A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  After a winter of standing up to the burden of snow, the branch from a long-drowned spruce cracks and falls into the water.

  “You were,” she says, pulling her braid up so that it touches her lower lip, “my lover.”

  From the opposite shore comes the beating of wings, and geese—a mated pair—land on Home Pond. It takes a long time for me to breathe again.

  Chapter 37

  The last night of the Iron Moon, I repeatedly scan the still-dark sky. But try as I might, I can’t get back into skin. I stretch out my paws, roll my shoulders, arch my back, bend deep into my haunches. Pushing my body to light the spark that will start the change, but the Iron Moon is done with us when she’s done with us and not a minute before.

  The storm and the slowly thawing earth have given rise to a dense mist. It would give us cover from humans who rely so heavily on their eyes, but not from wolves.

  After one large twang, the world goes silent and blank, and my skin begins to prickle. My bones feel like rubber, and my organs torque inside my body.

  The larger the wolf, the longer the change takes to complete; I’ve always been one of the last to finish. My feet haven’t fully formed yet when I jump up, crushing the little pine table beneath me. Quicksilver, who is small and already fully in skin, says something that I can’t make out.

  In a curdled voice that is half howl, half human, I call for Thea to come. She is barely awake, her hair knotted around her like a dark halo. I throw her coat around her shoulders and grab her hand, pulling her toward the woods at a run.

  A fine dusting of fur falls from my skin.

  Thea tries to pull away. I stretch my jaw, desperately popping my ears, trying to hear what she’s saying. What are you saying, Thea? She holds back, her wet, filthy socks skidding on the ground. Shoes, I forgot shoes. Doesn’t matter. We can’t stop. We don’t have time.

  Please, Thea, Please.

  Run.

  The Pack gathers in front of the Great Hall, and with each passing moment, another huge dirt-spattered body crashes from the forest.

  The pups skitter around, leaping up, their feet on the legs of nearby adults, looking for the reassurance that even though we look so alien, we belong with them and love them still.

  Thea hisses my name. Elijah? I put my hand to her mouth, scenting the currents. We need to go to the forest to the north and east of the Great Hall. Staying deep in the woods, we will trace a broad circle downwind before finally racing for the car.

  The rains have saturated the ground above the frozen subsoil, and everything has turned to gray snow and mud, but under the evergreens, I pray the cushioning layer of pine needles will muffle our steps.

  I should have known we didn’t have a chance. Not with the whole Pack here. Not with every single wolf of the Great North descending from last-minute runs higher up. Not with the sinewy wolf with the auburn hair, the best tracker in the 9th Echelon, standing in front of us.

  “No, Sarah, please—”

  She calls out for Evie.

  Everywhere I look, there are wolves. Wolves I’ve hunted with. Wolves I’ve fed. Wolves I’ve covered. Wolves I’ve fought. For the first time, I feel the hopelessness of the deer who knows what it is when we emerge from the trees.

  I pull Thea tight against my chest as more and more feral giants emerge from the fog-covered forest. Hair bristling, skin covered with mud, many still stained with the blood of their final hunt, they do look like monsters. I murmur comforting nonsense to her. It’s going to be all right. Loving me wasn’t a fatal mistake.

  Though, of course, it was.

  The Pack makes way for the dark silhouette emerging from just past the birches. Evie shakes once, not from the cold, but because her change is only just finished and she is trying to rid her body of the last remnants of black fur coating her steel-muscled body.

  She doesn’t hesitate. No doubt she’s been seething over this for the three days when she had no words and no thumbs. She strides up to us, then bending down, she plucks at the braid around Thea’s neck and sniffs several times in quick succession before letting the scent roll around in her nose.

  Thea draws back, and the hard thing in her pocket swings loose, hitting my thigh.

  “What were you thinking when you did this? When you braided the gift of our land with your blood and your seed?” She stands back up. “Did you think it meant something? Did you think this made her your mate?”

  Evie’s fingers go to the braid at her own throat. Every strand is even, and the braid is as neat and perfect as decades of experience can make it.

  “The braid, this braid, is sacred to us. And you cannot bind this pack and this land with this human, þes westend.” She spits out the word and her disgust. Her hand slides once more along the braid that reminds her every day of her mate and her loss. “It was not your right, Elijah. What you have done is to make a decoration. It is meaningless.”

  Victor snorts derisively and pulls his seax from its sheath. I slide my hand toward the heavy thing in Thea’s pocket.

  “But it is not meaningless to me.”

  And the second I pull the gun out, an explosion rips through the air. Shards of wood fly from a tree.

  I hadn’t meant to fire her gun, just wave it around, buy us some time. Let my tired lawyer brain think of a way out. But like so many human things, it takes such a little pressure to ruin everything. I stare down at my tingling hand as shocked by the steel object in my grasp as the Pack is.

  Thea’s fingers slide over my hand, loosening my hold. Numb and dumb, I let her take it. She’ll know what to do with it. How to cock it or aim it or make it kill. But she doesn’t aim it or cock it or make it kill. Instead, she ejects the magazine.

  “Thea!”

  With one smooth movement, she turns the gun to the side, pulling the slide. A single bullet falls to the ground.

  She looks down the barrel before slipping the gun back into her pocket. “Who would you have shot?” she asks me, pointing to Sarah. “Her?” She indicates a wolf from the 11th. “Him?”

  A curious pup bolts from between the legs of the adults, intrigued by the tart-smelling metal thing in the dirt. Thea scoops him up, holding him to her neck. “This one?”

  The Pack moves as one toward her, Evie with her hands out, pleading for her to be careful with our child.

  “That is not who you are,” she says. “And it’s not who I am either.” She rubs her cheek against the pup’s muzzle, then hands the cringing, whining bundle of gray fur back to his furious Alpha.

  A slow disturbance starts at the far edge of the Pack. In a wave, the enormous bodies move to the side, clearing a path. All I can see is Tiberius, but I know his mate is the one pushing her Packmates out of the way.

  Silver is at the rock bottom of the hierarchy, but she knows better than most that the Pack does not coddle weakness, and she shows none as she walks toward us, her back straight and her chin high.

  If possible, she looks even worse in skin than she did wild. Her fur at least gave her some bulk, but without it, her pale skin clings tight to her cheekbones, and her gray-green eyes seem almost ghoulish in her gaunt face. She is wearing the kind of long, loose dress our females prefer in the last weeks of pregnancy, though it hangs from the distended joints of her shoulders like a shroud.

  Tiberius follows her, a worried look on his face and a sturdy basket, the kind we keep kindling in, on his arm.

  “You should be resting, Silver,” Evie says as the runt stops in front of the amassed pack.

  “I won’t stay long.” She looks at the seax in Victor’s hand. “But before you kill Elijah’s human, Deemer, I wanted to raise a point of law.”

  Victor’s sour face turns immediately hostile. There is something about the runt that Victor does not like, and it’s not just her choice of mate. Tiberius makes a hard warning sound in the back of his throat, an
d Victor takes a half step back.

  “What is the Fifth Law?”

  Victor did not join the rest of the Pack until he was fully cleaned and dressed and armed. He’s got no little bits of prickly juniper in his hair or raccoon between his teeth. Always jealous of the dignity of his station, he is clean and well dressed.

  “That’s ridiculous.” He turns to Evie. “Everyone knows the answer. Why should I—?”

  “Because she has asked a question, Deemer, and we do not fear questions.”

  He sucks on his teeth before saying that “the only compensation for a death is a death.”

  “That’s the interpretation, but what does it actually say? In agenspræc, Dema.”

  In our own language, Deemer.

  “Alpha, I object—”

  “Answer it,” Evie snaps.

  “Eoldor angylde eoldor,” he says, spitting each word.

  “Exactly,” Silver says. “A life equals a life.” Now she turns, her hand out, and Tiberius moves forward, the basket toward her, his other hand ready at her back where she cannot see it or feel it or force it away. Unfolding two blankets, Silver gently scoops up the tiny black dot, whose fur has dried, making him look slightly less tiny than before. The pup is blind, its ears still folded close, and when he yawns, his mouth is pink and toothless. “This is Theo Tiberiusson. Maybe I would have survived this moon without the human’s help. Maybe not. So I do not ask for my own life. But Theo was already dead.”

  Silver rubs her cheek against the pup’s little head. Smelling Silver’s scent, he turns to her, hungry again as our nurslings always are.

  “Now he’s not. He is alive and greedy.” Her voice is already fading. Tiberius moves behind her, his massive chest nearly touching. “Our law is clear: Eoldor angylde eoldor. A life equals a life.”

  “That is not what it means!” Victor shouts. “The Fifth is meant to punish, not reward.”

  Silver stumbles. Evie grabs the pup with one hand and the basket with the other. When Tiberius lifts his mate, the soles of her feet and the hem of her dress are dark with blood.

  “Tiberius,” Evie says, “take Silver to medical. Tristan, go with them.” Evie rubs the tiny pup with her cheek, adding her own mark to this new addition, before settling him back among his littermates. “And, Adrian, find the human some shoes.”

  “Stay, Adrian,” Victor barks without bothering to face the nervous juvenile. “You aren’t actually taking the runt’s argument seriously?” he asks Evie.

  Victor is playing a dangerous game. He is questioning Evie, forcing her to make a decision: either back Silver’s argument, or appear indecisive in front of the Pack and risk it dissolving into chaos.

  Evie strides in front of Victor, her lean, hard body so close that her last loose guard hairs shed onto his clothes. “I take the law seriously, Deemer. I take that life seriously. Deemer.”

  Victor backs off just enough to cross his arms above his belly. A handful of wolves who had been arrayed behind him move closer. Others vacillate at the edges.

  “It is your duty to preserve the Old Ways. And this…this is not of the Old Ways.”

  “No, it is your duty to preserve the Old Ways. Mine is to preserve the Pack. When Ælfrida left her land, when she took in the wolves of Wessex, she was not keeping with the Old Ways. If she had kept with the Old Ways, Pack Mercia would have remained in Mercia and would have died there.”

  “But it was the wolves of Wessex. You can’t compare what she did with this. With letting a human live. Sum westend þe wat.”

  A human who knows.

  “Look what happened when your mate deviated from our traditions,” Victor continues. “Because he allowed the Shifter to join the Pack, we almost lost everything. Everything.”

  Ignoring the unsheathed dagger in his hand, Evie moves toward Victor, her black eyes close to his and very hard. “Careful, Deemer. Fretting over what might have been is a very human thing to do.” Her hair blows around her in a halo of tight, black curls specked with dried grasses and burrs. “I can’t know what would have happened, and neither can you. The Shifters had already found us. One of our own made sure of that.

  “If it is your job to uphold our laws without question, my job—the harder job—is to question them. Adrian,” she says, turning to the young wolf, “shoes.”

  This time, Adrian does not waver. He has been raised to obey both Alpha and Deemer, but he knows where his primary obedience lies. Evie watches the skinny juvenile as he runs off.

  In that second, while Evie’s attention is distracted, Victor whips around.

  My senses in skin aren’t strong enough, and I hear him too late. I see him too late. I smell him too late. I twist my back toward him.

  Too late.

  Thea falters in my arms. Her back arches, and her mouth opens with a soft cry that smells like copper. Something warm runs down my arm.

  Then Victor raises his hand, showing the Pack his seax covered with Thea’s blood as though he has battled a worthy opponent and won their submission. As though he hadn’t just ambushed my unarmed mate.

  My breath stops, and when it starts again with a huge rush of air and power, the fury of my wild pumps through me with a deafening howl. A howl filled with all the anger and despair over the daily corruptions and the constant soul poisoning that I have put up with for decades in order to preserve this land and this pack. To keep you you YOU alive and safe and—

  “Let him go, Elijah.”

  Victor is suspended in midair, his eyes bulging, his hands clawing, his face turning purple.

  “Your Alpha would not have you kill him,” Evie whispers in my ear. “Not yet, at any rate.”

  When that ancient duty of obedience looses my fingers, the Deemer collapses to the ground like a sack of lentils. Several wolves break away from the Pack and kneel beside him.

  I don’t care if he’s alive or dead. Tristan, I whisper, my throat unaccountably sore. I plead with the Alpha. I need Tristan.

  Evie squats down beside me. “Gabi is coming,” she says. “It’s better.” Her hand is on my arm. “Tristan doesn’t know how they work.”

  My shielder is dead. I am a pariah to the Great North. And Thea, my lodestone, my axis, is bleeding in my arms. I hold her tighter, rocking slowly, whispering into her hair. Pleading with her not to die. Please. I’ve lost any delusions that we could be together, but I need to know that somewhere she just…is.

  Please, Thea.

  Evie leans forward, her knees in the cold muck, and lifts my chin. She holds my eyes to make sure that I am at least this focused. So that I understand what she’s doing when she rubs her cheek slowly and deliberately against mine. First the right, then the left.

  Don’t worry, she says in our wordless way. You are not lost. You have a place.

  And then she does the unthinkable.

  She marks Thea. She rubs her scent on Thea’s pale-gold skin, extending her protection, her grace, to the woman I love.

  When she stands, Victor’s bloody seax in her hand, she stares at her wolves, daring them to question her judgment. Daring each of the strongest ones to return her gaze. Having made her decision, she is ready to fight for it.

  And one by one, they lower their eyes.

  Chapter 38

  “Elijah, move your arm,” a voice says. “I need to listen.” Gabi kneels beside me, still naked and covered with bits of fur, but carrying her med kit. She puts the cold metal bell of her stethoscope to Thea’s chest—first here, then there—while I watch anxiously, murmuring promises about a future I don’t believe in.

  “Not a flesh wound,” she says, her stethoscope around her neck, “but not fatal either. Let’s get her to medical.”

  “Gabi, you take her. I need to talk to Elijah,” Evie says. She hesitates a moment, then calls to Varya Timursdottir. “Shielder, make sure no one tries to hurt the huma
n.”

  “Yes, Alpha.”

  I hold the woman I love tighter. “Not her. She’s already threatened to kill Thea.”

  Evie scratches her eyebrow. “And, just to be clear, do not harm her yourself.”

  “Yes, Alpha,” Varya says, lowering her head in submission.

  “If you’re going to be at the Homelands,” Evie says once she is sure we are out of earshot, “you need to relearn the subtleties of the Pack. It is true that Varya hates humans, though I’ve never seen any sign that she much likes wolves either. But what she really hates is chaos. Disorder. If she says something will happen, it will happen. I trust her.” She steps over the tiny gully that serves as a course for the stream that runs past the Alpha’s cabin when the ice thaws.

  “So I’m not… I’m not exiled?”

  “The Pack is vulnerable. There are too many stresses both inside and out. I need strong Alphas to help keep it together. And with Celia dead, I need you to come home.”

  This is it. It is all I’ve wanted for so long, but now… Evie holds the storm door open for me.

  “And Thea?”

  The Alpha’s cabin is exactly the same as all the other cabins, except that it is more centrally located and close to the Great Hall. It is crowded with a desk and shelves of documents. The pink bag that I gave Tiberius for the trust hangs over the window latch. Soon, all this will be moved into Evie’s new office.

  “I took a risk letting your human live. Watch out.” She points to a long mattress in the center of the main room that seems like an unnecessary complication in such a cramped space. “I did it because she understood the nature of sacrifice. I need to make sure you do too.”

  Evie opens a narrow closet under the stairs that lead up to the sleeping loft. “More than strength, sacrifice is what makes an Alpha. Pants,” she says, thrusting a pair of extra-large and tall sweatpants at me. They have been washed and do not smell so much like John. I doubt she could have done it if they did. I know I couldn’t.