The Last Wolf

by Maria Vale

  Once my jaws crunch hard into his wrist, I pull myself up, my one strong hind leg tearing into fleshy stomach just above this man’s belt.

  Death does lurk in the dark, and I am it.

  His gun goes down; with my hind leg buried in his intestines, I push up and crush his windpipe. He claws at me with soft hands, like a raccoon.

  More gunfire erupts at the edge of the woods, flash after flash of it, and the man holding the gun screams furiously. I don’t think he’s attacking. I think we share this with humans. When we attack, we are silent. We make noise when we’re worried or confused, and I think this man is terrified. There’s another shot. Another single soft pop, different and distinctive, then silence. I race toward it, coming to a stop at the body of a man with a bullet so perfectly placed, it looks like a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

  The rifle with the big magazine smells like burned metal, and the barrel is warm.

  A man at the other side of the Clearing screams over and over and over and will not shut up.

  A wind from the mountains brings a soft unleashing of snow and the distant promise of my mate’s scent. I run toward him, my heart beating so fast that it almost blurs with the fluttering of a wood grouse dislodged from its blanket of snow. Almost. I skid to a stop, because I didn’t disturb the grouse. A Shifter did.

  The agony across the Clearing subsides to one final choked scream and then stops.

  Unlike humans, the Shifter senses me. Unlike Pack, he is presumptuous and careless.

  “I hear you, dog,” he says. He swings around and shoots at the ground.

  So. He can hear, but if he could smell me—see me—he wouldn’t have aimed where he did. I crouch behind a low, snow-encased bush, trying to remember everything I’ve ever learned about winds and land and the acoustic properties of snow. The hunter starts walking in ever-widening orbits, hoping to dislodge me like he did the grouse.

  I stay still as he circles closer, his gun held in both hands, his head moving slowly from side to side, listening. He’s so close that he is almost on top of me. If my legs were whole, I’d take him down, but as I am, I can’t take any chances. I know he doesn’t see me, because he keeps squinting into the woods. Just one more pass and—

  Pop.

  The Shifter teeters before falling onto his back, a shocked expression on his face.

  The man lies on the snow, his arms outstretched and a hole placed so perfectly in the middle of his forehead, it looks like a third eye.

  The seeping blood steams slightly in the moonlight.

  It’s barbaric, killing this way. Pushing a button in the distance. We at least see our victims. Taste their blood. Feel the incoherent spasming. Hear the final gurgling pleas. Death is real for us.

  Ti stands next to me, his leg against my shoulder. He holds his damaged hand close to his chest. His good hand still holds the gun.

  We both listen for hunters or gunfire, but there’s nothing. Everything in the Homelands is afraid, and that fear has a quiet so profound that it reaches to the very edge of silence.

  But there is one thing in the Homelands that isn’t afraid, and when Evie screams, it is as only a wolf can: cracked and haunted and primal.

  Twisting away, I stumble into the Clearing where Evie stands on the Alpha’s rock, a dark shadow howling her fury and loss.

  The Pack is already gathering at the edge of the woods, and that’s where I go, creeping low through all of those huge bodies. Whimpering, I nuzzle my head under John’s slack chin, begging him to get up. I lick at him, begging him to put me in his pocket and keep me safe when that makes no sense. Begging him to be waiting for me when I finally make it home. Begging him to mark me again. Make me belong.

  He didn’t even have a chance to fight. There is such a tiny hole in one side of his chest. That opens up into a huge chasm on the other. All of John’s strength and skill meant nothing, because the man who killed him saw him in the distance and, from that distance, shot him.

  Then Evie ripped out his intestines and calligraphed them across the snow. It had not been a clean kill, and until his heart dropped into the cavity left by his viscera, the man suffered.

  Demos stumbles into the clearing with what looks like a broken leg, but even though it must be painful, he plants his feet into the ground as always. Blood is already stiffening on his muzzle. He stands still while the others sniff at him and smell that Solveig is dead too. After a short bark, he adds his own mournful howl.

  Evie’s dark eyes reflect the flames at Home Pond that light up the sky like sunrise. Then, scenting something new, she turns toward the man as big as night who stumbles and then lowers his body into the center of the Clearing. He crosses his jeans-clad legs.

  Evie leaps from the Alpha’s rock and tears toward him, but Ti sits utterly still, his hands on his knees, his gun on the ground beside him.

  I race faster with three legs than I ever have with four. Tendons tear, bones scrape, nerves scream. I lower my head and throw myself at Evie, at my Alpha, my jaws open and ready to fight because Ti won’t, and I can’t explain that things are complicated or that her pups are alive.

  Surprised, she falters, and when I put my teeth on either side of her neck, she scrapes into my torso with her hind legs. My spine curls tight, trying to protect the little lives inside me as I clamp the back of Evie’s head in my jaws, hard enough to hold her but not to hurt her. She struggles and scrapes, and then she slows. Her nose flares again and again as she scents my muzzle. She has to smell Nyala, who I carried in my jaws, but she should smell the other pups too, who left their mark as they squeezed past.

  Her ears perk up, her head whipping away from Ti, and I let her go. The others are already racing toward the north edge of the Clearing nearest the High Pines. Several elder wolves emerge, accompanied by the quiet, frightened, questioning yips of the tired fur balls with them.

  The whole pack nuzzles them, sniffing them and licking away the smoke and sour cherry and kerosene. When they are done caring for the pups, the adults circle around and begin the long keening. Without quite knowing why, the pups join in, mourning our dead.

  “We are,” they say, “less.”

  I can’t mourn. I don’t have time. The crumpled man in the center of the Clearing is going to die if I don’t get him sheltered. I push my nose under his head. Get up, damn it. Get up. He mumbles something but doesn’t move. I fasten my teeth to his jacket and start to drag him, pulling and fighting for every stupid inch across the Clearing.

  Then starts the hard part—bumping him over the crowded, uneven ground toward our cabin. He lifts his hand. “One minute,” he says. But that’s what people say when they’re about to give in to cold and exhaustion, so to hell with your minute. I snap at his finger and start to pull him again.

  “No, I know. I just mean give me a minute to get up. That’s all.” He pushes up from the ground with his good hand and stumbles precariously. I move closer, and he braces against me, using my shoulders to push himself upright.

  Behind us, the trail of his blood stands out bright against the moonlit snow.

  We hobble slowly, the two of us, through dark paths until I see our cabin deep in the woods and Ti slows.

  He staggers those last few rough feet up the stairs and in through the door. As soon as the door closes, he collapses. I drag all the pillows and blankets and towels and pile them around and over him, like a snow nest, then curl my small body around my mate’s big shivering one. He holds his pierced and broken hand to his chest. Tristan will have to see to it later, but for now, I lick at it gently, carefully cleaning away the embedded rust and dirt.

  I can’t sleep, worried about Ti. Listening to the Great Hall collapse around its burned timbers. Listening to the coyotes calling for their packmates to eat our dead.

  Hearing John’s last words to me: “Death and the Iron Moon wait for no wolf.”

&n
bsp; Ti wakes with a shudder in the middle of the night. When I move my paw gently against his shoulder, his glowing eyes find mine, and he sighs. I don’t know what he was dreaming, but he smiles at me sadly before crawling toward the kitchen.

  The water runs. Ti opens a cupboard, and when he comes back, collapsing once again into the pillow nest, his face is damp. He is silent for a long time, but by the rise and fall of his chest, I know he isn’t sleeping.

  “Carrion and steel.” Ti’s voice is halt and slurred. “That’s what it smelled like. My father’s compound. I’d never noticed it before. I doubt my father did either. It was just the smell of our lives.”

  He grunts in pain as he shifts his hips, trying to get comfortable. I sniff at his back to see if he’s bleeding here too. “S’ok, Sil. Just broke something. Rib, I think.” He shuffles one more time and stops. “But it isn’t. It’s the smell of human life. There was no wood or earth or grass or rain. No blood or bone. Nothing that I recognize now as wild. That’s how I knew that my father—that all the Shifters—were gone.”

  He turns his face to my fur, taking long, gulping breaths like a drowning man. “I needed this,” he says, his breath heating my skin. “I need this.”

  Ti tracked the scent of Shifters north. But his failure to fall into the trap August had left at the compound had clearly made his father nervous. He added more Shifter guards, because while everyone knew the rumor that no one ever escaped August Leveraux, only August knew the truth. That no one ever escaped Tiberius.

  It was on the side of the James Bay Road that August opened the blackened window of his car and tossed out an apple core. And Ti shot him above the bulletproof vest and below the Kevlar helmet.

  Then it was the Shifters’ turn to hunt Ti. There were too many, and he’d been going for too long, and when they caught him, they were not…gentle. That’s what he said. Not…gentle. More than once, he thought he was dying. He said his mind clung to the vision of the silver wolf leaping from the rock overhang into the night-black water of Clear Pond. Clung to the knowledge that whatever happened to him, he had saved her. Saved me.

  He didn’t die, though. Instead, he woke up tied again to the overgrown chain-link fence where he’d spent the Iron Moons of his childhood, while Leary shoved papers at him: postdated, transferring controlling interest in the Trust once the Pack was gone. When Ti refused, Leary had him secured to a fence post with a spike through his left hand. “Not just any spike. A dog spike. Even before he said my father’s name, I knew he was somehow alive, because there is nothing that man likes better than torture with a side of irony.

  “I’d saved nothing.”

  * * *

  There is no Iron Moon Table when we change back, because we have no table, no roof, no walls. Nothing is left of the Great Hall but blackened wood around the ruin of the main fireplace. Digging through the wreckage, the pups find a few kitchen pots and three first-kill skulls.

  And the Eolh pen, protected in its cracked coffee mug.

  YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.

  IT’S AN ALPHA THING.

  It is not in the nature of the Pack to accept change quietly, but for now, the Alphas of the other echelons gather with Evie in the Meeting House. I found Tara and explained to her as best I could how Tiberius came to be in the company of a small army of Shifters and humans. I didn’t know what to make of her expression as she promised to explain to the Alphas and disappeared through the door of the Meeting House.

  There’s nothing for us to do but wait, even though Ti desperately needs food and medical attention. He weaves unsteadily against my shoulder until Tara pushes back through the door and signals to us.

  I help him up.

  All the Alphas are standing, ignoring the chairs as resolutely as the Year of First Shoes. No Alpha—not Eudemos with his broken leg, nor Evie with her broken heart and body still weak from her lying-in—will sit. Now more than ever, we cannot coddle weakness.

  Evie stares out the window and doesn’t move when we come in. The forest starts a few yards out, but I think her focus is beyond it, on the empty place where she left John’s body.

  “So, Shifter,” she says eventually. “You betrayed us after all.”

  “Yes,” he says, and just like in the Clearing, he doesn’t defend himself.

  “I told you that the second I knew you were lying to us, I would rip your throat out.” Her finger caresses the braid hidden below the collar of her shirt. “What’s to stop me from doing it now?”

  “Nothing, Alpha.”

  The other Alphas stand ready, muscles taut, hands on seaxes, eyes on Evie. We don’t use the Meeting House often, so the space is cold and thin clouds stream from their nostrils like so many dragons. All it would take is one word, one gesture, from Evie, and Tiberius would be ripped to pieces.

  All we have to defend ourselves are words, but Tara’s already talked to the Alphas, and clearly they aren’t in the mood for words. I know wolves when they’re in this frame of mind, when listening is hard and acting is so easy.

  Pivoting on my heel, I grab at Tristan’s seax, because the 5th’s Alpha knows my secret, and I know he would never hurt the tiny bodies inside me. The other Alphas, though… They whip their blades out, their thighs coiled and ready to pounce. Ti pulls me against his chest, his wounded hand crushing me to his chest, his other arm shielding my head.

  “Do what you need to with me,” he croaks, his voice raw and shredded. “But not her. Don’t touch her.”

  He freezes as the sharp blade of Tristan’s seax whispers against his throat. He searches my face with those black-and-gold eyes I love so much.

  Trust me, min coren. Trust that I see you at your most vulnerable. And I will not hurt you.

  Still holding my gaze, Ti lets go and stretches his arms wide like a crucifixion.

  Tristan is a doctor and keeps his blade sharp and clean, so when I strike, it splits Ti’s shirt easily down the middle. A button skitters across the floor.

  Now every eye is on us. Except for Evie. She never looks away from the ice-laced window in front of her.

  Ti hates the pity and the “tragic faces.” He’s always been so careful not to phase in front of the Pack. But I need them to understand that Ti is not just another Shifter, that this is not just another Shifter betrayal.

  “John told me that if Ti lied to himself about what he was, he was going to lie to us. And he was right—you were right, Evie—Ti did lie to us.”

  Ti tries to cover his neck, but I pull his hand away. “But he didn’t just wake up one morning and decide he didn’t want to be Pack. It took years to break him. Every Iron Moon, when we need to be wild, when he needed to be wild, his father collared him. Those scars are the marks of a wolf trying to get free.

  “Imagine how you would feel if you spent the three days out of every month that are most sacred to us chained to a fence like a dog. Would you really still believe that your other wild self was holy and deserved to be cherished above everything else? It wasn’t until he came here that he understood, and then he did everything he could to protect us. He tried to stop his father, and when that failed, when they tried to kill him”—my voice falters as I brush the wrist above Ti’s pierced hand—“when they hammered a spike through his palm, he refused to betray us.”

  The Alphas look again toward Evie. Her back is still stiff, but their posture has become more tentative, the posture of wolves waiting not for a command but for guidance.

  “He could have just taken one of their cars and run, but he didn’t, even though he knew the Pack would blame him for what had happened. Yes, he lied to us at first, but in the end, he did everything he could to save us.”

  Evie puts her hand to the window and smiles weakly at someone outside. Seeping through the windows come the rough-and-tumble sounds of pups playing in the snow.

  “Alpha,” says the last voice I expect to hear. “I
did not lose as much as you did. Still, Solveig was my shielder, my friend, and my Alpha. My echelon,” Eudemos continues, “now looks to me for guidance. But I have an echelon, one that includes Silver and Tiberius. The Great North Pack lost four wolves, and the only reason we are here to mourn them is that Tiberius fought for us.

  “Wolves killed five, but this man, this wolf, killed the rest.”

  Tristan moves toward Evie and stands beside her, whispering urgently. Our Alpha starts. “Silver?” she says. When I head toward her, Ti limps out in front, still trying to shield me. “Not him. I don’t want to see him,” Evie says to the window.

  I draw Ti’s worried face to mine, stretching as tall as I can so he can lean into my lips without having to bend his broken body. Then I stand before my Alpha, my head down.

  Evie breathes in my scent and holds it inside her. She hesitates only a minute before folding herself in half, her cheek sliding against mine. Marking me. Because she is a good wolf and will be a great Alpha, and she knows her duty to the four new lives that will never fill the holes ripped in our Pack, but might someday patch them.

  “Deemer,” she says, turning for the door. “He must be punished; I leave it to you to decide what is fit.” Then she leaves. It will be a long time before she can bring herself to look at Ti or say his name.

  When Tiberius has healed, he will take the stone like I did. But where I was marked with the Tiw, to remind me to uphold the law, Ti will be marked with the Ur rune to remind him to cherish the wild.

  Epilogue

  This moon is the last Iron Moon before my lying-in. I am still carrying quadruplets. Our doctors always advise culling if there are more than three.

  I finally told Ti, and he stood with me while Tristan and Gabi let him know all the possible complications. He held my hand when I said no to culling. The one they wanted to cull was, of course, a runt.