by Maria Vale
What does cold taste like?
My tongue flickers into his mouth. I take from him the taste of rock and air and ice, without all that extraneous life. The earth stripped bare. It’s not enough, though, and his lips move closer, ticklish and electric, sending tremors through my neck and chest, sparking the mangled nerves of my clawing, and igniting my body’s core. When I ease against him, he slides his other hand around my lower back, pressing hard so that when his mouth surges against mine, I feel the involuntary spasm of the thick ridge pressed against my hips. I push back, the bone of my hip against a muscle that might as well be bone.
His mouth clashes against mine. Neither of us have experience, not of this, and our teeth clash. I bite his tongue and taste blood. His groan vibrates against my lips as he turns his head so he can slide deeper, painting my mouth with the taste of copper. I suck at it, warm and beating and alive.
His hand touches my ruined breast, not tentatively but encompassing the hard ridge and the soft furrows in between, and where the nerves don’t join up properly, it feels like lightning.
I freeze.
Eyulf’s forehead drops to mine. “Varya?” he asks.
My eyes fall to the long, pale fingers stretched across the darker skin of my breast.
“He can’t look at me. Lorcan. After all these years, he looks away until my back is to him. So he won’t see.”
One hand slides around my waist. “I don’t know what his problem is, but I see you, Varya.” His eyes focus on my chest. “I feel you. Varya.” His hand traces every naked inch of the path carved by Illarion’s claws all those years ago.
“I want you,” he exhales. “Varya.”
Then…then he bends down, pushing his hair to the side, and takes my torn nipple into his mouth. My hand slides against the back of his head. At first, I mean to pull him away, but as he explores with the top of his tongue and the even softer, silkier swirl of the underside, I push him closer instead.
This has nothing to do with the quick and dutiful fucks that fulfill my responsibility to the Pack. Unfamiliar heat tears through my veins, making my body warm and liquid. Fitted to his. One damaged, awkwardly healed wolf to another.
He shifts and closes the distance between us, thigh against thigh, hip to hip, hand to shoulder, to waist. He smells musky and green, more like the bright spice of coriander than Lorcan’s crude rutting buck.
My mind, which has always been divided between then and now, is suddenly completely present.
I growl deep in my chest and feel the answering rumble in his. His hands glide down my back to cup under my ass and pull me in and up. The ridge of his cock pressing between my legs. I drag him down to the rock, which softens and warms under the heat of my thawing chill. Someone else might need a softer spot, the dry, thick, fragrant floor beneath the firs, but not us.
He touches my hair and runs his hand down my naked body. It feels like water. I touch him, too, try to pull him closer. I need him inside, I need him to fill me, really fill me. Not like wolves whose filling has always left me feeling emptier than before. I need him to leave a part of himself inside me.
Supporting himself on strong arms, he shifts his leg between my thighs and spreads me open.
His hair falls down on either side, and I am grateful to be shielded when he comes to me, when he enters me, when I knife my hips, forcing him further in, and then he does, driving deep and hard through that break in my shield, and touches the ache that is at the very center of myself.
I stay awake long into the night, listening to all the riotous sounds of Homelands.
I turn away, so as not to wake him and whisper my own chorus.
Listen to me. Look at me. Love me. Make life with me.
* * *
I have always been on guard when I sleep, waking fully alert at the slightest noise or smell or shadow that doesn’t belong. Never waking up like this: slowly, uncertain about where I am and what I’ve done and whose cold skin and hot blood is entwined with my body. I stare at the pale arm crooked across my torso, the hand stroking the scars that have defined me for so long.
Everything I am belongs to the Pack, except for this. This one thing belongs to me.
“It’s called a Clifrung. A clawing.”
His finger follows a single line. “You don’t have to tell me,” he says.
“I know I don’t. I’ve never told anyone, not really, because I didn’t care if they understood. But you are…”
What is he, Varya? He’s not your mate, your bedfellow. He’s not even part of your pack.
No, but he is the holder of my secret self, and I lay my cheek on his cool skin. “I had a shielder once,” I whisper. “His name was Mitya.”
“What is a shielder?”
“Just what it sounds like. I’m a shielder now. To Lorcan, but pups have shielders, too, mostly to help hunt and protect us during the change. Mine was a white wolf. Like you. The only other one I’ve ever known.”
His chin settles against the top of my head.
“But Mitya was more than that, more than a shielder. This was before the Great North. On that island in the Arctic that no one cares much about anymore. The humans had set a bounty of one hundred rubles for every wolf head. They said it was one hundred dollars, but it wasn’t. More like ten, but ten dollars was enough. I don’t know when it started, but I’d never known a time when we weren’t hunted, and it made my pack very…hard.”
There’s something prickly in a depression in the rock under my back.
“Except for Mitya. He was gentle and unspoiled, the only gentle and unspoiled thing on that island, and I did everything I could to protect that in him.”
“Did you love him?” Eyulf asks, his fingers moving up and softly picking away something in my hair.
“Mitya had hope and kindness in him, and because I needed that so badly, I needed him. I’d never needed anything more. Is that love? I don’t know. Maybe it is.”
He smooths my hair back down.
“I was the strongest of the young wolves, and Illarion, our Alpha, tried to give me a more powerful shielder, but I refused. What he never understood, they never understood, was how much strength it took to be gentle in a place like that. Anyone could be hard and bitter, and I knew that without Mitya, that’s exactly what would happen to me.”
Eyulf doesn’t say anything. I’m glad. I’m not sure I’d be able to continue if he did.
“The juveniles were the worst. They were desperate and angry, and they took it out on Mitya. Tried to. But I was desperate and angry, too, and when I got angry, something happened. Everything dropped away, and I was beyond pain, fear, obedience. A wolf who knows no pain, no fear, and no obedience is a terrible thing. So they became afraid of me.”
I move slightly, dislodging that thing that’s been digging into my back. A sweet-gum pod.
“It must have been almost exactly this time in our last year as pups, when the adults went hunting and Mitya howled. I don’t know why. He knew better than that. We all knew better than that. We knew it would frighten off prey and attract hunters. I’d never heard a wolf howl in Vrangelya. Ever.
“We all ran, hiding like scared rabbits wherever we could. And you know what happened? Absolutely nothing. No planes, no guns, no hunters. And because no one got hurt, I thought there would be no consequences. I was proud of him even. He’d been a real wolf and howled.
“But there were always consequences in Vrangelya, and the next morning when I woke up, Mitya and Illarion were both gone.
“There was so much threatening us… I hadn’t understood how easily the Pack would sacrifice individuals to protect the whole. I understand better now, but I didn’t then. Anyway, the Beta said Mitya would not be coming back. That the Pack could not afford to coddle him any longer, and besides, summer was coming and would bring more hunters, and we didn’t need a white wolf standing o
ut like a beacon against the dark gray of our island.”
Rubbing my cheek against Eyulf’s chest, I twine a strand of his white hair around my finger.
“I did, though. I needed that beacon against the dark. Then Illarion came back, and I don’t remember much after that. Just the blood drying on the underside of his muzzle and the world dropping away.
“I don’t think he took me seriously at first—he’d never watched us fight—then he did and fought for real. I wasn’t even a juvenile, yet I almost killed our Alpha.
“I had to be punished. They held me down while Illarion clawed me. After, no one was allowed to care for me so that the wound would leave scars and I would be marked forever as Wearg. Bloodthirsty. Outlaw. A savage, doomed to a short life outside the Pack. What they didn’t know was it was already too late. It was the beginning of the end.”
“But you survived?”
“I don’t mean the end of me. That wouldn’t have mattered, and that’s not what happened. It was the beginning of the end of Pack Vrangelya. Because of me, the Pack lost faith in Illarion, but there was no one stronger to take his place. Because of me, when death was outside, there was no order inside. Because of me, when the summer ended, there were no more wolves.”
I suck at my teeth with a soft tchck.
“The irony, if you can call it that, was that I survived because I was less of a target alone than I would have been as part of the Pack. That and because the hunters were humans. They didn’t eat what they killed, and I learned not to be picky.”
I look down at my hands. “They wasted so much death.”
Eyulf touches my skin, softly stroking it. His hand runs like water down my jaw and my neck to the spot between my breasts that feels not like it is cracked but broken wide open. He holds his palm tight against my heart, as though he understands that something has to be done to stanch the bleeding.
Chapter 29
There are many kennings for wolves in the Old Tongue. Some come from Pack, who needed ways to talk about us that kept our secrets from humans. Some come from humans, who feared conjuring wolves by saying the name outright. Which left us with, among others:
The bitch of wounds (my own personal favorite)
Mountain’s enemy
Night prowler
War lynx
The hound of the roaring sea of the dead
Evening rider
Fenrir’s spawn
The dog of blood
Sharp-eyed death dealers of the forest
The untamed dog of Sif
Gray heath-walker
Guardian of the marches
and
Wealdgast
Forest spirit.
If I am the Bitch of Wounds, Eyulf is the Forest Spirit. Even when he is doing something as completely human as drawing, he imbues everything with the Wealdgast. He gives a beech bud’s coppery scale weight and significance. He gives the mighty Norþdæl lightness and fragility.
In his hand, nothing in Homelands is expendable. And nothing is invulnerable.
He feels the subtlest pulse of the land. The thickness of the air and the curvature of sound and the shift of clayey soil. When I ask him about it, he shrugs and says only that it’s intuition.
Maybe, but I believe this “intuition” is really the distillation of years of experience as a lone wolf and in hiding. It has become so deeply ingrained that he is no longer aware of where it comes from.
What distracts him from the tiny beginnings of trillium that he had been nosing? Why do his ears start twisting and turning until he takes a step south and turns to look at me so I know to follow? It’s only after we’ve been running for a while that I finally hear the unusual quiet of the animals of Homelands.
That’s when we see him. A human warmly dressed in dark clothes with a backpack and a big grease-stained canvas tool bag slung over his shoulder with a long drill bit sticking out the back. Black scopes, attached to a convoluted array of straps crisscrossing his skull, stick up from his forehead.
The man has come back with his traps, and he knows he’s trespassing. If he didn’t, he’d’ve spared the expense of night-vision goggles and just used a flashlight.
He looks around to the front and the side but never to the back. That’s where I run, taking his scent onto my face. My shoulders shake with the painful desire to rip open his skin, to crush his windpipe, to tear out his entrails and feed on his liver. But instead, I do what wolves always do.
Lawyer up.
Josi’s gone hunting with her echelon. However, I track Elijah to the human’s cabin. “I’m busy, dammit!” he yells as soon as I open the door. Pulling the sweat- and seed-soaked blankets off with my teeth, I shove my westend-scented muzzle into his nose.
“What is it?” the human asks.
“Hunter,” Elijah says, kissing her hard before he pulls on his pants. He rearranges his stiff cock. “Oh no you don’t, Thea. I’ll be right back.”
The human doesn’t respond, simply continues to get dressed, and Elijah Sorensson, one of the most powerful fighters of the Great North, purses his mouth, silent as this little female throws on two additional layers. The only time she looks at him is before slipping on her holster. When he shakes his head, she puts it away again. Dark-green coat with a badge on the front and arm. She doesn’t comb out her hair, just ties it under a cap that has a badge on it as well.
Bright-yellow vest that says Police.
In case anyone has any doubts.
I head out the door, my claws clicking on the wooden porch and steps, then trot into the wind blowing in from the mountains. There are a lot of trees and branches downed by winter storms. The Pack will collect these later for firewood, but for now, they are too wet and combine with the endless mud to make the already difficult terrain much harder to traverse. When one pair of boots falls behind, I ignore it. I do not wait for humans.
At the edge of the woods, invisible to the hunter but close enough to see, Thea Villalobos catches up with me, breathing hard, her hair rimmed with sweat that glistens in the low, long afternoon light. My ears circle and my nose flares as I try to search out Elijah.
“He’s not used to this kind of mud on two legs,” she says. “I’ll take it from here.” Then without waiting for Elijah, she squares her shoulders, hooks her thumb through her belt loop, and hikes out across the soggy ground, heading directly for a man who certainly has a gun.
As much as I disapprove of Elijah’s choice, she has a right to be here. Not like the man who trapped the coyote and left her to suffer in the hopes of catching something bigger.
Keeping low, I parallel her in the lengthening near-night shadows of the forest.
“Hello, sir,” she calls loudly. “My name is Thea Villalobos. I’m the environmental conservation officer for this area. May I see your license?”
I dodge from the forest to the remains of a waterlogged spruce, to a Labrador tea, still holding on to its scruffy folded leaves. I settle in to watch. Or kill.
The man wipes a gloved finger under his nose. “You got some ID on you?”
Thea doesn’t argue, just takes a little wallet from her jacket and opens it for him.
He looks from the picture to the woman herself. “Thea Villalobos. What kind of name is that?”
“The name of the ECO for this area,” she says coldly. “Your license.”
He fishes out his wallet and hands her a piece of paper. Thea looks at it and takes a picture with her phone.
“Mr. Anderson,” she says, handing the license back to him. “What are you trapping for?”
“Beaver.”
“Season’s just about over.”
“Just about means it’s not.”
“Hmm-hmm. What size trap are you using?”
“Usual.”
“Looks like a sixteen. Four seems about right for
beaver.”
“You do it your way, I do it my way.”
“I’m afraid that’s not the way it works. Because there is no right way to trap on posted land.”
“Is it posted?” he says, staring right into her eyes. “I didn’t see any signs.”
“I think you did. I think you did last time too. Because last time, you set your duffel next to the post holding that sign that you didn’t see, and because you took the wheels off the duffel, it makes a very distinctive imprint in the snow. Like this.”
She holds up her phone again, showing it to him. His mouth thins. “So now, Mr. Anderson, maybe you can tell me what you keep looking for on private land with night-vision goggles and a bear trap.”
His face is red, the color of a man who has spent his whole life hunting for slights and finding them.
“There is something going on up here. These people, they buy up all the land they can. And they don’t do anything with it, right? They don’t take care of it, don’t clear any paths. They don’t put in drainage, don’t cut down trees. Don’t plant a fucking flower. Nothing. You know why I think? Because they don’t want people up here. Because they’re hiding something.”
“And what do you think they’re hiding?”
“Let me show you something.” His hand slides to his lapel. My legs coil, ready to spring, until he takes out a phone. I don’t trust this man.
“Look at that.”
Thea strips her glove and looks. She swipes at it with her bare fingers. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing.”
“Right there!” says Anderson, jabbing his finger into the air above the screen. “That print is nearly twice the size of my hand. That is the print of a fucking monster. Now do you see?”
“You know what I see, Mr. Anderson? I see two things: a fine example of the kind of distortion that happens to coyote tracks with snowmelt. And a great deal of blood and fur and suffering caused by a pattern of trespass on private land.”
“And here’s what I see: a fucking public servant policing private land.” He stands too close, trying to intimidate Thea, but aside from a slight shift to plant her feet more firmly, she does nothing.