Evie
I didn’t sleep much last night. I spent most of it in a desperate triangulation. How close was close enough for the Gray to get used to my scent? How close was too close? I didn’t know what might make her leave her mate’s side, the fur on her hackles high, her lips pulled back from sharp teeth.
Or worse, go Offland.
I’d immediately discounted Tristan’s suggestion that the Shifter had been responsible for what had been done to Magnus because I was the one watching him from the woods during the Iron Moon. I’d seen him stand—or rather sit—guard on the floor beside Magnus’s bed, his hands propped loose on his bent knees, staring ahead, unsure what to do with the fragile life in his care except stand guard.
Like me. I know how to deal with Pack. How do I deal with forever wolves? What will keep them here where I can at least try to stand guard?
I’ve also spent enough time Offland to know the shrill, staccato sound of hype, the sour sweet smell of a lie, the look of a short con, and the greasy taste that self-delusion leaves on the tongue. When I told the Shifter what was happening to Magnus, there was none of that. No denial or protestations, as though it wasn’t news at all. As though it was simply the confirmation of something he’d always dreaded. Now he walks silently beside me.
When the Great North bought the camp from the executors of Hiram Cheeseprunt, ruined suicide, in 1931, there had been four dormitories built to accommodate the enormous staff that Mr. Cheeseprunt required to service himself and his guests during the summer months. Three are normally used to house those Offland wolves who feel the need to sleep in skin, juveniles acting out “sleepover,” and now the motley of Shifters we are saddled with. The woods wanted the fourth so we salvaged what we could and let her have it. It is now an unstable hillock of green north of the Bathhouse.
The Shifter collapses on a lower bunk to one side and stares blankly at the distorted rectangle of late-afternoon light creeping hesitantly across the wide wooden planks.
He leans over, plucking something from the floor, and looks at it carefully before handing it to me. It’s nothing, a shirt button. We have a huge box filled with them in dry storage. Holding it to my nose, I scent past the carrion and steel to the juniper and black walnut.
“But he’s not going to die.” Half question, half statement of intent, it is the first thing he has said since we left Medical.
“No.”
He falls onto the mattress, his back to me, his arms wrapped around his waist.
I slide the button into my shirt pocket.
* * *
He must have heard me from the shower because when I come through the door the next morning, he is standing in the middle of the room soaking wet, a small towel wrapped around his waist, his legs coiled like a wolf ready to pounce. He is armed curiously enough with a curry comb in one hand and a rolled-up copy of Corporate Counsel magazine in the other.
Pulling the screen door closed, I drop a pile of clothes on the desk near the front. I twirl the desk chair around and settle in facing him, my legs straddling the chair back.
“How do you know Varya’s name?”
Water drips into his eyes. He wipes at it with the back of his wrist, then holds out his impromptu arsenal.
“Do I need these?”
“Not unless your fur is matted or you have a need for alternative dispute resolution, no.”
Smiling weakly, he tosses them onto one of the low bookcases where some Offlander must have left them and holds the unraveling ends of the towel.
Tiberius said he was dangerous and he is. Tiberius was afraid he might be dangerous to the Pack, but I don’t think he is dangerous to the Pack or even to the Alpha I have become.
But when he looks at me, I am afraid for the terrified, lonely self I packed away in mothballs the night John died.
With all his hardness and sharpness, this was a man I could cut myself on.
I reach back to the desk and throw him jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. His hand shoots out to grab them, and the towel falls with a damp plop.
Like that, I think, annoyed with myself for dropping my eyes as though I were some human unnerved by nakedness. Look up, Alpha. There’s nothing special about the way the early morning light catches the water beading across his skin before it gathers into small rivulets and swirls down the muscled fissure of his chest. Nothing unusual in the way they tremble among the dark hairs at his nipples or nestle in the curled thicket gathered around skin that is dusky and veined and muscled but not in the smooth and prosaic way of that hard chest.
Shit. I wrap my arms around the sturdy wooden ladder-back as though it will shield me from the distraction and slow the pulse that beats fast and hard at my nipples and puddles warm and slow at my core.
Except when he pulls on the jeans and I see the thick brown and burgundy scars at his ankles.
“She told me,” he says, the stiff line-dried denim rasping against his skin.
It takes me a moment to remember my question.
“Here’s my problem.” A strand of hair has come loose from the band. I tuck it under and cross my arms across the back of the chair. “When she first arrived years ago, Varya Timursdottir told one wolf her name. The Great North’s Alpha. She never told anyone else. The rest of us found out eventually, but not from her. So why would she tell you? A complete stranger? A Shifter?”
He starts to pull the T-shirt over his head.
“I’m going to tell you what I told Tiberius. You’re going to have to ask her.”
Chin propped on my arms, I look toward Westdæl.
“I can’t,” I say, turning back to him. “She will never have the words to tell me.”
His head emerges slowly from the collar. “She’s dead?”
“You really do think like a human. Just because a life has no words doesn’t make it less alive. She is very much alive, but she is an æcewulf, a real wolf. A forever wolf.”
He arches his back, reaching behind to the fabric scrunched up high against his damp skin. The jeans hang low, framing the hollow of his hips and a gash of dark hair right down the middle.
“So she will never be human again?”
“She was never human, but no, she will never have thumbs or words again.”
He stands near me, bending down to follow the path of my eyes through the window, past the billowing crown hardwoods, past the sharp tops of pines toward the dawn glow of Westdæl’s bare top, home to the one other wolf who knew what it was to be an outsider, a teeterer on the edge of annihilation.
“How did it happen?” he asks in a quiet tone that almost sounds as though he wants to know. I’ve forgotten what that feels like, the give and take of conversation. John had me to talk to, but I have a Pack of worried wolves, and with them it’s all Alpha, reassure us, Alpha, decide for us, Alpha, direct us.
“The Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If she finds us in skin, she makes us wild. If she finds us wild, she makes us æcewulfas. Forever wolves. Varya became a forever wolf so that she could protect us when we were at our most vulnerable. So.” I squeeze my hand, feeling the thick scar at the base of my thumb. “I really can’t ask her.”
Plucking the towel from the floor, he shakes it out and heads to the bathroom.
“You said Shifters had done something to your pack,” he says, watching me in the reflection of the little mirror nailed above the sink.
I smooth the curve of my eyebrow.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know I don’t. You can probably guess it. Hunters. Wolves. Except, in my case, it was three Shifters and a small pack trapped by the Iron Moon. They had guns. We had teeth. Within a few minutes, my entire birth pack was dead except the pup whose scent was camouflaged in the cesspit.”
He lowers his head, hands grasping either side of the sink, one finger beating silently on the porcelain. “Three Shifters then. Three Shifters now.”
“My birth pack was tiny compared to the Great North. They had no experience of Shifters. We do.” I stretch my head to the side, trying to loosen my stiff shoulder. “I watched the three of you during the Iron Moon: Julia is weak, Cassius is a fool. You are the one Tiberius says is the most dangerous, the one who must be watched. But then why did the most guarded and careful wolf in the Great North tell you her name?”
He raises his head, looking at me in the reflection.
“Do you see my problem?”
After squeezing some toothpaste onto a toothbrush, he grimaces through a mouthful of beige foam. Looking at the tube, he spits and rinses. “Peanut butter? I don’t suppose you have some other flavor?”
“Answer the question.”
He rinses his mouth out twice more, then leans against the doorjamb, facing me. “When she first came to the compound, Varya’d been pumped with enough ketamine and fentanyl to kill a grizzly, and that’s not an exaggeration. But she would not give up. She was locked up in the basement, throwing herself against things, forcing herself to move. It was nothing but will, and the sound irritated the hell out of August, so he sent me to get her. He wanted her to make the puppies—”
“Pups.”
“Whatever. The point is he wanted to see his grandchildren.”
I’m not surprised that August wouldn’t accept that the four pups playing Bite the Ear and Chase the Tail could be his descendants. He wanted his grandchildren with fingers and words, playing Parcheesi.
“I’ve seen death come for a lot of people, but this was the first time that I’d seen someone come for death. Varya knew she was alone, drugged, outnumbered, and outgunned, but she kept coming. If I had let them kill her, I would never have another chance at finding out what was worth dying for.”
He smooths the growth bristling on his cheeks with one hand.
“Did she tell you?”
“No. But she told me her name and I feel like that was something.”