Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 23 days
Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 23 days
The dry cleaner around the corner went through an overhaul and came out green. Organic, a sign now says, next to a picture of the earth in a tidy jacket. One cheerful eye is plopped in the middle of the Atlantic, the other in the middle of Europe.
The man helping me is holding down the button on the rotating clothes hanger while looking at the ticket on my phone. Then he stops and pulls out a handful of shirts. The smell of perc is overwhelming and makes my skin prick.
“Those aren’t mine.”
“Yes, they are. Look.” He shows me the ticket number on my phone and on the clothes.
“I don’t care what it says, those aren’t mine.” I hold the shirts up to my front. The shoulders are inches short of where they need to be. The cuffs a half foot.
“You got a wife?” he asks hopefully.
“No.”
With a sigh, he pushes his button again.
“I thought you were organic.”
“We are. One hundred percent organic.”
“Then why does it stink of perc in here?”
“Perc’s carbon-based. That’s what it means to be organic. Carbon-based.”
He should’ve been a lawyer. He knows that’s not what people think when they hear organic, but that’s the thing about humans—they never say what they mean.
“There they are.” I point to the long, white tails sticking out below the hem of a jacket. As soon as they come close, he reaches up with a metal stick and pulls them down, putting them next to the other shirts that look like they belong with a boy’s First Communion suit.
Back at home, I toss my shirts in the closet, grab a fork and a glass of water, then angle the photograph of the echelon so that the 9th will see it and know that I am always thinking about them.
I usually set aside Saturday night to videoconference with the 9th. Talk over any problems they might be having, offer advice, make decisions. Since John’s death, I’ve been trying to make it twice a week, though it doesn’t always turn out that way because most of my weeknights are taken up with clients.
Lorin and Francesca sign in, naked and spotted with blood.
“Good hunting?” I ask.
“Just a snack,” Lorin says, rubbing at the wrong place.
Francesca throws herself on the bed and licks the dark stains from his face. Then she sticks out her tongue, trying to pick something off with her fingers. “Fur,” she says. “What are you eating?”
I look down at the Styrofoam container blankly. Pushing the contents around, I finally remember. “Falafel.” I push some more. “Tabbouleh.”
“I swear that’s all you ever eat.”
I’d rather they think that I’m unimaginative than know that when I am Offland, I eat carrion and drink alcohol so that the humans will see me as a man’s man. An Alpha male. But a real Alpha, like all wolves, doesn’t eat anything he doesn’t hunt himself. Unfortunately, being a vegetarian teetotaler doesn’t fit humans’ conception of what it means to be an Alpha male.
“There’s a halal cart down the street. It’s fast. Hey, Celia.”
Celia, my shielder, has set her laptop outside her cabin—my cabin too, I suppose, though I’ve never stayed there. Because of the angle of the screen, I can’t quite tell what she’s doing, but her arms row steadily back and forth. If she were human, I’d have said she had a rowing machine, but Pack have no use for pretend work.
She stops for a minute, pushing her reddish-brown hair—the same color as mine—into a band at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are like mine too, bright blue. Littermates don’t always resemble each other, but Celia and I do.
Celia nods and keeps rowing.
Our similarities stop at physical resemblances. Celia is whip smart but socially very awkward, and her few forays Offland have ended badly. She is happiest, I think, staying in the Homelands.
I hope.
The other members of the 9th sign on singly or in pairs.
I’ve done everything I can to keep track of my echelon, but this is a difficult time, and wolves do not do well when the hierarchy is disrupted. I didn’t know that Trevor was working in the kitchen because he got injured defending his cunnan-riht to Ella and can’t go Offland until his leg heals. Dani has quit her job at the snowboard company, though she is sullen and it’s hard to tell whether she quit or was fired. Lorin and Francesca will be mated as soon as the Alpha is healthy enough to do her part.
I didn’t remember that they had become bedfellows.
Mostly, though, I worry about my Gamma wolves, Sarah and Adam. The first mated pair of our echelon, they are brilliant strategists, and Sarah is our best tracker.
But Sarah doesn’t look well fed. Instead, she is gaunt and haunted. Any questions I direct toward either of them are met with surprise—as if they’d forgotten where they were—or with a noncommittal nod.
It is only when everyone else has gone that I ask Celia.
She stops her rowing and pushes her hair back from her forehead again, using only her bent wrist. Something metal slaps against wood. Then she starts again. “Sarah lost her pregnancy.”
The falafel suddenly feels very dry and bulky in my mouth. I chew hurriedly before gulping down a long draft of water.
“She was pregnant? How far along was she?”
“Four months,” Celia says.
“And no one thought to tell me?”
“You know how it is. We don’t like to tell anyone,” she says, “for precisely this reason. Things go wrong.”
“But you knew.”
“Because someone had to make sure that Sarah’s work schedule was something she could safely do. That there was someone in authority in her echelon, in case of trouble.”
She doesn’t say, but I understand her criticism all too well. I should have known. It’s already so hard for us to reproduce. In all the moons I’ve been Alpha, the 9th hasn’t had a single successful pregnancy.
“When did she lose it?”
“A week after John died,” Celia says and starts her rowing again. “Stress…”
Her voice peters out, and she stops rowing, wiping a dull blade covered with fur.
“Is that for Lorin and Francesca?” I ask.
“The deer we hunted during the Moon.”
At least I was there for the hunt. Even if I am not there to scrape the deer’s hide and won’t be there when they cut the long, continuous thong and won’t be there for the Bredung, the braiding, when Lorin and Francesca are committed to the land, to the Pack, and to each other.
That long, thin piece of leather, tanned with the oak from our trees, will represent our land. The blood of the Alpha represents the Pack. The release of the couple themselves represents the bond between the two wolves.
My buzzer sounds—loud and high and jarring. It’s not the doorman. His buzz is softer and lower down the register. Someone is at my front door.
“Mark Sarah for me. Tell her…tell her that her Alpha thinks about her.”
“Shouldn’t you get that?” Celia cocks her head to the side, listening as the buzzer sounds again.
“No. I don’t know who it is, and I don’t care. And if Sarah and Adam need anything—”
“They do need something. They need you home.” I can tell the sound of the buzzer is getting on her nerves. Celia has spent very little time Offland. The insistent, demanding pitch of the human world is almost intolerable until you learn how to ignore it. “The Great North’s Alpha died. Our territory was invaded. There are still Shifters out there. Our echelon doesn’t need a boss. What we need is a leader, someone who will lay down their hopes, their desires, for the echelon. Someone who will be the first to hunt, the first to fight, the first to sacrifice, the first to die.
“What we need is an Alpha.”
Whoever was buzzing at my door is now banging at my door.
Celia must hear it. She starts scraping more furiously.
“Celia, I know it’s hard, but I am trying. Last moon, I asked Evie if I could come home. She refused, said the Pack needed me Offland. But the 9th can’t wait anymore, and I can’t either. So I am going to challenge her for primacy of the Great North. I will win, and then you will be the 9th’s Alpha.”
Celia’s head pops up.
“But the Alpha won’t be recovered from her lying-in yet. She’s not ready.”
“The Pack cannot tolerate weakness, Celia. You know that. Evie knows it too.”
Whoever is in the hallway has started kicking my fucking door now.
“You better go,” Celia snaps. “Some human needs you.”
Then the screen goes blank.
“Dammit.” I slam my computer shut. “Coming!” I yell, tossing the remains of my falafel in the refrigerator. Alana’s frantic face stares at me through the peephole. I open the door a crack.
“Thank god! I heard you talking in there, but you didn’t answer.” She plucks frantically at my arm. “Something’s wrong with Tarzan. He’s vomited up his liver.”
Well, hallelujah. Closing the door carefully behind me, I follow her to her apartment. It’s about time.
But as soon as she opens her door, I hear a high-pitched whimper. “I don’t think so. If he vomited up his liver, he’d be dead already.”
Alana looks at me with that expectant look human women get when they want you to open a jar or kill an insect or figure out a tip or deal with vomited dog liver.
Tarzan is indeed looking unwell next to a lumpy, purplish-brown puddle. Alana stands well back, her hand covering her lip and nose. “So, coyote meat,” I whisper to the tiny head, “had your last hunt?” He whines softly with breath that stinks of bile and sweet and dark bitterness. “Jesus, didn’t your dam ever tell you not to eat chocolate?”
I bundle Alana and Tarzan into a cab, because that many dark-chocolate-covered cherries will kill a dog this size. Alana won’t let me go. She’s afraid he will die. She’s afraid he will vomit. She’s afraid he will be incontinent. She wraps him in a towel and gives him to me.
“He likes you,” she pleads.
The vet cleans out Tarzan’s stomach and gives him charcoal to absorb whatever theobromine is left in his intestines, while I sit in the waiting room pretending to read an article in Best Breeder about cleft palate in shih tzus.
Simply being here makes me angry, because I am not where I should be. At home, helping Sarah. Reassuring her. Marking her. Hunting with her. Being an Alpha.
The Pack has so many stresses now. Snows come later. The bats are dying out, making mosquito season hell. Rains come in torrents or not at all. Humans hunt not for food but for sport. And unlike wolves, they take the strongest animals as trophies, leaving the herd weaker.
Then there are Shifters.
Someone pats me on the shoulder. A nurse with a sympathetic smile. “I can tell you’re worried,” she says. “But Tarzan is going to be just fine.”
No, he’s not. Because if I have to fuck Alana, I will rip his throat out.
• • •
I ended up fucking Alana, but I didn’t rip Tarzan’s throat out, because that tiny remnant of wild guided his little muzzle into the spot behind my jaw, where the scent is strong. He had just enough instinct to know that if I marked him, I was less likely to eat him.
He whimpers after me as I creep out of Alana’s bed and head back to the gym.
One.
I am coming home.
Two.
I am coming home.
Three.
I am coming home.