Chapter 10

“You really are a crappy wolf.”

“And you should have told me I wasn’t supposed to kill her.”

“Will you keep it down? Supposing someone hears you?” I look nervously around the Great Hall. No one is here, except for a pup peeling the birch bark from the banister supports. “Hey, Leelee! No chewing on the balustrade!” The pup freezes for a minute before scampering back upstairs.

“It was a challenge, Tiberius. You got her submission. In what world would you assume that killing was the point?”

He rubs slow and deliberate circles above the big aster scar on his torso. “The real world.”

“Yeah.” I put my hand on the door to the med station. “And how’s that been working out for you?”

Tristan pulls the curtain shut around one of the beds, though not before I see Solveig’s tail limp on the bed.

“How is she?”

“She’ll be fine. Tracheal rupture, but I patched it up. The worst part was getting her on the ventilator. You can imagine how happy that made her. Had to knock her out. A little less force next time, eh, Shifter?”

Ti purses his lips and then, before I know what he’s doing, pulls up my sleeve, revealing the ripped-up mess at my shoulder. “Maybe you can take a look at this.”

“What are you doing!” I yelp, pulling my sleeve back down.

“It’s huge. He should see—”

“It’s nothing.” I smile weakly at Tristan.

But it’s too late. Tristan, who is the Pack doctor and the 5th’s Alpha, shoves his gloved finger painfully into the bloody flesh. “So? It’s just a flesh wound,” he says. “Something wrong with your tongue, Shifter?”

“What?” Ti says, baffled.

“You couldn’t just debride it?” Tristan says.

Seeing Ti’s continued confusion, I clarify. “Lick it, Ti. He means lick it.”

Ti glances at the blood seeping from my upper arm, and his nose curls. “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re a doctor. You have all this.” He waves his hand at the med station. “And all you’re going to do is to say ‘lick it’?”

Tristan’s dark eyes roll so far up in his head that they have disappeared. I give him a strained smile.

“Solveig, who has a tracheal rupture,” Tristan says with meaning, “needs help. Silver, who has a flesh wound, doesn’t. She knows she has to tough it out. Otherwise, what happens when she has a flesh wound and all I have are claws? Here,” he says, shaking out a pale-green pill from the plastic container he keeps in the pocket of his white coat. “Have a Tic Tac.”

I refuse with a frantic shaking of my head, but Ti takes two and pops them into his mouth before I can warn him that any wolf scenting wintergreen will know we went to Tristan with a boo-boo.

“When she wakes up, I’ll tell your Alpha you stopped by to check on her,” Tristan says quietly as we head out the door.

“I thought John was your Alpha,” Ti says as soon as the door closes behind us.

His breath is an absolute toxic cloud of Tic Tac. I hear footsteps coming and pull him into the big closet that holds the seeds and tools for the cold frames to wait out the fug of wintergreen.

“John is the Pack Alpha,” I explain. “The Pack’s been too big for a single Alpha to control for a long time, so it was divided into echelons. They’re like age groups, mostly wolves born within sixty moons of each other. Solveig is the 14th Echelon’s Alpha. My Alpha for about five seconds before…well, before you arrived.”

I put a trowel back on its hook, then fold my arms in front of me, bouncing against the wall.

“What exactly are we doing here?” Ti asks, looking around.

“Waiting until you don’t smell like wintergreen.”

Now it’s his turn to roll his eyes as he stalks out. As soon as he does, I hear Tara’s voice telling him that John’s waiting for us. I push myself off the wall and head out to Tara’s waiting nose and disapproving eyes.

“You went to medical for that?” Tara asks, poking her finger into the bloody sleeve of my T-shirt.

I grit my teeth until she goes, then I let out my breath in a sharp d-owww.

“I know humans talk just to talk,” I say tightly, “but when I talk, it’s because I have something that needs saying. And you”—I jab my finger in his chest—“are going to have to listen.”

I’ve always liked John’s office. Crammed between the library and the medic station, it is a small space with a high ceiling, one tall window, and a smell like damp manila envelopes. Probably from shelf upon shelf of Pack legal documents that are meticulously copied and filed here. There’s even a copy of the original deed from three hundred and gibbety years ago.

Most of what’s left of the floor space is given over to John’s huge rolltop desk. It is made of cherry and has many drawers, although the bottom four are useless because pups have chewed the drawer pulls to nubbins.

John holds up a finger, then finishes something on his MacBook. Aside from the MacBook and the ancient Rolodex that no one has bothered to digitize, the surface of his desk is crowded with novelty mugs (Leader of the Pack or Alpha Male: Do Not Provoke) that gather dust and pencils at the back, mostly presents from Offlanders who spend much of the year away from the territory, doing the best they can to pass as human.

The gleaming first-kill skulls are prominently displayed on floating shelves above his desk. They’re all small: rabbits, mostly. Beavers. Raccoons. And a single fisher. Mine, a chipmunk taken in my sixty-fifth moon, is on a bottom shelf in the middle, partly because it’s small. I think John was also proud, because a chipmunk is fast and lithe, and for a crippled wolf, it’s a good kill, if not particularly good eating.

The aged printer hawks out a piece of paper; John swivels toward us, the ancient wooden bank chair creaking loudly. “So, Shifter…you and Silver have won the right to sit at our table. This means that for the next three moons, we will give you food and shelter in exchange for work. Your schedule is there,” he says, pointing to the piece of paper on the printer tray.

“During that time, the Pack, as a whole, will judge you both to see if you bring strength to the Pack. If you reflect honor and worth upon your mother’s blood. Personally, I hope you do, because I don’t want to lose Quicksilver. But if you fail, I will implement the consequences of her decision to join her fate to yours.” He pulls off the much-washed flannel shirt and hangs it over the back of his chair, revealing a T-shirt with a wolf’s head that must be another Offlander offering. THE NORTH NEVER FORGETS, it says.

“Let me be clear, Shifter. Do not underestimate Silver. She is strong of marrow and knows the Pack and the land better than anyone. You could not ask for a better shielder.”

“John?” I squeak. “His name is Tiberius.”

John’s hand hovers above the mouse.

“Please?”

One calloused finger hits on the plastic casing (tick, tick, tick).

“The Bathhouse should be empty. Tiberius, do us all a favor and try to get rid of the stink of steel.”

* * *

We call aspens the Old Whisperers. For five months of the year, they gossip about us from high up on their pale trunks.

ShiverShiverShiverShiver.

Now, as we make our way to the Bathhouse, I swear the whole Great North Pack has turned into a bunch of Old Whisperers.

ShifterShifterShifterShifter.

“His name is Tiberius!” I snap.

“You don’t have to keep doing that,” Ti says as we make our way to the Bathhouse. “You know, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones…’”

“Yes, they can, though generally I prefer mallets and mauls. At the end of the day, there’s less stuff to pick out of the marrow, which makes for better eating.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the old human saying. You know: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’?”

I hold open the door that leads to the screened-in porch, with its long chairs that wolves use to cool off. It may be an old human saying, but I’ve never heard it, and it doesn’t sound right to me. Humans are always shooting one another over names. Just ask a Yazidi or a Jew or a communist.

“All I’m saying is that if I’d worried about every name that anyone called me, I’d have had to fight every Shifter in Canada.” Ti pushes aside one of the leafy bundles of birch branches hung from the exposed beams. “I don’t let it get to me. You shouldn’t either.”

He takes off his clothes in the changing area and wraps a towel around his hips. I pat the big, slatted teak table in the shower room. He lies down on his stomach and watches me search through the net bag for a brush. “Remember how I told you that I was born premature?” I say once I’ve found it. I fill a bucket with warm, soapy water. “Like your mother, my mother didn’t make it.”

“And your father?”

“He passed soon after, but that’s not the point. The point is, I was tiny and really weak, and until I was nearly forty-two moons, I thought my name was Fromwart.”

“Fromwart? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“It’s not a name. I thought it was, but then I realized they were calling me Framweard, which is Old Tongue for someone going back where they came from. Someone doomed to die. They were so convinced of it that they didn’t bother naming me. I was in my sixtieth moon when Gran Sigeburg told John that I needed a name. She was the one who named me Quicksilver.”

Gran Sigeburg had told me that story over and over again, and no matter how often she told me, it was always sort of smushed together into one long, run-on sentence. “It was your sixtieth moon, which is a big birthday of course, and I told my son that it was high time you had a name, a real name, and that you should be called Ælfrida to honor our first Alpha, but John said, ‘She’s got enough problems without being named Ælfrida,’ and I was ripe angry about that, but then I remembered that her Deemer was buried right next to her, a spot of honor to be sure, and this Deemer, she ran from Caledonia to Portsmouth with her leg shot clean off ”—the way I’d heard it was that she’d come from Wessex to Portsmouth with a bullet wound, but if Gran Sigeburg wanted to heroize my namesake, who was I to gainsay her?—“and she must have been a silver too, because she was named Seolfer, and that’s what I told John, that you would be named Seolfer, and he said no but that Silver was fine, and I was ripe angry, because our Pack needed some good, strong Old Tongue names, so I said, ‘Quicksilver, then,’ because you were anything but quick and I was feeling tart, and he said it was a fine name or maybe he just said ‘Fine’?” Gran Sigeburg was already starting to lose her mind by then. She was somewhere around twenty-five hundred moons when she stopped telling the story and asked instead, “Who are you?”

She didn’t make it back from the next hunt.

God, Ti has a beautiful back. I start to scrub it with broad circles.

“I know it was only a name, but once they started calling me Quicksilver, the Pack stopped treating me like I was quite so…temporary. I’m just saying that if they focus on what you are, they’ll never pay attention to who you are.”

He considers me for a moment and then turns his head, propping his chin back on his wrists. He sucks in a deep breath as I scrub hard at his back and under his arms and his calves and lower thighs, where the sweat stinks of steel.

“Hands.”

He lets his arms flop limp at his sides. Scrubbing with soap and a brush does nothing for the smell. I try pumice, but not even that will scrub away the metallic tang.

How long do you have to hold a gun before the stench of steel seeps into your blood?

I’m careful of the wounds Solveig made in his flanks, just letting the water loosen the dried blood. Thin, dark-flecked rivulets run into the drain in the floor, and I can see just how deep Solveig’s claws went. Some are nothing, barely more than scratches.

But others are gouges made by claws and filled with dirt. My tongue swirls over the biggest one, gently caressing the caked blood and dried mud, but Ti flinches.

“Don’t do that,” he says, pushing my head away.

“Why? We don’t carry diseases, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I didn’t think you did.” He slides his hand under his stomach and lifts his hips for a moment. “It’s just, I don’t…I don’t like being groomed.”

“I see. Turn over?”

Holding his towel, he turns onto his back while I squirt a bit of shampoo in my hands, rubbing until it’s warm and lathered. I massage it into his scalp, kneading the knotted muscles at the base of his skull, lightly scratching his sideburns.

He grunts softly. “Sorry,” I say, stopping immediately. “I forgot. You don’t like being groomed.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I know exactly what you meant, even if it’s not what you said. It’s not grooming that bothers you. It’s that we do it in ways that humans don’t.” I lean over him, my silver hair falling on either side of his face, and I smile wide so that my mouth opens around teeth that are too long, too sharp, and too feral ever to be mistaken for human. “This is what I am, Ti. There are plenty of others here who will play human with you, if that’s what you want. But not me.”

He brushes my hair away from my face, but it falls back again and lands like a pale wash against the dark mahogany of his chest. He gently thumbs the point of my fang and looks hard into my eyes before turning on his side, exposing the biggest gouge, the one where four claws found deep purchase in his flesh.

I move the towel a little and hold his thigh while the eddy of my tongue gently cleans him. I keep at it, caring and curing until his muscles relax and he exhales, a long, low sound like air seeping out of an inner tube.