Season of the Wolf

by Maria Vale

  But this tall, broad-shouldered human is really as big as night.

  He pauses for a moment before threading his way through the wolves and lowering his body into the center of the Clearing. He crosses his jeans-clad legs. His feet are bare. Aside from a dark jacket, he has only two things:

  A gun and a gaping hole in his stomach.

  Chapter 2

  “I know who you are, and I won’t hurt you,” the stranger says in a voice that is cool and hard and perfectly calibrated to reach even to the outer ring of the wolves who were following him. “This.” His hand caresses the gun. “This is just for protection.”

  As soon as John gives a nod, I start forward. When I am wild, I am a strong tracker. More importantly, I am expendable. If the man shoots me, then we will know what he’s up to. He is armed and will kill many of us. And though he will eventually die, the careful ordering of our Pack will be undone.

  His eyes lock on mine, and he slowly moves his hand to his knee so I can see that he’s not touching the gun.

  I creep close, starting with the wound. He has been clawed and not by one wolf; I can make out at least three different scents. They circled him and came at him from different directions.

  For us, only the most heinous crimes warrant a disemboweling. But the Slitung, flesh-tearing, is a solemn ritual, not butchery. Every muzzle must be bloodied, so the tragedy of a life that we have failed is borne by all.

  This man may not look it, but he is extraordinarily lucky. There is damage to the fascia and muscles, and while there is blood—and a lot of it—there is not the distinctive smell of a gut wound. Those things are hard to repair and go septic quickly.

  Lifting my nose to the spot behind his ear, I almost gag at the overwhelming human smell of steel and death. But before I recoil, I catch the scent of something else. Snorting out air to get a clear hit, I try again. It’s faint but it’s here—crushed bone and evergreen—and it’s wild.

  There’s only one creature in the world that smells both human and wild, and it is the creature we fear most.

  Shifters are like us, but not. We can all of us change. But we cannot always change back. We are the children of the Iron Moon, and for three days out of thirty, we must be as we are now. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing—putting coolant in the backup generator, coming back late on the Grand Isle ferry (retrieving the car required some explaining)—Death and the Iron Moon wait for no wolf.

  It is our great strength and our great weakness. We depend on one another. We support one another. Without the Pack, we are feral strays, trapped in a human world without words or opposable thumbs.

  Shifters can always shift. They are opportunists. They used to change back and forth as it suited them, but now that humans are top predator, it suits them to be human. Like humans, they are narcissistic, self-delusional, and greedy. But they can scent things that humans can’t, and they are dangerous hunters.

  They know what we are, and in these past centuries, our numbers have been decimated by Shifters coming upon a Pack during the Iron Moon and slaughtering us with their human weapons.

  There is something else, though, about this Shifter’s deeply buried wild. Something more familiar than simply wolf. Moving close to where the scent is most concentrated, I suck in a deep breath.

  “Found something you like?”

  Snarling, I back awkwardly away from his crotch, but moving backward at a crouch makes my bad leg turn under, and the pain tears through my hip. Bone grinds against bone, and I stumble.

  “A runt and a cripple?”

  I flash my fangs at him. I may be a runt and a cripple, but I am still a wolf, damn it. John and Solveig and Demos sniff at my muzzle and immediately know what I know. Ears flatten, fur bristles, forefeet are planted, haunches bend under, and a menacing rumble spreads through powerful chests.

  “Yes, my father is Shifter, but my mother is…was…Pack-born. Mala Imanisdottir.”

  I knew it. I knew he smelled familiar. John sniffs my muzzle again, scenting for proof of his ancestry.

  “I challenged our leader, and I lost. I escaped his first attempt to kill me, but I won’t escape another.” His mind seems to wander, and then, with a real effort, he focuses again. “My father told me to escape. Find you. You are my last chance.”

  John looks out across his Pack, now bolstered with the older echelons. He snaps at the air over one shoulder and orders the Pack home. Mala or no Mala, this is the Great North Pack, not a sanctuary. The enormous Shifter will bleed out, eaten by the coyotes who even now are signaling to each other that there is something big and dying. They won’t come near us, but as soon as we are gone, they will move in.

  Solveig growls softly, calling me to heel. I hadn’t realized how far ahead they had gotten. I stumble after her with my tail between my legs.

  “The runt,” the man calls between panted breaths. “She’s not mated?”

  Without turning, John stops.

  “My mother said that the Pack would accept a lone wolf if there was another willing lone wolf.” A short cough tightens his face in pain. “She told my father,” he says. His skin is graying, and the circles beneath his eyes are so dark. “Before she died. She told my father.”

  There is some truth in what the Shifter says. Some. Unfortunately, none of us has the paper, the pencil, the voices, or the hands to sit him down and explain the complexities.

  John motions me toward him and rests his head on my shoulders. He’s so huge and comforting. His smell is the smell of home, and I can’t imagine not being surrounded by him. He represents protection from the outside and order at home.

  He butts me lightly with his nose. The stranger doesn’t know the complexities, but I certainly do. The choice is mine. If I return with my Pack, the stranger will die and I will be a nidling. As low as it is, I will have my place within the Pack.

  But if I stay…

  Then I am gambling that this Shifter and I are strong enough to fight for—and win—a full place in the Pack. It is a gamble, though, because if we can’t, both of us are exiled. He will be no worse off, but I will careen from bad decision to bad decision, ending up in the same damn puddle of blood and/or vomit as Ronan.

  The enormous Shifter weaves in our midst. I run back and sniff at him. He’s lost a lot of blood, but he looks really strong, and with a little help, he should make it. He lifts his head, and for the first time, I see his face. He’s darker than John’s mate, Evie, but where her eyes are pure black, his are black shot through with shards of gold.

  He whispers something that even my sensitive ears must strain to catch.

  “Runt?” he murmurs. “I don’t want to die.” Then he collapses into the grass.

  The Pack is already filtering out of the Clearing. Demos gives a curious sniff of the prone body and snarls. He swings his fat head, hitting my backside, telling me to get a move on.

  Maybe if he hadn’t done that, I’d have crouched down and followed. This is my world, and the Pack is my life, but I haven’t put this much work into surviving only to spend the rest of my life obeying every snarky whim of a thuggish half-wit like Eudemos.

  I nip at his ear, the universally understood signal—at least among Pack, it’s universally understood—to go fuck yourself. I shake out my back and straighten my tail and walk as tall as I can back to the Shifter. I lay my head across his shoulder.

  John takes one look along his flank and starts to run. The Pack follows quickly until they are nothing but the occasional flicker of fur among the spruce.

  Except for the low, slow plaintive cry of the loon on Clear Pond, it is silent. Then comes the reverberating howl signaling that John is home. The wolves stationed at the perimeter take up the howl.

  “We are,” they say.

  I’d cry if I could, but I can’t. I’d howl if I could, just to say Me too, but I can’t.

  All I can
do is nudge the huge mound collapsed in a damp hollow of the Clearing. Early fall nights in the Adirondacks are too cold for humans, especially lightly clothed, partially eviscerated ones. It takes a few nips to find a good purchase on his jacket, then I lock it between my jaws. I don’t like the plastic taste, but I pull anyway. In fits and starts, I move his inert bulk to a slight rise where it’s not so damp, but there’s no way that either the jacket or I are going to be able to make it much farther.

  After pulling on the jacket to cover as much of his body as possible, I curl around him, giving him the warmth of my body.

  The moon shines down on the Clearing. This is a place for a Pack, not for a single wolf on her own, and it feels exposed and huge and empty. Not to mention damp.

  A coyote creeps closer, picked out by the moon. I jump up, straddling the body with my shoulders hunched and my fur bristling so I look larger. I growl in the way John would—or Tara or Evie or Solveig or any of dominant wolves would—and hope.

  The coyote hesitates and then retreats. I settle back, covering more of this man’s big body with my smaller one. As I drop my head to his broad chest, a warm sigh ripples through my fur.

  I wish the loon would shut up.

  Chapter 3

  The dull, steady pressure against my cheeks wakes me at the same time as the yellowthroat’s high, insistent call. Widdiddy, widdiddy, widdiddy, wid. That pressure is the first sign that the Iron Moon is finished with me. My upper arm stretches and the muscles at my shoulder blades tighten, broadening my chest. As I shake out my hands, the metacarpals shrink and the forearm lengthens and the fur disappears, sucked back in, until nothing is left but a pale, almost-invisible dusting. A few loose silver hairs dance away in the breeze.

  The hip with the tendon that is too short pops back into place. It hurts at first, but as I walk the Clearing, the last remnants of pain and numbness subside, and my leg moves freely again.

  Despite the pain and the bum leg, no one loves being changed more than I do. I love the freedom and the crush of sounds and smells. I love the close and quiet connection to my Pack. I love the stillness of the cold Adirondack night constrained by nothing but my own fur.

  I’d change back to wolf right now, if I wasn’t in such desperate need of fingers and a voice. I feel the heat emanating from the Shifter and poke around the wound. Too much of the gash is clotted by the material of his jacket, and peeling it off will reopen the wound. But still, I can’t feel new bleeding.

  I need saline. And bandages and suture and antibiotic. Probably lidocaine, because humans are cowards, and Tristan says the bigger they are, the louder they scream when they see a needle. I need blankets and clothes.

  “Hey. You,” I whisper.

  A short breath.

  “Hey! Wake up.”

  One eye opens slightly, then the other.

  “Runt?” he croaks and then, “Water.”

  Of course he would need water. I pat at my naked hips like I might magically find a pocket with water in it. It’ll take me at least an hour to make the run to Home Pond and back, and that’s too long.

  His jacket tasted like plastic and is probably waterproof. I start to pull at a sleeve; since much of the front is shredded, I just need to tear hard at the back. Holding the neck still, I continue the rip along the sleeve.

  “Whatyoudoon?” he slurs, trying to move my hand.

  “Getting you some water.”

  He protests weakly.

  “I’ll be back in a second.”

  Clear Pond is big and smooth and fed by innumerable springs. Stretching out on the overhanging rock, I fill the sleeve with the clear water away from the weedy edges. It won’t hold much, but it’s the best I can do. As soon as I siphon the few ounces left into the Shifter’s cracked lips, he passes out again.

  I know I have to move fast, and moving fast requires reversing the whole process I went through earlier. Taking back the pain that will shoot through my hip and leg, because even a three-legged wolf is faster than a human.

  Heading from Clear Pond toward the mountains, away from the low-lying damp, I take the shortcut up through the tangled forests of young spruce and fir and paper birch. The early autumn sun is swept before dark clouds, and one of the frequent short rains starts in with its thick drops that make the bald hardpan slippery. I skitter down until I reach the mix of maple and beech behind Home Pond.

  Long time ago, before the Pack was lulled into a false sense of security, an earlier generation dug a long tunnel that led from the basement of the Great Hall into the forest. In case of emergency. Gran Sigeburg told me about it, as she rambled on about a long-ago party thrown by her echelon and how all the juveniles escaped from the Alpha’s fury through the tunnel. I think the moral of her story was supposed to be that you can never escape a furious Alpha, but the tunnel was the part that stuck.

  I’d found the end of the tunnel in the root cellar, but the other end was blocked. I scratched through the ferns and duff until I found it and came back with hands and an ax and hacked away the spruce root that had grown over it. Like all children, I liked the idea of sneaking and used the tunnel from time to time to get in and out of the Great Hall. Then I got older and more persnickety about spiders, and since nobody really cared where I was or when, I figured I might as well just use the damn door.

  There were two spruces: one big one and a small one. If you crouch down low like I am now, the tip of Whiteface is centered between them. I scratch around in the forest litter until I feel the hollow scrape of wood.

  I didn’t remember the space was so narrow, but I was smaller then and perhaps the taproots that broke through the tunnel roof were a little smaller as well. As soon as I get to the cellar, I squeeze through the light trapdoor and lay myself down, rolling my shoulders and letting the change twist through my body once more.

  The doors to the storerooms in the basement are close together in the narrow hallway. As soon as I open the broad wooden door of dry storage, I hear the hum of the dehumidifiers. The open metal shelves are filled with carefully marked bins of clothes. Popping open one of the smallest ones, I find a pair of athletic pants, a Henley, and a hoodie for myself. The Shifter is huge, but so are my people. In one of the several boxes marked XXXL (and Tall), I find a pair of sweatpants, a Big & Tall flannel shirt, a bright-red sweatshirt, and a bulky anorak. Not stylish and not much, but it’ll have to do because the clothes already take up more than half of the big backpack.

  Dried apples, ground corn, matches, miso, protein bars, lentils, hazelnuts. Then cooking equipment, a collapsible water carrier, a tarp. I also nab the single bedroll, a sleeping bag, and the pop-up tent the pups use when they play Human.

  How do they do it? The humans, I mean. I lasted about five minutes inside the nylon sleeping bag, surrounded by that shell of polyester and silicone, before I bolted out, falling to the grass, my feet already lengthening.

  Before I leave the basement, I pull the hoodie tight around my head to hide my telltale hair. I am a silver. Silvers aren’t common, but we aren’t rare either. It just means a wolf with light underfur and pale gray fur on top. In skin, their hair tends to be dark blond or light brown.

  When I’m wild, one tendon stays too tight and cripples me. When I take on skin, my hair stays silver. Just so I never forget who and what I really am.

  Gran Tito is up early as usual. His nose has started to fail, but I still steer clear of him as I make my way to the med station behind John’s office. Two hospital beds with bedside monitors, ventilators, a freestanding anesthesia system, ultrasound. Mobile storage units are loaded with drugs and first aid necessities. We’re strong and resistant to illness and heal quickly, but if we get injured, we can’t go to the hospital. Everything about us—our lung function, blood composition, urinalysis, resting heart rate, everything—screams alien.

  Two big bottles of saline wash, gauze, erythromycin, absorbable sutu
re, lidocaine. Electrolytes.

  Someone has started the coffeemaker, which means the Pack will be up soon. Moving carefully out the front door of the Great Hall, I sling the backpack on and make a headlong rush deeper into the trees.

  By the time the door closes, Home Pond is behind me.

  I’ve never walked this far in my skin. I’m slow on the path and even slower when I leave it, and at least one of my two feet snags on every bush and root and rock and fallen tree. At Clear Pond, I heave myself into the water, panting like a hunted elk before filling up the water carrier.

  The Shifter doesn’t wake up easily, even when the saline sluices over his torso and his jacket. I give him water and wait until I’m sure he’s awake to give him a tablet the size of a water bug. I add electrolytes to the rest of the water because if he gets the heaves, he’ll vomit up the antibiotic.

  I cut away at the gore-glued jacket, pouring on more saline and letting it soak, while I wash my hands with chemical cleanser and pull on the gloves.

  “You the bitch from last night?” he croaks.

  The jacket is still sticking, so I drench it with more saline.

  “I said, you the—”

  What he says next silences the birds for miles. He curls into a fetal position, his teeth grinding audibly.

  The torn and bloody remnants of the jacket hang slack in my hand. Wow. What happened to you? Because ripping away the remains of the jacket has exposed not only the explosion of claw marks underneath, but also the vestiges of a whole lot of other savaging. He’s got neat slices, like knife cuts, on one forearm. Three small craters at his left shoulder. I’m guessing a “hunting accident” like Sofia’s “hunting accident” from twenty moons ago, when a hunter shot her twice. It was no accident, but we continue with the fiction because the pups already have so many nightmares about humans.

  But the scariest marks? They’re claw-made. Most Pack have scars of some sort, though John has asked that we avoid muzzles during fights, because gouged eyes and clawed cheeks make potential Offland employers nervous.