Chapter 33

I push the last concrete block back in place. On the other side, in the dark, a rat scurries toward the body I left there.

I’ve got to get home.

Running from the narrow side exit beyond one of the half-dozen pretzel places, I raise my hand for a cab. My phone buzzes. There are three missed calls and a voice message, all from a 518 number I don’t recognize.

Sliding into the back, I give the driver my address and check the message.

“Elijah?” There’s a long pause, almost like Celia’s waiting for my voice to answer her. “Yours is the only number I know by heart.” Celia’s usually firm, clipped voice sounds tentative and weak. “I think someone followed me from New York. A Shifter and a human. I killed them, but not quickly enough.” She begins coughing up something that I know must be blood. “It isn’t a flesh wound.”

Where are you?

“The man in the gas station is looking at me,” she says weakly. “They will not have my body.”

Oh, min schildere. Where are you?

I throw money at the cabby and run down the sloping exit to the parking garage, calling the Great North.

It takes nothing for the Pack’s wolfish hackers to track the phone number to a body shop near Corinth. Within minutes, Evie has sent Tristan and four other wolves south. I am racing north at the same time, but Corinth is in the middle, and it will be hours before any of us can get to her—and by then, it will be too late.

Celia is strong and our bodies are resilient, but she will not survive if the man at the gas station calls the EMT. If someone draws blood or listens to her heart or anything, they will realize she is not human, and in the name of science, they will torture her. They will cage her, and they will find out what she is.

At the stoplight, I pop open the glove compartment and look grimly at the contents. Aside from the usual proof of insurance, maintenance schedules, owner’s manuals, registrations, and ice scrapers, all Pack cars carry a lighter and a WD-40 Big Blast, because Offland, we cannot simply die: we must immolate.

I do the only thing I can think of to save Celia.

The moment I call Thea, she begins to move. There’s the swish of her coat, the jingle of her keys, the dull thwack of that emergency backpack. Her boots.

At first, I couldn’t remember the word that would make a human understand why Celia was so important to me. She is within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity that is family. A female littermate. I finally remember.

“Sister. She’s my sister.” What a bloodless word. An accident of birth and parentage, carrying none of the sense of shared responsibility of a shielder.

Thea pulls her door closed with a dull click and runs for her car. The door slams, and I tell her where my “sister” is.

Her car engine comes to life, and she shifts into Reverse.

I tell her that my sister does not trust strangers. “Do you have the braid I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Show it to her. It will be enough.”

• • •

The Pack is already there by the time I pull in behind Thea’s Wrangler. Tristan has brought the kitted-out long-bed truck he uses on the rare occasion when he has to retrieve a wounded wolf. There’s another Land Rover as well. We’re not very imaginative when it comes to cars.

Thea is outside, running toward me before I close the car door. I pull her to me, my face buried into her hair, drawing one desperate breath after another.

“They’re here,” she whispers. “Your people.”

Thea opens the door to her cabin where my people crowd around like a family of giants in a dollhouse.

My blood runs cold. Standing beside the bed, one hand hooked around the broad main beam is Varya the Indurate. Her blood is pouring through a tube the size of a garden hose into pale-faced Celia.

On the other side, Tristan kneels on the floor, working on Celia under a surgical lighthead, its beam being directed by Marco. Two younger wolves are assisting.

“Alpha,” Varya says with a discernible accent and a freight load of scorn.

Thea’s phone chirps in her pocket. She puts her hand on my chest. “I better take this outside,” she whispers.

Varya stares silently at the place where a human hand had been until Thea gives the door that extra pull.

“What are you doing, Alpha?”

“Celia didn’t have hours to wait for us. She wasn’t going to be conscious much longer. She’s a good wolf and would have burned first, but she deserved better than that.”

I lean over the bed, my hand gentle against her cold forehead.

“There is a human here. A human who wears your braid?”

“She is not your concern.”

“You have made her my concern. You have made her the concern of the entire Great North.”

I keep looking at Celia, brushing back her hair. Her closed eyes look like bruises in her pale face. “Celia? Min scildere? Lada mec.”

“She can’t hear you. And it’s not her forgiveness you are going to need. It is the Alpha’s, and she will never forgive you for letting the humans know about us.”

“Stop being melodramatic. Thea doesn’t know anything.”

“She will certainly suspect something. Look around you, Alpha. Look at us.” She waves her hand at the outlandish bodies crammed into Thea’s cabin. As though to make her point, Marco cracks his head into the sloping roof with a resounding clomp and a muffled curse.

“The law is clear. Either you do it, or I will, but…”

The sticky latch on the door clicks. Thea looks at me, her phone in her hand.

“Se westend sceal forþferan.”

Se westend. The waster, the destroyer. It is the word wolves once used for humans. Se westend sceal forþferan: The human must die.

I jerk Thea to me and kiss her slowly and deliberately, making sure that Varya is watching me. Watching me mark Thea’s face and her neck and her body until she is thick with my scent.

“Wiðsæcest þu min fæstnung?”

Do you deny my bond, my protection?

Our laws are both remarkably exact and remarkably vague. They are exact in that there are prescriptions and proscriptions for every interaction: sex, mating, protecting, hunting, eating. They are vague in their assumption that all those interactions take place between Pack. The one so marked, it says, shall be under said Alpha’s protection even unto death.

It doesn’t say the wolf or the Pack member or the half Shifter. No, all it says is the one.

“This is not over,” Varya says, her already rigid face hardening. “You have only delayed the inevitable. The Deemer will know the law.”

Before I can answer, Thea tugs on my arm, pulling me down until her lips are against my ear, in the mistaken notion that she can’t be heard. “They have to go.”

“As soon as—”

“No, they have to go now. That was Doug. He called to say that an arrest warrant has come up from the city for you. I said I hadn’t seen you for weeks, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.”

Had the cabin been filled with humans, no one would have heard anything, but as it is, Varya is already pulling the tube from her arm. “Henry,” she says to the younger wolf. “You take over. I will drive.”

Varya continues barking orders. Henry plugs the garden hose into his own vein, and as the four wolves carefully take Celia out, he holds his arm high, finally folding himself into the back of Tristan’s truck. Marco and the remaining wolf are sent to retrieve Celia’s car.

“As for you,” Varya says as she starts the ignition, “do not let this mess follow you home.”

The door slams and the wheels jounce and I head back into the cabin. They even removed Thea’s sheets, in case they were stained by a drop of Celia’s alien blood.

“We need to talk,” she says.

“I know. I said they were like the Amish—”

“That’s later. What I want to know is why no one ever interviewed me about where you were the last night we saw each other.”

“What?”

“Doug told me. The warrant is for the murder of a woman who was killed that Saturday, but you were with me the entire time.”

“It’s…” I smooth out her mattress. “I’ll get you some new sheets.”

“Stop it. Just…stop it.” She takes my chin in her hand, forcing me to look her in the ironwood eye. “You were with me. I’m not asking about what just happened here with those people who are not even remotely like the Amish. I am asking you why you didn’t tell anyone that you had an alibi.”

My wolfish ears pick up the sound of tires hitting the forest track that leads to Thea’s cabin. Doug will be here in five minutes.

“You want to know why? It’s because that girl who was killed was my assistant, and I had slept with her. I was a shit, and I slept with a lot of women. Then I met you, and I thought I was done with that other me. I never wanted to have anything to do with him again. But I couldn’t get away from him, and I knew if the police interviewed you, they would make sure you knew every horrible thing about me.” I push her hair behind her ear. “And I would lose whatever chance I had that you would love me like I love you.”

It’s coming closer, the sound of wheels spinning against the loose stones.

“He’s coming,” Thea says, grabbing some clothes from the drawers under the bed and stuffing them into her backpack. She comes from the bathroom with a small bag and adds that as well. Then she starts to lace up her boots.

“What are you doing?”

“Coming with you. Going to clear this up.”

“I don’t—”

“I told you to trust me to take care of myself. Well, I do love you. So taking care of myself means taking care of you too.” A car door slams. She looks toward the window. “He’s here.”

Doug’s footsteps crunch along the small stones. He takes a picture of the license plate of my Land Rover.

“I’ll follow you in my car,” she says.

The heavy tread creaks on her porch. Doug looks through the window. Then he knocks on the door.

“Take mine. It’s got a parking sticker, and…” I fish in my pocket for my keys. “This is for my apartment.”

“Thea,” says Doug’s muffled voice. “I know he’s in there.”

“Is there anything else you want me to hold on to so it doesn’t end up with the property clerk?” she whispers. “Hold on a second,” she calls out. “We’re coming.”

I hand her my phone and my watch and my wallet, taking only my driver’s license.

Thea opens the door to Doug standing with his hand to the back of his belt.

“He doesn’t need handcuffs, Doug. He’s not resisting.”

“He’s a fugitive, The.”

“I’m not a fugitive. I was only a person of interest.”

“You were told to stay put. Hands behind your back.”

I put my hands behind my back, palms out.

Thea’s ironwood eyes narrow, and she slips back into her cabin.

“So you’re just her lawyer, eh?” Doug says, opening the handcuffs. “You should have known better.”

“I wasn’t under arrest,” I say again.

“Well, now you are.” He begins reading me my rights while he tries to close the cuffs, but the hinge pinches tight against my wrist bone and won’t close. “Dammit,” he says and slips the metal cuffs back into his belt, fishing out plastic restraints instead.

“It’s a long drive. At least let me have my hands in front.”

He puts my hands behind my back, tightens the restraints, and then covers my head with his hand as I tumble awkwardly into the back of his car. Through the rear window, I watch Thea pull herself up into my car and adjust the seat forward. She reaches over to put something into the glove compartment and buckles herself in.

My fierce female.

“What are you smiling about?” Doug asks when I face forward again.

“Nothing.”

He looks suspiciously into his rearview mirror.

Thea waves.

I wave back, the ripped remnants of the plastic shackle swinging from my wrist.