Forever Wolf
Also by Maria Vale
The Legend of All Wolves
The Last Wolf
A Wolf Apart
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Maria Vale
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover art by Kris Keller
Cover image © Arthur Studio-10/Shutterstock
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
A Sneak Peek at Kingdom of Exiles
Terms used in the Legend of All Wolves
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To M, H & G, who have been bemused throughout.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
—“Inversnaid,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
Chapter 1
The wolves of the Great North have been spoiled by peace.
They don’t think they are. They imagine they are besieged by enemies. But the raw numbers tell a different story. In the winter when the Shifters came, the Pack lost four. Four out of four hundred.
They mourned them and mounted stones with their names and the dates of their last hunt at the Gemyndstow, the memory place, the circles of stones that stretch out from the three-hundred-year-old markers in the center.
One was laid for John, the former Alpha of the Great North, along with another three high-ranked wolves. Then the Pack shuffled papers, buttressing the wall of law that is meant to protect them from outsiders.
And now they have lost another. Celia Sorensdottir, the 9th Echelon’s Alpha Shielder. There are fourteen echelons, fourteen age groups among the adults. Each has its own Alpha pair and hierarchies. That should tell them something right there. Packs that are truly under siege are never so fruitful. My birth Pack only had adults and nonadults; there were no echelons.
Celia was shot Offland. Any other time, she would have had a good chance of surviving. She had a half gallon of my blood in her by the end, and I am nothing if not a survivor.
Because it happened right before the Iron Moon, those three days when the moon is full and we have no choice but to be wild, it came with all the pulling and stretching and torquing and changing and, in Celia’s case, tearing and reopening and bleeding and, eventually, dying.
Still, it is only five wolves. Out of fourteen echelons.
They don’t know what it is like to be truly hunted.
I am here to make sure they never do.
* * *
The Great Hall is new and still smells raw. Like stone and wood. In the rebuilding, Evie insisted on using peeled cedar because that is what the burned heart of Homelands smelled like. A cheaper wood might have looked the same, but it would have smelled alien and been a constant reminder of the Pack’s loss. Soon it will take on the patina of fur and briar and yarrow and muskrat and sumac and resin and moss and deer.
The world wolves move through and carry with them.
Although it was rebuilt along the same lines as the hall that burned down, it is larger, designed by wolves, for wolves, rather than for the bankrupt industrialist the Pack bought it from way back when. The vaulted ceilings are taller, the staircase wider. The new windows are triple-paned to resist the blustering brutality of winters in the Adirondacks. The outer door is reinforced with iron plates to resist the blustering brutality of thoughtless wolves.
“This table is for the 12th,” I growl when one of those thoughtless wolves tries to sit.
He does an odd dance, keeping his raised leg from touching the bench at the communal table that I have claimed for my echelon. “Yes, Shielder,” he murmurs, his eyes lowered.
It is as it should be. Only in the absence of higher-ranked wolves would I be called Alpha. But I’ve always been happiest to be called Shielder. Unlike with Alpha, humans have not co-opted the word. A shielder is still distinctive to us: a wolf who assists in the work of herding deer toward the treacherous smooth stones of a dried riverbed or of shelling endless peas for a dinner to feed four hundred hungry wolves in skin.
A wolf who shields us from coyotes through the endless process of shifting when we are blind, deaf, immobile, and horribly vulnerable.
Lorcan, my Alpha, Alpha of the 12th, is big and jovial, with straight blond hair that he keeps tied back in a rubber band, even though his hair isn’t particularly long, and if I don’t remind him to take the rubber band out before the Iron Moon, it stays in during the change as an undignified sprout of tawny fur at the top of his head.
He slaps shoulders and lau
ghs loud, sitting at the head of the table with a clear view of the Alpha’s seat. Where John sat until he was shot and killed and where his mate, Evie Kitwanasdottir, now sits, fully recovered from her lying-in, but never, I think, from the loss of her mate.
Ulrich, the 12th’s Epsilon, balances his seax, the sharp dagger that is given to each wolf as they transition to adulthood, on its tip and thoughtlessly twirls it until I reach over and lift hand and knife. With my other hand, I feel the small pit in the newly constructed table.
“You will resand and wax this table after we are finished.”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
Ulrich rubs his finger over the spot. His eyes flit to the wolf sitting next to him, but he says nothing.
I stand away, my hands crossed at the small of my back.
“Shielder,” Lorcan says, pointing to a spot next to him. “Will you sit?”
“No, Alpha.”
I don’t know why he insists on asking, because I never do. Sitting makes for laziness and bad sight lines.
Every time he asks. Every time I refuse. And every time, he turns away visibly relieved. Even Lorcan, my Alpha and my shielder, does not enjoy my company. I am not popular. Wolves do not like me. I don’t care that they don’t like me. I only care that they fear me. That they obey me. That when the time comes, they will do what needs to be done to keep them alive.
“In our laws are we protected,” Evie calls, as the Alpha always does at the beginning of the Iron Moon Table. This meal is the most important event of the month. In skin, at least. Following immediately after the end of the Iron Moon, this is when the Pack is gathered and we all have the words and fingers needed to deal with Pack business.
“And in lawlessness are we destroyed,” the Great North calls back. It is a formula for them, but for me, it is the core truth of our existence. In lawlessness is the Pack ripped apart, and without a Pack, wolves die.
Evie calls for all the pups to leave, the juveniles too. She sends them all into the back, toward the kitchen. The juveniles grab big bowls of cereal and pitchers of milk and baskets of bread. Fruit, eggs.
Our Alpha is like me. An outsider. She is older than I am, but not by much, and like me, she is the last survivor of her Pack. The similarities end there. Her Pack was slaughtered with ruthless efficiency by Shifters. Mine was picked off over months, years, by westends.
The Great North doesn’t much use the Old Tongue word for humans, but I do, because human hides what they are. Westend doesn’t. Just puts it right out there. Destroyer. Waster.
Evie and I also differ in our responses. We both know what it’s like to be young and afraid and alone, but while Evie wants to protect the Great North—especially its young—from that knowing, I think they should understand that this existence is balanced on a knife’s edge so they will be prepared.
Still, she is Alpha, and I would never speak out against her.
“I am calling the Pack home,” she says, and in the silence, someone drops a butter knife.
Chapter 2
“We lost another wolf this moon. Celia Sorensdottir, Alpha Shielder of the 9th Echelon. Her stone will be set as soon as Sten”—she nods to the surly head of carpentry—“has finished carving it.”
The Pack looks confused. We would live long lives if the westends would let us, but they don’t. If they come upon us during the Iron Moon—or anytime, really—when we are wild, they assume we are æcewulfs, forever wolves, real wolves, and kill us.
If that was all that had happened, Evie would have said a mournful word or two, and we would have trudged out to the Gemyndstow and set this latest stone. No body though. Celia’s body has already been consumed as our bodies always are, by the wulfbyrgenna. Wolf tombs, we call them. Coyotes.
Only a few of us know that it wasn’t a westend who mistakenly shot Celia when she was wild. It was a Shifter who, knowing exactly what she was, shot her in skin.
Pack can become wolves whenever we want, but we can’t always change back. The Iron Moon, those three days when we must be wolves, makes us both secretive and protective. We must have land that will keep us hidden and provide for our wild. We must have each other.
Shifters aren’t bound to the Iron Moon, and because there is simply no advantage to being wolves, they don’t bother. They stay as they are, pretending to be human. Though they aren’t: their senses are stronger, their bodies are bigger, their blood and tissue are all wrong.
And, Evie says, their bodies betray them in one other much more important way.
It turns out that the last live Shifter birth was Tiberius Leveraux, born nearly thirty years ago to a Pack mother. Now his mate, Quicksilver, has given birth to four more, and August Leveraux—godfather of Shifters, despoiler of Homelands, father of Tiberius—does not believe in coincidences.
Silver had been with Tiberius for perhaps a minute before she became pregnant. August Leveraux cannot have known Tiberius’s mother, Mala, for much longer before she also conceived.
I can tell that the Alpha doesn’t believe this is a coincidence either. Pregnancies are infrequent among Pack, because our chromosomes are never static, always sliding between the poles of our nature, rarely alike long enough to make more of us. Evie herself was mated thirty years before she had Nils and Nyala this winter.
“August now believes that we, or rather our females, offer them a way back from the brink of extinction.”
Gabi raises her hand. Raises her hand, mind you. Still, Evie nods.
“Then why would the Shifters kill Celia?”
“As far as we can tell, they intended only to take her, but Celia fought hard. Tristan looked over the bodies before they were left for the coyotes. One Shifter, one human. He says he believes the Shifter shot her before dying.”
There’s something here that I don’t understand, and I put my hand on the hilt of my seax, which unlike raising one’s hand, is the proper way wolves signal for the floor.
“Shielder.” Evie nods toward me.
“If Celia fought them, they knew she would not be receptive.”
“Ah,” Evie says, turning to a tall wolf who is wearing pink stockings and a very short, very white skirt with many, many zippers that ping and rustle against each other. “Leonora?”
Leonora Jeansdottir, alone among the Great North, wears clothes that are impossible to run in and hard to clean. It is so that we understand how different humans are, and when we see someone Offland, we will know that to say “How pretty, can I get it online?” is considered conversational, while “How do you get bloodstains out of nubuck?” is not.
I have been forced to take ten years of human behavior with her, so I know.
“Humans,” Leonora says, fiddling with something catching in her hair—she wears little pieces of shiny metal in her ears that are very distracting—“have a long history of taking other humans who are not receptive. It is a form of conquest visited most particularly on females who by tradition are not taught to fight.”
We are sexually profligate. It is our duty, after all, to grow the Pack. But it always starts with finding out through the warmth of the other wolf’s scent whether they are receptive. Then the female presents, the male covers, and everyone hopes for the best.
Shifters have been among humans too long. No wonder Celia killed them.
There’s a bad feeling in the room. The scent of anger and a low, almost inaudible rumble in large chests. Before the trouble starts, I lean over the middle of our table, the heel of my hand pressed hard into the stout oak, sending a warning glance to the more aggressive members of the 12th.
Then it erupts: the posturing, the growling, the shouting. Within seconds, the 6th Epsilon’s mate has a mouth full of someone’s flesh. Evie leaps from her seat and slams his face into the table. The gobbet of skin pops out across the table.
Even in skin, it is
hard for us to resist the impulse to rip and gouge with our jaws.
“Alphas,” she yells, the male’s gagging head still squashed beneath her forearm. “Control your echelons before I do.”
The other Alphas finally shake themselves out of their torpor and act.
Like I said. The Great North has been spoiled by peace and does not know how little it takes for packs to go feral.
Only when the room settles do I raise my hand from the table, taking my place behind the table with the 12th. Lorcan nods at his echelon, congratulating them on their restraint.
Evie releases the bleeding wolf and returns to her seat.
This has been a difficult transition. The loss of an Alpha always is. It takes time for wolves to get used to a new hand at the helm. Evie is the strongest wolf in the Great North, but she had been weakened by childbirth when her mate died, and there were those who took advantage of that weakness to challenge her primacy.
Or tried. I see him. Elijah Sorensson, the 9th’s Alpha, who has just skittered across the hall from the kitchen to the medical station, where the westend he calls mate lies using up Pack resources. Victor, our Deemer—our thinker about Pack law, as opposed to human law—quite rightly saw the woman as a threat. She is not just a human but sum westend þe wat. A human who knows, the most dangerous enemy we have.
Still, he should not have stabbed her without Evie’s permission. The 9th’s Alpha took it as badly as a mated wolf would have, and the mark of Elijah’s hand is still purpling on the Deemer’s neck, while petechiae bloom around his eyes.
The wolves in front of me clear a space for him. He often sits with the 12th. It is a mark of the high regard the Deemer has for our echelon, the largest and best disciplined of the Great North.
The door to the Great Hall opens, and Victor looks only for a moment before turning his back purposefully on the large black wolf and the little silver wolf beside him. Tiberius and Silver ready themselves and their pups for First Marking. The pups were born only three days ago, but the Pack wastes no time before collecting the scents of their newest members and giving them their own.
Silver walks first, her hands cupped in front of her. I’d seen her before, briefly, but then the Deemer stabbed the westend, and the 9th’s Alpha strangled our lawgiver, and I lost track of what happened to Silver.