by Maria Vale
“You’re right. I wouldn’t have.” She raises her arm, stroking her cheek with the back of her hand. “Your skin is so soft,” she whispers, low and deep and urgent. “You should never wear anything but silk.”
If I weren’t so humiliated by the words, the sound of her voice would have made me come right there.
She grins and hands me the mug and a spoon.
“When you’re done with that, give it back.”
“What?”
“The spoon. I’ve only got one.”
She pours milk into the bowl in front of her and then coffee, and then taking the spoon from my hand, she swirls the clouds of milk through her bowl of coffee.
It is so terribly, achingly intimate.
There is, I realize, looking over the rim of my mug, only one of anything here. A single cup. A single bowl. A single small skillet. A single pot. A single chair. A single plate. A single towel hanging from the bathroom door.
The only thing that might accommodate more than one is the bed with its thick duvet and four pillows.
Doug wanted to expand Thea’s cabin. Install a refrigerator, a sofa, a TV. What did he say? “That’d be nice, right?” He wanted more. More noise, more stuff, more him.
But he missed the point of this place. Thea’s cabin isn’t just a shelter that could use modernizing and expanding; it’s a bulwark protecting her solitude. And no matter what he thought could be done, should be done, it would not be done, because there was no room here for more Doug or more of any man.
But…I am not any man. I am not a man at all. And as wolves, we understand what it is to be wordless. We understand the primal importance of silence.
She stirs distractedly, staring at the silence beyond the window.
“How long have you been here?”
“Four years,” she says, “give or take.”
“That’s a long time to be in the middle of nowhere. Do you ever get bored?”
“Bored? Never. I like the quiet. Helps me focus. For me, things get muddled when there are too many voices telling you what to do or how to be. Can I warm you up?”
You have got to be kidding me.
I glare down at the mountain ridge in my pants, pointing out that the only thing this woman with a steaming pot in her hand is offering to warm up is my coffee.
My cock does not listen, and my brain suddenly goes all curious about whether Doug is out of the picture. Because I don’t want him or anyone else offering to refill her.
“You don’t get lonely?”
“Sometimes. Not a big deal. Then I just make more effort to see friends. But most of the people I see need me. I like it. It feels more real than when someone’s squeezing you into their schedule, praying that you’ll cancel at the last minute.” She taps at the window with her finger, then wags the same finger. Even I, who am a creature of the forest, can’t see who she’s reprimanding. “Do you?” she asks. “Get lonely, I mean.”
“Me? Pffft. I see people all the time.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I think of all the clients I have spent time with, laughing and impressing and cajoling. And all the women I have spent time with, laughing and impressing and seducing. And in the end, have come home, vomited, and crawled into bed with a wolf-shaped hole in my chest.
“Yes. Sometimes.”
There’s a narrow shelf above the window at my eye level. Arrayed across it are a handful of things, none of them “As Seen on TV.” An elaborate corkscrew of woody bracket. An almost baroquely gnarled branch. The perfectly intact skin of what looks to be a rat snake. Several small cardboard boxes that read 20 CRTG. 7.62 MM LONG RANGE 118 in sun-bleached lettering.
And a gleaming white skull that I recognize instantly.
I freeze.
“You can hold it if you want,” she says, standing on her toes, her fingers feeling carefully along the shelf. “It’s not going to bite. Not now, anyway.”
Stepping closer to help, I get too close, so that when Thea turns around, her hand accidentally brushes a mother-of-pearl button, which grazes the top placket of my shirt, which touches the bottom placket, which touches my skin. She hands the skull to me.
Dust motes shimmering in sunlight float down around her.
“I found it,” she says, stepping away. She rubs the back of her hand. “A marten skull, I think? Anyway, it’s beautiful.”
I gently follow the arabesque of its jaw with my finger. The fine crested ridge.
“Have you ever seen them hunt?” I finally choke out.
“A marten?”
“Fisher. It’s a fisher. They… It’s like gravity doesn’t apply. If they’re hunting, they’ll just jump off a rock and”—my arm traces a spiral in front of me—“swim. Like an otter, except there’s no water, only air.”
Carefully, I put the skull back on its shelf. I was forty-two moons old when Nils put my fisher on a shelf of First Kills next to all those bunnies and squirrels. I didn’t pay much attention to it after, because there were all those skulls, and some of them were ancient, and like the Gemyndstow, they were a reminder of the persistence of the Pack. I didn’t realize how fragile that world was until I was older. Until Nils was gone and John was gone and the Great Hall was gone and the shelf was gone and that fisher was gone.
Now. Now I know how fragile it is.
“I miss it so much.” I stand back, looking at this other skull arrayed on this other shelf. “I miss it all.”
Thea holds me with her ironwood eyes, her head cocked to the side. I think I may actually have spoken.
Chapter 11
Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 11 days
Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 11 days
I should probably get a mate.
A bedfellow at the very least.
Bedfellow. Leonora once tried to explain that a fiancée is like a bedfellow except neither of you have to fight challengers claiming cunnan-riht. Fucking rights.
Celia has been a stalwart shielder, but she is too closely related to be a bedfellow.
Besides, being Alpha of the Pack is different from being Alpha of the echelon. Especially in the beginning, one cannot afford even the appearance of weakness or indecision in front of a pack of wolves just spoiling for a fight. For that reason, it is helpful to have someone who can talk you through any doubts and concerns in the privacy of bed. Wolves tend to be receptive to Alphas, so the list of possible candidates is long. Limiting it to strong hunters narrows the list down somewhat. Limiting it to fund managers who can offset my weakness with numbers narrows it to Tilda.
She’s been at Bank of Boston for seven years and is probably anxious to come home.
I try to imagine Tilda by my side and in my bed. I even try to picture her wearing the braid of a mated wolf around her neck, with her coal-black hair and her skin the gold of rye and her ironwood eyes and her ass like a Japanese pear.
Except that Tilda has hazel eyes, ruddy skin, fine blond hair, and the body of an East German shot-putter.
“Good morning, Mr. Sorensson. I believe Mr. Trianoff is looking…”
I nod distractedly and keep walking.
At my office, I flip on the light and turn to the large envelope in the emptiness of oak next to my telephone.
Personal and Confidential, it says. The opening on the back is sealed, and across the seal is a signature. Samuel Borston.
There are two folders inside. The thicker one has a tab with LIEBLING/DARLING printed on it in ballpoint. As he’s uninteresting and dead, I put it aside.
Instead, I open the other, thinner one, the one that says VILLALOBOS.
There isn’t much. She is thirty-five. Born in Fort Benning, Georgia. Her mother was a housewife. Her father was a sniper, first for the army, then for the Tucson police force. Both dead in a car accident nearly five years ago. DUI. She went to c
ollege in Texas for one year before transferring to Syracuse, which must have come as a shock to a girl who’d apparently never made it north of the 34th parallel before.
She kicked around a little. Worked at a cider brewery. At a veterinary clinic. As a tour guide in the Finger Lakes. Did some work—mostly clerical—for the police department in Ithaca. Then went to Pulaski to train as an ECO. Spent some time in the City and Long Island before transferring to Hamilton County.
And that’s it. She has managed to glide through a third of a century leaving barely a trace. Barely. Samuel did include an article from the Austin Beacon about a girl who died in a fall from the roof of a campus building. It wasn’t much of a story, but Samuel has highlighted both the caption to the photograph and a few lines from the story. “One distraught young woman started ripping off her clothes before school officials escorted her away. ‘Our students were all deeply affected by the tragedy,’ said school counselor, Solange Marisco. ‘Some more than others.’”
The other side is blank.
The photograph shows a building: a wood-sided house with Greek letters under the gabled roof. A group of girls and boys stand to one side, the girls almost all burying their heads in the boys’ shoulders. But standing alone is another girl. I turn on my desk light and look closely. It looks like Thea, and it doesn’t.
She has been “dolled up” as humans sometimes say. I’m used to seeing women “dolled up” and never really cared enough to notice the difference between a simulacrum of a woman and the real thing.
But none of this looks right on Thea. Not the hard black around her eyes, not the soft black above them. Not the dark lips or the pale skin or the waved hair or the jewelry or the cropped T-shirt laddered down the back. Nor the tiny, tight skirt that she is in the process of removing.
She looks both utterly calm and completely furious, her thumbs hooked around the waistband that is already at her thighs. The Austin Beacon reporter is probably himself barely more than a child. He’s got a story that combines death and nudity and coeds. To him, a hysterical college girl makes good sense and makes good copy.
A girl who has decided she is done with make-believe… That requires experience.
Another light snaps on in the office, and Maxim stalks past windows lit by the pale-purple morning light, looking as dark and threatening as a man with a face like a basset hound can look.
“Good morning, Max. What are you doing here so early?”
Even though Dahlia is the only other person here and the architectural glass is quite soundproof, Max closes the door. There is no disguising his fury as he turns on me, his hands splayed on my desk.
I ease back in the Titan, my fingers woven behind my head, and watch him yell. With his mouth yapping furiously, he reminds me of Tarzan.
“I don’t know what is going on with you, Sorensson.” He’s used my last name to indicate the high degree of his pissedness. “But you need to get a grip. Do something. Get a wife, have some kids, settle down. Or go fuck a string of women. I really don’t care. But don’t ever waste this firm’s time and money and political capital on a stunt like that again.
“The political capital,” he snaps again.
Slowly and deliberately, I unweave my fingers. Then I just as deliberately push my computer’s On button.
“Did you hear me?”
I deliberately stand and deliberately lean forward, bending my back until my nose is an inch from Maxim’s. A low rumble burbles in the depths of my chest. My wild remembers the image of Sarah in the crosshairs and strains with the need to claw flanks and rip muzzles.
I am the Alpha of the 9th. This time next week, I will challenge the Alpha of the Great North. Then I will fight, and I will win. And I will be the Alpha of the Great North.
The growl escapes, and any wolf would recognize it as the prelude to an attack. With a sprightly drrriiing, my computer comes to life.
“Close the door on your way out, Maxim.”
I pull out a tissue to wipe away the lingering damp handprints.
Chapter 12
Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 5 days
Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 5 days
There is something terribly wrong with the intercom link to reception, and Dahlia’s voice burbles and screeches from the speaker like a panicked fox. “Mr. Sor*#%sson? Umm, the*#% someone *#%? Says he’s %&# Gr*#t North LLC?”
“Did you say the Great North?”
“*#&”
Was that a yes? And what the hell is the Great North doing here? There’s no law about it, but there is definitely an understanding that our size makes any gathering of wolves Offland a cause for comment. We don’t want humans commenting about us. We don’t want them noticing us at all.
“Who is it?” I crane my head to see where Janine has gone.
“He won’t say. But”—her screeching-enhanced yell drops to a screeching-enhanced whisper—“I think you *#% get out here.”
“He.” I don’t know who it could be, but at least it’s not Evie or Tara, her Beta, the two wolves I least want to see right now. I pass Janine’s desk; her coat and purse are both gone.
Nestled between the offices that hug the plate-glass windows and the architectural glass of reception is a spacious and elaborate waiting area. Empty leather Knoll chairs are scattered here and there, each attended by concrete-topped side tables, fresh flowers, and glass bottles of water imported from places too cold for humans to have mucked up. They all attend upon the pleasure of clients who never come. Our clients pay too much to wait, so the whole thing is just a symbol of success. HST is so rich, it says, that we can afford to be profligate with space on the tiny, crowded island of Manhattan.
Several members of the staff, who all have better things to do, start tidying and adjusting: moving water bottles, plucking stray leaves, fluffing pillows and then chopping them so they are slightly dented in the top. Lauren, from Client Services, rearranges the hollow balls made of lacquered vines. As soon as she sees me, she holds my arm and nods toward the wall next to the elevator, as though I could miss the huge man who is leaning there reading because his body is too big to fit into the large, commodious furniture we provide for our large, commodious clients.
There is one other wolf that I really don’t want to see.
“Tiberius.”
“Elijah,” he says, pulling himself upright.
“Should we go into my office?”
“Probably for the best.” He looks impassively at the swarming humans busily doing nothing.
“Do you mind if I take this?” He holds the Atlantic up to Dahlia who bobbles her head like it’s not fastened on quite right.
The water movers and tchotchke arrangers and leaf pluckers and pillow fluffers stop what they’re doing and head toward their desks, all via the hall leading to mine.
“Did you have a nice trip?”
“It was fine. A little tie-up at the GWB, but other than that, no complaints. Nice setup you have here.”
“One makes do,” I say jovially as we enter my office.
As soon as the door closes, I turn to face him.
“So what the fuck are you doing here, Shifter?”
“I’m here on Great North business.”
“You should have used the phone. Now I’m going to have to make up some bullshit about football. I hate talking about football.”
“I would have used the phone,” he says, leaning forward, his eyes mute, “but seeing as you wouldn’t take your Alpha’s calls, I had no reason to think you would take mine.”
Neither of us backs down. I turn over the picture of Thea that I left on my desk. “Which brings me back to my first question. What are you doing here?”
“The Pack needs a new copy of the trust, because the one at the Homelands went up in flames.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. We need to rebuild. The Alpha also wants to familiarize herself with the changes you’ve made.”
The changes I made because it turns out that Tiberius’s father had found a loophole that would have allowed him to control all our assets by the simple expedient of turning the Pack of four hundred into a Pack of one. Well, two. His son and the crippled runt Tiberius would do anything to protect.
It’s hard to hide my resentments. My resentment over the destruction he has brought to our Pack. My resentment over the rebuilding that is taking place without me. When I am Alpha, it will be my turn to decide what to do about the Shifter.
Unlocking the safe, I pull out the thick, green letter box holding the voluminous pages of the Pack trust. I toss Thea’s file into its place.
I call for reception. “Dahlia? Did Janine go out for lunch?”
“I haven’t seen her.”
“I need someone to do some—”
Tiberius pushes a button and hangs up on Dahlia. “We copy the trust.” I start to object. “Soon after you brought the trust to the Homelands for us to sign, my father knew every detail. I believe, and the Alpha agrees, that someone here—”
I cut him off before he can say any more. “Or maybe his son gave him access to the copy in John’s office?”
He looks down at the desk for a moment, then lifts his hand in front of him. Tiberius’s right hand is branded with the Ur rune. It was meant as both a punishment and a reminder to him of the importance of the wild. His left hand, though, the one he holds up to me, was not branded but impaled. The third and fourth finger overlap slightly, and there is a giant, ragged starburst in the middle of his palm.
“If I had done what my father wanted, he wouldn’t have found it necessary to nail me to a post with a dog spike.” He tightens his fingers into a fist and then stretches them again. I can tell by the way he moves that the hand will never be whole. “I’m not saying it was you, Alpha. But until I know otherwise, I don’t trust anyone.”
He picks up the letter box from the floor beside me, as if I can’t even be trusted to carry this thing that I’ve tended for more than two decades, my only fucking progeny. Then, with an elaborately courteous sweep of his arm, he indicates the door.