The Last Wolf

by Maria Vale

  Finally, Evie herself is escorted in by the Alphas of every echelon. Each one lays their head beside hers. She tries to smile, but she still looks apprehensive.

  The Alphas make ready to move her into the bed. They pull back the blankets, fluff the pillows, smooth the sheets. When the six most senior Alphas, her mate included, lift her gently onto the bed, I can’t help feeling that they look like pallbearers. Evie is stiff and awkward, but she knows that this is the tradition for every female at her lying-in. She knows it is an important symbol of the Alphas’ responsibility to the future of the Pack.

  Gabi, the obstetrician, helps Evie into the holster that will keep the ultrasound transducer against her pregnant stomach. She adjusts it, laughing and trying to put Evie at ease. Alex, who is a radiologist, has extensive experience reading the ultrasounds during a lying-in. Without taking his eyes from the screen, he reaches across to tinker with the transducer. Barely five minutes go by before he calls, “Now.”

  Evie starts to change.

  And this is why the last weeks are the hardest. Early on, the pups change into babies, and the babies turn into pups in response to their mother’s hormones. But toward the end, the tiny cretins become self-aware and start doing it themselves, responding not to their mother’s hormones but to one another’s.

  So back and forth they go, and Evie has no choice but to change too before her body rejects the aliens inside.

  Gabi adjusts the harness so it will stay fixed to her contorting belly. How they ever managed to survive before all the medical technology is a mystery. Or not. They often didn’t.

  If Evie hasn’t delivered by the Iron Moon, she will be induced, because we can’t risk her trying to deliver when she’s turned. If she changes and the babies don’t, they’re too large. They will all die, and there won’t be a thing anyone can do about it.

  “They’re changing back.”

  And except for short exhausted interludes, this is the way it’ll be for the next three and a half weeks.

  Chapter 23

  “Yes?” Ti says to the knock on the Boathouse door.

  “Is Quicksilver there?” asks a tremulous voice.

  Ti opens the door and says nothing. Just stares at the naked man standing at the bottom of the stairs, shuffling in the snow.

  “Hey, Kyle,” I say, pulling off my thick socks. “Come on in while I get ready.”

  Ti glowers furiously at the naked man now standing in our quarters. Kyle’s head drops nearly to his chest, his hands fold over his crotch, his toes point in. He looks just like one of Leonora’s illustrations of human submission. Except those are never naked. Humans are funny that way.

  I pull off my sweater and T-shirt. “Where should we go?”

  Kyle mumbles something to the effect of “grumptlywatch?”

  Ti doesn’t say a word, just stands there, his huge arms folded over his massive chest, his bare foot rapping an angry ptt!…ptt!…ptt!…ptt! against the floor.

  Quickly peeling off my jeans and underwear, I squeeze past the scowling bulkhead. “I won’t hunt anything big, okay? So I’ll be back in time for dinner?”

  Ti’s nose flares, and a soft growl rattles around his throat until I pull at the collar of his fleece with one hand, then at his head with the other. I kiss him full on his lips, and his hand runs slowly over my naked shoulder and down my spine and around the curve of my ass. He holds me tight against him so that I feel exactly what I’m leaving behind. “It’s just a run, Ti,” I whisper. “It’s what wolves do.”

  Kyle stumbles as quickly as he can down the stairs and toward the snow-dusted forest. I will watch over him in his change so no coyote eats him when he’s vulnerable. He will do the same for me.

  In the silence of a run, we move as one. Under the snow, we feel the decline toward the moose wallow and swerve together. We smell the tree where a buck rubbed the velvet of his antlers and move closer. We follow the ragged ends of low branches that mark the beginnings of the deer’s browse line. We hear an unusual noise upwind and turn, ready to fight or hunt.

  Kyle skids straight into a wall of black wolf.

  Ti towers over Kyle, his lips curled back again from those sharp teeth. Kyle pulls everything in that can be pulled in—ears, tail, legs, chin, balls—before creeping backward. I slide my muzzle next to his, because Kyle shouldn’t be bullied, but he stinks of salt and old leather and is already skittering away.

  Ti watches until the last trace of Kyle’s fur has vanished deep in the trees. He turns in that awkward, shuffling crappy-wolf way and stands beside me. Pushing off with my front legs, I give him a big, open-jawed kiss. He gives me a sidelong glance and squares his already broad shoulders.

  And I run. Even with only three legs, I’m fast enough to make Ti work for it. He falters and gets up and falters again. I swat him in the face with my tail to remind him that his tail shouldn’t be dragged behind like toilet paper on the bottom of his shoe.

  It’s not until we reach the upper slopes that he is at my shoulder, following and leading as we thread our way through the beeches and hemlocks.

  The sky is gray with the promise of the first real snow of the season, one of those thick snows that generous nature uses to cover and protect wolves when they sleep. For now, the flakes sit like powdered sugar on top of branches and leaves and on the dried heads of grasses the color of old bronze. The snow erupts around us in little flurries when I jump on him and tumble to the side. I run away and then turn back, running toward him, and he rears on his hind legs, coming down, covering my back, and dragging his teeth gently, gently across my ear.

  He bounds, jumping so high in the air that he bumps a branch above him. A tiny kinglet complains, and snow lands on Ti’s face. I rub it off with my muzzle. He corners a fisher, which is always a bad idea, and the foul-tempered rodent bites him. He holds his leg up to me, and when I finish debriding it, he props his head on top of mine.

  Finally, we make it past the High Pines and the Krummholz to the scrubbed, mottled stone right under the heavy gray sky. Ti collapses on his back, and I flop down next to him, my nose buried in his fur. I breathe deeply, luxuriating in the scent of crushed bone and evergreen and damp fur, totally free of any hint of steel or carrion. And when I put my head to his chest, I no longer hear the slow, shallow sounds of the man in the wolf suit, because Ti has discovered the depth of his lungs and the strength of his heart.

  He stretches his neck out long, looking out toward the upside-down horizon. I think…I think he means for me to take it, but I hesitate, because the last time didn’t turn out well. Still, he holds his chin high as though he’s waiting, so very carefully, I put my teeth on either side of his throat. It’s what we do, and it means trust me. It means I see you at your most vulnerable and will not hurt you.

  He tenses slightly but doesn’t move.

  I rub against his jaw, and he rubs against mine, and I keep going until I am covered in his scent. I rub against the stones and scratch into the earth, advertising to everyone that he and I were here together. Wild.

  I throw back my head and howl. A handful of howls respond from the misty dark violet down below.

  From the black wolf beside me, there is only a polite cough.

  I wish we could stay longer, but we really can’t, because tonight is the New Moon, which all wolves avoid because, even wild, it’s hard to see on an overcast night with no moon.

  As soon as we’re outside the Boathouse, I plop down on the cold ground and pull my shoulders back. After the squishy cacophony of the change, my skin settles against the cold, brittle ground.

  Ti hasn’t changed. He is rolling his shoulders and shaking his massive head and jumping in all sorts of peculiar ways. As soon as I have my voice back, I squat next to him, suggesting various combinations of rolling and stretching and folding and curving that we use to get the phase started, but nothing works. Every time he emerges fro
m a fold or curve or stretch or roll, he looks at his still fur-covered paw with disgust.

  Left outside naked in the snow and dark, I feel my body starting to get cold, so I head inside with Ti following sullenly behind. I squat down and take his big head between my hands, rubbing my cheek against his muzzle. “I love you like this, and I swear on my own wolf that you will never be chained again. But I love the man who thinks he’s human too, and I need you to let him come to me now.”

  He rolls his shoulders distractedly, like a child shrugging out of a jacket, then trots back and forth, his claws clacking against the floor.

  Fingering my clothes distractedly, I decide to leave them where they are and turn off the lights. Inside under the new moon, it is pitch-black except for the still-glowing lucidum of Ti’s hypersensitive eyes. Staring at the glowing green pools, I lie back on our bed and begin retracing all the paths that Ti’s hands have traced on my body. I start in earnest, running my finger across my chin and up to my bottom lip, gently opening it and slipping my finger inside across my fangs. I suck it deeply into my welcoming mouth. With a pop, I pull the finger out and trace cool circles around my nipples until they stand upright, hard as apple seeds.

  A soft sigh from a damp nose hits my arm.

  My hand drifts lower in those long, languorous strokes. My fingers are cooler than his and smaller, but closing my eyes, I work my imagination hard, trying to re-create his big, strong, warm hands moving over my hips and belly and slipping between my thighs, making my back arch like I’m going to touch the ceiling.

  Invisible in the blackness of the room, the black wolf throws himself on the floor. I smile to myself at the elastic thrum of stretching muscles, the hard creak of bending bone, the slurried swish of organs changing places.

  Both the bed and I groan when he jumps on me with his full weight. The dustings of black fur settle around me, and I sneeze.

  Chapter 24

  The day before the Iron Moon, Evie is pumped full of oxytocin. Now she is contracting and changing and contracting and changing. I swear the one time I caught a glance of John through the open door of the Meeting House, he’d lost ten pounds and gained twenty years.

  Evie delivers two live pups and a third who didn’t make it. But the important thing is that the Pack grows and Evie can finally sleep.

  No one wants to tell John that we’re also down a wolf. There was an accident on I-87, and Nikki’s stuck in the resulting traffic jam. We all watch the progress of her cell phone on Tara’s iPad, but by the time Nikki can make any speed, she’s only got thirty minutes to get home. She can’t step on the gas, because the absolute worst thing she could do is get pulled over by the police.

  Last time that happened, we lost a wolf and had to eat a state trooper.

  The phone slows to a stop not far from the outer limits of our territory. The Pack sloughs off clothing, and we all wait together, naked in the cold, and pray that Nikki can make it, because there’s nothing more we can do.

  Ti is with me this time. He sits behind me, shivering despite the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. We watch the fading of the dull-gold stripe between the thick clouds above and the dark mountains below. John is in the Meeting House with his mate, so this time, Tara closes the door to the Great Hall.

  The thickness is just building in my sinuses when a crack reverberates through the night. I topple over, terrified among the contorting bodies of the Pack. If someone comes across us with a gun, we are all dead.

  Ti stands bolt upright. He says something that, of course, I can’t hear and then goes somewhere I can’t see because my eyes and ears are still changing. When my senses finally come online, he’s gone, but I hear the pups whimper. They nuzzle Tara, looking for guidance, but the other adults are still phasing, and I’m the first one up.

  Usually we would take the pups to the High Pines, but without adults to guide them, we cannot chance a meeting with coyotes or, worse, bobcats, so I snap at them to hide in the basement of the Great Hall. Even the most fractious pup knows what a gun is and obeys immediately. Small ones are already tumbling through the hinged door. The few nurslings go immediately limp as the juveniles carry them in their jaws.

  I make a stumblebum rush toward the access road and the gunshots.

  There is someone coming. More than one. Two voices, but at least three sets of footsteps. It’s hard to tell.

  “What did you see?”

  “Don’ know. Something.”

  “You sure they’re not here?” I can now smell the oil and warm plastic and wrinkled carrion sticks of Anderson, the junkyard man.

  “Nobody answers,” says another man whose rough voice gives way to a smoker’s hack. His lungs smell like coal and rot. “The machine says they’re at a yoga retreat.”

  “Yogurt retreat,” says the third, a dry, subtle humorist I don’t recognize but who sounds young.

  The Smoker coughs again.

  “You okay?” asks Anderson.

  “The cold air,” the Smoker wheezes out. “Just got to get used to it.”

  I finally sight the threesome coming around the curve. A juvenile, slightly younger than I am. Anderson. And the man from the gas station with the dying lungs. All of them armed, like humans always are when confronted with trees.

  “Second fucking time they call the DEC on me. Second fucking time. It’s my fucking land. I can do whatever the fuck I want to with it,” says Anderson.

  “Zed thinks they’ve got a meth lab up here.”

  “Shut up, Trey. Zed’s a moron, same’s you.”

  “But if they’ve got a meth lab, then we can tell the police and they’ve got probable cause, right?”

  “Jesus, Trey. Those shows you watch are a pain in my ass,” says Anderson.

  “Nobody wants the police involved,” says the Smoker. “We’re just taking a look around. Wanted to see what the neighborhood’s like.”

  “So,” says Anderson, “up there, they got this fucking huge fence. Easiest to cut through here to my—your—land. You sure they’re not here?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll say we’ve got that easement of necessity.”

  “Yogurt retreat,” giggles Trey, the wry humorist, again.

  Humans talk way too much.

  “Did you see Breaking Bad?” asks young Trey. “Those meth guys… They’re some scary people.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m just saying. If these are meth lords…”

  “They’re not meth lords, dickhead. They’re hippies. Do you think meth lords would go on a fucking yoga retreat?”

  “Quiet, both of you. This time, I really did see something,” says the Smoker.

  “I didn’t hear anything. Trey, did you hear anything?”

  I hear the swish of a gunstock on Gore-Tex, and Anderson looks through the sight and fires. “He’s right. There’s something moving out there.”

  “I thought they were all at a yogurt retreat.”

  “Some thing. Maybe you came out of my sister’s cunt, but there is no way you’re related to me.”

  The “thing” is Nikki. I can smell the waves of her desperate fear coming like a heartbeat. All three now have sights up and start shooting. Wood explodes from the trees as the bullets fly, but then I hear the soft involuntary whimper of an injured wolf.

  Having finally reached the Homelands, Nikki had gotten sloppy or unlucky. Though sloppy and unlucky are usually the same thing if you’re a wolf.

  “I think I got something.”

  “You? Why you? We were all shooting.”

  “Jesus. Fine. I think we got something.”

  Nikki is a brindle, and her season is past. Just a month ago, the ground and the trees were wet and dark and she would have been hard to see. Now it is my season, when early snow cover is still stippled with dried grasses.

  I run at an
angle that takes me toward the hunters, hoping to draw them away from Nikki.

  A hunter hit Gran Ferenc one Iron Moon. The bullet lodged in his thigh, and it took like a hundred moons before the thing finally worked its way out. Gran Ferenc said he panicked, and when he ran away, he ran straight. “Guns shoot straight, so you must never run straight.” He forced us to practice running in a zigzag, back and forth and back and forth, so that when we weren’t thinking straight, we wouldn’t run straight either.

  He forced me too, though those turns are a bitch with only one working hind leg.

  There’s a shot and then another, and the bark explodes from a birch near me.

  “There it is. Looks like I got it in the leg.”

  A shot hits the ground, but they’re following me away from Nikki, away from the Great Hall, away from Evie, and away from my vulnerable Pack. Toward Beaver Pond.

  The ice at Beaver Pond is thick and covered with snow. Easy to cross. Not that I want to be out in the open for long. I don’t want to give them a clear shot when they come crashing through the underbrush like rutting moose.

  “Check it out, Trey,” says Anderson, pushing at the edge of the ice with his boot.

  “Uncle Al?” the juvenile says, his voice shaky. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re lighter, dickhead.”

  They don’t notice me sheltered behind a winterberry. If you want to keep watch on your prey, shelter near something that misdirects the eye. If they notice anything, it will be the bright-red berries encased in ice, not the patch of white and gray blending into the winter’s monochrome.

  Beaver Pond is still and not so deep, and the ice is plenty thick. Trey heads across cautiously at first, then as he becomes more sure that it’s safe, he jumps up and down before slipping and landing on his butt. Anderson follows him onto the ice, laughing.

  “Is this all Torrance’s?” asks the Smoker.

  “You see up the mountains there and parts east go almost to Lake Champlain. They’ve got the biggest chunk of land in private hands in Upstate New York, and they just keep on buying. And for what? They don’t do a fucking thing with it.”