Season of the Wolf

by Maria Vale

  Vines sprout up from the ground and reach for our feet like the thin green fingers of a sentient being rather than some goddamn plant. Magnus trips on one and falls, twisting his ankle. He sits down on a moss-covered trunk, his arms tight around his waist. Cassius eventually arrives, complaining about the path and his hand. When Tiberius asks him where’s Julia, he turns around with a sour expression, as though annoyed to find out that all his high-quality grousing had been directed toward an audience that wasn’t there.

  “Stay here,” Tiberius shouts as he heads back the way we came.

  Rubbing his throat with one hand, Cassius glares at the bite mark on the other. “He took my phone,” he says as soon as Tiberius is out of range. “Julia’s too. Did they—”

  “No phone, no wallet. Nothing.” I drag a handful of chartreuse seedlings from the ground, their tiny roots naked and exposed, still clasping the ball of dirt that birthed them.

  “Fuck. We got to—”

  Tiberius pushes through, half carrying Julia. “Where were you?” Cassius asks irritably, pushing Tiberius’s arm away.

  She lifts her glittering red high-heeled sandals by the ankle straps and mewls something about blisters.

  “You should have told me,” he says. “What were you doing?”

  Julia doesn’t answer, just looks bleakly at her muddy feet before taking a seat beside Magnus. The wool blanket she grabbed from the cabin slips down from arms that are purple-splotched and pimply with cold.

  I begin tossing the seedlings one by one into the forest beyond the arthritic reach of their elders until Tiberius snatches the bouquet from my hand. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Clearing a path, because what you’ve got here, my friend, is not a path. It’s trees fucking other trees and making baby trees.”

  “Just because you can’t see the path doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” He squats down, putting the seedlings back into the holes, and taps them gently with his fingers. “The Pack cannot survive without its territory. We will not tolerate its destruction.”

  August would be spinning in his grave.

  Julia sobs, though no tears leave traces down her days-old makeup. Everything about her is a mess—from the dark capillaries of mud creeping up the white silk of her pants to the silt squelches between her chipped bloodred toenails and around her blisters.

  The forest ahead of us parts, revealing another werewolf. One who wasn’t there this morning. He is not burly like most of them, rather tall with a slim, elegant body, carved cheekbones, wide-set eyes, perfect curved lips. His wavy dark-brown hair brushes his jawbone.

  “Arthur,” Tiberius says and lowers his head.

  August said that the Pack only respected physical strength. That they were like dogs that way. I’m not sure he was entirely right about that. I have seen werewolves defer to the Alpha but also to the woman with the silver hair, and now here is Tiberius, who is as big and strong as any of them, lowering his eyes to a man he could snap between his fingers.

  “The Pack is already in the Clearing,” Arthur says. “But the Deemer can’t start without you.”

  “Can’t start without you either.”

  “No,” he says with a quiet smile, “I suppose not.”

  “Tell her I’ll get them moving as fast as I can.”

  “Wait a minute,” Cassius protests. “She’s got a blister, and look.” He flips his hand up, showing two long puncture wounds in a semicircle of smaller abrasions.

  The new werewolf looks at it with one cocked eyebrow. “A flesh wound,” he says.

  “It is not a flesh wound,” Cassius insists, affronted, and pushes his hand in front of Arthur. “It’s swelling. What if she’s got rabies?”

  “Our Deemer does not have rabies,” Arthur says, squatting down to look at Julia’s feet. “If it does not shatter bones or damage internal organs, it is a flesh wound.” He gently wipes at them. With the mud gone, I can see that the bloody flesh of her ankles and toes looks so much worse than Cassius’s hand.

  “We cannot keep the Offlanders waiting.” Arthur begins to untie his boots. “You will take these.”

  Julia doesn’t answer, looking instead at Cassius.

  “She has shoes. Nice ones.” Cassius points to the strappy red stilettos hanging from her fingers. “They weren’t made for hiking.”

  The young man leans over, pushing his hair behind his ear as he pulls off his boots. He hesitates a moment, looking at his stockinged feet.

  “I forget how humans feel about socks. Is it like sharing underwear?”

  Julia stares at him, dazed. “I…” Then she focuses on the boots and the socks in his hand, and her voice breaks.

  “I will tell the Deemer that you are coming,” Arthur says and pushes himself up on pale bare feet crisscrossed with scars. Then he is gone, leaving nothing to mark his passing but the shuffle of leaves and the boots on Julia’s feet.

  Tiberius pushes us faster until we finally break through the trees and he doesn’t have to. Here, we move on our own, grateful to trade the murky uncertainty for the sunlit clarity of long grasses with nothing above but broad blue sky, sun, and swallows.

  At the far edge of the ocean of grass is a single enormous boulder shaped like an anvil and surrounded by hundreds of werewolves. Some are wolves but most are in human form, dressed in some combination of lumberjack light and ex–student athletes of multiple alma maters, but there is also a hefty sprinkling of werewolves dressed as bankers and lawyers, except they wear their suit pants rolled up above their knees and their shoes tied flopping from the straps of their backpacks.

  They stand too close together, these lawyers and bankers and lumberjacks, all clinging to one another, curling around one another, touching, nipping, sniffing. A man in a black pinstriped three-piece leans against a woman’s breasts, his head tucked under her chin, while she reaches under his collar, scratching beneath his ear.

  Only the puppies running through the forest of legs make any noise. Everyone else is silent. The Alpha too. She sits on top of the enormous slab, her bare feet swinging against granite that glitters in the sun. Next to her is the pale-gray wolf with the bent hind leg, waiting.

  As soon as she sees us, the Alpha rises, brushing off her pants.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “You’re here because we cannot leave you alone,” Tiberius whispers, “but it has nothing to do with you.”

  As before, the Alpha speaks not as a woman, or not as just a woman. Her voice is complex, a conduit for generations of command, and though I don’t know what she is saying, I feel it penetrate me as raw as new heartbreak.

  “We earon twisælig,” she says.

  A murmured answer ripples through the Pack. “We are twice blessed.”

  “We cnawaþ nydriht frignes.”

  “We know the price of freedom,” the Pack responds.

  “Ond geweorþ pleos.”

  “And the worth of responsibility.” A woman with a string of pearls and a gray silk shirt dress tucked up into a belt buries her hand in the pelt of the wolf standing next to her.

  “We earon,” the Alpha says in a whisper that I feel against my face even though she is far away, “twisælig.”

  The Pack stands motionless, heads down, except for that pale-gray wolf, who stretches out her front legs and jumps from the rock, stumbling hard onto the ground. Next to me, Tiberius hisses out a low breath, strain written across his face.

  Otho used to say that cemeteries are filled with people who didn’t know what was coming next. I think he got it from someone else, not that I cared about the provenance, only the importance of reading ahead. Men, I know. Men, I can read. Werewolves? Not so much. The only thing I am certain of is that I don’t want to be here when whatever is coming arrives. I signal for Magnus to get behind me, and I begin to back up.

  “Don’t thi
nk about it,” Tiberius says without turning his head. The gun that had been in his waistband now peeks under his elbow, aimed directly at me.

  The Pack churns and ripples, making way for someone. Finally, he emerges in the space below the boulder. It’s Arthur, the same tall, slim werewolf who gave his boots to Julia. Now not only are his feet bare, but his whole body is too. He carries a thin folded pile of clothes awkwardly in front of him, looking around until a woman in a red suit and bare legs takes them with a whispered word. He smiles.

  “Julia! Baby! Get back here!” Cassius calls after Julia, who is pushing blindly through the big bodies, the oversize boots on her feet making sucking sounds each time she pulls them out of the damp ground.

  “Dammit.” Tiberius signals for the rest of us to follow him through the gap in the Pack to the very front where the man has taken a seat on the long grass.

  He lies down, reaching under his back and removing a small, tight green pinecone, then he stretches his arms out wide at his sides. Turning his head, he trains his eyes on the bald mountain to the west.

  The dirt on the outer rim of his feet marks a dark contrast to the pale skin at his arch.

  A man with blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail bends over Arthur, whispering. I recognize him as one of the werewolves who put hand to knife and promised to eat us, should the Alpha decide we were on the menu.

  Arthur nods quickly and pushes his long cock between his thighs before clamping them shut. He stretches out again, holding the pinecone tight in his left hand. Once again, he looks toward that distant mountain and the sketchy clouds running across it.

  Maybe he recognizes his borrowed boots standing next to him; he peers up at Julia and mouths something to her.

  I think it was meant to be reassuring, though nothing about this situation seems reassuring. Confused, Julia moves back when the ponytailed werewolf is joined by two others who kneel at either splayed arm while Ponytail kneels at his ankles. Arthur looks up toward the Alpha standing tall over the Pack.

  “Alpha, I can do this myself.”

  The Alpha blinks once, then waves her hand to the side. As soon as she does, the werewolves who were holding his extremities stand back, making way for the small lame wolf, who rests her muzzle beside Arthur’s face.

  The Alpha lowers her head, and the silver wolf places her paw on the upper quadrant of his chest right below his shoulder.

  Julia’s scream slices through the quiet. Werewolves back up, their hands, if they have them, over their ears. If they don’t, they stumble away fast.

  Julia drops to the ground next to Arthur, sobbing. She still clings to the stilettos gleaming just as red and bright as the blood pouring in rivulets across the man’s chest and down into the earth.

  She throws the shoes at the silver wolf, who blinks once before going back to licking her bloodstained paw. Tiberius grabs Julia’s arm. For whatever reason, he seems to be having trouble controlling her, and Julia breaks free of Tiberius’s hold only to be grabbed by Cassius. He wraps his arms around her, babbling “Babybabybabybabybaby. Caaalm down. Caaalm down” over and over again.

  Babybabybabybabybaby. Caaalm down. Caaalm down.

  Then this woman who has always been so contingent—Otho’s pretty, spoiled little girl; August’s pretty, spoiled ward; Cassius’s pretty, spoiled girlfriend—pulls back her hand and slaps him, hard, by the sound of the crack reverberating through the empty space. His head whips around and he lets go, the jolt as bright in his eyes as the pink hand mark is on his cheek.

  She tries to clamber up the Alpha’s rock, a futile assault on a stone that is too high for her.

  “You killed him,” she screams, falling back, blood and broken nails indistinguishable at the tips of her fingers. “The only decent person in this hellhole, and you killed him!”

  The Alpha cocks her head to the side as though seeing her for the first time. Then she jumps down lightly, landing on the grass near the man’s head. “He’s not dead,” she says, toeing him with her foot.

  “Breathe, Arthur.”

  And he does. As his chest expands, something pulses and glistens through the rips in his skin. The muscles at his jaw are working overtime, and he swallows convulsively. His left hand raking through the grass, retracing the same area as though he is looking for something.

  Julia falls to her knees and pats the ground like she understands. Like she knows what he needs. Finally, she finds that little green pinecone and puts it back in the palm that is marked with the sharp imprint of it. Arthur balls his hand into a tight fist. Perhaps the small pain he can control helps him bear the much larger pain he can’t.

  A man behind me offers someone a ride as far as Boston, saying something about detours and the HOV lanes on I-93. Turning, I realize that most of the werewolves have already disappeared back into the forest, taking with them their observations about traffic and bosses and missed breakfast, all of which would sound banal in an office building around a box of doughnuts but are disconcertingly cold-blooded in a swampy clearing where a man lies eviscerated.

  “He needs help,” Julia whispers to the disappearing Pack. “Why won’t they help you?”

  Arthur shakes his head, then touches her hand, pressing the pinecone into her palm as though it were something precious rather than another seed for another tree in a place that already has too many of them. She wraps her fingers tight around its thorny shape as though she thinks it’s precious too.

  The werewolf turns his head away with a strained smile, looking back toward the bald peak of a mountain far to the west. Julia stares at him, helpless, before taking off the maroon blanket. She holds it in midair, trying to decide where to put it so that it will not touch his shredded skin. Finally, she shakes it out and wraps it around his hips and legs.

  Chapter 5

  Evie

  “Beta,” I say to Tara, who follows somewhere in the silent dark. “Send Lorcan, Eudemos, and…and Elijah to my office.”

  At the Great Hall, pups play in the corner where Tiberius lies changing behind one of the Adirondack chairs. Usually Tiberius would have found an isolated spot, but I have smelled his temper and know how hard this Iron Moon spent in skin has been for him. I avert my eyes, a kindness we give each other during the change when we are neither in skin nor wild, when our faces contort and drool, when our hips narrow and shoulders thicken and fur sprouts out in strange places.

  John runs to me, his forepaws on my calves. I pick him up and mark him. Like all pups, he takes the belonging he needs before struggling away, back to clamber over his sire’s writhing body.

  John.

  Wolves don’t have time for regret, but sometimes anger bubbles up and I feel myself growing angry at Ronan, the wolf who brought the Pack to August Leveraux’s attention. Angry at John for letting Tiberius come. Angry at Tiberius for staying. Angry at myself for being weak after my lying-in. Unable to move quickly enough to get away when August’s men came. Angry with John, my mate, our Alpha, who distracted them and got himself killed, leaving me to deal with everything that came after.

  The screen door slaps closed behind me. There were two things John dreamed of fixing. One was the junkyard, that five acres of land that sits like a carbuncle in the middle of our territory. The owner had refused every offer of payment out of spite, and then out of spite, he sold it to August, who promised we would never have it.

  The other thing John wanted to fix was the Great Hall itself. “It’s not so much a Great Hall,” John had said, “as a Fair-to-Middling Hall that will never change because wolves like the way it smells.”

  Would he approve of it now? Now that the ash smell of the hall the Shifters burned is gone. Now that the whole Pack could gather together. Now that it is tall enough for adult wolves to stand without cracking their heads on dormers. Now that it is big enough for them to move about without knocking over lamps in cramped rooms.

&
nbsp; “Alpha.” Joelle, Gamma of the 10th, stands at the entrance to the Alpha’s office—my office—shaking out a sheaf of multicolored papers.

  The requirements of the Iron Moon—disciplining an echelon, helping with a hunt, teaching a juvenile—are so radiantly clear and necessary.

  In skin, the requirements of an Alpha are tedious and in triplicate.

  “Do it again without the two-by-fours.” I pass the purchase order back and run through the work schedule in my mind. “Send the 4th and 8th and 13th to take what the Shifters left on the lands north. Whatever we can use. There is good wood there.”

  Trevor approaches to ask about next year’s education plan, and I search through a canvas bag for the sheaf of papers bristling with multicolored stickies. I’d almost finished, but then came the time when I lost the fingers and thumbs I would need to hold a highlighter.

  When Lorcan, Eudemos, and Elijah come, they join Trevor next to the open window, tasting the news on the air, while I finish my paperwork.

  What happened to the Transcendentalism class? John taught Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman. I will not have that gone. I finish writing in the margins of the teaching plan and hand it back to Trevor. Tara’s claws click on the front stairs.

  Elijah cranes his head to look through the door. “They’re coming.”

  Heavy footsteps oblivious to everything thud up the stairs, and the front door opens.

  “Take off your shoes!” shouts one of the juveniles who had been sweeping the floor.

  Tara stops in front of my office and bends her head toward the mudroom.

  We wait, my foot tapping impatiently on the floor.

  How long does it take to take off shoes?

  “Did anyone check the Spruce Flats?”

  “Poul did,” Lorcan says. “The bodies are still there. The coyotes aren’t eating them. The deer who fled the land to the north have made the coyotes picky.”

  “And the dog?”

  “Not the dog either.” Lorcan’s chin droops down to his chest. He had called Victor Deemer, as we all had. And when Victor had used the excuse of Elijah’s human mate to divide the Pack, Lorcan had followed him, as had so many of the younger echelons. Then he discovered that Victor intended to replace me and hand over the Great North to August. Now Lorcan cannot look me in the eye.