The Last Wolf

by Maria Vale

  I knew the braiding was all about symbols—Land + Pack + Mate—but there’s something about the damp cold of the earth bleeding through the blanket under me and the miraculous trail of the heavens above me, the smell of John’s blood, and the deep thrusts of the man I love. There’s something about mind and body dissolving limits in an endless expanding and contracting that braids everything together. I see Ti’s seed spilling through the infinite sky above me. I smell my body in the cold, damp ground beneath me. And in my mate’s steady strokes, I feel the pulsations of blood and oceans and dark matter and everything else in the universe that moves in currents.

  It all twines together, contracting tighter and tighter until the whole universe is a tiny seed of infinite mass. Inside me. Inside us. A scream tears from my throat, and it explodes.

  “Open your eyes, Silver,” Ti whispers.

  He drives into me one more time, his eyes focused on mine as my contractions pull at him.

  “Because that is where I see the man I want to be.”

  * * *

  “Don’t do it too tight.”

  Gran Jean clucks irritably. I know I’m being irritating, but I don’t want this to remind Ti of any earlier band around his neck. Gran Jean adjusts the neck ring she has braided from the thin lash of deer hide tanned with oak bark, earth, John’s blood, and our sex.

  “Quicksilver,” she snaps, “in six hundred moons, I’ve never made it too tight.”

  “Of course I trust you, but I’m just saying if you have to choose between tight and loose, make it loose.”

  “Sil, it’s okay,” Ti says when she’s done. “It’s fine. It doesn’t feel anything like…well, it doesn’t feel like what you’re afraid of.”

  Standing between his legs, I unbutton his Henley to see how the new braid sits on the old scars. It does nothing to obscure them, but bursting out from under the thin leather, they have a wild beauty.

  My hands slide up from chest to neck to cup his face.

  “Min gemæcca,” he whispers with an accent that makes me laugh.

  “What? Gran Jean told me the word for mate. If this is going to be my home, shouldn’t I learn the language?”

  “Gea, min coren.”

  Yes, my chosen, my fit, my beloved.

  So all that’s left to complete our full membership in the Pack is the paperwork. The Homelands are covered by some elaborate trust document that all Pack must sign. Ti because he is new, me because I am now an adult and will replace John’s proxy signature with my own. The document is the work of generations of lawyers, and it seems as if many of those generations have gathered in the Meeting House. There are Kayla, the 14th’s lawyer, a first-year law student, and Reena, the 2nd’s Delta, who sits on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And of course, Elijah, who is the keeper of the Trust and the most aggressive defender of the Pack’s legal protections.

  Ti listens carefully to the lawyers’ explanations and looks through the sheaves of paper set in front of us. Looking at line after line of numbers, I remember when I was a pup and crawled into the tiny space between the wall and John’s desk because at Iron Moon Table, he’d called a meeting of all the Pack’s “fun managers.” I was stuck there for what seemed like hours, having less fun than I’ve ever had in my life. When the last of the no-fun-at-all managers left, John leaned over the back of his desk and scooped me up. He’d smelled me the second he’d come in but figured making me sit through the whole tortured meeting was an appropriate punishment for skulking. I’ve been allergic to money talk ever since.

  I watch Nils and Nyala enviously. Nils is busily gnawing a cheese chew under a bookcase, while Nyala bats at him until she finally retrieves it. Nils pops out, and they tussle for a while, the cheese chew ignored on the floor beside them. They only stop when the howl of a perimeter wolf brings them up short. Cocking their heads to the side, they listen to the Pack responses and then reply with their own squeaky, staccato howls.

  When we finally get around to the actual signing, Tara takes out a small, heavy glass jar filled with black ink and a slim, dark box burned with a kind of stylized tree. With its upraised fletching, the Eolh rune is almost the opposite of the Tiw I have on my hand and symbolizes the defense of what one loves. Opening the ink, Tara struggles to fill the pen, wipe it on a rag, and write a few scribbles on a piece of scrap until the ink runs.

  Evie starts, signing on behalf of Nils. John signs on behalf of Nyala. Tara refills the Eolh pen before handing it to me.

  This doesn’t really seem like us, and seeing my expression, Tara must know that’s what I’m thinking. “Bartholomew had it made up,” she says, naming an earlier Alpha. “Thought it gave the process gravitas.”

  But a thing either has gravitas with a Number 2 Ticonderoga pencil, or it doesn’t. What this outsized, poorly weighted tool gives the process is repetitive stress syndrome, and after all the signing and initialing, my hand cramps horribly.

  So maybe it’s my fault that when I pass the pen to Ti, it rolls from my hand and doesn’t land in his but instead hits the table and then falls to the floor on one end and flips to the other before breaking apart in a puddle of ink.

  No one says anything. Nils bats at one silver half, chasing it as it twirls away. When he runs after it, little black paw prints smudge across the scrubbed wood. Evie chases after him, and Nyala jumps from the table to see what the excitement is. Finally, Evie picks up her children, holding the squirming, furry little bodies far from hers until they get outside and she drops them in the snow.

  “I’m…I’m sorry,” Ti says, gathering up the broken remnants. The ink runs down his palm like blood.

  One of the lawyers has a Bic in the bottom of her bag, and he signs with that.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says again when it’s all over.

  But John shakes his head. “I always hated that thing,” he says, and once we’re back at the Great Hall, he puts the remnants of the Eolh pen in a dusty blue-and-white coffee mug that says:

  YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.

  IT’S AN ALPHA THING.

  We have been given Cabin 97, maybe because some wolves are still nervous about having a Shifter in their midst. It’s in the middle of the trees halfway toward the Clearing. I love it because when I leave our bed at night, all I have to do is tumble down the stairs to sleep in the woods.

  The Boathouse has been closed up. The boats are on the walls, and as soon as we get our things—mostly just clothes and books—the pipes will be drained, and no one will go in again until spring.

  Ti sits on the snow-covered Adirondack chair overlooking Home Pond. It is completely iced over, though when the weather changes, like it has today, it creaks and complains with sharp pops and dull twangs like some giant, soggy rubber band.

  “Ti?” I say, perching on the broad arm of the chair. He’s been distracted since the signing. “Ti?”

  “He was right.”

  “Who? John?”

  “My father. Packs do hoard. You weren’t paying attention, but I was. Scattered around various funds. About 1.5 billion.”

  “Billion what? Dollars? And are you saying billion with a B?”

  “Yes, billion, and yes, dollars. U.S., not Canadian. That’s without the land.”

  I thread my hands into the sleeves of my fleece.

  “So we’ve saved some money. It’s just to take care of the Pack, take care of its future.” But even as I say it, I shiver and burrow my face in my collar. “Do you think your father knows?”

  “No. They’re very careful with it. They keep the Trust documents locked away in Elijah’s safe in New York. Besides, it is set up so that while new names can be added, nothing can be changed without the unanimous consent of the entire Pack, and my father is just not that persuasive.”

  Home Pond groans and pops again, sounding for all the world like a giant straining to free himself of chains of
ice.

  * * *

  Sten nods his assent for us to poke around among the furniture in the barn behind his shop. “Don’t…” He circles his hand higgledy-piggledy in the air.

  “Of course not. We’ll put everything back where we found it.”

  In the end, Sten and a couple of other wolves help us carry a mattress, a sofa, two comfy chairs, a small desk, a dresser, and two tables—dining and coffee—into our cabin. All of them have been carefully sniffed for mold or bugs.

  Before today, the coffee table was a table table, but then we sawed it down. Badly, as it turned out, and now it thumps and bumps. Tomorrow, we’ll measure twice and cut it once, but for today, I search through the stack of summer wolf publications that we brought from the Boathouse, looking for something of the proper thickness to keep it steady.

  “Architectural Digest?” Ti says, plopping next to me on the big orange and bright-green leaf-print sofa that is hard on the eyes but super nice on the ass. “I’m not sure it’s aimed at cabin-dwelling wolves.”

  “Really isn’t.” I prop my head on his thighs and my feet on the sofa arm and flip through a few more pages before letting the magazine fall on my lap. “Though it is kind of what I imagine you had before.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Maybe. Why are you asking?”

  “Just curious. I wonder sometimes what you gave up to be here.”

  He takes the magazine from my lap and starts to look through it. “Why don’t I tell you what I had,” he says. “Then you can decide for yourself what I’m giving up.”

  He opens the magazine.

  “I was seventeen when I got my own place in Montreal. Well, I didn’t get it myself. My father paid an agent to find me something ‘appropriate.’”

  He turns a page.

  “It was a newly remodeled three-bedroom duplex with marble and copper and travertine and bronze and a terrace and a Jacuzzi and a fireplace that came on with the click of a button. The lights were so bright and the walls were so white that they hurt my eyes. But it was definitely ‘appropriate.’ It sent the right message about who I was, or rather who my father was. For a long time, all I had there were a blow-up mattress and boxes of clean shirts in the bedroom. Soap and toothbrush in the bathroom. Batteries in the refrigerator.”

  I can’t see Ti, just the back of the magazine with a picture of a large watch on a fine and featureless wrist with carmine-tipped fingernails that looks nothing like my own hawthorn- and weasel-ravaged hands.

  “Then I started entertaining, and the women I entertained expected more than an air mattress at a good address for their services.”

  He must feel my head on his thigh tilt toward him. “They weren’t prostitutes, Silver. But there was an unspoken transaction: Money for beauty. Power for sex. I don’t know why it isn’t prostitution, but apparently it isn’t.”

  A rough stripping sound is followed by the sudden overwhelming acridity of artificial resin and citrus. Ti angles the perfume ad toward me.

  The call of the wild, it says.

  I flail furiously at the air in front of my nose until he crumples it up and throws it away.

  “Since my father compensated me well for my invaluable contributions, I had the money to pay someone a ridiculous amount to fill the shell I’d spent a ridiculous amount to buy.

  “So there were more ‘appropriate’ things: a leather sofa with no arms that was angled so deeply, you couldn’t sit on it—or get out of it, if you did. Barstools of carbonized steel hexagons. Tables of clear acrylic that needed to be cleaned if you breathed near them.

  “Since the ceiling was dotted with spot lighting for artwork, they covered the walls with big paintings of beautiful women, their eyes part closed and their mouths part open.”

  He flips to the end of the magazine.

  “As for the actual beautiful women, I had to warn them to close their damn mouths and open their damn eyes and focus, because my king-size mattress floated on a platform of stainless steel so sharp, it could cut glass. And when they sliced open their shins, there would be blood and tears, and I would have to pretend to care.

  “And I hated that most of all.”

  He reaches down to the side and slides the magazine under our wretchedly tilting table.

  “So now talk to me, Wildfire, about what I’m giving up.”

  Chapter 29

  Tiberius is trying so hard. He’s learning to distinguish the scent of a sick deer, the torn-up stumps that mean bear, the shorelines that attract raccoon, the gnaw marks of muskrat (nummy) vs. the gnaw marks of a porcupine (pointless).

  Because he won’t ever be a real wolf until he learns to hunt. But he won’t ever learn to hunt until he learns to hunger.

  It’s not easy.

  “You said they tasted like chips,” he says, washing out his mouth again.

  “I said voles are like chips. They’re crunchy. A little salty. And nobody can eat just one.”

  He leans down, pulling his lip away from a flat bicuspid.

  “There’s something stuck between my teeth. Do you see it?” Before I can look, he coughs. “And there’s hair in the back of my throat.”

  I find myself afraid to look into the mirror, afraid to discover that I’ve stepped into someone else’s life and love and luck. We are officially the 14th Echelon’s Theta pair. I’m not strong enough for a higher position, and Tiberius can’t hunt. But Theta is a good position, hitting that sweet spot in the hierarchy between grim pathos and seething envy.

  Our little cabin is perfect. We’re working steadily with the silent Sten. There are a lot of voles. And most of all, I am mated to a man I love more than I can express in words.

  There are times when we run that everything seems like a metaphor for that love. The root wrapped tight around an inopportune rock. The black tree dusted with a silver shimmer of snow. The low sun piercing through the netted forest canopy. Love and greed. The two great catalysts of human endeavor. I don’t understand greed, but I fear it, because if human greed is half as strong as my love, then all the safeguards of all those generations of Pack are worth nothing.

  * * *

  Last week’s strong winds mean blowdown. Wolves search the forest for likely looking trees, while others take turns chopping before the wind-thrown wood turns to ice.

  Ti and I are the ones doing the chopping now. Both of us have stripped down to muscle shirts. There is something hypnotic about the winter quiet, interrupted by nothing but the thunk of the maul, the crack of the split log, the dull stuttering fall of wood on snow-muted earth, and wolf howl.

  Deep-Deep-Deep-Deep

  I startle at the unexpected sound. A furrow appears on Ti’s brow. Then John passes at a run. With a quick look at each other, we follow.

  “What is it?” I ask Sara, the wolf on gate duty.

  “A truck.”

  “I can see that. I mean, what’s it doing here?”

  “Not sure, but John’s called for Tara and Josi.”

  Then the wind shifts, and even though I can’t see into the cab of the truck, I smell oil and heated plastic and carrion sticks.

  Anderson jumps to the ground, his voice growing louder. Two burly, beer-gutted men emerge from the back, one with his hand reaching to the back of his waistband.

  Josi, the 3rd Echelon’s lawyer, arrives, racing past in oversize rubber boots and an anorak. Her legs are covered with fleece pajamas that mark her as someone who has an office and a life Offland. Still, Josi is our go-to for leading the second prong of a pincer attack and New York property law.

  Sara opens the gate for her.

  Josi begins talking with Anderson, softly and urgently, while John looks on. Other members of the Pack arrive, cleaning under their nails with seaxes, knocking mud from their boots with mallets, scratching their calves with oversized adze
s.

  A door opens on the passenger side of the cab, and a man jumps down. His lungs react to the first bite of sharp, cold air with dry, expulsive barks.

  “Mr. Torrance?” says the Smoker, holding out his hand as he walks around the front of the truck. “Daniel Leary. I represent the new owner. We’re clearing out Mr. Anderson’s lot here.” He taps his chest and coughs again. When he stops, a line of silver glimmers at his gum line. “Sorry,” he says. “My lungs.”

  He must see Ti standing huge at the front of the gate, fisting the enormous maul, but he ignores him, reaching into an inner pocket of his jacket and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He taps it firmly against the heel of his hand.

  “Only one left,” Leary says quietly, almost to himself. Ti’s eyes narrow. A single cigarette slides out. “But legally, it’s still a pack of cigarettes. Even if there is only one left. It is still a pack.”

  John and Josi and Anderson all look baffled for a moment while he cups his hands around his lighter, drawing hard on his cigarette until the tip glows red. “This kind burns real nice,” he says before dropping his lighter into his pocket and turning back to the huddled conversation.

  Ti stands frozen for an eternity and then, without taking his eyes from Leary, lifts his maul high over his head and brings it down on a pale granite boulder embedded in the frozen earth. A chunk shears away into powder.

  Leary doesn’t react at all, but Anderson puts his hand to his chest, and the one beer-gutted man puts his hand to his waistband again.

  John signals to Tara. After a few whispered words, she returns to the gate.

  “Your Alpha says you are to leave,” she says quietly. “These are nervous men with guns. He will not see any of you hurt.”

  And because John spoke not as himself but as our Alpha, the Pack disperses in the wind like the seeds of a dandelion.

  Except for my furious mate, who has to be dragged and pushed all the way to our cabin. By the time I slam the door and block it with my body, he is panting and pacing like a caged wolf. He slams his fist into the door beside my shoulder, making me jump. I wipe the tiny slivers of wood from my sleeves.