A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  Her voice is stiff and formal; her fist is tightening around the glass.

  I cup her hand in mine. “Relax, shielder. Things break easily here.”

  As soon as she does, I put the glass on the countertop and hold her hands again. “I won’t fight you. I should have given up primacy years ago. I didn’t, but it wasn’t because of power. It was because I needed to matter in the only place that ever mattered to me. But what matters to me now is what’s best for the Pack and best for the 9th. Evie thinks it’s best for the Great North if I stay Offland. And I know that you are what’s best for the 9th. Anyway, you’ve been Alpha in all but name for so long. It’s time for that ass Lorcan to treat you like one.”

  She looks at her hands cupped in mine and then cocks her head to the side.

  “I will be proud to call you Alpha, Celia.”

  And Celia leans forward, not with some meaningless air kiss. Instead, with the slide of her skin against mine, she leaves minute traces of herself and the promise of protection and belonging.

  The way a wolf does it.

  • • •

  This time, Conradi tries something new. He shows up, sits me down at the interview table, and pulls out a pack of gum—not the kind with the bubbles, but the old-fashioned kind with the papery aluminum foil. Because the room is covered in acoustic tiles, I can hear every crinkle and bend.

  Maybe he has had success with people who are unnerved by silence. Who will start talking just to fill it in, and when they start talking, he starts tying them in knots. People maybe, but not me. So I settle in, waiting like a wolf at a watering hole.

  An hour later, he stalks out and slams the door.

  A skinny, balding cop with a thick mustache and a distracting hairy mole on his jawline opens the door and tells me that Conradi’s gone and they need this room. He drinks noisily from a coffee mug that instructs me to “Be Safe: Sleep with an Officer.”

  “Don’t leave town,” he says to my back.

  As soon as I leave the interview room, pulling on my jacket, I smell it again. The strong unmistakable scent of lavender breeze cutting through the fug of churros and steel and sweat-stained polyester and beer-saturated livers.

  I don’t even bother to pretend. With my mouth partly open, I lower my head, sucking in short, panted breaths to help me focus on the source. I follow it to the door and to a man waiting outside. Last time, I had been confused because I relied like a human on my eyes. I saw the white-haired man and discounted him. This time, I track the scent like Pack.

  Underneath his pricey suit is a thin, almost hollow body. The skin at the back of his neck is sallow and papery. He stops and turns to the side, a lighter held in the hollow of his yellow fingers, trying to protect his cigarette from the wind.

  Half of his mouth is topped by a pale strip, as though a mustache had once blocked the sun there. The other half… It isn’t properly a mouth at all. It’s just a slit in a cheek that is bright pink and puffy and smooth like a mushroom. With no lips to keep it in, saliva collects in the corner.

  I follow him from the precinct to a bench in the tiny park at Canal and Sixth. He alternates between sucking at his cigarette and dabbing at his leaking mouth with a large handkerchief.

  “Why don’t we play Twenty Questions,” he says without bothering to look at me.

  I don’t respond.

  “You have to say animal or vegetable or mineral.”

  I don’t have to say anything.

  “Fine then,” he says, taking a deep toke. “Are you a wolf?” Smoke leaks out with each word.

  I stand behind him. “If you know what I am, human, you should know to be afraid. What did you want from Janine?”

  With the practiced action of his thumb, he flicks ash on the ground.

  “What did she tell you? What did your boss want from her?”

  “Is this the part in the movie where the villain, for unaccountable reasons, reveals in agonizing detail both his motivations and his plans? Though before we assign villainy, can I point out that you were the ones who ate my fucking face?”

  “And you were the ones who invaded our land.”

  “And you were the ones who sent the parricide. Between the two of us, I imagine we could spend a few rollicking hours trading accusations.”

  “There’s a difference between us. We just want to be left alone. We are just trying to survive.”

  “Isn’t that all anyone is trying to do? Ensure the continuation of the species?” He pulls out his phone and looks at it briefly; he swipes twice with his thumb. “Their own species, of course. Other species be damned. Like those that cling to their habitats even as those habitats shrink and then—pop—the noose pulls tight and there is no room for them at all.” Having gotten a response, he turns his phone facedown on his leg. “You, for example. When will you get it through your heads that this world has no room for monsters?”

  “We are not monsters.”

  August Leveraux’s human pawn laughs, his tongue darting out to lick the fold where his lips should be.

  “Shall we test that? I invite you, in the view of all these lovely, lovely people, to turn into a werewolf—”

  “Not a werewolf.”

  “Well, whatever you choose to call yourself. I think you would find that the next thing you heard was the sound of every one of said lovely, lovely people slipping off the safeties.”

  He wipes the inside of his missing mouth.

  “Growl all you want,” he says. “Yes, you can tear me apart. Physically, maybe, but practically speaking, you can’t. Your strength has to be kept secret. Our strength—my employer’s strength—does not. In fact, his power is the sort that has no point without people to wield it over. People to buy and frighten and persuade. I am the first to admit that I am not strong, but, Mr. Sorensson, I am terribly powerful.”

  A black car stops in front of us. The tinted window rolls down, and the driver leans his head out, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Daniel Leary?”

  “That’d be me,” Leary says. He stops for a moment at the door to the car. “Don’t you have to be getting home too?” He takes a look at his phone and then stuffs it back in his pocket. “If I’m not mistaken, it will be Alpo time soon.”

  Then Daniel Leary, the man with the scar-rimmed, bright-pink cheek and yellow fingers and rotting breath and half lips, the man who killed our wolves, who burned our home, who hammered a spike through Tiberius’s hand, who peeled off Janine’s face, and who has the gall to call us monsters, slides into the back of a car and closes the door.

  “Penn Station?” asks the driver, looking in the rearview mirror. And my tongue finds the slight point of my canine.

  Maybe Leary has been flagged by the IRS. Maybe he has a dodgy passport. Maybe he’s just afraid of flying. But whatever the reason, his route “home too” is via Hell’s Vestibule.

  And that…that is a place with room for monsters.

  It takes me no time at all to find him in Penn Station. The stench that disguised his association with Shifters is so strong and so easy to follow. I don’t need to see him, making it easy to stay hidden. Mostly hidden. Nothing makes someone more nervous than the feeling of being followed without any tangible proof. Wolves sometimes do it, follow a deer for hours unseen. It makes the deer skittish and unfocused and tired and prone to mistakes.

  Like Leary. He whips around and snarls with his misshapen face, “Get the fuck away from me!” That was a mistake, yelling into the crowd. Humans really don’t like ugliness and insanity and unpredictability and scurry away from him.

  This is how wolves hunt: separating the weak and infirm from the protection of the herd.

  I know every hidden space and secret passage of this maze. I know how to access platforms without heading up and down crowded escalators. I can cross tracks unseen. I can be nowhere and everywhere. I don’t show
myself until he is in the broad, brightly lit tunnel that was used to usher delegates away from protestors during some convention before it was soldered up and turned into…

  …a dead end.

  “Wolves believe in the sanctity of death.” My voice echoes down the empty hallway.

  He walks quickly, fumbling for his phone. He jabs at it, refusing to believe that there are parts of New York without network coverage.

  “They do not kill without reason. They do not torture.”

  “August Leveraux will flay you alive if you touch me.” A dribble of spit flows down the side of his mouth.

  “Unfortunately for you, I’ve spent decades with humans. Thanks to them, I know what it is to be truly monstrous. And when I am done, you will know too.”

  He starts to scream, but it dissolves quickly into a breathless hacking cough. For his power to work at all, he needs people to buy and terrify and persuade, and there are none here.

  I punch the oversize handkerchief through his teeth and drag him to the break in the wall where the rats are.

  Chapter 33

  I push the last concrete block back in place. On the other side, in the dark, a rat scurries toward the body I left there.

  I’ve got to get home.

  Running from the narrow side exit beyond one of the half-dozen pretzel places, I raise my hand for a cab. My phone buzzes. There are three missed calls and a voice message, all from a 518 number I don’t recognize.

  Sliding into the back, I give the driver my address and check the message.

  “Elijah?” There’s a long pause, almost like Celia’s waiting for my voice to answer her. “Yours is the only number I know by heart.” Celia’s usually firm, clipped voice sounds tentative and weak. “I think someone followed me from New York. A Shifter and a human. I killed them, but not quickly enough.” She begins coughing up something that I know must be blood. “It isn’t a flesh wound.”

  Where are you?

  “The man in the gas station is looking at me,” she says weakly. “They will not have my body.”

  Oh, min schildere. Where are you?

  I throw money at the cabby and run down the sloping exit to the parking garage, calling the Great North.

  It takes nothing for the Pack’s wolfish hackers to track the phone number to a body shop near Corinth. Within minutes, Evie has sent Tristan and four other wolves south. I am racing north at the same time, but Corinth is in the middle, and it will be hours before any of us can get to her—and by then, it will be too late.

  Celia is strong and our bodies are resilient, but she will not survive if the man at the gas station calls the EMT. If someone draws blood or listens to her heart or anything, they will realize she is not human, and in the name of science, they will torture her. They will cage her, and they will find out what she is.

  At the stoplight, I pop open the glove compartment and look grimly at the contents. Aside from the usual proof of insurance, maintenance schedules, owner’s manuals, registrations, and ice scrapers, all Pack cars carry a lighter and a WD-40 Big Blast, because Offland, we cannot simply die: we must immolate.

  I do the only thing I can think of to save Celia.

  The moment I call Thea, she begins to move. There’s the swish of her coat, the jingle of her keys, the dull thwack of that emergency backpack. Her boots.

  At first, I couldn’t remember the word that would make a human understand why Celia was so important to me. She is within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity that is family. A female littermate. I finally remember.

  “Sister. She’s my sister.” What a bloodless word. An accident of birth and parentage, carrying none of the sense of shared responsibility of a shielder.

  Thea pulls her door closed with a dull click and runs for her car. The door slams, and I tell her where my “sister” is.

  Her car engine comes to life, and she shifts into Reverse.

  I tell her that my sister does not trust strangers. “Do you have the braid I gave you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show it to her. It will be enough.”

  • • •

  The Pack is already there by the time I pull in behind Thea’s Wrangler. Tristan has brought the kitted-out long-bed truck he uses on the rare occasion when he has to retrieve a wounded wolf. There’s another Land Rover as well. We’re not very imaginative when it comes to cars.

  Thea is outside, running toward me before I close the car door. I pull her to me, my face buried into her hair, drawing one desperate breath after another.

  “They’re here,” she whispers. “Your people.”

  Thea opens the door to her cabin where my people crowd around like a family of giants in a dollhouse.

  My blood runs cold. Standing beside the bed, one hand hooked around the broad main beam is Varya the Indurate. Her blood is pouring through a tube the size of a garden hose into pale-faced Celia.

  On the other side, Tristan kneels on the floor, working on Celia under a surgical lighthead, its beam being directed by Marco. Two younger wolves are assisting.

  “Alpha,” Varya says with a discernible accent and a freight load of scorn.

  Thea’s phone chirps in her pocket. She puts her hand on my chest. “I better take this outside,” she whispers.

  Varya stares silently at the place where a human hand had been until Thea gives the door that extra pull.

  “What are you doing, Alpha?”

  “Celia didn’t have hours to wait for us. She wasn’t going to be conscious much longer. She’s a good wolf and would have burned first, but she deserved better than that.”

  I lean over the bed, my hand gentle against her cold forehead.

  “There is a human here. A human who wears your braid?”

  “She is not your concern.”

  “You have made her my concern. You have made her the concern of the entire Great North.”

  I keep looking at Celia, brushing back her hair. Her closed eyes look like bruises in her pale face. “Celia? Min scildere? Lada mec.”

  “She can’t hear you. And it’s not her forgiveness you are going to need. It is the Alpha’s, and she will never forgive you for letting the humans know about us.”

  “Stop being melodramatic. Thea doesn’t know anything.”

  “She will certainly suspect something. Look around you, Alpha. Look at us.” She waves her hand at the outlandish bodies crammed into Thea’s cabin. As though to make her point, Marco cracks his head into the sloping roof with a resounding clomp and a muffled curse.

  “The law is clear. Either you do it, or I will, but…”

  The sticky latch on the door clicks. Thea looks at me, her phone in her hand.

  “Se westend sceal forþferan.”

  Se westend. The waster, the destroyer. It is the word wolves once used for humans. Se westend sceal forþferan: The human must die.

  I jerk Thea to me and kiss her slowly and deliberately, making sure that Varya is watching me. Watching me mark Thea’s face and her neck and her body until she is thick with my scent.

  “Wiðsæcest þu min fæstnung?”

  Do you deny my bond, my protection?

  Our laws are both remarkably exact and remarkably vague. They are exact in that there are prescriptions and proscriptions for every interaction: sex, mating, protecting, hunting, eating. They are vague in their assumption that all those interactions take place between Pack. The one so marked, it says, shall be under said Alpha’s protection even unto death.

  It doesn’t say the wolf or the Pack member or the half Shifter. No, all it says is the one.

  “This is not over,” Varya says, her already rigid face hardening. “You have only delayed the inevitable. The Deemer will know the law.”

  Before I can answer, Thea tugs on my arm, pulling me down until her lips are against my ear, in the mistaken
notion that she can’t be heard. “They have to go.”

  “As soon as—”

  “No, they have to go now. That was Doug. He called to say that an arrest warrant has come up from the city for you. I said I hadn’t seen you for weeks, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.”

  Had the cabin been filled with humans, no one would have heard anything, but as it is, Varya is already pulling the tube from her arm. “Henry,” she says to the younger wolf. “You take over. I will drive.”

  Varya continues barking orders. Henry plugs the garden hose into his own vein, and as the four wolves carefully take Celia out, he holds his arm high, finally folding himself into the back of Tristan’s truck. Marco and the remaining wolf are sent to retrieve Celia’s car.

  “As for you,” Varya says as she starts the ignition, “do not let this mess follow you home.”

  The door slams and the wheels jounce and I head back into the cabin. They even removed Thea’s sheets, in case they were stained by a drop of Celia’s alien blood.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  “I know. I said they were like the Amish—”

  “That’s later. What I want to know is why no one ever interviewed me about where you were the last night we saw each other.”

  “What?”

  “Doug told me. The warrant is for the murder of a woman who was killed that Saturday, but you were with me the entire time.”

  “It’s…” I smooth out her mattress. “I’ll get you some new sheets.”

  “Stop it. Just…stop it.” She takes my chin in her hand, forcing me to look her in the ironwood eye. “You were with me. I’m not asking about what just happened here with those people who are not even remotely like the Amish. I am asking you why you didn’t tell anyone that you had an alibi.”

  My wolfish ears pick up the sound of tires hitting the forest track that leads to Thea’s cabin. Doug will be here in five minutes.

  “You want to know why? It’s because that girl who was killed was my assistant, and I had slept with her. I was a shit, and I slept with a lot of women. Then I met you, and I thought I was done with that other me. I never wanted to have anything to do with him again. But I couldn’t get away from him, and I knew if the police interviewed you, they would make sure you knew every horrible thing about me.” I push her hair behind her ear. “And I would lose whatever chance I had that you would love me like I love you.”