Chapter 1

I’ve done it so often, I don’t have to think about it anymore. My hands hardly seem to belong to me as they unfasten my cuff links. A quick twist to the left, then to the right. One after the other, they plink into the silver Tiffany tray beside the sink.

The tray is engraved in flowing eighteenth-century script, an absurdity for the plastics industry.

To Elijah Sorensson

with Gratitude from

Americans for Progressive Packaging

The platinum chain links with a bar in between were another gift. This from Aldrich Halvors to mark my first day at Halvors & Trianoff, nearly twenty-three years ago. Our Alpha, Nils, had just died. Shot along with his mate. And now another bullet has taken his successor, John.

Aldrich told me the cuff links were a reminder that no matter where we found ourselves, we were still crucial parts of the chain that bound the entire Pack.

Halvors. His real name, his Pack name, was Aldrich Halvorsson, but he gave that up. Just as he gave up any rank within the Pack hierarchy. When he died, he was the Omicron of his echelon even though he had once been so strong. Being Offland—being away from our Adirondack territory, being in skin for twenty-seven days at a stretch, being surrounded by humans—does that to you. Leaches your strength. Leaches your will. Leaches your soul.

Aldrich had already been Offland for years when I first met him in New York City, representing the Great North Pack’s interests in a human-staffed firm founded with Pack money. Lori, who was Aldrich’s assistant before she started to work for the surviving partner, now my partner, Maxim Trianoff, says that at the end, Aldrich had become increasingly withdrawn and would stare out the firm’s huge plate-glass windows for days at a time.

He needed to go home.

An hour after he stared out that plate-glass window for the last time, Maxim got a call from the police. Aldrich had wrapped his car around a lamppost on the West Side Highway. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

Wasn’t wearing any clothes either.

It was a simple accident, but if the coroner had gotten involved, they’d have found that the corned beef hash in the driver’s seat had been a man halfway to becoming a wolf.

He just couldn’t wait another minute.

Almost makes me wonder if there’s something in the HST offices. I gave two wolves who have been Offland as long as I have a ride down to the City this moon. Reena, who sits on the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and her mate, Ingmar, who does something I couldn’t quite figure out for the New York Department of State, only go home for the very rare holidays. And, of course, for the Iron Moon. For those three days out of thirty, when the moon is pregnant and full and her law is Iron and the Pack has no choice but to be wild.

Subordinate wolves in the 2nd Echelon, Reena and Ingmar seem unaffected by the tearing alienation of Offland. They yacked the whole way about lawyers and restaurants and real estate and Hamilton. It was like being trapped in an enclosed space with humans for five hours. Except without that horrible smell of carrion and steel humans always have.

I would’ve bitten them, but they’re not in my echelon.

• • •

I toss my shirt (Turnbull) into the dry-cleaning bag and hang my suit (Brioni) before stepping into my marble-and-copper-tile shower stall.

My. Nothing in this apartment is mine. It was bought sight unseen from floor plans by Pack money managers who had determined that it was likely to appreciate, so when it came time for me to leave New York, the Great North would be able to net a tidy profit.

Remember that things Offland break easily, they said, as though I hadn’t been warned repeatedly. As though the Pack hadn’t already had to pay to replace various pixie-stick constructions that pass as furniture out here.

Don’t do anything that will damage the resale value.

So I’m particularly careful when I scrub off the last remnants of my change, because I’ve already had to replace the showerhead once. The shower stall may be generously sized by human standards, but by Packish standards, it’s a tight squeeze.

Then I carefully wipe out the drain strainer, scraping out the fur and leaves and prickles of my home into the trash can.

In my bedroom, I hit the switch that changes the floor-to-ceiling windows from opaque to transparent. And when I stand here in skin, I have unobstructed views over the East River and can watch the moonrise and calculate how long it will be before I can go home again.

I am not like Aldrich. I did not give up my name—my Pack name—so now Halvors, Sorensson & Trianoff is acid-etched on the glass doors.

I did not give up my position either. Plenty have tried, but I am too strong and have fought too many wolves for too many years. Even the most powerful, most belligerent wolves of the Great North have begun to realize that there is no one powerful or belligerent enough to unseat me as Alpha of the 9th Echelon, the age group I have controlled since we made the transition to adulthood.

The Pack has been in turmoil since September when a badly injured Shifter came to us. All Packs hate and fear Shifters. Shifters can change, but unlike us, they don’t have to, and that single difference has allowed them to become almost human, to become as corrupt and self-serving as humans.

The Iron Moon, those three days when we must be wild, is a sacred time for us, but like anything that is truly important, it comes with risks.

The risk that humans will come upon us by accident and, thinking that we are ǣcewulfas, real wolves, forever wolves, kill us. The risk that Shifters with their almost Packish senses will come upon us on purpose and, knowing exactly what we are, kill us.

If it had been up to me, I would have left Tiberius for the coyotes that first night, but he was half Pack, and our Alpha, John, was soft. Soft on him, soft on Quicksilver, the runt who is now the Shifter’s mate.

It turned out he was a lie. He had been sent to infiltrate us, find our weaknesses, by the godfather of all the Shifters, August Leveraux, his father. The fact that Tiberius changed allegiances from Shifter to Pack is in his nature. In the Old Tongue, Shifters are called Hwerflic. Changeable.

He killed many of the Shifters and humans who descended on us during the Iron Moon. I killed one. But the Great North Pack lost the Great Hall, our main gathering place. We almost lost our pups, our future. We lost four wolves, all of them highly placed, because the true meaning of leadership is sacrifice.

At the end of this Iron Moon, we laid the stones for the wolves we’d lost at the Gemyndstow, the memory place: Solveig Kerensdottir, Alpha of the 14th Echelon. Orion Tyldesson, Alpha of the 5th. Paula Carlsdottir, Beta of the 8th. And John Sigeburgsson, Alpha of the Great North, the Alpha of Alphas.

But John’s stone, like all the others, is marked only with his name and the date of his last hunt. The Pack is a thing of hierarchies, but there is no hierarchy in death.

The ritual was silent, as our most important rituals always are. A nod to all those times we are wild and speechless. At the very center of the widening circle of stones are the worn ones of Ælfrida, the Alpha who dragged her unwilling Pack from the dying forests of Mercia to the New World all those centuries ago, and Seolfer, her Deemer.

The dozen or so pups run in and out among the stones, understanding only that somehow this place is important and that every important place must be marked. So they do.

The stones are set. There are no bodies here. Those were quickly consumed by the coyotes, which is why we call them wulfbyrgenna. Wolf tombs. So death has been honored, and now we must get on with life.

As we walked back toward the Great Hall, I fell in step beside Evie, John’s mate and the new Alpha. The fourth wolf I have addressed by that title.

“Alpha, it’s time for me to come home. The 9th needs me. I have been Offland for thirty years”—it slipped out, but I quickly correct myself—“three hundred and sixty moons and—”

“And we need you protecting our interests Offland more than ever.” She picks up a pup who is jumping at her ankles and rubs him against her jaw, marking him. He lies on his back, offering up his belly to be rubbed, but as soon as he hears another pup, he twists and turns, anxious to get back down. They are like that. They need love, but they need freedom too.

“The Pack is vulnerable now, and no one knows better than you how to protect us from the human world. I agree with you that the 9th needs its Alpha, but it doesn’t have to be you. It is time for you to let your shielder take primacy; Celia’s been holding the echelon together for years, and it’s time, Elijah. It’s time for you to let go.”

Long after she left, I stayed staring down into the foundation of the Great Hall being laid on the still-blackened, smoke-scented foundation of the old one. It is cavernous and complicated because we need storage and because the frost line is so deep.

What Evie doesn’t understand is that I am blind in a maze, with only this thread to hold on to. If I let go, I will never find my way out again.

• • •

At 3:00 a.m., when the city that never sleeps finally does, the twenty-four-hour fitness center of my luxury condominium building is finally empty.

That’s when I drag out the cambered power bar that I store in my hall closet. Turns out that the cheap things they have at the gym develop a permanent kink once you load on eight hundred pounds.

Evie refused my request, and Evie is immensely powerful, but females take at least three moons to recover from lying-in. It has been only two. Meaning she will still be weak for one more moon.

I have spent over ten thousand days Offland. That’s ten thousand days in skin. Ten thousand days without the earth of home under my paws, without the pine-scented breezes rolling down the mountainside and through my fur, without the bones of prey, real prey, giving up their marrow to my powerful jaws.

But I refuse to end up like Halvors: corned wolf hash, wrapped around a streetlight on the West Side Highway.

One.

I am going home.

Two.

I am going home.

Three.

I am going home.

Four.

I am going home.

“What are you looking at?” I bark at the balding man staring at my overloaded bar. He stumbles backward over the threshold to the gym. The lid to his water bottle trundles across the floor.

He leaves it.

Five.

I am going home.