by Maria Vale
“Permanently?”
“Hmm. You know, become an æcewulf.” But I can tell by the look on his face that he doesn’t, in fact, know. “All the Iron Moon does is makes us wilder. If we are in skin, it makes us wolves. But if we are already wild, it takes us a step further and makes us æcewulf. A real wolf. A forever wolf.”
“And you can never change back?”
“That’s why it’s called ‘forever.’”
“Jesus.” Ti shakes out the bottom sheet. “Wouldn’t you miss it? Being human?”
“I’m not human. I’m in skin. Not the same thing. Anyway, not really.” I run my hand along the worn softness of the sheets. “Maybe the way things feel against my skin. Wind. Water. This sheet. It is different, and I guess I’d miss that.” I hold out one end of the top sheet to him, and his hand slides against mine.
Jerking back from the sharp jolt of his touch, I let go of the sheet. It floats down, almost perfectly covering the bed. I hide my burning face deep in the storage chest. “One pillow or two?”
“Two,” he says. He moves with more wolflike grace on two legs than he ever could on four and grabs the single knife from the butcher-block stand in the “kitchen.”
A second later, the knife hits the floor. I jerk upright. The still-quivering knife has cut through the neck of a long, striped snake.
“You killed a milk snake?”
Ti kneels down beside the poor constrictor.
“Yes, and you’re welcome.” He pulls the knife out and turns to the sink to wash it.
“It’s a milk snake, Tiberius. Probably just sleeping in the sheets. Wow. It’s a big one, though. Hope you’re hungry.”
“What do you mean ‘hungry’?” he asks, drying the knife.
“Well, you gotta eat it.”
He puts the knife back in the butcher-block stand.
“Are you crazy? I’m not going to eat that.”
“You’ve got to. We’re not allowed to kill anything we don’t eat. Pack law.”
“I’m not eating a snake.”
“You killed it. You eat it.”
“No.”
“Fine! I’ll do it.” It’s got to be three feet long, and just looking at it is making my stomach hurt. “You do know that I just ate a whole muskrat, and I don’t even like snake.”
Stripping, I toss the decapitated constrictor over my naked shoulder and march to the honey locust at water’s edge to change, because I don’t want to have to eat this mess of milk snake and clean up the floor afterward.
When I finish with the snake, I pull at the door with my teeth. My claws click across the floor, and Ti looks over the edge of the book he’s claimed from the pile left by the summer wolves.
“Did you do it?”
I turn over on my back, stretching my three good legs straight above my distended tummy. I flip over again and turn to the book I’d left on the floor. Lying down, with my paws on either side of the book, I stretch my hind legs akimbo, because the pressure of the cool wood against my belly makes the dull weight of muskrat and milk snake feel a little better.
The page crackles as I turn it with my damp nose.
“Well, Toto,” Ti says, scratching his eyebrow. “I do believe we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Chapter 9
When I open my eyes and peer through the saplings, Ti is standing in front of me in his bare feet, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “Hunting dream?” he says.
My leg twitches a few more times from the memory of herding the pregnant cow moose. I flick my tail away from my face and hop up, stretching first my forelegs, then my hind leg, and lurch after him back to the Boathouse.
He crumples up the wrappers from the three Snickers bars he had for breakfast and, after a tiny flick of his wrist, sinks them in the distant trash can.
“You’ve got to stop pacing.”
He lies back on the bed, flipping through an old Vanity Fair with damp-swollen pages that had fallen behind the bed. Must be nice to be able to just sit there reading out-of-date magazines without a worry in the world. My claws keep up their syncopated clack-clack, cli-clack on the hardwood floor.
“Okay. That’s it. I can’t take it anymore.” He drops the magazine and stretches, pushing one elbow to the opposite shoulder, then reverses the process. “Let’s just go.”
I lead him on a shortcut through the woods, my leg curled tight against my abdomen, steering clear of the sticks and broken trees that might jostle my foot and send those streaks of pain into my hip.
Fighting is a fact of life in any pack. Someone is always watching for that loss of power or respect that signals the time to make a move up the hierarchy. Or to gain cunnan-riht, the right to cover a more viable wolf. Aside from the Dæling, when an entire echelon is brawling, we hold our fights in a low palisade of logs about the shoulder height of an adult wolf, hammered in to the ground around a big square of scuffed dirt. It is near enough to the Great Hall that it’s a short run to the med station. Far enough that blood doesn’t splatter on the woodwork.
It looks like a sand box, except that the inside is shredded by claw marks and the dirt is stained with sprays and puddles of brown.
Ti sits at one of the logs that mark the corners and unlaces his boots. A smattering of Pack watch him with undisguised hostility, but he pays no attention, just stuffs his socks into his boots and places them behind the stump.
In his bare feet, he crisscrosses the packed dirt. Heel, slow curve to the ball, toes. His eyes are closed. I stand outside, staring at the low wall, trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to jump with one leg over the enclosure and not make a complete fool of myself.
“Need a leg up, Silver?”
The idiot Demos laughs to himself as he walks off to change. If John wasn’t so fussy about paralyzing injuries, I’d be gnawing through Demos’s Achilles tendon right now.
After he walks the entire length of the enclosure, back and forth and side to side, Ti picks up his boots and moves to the rough bench carved from an enormous log that the elders use to watch the fights. Folding his hands across his torso, he stretches his legs out and leans his head back, his eyes lightly closed, sucking in the sun. I plop down beside him, staring morosely.
Eventually, Solveig and Eudemos reemerge, the big wolf with light-golden-brown fur and dark-gray markings along her back and down her muzzle and the barrel-chested, broad-shouldered gray. As the two of them spar, my heart sinks lower and lower, because I don’t see how we can possibly win. And Ti…I think Ti may have fallen asleep. I jostle his elbow. If it weren’t for the single cautioning finger raised slowly from his crossed hands, I might have thought he was dead.
Any challenge brings a few observers. Usually members of the echelon who are just above or below in the hierarchy come to check out the competition. This is not a few observers. It’s as big an audience as we had for The Wolfman, but without the popcorn and cider slushies.
“Silver, I think we should go get changed now,” Ti says, suddenly alert.
I look up at him miserably. I am changed.
He walks toward the woods and then signals me to come with him. I hop a few times onto my good hind leg and follow. We barely cross into the woods when Ti starts to talk softly and quickly.
“Eudemos,” he says, “is very strong, but inflexible. Once he is in his position, you will not be able to move him, but it’s hard for him to move as well. He spent the entire time watching me. He doesn’t think you’re a threat, but even as you are now, you are more agile than he will ever be. Once we pop your leg back, you just need a little strategy to win. Oh, he always swings his head left to right for any attack. I’m not sure how that’s helpful, but every tic is good to know.”
I stare after him, one paw suspended midstride, frozen by a tone of faith that is totally alien.
“Are you coming?”
; We’re almost at the old sap house before Ti decides we’re far enough in to change. I start the way I always do with the curling back of my shoulder blades; then, it all flows from there. My rib cage becomes shallower and wider, my spine more rigid, my arms and legs longer. Once I’m in skin, I start to shift easily back to wolf—only this time, Ti’s hand is on my hip, warm and insistent and then hot and painful. As soon as I’m done, I trot around, working out the kinks.
I sit back on my hind legs and wait for him.
Ti stares at me, then shoos me away. I bend my head to the side.
“Oh, no you don’t. I don’t like to be watched.”
Pffft. I don’t like to be watched either. And it’s not as if I don’t know what happens. Like I don’t know that his cheekbones will push out from his face and his mouth will turn into a long rip with frilled black edges, and that the end of his nose will tilt up and his ears will migrate to the top of his head and he’ll still be in skin, except for some reason for his cock, which will emerge completely sheathed in fur.
“Will you just go!” he snaps irritably.
Stalking over to a thick bunch of beech suckers, I lie down with my back to him, while behind me, his big body flops and twists to the dull twang of ligaments and the rusty creak of bones and the rubbery distend of skin, until a breeze through fur tells me that the man is once again wearing his wolf suit.
Ti concentrates on walking with his legs centered under his chest, like a real wolf, but he’s still slow. As we approach the edge of the woods, I curl my leg up against my stomach the way I always have. It’s an excuse for our deliberate progress, but I’m also hoping that it will give me a slight advantage when I give up the charade. May not be the most honorable thing I’ve ever done, but a wolf with strategy is bad news for dummies.
The Pack turns to watch as we break through the underbrush. As always, some are wild, others are in skin. John stands at the front, talking to a juvenile whose name is escaping me in my panic but whose scent I recognize as Finn’s son.
Solveig and Eudemos lie near the middle of the palisade, their bodies relaxed but their heads alert, watching.
The pups dart between feet and paws, loved by everyone. Belonging to everyone. John is here to make sure the fight is fair and the laws are obeyed. After each Dæling, his hair and trim beard seem a little grayer, and now his beard, at least, is peppered with hair the color of his pale-gray eyes. In my life, I’ve rarely seen our Alpha without a pup nestled against his broad chest. His scent marks us all and binds us together, but I can’t imagine how hard it is to watch a pup you’ve held and cared for grow into weakness, knowing that for the good of the Pack, you will exile him or her into almost certain death.
One little pup tries to jump from the bench to the palisade for a better look. Anna from the 3rd Echelon picks her up, whispering into her fuzzy ear before sending her toward the back.
Solveig stands suddenly, her hackles rising, usually a sign of anger, but now just an instinctual attempt to make herself look bigger. Because in skin, the Pack-Shifter mix has made Ti as big as any male in the Pack. But wild, he is a monster.
The time comes for us to jump over the palisade. I clear it easily, revealing that my hind leg is whole. Ti catches his back paw as he leaps and ends up coming down hard on his shoulder, muzzle in the dirt.
Solveig and Eudemos look at each other. Ti has barely struggled back up on all fours before Tara gives the low warning growl followed by a sharp yip that signals the start.
Trying to stretch out my leg, I stumble a little. It’s not for just for show; my thigh is tight from the effort of holding it in the cramped position. But Ti is right. Eudemos is so used to ignoring me that he keeps right on doing it, watching as Solveig circles Ti, until I slink around behind him and bite deep into his hock.
Now he knows I exist.
When he lands back on the ground, he whips around, growling, and paws the dirt, taking his stance. I see immediately what Ti was talking about. Demos is stocky and barrel-chested and just plants his feet into the ground. Fights are about honor and position. Since I never had any position, and there was no honor in beating me, I never paid much attention to them, but I do know that the point is to pin the opponent down until they submit. Since Demos is impossible to down, I’m not sure he can be beaten. I take another run at him, catching his tail.
It’s not considered particularly honorable to resort to feints and retreats, but that’s another luxury I’ll have to do without. I race in, nip him, and run away. He lunges for me, but now that I’ve got four whole legs, I’m crazy fast and agile, and with a shift of my hips, all he gets is air.
Maybe Ti is right. Maybe all I need is a little strategy. I just have to figure out what it is, but until I do, I keep biting and running, watching Demos get more and more frustrated as he shuffles around the enclosure.
I hear a sharp intake of breath from a juvenile nearby and make the mistake of looking toward Ti and Solveig.
Ti has stumbled again, and Solveig lunges. If she’d been tentative earlier, she’s not now. Ti is having trouble turning in the tight space and trips across his front paws. His tail drags in the dirt behind him like a deadweight, instead of the graceful counterbalance it is.
Pain stabs into my shoulder, my momentary distraction having been enough for Demos to sink his teeth there.
I try to pull away, but his powerful jaws clamp tight on a mouthful of skin. One good twist, and he’ll have me down.
Then I think what Tristan, our doctor, always says: if it doesn’t shatter bone or damage internal organs, it’s just a flesh wound.
Curving my spine so tightly that my back nearly folds in two, I anchor my hind leg on Demos’s broad chest and push. The skin rips, and icy agonizing shards give way to dull warm spasms. Demos coughs out a bloody gob of fur.
May just be a flesh wound, but it still really hurts. I leap away from Eudemos and concentrate on him. I will not be distracted again. Ti was right about that other thing—about the way Demos moves his head. Always left to right, and now I focus on that. On how to use it.
I move as far from Demos as I can to get a running start. He plants his legs firm, his bulk centered, waiting for me to plow into him and try to bowl him over. Which would be just stupid, and I’m not that stupid. As soon as he starts that devastating head sweep, I adjust slightly toward the left and scoot past his jaws and around his immoveable chest and front legs and grab his tenderest bits in my teeth. I don’t bite down, but just create a firm cage with my teeth. Teeth that are strong enough to scissor through bone and suck the tender marrow inside. Demos jumps away but yelps when his packaging stretches.
I pull my small body smaller so that I am nothing but an enormous carbuncle hanging from his chassis. Everything Demos tries—biting, scratching at me with his hind leg, everything—starts the painful package pulling. He barks and skitters, my muzzle pressed against his privates, waiting for someone to dig me out from under and make me fight like a wolf.
No one does.
I turn to watch Ti, Demos’s fuzzy balls still tight in my teeth, and he has no choice but to turn too. Solveig tears into Ti’s haunches and runs around for another pass. Like me, she is going for agility over power, and Ti seems to be losing height, crouching lower and lower, growling with every pass. He looks like he’s just centimeters from submission, but his scent hasn’t changed. There’s no way I could have missed the unmistakable smell of salt and old leather that signals fear.
Solveig coils for the leap that will bring her down on his neck and he will have no choice except to submit. But while her legs tighten for the jump, Ti shoots under her and grabs stiffened legs and twists. She scrabbles in the dirt; Ti contorts once more and grabs her throat. With a wrenching of his head, he forces her back to the ground.
It’s not unusual for winners to hold losers down, making sure that there is no doubt submission has been offered. So
lveig’s ears are flattened, her eyes down, her tail pulled between her legs. John nods his head. The thing is over, but Ti doesn’t let go.
There’s a strangled whimper.
Letting go of my prize, I hurl myself into the big wolf, jumping around, licking his face, giving him open-jawed kisses, forcing him to let go.
His mouth tastes like blood and Solveig’s fear.
Chapter 10
“You really are a crappy wolf.”
“And you should have told me I wasn’t supposed to kill her.”
“Will you keep it down? Supposing someone hears you?” I look nervously around the Great Hall. No one is here, except for a pup peeling the birch bark from the banister supports. “Hey, Leelee! No chewing on the balustrade!” The pup freezes for a minute before scampering back upstairs.
“It was a challenge, Tiberius. You got her submission. In what world would you assume that killing was the point?”
He rubs slow and deliberate circles above the big aster scar on his torso. “The real world.”
“Yeah.” I put my hand on the door to the med station. “And how’s that been working out for you?”
Tristan pulls the curtain shut around one of the beds, though not before I see Solveig’s tail limp on the bed.
“How is she?”
“She’ll be fine. Tracheal rupture, but I patched it up. The worst part was getting her on the ventilator. You can imagine how happy that made her. Had to knock her out. A little less force next time, eh, Shifter?”
Ti purses his lips and then, before I know what he’s doing, pulls up my sleeve, revealing the ripped-up mess at my shoulder. “Maybe you can take a look at this.”
“What are you doing!” I yelp, pulling my sleeve back down.
“It’s huge. He should see—”
“It’s nothing.” I smile weakly at Tristan.
But it’s too late. Tristan, who is the Pack doctor and the 5th’s Alpha, shoves his gloved finger painfully into the bloody flesh. “So? It’s just a flesh wound,” he says. “Something wrong with your tongue, Shifter?”