the 9th.
Elijah’s eyes shift toward me. Without turning away from the window, I lift a lip over my right canine. The prey wants to play. Play with him.
Elijah is a lawyer and spent decades Offland before coming back home this winter. It has made him a consummate practitioner of human customs, and maybe that’s what fools Cassius into thinking that the one who looks the most human, the one with neatly combed hair, with no traces of burrs, with no patches of molting fur stuck to old blood, must be in charge.
Or maybe it’s just that Elijah wears a shirt with buttons, the kind of additional obstacle to being wild that Homeland wolves have little patience for.
“Alpha?” Cassius says again, holding out his hand. “Name’s Cassius. I’m what you might call the Alpha of our merry group.”
Two of the Shifters anxiously follow Cassius’s interaction with the “Alpha,” but the fourth one, the dangerous one, watches me. He is tall enough to see even over a roomful of wolves. To make sure he’s not looking out the window, I step to the side. He doesn’t move, but his eyes track me. It’s an old Alpha trick: to watch without watching, because wolves who feel their Alpha’s gaze on them become stilted and unnatural.
Constantine is the dangerous one.
What makes you dangerous, Constantine?
I watched our “guests” during the Iron Moon. Magnus is too sick to be dangerous; Cassius, too stupid; Julia, too afraid. Constantine has never seen me in skin, but I get the uncomfortable feeling he knows who I am anyway.
“As one Alpha to the other,” Cassius says, “I wanted to find a way out of this misunderstanding so that no one has to get hurt.”
Elijah scratches the corner of his eye. “What do you think has been misunderstood?”
“This whole…” Cassius waves his hand vaguely in the air, indicating the general disastrousness without admitting to anything in particular. “Julia and me, we came here for a dinner. You can tell… Come here, baby.”
They look like they could both be in the same echelon, the same age group, so why would he call her “baby”?
Julia puts down the empty bowl and teeters over to Cassius, a hand clutching one of our blankets around her bare shoulders. He puts his arm around her waist. “Look at her. Look at me. You can tell by the way we’re dressed that we were just coming to party.”
“So nothing about the ATVs and rifles and jacklights at the edge of our land made you suspect that this wasn’t just a dinner?”
“I knew it wasn’t just a dinner. But I didn’t know it was your land. Before he got shot, August hosted hunting parties all the time. You know, get a bunch of rich guys together, drive them out to some piece of land all stocked up with game. He always said nothing lubricates business like shooting at exotic animals wondering how the fuck they ended up in Canada.”
He laughs and looks around at the silent faces surrounding him. He has mistaken his audience if he thinks we would appreciate the uproarious confusion of tropical beasts trembling in the cold while guns explode around them.
Yes, we are hunters. But our hunts are not from a safe distance; our hunts are intimate: teeth against hide, tongue against blood. The Gemyndstow, the memory place, is filled with stones bearing the names of wolves who have taken a hoof to the head or a claw to the throat. Soon hands go to seaxs, the daggers that are a poor substitute for the lost sharpness of fang and claw when we are in skin.
I shake my head once and they drop their hands, but I know they are not happy about it.
“Anyway, when August tells me to pick up these rich guys at Saint-Hubert Airport and drive them here, have dinner, be entertaining, then wait around until they’ve had their fun and drive them back, I did it. That’s the way it is with him. He tells you what to do, and you do it. It wasn’t up to me to figure out why.
“I honestly had no idea he was hunting you,” he continues. “Look, if August really is dead—”
“He is dead,” says the tall Shifter, in a voice that is deep and fluid and quiet, the kind of hissed quiet that is meant to make humans listen.
“If it turns out that August really is dead,” Cassius snaps back, “which I still can’t hardly believe, then it’s over. I’ve got no beef with you.”
“And what makes you Alpha?” I ask.
Cassius stills as the gathered Alphas of the Great North turn toward me, their heads lowered. He looks between Elijah in his wool slacks and white shirt and me in my torn jeans and ivory waffle-knit shirt with rust stains across the front and wonders if perhaps he has made a mistake.
My wolves part in front of me like water.
“Ah.” Cassius’s mind grapples with the new development. “Of course. Alpha.” He holds out his hand to me this time.
Now that I am Alpha, I have had to deal more often with the proffered hands of humans and know that I am expected to touch it, but here in Homelands, I do not have to pretend to be other than I am and will not shake this appendage that stinks of steel and carrion.
“What,” I ask again, “makes you Alpha?”
His empty hand drops. “Not really Alpha exactly, but my fiancée?” He points to the female. “She is August’s niece. By marriage.”
Fiancée. Niece. Marriage.
“Leonora?”
Leonora pushes forward. She has a little brown bag that makes a hard snap when she opens it. Pulling out a tiny mirror with a tinny shine, she dabs at her face with a damp towel.
“He is saying”—she looks into the mirror—“that he is the bedfellow”—there is a streak of pine sap at her lower jaw—“of the offspring.” It bristles with the sticky remains of owl feather. “Of August’s mate’s littermate?” Even Leonora seems uncertain about her interpretation.
“And this is a thing?”
“Humans put great importance on blood lineage regardless of suitability.”
“But if it’s about blood lineage, then why is ‘the girl’ not the new Alpha?” I indicate a spot behind Leonora’s jaw. Owl blood.
Leonora pauses in her cleaning to shoot a questioning look over her mirror at Cassius.
“Well, because she’s…” Cassius starts.
“Yes?”
“Because she’s not interested, that’s why. She doesn’t know anyt
hing about import and export and stuff like that. Fuck, she doesn’t know how many grams are in a kilo. And she doesn’t want to know. Right, baby?”
Julia nods without looking up from the slow process of chipping away the nail polish on her thumb. I’m not sure she heard the question, just that Cassius has said something to her that requires an affirmative.
The screen door opens. I can’t see who it is over the heads of the Alphas, but as soon as I see the big wolves jump away, I know it’s Silver. Silver who was born a runt and stayed a runt, but it doesn’t stop her from pushing her way through with that rolling gait that is wild even in skin.
I have known Silver since she was ripped tiny and weak from her dam’s belly. Packs have no tolerance for weakness, and not only is she a runt, but her leg curls tight against her torso when she is wild. Still, there is no one in the Great North who is stronger of marrow or who loves the land, the Pack, and the wild more. No one who knows our stories and our laws better.
So when our last lawgiver betrayed the Pack, I called her to be Deemer. Her role is to clarify, arbitrate, mediate, and finally to offer a decision to the Pack.
Respect for the law starts young and continues. This morning, too, we started the Iron Moon Table, that one time when wolves are all together and in skin, with the familiar call and response.
In our laws are we protected.
And in lawlessness are we destroyed.
They’ve been through a lot, the Great North, and maybe it would have been better to choose a bigger wolf as Deemer. Someone with strength and size to handle the anxiety and skittishness that can make wolves hard to control.
Too late. An Alpha cannot afford even the appearance of doubt, so I school my face to confidence, staring unseeing into the middle distance as though there is no chance that the Alphas of the various echelons will fail to offer Silver the deference due her position.
Most lower their eyes, though Poul, Alpha of the 10th, hesitates. I pray to the moon that I have not made a mistake and that Silver is not too young or too weak to fight for herself, but I feel my body tighten, already preparing to enforce my decision in case she can’t.
Silver leaps, scrabbling past other wolves, her silver hair tangled with burrs and dried grasses, a cut on her forehead, her upper lip curled back from fangs that are too feral and long and sharp ever to be mistaken for human.
A low, long rumble runs through her chest, Poul bows his head, and I finally exhale.
“Deemer,” I ask. “Does the law allow us to kill the Shifters?”
The tall Shifter’s eyes flit to the door, to the wolves closest to it, to their seaxs, to the sick young man behind him. Maybe he could get some distance, but not with Magnus. And while I believe Cassius would leave his bedfellow, everything that I saw over the Iron Moon made me think that Constantine would not abandon Magnus.
Besides, I watched them. Not a single one knows how to read the forest.
“If they are not a direct threat,” Silver says, “we cannot by law kill them.”
“Thank god for small favors,” Cassius snaps.
Wolves say what they mean and find human things like irony and facetiousness difficult to understand. Still, Silver seems to grasp that Cassius is not offering up thanks to his deity. She moves toward him, standing close, her eyes unyielding.
“Unless, of course, we eat them,” she says and sucks at her front fang.
Cassius moves closer, and though he is taller and larger by far, Silver does not back down.
“Bite me, bitch,” he says, and because wolves say what they mean, Silver does.
Before he finishes drawing his fist back, I pin him to the wall, his feet dangling in the air, clawing at my forearm pressed under his chin, so that now this Shifter will have no choice but to listen.
“I lost my birth pack to Shifters,” I growl against his face. “I will not lose another. A hundred years before the United States had any ‘founding fathers,’ our founding Alpha came to this country. The last thing she did before departing the Old World was to eat a Shifter, a loose end that needed to be clipped off before they left. If you so much as inconvenience a single one of my wolves, I will follow Ælfrida’s example and eat you—eat all of you—myself.”
Cassius falls to the floor, gagging, the side of one hand bleeding from the deep puncture wounds left by my Deemer’s teeth.
A murmured sound of disapproval circulates through the room. “No, Alpha,” says Eudemos, Alpha of the 14th, Silver and Tiberius’s age group. “That cannot be.” He puts his hand on the hilt of his dagger. “You will not eat alone. The 14th will join you in the taking of their foul flesh.”
One by one, my Alphas repeat the pledge. Wolves are not particularly imaginative, so most repeat it verbatim, though Esme, perhaps remembering the taste of the state trooper some years back, opts for “rancid tallow” while Orvin, the fusty Alpha of the 1st, vows to partake of the “loathsome thews.”
Gea-la. Gea-la, they yell, a kind of general affirmation of togetherness that is as close to a howl as we have in this form.
Although I know she can’t, it is almost as though she hears us, and the Gray’s howl echoes down from Westdæl. The Alphas fall into a respectful silence, listening to the æcewulf, the forever wolf, as she sings her long and curious song. The only sound comes from the sick Shifter. From Magnus, whose red-rimmed eyes look beseechingly through the window toward Westdæl.
“Please. Someone answer,” he croaks through cracked lips. It’s the first I’ve heard him speak in the days he’s been here. Constantine shakes his head, telling him to be quiet. Telling him that no one said anything, but that’s not true. The Gray spoke and Magnus heard. He looks at me, a hopeless expression in his eyes. “Please.”
I size him up, this sick young man, trying to figure out what is niggling at the back of my brain. What doesn’t belong.
But he’s right, the Gray must always be answered. I clear my throat and start to speak, not with the voice that is the familiar one I have used since I came into adulthood but the other one. The one Alphas have always used to compel their wolves’ innate debt of obedience. I asked John, when he first became Alpha, how he’d learned to use it. “I didn’t learn it,” he said. “It was always there. Waiting to be needed. It’s like when a queen bee dies and another arises because it is needed.”
I didn’t think about it again until John died and the wolves of the Great North looked to me. Even though I was drained by my lying-in and heartsick, they looked to me and I had no choice but to lead or watch the Great North fall apart. That first night when decisions had to be made, I made them. And I made them using the voice of an Alpha, the voice that had always been inside me. Waiting to be needed.
Now, it vibrates through my chest and throat and the cavities of my face, and when I finally let it loose, it resonates like a wave through the assembled Alphas.
“Sona hy æcewulfas andwearde.”
The wolves lower their heads and murmur their reply. “The forever wolves will be answered, Alpha.”
Magnus slumps against the wall.
Chapter 4
Constantine
There is something about what she said. Or not what she said—I don’t know what it was—but how she said it.
Her head held high, so I could see the vibration along the deep ochre skin of her throat, a sure sign that I’m looking too closely. Her voice is like a physical thing unfurling from her and embracing everyone. The werewolves lean in like they are trying to lick up that last syllable before it fades away. Only after she has lowered her head do I realize that I am leaning toward her too. Now I see in the cloud of her hair a single parachute of a single seed sparkling among the black, like a lone star in the night sky.
There are holes in her jeans. Not the expensive, purposeful kind. These are free and come with age and wear. Muscles curl, sensuous and strong just underneath. Something
ripples across my skin and every nerve ending tingles and stings and something happens that hasn’t happened since I was a fourteen-year-old virgin. My cock is so hard it aches, the tip rasping against my mud-stiff jeans.
She catches me staring, with her amber eyes. I hold my wrists over my crotch, grateful when the door opens again and Tiberius’s enormous body fills the doorway. The woman with the silver hair moves to him quickly. His hand slides around her back, pulling her close, and he whispers into her ear. When he’s done, she nods and rubs her cheek against his, putting her hand to his heart. This, then, is Tiberius’s pale-gray wolf in human form.
“Alpha, I will change now,” she says. “Offlanders have times written in calendars that require them to do…things.”
Then she smiles a sad smile full of long, sharp feral canines.
Are they all like that? I wonder, staring at the Alpha’s mouth, wondering if hidden beneath her soft lips, there are fangs. Wondering just how dangerous her mouth is.
“And the Shifters?” the Alpha asks.
“A Clifrung must be witnessed by the entire Pack. They will have to come along.”
* * *
“Hurry it up, and stick to the path,” Tiberius barks. The other werewolves slipped past us long ago.
“There is no fucking path,” Cassius yells back.
Not that I’m going to make a habit of it, but for once, I agree with Cassius. Even in the daylight, there is no path. No markings or clearings of any sort. The only “sign” at all is the eye-height recoil of branches that indicates Tiberius’s passage.
The forests of my mother’s stories were always winter forests, with their long nights, skeletal trees, sharp ice and snow beckoning pilgrims to eternal sleep, but give me a winter forest anytime. Here, there’s too much fucking life flapping, screeching, eating, slithering, defecating… I can almost feel the sap oozing up and down the trees, life sucked from both the earth and the sun.
And so much green: hunter-green leaves overhead, gray-green lichens, emerald ferns, tea-green bushes—it’s like we’ve been consumed by some enormous chlorophyll-sodden entity and are being squeezed through its entrails.