Chapter 19

The first sunny day after two weeks of unrelenting gray, and Sten rushes us to put in the last storm windows and doors for the tempest just around the corner. I look at trees that are almost neon yellow and orange and red under the searingly blue sky, I sniff the air, listen to the unperturbed sounds of the animals, and ask him what makes him think it’s going to rain.

Sten looks at me from under one bushy, reddish eyebrow and makes a little cough-rumble deep in his chest and hands me a rubber mallet.

Two hours later, as we are pounding the last of the tight-fitting second windows into their casings, black clouds skirt the mountains to the northwest and rain tumbles down in torrents.

A wolf runs through a puddle, heading fast toward the woods to the north. Then another heads to the woods to the west. More wolves come, their noses close to the damp ground.

Something’s not right.

Ti stops hammering, his eyes unfocused, listening. “Who is Golan?” he asks.

Another wolf runs past.

“A pup. He’s in Leelee’s echelon. He was the one who caught the mouse that—”

“He’s disappeared.”

Rains are coming even thicker now and the cracks of thunder faster, but outside, I can hear the voices calling Golan’s name and the howls across the Homelands telling him to come home.

At the Great Hall, Pack in fur and skin wait for directions from John. Golan was last seen in the basement, hunting mice.

Wolves have circled the woods nearby and found no hint of Golan, but no hint of coyote either. Usually coyotes won’t come near Home Pond because it’s too well marked, but sick coyotes are unpredictable, and a pup is an easy meal.

“He’s afraid of thunder,” his father retorts when someone suggested again that he was probably outside.

We head to the empty basement, even though I tried to tell Ti that it was pointless. Every member of the Pack has already been here, and I can scent them all, but Ti just stands in the narrow hallway and opens his lungs long and slow, drawing the air through his nose.

“Ti, it’s—”

But he holds up his hand and inhales again, moving slowly toward the door to dry storage. He leans down to a spot on the doorframe and looks at me. I sniff at it once, smelling first the traces of a dozen wolves. Then newly administered Skunk-Off. And finally, the oh-so-slight but unmistakable scent of Baileys and kibble.

I yell for John.

His heavy tread is already racing downstairs. I point to the spot Ti found without saying anything, hoping that we’re both wrong.

“Did anyone see Ronan?”

“Ronan? He’s probably dead or with the Nunavut Pack by now,” Tara says.

“He’s not. He’s here,” John snaps before raising his voice and asking why the hell no one stopped Ronan from coming into the Great Hall, doesn’t exile mean anything to—

“John?” I say, looking only briefly into his eyes before settling on his chin. “Maybe he used the tunnel?”

“What tunnel?”

I head toward the root cellar, sensing John’s fury behind me. The trapdoor is camouflaged with the same packed earth as the rest of the floor, so it blends in, but it isn’t hidden exactly. I assumed that if I knew about it, John did as well.

But when he traces the scuff marks and finds the spot near the wall wide enough for fingers or claws, I know he’s never seen it before.

John opens it and breathes in.

“Where does this go?”

“Pretty deep into the woods.” I start up the stairs. “It was supposed to be for emergencies. To escape. That’s what Gran Sigeburg said.”

“And Ronan knew about this?”

I nod. “I honestly didn’t know it was a secret.”

At the top of the steps, John bellows for Golan’s parents. “And Charlie too.”

My stomach tightens. I like Ronan’s father. Charlie’s always been very sweet to me. He pretended to be pleased when it was announced that I would be Ronan’s schildere, even though it had to be a disappointment.

Charlie lost his mate and Ronan’s two littermates during childbirth and poured all his sad dreams and affections into the sole survivor. Now, if we’re right and Ronan is on the Homelands and did something, anything, with Golan, then the Pack will hunt the last member of Charlie’s family. And they will kill him.

Water collects in the forest canopy, weighing down the weakening leaves until they tumble down in thick clots.

The rain made it impossible for Ronan to disguise the mouth of the tunnel. Oscar and Livia, Golan’s parents, scratch at the door with their claws at the damp pile of mulch over the hatch. When John pulls it open, they drop their heads in, smelling with their keener wild senses. It doesn’t take long for them to confirm that Golan had been there and Ronan, but the downpour wreaks havoc on the scent above ground.

“Your Alpha,” John says, using the commanding voice and the formulation that brooks no dissent, “will have you find Golan Liviasson and Ronan Eardwrecca.”

Ronan has no rights anymore. Not to Pack land, or Pack law, or even a Pack name. He is Ronan Eardwrecca. Ronan Banished.

Whenever John speaks, the Pack listens, but when he speaks as Alpha, the Pack obeys. Those of us who are still in skin shrug out of our clothing and fall to the ground, changing.

What started with the shivering of my naked human body under cold autumn rain becomes a ripple and then an undulation and then a violent thrashing as tendons twang, muscles slide, bones shift, spine lengthens into tail, lungs expand, and my heart strengthens. My nose itches, but I’m helpless to scratch it. Ti yanks on my leg, and the pain makes me forget the itch in my nose.

The bigger the wolf, the longer the change, so they are still roiling and gurgling and stretching when I am done.

Ti has put on some wolf’s discarded parka and stands utterly still as the rain pours over his face. He moves his head a little, angling it to the side, his chest expanding on long, slow breaths.

As a wolf, I can see the silvered movement of water on the black bark of a distant cherry. I hear the scrabble of salamanders and the creak of branches. I smell woody fungus on the roots of a downed tree that I can’t see. But aside from that tiny hit of Baileys and kibble at the entrance to the tunnel, I can’t smell Ronan. This explains how we’ve been running through so much Skunk-Off.

“This way,” Ti says and starts to jog through the woods.

Ronan never cared much about the Homelands, preferring the promises of the world beyond. So my guess is if he’s anywhere, it’s in one of my hiding places. As Ti picks up speed through the High Pines, I know where Ronan has gone.

The Pack doesn’t like the Krummholz, “the Crooked Woods,” that tormented nowhere land between the High Pines and the wind-scoured peaks. Here, nature is stretched thin to breaking: there are no forests, just scattered treelike deformities clinging to the mountaintops. Some creep near the ground like penitents. Some stand like flags, scrubbed bare on the windward side.

It haunts our tales as the place between places:

Winter-blasted, wind-twisted,

The world’s last sentinel.

Forsworn, forsaken

By all but the forever

Wolf.

Sounded better in the Old Tongue, but I’ve forgotten the original.

I brought Ronan here because while I love the whole of the Homelands, I have a special warmth for the Krummholz. Maybe it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that where I saw something noble in the small and crippled trees clinging fiercely to their precarious existence, Ronan saw only pathos and failure.

Ronan had once been the presumptive Alpha of our echelon. It was years ago, so it’s hard for me to remember, but I think that was very important to him. He’d been born with a lucky genetic mix that made him biggest and most powerful almost without trying.

Because he didn’t have to work at it, he was eventually surpassed by those who did. Like Solveig, who’d spent grim hours shifting big rocks. After a few months of rock shifting, she challenged Ronan and, in the fight, tore into him over and over again until John told her to put an end to it. She didn’t want Ronan as her Beta, so she not only made him submit, she made him weak, vulnerable. Challenge by challenge, he started his slide down until he landed at the very bottom with me.

The only thing his big size got him was alcohol when he was nineteen. He’d come home usually drunk and sometimes with money. He hid his winnings under my mattress. “It’s not like you’re ever going to use it.”

I kept his secrets, because without him, I would be a lone wolf. And I shared my own, hoping he would see that while I might be a crippled runt, I had cool stuff in my arsenal too.

Ti follows me toward the eye-shaped break in the layered rock that would be tough for him to squeeze through, but I slip easily over the lip and under the lid. As a wolf, my eyes adjust to the dim light. As a wolf, though, I am almost undone by the smells. Sickly sweet spilled liquor. Rotting meat. Ammonia and excrement. My nose is overwhelmed and useless for scenting out Golan.

“Is that you, Silver?” asks a tatty sleeping bag at the back of the cave.

I sneeze as I push aside some old boxes.

“Not looking for me, then, schildere? He’s in the bag. Stupid thing. Would not shut up. Couldn’t very well have the Pack knowing the exile had returned, could I?”

My heart pounding against my ribs, I gently scrape at the cord of the backpack near Ronan’s feet until I hear a tiny muffled whimper. With my paw, I nudge Golan out. His little eyes look terrified over a crumpled muzzle of duct tape. Though he stinks of fresh piss, I pick him up gently between my teeth—the pup goes limp as they always do—and hurry him away from all this dirt and misery to the mouth of the cave.

As soon as he feels the fresh air, Golan’s little legs churn up the dried wort that serves as ground cover up here, but I don’t let him go. Pulling a Swiss Army knife from his pocket, Ti clamps one hand tight around the struggling pup’s jaw and carefully cuts through the tape so Golan can at least open his mouth.

I let him go, and the terrified fur ball runs, with Ti hot on his trail.

“I don’ suppose you can just take the kid,” Ronan slurs behind me. “Forget you foun’ me?”

I suck in a deep breath of cold, wet Krummholz air and howl.

John responds almost immediately.

“Of course not.” Ronan turns in his sleeping bag and stares at the roof of the cave. “You know I went to John before the Dæling. After I’d had those two disastrous challenges. It wasn’t fair; the ground had been so slick during that first fight that I’d slipped. My leg was still messed up two days later when I had my second challenge, but John refused to let me have another chance.”

I don’t know why he’s telling me this. What has this got to do with kidnapping a tiny pup, taping his muzzle, and shoving him in a backpack?

“Anyway, we got to talking about how I was born to be an Alpha, and once my luck changed and I got back on my feet, I would be again, but—and I don’t mean this as an insult or anything, you understand, it’s just true—you were never going to be anything but a Kappa at best. So while I might be your schildere, I would never mate you.”

I peer over my shoulder.

“You know what John said?”

Ti comes back with the struggling pup held tight against him. He strokes Golan’s head and sits on the rock outside the cave’s entrance. The rain has soaked the cupped hood of his borrowed parka.

“John said you were twice the wolf I would ever be, and he’d be damned if he’d ever let you be mated with me. With me.”

I hear Ronan struggle with the zipper of his sleeping bag.

“What a waste,” he says. I look toward the back of the cave. Ronan is sitting now on top of the sleeping bag, a once-white dress shirt falling open, revealing soft, pale thighs and a limp, dark cock. “I mean him. The Shifter. Yeah, you. I’m talking about you.”

Ti turns his head to the side, not far enough to see Ronan but far enough to make clear he’s heard him.

“I told you my luck would change, Sil, and it did. I got back all the money John gave me and more, and I was free. I rented a car, and you know where I drove it? East of no-fucking-where. I had no place I had to be. Nothing I had to do. I bought shirts that weren’t easy to care for. And guess what? I screwed human women who were never going to breed more Pack. I was free to do what I wanted.

“I was free,” he murmurs once more. “But then my luck changed again, and I was right back where I started.”

Golan has settled a little and allows his head to fall against Ti’s broad chest.

“Silver?” Ti says quietly. “Any water in there?”

Ronan leans back and, grabbing something from behind him, throws it toward me. I nose the bottle toward Ti, who pours it into his cupped hand.

With a sharp bark, John announces himself. Ronan turns his face to the wall. He doesn’t have any fight left in him, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to walk to his death. They’re going to have to drag him out.