Chapter 26

“John?” I poke my head into his office. “You wanted to see me?”

“Come in. I’m just packing up some things so I can work in the Meeting House with Evie and the pups. Can you unplug the adapter?”

He wraps the cord around his laptop.

“How is the Boathouse working out for you?”

“Fine. It’s getting a little cold for Ti, but he’s managing.”

John nods. “You know,” he says as he slides his computer into a messenger bag, “when you were little, Evie and I would stay up waiting for you after every Iron Moon. Those were exhausting days. But you always came back. Limping and wheezing, you always came. We called you the tiny Terminator.”

There’s a knock on the door, but before John can say anything, Tara comes in, a sledgehammer balanced easily on one shoulder.

“It’s right here,” John says and toes the camouflage bundle that Ti brought in that first night of the Iron Moon. Tara picks it up, wrapping the ends twice around her fist so the bundle won’t fall.

“Tara, you know to—”

“Smash ’em and trash ’em,” she says and lifts the sledgehammer. “I’m going to do it right now.”

“Thanks, and, Tara? Maybe we should close up the Boathouse.” She nods with a quick smile in my direction.

John watches his Beta’s retreating back. “There’s something I’ll never understand. One rifle’s not enough? Why do they need two each?”

I pause a moment.

“Humans,” I say. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t get Showtime without ’em.”

John chortles with his sad eyes. “Sometimes you really do remind me of my brother.”

Thing is, I was there and I can count. There were seven rifles and two handguns.

So tell me, Ti… Where are those other guns?

I’m pretty sure that John was trying to tell me that we were in. That we’d made Pack. Closing up the Boathouse can only mean we’re moving out. Hopefully getting a cabin with insulation and a little stove and no ice on the inside of the windows.

There’s not much time for me to tell Ti. Besides, if someone objects at the last minute, his disappointment would be that much worse.

At Iron Moon Table, Adrian, the juvenile who likes marking John’s boots and is fast enough to get away with it, yips a warning to the assembled Pack.

The scrape of benches and chairs, a final slurp of coffee, and the high, sharp yelp of a pup falling down the stairs are the only sounds as the Pack gets to its feet, huge and silent.

Ti pulls on my hand, his brow furrowed. “What…?”

I always forget how little he knows. “First Marking,” I whisper, but then Evie enters, and I hold up a finger to my lips.

Evie is so thin now, sucked dry by the past month, but her back is still tall and straight. Except when she nuzzles her cupped hands and a furry tail moves a little. The pup in John’s cupped palms sticks her nose over the rim of her father’s hands. She sniffs the air curiously and yawns, but her eyes won’t open for a few days yet.

They are followed last by Gran Drava, our eldest wolf. Her cupped hands tremble a little.

Nikki is nearest the front door. She hobbles to her feet and puts her hands under Evie’s before bending down to the tiny pup, sniffing carefully to find his scent and memorize it. She leans in and rubs a cheek against his tiny, furry body; it is the beginning of a lifetime of being marked by the Pack. She does the same with the pup in John’s hands.

She repeats it with Gran Drava, even though her hands are empty. It is a sign of mourning for the pup who didn’t make it and a recognition of the void left in the Pack.

Each member will mark and scent the pups. It’s a long process, and by the time they come to us, Evie’s face is drawn. A trickle of blood stains her ankle. When she stumbles against the corner of the bench, Ti starts toward her, but I pull him back. However much she may distrust him now, if he makes her feel weak, she will hate him more.

She lifts the pup up to the wolf next to us and murmurs his name for the zillionth time. Nils Johnsson. Torrance is a name we use for legal documents. I have no idea where it came from. But our real names, our Pack names, are derived from our highest-ranked parent.

I am Quicksilver Nilsdottir. Because I am the daughter of the former Alpha, John’s brother and this tiny pup’s namesake.

Ti reaches out for his turn with the pup, but Evie walks past without a second look, and his face freezes.

I tug at his arm. “Only Pack can mark him,” I whisper, my heart breaking as she passes me as well. Still, there is no law that can stop me from breathing in little Nils’s scent, committing it to memory.

I do the same for Nyala Johnsdottir. Ti keeps his hands tightly clasped in front of him as Gran Drava walks by. Her airy burden is named Hannah Deathsdottir, because Death holds the highest rank of all.

After the last of the Pack scents and marks the pups, Evie and her children will return to the Meeting House to rest. Usually her mate would accompany her, but for now, John must stop being the nurslings’ father and must be Alpha again.

The Pack sits once again and digs in.

“Any Iron Moon that marks the increase of the Pack is a happy one,” says John, once Evie has gone, “but this is doubly so. Not only are we welcoming two nurslings, but we welcome back Quicksilver Nilsdottir”—I turn to Ti with a big smile that dies on my lips as I see his horrified expression—“and her bedfellow who will be known from now on by his Pack name, Tiberius Malasson.”

Ti leaps to his feet so fast that the bench tips backward. “Your mate,” he says. “She has to be here. We can’t… She has to be here—”

“I would never go behind Evie’s back. You helped protect us when we were vulnerable, Evie most of all. And you did it without killing, even after you got one of their guns.”

I admit, I may have fudged that bit. There’s no telling what John would do if he knew that Ti had sieved through the bog and hidden a gun for a moon or more.

“Whatever concerns there might have been about this Pack claim”—John’s eyes hold those of a disgusted-looking Victor—“have been addressed. As there are no against-speakers, the only thing left is to make arrangements for your Bredung. Your mating.”

Ti’s big body weaves slightly under my hand. I look up, hoping for a clue, but he focuses on the ground, and for the first time, I scent the unmistakable smell of salt and old leather, the smell of fear.

His breath is coming fast, and he swallows convulsively. The circles under his eyes appear almost black against his dark skin, and he starts to shake. Grabbing his arm to support him, I quickly blather something about “gratitude?” and “this unexpected honor?” and everything comes out as a question like I’m hoping someone will tell me why my unflappable bedfellow is having a full-fledged panic attack.

John nods at me with a sad smile and pity, because instead of greeting the news of our Bredung with joy, Ti looks like he’s going to vomit on the floor.

There are more goddamn sad smiles and pitying eyes as I stumble out, dragging the numbed Ti behind me. Kayla catches my sleeve as we leave, her expression somber, like she is going to miss me. I pull my arm away.

As soon as we get outside, Ti leans over, his hands braced against his knees. I keep my hand steady on the base of his skull, rubbing absently with my thumb while I wait for him to explain, but he stands shakily and walks away. I watch as he breaks into a jog, then a run, racing toward the woods. I let him go. Let him escape into the filigree of bare trees.

We were supposed to be celebrating our upcoming mating with a move into a cabin. A place with proper heat that would be our own. Instead, I return alone to the frigid Boathouse and collapse onto cold sheets that still smell like sex.

I wish I’d known that the night before the Iron Moon was our last night. I wouldn’t have slept at all. I would have memorized how his hands moved across my body. I would have lingered over the taste of his sweat and his seed. I would have kept him from coming so I could revel in the feeling of his thickness buried inside me and the staccato thrumming of the veins that warned me he was getting close. I would have listened harder to the throttled cry he always makes at the end.

Made.

Better yet, I’d go back further to a time before my heart got involved.

Ripping off my clothes, I pull the sheets that don’t smell like steel anymore between my legs. I rub my face into the pillow that smells of crushed bone and evergreen, but it’s too late to mark him.

What was it Lear’s Fool said? He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf or in a boy’s love.