Forever Wolf

by Maria Vale

  At the end of the hall is a living room with a high cathedral ceiling and plate-glass windows that extend from floor to ceiling. The scrupulously clean glass looks out over a low, perpetually leaden sky that meets the sage-gray scrub and the vast expanse of water beyond.

  It’s like entering a dream of my childhood. The beach of pebbles, rough waves, tough sedges extending to the ocean. It is a hard landscape, the mating of glacier and rock and sea, infused with the damp salt and sand and cold smell so reminiscent of Vrangelya.

  The room itself is not as big as the Great Hall, but that is crowded with tables for hundreds of wolves, sofas and shelves and baskets of wood and kindling. This is a vast white-carpeted emptiness surrounding a U-shaped pale-gray sofa. A young man sits on the sofa, a mug pressed to his cheek as he stares into a fireplace with a “fire” that is smooth and regular and silent and odorless.

  “Magnus!” Lucian yells.

  The young man startles.

  Without warning, Constantine lashes out as fast as a copperhead’s strike. All I hear is the snap of skin against bone. All I see is Lucian cradling his cheek.

  “You fucking lunatic. I swear to god if you broke my face, I will kill you in your sleep.”

  “Told you not to talk to Magnus.” Constantine wipes the back of his knuckles against his shirt.

  This is a very badly run pack.

  Lucian rams the gun into my back. Happily, it is aimed at my lung, instead of my spine as it was before.

  I clench my thigh, feeling the metal bar dig hard into my leg.

  “Door,” Lucian snaps.

  After a moment of looking around for a coaster, Magnus puts his coffee cup next to the fireplace and runs to the door. When he opens it, his jacket swings back, showing his own holster. Three Shifters with three guns.

  We step out under a bare metal trellis onto an expanse of small, smooth pebbles neatly arranged in tiny furrows. They are gold-toned and not native to this place, which means that August Leveraux, who lives in a place of nothing but rocks, imported even more. A razor-wire-topped cement wall circles everything, leading all the way down to the ocean and in, until it finally disappears under the waves.

  The gun in my back directs me along a flat stone path leading toward the back. A Shifter is busily raking away the tracks left by a car in the pebbles. He has short-cropped red hair.

  “Antony,” Lucian says, and the Shifter sets his rake against a gate of overlapping steel plates, taking up a gun instead. Even inside this fortress, they are all armed.

  Halfway along this windowless length facing the gate, I hear them. A soft whimper of tiny swallowed barks. The sound of pups who are alone and terrified. Without thinking, I rush forward, until Lucian wraps his hand in my hair, jamming the gun tighter against my back.

  Then I see them. Our pups attached by chains to the metal trellis, each tiny neck circled with a prong collar, miniature versions of the one Silver used to torture Adrian. The chains are so short that they can’t lie down. Even worse, the chains are too short for the pups to touch each other.

  I lurch forward, dropping to the ground in front of Sigeburg. Lucian loses his balance and his grip on my hair just long enough for me to touch Sigeburg’s little face. Each of the other pups makes an achingly quiet bark, begging to be reassured. Nothing like the loud demands they make at Homelands where that reassurance is their birthright.

  Lucian grabs my hair again, but I snarl deep in my chest as I shuffle along the line, marking the other frightened pups.

  Then I hear a wheeze and a bump and a monotone vibration.

  “You really are just dogs, aren’t you?”

  Chapter 43

  I had heard five sets of footsteps, but there aren’t five Shifters: there are six. It’s hard to imagine that the thin man in the wheelchair, with his withered, dark-russet skin wrapped in layer after layer of thick clothing against the weather, is Tiberius’s father.

  Except for the shape of his eyes, which must have once been beautiful. Maybe when he seduced poor Mala, who was so alone and so vulnerable. But I know this is August Leveraux, because the “exclusively designed” clothes smell like him. That, and because Tiberius shot him through the throat and failed to kill him.

  The Shifter eyes me coldly, then lifts his chin, and Lucian jerks me up to one knee. I tighten my thigh muscle holding the metal bar.

  “Romulus,” August gasps and another Shifter standing behind him wheels him closer. He is—or was—larger than I originally thought and wears the appraising expression of a man who is used to power.

  He takes several deep breaths and holds out his hand.

  Bad hunters see prey, then give chase immediately. Good hunters observe prey before giving chase. Learn which are sick, which are old. Which are aggressive, which are hesitant. Lucian would shoot me without a second thought, but he is sloppy and angry. Constantine is more dangerous but also conflicted. He watches Magnus with a worried eye.

  Romulus shakes out a clean, sharply ironed handkerchief from a pile of them on a low table and hands it to August. August holds it over his neck with two hands, then coughs several times, dabbing at his throat before handing the handkerchief back.

  “I need grandchildren,” he says once he catches his breath. “Don’t want pets.”

  I look slowly and deliberately at the five men waiting on him.

  “Then why do you have so many of them?”

  For some reason, that makes him laugh, then cough, and Magnus grimaces while making ready with another clean handkerchief.

  “Who are you? Not my son’s mate. Not the runt that idiot human was sent to pick up. We retrieved the money, by the way, so I suppose we should thank you for that.”

  “I would do nothing for you.”

  “I didn’t mean you specifically. You were indisposed. I meant your Pack. The Great North.” He says Great with elaborate sarcasm, because he doesn’t understand that they are not Great and Vast or Great and Powerful, but Deore, Great and Precious.

  “They ripped open his car. Him too. That goes without saying.” He drags his clawed hand across his abdomen, tracing almost exactly the path of my clawing. “Didn’t eat him though. Just left his bits and pieces littering up the woods. Very confused”—he gasps for air—“about that particular law.”

  Who killed the dogcatcher? The Great North would never have done something like that Offland. It’s too dangerous. And they certainly wouldn’t have left the body where anyone could find it.

  “Poor old Daniel. He ended up being eaten by rats. Did you know that? Rats. Such an undignified end.” Clearing his throat, he turns toward the Shifter with the cropped red hair. “Antony, you wouldn’t let me be eaten by rats, would you?”

  “Never, August. Never.”

  A cruel smile plays across August’s lips. “But you are planning to outlive me, is that it?”

  Antony quickly becomes flustered. “No, I didn’t mean that. I meant that if somehow I did, I wouldn’t… I…”

  Unlike our Alphas, who control by a combination of discipline, example, and sacrifice, August controls by force and whim and keeping his followers unbalanced and unsure.

  “What is your name, bitch?” August says.

  I can’t stand the sound of my name on Lorcan’s lips. I’m certainly not going to give it to August.

  The gun shoves hard against my temple.

  “Answer him. What’s your name, bitch?”

  “You’re not offending me by calling me ‘bitch.’ I am a female wolf. ‘Bitch’ is just what I am. Call me ‘girl,’ though, and I will eat your tongue.”

  The gun is now under the slope of my skull. “What is your fucking name?”

  “I am the Alpha Shielder of the 12th Echelon of the Great North Pack.”

  “Ah, a bitch with a title.”

  “Wolves don’t have titles, Shifter. We have respon
sibilities.”

  I tighten my leg again to feel the metal bar against my skin, reminding me that when the time comes, I have more than soft, stubby fingers and flat little teeth.

  “You’re not from the Great North originally, are you? If I had to guess by your accent, I’d say…Russia? There were two Packs at the end, weren’t there? Sakha and… What was the other one? Randall’s?”

  Once upon a time, they had both been great packs, with many wolves and vast territories, but now they are nothing, just one more thing tossed in the rubbish bin of inexactly remembered trivia. “Wrangel Island. The Pack was Vrangelya.”

  “Well, gone now. Like Sakha. Like Nunavut. Like Osdalen. All gone. What makes you think the Great North will survive?”

  The heat that has been prickling at the back of my neck spreads down over my chest. If I were wild, my hackles would be raised and they would know I was about to strike, but August doesn’t notice. Even now, he’s a man in love with his own voice. “Chimpanzees and humans once shared a common ancestor. But one chose to stay in the trees, and the other chose to evolve. It is the same with us.” He is interrupted by another series of short coughs. “We share that common ancestor, but at some point our paths branched. We suppressed our more bestial instincts; you indulged them, worshipped them. Move out of the way,” he snaps at Romulus. “I can’t see.”

  The Shifter scampers out of August’s sight line.

  “There was only one difficulty. Our ability to reproduce has slowed, but I had barely joined to Mala when she became pregnant. My son hardly touched the little runt when she conceived. We are dying out because we can’t reproduce. You are dying out because you are hunted. I was proposing a way forward for both of us.”

  “It might help if you had females.”

  “My wife is not the one kneeling on the ground with a gun to her head. We keep our women safe,” he says. “You’ve lost how many? Three females? Four? Because you put them at the front lines. We have lost none. Our women are our most precious commodity.”

  “Commodity? Does a commodity have a choice? Or is it like the ‘choice’ you gave the Great North, which was none at all.”

  He slaps his hand against the padded arm of his chair. The weak, muffled sound of a once-strong arm infuriates him more.

  “I will not be made the villain here,” he snaps.

  Isn’t that what every villain tells themselves? No matter how overwhelming the evidence—our home invaded, our wolves dead, a gun shoved into my head, his own grandchildren being strangled by prong collars—but no, he’s not the villain.

  His coughing gets worse, and the other Shifters look nervously at one another. Romulus readies more clean handkerchiefs.

  “There is no room for wolves in this world,” he says. “And it is time for you, for them”—he points to the four pups who cringe behind me—“to accept it.” He expels a long wheezing breath. “Don’t doubt my will. Tiberius may have been born like you, but I made him a man. It took years, but I made him human.”

  I look at him, not with a casual glance but with an Alpha stare. August narrows his eyes but doesn’t look away. “I saw your son. Right before your dogcatcher took me. He was with his pups. Letting them play with his tail, grooming them. Then he left to go hunting with his mate. For rabbits, I think. Or maybe voles. Whatever you think of your will, it took the least of our wolves a few weeks to undo everything.

  “He is,” I say and mean it, “a glorious wolf.”

  August begins to cough again, and now it won’t stop. He hacks and hacks, unable to catch a breath. The noise worries the already anxious pups behind me. But it terrifies the Shifters. I can feel it in the hesitation of Lucian’s gun.

  “Mynaþ, guðlingas,” I whisper, “þæt ge beoþ.”

  Remember, little warriors, what you are.

  I feel for the metal bar at my waistband.

  Chapter 44

  And freeze.

  Constantine has pulled Magnus back against the wall of the house. Romulus is searching for another handkerchief, the muzzle of Lucian’s gun vibrates slightly, and somewhere in my hunter’s mind sorting through all of it comes something that they would never understand. Something carried on a wind that smells of sand and decaying seaweed. Clean stone and petrichor, the mineral, electric scent of a storm.

  The cold is coming.

  The cold is here.

  I tighten my grip on the metal rod and bend forward, just as that cold slices like a knife through the air. Lucian stares at the hot intestines in his hands and starts to scream.

  Romulus hesitates. Then fumbles around, looking for the thing he hadn’t seen or smelled that just tore through Lucian’s guts. As his hand starts toward his jacket, the metal bar breaks his skull.

  Eyulf tears off Antony’s hand holding the gun, and the Shifter stumbles to his knees, tracking big, lurching circles in blood on the stone.

  Leveraux opens his mouth, gurgling and coughing for help. Magnus takes one uncertain step forward, but Constantine whispers something and pulls him back.

  A good kill is a kill that happens quickly. And that is what I give August Leveraux. I won’t say that I don’t feel some satisfaction at the crunch and snap of the metal bar when it slams through the gap in the wool and through the gap in August Leveraux’s throat. It slides quickly through soft tissue and bits of bone until it meets the resistance of the back of his wheelchair. The fear and surprise in his eyes start to fade as I hold on to the chair with one hand and twist. Unlike his son, who tried but failed to kill him, I will not leave him alive to haunt us.

  The chair rolls back a few feet and bumps to a stop against the trellis’s metal supports.

  I wrench the metal bar out and lurch toward Constantine, whose gun is trained on my snarling, blood-spattered white wolf.

  “I don’t want to shoot him, but he has to stand down. I told you, I am not your enemy. If you want to get out of here, you’ll need a car. So I’m going to put the gun away”—he slides the gun slowly back in its holster—“and Magnus will get it.”

  As soon as Constantine’s holster snaps closed, I throw myself at Eyulf, rubbing my face into his fur, taking his markings over and over again. He drops his muzzle to my shoulder and makes a strangled sound deep in his chest while I hide my face in his fur.

  Solveig lets out a squeaky, questioning ooowooow. Eyulf growls over my shoulder at Constantine, who is heading toward the pups.

  “I just want to take the collars off,” he says. “You need to push here.” He shoves his pinkie into a slightly larger link, and with a quiet snick, it loosens enough to slide over Sigeburg’s head.

  Leaning into her shoulders, the pup growls angrily at the collar. Then she holds up her tail and her head and, with that lurching martinet trot of the littlest pups, marches over to where her grandfather sits crumpled in his chair, his arm dangling loosely over the armrest, blood funneling from his throat.

  She sniffs the dark puddle, then squats down, marking it. Finally, she turns and scrapes dismissively at the cold stone with her hind paws. One by one, her littermates do the same until the spreading sea of bright-red Shifter blood is marbled with gold wolf piss.

  A mechanized whirr and the scrape of metal against stone and the pleas of the wounded and dying Shifters. Still, my wolf leaps forward, shoulders high, head down, a growl of anticipation rumbling through his chest. I hold the metal bar at my shoulder, ready. Behind us, my pack of four fearsome pups lines up.

  “Just the car. There should be water and clothes for him.” He points to Eyulf with his chin. Magnus hops out, a phone and prepaid card in his extended hand. I am struck suddenly by the overwhelming feeling that he doesn’t belong here.

  “There’s still time, Alpha Shielder of the 12th Echelon of the Great North. Not a lot, but maybe it’s enough.”

  As soon as the last of the pups is in the back, Eyulf jumps in after them.
I throw the stack of neatly folded handkerchiefs in and pull the door closed. Then I start the engine, my foot itching to hit the gas and take my wolves home.

  Just as the gate begins to close, I roll down the window and look toward the gaunt Shifter in the rearview mirror.

  “Varya,” I call to Constantine. “My name is Varya Timursdottir.”

  Chapter 45

  Do Offlanders ever get used to driving?

  Do they get used to hurtling through space, insulated from sounds and smells by glass and metal and speed? Do they ever get used to the way everything zips past unnoticed and unnoticeable? I never will.

  Unsure what Canadians would think of a wolf on the A-20, Eyulf stays in the back with the pups, shifting while we are still on the relatively deserted back roads surrounding August Leveraux’s compound.

  The pups crawl back and forth over his roiling body, sniffing every corner of him and marking him as their own. They do it to all of us, their sharp claws slipping and sliding across our skin. Now they do it to him. I keep peering into the rearview mirror, desperate for everything I thought I’d lost. The hollow voice, the sharp face, the pale hair, the lithe body of my wanderer.

  How are you here? Why?

  Finally, I catch his eyes in the mirror: one the faded blue of old ice at day’s end, one the bright, variegated green of the forest depths. I can tell from the dull light in them that they aren’t working yet, but I see him. I see him as he was and will be, and suddenly I don’t see the road clearly anymore. The landscape in front of me runs like an ink painting in the rain, and I have so much in this car that I need to care for, that I am responsible for. That I love. I pull over to the shoulder, my fists tight on the steering wheel, listening to the sound of cotton sliding over skin.

  Eyulf clambers over the front seat in a cloud of loose white fur and the smell of cold.

  I stare straight ahead so the pups won’t see. Wolves should never see their dominants’ distress. But then Eyulf pulls my face toward him. I feel his thumbs running over my cheeks and then his lips.