Chapter 18

One of the things that Leonora failed to tell us about Offland is that movies add like a solid foot to humans. It turns out that among the humans of Plattsburgh, at least, five foot nine isn’t all that runty.

At Hannaford, Ti leaves me in the checkitout line with our cart so that he can run back and get the coffee that I didn’t pick up. I was moving down the aisle, looking for the right brand, when I was absolutely socked by the overwhelming smell of carrion. By the time Ti found me staring terrified at the cases filled with watery pink slabs of rotting flesh, I’d completely forgotten about the coffee.

“Stay here, Sil,” he says. “I’ll be right back. Just keep moving the cart in the line and don’t do”—he looks around briefly before adding—“anything.” He draws two fingers down my upper lip to remind me about my teeth.

But then a woman tries to maneuver a cart filled with three children and food down the aisle behind me, and because it has a balky wheel, it gets jammed behind a display of hand sanitizer. No matter how much she pushes and pulls, the cart won’t move. She doesn’t seem to understand that it needs to be lifted. There is a man behind me in a Patriots sweatshirt who is mumbling something about Bill Belichick. I tell him I’ll be right back.

“What? No, hold on, Frank. What did you say?”

“Frank? My name’s Silver, actually. And this is my cart. I’ll be right back.”

He rolls his eyes.

“You need to lift it,” I say to the woman, but she doesn’t seem to understand, so I just do it myself, hoping that she won’t be angry and think I meant to expose her weakness.

She opens her mouth and closes it, but no sound comes out. Humans are always talking, so this naturally worries me. I make conversation, like Leonora told me I should to put humans at ease. I ask if the three children in the cart are all hers. She nods slowly, and I congratulate her on her fertility and on surviving so many live births.

The littlest kid who is seated up front starts to cry, and the mother takes him out and glowers at me. One of the kids in the back says I’m very strong for a grandma. He is small, so I explain to him that I am 270 moons and it will be many, many moons before I breed. If ever. A lot of people stare, and it’s not friendly, and I suddenly feel very self-conscious about my hair. I tuck it under my hoodie and suck my lips tighter over my teeth.

Someone pushed our cart out of line. The man in the Patriots sweatshirt is now almost at the front.

I’d told the man in the Patriots sweatshirt that I’d be right back, I explain when Ti tumbles his armload of vacuum-packed coffee bricks into the cart that is at the back of the checkitout line again. “He probably figured he could move our cart, what with me being a subordinate and all.”

The man, who has already put his groceries on the counter, keeps talking and laughing, though his laughter fades as his eyes wander from me to Ti, whose massive arms are folded in front of his chest. The man grabs at his groceries and stumbles away, oranges dropping to the floor. Not that Ti has done anything. Just stared through him with those hard eyes.

I put a box on the conveyor belt that moves it from point A to point A plus two feet. The lady rubs it over a window until it chirps. I put another box on the conveyor belt and watch it proceed on its strange little pilgrimage. The lady’s eyebrows shoot up.

Someone behind us coughs irritably, and Ti starts cramming things willy-nilly on the conveyor belt, and they all crowd to the lady, who no longer has time to do anything with her eyebrows. A boy at the end tries to put things into plastic bags, but I open up the old firewood bags we use instead. We get enough of other people’s plastic bags flying around, and it makes John angry when they get stuck in our trees. A few years back, one got tangled around Tilly’s neck, and she ran terrified through the woods with this white bag that said…

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

Thank you

…flapping around her head until a posse of Pack finally corralled her and got it off. I worried for nearly a moon about why someone would demonstrate gratitude in such a blatantly cruel way until one of the older wolves explained.

I toss one bag over each shoulder, take one in each hand. Ti slides a plastic card back into his pocket and then takes the other four.

I’m starting to feel less and less comfortable, feeling like for all the reading I’ve done, I don’t really understand this world, and at Tails of the Adirondacks, I forget myself and suggest that twelve dollars is a lot to pay for a guinea pig that seems to have a lot of fur and very little meat. I stumble over the answer to why we need a gross of cheese chews and twenty-four tubes of peanut butter toothpaste. “Because the chicken toothpaste tastes disgusting.”

“What she means is that the dogs prefer the peanut butter. We breed dogs,” Ti says. “Huskies and Northern Inuits.”

I know it’s what John wants us to say, but I can’t get my mouth to form the sounds. Our pups don’t like carrion toothpaste. Our children like peanut butter.

I’m not hungry; I just want to go home, but we have one last stop. We get stuck waiting while huge machines tear up the earth with massive claws that rip through the roots of trees. NEW MUN•PAL •ARKING LOT OPENI•G SOON, says the bullet-riddled sign.

At our final stop, Ti pumps gas while I take my list into the station. The boss is a tall, lanky young man with lots of pimples, straight-cut bangs, and a blue polo shirt. He wears a red and white hat with a grease-stained bill that says Utica Club on it.

He seems nicer than most and helps me find the remaining things on our list. I’ve got two cans of oil, a compressor belt, an air filter, and a sealed beam headlight.

“Never seen a girl color up her hair all white ’n’ gray.”

“Didn’t color it. It just comes this way.”

“Can I touch it?” he says, his hand raised.

Now, honestly, if he wants to cover me, he should just say so. Though he’s got Omega written all over him. I wish Ti would hurry up.

The boss puts his hand in my hair. “You’re real pretty,” he says quietly.

“I see that you have an erection,” I say, trying to sound sympathetic. “But I feel I should tell you that you would probably have to fight him”—I point out the window—“if you want to cover me.”

Ti sees me and mouths, You okay? I wave back.

The boss looks at me and then at Ti and, with his mouth still gaping, lurches toward the back office. I’m guessing he hadn’t anticipated that a runt like me would have a bedfellow like Ti.

Not a minute later, a man in a red button-down shirt, camouflage jacket, and blue jeans belted high around his waist comes out of the same office.

“That your car?”

“The red one? Uhh, yes?”

“You up there with John Torrance?”

“Yes, I’m John’s niece,” I say, remembering what John told me about blood being more important to humans than Pack.

“And him?” He points to where Ti just hung up the gas nozzle. “He with you?”

“He’s my bedfellow.” John told me that if anyone asks, Ti is my boyfriend. Not bedfellow. Boyfriend. But I can’t do it. It’s like the thing about dogs. Some words feel wrong on my tongue. Ti is no boy, and he’s not a friend either. A friend doesn’t make me feel like climbing him, my legs tied around his hips, until he thickens and swells into my mazy spaces.

The man in the camouflage jacket sucks on his back teeth with a sharp sluck.

“What the hell goes on up there?”

“We are a group of like-minded individuals”—this time, except for one little fumble, I recite John’s instructions exactly—“who seek to live in harmony with nature and our fellow Pack…man.” There was another word he told me, but I’ve forgotten what it was. I leave out the dog part.

“Hippies?”

“Hippies. That’s it.”

“Where’d your ‘bedfellow’ go?”

I look toward the deserted car. “I’m guessing the bathroom.”

There are a lot of irritating noises here. The flickering lights overhead. The refrigerators. The countertop oven with wrinkled carrion sticks circling endlessly on metal rods.

“I don’t much like hippies.”

And everything smells like death: the gas, this man, and those wrinkled carrion sticks. HOT DOGS, the sign says, 2 FOR $1.50.

The dog in me is getting panicky. She doesn’t like the overheated air buffeting my skin or the slick plastic smell everywhere.

And she wants to claw out that man’s disapproving eyes.

The bell rings, and those disapproving eyes narrow, watching Ti carefully. “Where’d you go?”

“Bathroom,” Ti says in that quiet, dark voice that feels like night air on my soul right about now. “If that’s okay by you.”

“No, it’s not okay. I don’t like you people. I don’t like that you buy up all that land and don’t do a damn thing with it. I don’t like that when I try to do something with my land, land that has been in my family for generations, Torrance calls in the government with some crap about polluting the aquifer.”

Ah. So this is the Junkyard Man.

“You know, one of our pups fell—” I start, but Ti interrupts me.

“Why don’t I just pay, and then we’ll be on our way.” He hands the man another one of the prepaid cards the Pack keeps in a box in the office.

“I’ll take a receipt,” Ti says when the man hands the card back.

“You’ll take yourself out of here is what you’ll do.” And the man pulls back his camouflage jacket. I see the handle of a big gun stuck in a holster.

In that second, my breath comes fast and my heart beats hard and a growl rumbles through my chest, but Ti just shakes his head at me.

How is it that he is never afraid? How is it that I never scent that cocktail of salt and old leather, the potent combination of sweat and adrenaline, the smell of fear? In one step, he pulls the receipt out of the cash register and hovers above the man so that the Junkyard Man can feel the many inches Ti has on him. Feel that this man, my bedfellow, has the BMI of a jackhammer.

The bell rings at the door, and the man lets his jacket fall, covering the gun. It’s no one, just a thin older man with a yellowed mustache and yellow fingers.

The man looks for a moment at Ti, and then his eyes slide back to the Junkyard Man. “Marlboro Red, Anderson. Soft pack.”

Ti’s mouth tightens, his nose flares under his furrowed brow, and my unflappable bedfellow suddenly smells like a crushed cottonmouth.

“Time to go,” he snaps, putting his hand around my arm.

The door to the back office is opened slightly. The boss watches through the crack.

“I can’t believe you let him treat us that way.” Bafflement flits across the boss’s pimply face as I point to Anderson. “I don’t know how you got to be in charge, because you’ve got the balls of an Omega.”

Ti jerks hard on my arm, and I stumble across the threshold of the body shop.

“What would make you say that?” he says, clambering into the car beside me. “He’s not in charge; he’s just some high-school kid.”

“Didn’t you see? It said, right here…” I jab my finger at a spot high on my left breast. “It said ‘BOSS’ in big letters.”

“Oh Jesus, Sil.”

Ti starts the car, and the engine roars on. I sniff hard, trying to get rid of the smell of the carrion sticks, but all I get is the smell of petroleum. The faces of the angry junkyard man and the frightened boy who was not the boss and the man with the yellowed mustache tapping his red-and-white package against the heel of his palm stare through the window until we are out of sight.

At a stop sign, Ti reaches across me to pull on the seat belt.

But I’m feeling angry and like I need to run, and I push him away.

“You have to wear it.”

“I can’t.”

A car behind us beeps, and I leap out of my seat.

“Listen to me,” Ti says. “Let me just get you out of town, then we’ll undo it.”

Whoever it is leans on their horn, and my breathing comes faster, and I kick off my shoes.

“Shit,” Ti hisses, then steps on the gas, one hand holding the wheel, the other pushing me back against the seat.

Unzipping my jeans, I wriggle my hips until my bottom half is bare.

“Not now. Just try to hold on for me.”

But it’s too late. My face starts to push forward before I’ve even stripped off my shirt. Ti floors it, taking the curves at a squeal. At a dirt road, he peels off down what will probably be a snowmobile track soon.

He hits the brakes and then comes around to my side and opens the door. He lifts my grotesque half-changed body from the seat. My eyes can’t focus and my ears can’t distinguish, but as I lean against his chest, I feel the rumble of his voice.

As soon as he lays me on the moldering pine needles beside the path, I start to stumble off, ricocheting against a willow.

I’m already far away when I can finally hear him, his usually soft voice raised in a yell.

“Run, Wildfire. Don’t let anyone see you.”

* * *

I’m careful to keep low and to the trees as I race for our territory. Once I cross the marked and posted boundary, though, I don’t head straight back to the Home Pond. Instead, I run wild, reveling in the crunch of frost-covered leaves under my paws. At the peaks, I breathe deeply the ice-cold air and watch the subtle shifts of soft gray over the lower peaks and valleys all around me, each damp caress washing away the heat and death.

John howls, telling me that’s enough already and it’s time to come home.

The sun is almost gone by the time I stumble awkwardly up to the Boathouse dock. Both big wooden chairs are occupied. John nods to Ti and puts his hand in my ruff.

“Tomorrow,” John says. “Early,” he says. He doesn’t say that I’m in deep trouble, that there will be hell to pay, but as I lay myself down and roll my shoulders back, starting the change, I know there will be.

No law is more strictly enforced than the law against changing Offland. It is the only way to protect our sacred wild. The humans already slaughter the æcewulfs. Hunt them with rifles and bolts from the ground and from the air. If they found out about us…

Shit.

As soon as I’m in skin, Ti opens the big red-and-gray-striped blanket wide. I curl naked into his lap, and he props his head on mine.

I lay my hand on his chest. “Why were you so angry about that man in the gas station? Not the man with the gun. The other one. The man with the dying lungs?”

“I wasn’t. You were getting upset. I was worried about you.”

I frown, my finger beating with the speeding rhythm of his heart. I know there’s something going on inside here. A man as much as threatened him with a gun. But Ti stayed stone-faced and quiet voiced. That changed, though—I know it, I smelled it—when he saw the man with the yellow-stained fingers and breath like coal and rot.

“Ti?” I shift up so I can whisper in his ear. “You know we’re not allowed to kill without eating. But if you need me to, I will eat him for you.”

He doesn’t say anything, but his thick arms pull tight around me. We listen for a while to the coyote shrieks in the distance.

“You know,” he finally says, “you’re the only person who has ever wanted to protect me.”

When the sun is gone and the clouds cover the waxing gibbous moon, he says, “I don’t think he would taste very good.”

“No. I didn’t think he would.”

* * *

“Kyle,” I call softly to the young man coming from the kitchen with an enormous hunk of corn bread. “Kyle!”

Kyle is the 12th’s very sweet, slightly anxious Theta. We didn’t know each other well, what with him being in the 12th, but then his bedfellow left for an internship at some office in Albany last year, and we started running together from time to time.

“Do me a favor, please?” I look back into the office where John and Victor are still hunched in conversation. “If you see Ti coming this way, can you stop him?”

Kyle stoops suddenly and loses several inches.

“M’ou wan me to thtop Tibewius?” he asks, crumbs spewing.

“Just stall him. You know, talk to him. Engage him in conversation? Pleeease.”

“Silver?” John calls out. “A decision has been made.”

At the sound of John’s voice, Kyle disappears.

“Kyle!” I hiss into the hall. “Pleeease.”

I duck quickly back into John’s office. I knew there would be a punishment, and I was pretty certain I knew what it would be. John and Victor have offered me a choice that is no kind of choice at all.

“Right,” I say. “So let’s get this over with.”

“There have to be witnesses,” Victor says. “And you are not wearing that”—he points to my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt (Geek Mountain State: Geeking Out in the Green Mountains)—“are you?”

“John? Tiberius wasn’t raised Pack, and I’m not sure he’s going to understand—”

“I agree. Get Tristan and gather your witnesses, Deemer. We will not be standing on ceremony.” Victor starts to object, but before he can get a word out, John says that his Alpha wants him to make it snappy. Victor slinks out, huffing and chuffing about respect for the Old Ways. I know that Taking the Stone like this is not in keeping with the dignity of the Old Ways, but if Ti tracks me down, I think we will discover that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Old Ways.

Luckily, the fire is already going in the Great Hall. Victor starts to object to the ritual being performed inside, away from the view of the moon, in front of an unhappy batch of witnesses who keep looking at their watches, but drops it as soon as John catches his eye.

“Is it ready yet?” I ask.

“No, it’s not ready yet,” Victor snaps. “Right hand or left?”

“Right,” I say immediately, and Victor nods. That, at least, is as it should be.

Kyle’s screeching yelp in the distance makes us all turn.

“Shit,” I observe.

“Quite,” John agrees and signals for Tara to lock the door.

Something breaks through the undergrowth. “Silver!”

“Deemer?” says John, as the sound gets closer. “Any time now.”

“We need to bind her hand to keep it open,” Victor says.

“No time,” I say. “Just do it. I’ll manage.”

When the searing-hot stone settles onto my hand, every breath I have ever taken explodes from my lungs. My hand stays open, though.

Ti crashes through the storm doors into the foyer and starts throwing himself at the main doors of the Great Hall, screaming my name. Built to withstand the carelessness of the Pack and the aggression of the Adirondack winter, the doors are solid oak, but even they start to groan.

“Ach,” says Sten disgustedly. In that one sound, he compacts a world of complaint about replacing the storm doors and possibly the frames and even the main doors and how no wolf who values his pelt had better grouse about their dinner getting cold. Ach.

“Are we almost done, Deemer?” John asks. “I’d like to open the door before the hinges give.”

Victor nods. I hiss a little as he pulls the branding stone off my hand with a pair of fireplace tongs, then skitters away, leaving Tristan to treat my hand with cool water and bear grease.

On John’s signal, Tara turns the lock and steps back.

“What the fuck is going on?” Ti looks around at John and the witnesses, his eyes unflinching and his nose flared. “And why does it smell like barbecue?”

“Hey, Ti. I think there’s some corn bread in the kitchen, if you’re hungry.”

“Do not change the subject.”

“I think perhaps we should leave Silver to explain,” says John, and with a nod, Victor, Tristan, Tara, and all of the other witnesses stream out after him.

Ti bends over me, honing in immediately on my throbbing hand, slathered in bear grease. His jaw twitches as he looks at the swollen, red skin of my palm and the clear arrow there.

“Just what the hell is that?” he asks furiously.

“Ti, please, you’ve got to stop fracking out.”

“It’s freaking out. I’m freaking out!”

“Listen to me. The most sacred thing we have is our wild. By changing Offland, I endangered that. It is felasynnig, most wicked. I had to be punished.”

“So they branded you?” He jumps up and turns quickly toward the back. Victor’s head pops back into the safety of John’s office, and the door locks.

“This was my decision,” I snap. “It’s just a flesh wound. Besides, I am proud to wear Tiw’s mark.”

“Do not say that’s my mark,” he says. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“Not Ti’s mark, Tiw’s mark.” He looks bewildered. “Tell me you don’t know the story of Fenrir and Tiw?” But of course, he doesn’t. How could he? His mother dead, his father hostile to his wild, it’s up to me to make sure he knows our stories. Not the version humans tell themselves, but the one that wolves tell. The real one.

“So.” And I start to tell him about Loki’s son, the huge and terrifying wolf, Fenrir. I tell him how even the gods were afraid of his ferocious wildness and wanted him bound.

“The humans say Tiw volunteered to put his right hand in Fenrir’s mouth as surety that the fine ribbon the gods meant to wrap around him would do Fenrir no harm, but as usual, the gods could not be trusted. The ribbon being made of bird spit or something was actually magic so powerful that it was able to chain Fenrir. Furious at this betrayal, Fenrir bit off Tiw’s hand.

“We wolves have a different story. We say that Tiw did bind Fenrir, but he bound the wolf inside himself, having fed Fenrir his right hand, the hand that gods and humans use as warranty for their lies, so he would never make a false promise again. We say that once the wolf was bound within him, Tiw stopped being the god of war, as he had been, and instead became the god of law, because he understood in a way no one else could that law is the balance of freedom and restraint.

“It’s the mark of a real wolf,” I say urgently, my good hand against his cheek. “Someone who was more human would have taken the other option and stayed in skin for two moons.”

He cradles my swollen, greased palm.

“And you, of course, couldn’t do that, could you, Wildfire?”

“Never.”

Later in the medic station, while waiting for Tristan to bandage my hand, I ask Ti what happened with Kyle.

“Mmmph,” he says, taking a bite of apple. “When a Yankee says, ‘Wow, so you’re from Canada. How interesting,’ you know you’re being swindled.”