Chapter 6

Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 20 days

Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 20 days

“Mr. Sorensson, you received two calls from Evie Kitwana. She says she’s the new CEO of Great North?”

Janine looks at me expectantly, her fingernail tapping at the casing of the phone, because she knows that whenever Great North calls, I jump. But not this time. Celia must have told Evie that I would be challenging her for primacy of the Great North. Our laws require that I recite the ancient formula for a challenge at the next Iron Moon. They do not require me to chat about it over the phone.

“Should I put the call through?”

“No, I’ll take care of it when I have time.”

My assistant leans over toward my computer, pulling up today’s schedule. A petite blond with slender hips, a cross-trained abdomen, and an overabundance of pertness: breasts, nose, lips. She is perfectly beautiful, in the cookie-cutter way of so many women now. Max warned me to stop screwing around with the office staff. I’d done my best, hunting primarily at Testa, but then Janine came…

I couldn’t resist. It wasn’t because of the way she looks; it was because of the way she smells. She uses some kind of vanilla scent that makes me so hungry. I’m sure she thinks it smells like cookies or ice cream, but, in fact, it smells like the excretions of beavers’ castor sacs, located under their tails. They use it to mark their territory, and just a whiff will make any wolf go into salivating paroxysms of need for fresh, chewy beaver liver.

I shake my head, trying to clear away the scent.

Janine flailed and flubbed her way through college. After finishing—whether she graduated is unclear—she took a series of jobs under men and women she describes uniformly as “asshole sadists.” That made for a terrible résumé, but because Max knew Janine’s father from law school, she landed here. With a loft paid for by her parents, a cushy job she can’t be fired from, and the guarantee of a brilliant recommendation from the man who was stupid enough to bed her.

Her fingers reach for a pale tendril at the nape of her updo, directing my eyes toward the tattooed tail that ends there. I know now that the tail belongs to a dragon that clings to her back and around her ribs and up, its jaws set on either side of the nipple tight like an apple seed on top of her left breast.

“Where do you want me to make reservations?” Janine asks, pointing to my dinner date with a potential client. Her softness presses against my shoulder. My cock responds not at all, and my wolf curls into a ball, his muzzle buried beneath paw and tail.

“Oak. No, make it Plank. At eight.”

Max has largely relinquished new clients to me—and with good reason. No human understands the workings of hierarchy as well as I do.

Admittedly, establishing your place in the Great North hierarchy is much more straightforward. Either your jaws are strong enough, your claws sharp enough, your power fierce enough, your strategy cunning enough…

Or they’re not.

Human hierarchy is complicated and subtle. The strength and strategy is in knowing how it works.

At dinner, for example, I will take this man, described to me as the King of Ball Bearings, to Plank, a restaurant just starting to trend, but where I’ve already established a reputation for generosity—fairly easily, because the maître d’ was at a previously trending restaurant where I had already been established.

Shown to a table near the fireplace with its pattern of perfectly cut logs set into the slate cladding, I will sit with my back to the door. I will not crane my head searching the crowds.

The potential subordinate—I mean, client—comes on time, but I am already there, and with a quick look at my AP, which he won’t recognize because he has a clunky gold Rolex, he immediately starts to feel awkward.

When I stand, I tower over him, and whether I have to or not, I bend slightly to shake his hand. Opening the button on my Hardy Amies jacket, I pull it back from my Charvet shirt. The hem of my pants breaks just so above my Berluti shoes.

We sit, and when the sommelier comes, standing at my elbow, looking first to me, I nod indicating my subordinate-to-be. It is by my grace that he goes first. When he orders a dully predictable cabernet, I suggest instead the Côte-Rôtie, a more interesting choice. The sommelier smiles.

Then the client orders a filet mignon because it’s the most expensive cut. I order the sirloin because it is the best.

We start to talk. My subordinate is eager to impress me with his importance, to tell me all the amazing ways in which the world runs on ball bearings. On his ball bearings, in particular. I wait until he is finished and ask him an intricate question about counterfeiting and patent law, so that he knows that I have already gone far beyond his palaver and know why he needs me.

The switch takes place. Suddenly, I am no longer trying to get him as a client. He is trying to get me as a lawyer. He will have already started to scan the room, looking for any powerful person to bolster his standing. He finds one and nods to him. I don’t turn my attention from the client. I do not court power; power courts me.

He takes out his cell phone. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to take this.” He does it to prove that he is a busy man and much needed.

I nod, giving my permission. But I keep my phone off. It is a tool for my convenience. I am at no man’s beck and call.

While he talks, a woman I’ve had walks past with another man. She gives me a small smile. I lower my head for one almost unnoticeable second, and her body softens in response. Another woman, one I haven’t had, lifts her eyes to mine, her lids lowered. My eyes linger on her a little longer than necessary. She pushes her hair behind her ear, then pulls her hand back, letting it slide down her jaw toward her lower lip.

The subordinate notices everything, and if I’ve done it right, he will do anything to be in this world, my world.

With a twist of my jaws, he is down and I am Alpha.

At the end of dinner, I shake his hand and thank him. Noblesse oblige and all that. I watch until he is safely out of the restaurant and then head toward the back. There, I lock the door of the shiny-bright restaurant bathroom with its orchids and bowl of river rocks. I stick my finger down my throat and tickle my uvula until both wine and sirloin, alcohol and carrion, are purged.

I am so sick of this world. My world.

• • •

It takes me a long time to fall asleep. Stripping down to nothing, I curl on top of my big bed, staring out the window at the moon—unless the moon isn’t there, in which case I stare at the East River, trying to find a bit of it that is not garishly lit by the Manhattan Bridge.

I don’t sleep well in skin. Haven’t been able to for years or maybe ever, but it’s been getting worse. I’ve started having dreams now. Dreams in which I start the change, but it takes so long.

In this dream, I’ve stayed late at HST, so late that the Iron Moon comes, but this time, only my legs change. I stay there waiting, pretending to work with my human hands clicking stupidly and endlessly at my keyboard while my bent wolf legs dangle hidden beneath my big desk. I smile and wave as each person in the office leaves. Making excuses about the Makropulos case, which isn’t a case at all.

Once everyone is gone, I drop to the plush carpet and scurry away on my human knuckles and my lupine feet.

Breathless and panicky, I wake up and grab my sweats and sneakers. I run downstairs.

“Can I get you a cab, Mr. Sorensson?” asks the doorman.

“It’s all right, I’m having trouble sleeping. Thought I’d go for a run.”

His eyes flicker to the empty darkness outside. “Be careful out there.”

“I will, Mohammad. Thank you.”

I follow the rumble of the cement under my feet toward the place where the air smells less of ocean and more of river.

At the 1 train, I swipe my card. A man in a frayed, black puffer coat with two wheelie bags is lying in one corner, his head cushioned on an overstuffed Babies “R” Us bag. He lifts one eyelid to see if I’m likely to tell him he has to move along.

I shake my head and turn away. I am the least of his worries.

Penn Station is quiet, though even now, it’s not empty and there are more than enough police. Still, I’ve done this before and know my audience. Moving like a drunk bridge-and-tunnel partier, I head to the very end of platform 16, leaning heavily against the wall until I’m sure no one is watching. Then, with a quick turn, I sprint down the narrow metal stairs at the end, prancing carefully across the tracks. Another few feet, and I’m safely at the walled-off remains of the old tunnel that served as mail access to the trains. Beside one crumbling part of the wall, I drag out two concrete blocks and wriggle in.

Now comes the dangerous part.

There is no law more deeply held by Pack than the one against changing Offland. It is felasynnig, an Old Tongue word that doesn’t really translate because it combines both criminality and immorality. Not everything that is immoral is illegal, and not everything that is illegal is immoral, but something that is felasynnig is the worst of both.

I’ve taken every precaution I can to not be seen, but if Evie ever found out I’d changed here in the heart of New York City surrounded by millions of humans, she would have no choice but to condemn me to a Slitung, a flesh tearing.

Still, I’d rather be torn apart as a wolf than to face life trapped in skin.

Shoving my clothes and wallet into my bag, I lie down on the dusty tile. My fading wolf lifts his head, hobbling slowly to his feet.

Wolves have different ways of starting the change. Some roll their shoulders, some arch their backs, some bend deep into their haunches. I stretch both arms in front of me with my palms flat, my wrists extending as far as they can go. Then my other self, my real self, takes over, and I relax into it. Muscles lengthen or contract, and bones do the same, bending in new ways. Organs move. I am blind and deaf as my features rearrange. I am immobilized as my bones and muscles shift. My skin goes numb as the sad coating of hair is replaced by thick fur. Or vice versa.

And unlike the werewolves of fiction, I am completely and utterly helpless.

When the change is over, it takes me a moment before I can bear to look at my front legs, to make sure that they are, in fact, paws and not the hands of my dream. The relief is almost a physical thing.

I tried once before to change in my locked bathroom, but a caged wolf is no kind of wolf at all. This may be a poor substitute for my forest, but in this world, the steel beams are my trees, the tracks are my rivers, the sirens are my birdsong, the distant rumble of trains is my bellowing moose.

And the rats are my prey.

A big rat, nearly as large as Tarzan, scurries in the dark. The big ones make for the best hunting, not just because they have the most flesh on them, but because they have been smart enough to avoid rat poison and are fast enough to avoid trains.

Leaping across the tracks, I chase after him, weaving in and out of the beams and splashing through the fetid puddles. Before he goes somewhere I can’t follow, I jerk forward, clamping onto him and pulling him back out. As he tries to race away, my claws scritch along the ground, banging into an old plastic bucket. I grab his tail and throw him into the air and catch him on the way down. Then I let him escape and take after him again.

It is not a good kill, John, but this is what happens when you domesticate a wolf. You pervert him.

I savor every bit of the chase and every last gout of warm blood and every delicately crunchy bone.

Then I head back to my hole in the cinder block as despondent as always. A slow rat smelling of almond and carbolic crosses my path. I give it wide berth. Poisoned rats won’t kill me, but they do tend to cause bloat.

• • •

“Good run, Mr. Sorensson?” asks the night porter.

“It was fine, Saul. Thanks.”

As I wait for the elevator, Saul starts the floor polisher again and follows my dusty footprints as far as the elevator.