Forever Wolf Read online

  Even though she is wearing the long, black shift that our females wear in the weeks around birth so that doctors will have rapid access to their wrecked bodies, it’s easy to see how much Silver has lost. Her body is beyond thin, her eyes huge in her fleshless face.

  Lying-in is always hard. Early on, the offspring switch species in response to their mother’s hormones, but toward the end, they start responding not to their mother’s hormones but to one another’s. Then the mother must change before her body can reject the alien species inside, killing both mother and young.

  The greater the number she carries, the greater the risk, and the runt carried four.

  I never did understand this pairing: Tiberius is Silver’s opposite—strong, where she is frail; huge, where she is small; worldly, where she is wild—but there is something there. Because Tiberius is half Shifter, I have watched him carefully, but now as he hovers over his worn mate, I see the terror in his usually impassive face.

  Packs are for wolves, and Tiberius should never have been given a place in the Great North. But I recognize that there is something between these two that transcends the dutiful mounting that defines my relationship with Lorcan.

  Wolves are already marking the two pups cradled in Silver’s hands. A little pink mouth opens and snaps closed as Tara, Evie’s Beta, rubs her cheeks against one, right first, then left. She repeats it with the second, always with a little pause as the blind, deaf pups draw in her scent. There is a murmured exchange as Silver recites the names of the two pups. Tara then goes through the process again with Tiberius, except that he holds both pups in one enormous hand, keeping the other loose by his side, ready in case Silver might need him.

  The pair moves slowly past row after row of wolves until they come to me. I cup my hands under Silver’s, a kindness in our ritual to the new mother who is allowed to rest her hands for a moment in those of a stronger wolf.

  John, Sigeburg, and Solveig. Powerful names, reminders of dominant wolves who have died. But then comes the fourth, Theo Tiberiusson, a tiny black runt who even through three-score Pack markings still stinks of westend and was named after Thea Villalobos, the westend who saved Tiberius, saved Silver, saved Elijah. Or, at least, that’s what Elijah claims.

  Silver frowns as I lower my head to the air above her hands but says nothing. No one can doubt the strength of my dedication to the Pack. If I choose not to mark its individuals, that is my business.

  She continues on her way, with only the occasional waver that most wolves have the grace to pretend they haven’t noticed.

  “It is a disappointment, isn’t it, Shielder?” Victor’s voice is still rough from his throttling.

  “What is a disappointment?”

  “The Shifter and the runt. And now Elijah Sorensson, who is descended from the wolves of Mercia and should set an example of respect for discipline and respect the Old Ways.”

  “What does respect for discipline have to do with Mercia, Deemer? The Alpha is not of Mercia—”

  “No, she is not,” he says and sniffs disapprovingly, rubbing his nose with his bent knuckle.

  “I am not of Mercia.”

  He sucks in his lips for a moment and looks away from me, away from eyes that are too long, under brows that are too black and too straight, set in a face that is too sharp with hair too dark to ever be mistaken for a wolf from the once-upon-a-time forests of England. Victor gathers himself together quickly.

  “Ah, but you, Shielder, have proved yourself. You”—he slices his finger across his torso—“understand the need for law, because you know firsthand the price of lawlessness. You…are æfast.”

  I know the Deemer means it as a compliment when he calls me firm in the law, but I am a wolf, and wolves do what they do because they must. We are wary of compliments. Even those from our Deemer.

  Perhaps Victor was expecting some more effusive response than cold silence. A moment later, he returns to Lorcan, his head bowed, his voice so low that even my Alpha has to bend in to hear.

  At the end of Table, I keep the 12th seated, giving out housing assignments, because nearly half the wolves of my echelon spend the month Offland working or going to school. Evie wants them all home, so we will have to accommodate them, and since Offlanders are fussy about their sleeping arrangements and only rarely willing to sleep wild, Homelands’ wolves will have to give up their beds.

  Other echelons are still arguing over sleeping arrangements when the last of the 12th’s wolves have left to move into their new quarters. Lorcan stands next to me, his hand hovering above my back. I feel the heat of it.

  “We make a good team, Shielder.”

  Every hair stands up on end, every muscle ripples, my eyes burn, and my tongue flicks over my teeth. But I know that this, too, is part of my responsibility, my duty to do what I can to mate power with power and bring strength to the Pack.

  “Do you have a towel?”

  It proceeds as it always does, at a likely tree a little farther into the woods and a little farther from Home Pond. Lorcan looks away as I take off my shirt; then I lay my cheek against the smooth bark of the beech tree. The faded orange-brown leaves rustle above me. I wonder how long it will be before they drop, making way for new buds. Lorcan’s teeth grasp the join of my neck, holding me firm for him while I stare out into the shady mix of pines and hardwoods and wait for Lorcan’s shuddering finish. He stays there, his stomach pressed against my lower back, the small curls of his chest irritating my shoulder blade. He breathes deeply at the back of my ear, a little above the curve of my neck where his teeth have left a mark.

  “How is it that you never smell warm?” he says as his detumescent cock slides out.

  I pull my shirt back on and shake my hair free from the collar.

  “Towel?” I ask.

  Sheepishly, he hands it to me.

  Chapter 3

  An Alpha leads by example. I do not take cabins away from my echelon’s Homeland wolves only to return to my own bed at night. A mated pair from the 7th is occupying my sleeping loft. Two other wolves have taken my sofa.

  My tiny bathroom is crammed with my new roommates’ stuff. Moisturizer: his and hers. Razors: his and hers. Sunscreen: his and hers. As if the sun shines differently on you depending on your genitals.

  When I take off my muddy shirt, the sleeve knocks into lip balm (his) that teeters on the edge of my corner sink. It flies into the toilet and twirls around on top of the water like a bicycle wheel in a cyclone, until I pluck it out and set it back in its place.

  As soon as I put my clothes in the laundry, I go to the refrigerator to see if my roommates cleaned up the milk spill as I instructed.

  They have not, and now it is caked and dried.

  The days spent crowded around Home Pond putting out brush fires among fractious wolves are getting on my nerves. I tell Lorcan I will be taking a run. That it might take me a little time to find some place quiet and private. He waves airily, as though I’d asked him for permission. All I wanted to do was to make sure he knew he had the reins.

  Everyone has a different way of triggering the change. For me, I lean into my haunches and stretch until a muscle catches in my left thigh, and when I stretch it a little farther, my wild unravels and fills me. My lungs change, and my ribs narrow and deepen to accommodate them. I take my first real breath since the Iron Moon. My shoulders round, the muscles growing thicker around them. Around my hips too. My hands and feet lengthen and bend, and I collapse, blind and frail, to the ground where I will stay until the end of the elastic thrumming of my body.

  My hearing is just returning, but not my voice, when a wolf breaks through the underbrush and steps on my still-paralyzed body.

  I don’t blame him. He’s just trying to do what I am: find a little space, a square with a little retreating snow and a little frilled lichen and drops of ice and no wolf piss-marking it off.

 
The netted scents of Offlanders are close to the Great Hall; Homelands wolves are more comfortable moving farther up the mountains. Holding my head low, I smell them as I pass the pine and paper birch of the lowlands, farther up to where the sun breaks through the bare branches of the beech and maple. But even up here, the crusted snow reveals the fresh crisscrossed paw prints.

  The sky was overcast, as it often is in the last days of winter and early days of spring, but then suddenly the sun breaks through, shining on the bare peak of Westdæl, the most distant part of Homelands, farther from Home Pond than even the High Pines. On the far side is the Utwald, the Outer Woods, which are hard to get to, even on four legs, and too close for comfort to the lands owned by humans.

  Almost at the top, the trees thin out and contort until there is nothing left but the bald crown surrounded by the bent and scoured pines of the Krummholz.

  It haunts wolves’ stories.

  Winter-bearn, wind-woh,

  Se endeweard weorolde.

  Eal forsworen, forsacan

  Nefne

  Æcewulf.

  Winter-blasted, wind-twisted,

  The world’s last sentinel.

  Forsworn, forsaken

  By all but the forever

  Wolf.

  Silver used to come up here, but she has never known anything but the security of the mighty Great North and doesn’t have the sense to avoid places without adequate cover.

  I should know better. The island of my birth, Vrangelya, was surrounded on all sides by the Arctic Sea. It was infertile, cold, windswept… No, not windswept. Not wind-scrubbed either. The wind came out of the north and sandblasted it, leaving behind either snow or the rubble of stone that bloomed when the snows retreated.

  How is it possible that the last survivor of Vrangelya allowed herself to be caught out in the open when the helicopter comes?

  The sound bounces around the valleys and mountains to the north, making it impossible to pinpoint. If I were among the trees, I’d curl my body around the base of a pine and stay absolutely still. Up here, there is nothing but snow and rock and lichens and sad, distorted excuses for trees.

  Crouching as low as I can, I shuffle toward a rocky fold, then slip down, looking bleakly at the exposed run across hardpan that would take me to the sheltering tree line. Because the rock slopes back from my position, I will be completely exposed if the helicopter comes any nearer. A little farther along is an overhang. It’s not much, but if I pull myself close to the rock face and stay utterly still, my gray fur may look like shadow against the granite.

  As I move closer, the shade of the overhang resolves into a thicker darkness, and I realize that it is not just an overhang. It’s a cave. Shelter. A place to hide. I hesitate, one foot raised above the packed earth. This place doesn’t quite belong. The smell is wrong: acrid and sweet and with a single-note intensity that drowns out the softer complexity of the wild.

  I remember that smell from before. John, our Alpha, followed Silver’s call to Ronan, the exiled wolf who had snuck back into Homelands, stolen food and supplies, and then kidnapped the pup who found him doing it. He’d taped Golan’s muzzle closed and shoved him into a backpack.

  Ronan knew what was going to happen, and if he didn’t resist when we came into the cave, he didn’t help either. The four of us—John, Tara, Marco, and I—had to pull the drunken two-legged wolf out by his hands and feet and drag him all the way to the Clearing. Then the Great North did what the law requires we do to an exile who kidnaps a pup: we tore his body apart in a Slitung, a tearing. Every member of the Pack took part, as we must, so that we all bear responsibility for our failure to this wolf.

  The thuppa thuppa thuppa is growing louder, and as much as this is not where I want to hide, there is really no choice between Ronan’s cave and a helicopter carrying a westend with a gun. Shuffling backward, I creep into the cave, until the sky and the forests and the folded hills of Homelands are nothing but a blink of white and gray in a dark frame of stone.

  They can’t see me. I know that, but fear makes a mockery of reason, and step by hesitant step, I move deeper into the cave until I can’t go any farther and I am pressed shivering against one wall, straining to hear the oddly benign pop that means wolves are being killed from the air.

  It never comes. I listen the whole time until the thuppa thuppa thuppa attenuates, then disappears Offland.

  Hesitantly at first, I peel myself away from the wall, shaking out my coat so that no wolf will see that my right flank is matted. I lick my nose and finally remember to breathe. I breathe again because there is something else here. Something that does not smell like Ronan’s last days or like any part of the Great North. It’s clean and sharp and painfully familiar.

  With the helicopter gone, silence returns with a rough wheeze. Maybe a trick of the wind in an enclosed space. At least that’s what I think until what seems like minutes go by and I hear it again—a slow and shallow breath, the sound of something living, but not well or for long.

  I search through the faded scents of Ronan, Quicksilver, and even of John, until at the very back of the cave, I find a sleeping bag.

  Another human, who has ignored our signs and crossed our borders and brought their junk to our territory. I investigate quietly, because if humans know, or even suspect, that there are wolves here, no signage, no law will stop them from bringing their guns to make sure that the former apex predators know who’s boss now.

  The sleeping bag churns, and my heart stutters and then leaps. Arctic wild has a fragrance so subtle that even wolves can’t smell it. For them, it is only the sharp smell of cold. It takes a wolf who has been raised cold to distinguish its subtle varieties. This is somewhere between metal and rock and petrichor, the electric mineral smell before a storm.

  This is not only a wolf; it is an Arctic wolf.

  Like me.

  Chapter 4

  Scratching lightly at the nylon cocoon with my paw, I stick my head in, and my nose is scorched by the heat. With claws, I try desperately to dig the wolf out, but it moves deeper in, and zippers…zippers are made by humans for humans and are the devil’s own work with teeth and claws.

  I need hands and fingers.

  On the floor of the cave, I lean into my haunches once again and feel the snick that will start the whole unbearably slow process in reverse. The bones of my feet turn to rubber and the bony crests of my spine smooth and my eyes turn blindly in my altering skull and skin stretches forward and back and the familiar movement of fur disappears, leaving me only with skin and a shattered whisper of gray fur in the air.

  I suck in short, gasping breaths, trying to reacquaint myself with the changes in my lungs.

  The mummy pack is pulled tight like a cocoon. But now that I have fingers, I pull open the zipper and unleash a whoosh of heat and the shivering body of a wolf in skin.

  Arctic wolves have longer hair in skin, just as we have longer fur when wild, and this wolf’s hair falls forward over his pale neck, sweeping his chest. Pale with just a hint of gold underneath, it is the color of bone.

  White wolves are rare even among Arctic Packs. The only one I’ve ever known was the shielder of my childhood, and he has been dead for nearly thirty years. Now here is another one who isn’t long for this world. Even without touching him, I can feel the fevered heat of his skin.

  I know Mitya is dead, but I can’t help it. My hands still shake with a kind of morbid anticipation, as though I will smooth back the long, white hair and find out that I was wrong and that by some miracle my white wolf survived. That I hadn’t actually failed him.

  But that’s not the way it works, is it? This face is nothing like Mitya’s. I knew it couldn’t be. In the Great North, pups are almost always wild, so there are many I have never seen in skin and wouldn’t recognize if it weren’t for their smell. Pack Vrangelya understood that it was always safer to at le
ast look human. Miserable and awkward humans, but still not wolves.

  In skin, Mitya had a round face, soft with high cheekbones and a short chin. White eyebrows and lashes, too, that rimmed his pale eyes with long fringes, the color of fairy fingers.

  This face is gaunt and long, almost bleak, the sharpness picked out by dark brows and lashes. He has to curl up to fit inside even the extra-long sleeping bags the Pack always buys, so I know he’s tall.

  There is something else unusual about his body. Unwolflike. We are fighters, all of us, and we are crisscrossed with the scars. From the hooves of prey, from a childhood spent tussling with sharp teeth and claws, from juvenile years spent posturing and getting called on it by stronger wolves, from adult years spent challenging for position and mates and respect.

  Of course, there are other ways of earning scars. My hand floats across the corrugations that score my torso from left hip to right breast.

  His skin, though, is smooth and tight across hard muscle, except for a single hole on his upper chest. A bullet wound that is large but also old and has nothing to do with why he’s burning up.

  There is one other thing, and it’s killing him.

  On his right thigh, just above his knee, is a broad, bright-red mountain range. For a moment, I think maybe it was caused by the teeth of another wolf, but the cuts are even and sharp and the flesh is badly mangled both front and back. As soon as I smell the rust, I realize he must have stepped in a trap, a big one with teeth.

  It probably happened during the Iron Moon, so he was stuck there, hungry and bleeding and afraid, the teeth sawing into his changing body, until he had the fingers he needed to free himself.

  It hasn’t been cared for. Not by a westend, a Pack doctor, or by the tongue of another wolf, so now his body’s rapid healing has sealed over the wound and rust and probably some chunks of fur. If he were stronger, it might not have gotten infected, but he has clearly lost a lot of blood, so he’s not and it has.