Chapter 27

I don’t remember falling asleep, just waking up. The sun couldn’t be bothered with more than a lazy visit above the horizon, and the sky is the color of mercury, and the waters of Home Pond are the color of lead, and the skeletal fingers of spruce have turned from evergreen to graphite.

There’s something warm against the curve of my spine. I take a deeper breath, feeling the shape of his shoulder blades. I turn onto my back and pull the blankets tight over my body.

“I’m sorry, Sil, but I had to think.”

There’s a wasp’s nest in the highest reaches of the pitched roof.

“I did some thinking too. I don’t want to be exiled, so why don’t we just go through with the Bredung, but then you cover whatever viable—”

“Stop,” he says wearily. “Just…stop.” Pushing himself off the floor, he climbs in next to me. His hands, so warm and rough, soothe my aching skin. I turn toward his body, dark and big and scarred as an old oak.

“Those ‘viable females’?” he says. “They’re like beautiful humans. Always confusing luck with birthright and expecting everything to come to them as their due. Not like you: you assume nothing and fight for everything. You fight for yourself. You fight for your pack.

“And you fight for me,” he whispers, his voice as rough as his bearded cheek. “You fight for me. No one’s ever fought so hard for me. No one’s ever tried so hard to make me feel like I might belong. That I may need to be cared for.

“And that this divide in my soul isn’t fatal.”

He curls his legs and his shoulders tight around as if he’s trying to make his body small. Trying to fit in the circle of my arms. He’s too big, but I hold him close anyway and whisper to him that I don’t understand what’s wrong, but that I love—

“Don’t,” he says harshly. I try to turn my head, to look at him, but he traps me. “I have something to say, and I don’t want to see your face when I say it. Please just listen. I didn’t come here because I was trying to escape, Silver. I came here because I was sent.”

Sent?

Shifters, he says in a whisper like a dragonfly skimming over summer water, may pretend they’re human, but they aren’t. They don’t grow old the way humans do. They can’t go to doctors, because, like us, their bodies are alien. Their paperwork is forged, making legitimate business and public life difficult, because eventually someone starts to get suspicious. It always happens. So they survive on the fertile border between legality and criminality, cocooned in a combination of money and intimidation and the particularly nasty class of humans attracted to that combination. And at the head of it all, at the head of all the Shifters of North America, is a man named August Leveraux.

“My father. I didn’t lose any challenge. The whole thing—the challenge, the clawing, everything—was thought up by my father, because he knew no Pack would trust a Shifter, even one whose mother was Pack.”

My eyes keep drifting to the wasp’s nest. How is it that I never noticed it before? Had the males all died before we moved in?

A Shifter at one of the border casinos scented a wolf, he says. “Lone wolves come through occasionally, searching either for a place to belong or a place to die. But this one was marked up, like he was still part of a pack.” The Shifter reported it to August, and August sent his best tracker to follow him. Which was how Ronan led Tiberius straight to us.

Where is the mated queen? Is she buried all alone in the frozen ground, her mind and body numb, waiting?

Tiberius pulls at a strand of my hair that’s stuck to his lips.

As furious as I am with Tiberius and Ronan, it is nothing compared to my anger at myself. Because I didn’t want to be a nidling, I kept Ronan’s Offland visits secret when I should have told John. Because I didn’t want to be a nidling, I brought a Shifter into our Pack.

“Get off of me!” I curl and twist and struggle to get away from him, but Ti refuses to let go. “Shifters always believe we have money. But you’ve seen how we live. We’re not rich; we—”

“You said you have fund managers, Sil,” he murmurs quietly. “They must be managing something. Besides, it would hardly matter. There’s a massive shale play extending through the Great North. Yours is the largest holding outside the Adirondack Park, and Washington is offering too many incentives to leave this land alone.”

Held in the steel cage of his thighs and the pinion of his thick arms and by the weight of his chest, I slash out at his face with my fangs. He doesn’t flinch when I gouge his cheek.

He lifts his head. Blood wells up along the gash left by my canine.

“You told him, didn’t you?” I turn away from those gold-flecked black eyes that took me from the very beginning. “I trusted you, Tiberius.” A single warm drop burns a trail along my cheekbone.

“I know, Wildfire. Please. I’m telling you everything—everything—because I need that trust again. Yes. I told him. The man with the dying lungs? The one you didn’t like? That’s Daniel Leary, my father’s right-hand man. You have to know I was already so conflicted when I met him at the gas station, but yes, I told him. Then he dared to come onto your land and threaten you and—”

“And you kept his guns. I know you didn’t give them all to John. Why? So when the moon comes and we are helpless, you can kill—”

“No!” he shouts. “No. No…god no. I did keep them, but I did it because I know my father, and I wanted to be able to protect you. I told you I was a terrible shot, but that was a lie too, because the truth is, Sil…I am a fucking miracle.” There’s no pride in his voice, just disgust and deep weariness.

“I was my father’s enforcer. You know how I said I managed human resources? I did it by hunting them down and killing them. I’m the reason they say no one can escape August Leveraux. But not anymore. Not ever again.”

He lifts his hip and slides his hand into his front pocket, reaching for his wallet. He hands it to me. “There’s a receipt in there. Read it.”

I pull out a receipt from the U.S. Post Office, 10 Miller Street, Plattsburgh, for a priority envelope to the CRA in Ottawa and another to August Leveraux care of a PO box in Halifax.

“So?”

“That’s what I was doing. I went to the safe-deposit box in Plattsburgh where I keep—kept—things from my old life. I sent a copy of a zip drive with the most intimate details of August Leveraux’s financial holdings to the CRA and a letter to my father telling him what I had done.”

I stare a little uncomprehendingly at the receipt. “And what exactly is the CRA?”

“Canada Revenue Agency. Like the IRS. I didn’t want you to have to trust the promise of a man who had lied to you so often. I had to make it real. There is no changing it now. Even if you reject me, I have nothing left to go back to.”

A drop of blood falls from his face to mine, warm and smelling of iron and salt and mutely tragic.

“Do you remember? At the Clearing? When I told you I didn’t want to die? That was a lie too, because the truth was I really didn’t care. But then I found you. And you made me realize that it didn’t matter whether I was a real human. What mattered was that I was a real man.”

* * *

In the morning, we are summoned to the Alpha’s office, and all the way there, I imagine telling John about Tiberius. But then I imagine never seeing Tiberius again. Or never seeing my pack. Or more probably both. And I can’t.

So instead, we find ourselves in John’s office with more wolves than there are carrion beetles on week-old roadkill. Victor is here. Tristan. Leonora. Tara.

Ti stands with his back against the wall nearest the door, his arms tight around my waist. His gaze is cool and impervious, but his body is cautious and needy.

“Tiberius, I understand from Leonora that you suffer from a fairly common human affliction called frosted feet?”

“Cold feet, Alpha,” she says and slurps on a stick in a mug of coffee.

“Yes, well.” John looks pointedly at the stick. “I’m not going to find that blowing around Home Pond, am I?”

“No, Alpha, I keep it in my handbag. I am simply trying to instruct the Pack in the proper use of straws. The juveniles’ field trip to Chipotle last week got out of hand.”

She sucks up another long swig of coffee before putting the mug on a coaster of the waxing quarter moon, one of a set sent to John by an Offland wolf. She crosses her arms, and I cower into Ti’s chest. I just know that she’s going to ask me something I can’t possibly answer, like the difference between a brasserie and a brassiere.

“Tiberius,” she starts, and my body relaxes. “Our Alpha has asked me to explain the Bredung to you. Perhaps you are under the impression that it is a Breeding? If so, I’m here to assure you that they have nothing to do with each other. Unlike with humans, any child born to us is a wish child, whatever the circumstances of their birth.”

I reach my hand around to cover his fingers tight on my waist.

“Bredung is Old Tongue for Braiding. It symbolizes”—Leonora knots her fingers together—“an intertwined commitment not just to each other, but to the land and to the Pack as well. Through it, we mingle blood and earth and seed, and for us, all three parts are fundamental. Once you are braided, you are part of this Pack, part of this land, part of Silver. You cannot untie one without untying everything. I am telling you this so that you will not mistake it for marriage. It is not simply about keeping faith with Silver. It is about keeping faith with us all.”

Absently, Leonora toys with the thin braid of leather around her neck. Her mate, Boris, was hit by a car years ago, and though it didn’t kill him, he wasn’t the same. A few moons later, he didn’t make it back from a hunt. She never took another mate.

“I have studied humans for years. They get restless. They feel it is their right to use something and then discard it when it no longer suits them. That is not our way. When a wolf commits to something, there is no end, except in death.

“So this is your last chance to decide what you are: Are you human, or are you wolf?”

John tears off a chunk of the dark roll he nabbed from breakfast and butters it slowly.

Ti stares at the floor, and I worry that maybe he’s gotten frosted feet for real this time. But when he lifts his head, his lips are drawn back from his fangs, and he dares each of the wolves with their smooth, human teeth to doubt how wild he is. I can’t help but smile too.

John’s eyebrows quirk up as he glances from Ti’s mouth to mine. He runs his tongue over the points of his own dull canines and nods.