by Maria Vale
The Gray has been moving silently behind us at a distance, at the ready in case play should turn into something else and her mate needed her. I am very careful not to touch him: Varya had always been a fierce fighter, and I don’t want there to be any confusion about my intent. I would never hurt her, which would put me at a disadvantage if she felt threatened and attacked.
She comes closer and I squat back into my haunches again, tail wagging, my forelegs low to the ground, watching her consider me.
I yelp, flick my ears, ask her without words to remember me.
Remember me. Just a little.
She cocks her head to the side. I watch her eyes move to her mate, a silent signal to him. Then she finally comes forward, slowly, slowly and stands in front of me, chest high, tasting the air around me.
Only the tip of her tail twitches.
I stay low and wait.
Varya had always been so controlled, but I really need the Gray to let go, so with a quick and gentle twitch of my paw, I bop her nose. She looks startled. I wag my tail, just about to reach out again when she leaps.
Zigzagging across Westdæl, I lead them to the southernmost area of her territory where it was ringed by the embrace of Homelands, though all the wolves of the Great North have been told in no uncertain terms to keep their distance downwind.
As soon as I slow down, she throws herself at me, her foreleg across my shoulders, her jaws on either side of mine. If we had hands and tongues instead of fangs and claws, maybe we would hit each other and say “Tag, you’re it,” but we don’t.
For us, even play involves risk and I didn’t know how much the forever wolves know or remember, but aside from the scrape of her fang across my muzzle, the Gray doesn’t hurt me.
Until that loud alarm goes off and all hell breaks loose. The Gray and the Bone Wolf are instantly on alert, racing north to find out what they need to fight. They have a head start and I need not to catch up with them but to get in front of them, head them off. That’s why when I came to the steep gully formed by years of winter runoff, I leapt straight across rather than heading up where it is narrower.
I made it to the other side, but not before jamming my ribs into a shattered root sticking out from the far wall.
But I keep going.
I have no choice but to keep going.
Chapter 18
Constantine
It’s early morning by the time we are on the quiet country highway heading back to Homelands. Luckily, there’s no one around to notice the naked werewolves twitching nervously in the truck bed.
As we turn into Homelands, they leap away, the cab bobbing with each jump. As soon we reach the parking lot, Ziggy follows, leaving nothing behind but a pile of clothes slowly deflating on the driver’s seat.
Filthy and exhausted, I slam the door shut and start for the Bathhouse.
The Bathhouse is a large and mostly windowless building buttressed on one side by a woodshed and on two sides by a screened-in porch festooned with sprays of leafy branches hanging from the rafters. When I’ve been here before, long empty chairs have been occupied by naked werewolves, their sauna-heated skin steaming in the cool evening air.
Inside smells clean and damp and woody with overtones of eucalyptus and a smell I can only identify as damp feather pillows. I collect a towel and a brush and, on a whim, a bouquet of branches. In the shower, I scrub myself raw with the determinedly neutral shampoo they use.
There is a large mirror built into the tile of the shower room and spotted with black spots where water has condensed underneath. While I’ve caught sight of myself in it from time to time, I don’t do any real “gazing”: something to do with the dozen or so naked werewolves sniffing around my crevices and saying, “What is that smell, Egbert?”
The man in the mirror pulls his hair back same as I do. He stretches his lips over gritted teeth same as I do. I still can’t quite believe he’s me. All the emptinesses have been filled in. Even the gaunt hollows under my eyes and my cheekbones are gone.
I stroke the beard over skin that looks more golden than before. Or maybe that’s a trick of the gold trickling from the fogged window of the sauna.
Someone needs to turn the light off.
Among Lukani at the compound, menial labor was left to the humans. It was a point of pride.
“Someone needs to take out the trash.” “Someone needs to fill the ice-cube tray.” “Someone needs to turn off the light of the sauna and bank the stove.”
If there’d been a poll at the compound, I’d probably have been voted least likely to be “someone.” Exhausted as I am, I head to the sauna to turn off the light and bank the stove… Except when I open the door, water explodes into steam on hot rocks. The Alpha drops the ladle back in the bucket of water and sits down on the lowest of the ranged benches, a towel wrapped tightly around her. It’s unusually modest for pack.
“Close the door.”
I only then realize that I’ve been standing here a while, letting all the heat out.
“They’re wild,” she says, half question, half statement.
“Yes.”
“Glad.” She stares unseeing at the stove. “Will it work?”
“I think so. We’ll know better after a decent rain.”
“Hmm.”
“Alpha…” I pat my shoulders with the branches. “There was a little trouble with men who came. I—”
“Crushed their MTVs. I saw.”
“ATVs actually, but yes. The men too. A little.” I take down the branches so that I will have something to look at that isn’t her.
“I’ll tell the lawyers.”
“I doubt they’ll be any trouble. I don’t think there was any lasting damage, and men like that…three against one. They won’t report it. Point of pride.”
She starts to laugh, then draws up short, her face tight. “Still,” she says. “Lawyers.”
Feeling suddenly awkward, I continue my futile swatting with the dry branches.
“Here.” The Alpha holds out her hand, taking them from me. “I’ll show you. Turn around.”
She submerges the branches in the bucket filled with water next to the stove. The first thing I feel is the cool lash of water against my overheated skin, followed by the beat of stems. The caress of leaves. The green embrace of birch.
I drape my arm between my legs, hoping the friction from the rough towel will tame the bulge my exhausted mind could not have imagined a few minutes ago. It doesn’t, though, because she’s touching me. Maybe it’s not skin to skin, but her body is just there. A short branch-length away. My breath is pained and ragged as if I were actually being beaten, not lightly slapped around with birch leaves. My mind knows I should tell her to stop, but I’m spinning and my body won’t allow it. My skin is torn between the two, stretched to splitting like a thumb against an overripe plum.
“No…no more.” I twist around, taking her wrist. “Please.” I hear her breath, the thrumming of her pulse, the slight movement of her arm as she tries to stop the towel that is slipping down. The word echoing around my skull:
Please.
Please.
The towel had nothing to do with modesty. Nothing to do with hiding the soft weight of her breast above the curve of her waist. Not the sinewed muscle of her back ending in the perfect curve of her ass, but a ragged gouge that connects the two.
“I needed to stop her, the Gray,” she says, as much to herself as to me. “The jump went wrong.”
She doesn’t bother to cover herself now. With her free hand, she curls her arm around the back of her head and smooths her hair back from her cheek. She is so close to me that I can see tiny beads of sweat sparkle in the filigree curls at her hairline and another rip through the deep-brown satin of her cheek. Her tired eyes don’t leave mine, daring me to notice that she is not invulnerable.
All I
want to do is gather her to me in this hot and silent place, where no one is calling to her, and touch my lips to those tiny sparkles at her brow and to the cut on her cheek and tell her it’s okay to be vulnerable, but I know that for her, it really isn’t.
“Long night,” I say, trying to make it light. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it out the door.”
“Sleep on the porch. Wolves do it all the time. Not so much when the…”
She wiggles her fingers in the air near her ear.
“Blackfly?”
“Hmm. Not so much when the blackfly are out. The chairs,” she says, “recline.”
“Would you show me? I mean when you’re done.”
“I’m done. I was sitting here because I was…”
Because she was tired but won’t admit it. I open the damper and sit beside her silently while the fire burns hotter and then dies. We close it down and turn out the light.
She stumbles on the way to the porch while I pretend not to notice. I forget the whole point of my flimsy excuse and lower my chair before she does. She gives me a wan smile.
I sit down.
Something barks out a loud, trilling yell.
“What is that?” I ask, stretching out.
After a moment’s hesitation, she lies down on her undamaged side, her head cushioned on her crooked arm.
“Raccoon,” she says.
There are no walls, only screens, and the wind kisses the still-damp hairs at the base of my neck. Wings flap suddenly from above. There is a growl and a scrabble and the soft sound of her breathing that eventually becomes deeper, lulled by the forest stark and grim that breathes in the flutter of wings and breathes out the death of prey, that breathes in the rot of old trees and breathes out the roots of seedlings.
Finally, the bow between her lips opens. Silently, I get up, returning to cover her with two clean towels.
Her mouth contracts to a tiny moue, a leg kicks free.
I reach across and pull a single tight zigzag of hair free from where it has stuck to her lower lip. Then I let my hand stretch across the narrow divide between us, my hand under hers.
Chapter 19
Evie
I dreamed.
It started out normally enough, with anticipation, waiting. Keeping low and silent, listening, scenting, looking. I don’t know what we’re herding or where we are herding it, only that someone I trust has the far flank.
I must be upwind, but why? No hunter waits upwind. Suddenly, all my wolves turn, surging around me. I see the terror in their eyes as they pass, smell it on their fur, but have no idea what they are running from. I run around snarling and biting and trying to get them to follow. I don’t know what’s ahead, but whatever it is, I can’t do it alone.
No wolf stays, and soon, the pack is nothing but the whisper of hundreds of quiet pads fading into the forest.
A figure on two legs emerges from the mist. He is dressed in leaves and carries a sprouting stem. In my relief, I call to my wolves to tell them to come back. It is the Grenemann, the Green Man come to protect his forest, to protect us, wolves, the protectors of the woods.
I bound toward him, toward the figure dressed in green and brown, carrying a stick. Toward the man in camouflage with a gun.
His eyes are pine dark, streaked with the green of bright-summer leaves.
My eyes snap open, my heart beating. It takes me a moment to recognize the scent of dried birch and cold water, to hear the small breezes sweeping through the aspens. To see Constantine across from me, one hand warm and sleep-slack under mine.
He has put towels over me.
I slide my hand free. He twitches but doesn’t wake. I begin the painful process of sitting up. The rib isn’t broken so it’s pointless to go to Tristan only to hear him say “It’s a flesh wound” and offer me a Tic Tac. Not that I think he’d be so brazen, but one never knows.
The walk back to my cabin is slow. I step cautiously around obstacles I would have leapt over and walk terrain I would normally run. I keep the towel wrapped tight around me so that wolves drawn by their curiosity to the smell of blood don’t see the extent of their Alpha’s injury.
In my cabin, I peel away the towel and the wound opens again. I look for a black T-shirt and start the slow process of getting dressed. One Salty Bitch, it says, though I really don’t feel like it.
I contemplate my hair band, but I would really need both hands for that. Instead, I finger comb with my left hand, loosening the sleep-crushed hair and double-checking for burrs. I feel the fang mark on my cheek.
When I walk, I am careful not to favor my right side.
The Pack quiets as soon as I climb stiffly up the stairs. There’s no disguising that I’ve been hurt, but as long as I pretend the injury doesn’t matter, my wolves will too.
In the mudroom, I lean against the wall. Bending is excruciatingly painful and there’s no point to it, so I scrape off each shoe with the toe of the other. When I open the heavy main door, the muscles around my torso contract and my ribs ache.
We are all playing our roles. The Pack bends over their bowls of buckwheat and plates of eggs while I walk on. Head up, back straight. Jaw tight. My right hand trembles as I reach for the coffee cup. My left is steadier. Best to use the left.
“Sit down,” Sigegeat whispers to someone behind me. I know who it is without looking, and sure enough, Constantine says, “She’s hurt.”
More wolves start wrestling at the table, meaning it’s time for me to take charge.
When I turn, picking up an oatcake so it will look casual and unconcerned, I catch his green eyes staring at me, like I knew I would. He is still standing despite the combined efforts of Sigegeat, Inge, and Järv trying to force him to sit down. My lids flutter down for a moment and I shake my head, hoping that he isn’t so human that I have to put everything into words.
I rub the back of my hand, trying to wipe away the trace warmth of his palm supporting it. Finally, Constantine sits down, angrily yanking his arms away, and I manage a controlled descent without showing how much it hurts. I reach for the butter and the remnants of last summer’s mulberry jam.
A wolf snarls.
Skirmishes are a common enough occurrence, but I have to be careful. It may be the usual posturing over hierarchy or fucking rights, but wolves will act out if they fear the Alpha is weak. They need to feel I am in control and can’t help but test the issue if they are unsure.
I watch the Pack carefully. Luckily, it’s nothing but a minor tussle over dominance between the Gamma mate and the Delta of the 13th. Esme, their Alpha, jumps in quickly, banging them around until they come back to the table looking sheepish, their heads cocked to the side. Waiting for Esme to mark them so that they know, whatever their pettinesses, they belong to something bigger.
Had I not been watching so carefully, though, I might not have noticed Cassius take advantage of the chaos to knock into Constantine. I wouldn’t have seen tiny Theo picking up the folded piece of paper in his teeth because anything that falls to the floor belongs to the pups.
I would, however, have noticed Cassius pinioning Theo’s little tail with his big fucking foot. No way I would have missed that because Theo yelps loudly and tries to skitter away. Leaping over the table, I grab Cassius and throw him bodily toward Elijah, my shredded skin screaming at me to stop until Elijah takes hold of Cassius by the collar and drags him away, the Shifter’s feet churning desperately against the floor, trying to keep upright so he won’t choke on the fabric tight around his trachea.
Constantine sits on the floor holding the whimpering Theo, but the piece of paper that had been in Theo’s spitty mouth is gone.
You see, my furious heart says. You let yourself be deluded. There is no one to hold your hand while you hold the Great North together. This is on you alone.
I am so tired and my body hurts and I don’t
know how to save the forever wolves and I have let Shifters into Homelands and one of them was dangerous enough to make me lose track of who I am.
The Alpha of the Great North Pack.
I drop to my knees, pulling the tiny pup from the Shifter’s hands. A sweet cheese dumpling bounces onto the floor and Theo jumps away, his little tail high and straight as a flag.
Then I turn back to the Shifter, my jaw trembling as—
He holds out the tightly folded piece of paper.
“Alpha?” he says as the wave of my anger recedes, leaving my heart flopping on the shore, panting and breathless.
My left hand stinks of Cassius. My right hand is still holding that now-crumbled oatcake slathered with butter and last summer’s mulberries.
“Should I read it?” he asks and I nod, licking at the butter and mulberries while he unfolds it carefully because it’s been stapled together by pup teeth.
“It’s for Julia.” He points to the name on the outside. “He tells her to get away from…Logan?…and meet him in the basement the day after tomorrow. At breakfast.”
He holds it out to me and I almost laugh with relief. It’s a mash note. Constantine was only a messenger boy. “Lorcan,” I finally say. “It’s Lorcan. Cassius thinks the 12th’s Alpha wants Julia, though if he took a single whiff of him, he’d know it wasn’t true.”
He stares at the little piece of paper.
“That man, the one who’s always sniffing around you…” he starts.
The door opens and closes on Rieka, naked and gnawing on a hoof. She scans the room, looking for me. She’ll find me soon enough, but I haven’t finished looking over the USDA prelicense application package (Class C), so I really have nothing to say to her. I crouch down lower, hiding behind the backs around me. She’ll find me soon enough.