by Maria Vale
“The greatest Alphas have the same qualities as Ælfrida,” she continues, pulling up her own jeans. “The willingness to sacrifice and the ability to make hard decisions. If your human—”
“Her name is Thea Villalobos.”
I catch sight of her eyebrows shooting up as she pulls on a pale-gray muscle shirt.
“I am not a believer in any fate I do not make myself, but that is a coincidence. Still, if we have any indication that your Thea Villalobos has betrayed us or simply been indiscreet, then I need to know that you can make the hard decision and that you will make the sacrifice.”
I know what she is asking. She’s asking where my loyalties lie. The risk she is taking is not just for herself but for the whole pack. And she needs to know that if there is any doubt about Thea, any doubt at all, I will protect the Great North and rip Thea’s throat out.
“If I am wrong, I will do what needs to be done.”
Evie nods and heads into the bathroom, coming back with a wide-toothed comb.
“Alpha, there’s something you need to know.”
While Evie slowly combs through her tight, black curls, removing all the forest duff, I tell her what I learned from Daniel Leary in the minutes before I killed him. That Tiberius was the last live birth. That Shifters are dying out. That Tiberius and Silver’s young represent possibility. And that August Leveraux doesn’t believe it is a coincidence that the only live Shifter births of recent decades have had Pack mothers.
I didn’t know that Celia had already been taken. I doubt Daniel Leary did either, because at the end, he would have told me anything.
Thankfully, Evie doesn’t ask how I know any of this.
Her eyes close for a second longer than a blink but not long enough to show hesitation or fear. When she is done combing her hair, she unzips a waxed suit bag. There’s no suit inside, just an old, worn flannel shirt that does smell like John. He must have worn it before that last moon, and Evie kept it. She pulls it over her muscle shirt, buttons it up, then stretches her arm high, rubbing her head against the sleeve. There is no one above Evie in the hierarchy, no one to mark her and reassure her when things are falling apart. But that doesn’t mean that the instinct for that reassurance disappears. Only that its source has.
There is a slight scritching from the sleeping loft above. When I look up, two furry, yawning faces, their noses twitching excitedly, stare back at me from between the railings. Then, with a pop, they disappear again. There is more scritching in the loft. “Stand back,” Evie says, then she takes a hair tie from her wrist and tames her hair.
Two little brindle bodies come flying from the sleeping loft. They tumble and twist onto the soft mattress before righting themselves and trotting happily over to their mother. Evie lifts one in each hand, marking both of them.
The two pups look up at me expectantly. I smell like their mother. I smell like Pack. For them, I smell like love and home. As soon as I mark them, though, they are done with me and squirm toward freedom.
“The Pack has assembled in the Great Hall,” Tara says as soon as we leave Evie’s cabin. “I’m sorry to tell you that the human will live, Alpha. Even more disappointing, the Deemer will too.”
Evie’s mouth quirks with a little smile, but her eyes are solemn. “Tara, I am calling the Pack home.”
“Who?”
“The Pack. Keep up.”
Tara lopes beside her Alpha.
“All of them?”
Evie nods and runs up the stairs of the Great Hall. Tara follows behind, her engineer’s mind swirling with the endless complications of accommodating full time the appetites and tempers of four hundred wolves, twice the usual number.
• • •
I remember my own Year of First Shoes, the time when we start to learn how to function in skin.
We never are before that. In skin. Why would we be? Our bodies are stronger and more agile, our senses more acute, our connections more intense.
But to stay as wolves forever is an invitation to slaughter.
The Year of First Shoes is when we start to wear clothes and use words and hold forks. In skin, the world seems muffled and our bodies alien. It is a horrible, horrible time.
It is also when we begin taking on responsibility, and in the afternoon, our echelon, like every echelon before us, would gather around in the big kitchen. It started with us standing awkwardly in clothes that had been passed from one generation to the next. Inside out, back to front with stretched-out necks and frayed hems and holes the size of cabbage roses, they were stained by years of careless beginning eaters. But they were nonetheless clean and as comfortable as clothing could be to a pup who didn’t want to be wearing anything at all.
We would be lined up at the huge trough sink with three faucets and told to wash our hands. Get rid of the bits of prey and one another lodged under our nails. The dirt and blood and butter that inevitably extended halfway up our arms.
Once we’d been washed and dried and inspected, we gathered around a huge, old table of pale wood that had been bleached and scrubbed and dotted with burn marks from pots straight from the stove. Then we were each given a ball of dough to fight and tussle with and to mold and hit and beat, and while we did it, one of the wolves who taught us would read to us.
We called it Knead and Read. And while I know that I hated each component individually—clothes, washing, working, being in skin—melded together and through the lens of memory, it was glorious.
It is hard to finally come home, just when everything has changed.
Even the back door that leads straight into the kitchen is different. It is bigger now, taller and broader and designed to accommodate not the humans who originally built the great camp a hundred years ago, but the wolves who live here now.
Inside is different too. It had been dark—dark wood cabinets, dark tongue-and-groove paneling on every wall and even on the ceiling. Now it is much larger, big enough for two echelons. The ceilings are higher so that a full-grown wolf can stand without feeling oppressed. The walls are white, though there is still dark tongue-and-groove waist-level wainscoting, because white walls and pups do not mix. The claw-scratched wine-and-beige-checkered linoleum has been replaced by sturdier tile. The trough sink is new and industrial-strength, the warped wood around it replaced by white tile.
The windows are big and bright and crisscrossed with a dozen shelves holding seedlings.
All the adults are in the main room listening to Evie explain how we will squeeze muzzle by jowl into the Homelands. And why.
But it is not something she wanted our children to worry about, so the juveniles are here washing dishes, while pups scurry underfoot, being picked up and fed choice bits of leftovers.
And the Year of First Shoes sits around a huge, scraped wooden table banging at dough while Gran Moira reads Harry Potter. They hate Fenrir Greyback, Voldemort’s villainous werewolf, just as much as any child does, failing to recognize that this is what humans think we are. This is why we have to be so secretive. For now, they no more recognize themselves in fictional werewolves than they do in talking spiders or car-crazed toads.
A pup whines at my leg, worried about the secrecy. I lift her to my cheek and mark her. As I set her carefully on the floor, a juvenile at the sink looks nervously over his shoulder. He is at that awkward age when he is young enough to feel anxiety, too old to ask for reassurance, and not old enough to know that reassurance is his right and an Alpha’s responsibility.
I mark him without being asked and then, one by one, with a gentle bend of their heads, the juveniles raise the lower lines of their jaws. I mark each and every one of our worried children. For the first time, I truly understand what it means to be Alpha. It means interposing every ounce of my power and strength between our enemies and the pack. To carve a home for them out of the granite of a hostile world.
A phone dings, an
d the juveniles move quickly to the ovens. Huge trays of orange and cranberry muffins are dumped on cooling trays. I take one that has fallen to pieces on the counter, squeezing the crumbs into a ball before, pipipop, it disappears into my mouth.
Then I head quickly across the hall so that I don’t distract the Pack listening to Evie and open the door into the medical station.
Tiberius puts his finger to his lips, as though I didn’t see that both Silver and Thea were asleep the second I came in. He is reading, with his legs propped up on the foot of the bed, like someone who knows the drill. Someone who knows that constantly replaying the decisions that landed the one you love in the medical station leads nowhere.
But he doesn’t have the same problem I do. When Silver wakes up, she will love him. When Thea wakes up, who knows? The only thing I do know is that we will have a discussion consisting of three topics, none of which I want to touch:
(A) I am a monster, and not just in a metaphorical sense.
(B) My particular monstrosity doesn’t come with the romantic nihilism of, say, vampires. It comes with the much-less-acceptable suggestion of bestiality.
You were my lover.
(C) And most monstrous of all is the fact that if she should tell anyone anything about us, I will have to hunt her down and eviscerate her.
I’m not sure I have the strength for any part of this conversation, but when I look down at her, her arm thrown back over her head, gold and black against the white pillowcase still stiff from the cold, dry air… When I see her chin tilted slightly up, her long neck exposed, I am not at all sure I could do it.
Before she wakes up and remembers what my mouth looked like yesterday and we start in on the whole conversation about part B, I bend over to kiss her, catching an unfamiliar wolfish scent from under the blanket. It trembles a little and burps a tiny burst of warm wolf milk. Theo licks his muzzle and stretches out contentedly between the breasts of his soft human godmother.
That’s when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could never do it—and even more certainly that I will never have to.
Her braid is on the bedside table. I crumple it in my hand.
Sitting on the hard chair, I lean forward, burying my face into the blankets near her hip. I hold my fist clutching her braid close to my heart.
Please, Thea.
Forgive me for being a monster.
I wake up to a plaintive mewling and Tiberius’s arm stretched across my head as he tries to retrieve his son. Theo’s tiny paws are tangled in Thea’s hair. Thea shushes Tiberius while trying to disengage the pup’s claws.
In order to avoid conversation parts A, B, and C, I pretend to be asleep. Through my slitted lids, I watch the little furball wobble around the vast plain of his father’s palm, complaining. Tiberius lifts him high, giving him big openmouthed kisses to his ear. Theo’s tail wags, and his wobbly legs collapse.
“Elijah,” Tiberius says, his hand at the door. Would it have killed him to let me pretend to be asleep? To ignore the change in my heartbeat or the sudden overwhelming stench of my fear?
“Do you want the door open or closed?”
“Closed,” we both say.
Then we say nothing.
And yes, it is awkward.
Without looking at Thea, I pluck at the blankets, pulling them up to her shoulders, as though covering her now makes up for all the other ways I failed her.
“So I guess we have to talk.”
“I’m so sorry, Thea. About everything. About lying to you most of all.”
She shrugs. “Why? Belonging to a pack of werewolves—” I take a big breath, but she taps my arm. “I know, not werewolves, but still belonging to a pack of Pack is hardly your secret to share. Can you help me up? I feel weird lying down like this. I think there’s a button on the floor.” She points to the opposite side of the bed.
There is a button hanging not far from the rubber tubing that runs from her chest to a bag partly filled with bloody liquid.
“Shh, Elijah,” she says, putting her finger to my lips. Then she touches my braid and feels for her own. “What happened to my necklace?” She flinches as she looks around.
“I’ve got it.” I open up my fist. It had been so tightly clenched that the pattern of the braid is imprinted on my skin. The crumpled leather unfolds on my palm.
She holds her hair up with one hand. “I can’t…I can’t lift my other arm.”
She is asking me to help her put my braid back on.
She isn’t saying no.
But she’s not ready to say yes. Not until she knows what she’s saying yes to.
When I pull her hand away, her hair tumbles after, falling across her shoulders. I cough, trying to clear a sudden tightness in my throat.
“This…” I say, stretching her braid across the bedcover. “It isn’t just a necklace any more than you are just a friend. I don’t want you to wear it if that’s all you think it is.”
I pull my chair closer to the head of her bed, then take her hand, rubbing her palm with my thumb. “Evie was right. I was pretending before. I wanted you bound to me, so I pretended I could just do it. Ignoring what that meant for the Great North, and most of all, what it meant for you. But I’m done with pretending. I need for you to understand what it means.”
“Tiberius had one,” she says quietly. “He said all… Well, he said all mated wolves wore them.”
“It’s not just that. Here’s what it means. It means tying yourself to a life of secrecy, because if you ever tell anyone anything about us, because—”
“I would never.”
“We have a lot of enemies—humans, mostly, but there are others.”
“Shifters.”
I think maybe Tiberius was more forthcoming than I could have imagined.
“Exactly, but that’s not all. It’s a dangerous time. The… Evie…”
“The Alpha. Your Alpha.”
“Yes, my Alpha. Has asked me to come back. But you can’t live here, because the Pack… They don’t trust anyone who isn’t Pack. Especially not humans, and especially not humans who know what we are.”
Sum westend þe wat.
A human who knows.
I hold one end of the braid, turning it around and around into a tight coil.
“I’m going to put this into your pocket.”
I slip it into the pocket of her coat that doesn’t hold her gun.
When I sit back down, Thea takes my hand. There are a few scrapes and a bite mark near the wrist. About what you’d expect from a meal of muskrat.
“Something I ate,” I say. “It’s what we are. What I am.”
She keeps looking at my hand, at the masculine but not bestial smatterings of hair, at the undeniably bestial claw marks left by my dinner.
“Did you brush your teeth?”
“Yes.”
“Flossed?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she says, and she pulls me to her and tastes my hunter’s mouth.
Epilogue
The Pack is home.
We’ve had over a week of rain. How much over a week, I don’t remember, but enough to force prey to higher ground. Enough to make the earth churn under paws and feet into a slippery veneer of mud. Pack tempers are running high. Dominant wolves are constantly fighting dissent. Except for the ones who are fomenting it.
Now a wolf has killed a young, healthy moose, ripped out the best parts, and left the rest for rot and coyotes. I nose the earth around her remains, trying to distinguish the scent of the responsible cur from the random scavengers.
Something is riling the Pack again. Ælfrida founded a pack with just fifty wolves. In the 350 years since, we have added to our territory whenever possible, but there simply isn’t space for four hundred wolves with too much time on their hands.
Nosing the carc
ass aside, I try to get underneath where hopefully the rain hasn’t washed away the smell of this breaker of laws, this waster of life. Let the dominant wolves closer to the Great Hall deal with the ruckus down below.
Then finally, I get it. A tiny remnant of wolf scent. This is no small crime, and someone is going to pay for it.
Now the call has been taken up by the 9th. The other echelons fall silent as Sarah and Francesca and Adam and Lorin and Dani call for me. I howl back. Enough already, I’m coming. I’m coming.
Through an elaborate triangulation, my echelon guides me past mixed woods and spruce swamp and Home Pond and sugarhouse. In the distance, Melanie from the 13th is talking about taxes.
They called me from halfway up the mountain for this?
“No, actually, I’m a tax attorney. We have CPAs who…who do the actual taxes.”
I can’t see who she’s talking to. About taxes. She scratches the back of her mud-covered calf with the big toe of the other foot. “Do you…do you have an accountant?” she asks conversationally.
“No, I use the 1040EZ.”
I skitter to a stop. It’s been six weeks since I heard that voice. Six weeks since I sent her away with a promise to think about what it meant to tie her future to me. To us. To be under attack from a hostile world outside and a prejudiced Pack at home.
To give up any dream that she might have children of her own.
Because this thing of ours… It’s not like a marriage. You don’t give it a whirl. Try it on for size. It’s a fight to the death. That’s what I told her. You just keep fighting, and then you die.
I start to run.
“That’s good,” Melanie is saying. “Though it’d be better if they upped the interest income rate, right?” She raises her nose and sniffs at the air. “He’s coming. Well, it was nice to meet you, Thea.” She pats her naked hips. “I’d give you my card, but…”
I break through the trees onto the path leading to the gate.
“Another day,” Thea says. “When you have pockets.”
Melanie twists quickly and jogs toward me. “The Alpha does not believe it is safe for her here…”