Chapter 24

The day before the Iron Moon, Evie is pumped full of oxytocin. Now she is contracting and changing and contracting and changing. I swear the one time I caught a glance of John through the open door of the Meeting House, he’d lost ten pounds and gained twenty years.

Evie delivers two live pups and a third who didn’t make it. But the important thing is that the Pack grows and Evie can finally sleep.

No one wants to tell John that we’re also down a wolf. There was an accident on I-87, and Nikki’s stuck in the resulting traffic jam. We all watch the progress of her cell phone on Tara’s iPad, but by the time Nikki can make any speed, she’s only got thirty minutes to get home. She can’t step on the gas, because the absolute worst thing she could do is get pulled over by the police.

Last time that happened, we lost a wolf and had to eat a state trooper.

The phone slows to a stop not far from the outer limits of our territory. The Pack sloughs off clothing, and we all wait together, naked in the cold, and pray that Nikki can make it, because there’s nothing more we can do.

Ti is with me this time. He sits behind me, shivering despite the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. We watch the fading of the dull-gold stripe between the thick clouds above and the dark mountains below. John is in the Meeting House with his mate, so this time, Tara closes the door to the Great Hall.

The thickness is just building in my sinuses when a crack reverberates through the night. I topple over, terrified among the contorting bodies of the Pack. If someone comes across us with a gun, we are all dead.

Ti stands bolt upright. He says something that, of course, I can’t hear and then goes somewhere I can’t see because my eyes and ears are still changing. When my senses finally come online, he’s gone, but I hear the pups whimper. They nuzzle Tara, looking for guidance, but the other adults are still phasing, and I’m the first one up.

Usually we would take the pups to the High Pines, but without adults to guide them, we cannot chance a meeting with coyotes or, worse, bobcats, so I snap at them to hide in the basement of the Great Hall. Even the most fractious pup knows what a gun is and obeys immediately. Small ones are already tumbling through the hinged door. The few nurslings go immediately limp as the juveniles carry them in their jaws.

I make a stumblebum rush toward the access road and the gunshots.

There is someone coming. More than one. Two voices, but at least three sets of footsteps. It’s hard to tell.

“What did you see?”

“Don’ know. Something.”

“You sure they’re not here?” I can now smell the oil and warm plastic and wrinkled carrion sticks of Anderson, the junkyard man.

“Nobody answers,” says another man whose rough voice gives way to a smoker’s hack. His lungs smell like coal and rot. “The machine says they’re at a yoga retreat.”

“Yogurt retreat,” says the third, a dry, subtle humorist I don’t recognize but who sounds young.

The Smoker coughs again.

“You okay?” asks Anderson.

“The cold air,” the Smoker wheezes out. “Just got to get used to it.”

I finally sight the threesome coming around the curve. A juvenile, slightly younger than I am. Anderson. And the man from the gas station with the dying lungs. All of them armed, like humans always are when confronted with trees.

“Second fucking time they call the DEC on me. Second fucking time. It’s my fucking land. I can do whatever the fuck I want to with it,” says Anderson.

“Zed thinks they’ve got a meth lab up here.”

“Shut up, Trey. Zed’s a moron, same’s you.”

“But if they’ve got a meth lab, then we can tell the police and they’ve got probable cause, right?”

“Jesus, Trey. Those shows you watch are a pain in my ass,” says Anderson.

“Nobody wants the police involved,” says the Smoker. “We’re just taking a look around. Wanted to see what the neighborhood’s like.”

“So,” says Anderson, “up there, they got this fucking huge fence. Easiest to cut through here to my—your—land. You sure they’re not here?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll say we’ve got that easement of necessity.”

“Yogurt retreat,” giggles Trey, the wry humorist, again.

Humans talk way too much.

“Did you see Breaking Bad?” asks young Trey. “Those meth guys… They’re some scary people.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying. If these are meth lords…”

“They’re not meth lords, dickhead. They’re hippies. Do you think meth lords would go on a fucking yoga retreat?”

“Quiet, both of you. This time, I really did see something,” says the Smoker.

“I didn’t hear anything. Trey, did you hear anything?”

I hear the swish of a gunstock on Gore-Tex, and Anderson looks through the sight and fires. “He’s right. There’s something moving out there.”

“I thought they were all at a yogurt retreat.”

“Some thing. Maybe you came out of my sister’s cunt, but there is no way you’re related to me.”

The “thing” is Nikki. I can smell the waves of her desperate fear coming like a heartbeat. All three now have sights up and start shooting. Wood explodes from the trees as the bullets fly, but then I hear the soft involuntary whimper of an injured wolf.

Having finally reached the Homelands, Nikki had gotten sloppy or unlucky. Though sloppy and unlucky are usually the same thing if you’re a wolf.

“I think I got something.”

“You? Why you? We were all shooting.”

“Jesus. Fine. I think we got something.”

Nikki is a brindle, and her season is past. Just a month ago, the ground and the trees were wet and dark and she would have been hard to see. Now it is my season, when early snow cover is still stippled with dried grasses.

I run at an angle that takes me toward the hunters, hoping to draw them away from Nikki.

A hunter hit Gran Ferenc one Iron Moon. The bullet lodged in his thigh, and it took like a hundred moons before the thing finally worked its way out. Gran Ferenc said he panicked, and when he ran away, he ran straight. “Guns shoot straight, so you must never run straight.” He forced us to practice running in a zigzag, back and forth and back and forth, so that when we weren’t thinking straight, we wouldn’t run straight either.

He forced me too, though those turns are a bitch with only one working hind leg.

There’s a shot and then another, and the bark explodes from a birch near me.

“There it is. Looks like I got it in the leg.”

A shot hits the ground, but they’re following me away from Nikki, away from the Great Hall, away from Evie, and away from my vulnerable Pack. Toward Beaver Pond.

The ice at Beaver Pond is thick and covered with snow. Easy to cross. Not that I want to be out in the open for long. I don’t want to give them a clear shot when they come crashing through the underbrush like rutting moose.

“Check it out, Trey,” says Anderson, pushing at the edge of the ice with his boot.

“Uncle Al?” the juvenile says, his voice shaky. “Why me?”

“Because you’re lighter, dickhead.”

They don’t notice me sheltered behind a winterberry. If you want to keep watch on your prey, shelter near something that misdirects the eye. If they notice anything, it will be the bright-red berries encased in ice, not the patch of white and gray blending into the winter’s monochrome.

Beaver Pond is still and not so deep, and the ice is plenty thick. Trey heads across cautiously at first, then as he becomes more sure that it’s safe, he jumps up and down before slipping and landing on his butt. Anderson follows him onto the ice, laughing.

“Is this all Torrance’s?” asks the Smoker.

“You see up the mountains there and parts east go almost to Lake Champlain. They’ve got the biggest chunk of land in private hands in Upstate New York, and they just keep on buying. And for what? They don’t do a fucking thing with it.”

I creep away, moving slowly until I’m sure that they are across the pond. Then I move toward the pines. This part of the forest is not good for me. The snow is in the canopy, and the needles underneath are damp and dark. It shows me to worst advantage.

“There it is,” Anderson shouts, pointing his gun in my direction. I bolt for Clear Pond.

Now, there is a reason it’s called Clear Pond. Not just because the water is so clear. It’s also a mnemonic for our pups. From their very first winter, they are told that it’s called Clear Pond, because you stay clear of it in winter. But for anyone who doesn’t know, in the winter it looks like a continuation of Beaver Pond, a broad plain of ice covered by snow.

It isn’t. The water is much deeper, and the ice here is almost always gray, thinned by the relentless churning of the springs underneath. There’s a thick layer of snow that not only disguises it, but insulates the friable ice below from the cold air above.

I splay my legs to distribute my weight as widely as possible until I get across. Then I limp into a stand of pines on the opposite side.

Trey is smarter than his uncle gives him credit for. He looks at the orange rescue sled and hesitates. Not Anderson or the Smoker, though. They see the hunt coming to an end and follow my tracks across snow that crunches under their boots and disguises the sound of ice groaning underneath.

A new smell of evergreen and crushed bone wafts through the air, and the cloud-dimmed moon picks out the enormous dark outline of my bedfellow.

Damn it, Ti. Don’t you go telling them about the ice.

“What are you doing here?” he says tersely. I follow the green glow of his lucidum to the Smoker. There’s a glint from the heavy dull-gray gun held lax in his hand.

“Are we trespassing?” the Smoker asks, though he knows he is. “We’re just out doing a little night hunting and winged a coyote or some such. Wanted to finish it off. Don’t like to see a creature suffer,” the man says. Then he smiles. “Not even a dog.”

Ti raises the gun.

A red dot appears on Ti’s chest. I growl so that Ti will see Anderson has a bead on him. I smell adrenaline and sweat coming not from my bedfellow but from Anderson. Must be pretty strong if I can smell it this far away. And above the stink of gasoline and carrion sticks.

“Relax,” the Smoker says to Anderson. “He won’t shoot. You know what they say,” he continues, still smiling. “A barking dog never bites.”

Maybe that’s true, but Ti has said exactly five words, and when he shoots at their feet, the already stressed ice finishes fragmenting, and a huge shard tips forward. Scrabbling backward, the Smoker falls and grabs for the edge of the ice. It bobs up, sending him tumbling in. He claws frantically, pulling himself up on the ice, but each time, it splinters and he falls again.

Anderson’s shot goes wild as he flails, the water seeping up and turning snow gray and the ice slick. It slips away from him, and he falls into the slush, screaming for his nephew.

Trey hesitates and then tentatively walks onto the fragile ice edge weakened by cattails. It gives way under him almost immediately, first one foot, then the other. He grabs on to the weeds, his teeth chattering, and pulls himself to shore.

I feel a little for Trey, who is a juvenile. The adults should have taken better care of him on the hunt. He is too deep into our territory; he will not be able to find his way out before he becomes sluggish and gives in to the cold sleep.

I watch the adults’ last efforts carefully so we will have a better idea of where their corpses are at spring thaw and can fish them out before they rot.

But then Ti pushes his gun into his waistband and throws the orange rescue sled through the slush to the flailing men. I bark angrily, but he says that he knows what he’s doing.

After he strips them of their guns, he drags the shivering, clattering, hacking load over the rough path to the Boathouse, which is closest to Clear Pond and farthest from where Evie and her pups lie vulnerable.