A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  Wolves. I cluck with disgust and lead the way through the pale halls, past the associates’ offices and conference rooms, through the waiting area with its pointless water bottles. Opening the transparent glass door to reception.

  “Dahlia? Could you have someone look into my intercom?”

  Then I open the opaque green-glass door into the bullpen. Here, the whispered voices are crowded around, close at hand.

  Sinise from accounting laughs with one of the clerks. “That’s not what Janine says. She says he’s hung like a fucking bear.”

  “You mean ‘bull,’” the clerk corrects her.

  “Whatever. I mean, a bear’s gotta be hung, right?”

  “I don’t know anything about bear prick, but I do know that the expression is ‘hung like a bull.’”

  Sinise snorts. “I’ll tell you what. When I’ve seen it for myself, I will give you a full report.”

  “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Look, it’s not even a thing. He’ll do anybody who’s clean and has a decent set of tits.”

  Oh my god, that’s sad. I would say how pathetic to be that man, but, of course, I am that man. I know just how pathetic it is.

  Tiberius’s senses are freakish in skin, so he hears—how could he not?—but he doesn’t react. Before he came to the Homelands, before he met Quicksilver, he was just like me. A man of the world. Of this world.

  He asks loudly where the copy room is.

  Sinise pops her head out of one of the cubicles, her face ashen. She pulls it back in and starts babbling noisily about billable hours.

  “Almost there.”

  There are two clerks in the room. I kick them out and close the door. There is no lock, so Tiberius unplugs one of the copiers and pushes it against the door. Dust snakes that had been hidden beneath are suddenly exposed and trundle across the floor. “Now,” he says, “which one do we use?”

  “This is why we have staff,” I say irritably as I search around. There are several machines. Some are big; some are smaller. One is very big, as if maybe the bullpen uses it for all those stupid Calm Down and Lawyer Up posters.

  I head toward one that is centrally located. Tiberius and I both stare at it blankly.

  “Where do the originals go?” he asks.

  “No idea,” I snap again. “That’s why we have staff. Maybe here, where the rectangles are?”

  Tiberius pounds the edges of the sheaf of papers.

  “And who among that staff had access to the trust?” Tiberius asks, piling the pages in a tray.

  “No one. My assistant copies only the signature addendum when we are adding to the Pack. But she doesn’t handle the trust itself. And only John—well, now Evie—and I have the combination to my safe.”

  Tiberius pushes the green button with a circle and a line in the middle. A light goes on, but nothing happens. “You’re sure she didn’t touch anything else?”

  “Absolute…” But even as I say it, I can’t help but think of the times she flitted around my office either being professional or very, very unprofessional. I was always careful to put the trust away. I was always careful that the safe was closed and locked. Even when I was in the middle of that raging castor-induced hunger, I was always responsible.

  Wasn’t I?

  I look at the machine. When did things get so complicated, and what are all these buttons for?

  Suddenly, Tiberius pushes something, and the machine starts its rapid-fire suck and cough. “Don’t touch anything,” he says.

  “I wasn’t going to touch anything. Jesus.”

  Tiberius stands silently, stooped over the shelf holding the Pack trust, drawing in deep breaths as the pages fly in and out of the machine. When it’s done, he picks up the original and riffles the pages.

  “But someone else has had this,” he says, fanning the pages once more toward me. My senses in skin are strong compared to the humans, but they are nothing like my wild senses. And even my wild senses are nothing like the freakish array of Tiberius’s mixed Pack-Shifter heritage. Still, I would definitely be able to catch the unmistakable carrion-and-steel stench of humans.

  “I don’t smell anyone.”

  “You’re not scenting for someone; you’re scenting for something. It’s faint, but it is there. Try again.”

  This time when he fans the pages against my nose, I catch the slightest whiff of something I can only describe as a mix of lavender breeze and the off-gassing of polypropylene carpets.

  “What is that?”

  “Industrial smoke remover, but Shifters sometimes use it to wash their hands when they’re trying to hide what they’re doing from other Shifters.”

  “Oh please.” I slip the still-warm trust into its brand-new letter box. “Offland is full of fake smells. Don’t be so paranoid.”

  I shove the box into one of the bags floating around the office from a charity run that HST sponsors.

  “You should change the combination.”

  Tiberius is starting to get on my nerves.

  I thrust the bag toward him. STRIDE TO SURVIVE, it says in bold, white letters. The handles of the bright-pink bag are not long enough to fit over his huge shoulder.

  “Oh, and Silver thought I should tell you that I will be challenging the Alpha for supremacy of the Great North this coming moon.”

  “What?”

  “I will,” he repeats slowly, “be challenging the Alpha for supremacy of the Great North this coming moon.”

  “I heard you the first time. There is no way—no way—the Great North would…accept…a Shifter…as…”

  I know what he’s doing. He has no interest in challenging for the Alpha spot. This is not about fighting Evie; this is about fighting me. According to our law, two wolves who challenge for the same position must fight each other first. Then only the winner is allowed to proceed.

  With Evie weak, Tiberius is the one wolf, the only wolf, who might have a chance at stopping me from coming home.

  “I hope there are no hard feelings?”

  We are Pack. Fighting is how we settle status. It would be like a human holding a grudge because his cousin wore pricier shoes to Thanksgiving dinner.

  “No, of course not.”

  As he walks away, the pink satchel swings daintily from his forearm. Tiberius knows his wild now. He holds it burned into his skin and safe in his heart. And these women who smile at him with half-closed eyes and these men who scuttle out of his way are as meaningless to him as dried leaves to the wind.

  Chapter 13

  Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 2 days

  Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 2 days

  Pack law evolves very slowly. Our culture is old, and our nature is wary. John liked to say that “an Alpha cannot lead via Skype. It has no teeth.” Maybe Skype doesn’t, but I do. Because there is no law that says an Alpha must be on the Homelands, anyone who has had an issue with my primacy of the 9th has had to take it up the way wolves do: with tooth and claw.

  Plenty have tried, but I am too strong, and now after thirty years of challenges, I am the most formidable fighter in the Great North. I know better than any of the Great North how a wolf fights and how a wolf wins.

  Tiberius may be a killer of men, but the one time he fought wild was when he and Silver paired off against the 14th’s Alpha pair.

  What a fucking mess that was. Tiberius stumbled around, letting Solveig get the better of him over and over, until lulled by a kind of lupine rope-a-dope, she raised herself to strike the final blow and he lashed out, almost killing her.

  Quicksilver simply grabbed Eudemos’s balls with her teeth and held on for dear life while the big lug scratched at her like a deer tick.

  Still, I am leaving nothing to chance. At 9:00, the gym is still populated by a posse of humans hoping to retain sexual viabilit
y into late middle age, so I pretend to grunt and strain over two hundred pounds until they go.

  Then I start the real work.

  • • •

  I smell Janine before she knocks on the doorframe, so I nod without looking up when she does. My desk is more cluttered than usual with loose ends I am trying to wrap up before I leave for good. Janine moves things around, clearing a space for the mail that needs my personal attention. She usually leaves, but this time, she doesn’t.

  “You going back up to visit the silent partners?” she asks.

  “Hmm.” I scribble something I need to double-check in LexisNexis. Why the odd emphasis?

  “What do you do up there?”

  “Business.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But maybe it would be more fun if, you know, you had company.”

  The trace of her fingernails along the back of my neck is like nettles.

  I sit back to see what she really wants. The hand that had been scraping so irritatingly across my skin falls. The other is holding an ivory envelope with a black embossed snowflake and an inscription that reads “Because of the cold, they kindled a fire and received us all.” —Acts 28:2.

  Then I know. This is the invitation to an event that everyone calls L-Cubed. Maybe not everyone, because officially, it’s some combination of Homeless or Hospitals or Help or Hearts, but most everyone knows it as L-Cubed because while there are always a few celebrities, the guest list is overwhelmingly lawyers, lobbyists, and lawmakers.

  It is the most important networking event of the year, and HST always buys a table.

  “Should I take care of this for you?” Janine asks, picking it up and tapping the edge of it on her lips. Not terribly subtle. She has clearly heard that I buy clothes and shoes and bags and cuts and colorings and waxings and whatever other treatments are necessary to assure that my plus-one reflects well on me and maintains my place in the hierarchy.

  Naturally, she presumes that as I have plumbed the mysteries of her dragon, she is the most plausible recipient for clothes, shoes, bags, cuts, colorings, and waxings.

  “I’ll take care of it,” I say, turning again to my computer screen. “Later.”

  Now she taps the envelope against the desk, unwilling to let it go. She doesn’t understand, and I can’t tell her that I am not saying no to her. I’m saying no to parties, no to the Plaza, no to lawyers, no to humans.

  No to Offland.

  I’m saying I don’t give a damn what happens with this, because in five days, my challenge will be fought and won. The Iron Moon will be over. And Tara will call Maxim to tell him that the board of managers has voted for me to replace the interim CEO of Great North LLC.

  Then there will be no lever long enough to shift me away from the Homelands again.

  “What do you think this is?” Janine says, shaking a small box against her ear. The scent of pine wafts to my twitching nose, and I hold out my hand.

  T. Villalobos is scrawled on the top left-hand corner. Fragile, it says. Personal.

  Janine watches expectantly like a child who believes every box, no matter how small, must include something for her.

  My hand covers the box completely, because whatever it is, it is Personal and Fragile and is from Thea to me. To me.

  “I don’t know.”

  She doesn’t leave at first, not until she sees my face stripped of the practiced look of consideration and compromise, revealing instead the millennia of Alphas whose rock-hard will is my legacy.

  Janine backs away from my desk.

  “Close it, Janine.”

  In the bottom drawer of my desk, hidden under everything else, is my seax, the dagger that every adult Pack wears. It slides easily through the tape holding the brown paper recycled from the local Publix. An envelope on the outside reads DON’T SHAKE.

  So you don't miss "it" quite so much.

  Thank you,

  Thea

  Poking one finger through the dried fir needles she used as packing, I feel the high ridge and the graceful arabesque of the jaw. I dig out the fisher skull, blowing off the dried duff until the skull lies pale and slender in my palm.

  Maybe this was meant as a goodbye gift, but it’s nothing like those pearl-gray silk robes that served as a sop to my underwhelmed conscience. Those shallow white boxes I left for whatever woman was in room 513.

  When I take over the Alpha’s office, I will put the fisher skull front and center on the shelves holding the Pack’s First Kills, even though it’s not Pack and not First and not a Kill. My mind is already spinning out a future that has nothing to do with taking Tilda as bedfellow. It has entirely to do with spending nights in Arietta and comforting this huge, overfull erection between Thea’s thighs.

  I’m afraid to adjust it, afraid the touch of my hand will set it off.

  Why couldn’t I have felt this with one of those hundreds of women who laid themselves down and made every orgasm a chore? Why for this woman? Why for this one who hasn’t tried to seduce me? Whose only touch was a handshake. Oh, and the accidental flick of her hand against my button, which touched my top placket, which touched my bottom placket, which touched the skin above my heart. She touched my skin.

  Slamming the door shut to my executive washroom, I barely manage to push my cock down before the great bone-white streaks explode in pulses that match the rhythm of my heart.

  “Mr. Sorensson?”

  Gripping the side of the sink, I look at myself in the mirror. My still-hard sex mocks me between the open zipper of my vicuña trousers and the tails of my high-count white twill shirt.

  “Elijah?” Janine says more softly this time. “Are you all right? Do you need something?”

  “I’m fine. Just…just spilled something. On my shirt.” After zipping up, I run water over one of the fine towels by the side of my sink and use it to wipe the mirror. Then I dab at my shirt, so when I head back out to Janine, I have a plausible wet spot.

  I shouldn’t have worried. Janine’s eyes are locked on the bathroom mirror with its filmy smear of drying wolf semen.

  Chapter 14

  Wilcume, ðu londadl hǽðstapa.

  Welcome, you landsick heath-wanderer.

  At the rusted sign saying Private Drive, I yank hard on the steering wheel, heading onto the rough, narrow road with deep trenches on either side. It is a nearly impossible entrance, but we like it that way. All but the most practiced hands will find themselves spinning their wheels in the gutter.

  A few yards in, the road takes a curve at the deserted fire watchtower, and here, hidden from the asphalt, I hit the brakes. Looking up through the windshield, I let the stillness of the place I love take me over. The pale-gold-and-gray sky is a cutwork pattern through the bare branches of the hardwoods and the spiky tops of the evergreens. Through the windows come the smells of damp bark and needles, the sounds of mallards overhead, which must mean that the ice is breaking on Home Pond. The land stretches and expands as the deep layers of frost recede and it starts to remember that spring is a possibility.

  I will never leave again.

  Everything that is of any importance to me is in a paper bag from Whole Foods I found in the trash room. Toothbrush, the trust, degrees, seax, the picture of my echelon, and the fisher skull nestled in its box of pine needles. I didn’t bother to bring any of the bespoke suits or shirts.

  “Hello, Mei.”

  The wolf on gate duty waves me through but does not look happy about it.

  “Want a ride?” I call through the open window.

  Her back toward me, she threads the thick chain tight through the fence and clicks the padlock. Then, without a backward glance, she lopes through the trees toward Home Pond.

  I take it that means no.

  Parking beside the assortment of Wranglers and Land Rovers, I slam the door. There’s something par
ticularly satisfying in that thunk, as though the Land Rover’s door is the door on another life.

  At Home Pond, only the pups are wild. The adults are all in skin as they are in the hours before the Iron Moon, because the Moon is like a current, pulling us further along our feral spectrum. If she finds us in skin, she makes us wild. But if she finds us already wild, she makes us ǣcewulfas, forever wolves. Real wolves. Because the pups are already at the wildest end of the spectrum, they cannot be pushed any further.

  She allows them this kindness until they are juveniles. Then they too must greet her in skin.

  I don’t know where the 9th is. I can’t find anyone. None of them are in their cabins, and as I search for them, every member of the Pack looks at me angrily. Wolves I’ve known my whole life turn their backs to me.

  There’s someone at the Boathouse. I was right; the ice must have broken, because there is a slow splashing in the water. At the edge of the dock, watching the mallards at the dark center of Home Pond, her feet breaking through the thin brittle ice at the edge of Home Pond, is a small female with a long mane of silver hair that glows in the fading daylight.

  She sprints up as I approach, her bare feet and jeans wet with icy water. Silver has always been more wolfish than the rest of us. In skin too. It’s not just her silver hair or the long eyeteeth; it’s something that’s harder to pinpoint. It’s almost as though the earth talks to her in her human form, the way it talks to the rest of us when we’re wolves. Even the way she moves—the sudden reactions, the loping steps—all are more wolf than woman.

  “Did you set him up to it?”

  “Tiberius?”

  “Yes, Tiberius. I don’t believe he would have challenged me if you hadn’t told him to.”

  “Tiberius was going to challenge you. I only advised him because he doesn’t know our law. He hadn’t understood that if he challenged you instead of the Alpha, it changed nothing. That even if he had won, you could still fight Evie. Now, if he wins, you can’t.”