The Last Wolf

by Maria Vale

  I do the same for Nyala Johnsdottir. Ti keeps his hands tightly clasped in front of him as Gran Drava walks by. Her airy burden is named Hannah Deathsdottir, because Death holds the highest rank of all.

  After the last of the Pack scents and marks the pups, Evie and her children will return to the Meeting House to rest. Usually her mate would accompany her, but for now, John must stop being the nurslings’ father and must be Alpha again.

  The Pack sits once again and digs in.

  “Any Iron Moon that marks the increase of the Pack is a happy one,” says John, once Evie has gone, “but this is doubly so. Not only are we welcoming two nurslings, but we welcome back Quicksilver Nilsdottir”—I turn to Ti with a big smile that dies on my lips as I see his horrified expression—“and her bedfellow who will be known from now on by his Pack name, Tiberius Malasson.”

  Ti leaps to his feet so fast that the bench tips backward. “Your mate,” he says. “She has to be here. We can’t… She has to be here—”

  “I would never go behind Evie’s back. You helped protect us when we were vulnerable, Evie most of all. And you did it without killing, even after you got one of their guns.”

  I admit, I may have fudged that bit. There’s no telling what John would do if he knew that Ti had sieved through the bog and hidden a gun for a moon or more.

  “Whatever concerns there might have been about this Pack claim”—John’s eyes hold those of a disgusted-looking Victor—“have been addressed. As there are no against-speakers, the only thing left is to make arrangements for your Bredung. Your mating.”

  Ti’s big body weaves slightly under my hand. I look up, hoping for a clue, but he focuses on the ground, and for the first time, I scent the unmistakable smell of salt and old leather, the smell of fear.

  His breath is coming fast, and he swallows convulsively. The circles under his eyes appear almost black against his dark skin, and he starts to shake. Grabbing his arm to support him, I quickly blather something about “gratitude?” and “this unexpected honor?” and everything comes out as a question like I’m hoping someone will tell me why my unflappable bedfellow is having a full-fledged panic attack.

  John nods at me with a sad smile and pity, because instead of greeting the news of our Bredung with joy, Ti looks like he’s going to vomit on the floor.

  There are more goddamn sad smiles and pitying eyes as I stumble out, dragging the numbed Ti behind me. Kayla catches my sleeve as we leave, her expression somber, like she is going to miss me. I pull my arm away.

  As soon as we get outside, Ti leans over, his hands braced against his knees. I keep my hand steady on the base of his skull, rubbing absently with my thumb while I wait for him to explain, but he stands shakily and walks away. I watch as he breaks into a jog, then a run, racing toward the woods. I let him go. Let him escape into the filigree of bare trees.

  We were supposed to be celebrating our upcoming mating with a move into a cabin. A place with proper heat that would be our own. Instead, I return alone to the frigid Boathouse and collapse onto cold sheets that still smell like sex.

  I wish I’d known that the night before the Iron Moon was our last night. I wouldn’t have slept at all. I would have memorized how his hands moved across my body. I would have lingered over the taste of his sweat and his seed. I would have kept him from coming so I could revel in the feeling of his thickness buried inside me and the staccato thrumming of the veins that warned me he was getting close. I would have listened harder to the throttled cry he always makes at the end.

  Made.

  Better yet, I’d go back further to a time before my heart got involved.

  Ripping off my clothes, I pull the sheets that don’t smell like steel anymore between my legs. I rub my face into the pillow that smells of crushed bone and evergreen, but it’s too late to mark him.

  What was it Lear’s Fool said? He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf or in a boy’s love.

  Chapter 27

  I don’t remember falling asleep, just waking up. The sun couldn’t be bothered with more than a lazy visit above the horizon, and the sky is the color of mercury, and the waters of Home Pond are the color of lead, and the skeletal fingers of spruce have turned from evergreen to graphite.

  There’s something warm against the curve of my spine. I take a deeper breath, feeling the shape of his shoulder blades. I turn onto my back and pull the blankets tight over my body.

  “I’m sorry, Sil, but I had to think.”

  There’s a wasp’s nest in the highest reaches of the pitched roof.

  “I did some thinking too. I don’t want to be exiled, so why don’t we just go through with the Bredung, but then you cover whatever viable—”

  “Stop,” he says wearily. “Just…stop.” Pushing himself off the floor, he climbs in next to me. His hands, so warm and rough, soothe my aching skin. I turn toward his body, dark and big and scarred as an old oak.

  “Those ‘viable females’?” he says. “They’re like beautiful humans. Always confusing luck with birthright and expecting everything to come to them as their due. Not like you: you assume nothing and fight for everything. You fight for yourself. You fight for your pack.

  “And you fight for me,” he whispers, his voice as rough as his bearded cheek. “You fight for me. No one’s ever fought so hard for me. No one’s ever tried so hard to make me feel like I might belong. That I may need to be cared for.

  “And that this divide in my soul isn’t fatal.”

  He curls his legs and his shoulders tight around as if he’s trying to make his body small. Trying to fit in the circle of my arms. He’s too big, but I hold him close anyway and whisper to him that I don’t understand what’s wrong, but that I love—

  “Don’t,” he says harshly. I try to turn my head, to look at him, but he traps me. “I have something to say, and I don’t want to see your face when I say it. Please just listen. I didn’t come here because I was trying to escape, Silver. I came here because I was sent.”

  Sent?

  Shifters, he says in a whisper like a dragonfly skimming over summer water, may pretend they’re human, but they aren’t. They don’t grow old the way humans do. They can’t go to doctors, because, like us, their bodies are alien. Their paperwork is forged, making legitimate business and public life difficult, because eventually someone starts to get suspicious. It always happens. So they survive on the fertile border between legality and criminality, cocooned in a combination of money and intimidation and the particularly nasty class of humans attracted to that combination. And at the head of it all, at the head of all the Shifters of North America, is a man named August Leveraux.

  “My father. I didn’t lose any challenge. The whole thing—the challenge, the clawing, everything—was thought up by my father, because he knew no Pack would trust a Shifter, even one whose mother was Pack.”

  My eyes keep drifting to the wasp’s nest. How is it that I never noticed it before? Had the males all died before we moved in?

  A Shifter at one of the border casinos scented a wolf, he says. “Lone wolves come through occasionally, searching either for a place to belong or a place to die. But this one was marked up, like he was still part of a pack.” The Shifter reported it to August, and August sent his best tracker to follow him. Which was how Ronan led Tiberius straight to us.

  Where is the mated queen? Is she buried all alone in the frozen ground, her mind and body numb, waiting?

  Tiberius pulls at a strand of my hair that’s stuck to his lips.

  As furious as I am with Tiberius and Ronan, it is nothing compared to my anger at myself. Because I didn’t want to be a nidling, I kept Ronan’s Offland visits secret when I should have told John. Because I didn’t want to be a nidling, I brought a Shifter into our Pack.

  “Get off of me!” I curl and twist and struggle to get away from him, but Ti refuses to let go. “S
hifters always believe we have money. But you’ve seen how we live. We’re not rich; we—”

  “You said you have fund managers, Sil,” he murmurs quietly. “They must be managing something. Besides, it would hardly matter. There’s a massive shale play extending through the Great North. Yours is the largest holding outside the Adirondack Park, and Washington is offering too many incentives to leave this land alone.”

  Held in the steel cage of his thighs and the pinion of his thick arms and by the weight of his chest, I slash out at his face with my fangs. He doesn’t flinch when I gouge his cheek.

  He lifts his head. Blood wells up along the gash left by my canine.

  “You told him, didn’t you?” I turn away from those gold-flecked black eyes that took me from the very beginning. “I trusted you, Tiberius.” A single warm drop burns a trail along my cheekbone.

  “I know, Wildfire. Please. I’m telling you everything—everything—because I need that trust again. Yes. I told him. The man with the dying lungs? The one you didn’t like? That’s Daniel Leary, my father’s right-hand man. You have to know I was already so conflicted when I met him at the gas station, but yes, I told him. Then he dared to come onto your land and threaten you and—”

  “And you kept his guns. I know you didn’t give them all to John. Why? So when the moon comes and we are helpless, you can kill—”

  “No!” he shouts. “No. No…god no. I did keep them, but I did it because I know my father, and I wanted to be able to protect you. I told you I was a terrible shot, but that was a lie too, because the truth is, Sil…I am a fucking miracle.” There’s no pride in his voice, just disgust and deep weariness.

  “I was my father’s enforcer. You know how I said I managed human resources? I did it by hunting them down and killing them. I’m the reason they say no one can escape August Leveraux. But not anymore. Not ever again.”

  He lifts his hip and slides his hand into his front pocket, reaching for his wallet. He hands it to me. “There’s a receipt in there. Read it.”

  I pull out a receipt from the U.S. Post Office, 10 Miller Street, Plattsburgh, for a priority envelope to the CRA in Ottawa and another to August Leveraux care of a PO box in Halifax.

  “So?”

  “That’s what I was doing. I went to the safe-deposit box in Plattsburgh where I keep—kept—things from my old life. I sent a copy of a zip drive with the most intimate details of August Leveraux’s financial holdings to the CRA and a letter to my father telling him what I had done.”

  I stare a little uncomprehendingly at the receipt. “And what exactly is the CRA?”

  “Canada Revenue Agency. Like the IRS. I didn’t want you to have to trust the promise of a man who had lied to you so often. I had to make it real. There is no changing it now. Even if you reject me, I have nothing left to go back to.”

  A drop of blood falls from his face to mine, warm and smelling of iron and salt and mutely tragic.

  “Do you remember? At the Clearing? When I told you I didn’t want to die? That was a lie too, because the truth was I really didn’t care. But then I found you. And you made me realize that it didn’t matter whether I was a real human. What mattered was that I was a real man.”

  * * *

  In the morning, we are summoned to the Alpha’s office, and all the way there, I imagine telling John about Tiberius. But then I imagine never seeing Tiberius again. Or never seeing my pack. Or more probably both. And I can’t.

  So instead, we find ourselves in John’s office with more wolves than there are carrion beetles on week-old roadkill. Victor is here. Tristan. Leonora. Tara.

  Ti stands with his back against the wall nearest the door, his arms tight around my waist. His gaze is cool and impervious, but his body is cautious and needy.

  “Tiberius, I understand from Leonora that you suffer from a fairly common human affliction called frosted feet?”

  “Cold feet, Alpha,” she says and slurps on a stick in a mug of coffee.

  “Yes, well.” John looks pointedly at the stick. “I’m not going to find that blowing around Home Pond, am I?”

  “No, Alpha, I keep it in my handbag. I am simply trying to instruct the Pack in the proper use of straws. The juveniles’ field trip to Chipotle last week got out of hand.”

  She sucks up another long swig of coffee before putting the mug on a coaster of the waxing quarter moon, one of a set sent to John by an Offland wolf. She crosses her arms, and I cower into Ti’s chest. I just know that she’s going to ask me something I can’t possibly answer, like the difference between a brasserie and a brassiere.

  “Tiberius,” she starts, and my body relaxes. “Our Alpha has asked me to explain the Bredung to you. Perhaps you are under the impression that it is a Breeding? If so, I’m here to assure you that they have nothing to do with each other. Unlike with humans, any child born to us is a wish child, whatever the circumstances of their birth.”

  I reach my hand around to cover his fingers tight on my waist.

  “Bredung is Old Tongue for Braiding. It symbolizes”—Leonora knots her fingers together—“an intertwined commitment not just to each other, but to the land and to the Pack as well. Through it, we mingle blood and earth and seed, and for us, all three parts are fundamental. Once you are braided, you are part of this Pack, part of this land, part of Silver. You cannot untie one without untying everything. I am telling you this so that you will not mistake it for marriage. It is not simply about keeping faith with Silver. It is about keeping faith with us all.”

  Absently, Leonora toys with the thin braid of leather around her neck. Her mate, Boris, was hit by a car years ago, and though it didn’t kill him, he wasn’t the same. A few moons later, he didn’t make it back from a hunt. She never took another mate.

  “I have studied humans for years. They get restless. They feel it is their right to use something and then discard it when it no longer suits them. That is not our way. When a wolf commits to something, there is no end, except in death.

  “So this is your last chance to decide what you are: Are you human, or are you wolf?”

  John tears off a chunk of the dark roll he nabbed from breakfast and butters it slowly.

  Ti stares at the floor, and I worry that maybe he’s gotten frosted feet for real this time. But when he lifts his head, his lips are drawn back from his fangs, and he dares each of the wolves with their smooth, human teeth to doubt how wild he is. I can’t help but smile too.

  John’s eyebrows quirk up as he glances from Ti’s mouth to mine. He runs his tongue over the points of his own dull canines and nods.

  Chapter 28

  I knew the general outlines of what happened at a Bredung, but it is a silent, private affair, mostly conducted by the two participants, so I met with Gran Jean to go over the details, while Ti met with Gran Tito. We have to understand going in, because it is our most sacred ritual, and there are no words. Words would show preference for the skin over the wild, and we would never do that.

  I was calmer when I knew less. I drop the long, coiled strand of leather. It’s stiffer than bought leather, but it is from a Pack-hunted deer and was tanned with oak bark from our woods. So it carries with it the DNA of our land.

  Ti catches it before it falls and twists his fingers into the thin length as we wait for John in the forest next to the Clearing. I pull the blanket tighter around us. He tells me about human weddings, held inside or outside if the weather is mild. The couple wear clothes that are painfully uncomfortable and make their friends do the same. An officiant says a few words that neither party has really thought through—sickness and health, richer and poorer, better and worse—or at least don’t believe will be put to the test. Family and friends toast the couple, eat a little, drink too much, give vases, dance badly, and then run for the exits.

  I think he’s just trying to make me feel better when he says that so far at least, sitt
ing naked at night in a blanket on an icy stump is way better. Then John comes.

  Our Alpha knows it’s cold and that we have more to do, so he doesn’t waste time stripping down to his jeans. From the worn, oil-darkened sheath on his hip, he pulls out an ancient seax, narrowed by centuries of sharpening. Without hesitation, he pulls the knife down the center of his chest from clavicle to navel. I’m not sure Ti realizes the honor John does us in the prominent placement of the cut.

  Blood starts to run as he holds out his hand for the leather lash. He puts it in place inside the cut. With my splayed hand on John’s chest, I hold the lash in place. After a moment, Ti does the same. John puts one hand over ours and then pulls the lash through with his other, until the full length is coated with his blood, symbolizing our bond with the Pack.

  It’s a bitch, being Alpha.

  When we’re done, the wound is red and angry and will scar, an emblem of what it really means to be Alpha: power built on sacrifice.

  Gran Jean showed me how to tie on the lash, but it’s harder to do now that we’re both shivering in our bare skin. Ti holds one end in his hand while I thread it over his shoulder and mine, down my back, between my legs and between his (“always being careful of his testicles, dear”), and then crisscrossing to the other shoulder and back between our legs. John helps tie a special knot that won’t loosen but has a loop that will allow us to get free after.

  Then John leaves, and we are alone.

  I circle my legs around Ti’s hips as he squats down, careful not to drop me. There’s a reason the Bredungs almost always take place in the warm months, one I didn’t mention to Ti, because, well, the whole thing is awkward enough without putting the idea of cold-induced impotence in his head.

  It turns out not to be a worry, because I can feel him, steel sheathed in silk, against my stomach. His arms cage me, his hands cupped around my head. He curves his back high so he can take both my mouth and my sex.