Chapter 31

It’s been nearly four days since I snuck across the border somewhere north of Perry Mills Road. And except for the unpleasant interval needed to eat someone, I’ve been in skin.

As a wolf, the world is filled with cues: the dry crack of a branch under the weight of snow, the smell of fungi, a quiet rustle of a nest that once housed a sapsucker and now a squirrel in a tree that is dead and not just for the winter.

As a human, the world is filled with commands: YIELD, DO NOT PASS, WATCH FOR CHILDREN, KEEP CANADA CLEAN, IT’S CHOCOLATE TIME AT TIM HORTONS.

In skin, my mind is being dulled by the constant onslaught of headlights of cars coming west from Montreal, by the deadening drone of our tires on blacktop.

“You’re going to scratch yourself raw,” Ti says somewhere east of wherever it was we were before. “I think it’s best if I drop you off at the edge of Homelands first and then return the car.”

An hour later, he drops me off at the border of our territory. He gets out and crouches beside me and says something that starts with “Remember…” but it’s too late. I’ve already started to change. I’ll have to ask him when he comes home. I tumble down a decline, dislodging damp needles. At the bottom, my still-useless and contorting body lands against a spruce. Soft snow sifts down, cooling my half-furred skin. I want to scream at the relief of it, which of course I can’t.

Instead, I run, sniffing the markings of my pack, and struggle to make my way through the thick snow, which is especially hard with only three legs. I’ve just dislodged a redpoll when a perimeter wolf emits a sharp huff, a kind of witheringly dry cough. It’s what we do when we don’t have words and need to say Alpha first; cavorting later.

* * *

John raises his eyebrow at my damp hair, still-grubby nails, and motley collection of oversize, yellow-and-purple Saxons athletic gear. “Tiberius asked if you could come with him to settle his affairs Offland, but you should have asked too, Quicksilver.”

“I-I… You talked to him?”

He waves me off as he picks up his Rolodex and a sheaf of papers. “He called. Said you did well at first, but that he didn’t think you could last much longer in skin.” John’s eyes narrow skeptically. “So you didn’t change for nearly four days?”

I nod dumbly. I guess Ti called on his way to the rental place? It would have been helpful if he’d told me that he would be talking to John.

“Good. Anyway, he says he’ll be finished by the Iron Moon.”

“What? But that’s—”

“Yes?”

“—a while,” I end lamely.

He nods, tired and distracted as he continues sorting through the sheaf of papers. He doesn’t notice when I leave.

I track Ti’s most recent movements from the access road back to the sap house, and under a couple of loose floorboards, I find the rags soaked in turpentine and lavender oil he used to cover the stench of his guns. The Beretta and the rifle are gone. But the gun he brought when he came here is still there.

I track him back to our cabin and the hastily scribbled note on our coffee table.

Wildfire… The paper in my hands shakes badly.

If you’re reading this, you’re home. And you probably already know where I’ve gone. If I’m not back the afternoon of the Iron Moon, then my father may still be alive, but he has lost his Pack of One.

I never expected to find love. I didn’t really believe in it, the way they said it would come. That it would be sudden. Inexplicable. Mystical. It wasn’t. Not for me, anyway. I fell in love with you because you took my hand and walked me there. You took me as you found me, and step by step, you walked me there.

I would never have been able to find the way by myself, but I’m here now and this is where I will stay. Always in love with you.

Tiberius

* * *

The junkyard is empty now, just a scrubbed rectangle of dirt. Leelee’s hole is gone, as are the old TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs. Our markings around the barbed wire have been disturbed as well, so several male wolves drink gallons of tea and head over to trace the perimeter once again.

I spend too much time here, pacing and waiting. There are no trees nearby to block the snow, and no animal will cross it because the edges have been marked by wolves, so it’s a pristine white parallelogram, a sterile breeding ground for my troubled imagination.

The Iron Moon is coming, and I feel the humans circling.

Even before my foray into humanity and Canada, I’d been getting tired easily. I thought it was just the sudden fullness of my life, but it’s been worse recently. I tried to say something in passing to Tristan, so it wouldn’t seem like I’d actually come to see him.

He sniffed at my ear, pushed his hand against my belly, and fingered my breasts.

I told him I wasn’t receptive and nipped him.

He dragged me to medical and hooked me up to the ultrasound. As impossible as it seems, I’m pregnant. Conception is usually so hard for us that I wouldn’t have believed it, except I’ve seen the four miniscule bodies nestled inside me.

Tristan didn’t offer me a Tic Tac.

* * *

The day of the Iron Moon, I walk back and forth along the perimeter nearest the access road, carving a dark dirt path in the snow. Every wolf coming home sends my heart racing.

But with each wolf who passes through the gate, my anxiety grows. I run for the sap house, worried about deserting my post, and then push Ti’s gun, the one that he left, into a squirrel hollow not far from the gate.

By late afternoon, I’m clinging to the chain link, praying for a glimpse of black. I beg the gate wolf to let me lock up. He looks divided, then nods and heads back to the Great Hall. He must have passed John on the way down, because it’s only a few minutes until I hear John’s boots.

He stands next to me, looking out on the quiet ice- and snow-frosted woods beyond the fence. “Maybe he got held up in traffic,” he says.

I can’t bring myself to respond with anything but a nod.

“Lock the gate before you come,” he says after a few quiet minutes. “But don’t be too long. Remember: Death and the Iron Moon wait for no wolf.”

He rubs his cheek against my head and walks back the way he’d come. I watch him leave, grateful beyond words that on this, his first real Iron Moon with Evie and his pups, he took the time to mark me again and remind me that whatever else happens, I belong.

I take my hands out of my pockets, hoping that in skin, he couldn’t smell the bitter scent of steel and gunpowder.

John is long gone, and there are only maybe thirty minutes of light left when I finally hear the sounds of tires grumbling over the snow and gravel. I rush to the gate, feeling for the latch, and then stop, listening more closely.

It’s a car, sure, but why is it moving so slowly? Ti would know to hurry. He would know that I was waiting and that the change was coming.

It’s also a layered sound: some closer, some farther away. I think—no, I know—there is more than one car. I dart back into the dark, back for the elm with the emptied knot that holds the gun. The cars turn off at the junkyard.

Doors open carefully, followed by urgent whispering. Something bangs against the doorframe, and a flashlight comes on and then quickly shuts off. These accents are strange, and the tones are alien. One voice hisses something and starts to cough.

Something heavy falls to the ground with a muffled groan and goes silent. I creep along the forest floor, keeping hidden by the understory until I am directly upwind, then I strain every nerve of my poor human senses, sieving through the smells: steel, carrion, dying lungs, the varying scents of so many humans. Two—no, three—bear the teasing trace of wild that marks them as Shifters.

Then the smell of evergreen and crushed bone and iron and salt and old leather. Tiberius is bleeding and afraid, but I’m not about to run into a herd of healthy animals armed with nothing but hope and a gun I’m not sure how to use.

Leary hisses out his instructions. One Shifter will take a group north. The other will take a group south. The third will go up the main path, all converging on the Great Hall.

“Allons-y. Commençons la chasse. Et n’oubliez pas. Tous les chiens. Meme les p’tits. Mais pas l’avorton d’argent,” Leary says before translating for the Anglophones. “We start the hunt, and remember: all the dogs. Even the little ones. But not the silver runt.”

“What about him?” says a voice.

“Chain him up before you go,” Leary says. “Chambord and I will stay here. This cold, dry air”—he hacks twice—“is not good for my lungs.”

Winter dusk is already too dark for human eyes. Leary points the flashlight, and for the first time, I see Ti. He slumps forward as they chain him to a tree. Then the man pulls on a rope, and Ti’s head jerks back. The light reflects from tiny rivulets of blood glistening below the line of a prong collar. From the steel grill across his mouth.

My tongue darts over my sharp fangs, and my body shivers with the need to tear apart the men who dared muzzle my mate.

As soon as the Shifters have taken their teams, I move silently to the little hollow behind Ti’s tree. Neither Leary nor Chambord are Shifters, so they don’t hear me or smell me, even though I am now downwind. Ti does. I know because he stiffens suddenly, and he turns his head, his nose flaring.

The closer I get, the thicker the scent of blood, until I am at his hands, shackled with a loose chain looped around the back of the tree. The smell of blood is almost overwhelming around one hand that is swollen and crusted and hangs at an odd angle.

He makes a soft, pleading sound.

“Shut up,” Leary says. “What you destroyed would have been your inheritance. You owe your father restitution. Personally”—he spits—“I would have crucified you, but August reminded me that we need your signing hand.”

Ti doesn’t make another sound as I lift the gun, plant my feet, and aim carefully. Then I pull at the trigger. Nothing happens. I try it again. There’s something about a safety? I start feeling around for it.

“Oh, Jesus fuck,” Leary snorts, his own gun at the ready. He nods to Chambord. Both of them search the dark near me. “You call this a rescue party? A man who can’t even use a gun?”

Of course, he’s right. I was never meant to be a man with a gun. I move as quietly as I can around the other side of Ti’s tree, pausing for a moment, brushing silently against the warmth of his uninjured hand.

Each step I take sounds thunderously loud to me, but Leary keeps staring into the blackness where I had been until he feels something hard in his back and stiffens. The air stinks of salt and old leather as he waves Chambord off.

“Now,” I whisper tightly. “Let him go.”

The moment I speak, the scent of his fear fades, and his spine relaxes against my touch. “Well, that’s a problem,” he says coolly. “See, I don’t have the key.”

Leonora says humans fear men but not women. Which I don’t understand at all. How is it possible that they alone of all animals don’t know that there is nothing more ferocious, more deadly, more willing to die than a female protecting her own?

“You were right about the gun,” I say softly, my lips against his scruffy cheek, “but not about the other thing. I could never be a man. I am not even human.”

In a flash, I sink my wolfish teeth into his face. Not my fangs, which would only tear through. I use my carnassials, and in two slicing bites, the whole side comes off. One. Two.

Judging by the way Chambord freezes, staring at Leary’s screaming partly exposed skull, I don’t think he was told exactly what he would be hunting.

That moment’s hesitation is too long, because Tiberius does know how to use a gun, and the chain has enough play in it to let him angle the one I slipped into his “signing hand.”

I crouch over Leary, holding two fingers out like the barrel of a gun. “Bang,” I say and throw his gun far away. I don’t want to kill him. I need his screams to alert the Pack.

Reaching behind Ti’s head, I gently unfasten the muzzle, and he takes a deep cracked breath. “They’ll hear him,” he says, his lips dried and split against mine, his breath sour and bloody. “They’re going to come back. You’ve got to go.” I drop the muzzle and start to work on the prong collar. I can’t go too fast; some of the metal is still embedded in his neck and sticks as I pull at it. He just keeps whispering for me to go. As soon as it’s loosened, I carefully pull it up, raising myself on my toes to make sure I don’t scratch his eyes.

“Do you know who has the keys?”

He shakes his head. “Please, Silver.”

I put my knee on Leary’s writhing chest to hold him steady while I look for the keys. I know he said he didn’t have them, but he’s human and they lie.

He tries to say something but lacking lips and one cheek, it comes out garbled, incomprehensible.

In his jeans pockets, I find his lighter. And a set of small, square-topped keys. Leary splutters again, blood bubbling between his teeth. The keys start to shake, almost slipping through my fingers. I clutch them in both hands and stumble back to Ti.

“I can hear them. They’re coming,” he hisses. “Get out.” I steady myself against the tree as best I can, but the Iron Moon is pulling me inexorably toward wildness. My hands shiver badly, and my eyesight is failing. I scrape the key along the surface, searching for the keyhole. It sinks into something, and I turn the key. I don’t know if it was the keyhole or just air, but it doesn’t matter. I’m done: my eyes are useless, my hands misshapen. The bones in my feet fuse and lengthen, my legs contort, and as my body begins to fall, I wrap my arms around the little beings nestled in my belly.

“Silver!”

Then it’s over, and I hear nothing beyond the milky stillness. Except gunfire. Gunfire has an unnatural percussive power that hits even my changing ears like a shock wave.

A hard push against my ribs sends me falling back into the hollow. My arms and legs flop helplessly as I tumble down until something catches on my running pants. I scrabble as best I can, moving whatever muscle obeys me at that moment—a toe, a finger, my shoulder—until gravity takes over and sends me careening to the bottom of the decline. I can tell from the cold on my legs that my pants, loose around my changing body, have come off.

Shaking my head, I try to clear my ears. There are two more gunshots. Four. Finally, my ears clear and I hear humans running, surrounded by the small pandemonium of animals cowering, the crack of sapless winter branches, and the thick fall of snow dislodged from the forest canopy.

A car starts and peels off.

Struggling up the hollow sideways, I keep my two healthy legs always on the downward slope so I don’t fall back. The chain is slack at the base of the tree. Chambord, three other humans, and a Shifter lie dead. Leary is gone. So is Ti, but I can’t follow him now, because howls and gunfire and high, sharp barks are coming from the Great Hall, and then the wind brings the thin smell of accelerant.

As I near the Great Hall, I hear Adrian’s howl reverberate from the basement, followed by the high staccato sounds of the pups. I skid into a turn, running for the two spruces, one big, one small, the tip of Whiteface centered between them.

Another gunshot, and the crackle and acrid smoke of arson. My claws hit wood under the forest carpet, digging hard until I find the rope handle and pull and push. It falls with a thump to the hard ground.

Squeezing through the roots that have dug down from above, I yip as I run so the pups will know that someone’s coming. They must hear it, because their claws scrabble at the trapdoor. It would be hard for them to open from the other side, of course, but I can just push—

Except that after Ronan broke in, John had the trapdoor covered with shelving, and it won’t open wide enough, not even for the littlest. I slam my shoulders against it again and again, trying to topple the damn shelf. Adrian seems to have figured out what I’m trying to do. He barks and barks some more, and then with one more push, I hear something crash. Now when I push, the trapdoor opens a little.

The floor is covered with gory-looking puddles, but it’s just the sour cherries we put by in the summer. I can’t open the trapdoor wide, but it’s big enough. The little pups are confused and hesitate until I yip for Leelee, who trots over and bends to look into the darkness beside me. I smack her in with a twist of my head, and as soon as she lands, she barks so the others know it’s not deep. Some jump bravely, some waver, but not for long. Juveniles at the back push them in.

Then Adrian, the final juvenile, jumps in with Nils in his jaws, but Nils whines worriedly, and I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen Nyala.

I curl up tight, my good hind leg wedged high into the wood slats that keep the tunnel from collapsing. With one big shove, I push through, the hatch falling on the tip of my tail.

I remember Nyala’s smell from the First Marking, but there’s too much confusion—smoke and fire and sour cherry—and my senses are muddled. She’s too small to climb up, so I push my nose along the base of the floor, scenting her almost immediately. I stick my muzzle farther under the potato bin and yip softly, hoping she’ll come to me. Maybe because I didn’t scent-mark her at the presentation ceremony, she isn’t sure I’m Pack and holds back.

Too damn bad. I lie on my side and reach under with my paw and slap her out. She mewls in complaint, but when I grab her withers between my jaws, she does what every instinct tells her to do and goes slack. Standing with a mouth full of pup, I realize that I can’t leave by the door, and the trapdoor, blocked by the toppled shelves, is impossible to open from the inside.

Like any Pack, my eye flickers toward the moon, just an instinctual need to track the pattern of my life. But now when I do, I see not only the moon, but its light running down where the shelving struts broke through the single tiny, narrow window high in the wall.

I growl at the limp thing in my mouth, warning her, because I have to jump. Jumping requires coiling the muscles in both thighs, in both hips for a simultaneous release. I don’t have both, I only have the one, so when I jump, one goes off properly, the other doesn’t, and my body does a semi-spiral. Clinging with my claws, I scrabble awkwardly up the shelves.

Shoving my head through the break, I spit Nyala outside. The hole isn’t really big enough for me, but I have no choice. Glass cuts lines along the length of my body as I push my way through; still, my bones and internal organs are in one piece, so it is a flesh wound.

Another gunshot.

Terrified, Nyala creeps forward, pressing her shivering body against me as I hang my head, trying to find my balance again, before I pick her up once more and race toward the mouth of the tunnel in the forest. Gran Moira, who was hiding in the woods, joins me, keeping pace next to me. At the mouth of the tunnel, I drop Nyala and smell for the other pups. Nyala barks softly, and Nils stumbles out. Gran Moira pushes the little pup toward her brother. Laying my muzzle beside hers, I give over responsibility for our young. Gran Moira turns and snaps, herding them toward the protection of the High Pines.

Another shot.

There’s a dead human lying halfway in the water. The huge, red jerrican in one hand is leaking gas onto the ice of Home Pond. His gun is still holstered, but his throat is ravaged. A few feet away, a big, golden-brown wolf with dark gray markings lies dead, a hole in the back of her head. The Iron Moon is reflected in her open eyes, and human blood stains her mouth.

Wolves are not like humans. We do not wait for death to find us. We die hunting.

Solveig fulfilled her destiny as a wolf and her duty as an Alpha and died hunting.

My nose close to the ground, I follow the stench of steel and carrion into the woods and toward the Clearing.

A heavy footstep crunches through the snow nearby. It isn’t Ti; even wounded, he would never be that loud and clumsy. I bury myself in the snow behind a patch of dogbane and wait for the hard boots with thick treads. The hunter reeks of salt and old leather and startles when one foot sinks into the brittle undergrowth. A shot rings out from a few hundred yards, and he pivots toward it, pulling frantically at his leg, his gun trembling in his hands, like a vampire hunter with a cross, terrified that a death he doesn’t understand lurks in the dark.

Once my jaws crunch hard into his wrist, I pull myself up, my one strong hind leg tearing into fleshy stomach just above this man’s belt.

Death does lurk in the dark, and I am it.

His gun goes down; with my hind leg buried in his intestines, I push up and crush his windpipe. He claws at me with soft hands, like a raccoon.

More gunfire erupts at the edge of the woods, flash after flash of it, and the man holding the gun screams furiously. I don’t think he’s attacking. I think we share this with humans. When we attack, we are silent. We make noise when we’re worried or confused, and I think this man is terrified. There’s another shot. Another single soft pop, different and distinctive, then silence. I race toward it, coming to a stop at the body of a man with a bullet so perfectly placed, it looks like a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

The rifle with the big magazine smells like burned metal, and the barrel is warm.

A man at the other side of the Clearing screams over and over and over and will not shut up.

A wind from the mountains brings a soft unleashing of snow and the distant promise of my mate’s scent. I run toward him, my heart beating so fast that it almost blurs with the fluttering of a wood grouse dislodged from its blanket of snow. Almost. I skid to a stop, because I didn’t disturb the grouse. A Shifter did.

The agony across the Clearing subsides to one final choked scream and then stops.

Unlike humans, the Shifter senses me. Unlike Pack, he is presumptuous and careless.

“I hear you, dog,” he says. He swings around and shoots at the ground.

So. He can hear, but if he could smell me—see me—he wouldn’t have aimed where he did. I crouch behind a low, snow-encased bush, trying to remember everything I’ve ever learned about winds and land and the acoustic properties of snow. The hunter starts walking in ever-widening orbits, hoping to dislodge me like he did the grouse.

I stay still as he circles closer, his gun held in both hands, his head moving slowly from side to side, listening. He’s so close that he is almost on top of me. If my legs were whole, I’d take him down, but as I am, I can’t take any chances. I know he doesn’t see me, because he keeps squinting into the woods. Just one more pass and—

Pop.

The Shifter teeters before falling onto his back, a shocked expression on his face.

The man lies on the snow, his arms outstretched and a hole placed so perfectly in the middle of his forehead, it looks like a third eye.

The seeping blood steams slightly in the moonlight.

It’s barbaric, killing this way. Pushing a button in the distance. We at least see our victims. Taste their blood. Feel the incoherent spasming. Hear the final gurgling pleas. Death is real for us.

Ti stands next to me, his leg against my shoulder. He holds his damaged hand close to his chest. His good hand still holds the gun.

We both listen for hunters or gunfire, but there’s nothing. Everything in the Homelands is afraid, and that fear has a quiet so profound that it reaches to the very edge of silence.

But there is one thing in the Homelands that isn’t afraid, and when Evie screams, it is as only a wolf can: cracked and haunted and primal.

Twisting away, I stumble into the Clearing where Evie stands on the Alpha’s rock, a dark shadow howling her fury and loss.

The Pack is already gathering at the edge of the woods, and that’s where I go, creeping low through all of those huge bodies. Whimpering, I nuzzle my head under John’s slack chin, begging him to get up. I lick at him, begging him to put me in his pocket and keep me safe when that makes no sense. Begging him to be waiting for me when I finally make it home. Begging him to mark me again. Make me belong.

He didn’t even have a chance to fight. There is such a tiny hole in one side of his chest. That opens up into a huge chasm on the other. All of John’s strength and skill meant nothing, because the man who killed him saw him in the distance and, from that distance, shot him.

Then Evie ripped out his intestines and calligraphed them across the snow. It had not been a clean kill, and until his heart dropped into the cavity left by his viscera, the man suffered.

Demos stumbles into the clearing with what looks like a broken leg, but even though it must be painful, he plants his feet into the ground as always. Blood is already stiffening on his muzzle. He stands still while the others sniff at him and smell that Solveig is dead too. After a short bark, he adds his own mournful howl.

Evie’s dark eyes reflect the flames at Home Pond that light up the sky like sunrise. Then, scenting something new, she turns toward the man as big as night who stumbles and then lowers his body into the center of the Clearing. He crosses his jeans-clad legs.

Evie leaps from the Alpha’s rock and tears toward him, but Ti sits utterly still, his hands on his knees, his gun on the ground beside him.

I race faster with three legs than I ever have with four. Tendons tear, bones scrape, nerves scream. I lower my head and throw myself at Evie, at my Alpha, my jaws open and ready to fight because Ti won’t, and I can’t explain that things are complicated or that her pups are alive.

Surprised, she falters, and when I put my teeth on either side of her neck, she scrapes into my torso with her hind legs. My spine curls tight, trying to protect the little lives inside me as I clamp the back of Evie’s head in my jaws, hard enough to hold her but not to hurt her. She struggles and scrapes, and then she slows. Her nose flares again and again as she scents my muzzle. She has to smell Nyala, who I carried in my jaws, but she should smell the other pups too, who left their mark as they squeezed past.

Her ears perk up, her head whipping away from Ti, and I let her go. The others are already racing toward the north edge of the Clearing nearest the High Pines. Several elder wolves emerge, accompanied by the quiet, frightened, questioning yips of the tired fur balls with them.

The whole pack nuzzles them, sniffing them and licking away the smoke and sour cherry and kerosene. When they are done caring for the pups, the adults circle around and begin the long keening. Without quite knowing why, the pups join in, mourning our dead.

“We are,” they say, “less.”

I can’t mourn. I don’t have time. The crumpled man in the center of the Clearing is going to die if I don’t get him sheltered. I push my nose under his head. Get up, damn it. Get up. He mumbles something but doesn’t move. I fasten my teeth to his jacket and start to drag him, pulling and fighting for every stupid inch across the Clearing.

Then starts the hard part—bumping him over the crowded, uneven ground toward our cabin. He lifts his hand. “One minute,” he says. But that’s what people say when they’re about to give in to cold and exhaustion, so to hell with your minute. I snap at his finger and start to pull him again.

“No, I know. I just mean give me a minute to get up. That’s all.” He pushes up from the ground with his good hand and stumbles precariously. I move closer, and he braces against me, using my shoulders to push himself upright.

Behind us, the trail of his blood stands out bright against the moonlit snow.

We hobble slowly, the two of us, through dark paths until I see our cabin deep in the woods and Ti slows.

He staggers those last few rough feet up the stairs and in through the door. As soon as the door closes, he collapses. I drag all the pillows and blankets and towels and pile them around and over him, like a snow nest, then curl my small body around my mate’s big shivering one. He holds his pierced and broken hand to his chest. Tristan will have to see to it later, but for now, I lick at it gently, carefully cleaning away the embedded rust and dirt.

I can’t sleep, worried about Ti. Listening to the Great Hall collapse around its burned timbers. Listening to the coyotes calling for their packmates to eat our dead.

Hearing John’s last words to me: “Death and the Iron Moon wait for no wolf.”

Ti wakes with a shudder in the middle of the night. When I move my paw gently against his shoulder, his glowing eyes find mine, and he sighs. I don’t know what he was dreaming, but he smiles at me sadly before crawling toward the kitchen.

The water runs. Ti opens a cupboard, and when he comes back, collapsing once again into the pillow nest, his face is damp. He is silent for a long time, but by the rise and fall of his chest, I know he isn’t sleeping.

“Carrion and steel.” Ti’s voice is halt and slurred. “That’s what it smelled like. My father’s compound. I’d never noticed it before. I doubt my father did either. It was just the smell of our lives.”

He grunts in pain as he shifts his hips, trying to get comfortable. I sniff at his back to see if he’s bleeding here too. “S’ok, Sil. Just broke something. Rib, I think.” He shuffles one more time and stops. “But it isn’t. It’s the smell of human life. There was no wood or earth or grass or rain. No blood or bone. Nothing that I recognize now as wild. That’s how I knew that my father—that all the Shifters—were gone.”

He turns his face to my fur, taking long, gulping breaths like a drowning man. “I needed this,” he says, his breath heating my skin. “I need this.”

Ti tracked the scent of Shifters north. But his failure to fall into the trap August had left at the compound had clearly made his father nervous. He added more Shifter guards, because while everyone knew the rumor that no one ever escaped August Leveraux, only August knew the truth. That no one ever escaped Tiberius.

It was on the side of the James Bay Road that August opened the blackened window of his car and tossed out an apple core. And Ti shot him above the bulletproof vest and below the Kevlar helmet.

Then it was the Shifters’ turn to hunt Ti. There were too many, and he’d been going for too long, and when they caught him, they were not…gentle. That’s what he said. Not…gentle. More than once, he thought he was dying. He said his mind clung to the vision of the silver wolf leaping from the rock overhang into the night-black water of Clear Pond. Clung to the knowledge that whatever happened to him, he had saved her. Saved me.

He didn’t die, though. Instead, he woke up tied again to the overgrown chain-link fence where he’d spent the Iron Moons of his childhood, while Leary shoved papers at him: postdated, transferring controlling interest in the Trust once the Pack was gone. When Ti refused, Leary had him secured to a fence post with a spike through his left hand. “Not just any spike. A dog spike. Even before he said my father’s name, I knew he was somehow alive, because there is nothing that man likes better than torture with a side of irony.

“I’d saved nothing.”

* * *

There is no Iron Moon Table when we change back, because we have no table, no roof, no walls. Nothing is left of the Great Hall but blackened wood around the ruin of the main fireplace. Digging through the wreckage, the pups find a few kitchen pots and three first-kill skulls.

And the Eolh pen, protected in its cracked coffee mug.

YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.

IT’S AN ALPHA THING.

It is not in the nature of the Pack to accept change quietly, but for now, the Alphas of the other echelons gather with Evie in the Meeting House. I found Tara and explained to her as best I could how Tiberius came to be in the company of a small army of Shifters and humans. I didn’t know what to make of her expression as she promised to explain to the Alphas and disappeared through the door of the Meeting House.

There’s nothing for us to do but wait, even though Ti desperately needs food and medical attention. He weaves unsteadily against my shoulder until Tara pushes back through the door and signals to us.

I help him up.

All the Alphas are standing, ignoring the chairs as resolutely as the Year of First Shoes. No Alpha—not Eudemos with his broken leg, nor Evie with her broken heart and body still weak from her lying-in—will sit. Now more than ever, we cannot coddle weakness.

Evie stares out the window and doesn’t move when we come in. The forest starts a few yards out, but I think her focus is beyond it, on the empty place where she left John’s body.

“So, Shifter,” she says eventually. “You betrayed us after all.”

“Yes,” he says, and just like in the Clearing, he doesn’t defend himself.

“I told you that the second I knew you were lying to us, I would rip your throat out.” Her finger caresses the braid hidden below the collar of her shirt. “What’s to stop me from doing it now?”

“Nothing, Alpha.”

The other Alphas stand ready, muscles taut, hands on seaxes, eyes on Evie. We don’t use the Meeting House often, so the space is cold and thin clouds stream from their nostrils like so many dragons. All it would take is one word, one gesture, from Evie, and Tiberius would be ripped to pieces.

All we have to defend ourselves are words, but Tara’s already talked to the Alphas, and clearly they aren’t in the mood for words. I know wolves when they’re in this frame of mind, when listening is hard and acting is so easy.

Pivoting on my heel, I grab at Tristan’s seax, because the 5th’s Alpha knows my secret, and I know he would never hurt the tiny bodies inside me. The other Alphas, though… They whip their blades out, their thighs coiled and ready to pounce. Ti pulls me against his chest, his wounded hand crushing me to his chest, his other arm shielding my head.

“Do what you need to with me,” he croaks, his voice raw and shredded. “But not her. Don’t touch her.”

He freezes as the sharp blade of Tristan’s seax whispers against his throat. He searches my face with those black-and-gold eyes I love so much.

Trust me, min coren. Trust that I see you at your most vulnerable. And I will not hurt you.

Still holding my gaze, Ti lets go and stretches his arms wide like a crucifixion.

Tristan is a doctor and keeps his blade sharp and clean, so when I strike, it splits Ti’s shirt easily down the middle. A button skitters across the floor.

Now every eye is on us. Except for Evie. She never looks away from the ice-laced window in front of her.

Ti hates the pity and the “tragic faces.” He’s always been so careful not to phase in front of the Pack. But I need them to understand that Ti is not just another Shifter, that this is not just another Shifter betrayal.

“John told me that if Ti lied to himself about what he was, he was going to lie to us. And he was right—you were right, Evie—Ti did lie to us.”

Ti tries to cover his neck, but I pull his hand away. “But he didn’t just wake up one morning and decide he didn’t want to be Pack. It took years to break him. Every Iron Moon, when we need to be wild, when he needed to be wild, his father collared him. Those scars are the marks of a wolf trying to get free.

“Imagine how you would feel if you spent the three days out of every month that are most sacred to us chained to a fence like a dog. Would you really still believe that your other wild self was holy and deserved to be cherished above everything else? It wasn’t until he came here that he understood, and then he did everything he could to protect us. He tried to stop his father, and when that failed, when they tried to kill him”—my voice falters as I brush the wrist above Ti’s pierced hand—“when they hammered a spike through his palm, he refused to betray us.”

The Alphas look again toward Evie. Her back is still stiff, but their posture has become more tentative, the posture of wolves waiting not for a command but for guidance.

“He could have just taken one of their cars and run, but he didn’t, even though he knew the Pack would blame him for what had happened. Yes, he lied to us at first, but in the end, he did everything he could to save us.”

Evie puts her hand to the window and smiles weakly at someone outside. Seeping through the windows come the rough-and-tumble sounds of pups playing in the snow.

“Alpha,” says the last voice I expect to hear. “I did not lose as much as you did. Still, Solveig was my shielder, my friend, and my Alpha. My echelon,” Eudemos continues, “now looks to me for guidance. But I have an echelon, one that includes Silver and Tiberius. The Great North Pack lost four wolves, and the only reason we are here to mourn them is that Tiberius fought for us.

“Wolves killed five, but this man, this wolf, killed the rest.”

Tristan moves toward Evie and stands beside her, whispering urgently. Our Alpha starts. “Silver?” she says. When I head toward her, Ti limps out in front, still trying to shield me. “Not him. I don’t want to see him,” Evie says to the window.

I draw Ti’s worried face to mine, stretching as tall as I can so he can lean into my lips without having to bend his broken body. Then I stand before my Alpha, my head down.

Evie breathes in my scent and holds it inside her. She hesitates only a minute before folding herself in half, her cheek sliding against mine. Marking me. Because she is a good wolf and will be a great Alpha, and she knows her duty to the four new lives that will never fill the holes ripped in our Pack, but might someday patch them.

“Deemer,” she says, turning for the door. “He must be punished; I leave it to you to decide what is fit.” Then she leaves. It will be a long time before she can bring herself to look at Ti or say his name.

When Tiberius has healed, he will take the stone like I did. But where I was marked with the Tiw, to remind me to uphold the law, Ti will be marked with the Ur rune to remind him to cherish the wild.