by Maria Vale
“What?” Ti says, baffled.
“You couldn’t just debride it?” Tristan says.
Seeing Ti’s continued confusion, I clarify. “Lick it, Ti. He means lick it.”
Ti glances at the blood seeping from my upper arm, and his nose curls. “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re a doctor. You have all this.” He waves his hand at the med station. “And all you’re going to do is to say ‘lick it’?”
Tristan’s dark eyes roll so far up in his head that they have disappeared. I give him a strained smile.
“Solveig, who has a tracheal rupture,” Tristan says with meaning, “needs help. Silver, who has a flesh wound, doesn’t. She knows she has to tough it out. Otherwise, what happens when she has a flesh wound and all I have are claws? Here,” he says, shaking out a pale-green pill from the plastic container he keeps in the pocket of his white coat. “Have a Tic Tac.”
I refuse with a frantic shaking of my head, but Ti takes two and pops them into his mouth before I can warn him that any wolf scenting wintergreen will know we went to Tristan with a boo-boo.
“When she wakes up, I’ll tell your Alpha you stopped by to check on her,” Tristan says quietly as we head out the door.
“I thought John was your Alpha,” Ti says as soon as the door closes behind us.
His breath is an absolute toxic cloud of Tic Tac. I hear footsteps coming and pull him into the big closet that holds the seeds and tools for the cold frames to wait out the fug of wintergreen.
“John is the Pack Alpha,” I explain. “The Pack’s been too big for a single Alpha to control for a long time, so it was divided into echelons. They’re like age groups, mostly wolves born within sixty moons of each other. Solveig is the 14th Echelon’s Alpha. My Alpha for about five seconds before…well, before you arrived.”
I put a trowel back on its hook, then fold my arms in front of me, bouncing against the wall.
“What exactly are we doing here?” Ti asks, looking around.
“Waiting until you don’t smell like wintergreen.”
Now it’s his turn to roll his eyes as he stalks out. As soon as he does, I hear Tara’s voice telling him that John’s waiting for us. I push myself off the wall and head out to Tara’s waiting nose and disapproving eyes.
“You went to medical for that?” Tara asks, poking her finger into the bloody sleeve of my T-shirt.
I grit my teeth until she goes, then I let out my breath in a sharp d-owww.
“I know humans talk just to talk,” I say tightly, “but when I talk, it’s because I have something that needs saying. And you”—I jab my finger in his chest—“are going to have to listen.”
I’ve always liked John’s office. Crammed between the library and the medic station, it is a small space with a high ceiling, one tall window, and a smell like damp manila envelopes. Probably from shelf upon shelf of Pack legal documents that are meticulously copied and filed here. There’s even a copy of the original deed from three hundred and gibbety years ago.
Most of what’s left of the floor space is given over to John’s huge rolltop desk. It is made of cherry and has many drawers, although the bottom four are useless because pups have chewed the drawer pulls to nubbins.
John holds up a finger, then finishes something on his MacBook. Aside from the MacBook and the ancient Rolodex that no one has bothered to digitize, the surface of his desk is crowded with novelty mugs (Leader of the Pack or Alpha Male: Do Not Provoke) that gather dust and pencils at the back, mostly presents from Offlanders who spend much of the year away from the territory, doing the best they can to pass as human.
The gleaming first-kill skulls are prominently displayed on floating shelves above his desk. They’re all small: rabbits, mostly. Beavers. Raccoons. And a single fisher. Mine, a chipmunk taken in my sixty-fifth moon, is on a bottom shelf in the middle, partly because it’s small. I think John was also proud, because a chipmunk is fast and lithe, and for a crippled wolf, it’s a good kill, if not particularly good eating.
The aged printer hawks out a piece of paper; John swivels toward us, the ancient wooden bank chair creaking loudly. “So, Shifter…you and Silver have won the right to sit at our table. This means that for the next three moons, we will give you food and shelter in exchange for work. Your schedule is there,” he says, pointing to the piece of paper on the printer tray.
“During that time, the Pack, as a whole, will judge you both to see if you bring strength to the Pack. If you reflect honor and worth upon your mother’s blood. Personally, I hope you do, because I don’t want to lose Quicksilver. But if you fail, I will implement the consequences of her decision to join her fate to yours.” He pulls off the much-washed flannel shirt and hangs it over the back of his chair, revealing a T-shirt with a wolf’s head that must be another Offlander offering. THE NORTH NEVER FORGETS, it says.
“Let me be clear, Shifter. Do not underestimate Silver. She is strong of marrow and knows the Pack and the land better than anyone. You could not ask for a better shielder.”
“John?” I squeak. “His name is Tiberius.”
John’s hand hovers above the mouse.
“Please?”
One calloused finger hits on the plastic casing (tick, tick, tick).
“The Bathhouse should be empty. Tiberius, do us all a favor and try to get rid of the stink of steel.”
* * *
We call aspens the Old Whisperers. For five months of the year, they gossip about us from high up on their pale trunks.
ShiverShiverShiverShiver.
Now, as we make our way to the Bathhouse, I swear the whole Great North Pack has turned into a bunch of Old Whisperers.
ShifterShifterShifterShifter.
“His name is Tiberius!” I snap.
“You don’t have to keep doing that,” Ti says as we make our way to the Bathhouse. “You know, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones…’”
“Yes, they can, though generally I prefer mallets and mauls. At the end of the day, there’s less stuff to pick out of the marrow, which makes for better eating.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the old human saying. You know: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’?”
I hold open the door that leads to the screened-in porch, with its long chairs that wolves use to cool off. It may be an old human saying, but I’ve never heard it, and it doesn’t sound right to me. Humans are always shooting one another over names. Just ask a Yazidi or a Jew or a communist.
“All I’m saying is that if I’d worried about every name that anyone called me, I’d have had to fight every Shifter in Canada.” Ti pushes aside one of the leafy bundles of birch branches hung from the exposed beams. “I don’t let it get to me. You shouldn’t either.”
He takes off his clothes in the changing area and wraps a towel around his hips. I pat the big, slatted teak table in the shower room. He lies down on his stomach and watches me search through the net bag for a brush. “Remember how I told you that I was born premature?” I say once I’ve found it. I fill a bucket with warm, soapy water. “Like your mother, my mother didn’t make it.”
“And your father?”
“He passed soon after, but that’s not the point. The point is, I was tiny and really weak, and until I was nearly forty-two moons, I thought my name was Fromwart.”
“Fromwart? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“It’s not a name. I thought it was, but then I realized they were calling me Framweard, which is Old Tongue for someone going back where they came from. Someone doomed to die. They were so convinced of it that they didn’t bother naming me. I was in my sixtieth moon when Gran Sigeburg told John that I needed a name. She was the one who named me Quicksilver.”
Gran Sigeburg had told me that story over and over again, and no matter how often she to
ld me, it was always sort of smushed together into one long, run-on sentence. “It was your sixtieth moon, which is a big birthday of course, and I told my son that it was high time you had a name, a real name, and that you should be called Ælfrida to honor our first Alpha, but John said, ‘She’s got enough problems without being named Ælfrida,’ and I was ripe angry about that, but then I remembered that her Deemer was buried right next to her, a spot of honor to be sure, and this Deemer, she ran from Caledonia to Portsmouth with her leg shot clean off ”—the way I’d heard it was that she’d come from Wessex to Portsmouth with a bullet wound, but if Gran Sigeburg wanted to heroize my namesake, who was I to gainsay her?—“and she must have been a silver too, because she was named Seolfer, and that’s what I told John, that you would be named Seolfer, and he said no but that Silver was fine, and I was ripe angry, because our Pack needed some good, strong Old Tongue names, so I said, ‘Quicksilver, then,’ because you were anything but quick and I was feeling tart, and he said it was a fine name or maybe he just said ‘Fine’?” Gran Sigeburg was already starting to lose her mind by then. She was somewhere around twenty-five hundred moons when she stopped telling the story and asked instead, “Who are you?”
She didn’t make it back from the next hunt.
God, Ti has a beautiful back. I start to scrub it with broad circles.
“I know it was only a name, but once they started calling me Quicksilver, the Pack stopped treating me like I was quite so…temporary. I’m just saying that if they focus on what you are, they’ll never pay attention to who you are.”
He considers me for a moment and then turns his head, propping his chin back on his wrists. He sucks in a deep breath as I scrub hard at his back and under his arms and his calves and lower thighs, where the sweat stinks of steel.
“Hands.”
He lets his arms flop limp at his sides. Scrubbing with soap and a brush does nothing for the smell. I try pumice, but not even that will scrub away the metallic tang.
How long do you have to hold a gun before the stench of steel seeps into your blood?
I’m careful of the wounds Solveig made in his flanks, just letting the water loosen the dried blood. Thin, dark-flecked rivulets run into the drain in the floor, and I can see just how deep Solveig’s claws went. Some are nothing, barely more than scratches.
But others are gouges made by claws and filled with dirt. My tongue swirls over the biggest one, gently caressing the caked blood and dried mud, but Ti flinches.
“Don’t do that,” he says, pushing my head away.
“Why? We don’t carry diseases, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I didn’t think you did.” He slides his hand under his stomach and lifts his hips for a moment. “It’s just, I don’t…I don’t like being groomed.”
“I see. Turn over?”
Holding his towel, he turns onto his back while I squirt a bit of shampoo in my hands, rubbing until it’s warm and lathered. I massage it into his scalp, kneading the knotted muscles at the base of his skull, lightly scratching his sideburns.
He grunts softly. “Sorry,” I say, stopping immediately. “I forgot. You don’t like being groomed.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you meant, even if it’s not what you said. It’s not grooming that bothers you. It’s that we do it in ways that humans don’t.” I lean over him, my silver hair falling on either side of his face, and I smile wide so that my mouth opens around teeth that are too long, too sharp, and too feral ever to be mistaken for human. “This is what I am, Ti. There are plenty of others here who will play human with you, if that’s what you want. But not me.”
He brushes my hair away from my face, but it falls back again and lands like a pale wash against the dark mahogany of his chest. He gently thumbs the point of my fang and looks hard into my eyes before turning on his side, exposing the biggest gouge, the one where four claws found deep purchase in his flesh.
I move the towel a little and hold his thigh while the eddy of my tongue gently cleans him. I keep at it, caring and curing until his muscles relax and he exhales, a long, low sound like air seeping out of an inner tube.
Chapter 11
Tara said that as guests of the Pack, we could help ourselves to anything down in dry storage. There are no jeans, because we wear those until the tears in the knees meet up with the holes at the ass, so we find Ti sweatpants from the St. Lawrence Vikings and hoodies from the St. Lawrence Saints.
Upstairs, the screen door opens and closes with a slam. Orders are barked out, and heavy treads stomp back and forth between hall and kitchen. As the Pack passes the stairs to the basement, the complex fragrances of the dishes they’re carrying waft down to us. Benches start scraping across floors, and I push Ti’s extra clothes into a bag and push the man himself up the stairs.
As soon as we reach the hall, the smile I hadn’t even known I was wearing fades. The Alphas of every echelon are standing around the heavy hand-scraped tables, each one of them holding tight onto their seaxes, the sharp daggers that all adult Pack wear at their waist.
There are strict penalties for attacking a table guest, and John will kill anyone who tries, but edgy wolves are edgy wolves and not always in control. I am this man’s shielder, and I face them, my thighs coiled low, my shoulders squared, and my lips curled back from my teeth, so these wolves know that I will fight, even in skin.
Tock, tock, tock.
Behind me, Ti is not even facing the right way. He’s looking at the table, opening up casseroles with one hand, while flicking his spoon up and down against his bowl with the thumb of the other (tock, tock, tock). As though there weren’t a hundred evil-eyed wolves staring holes into his back.
He lifts a hand-thrown lid and sniffs the saag paneer. Another basket with bread. A selection of Corningware casseroles hold cauliflower and lentil stew; sun-dried tomatoes and fresh cheese; corn chowder. Pasta with herbs. Egg salad.
“So…you’re vegetarians?” Ti says to no one in particular.
“Not vegetarians,” John answers. “But not carrion eaters either. You are our guest,” he says loudly to remind all the wolves with itchy palms about our very ancient and very strict rules of hospitality, “and free to hunt anywhere on our land, but, Shifter? You must eat what you kill.”
“John?” I whisper, pulling at his elbow, and he bends down. “His name?”
John scratches his graying beard for a moment before pointing to one casserole dish in Blue Onion pattern. “Tiberius?” he says. “My personal favorite is the cauliflower and lentils. Be sure to add some toasted hazelnuts.”
Someone coughs, but John has broken the spell, and the Alphas reclaim their seats. Though when they do, they seem to have doubled in size, their broad shoulders and thighs now claiming whatever spare space we might have squeezed into.
I bend my head toward one of the empty tables. Those too will be full when the Offlanders come home for the Iron Moon, but for now, we sit there alone, side by side. The Pack starts talking again, bent low over their food because our table manners at home are not all they should be.
Naturally, there is a lot of talk about Ti, and while no one will question John’s decision, it is one of the peculiarities of the Old Tongue that the word giest means guest and stranger and enemy, so when someone speaks of our new giest, everyone understands the double meaning.
Then John says that’s enough Old Tongue for now.
A handful of pups scrabble up the stairs from the basement storage. They’re chasing something, taking wide frantic turns around the room.
“Mouse,” I whisper to Ti. “They don’t last long here.”
“She didn’t take me down,” Eudemos complains loudly. “I mean, I was still standing.” He hacks at the big loaf of bread with his seax. “Where’sa butter?
“I neber submided,” he insists, a pa
le-yellow crumb flying across the table. He uses his thumb to push the mouthful back in. “If what she did counts as submitting now, I think we should change the laws, thass all I’m sayin’.”
“Deemer?” says John.
Victor, our Deemer, our thinker about Pack law, crosses his arms and looks at the ceiling for a moment. “The law does say an opponent must be pinned down,” he says. “But while Eudemos was not down, he was very definitely pinned, and that is the more important part of the law.”
“Your Alpha agrees. The spirit of the law was upheld.”
And with that, Eudemos will not say another word about the matter.
The mouse finally caught, Golan trots up to John, followed by a roiling mass of fur. He lays his tiny prey at the Alpha’s feet. John looks at it, making sure the kill was clean and the mouse didn’t suffer, then he scratches Golan’s ear and wishes him good eating.
Suddenly, Ti jumps and lowers his hand to fend off a juvenile, who has her damp nose in his crotch.
“Rainy!” shouts Gran Moira. “Come here!”
Rainy cocks her head to the side and stares up at Ti before running off.
“Why do you have so many dogs?” Ti asks, his legs now tightly crossed.
“Nooo,” I hiss. “They’re not…”
It’s too late. He didn’t say it loudly, but our hearing is very good, and one set of very good ears is all that’s needed. One by one, the Pack falls silent, appalled by what Ti has called our children.
Four fuzzy snouts peek over the arm of one of the fireplace sofas. Other pups glower down from the curved stairs that lead up to the children’s quarters.
The only sound is the brittle crunch of Golan’s sharp, white teeth.
“Excuse me, Shifter?” pipes a small voice. A ten-year-old girl with long, pale-brown curls, wearing shorts and a much-washed blue T-shirt with a picture of a pickle on it, scratches the back of her calf with a bare foot. “I am sorry I smelled your crutch?” she says, glancing back at Gran Moira, who mouths the word crotch with an encouraging smile. “But that’s what I said. ‘Crutch.’”