Chapter 5

Two bunnies are more than I really wanted, but when you kill something, you have to make that death meaningful. I take the second bunny to the pups, who would much rather fight over a still-warm bunny than a spit-covered cheese chew.

Kayla catches me holding open a small backpack, already half-filled with food.

“John knows you’ve been stealing,” Kayla says, leaning against the entrance to the basement. “They smelled you in the med station.”

“Hey, Kayla. I’ve missed you too. I’m not stealing. I’m giving Pack supplies to a potential Pack member.”

“If you’d really thought that way, you would’ve simply asked rather than sneaking.”

There’s a reason Kayla was picked to become my echelon’s lawyer.

When we first settled here, our Alpha decided that we needed specialists to help us deal with the human world. At first we had doctors and lawyers. Now we have doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, fund managers, hackers, and more lawyers. Every echelon has at least one. Lawyer, that is. But they’re all here to protect us. They work to make sure that every i is dotted, every t crossed, every p and q minded, so that we are never vulnerable.

Anyone who gets a thirty-page contract for the sale of a used coffeemaker is dealing with a Pack.

Luckily, Kayla likes me. She watches out for me. Slightly older and a lot bigger, she always set aside a rib with a bit of meat still clinging to it from the bigger kills.

“So tell me… What’s he like? The Shifter. Do they stink like humans even when they’re wild?”

“He’s still healing, so I haven’t seen him wild.” Kayla doesn’t need to know that he’s healed and all I know is that he can probably change. My stomach clenches around my bunny breakfast. “But I think…I think Shifters may have become carrion eaters. I brought him a really nice, fat bunny, and he refused to eat it.” I put a bag of pistachios in the bag. “He wanted bacon.”

“Gross,” she says, her nose wrinkled in a grimace, but she leans in closer, sniffing delicately at the air near my ear. “You’re receptive. Do you think maybe he’d cover you?”

I ignore her; she’s just being a jerk. “Do you know where those dried, marinated tempeh strips are?”

“No idea. But I’m being serious. They’re not like us. Tessa said she heard Shifters will even”—her voice drops—“cover humans.” She pulls an elastic tie from her wrist and loops it around her thick auburn hair. “I mean if they’ll cover humans, they’ll cover anything.”

Funnily enough, I do consider Kayla to be my friend.

I finally find the dried, marinated tempeh strips. The ones we use for bacon and grilled cheese sandwiches.

* * *

An otter bites down on a bullhead with a satisfying crunch. The red-edged sugar maple gives way to tamaracks that are in that especially beautiful and especially short phase between summer green and autumn gold. Even when I’m in skin, a lot of animals either run from me or go silent, because whatever I look like, I smell like something that will hunt them.

My hearing isn’t great in skin, but under the endless honking of the geese heading to that other home, I hear an unusual sound. Something big is fumbling around in the distance. I can tell it’s not running away. Bears will, when they scent us. Probably moose. We’re reintroducing them, but John says we’re not to hunt them until the population is truly self-sustaining. They’ve gotten pretty complacent, which is putting a strain on tempers and appetites across the Pack.

But the longer I listen, the more certain I am it’s not moose. I think it’s bear—and a badly injured one. Clambering up one outcropping, I take off my clothes and fold them into my backpack, then I hang it over the highest branch I can reach. I start quietly and carefully toward my prey.

If its injuries aren’t too bad, I will call the Pack. But if it’s as badly wounded as it sounds, I will hunt it myself.

Creeping around the bog mats near Beaver Pond is tricky. Never can be sure when you’re going to slip right in, which would alert my bear. Once I get close enough, I realize the wound must be mortal—a bolt maybe. It will be a kindness to put it out of its misery.

What bullshit. All I care about is a chance at the blood-rich chewiness of bear heart. Which I will eat all by myself before I call the Pack. If I weren’t so full, I’d eat a lung too, just because those choice bits are always long gone by the time I get to any kill.

Under cover of a laurel bush, I finally get a good glimpse of my prey across the inlet. It is the size and color of a black bear, but with the long muzzle, slim face, pointed ears, narrow torso, and tail of a wolf. His teeth shine sharp in enormous jaws. His thighs are coiled muscle above huge paws. His coat is the color of midnight and thickening beautifully, like an autumn coat should. He smells of wild and steel.

Tiberius is quite simply the most glorious wolf I have ever seen. Or would be, if he were stuffed with sawdust on a metal armature and mounted in a prettily painted diorama surrounded by glass and sticky-fingered children.

Here, he is an abomination. His legs are splayed out to the sides. His head sticks up high like a horse. His back is curved the wrong way, and his tail drags along the ground.

“Hey,” I yell. “That’s beaver water.” He looks at me with those gold-flecked obsidian eyes. “Who drinks beaver water?”

He makes some peculiar motions with his mouth before snapping his jaws shut. Then he tries to walk toward me.

His back legs move forward one at a time until they meet with his front paws. Then he hobbles forward with a kind of old-man shuffle. He stops and rewinds and begins again.

We are so toast.

The little bones in my feet start to lengthen, and I fall to the ground, my body contorting, the world fading from my consciousness, but the moment my change is over, I race around and snip at his flank to nudge one of his legs farther under him. He bats me with his head and falls straight to the ground.

I prod him with my nose until he gets up again. Clearly, the first thing that needs to be fixed is his leg position. He stands like a nursling, with his paws wide apart. Makes me wonder when he last shifted.

This time, I swing my head, bumping against his legs. I pull my own bum leg down as far as I can. It doesn’t matter that a tearing pain shoots through my hip; I have to be able to show him what a proper wolf stride is supposed to look like, with his legs nearly lined up straight down the center of his chest.

I walk slowly in front of him. Front right paw forward, rear left paw forward, almost kicking the front left paw forward, then the rear right paw. I bark at him, trying to encourage him to move, but he startles and his hind legs wobble and he sits on his tail, mystified. He holds up his paws, first one, then the other, and opens his mouth, his tongue flapping and his gums slapping, like he expects something to come out.

I slump down on a bed of soft moss, watching my life flash before my eyes, followed in quick succession by a roly-poly and an oblivious shrew. I bat at the shrew. They’re not particularly good eating, because their spit tastes bad and numbs the tongue, but I can’t help myself and bat at it again. And again. And then I’m up on my paws and running around and herding the angry shrew toward Ti. Maybe all he needs is prey to get him up and moving.

He hasn’t had much to eat, and I hear his stomach grumble, but he shows no interest in hunting the shrew. Maybe…I hold its hindquarters under my paw and bite off its head, so Ti can eat it without having to deal with shrew spit.

He just stares at me forlornly and then jerks to the side and stumbles away.

What a crappy wolf.

* * *

“You’ve got mouse blood,” he says, rubbing at the corner of his mouth, “here.”

Peanut butter. Dried apples. “It was shrew.” I rub my chin distractedly. I’m sure I packed the bacon.

“You didn’t get it. It’s on the other side. And there’s more here…” He dampens the cuff of his sleeve with water and wipes hard at my lips. Then he stops. “Are all Pack like you?”

“What do you mean?”

He pulls my lip up, revealing the tips of my canines.

“Ah…no. Just me.” When they’re in skin, Pack look human, and though their teeth aren’t always perfect—orthodontia is not really an option for werewolves—they look human. My canines are perfectly appropriate to a wolf, but they somehow forget to change when I’m in skin and remain too long, too sharp, and too feral ever to be mistaken for human.

“Gran Sigeburg always said my leg and my hair and my teeth don’t change the way they’re supposed to because I was premature and never cooked properly.”

I stare at a bag of acorn flour. Why did I bring acorn flour? “And can I ask you something?”

He picks up the peanut butter.

“When exactly did you last change?”

“I don’t know exactly. A while.”

“But this.” I sweep my finger around my neck. “And this.” I point to the spot on my own body where he now has the aster scar. “Those come from fights with wolves.”

“The men who did this”—he lays his hand on his stomach—“had changed so they could track me. I hadn’t changed. It wasn’t meant to be a fight; it was meant to be an assassination.”

Miso. Dried eggs. He doesn’t say anything about his neck. Halloumi.

He looks at all the things I’ve pulled out of the backpack. “Is it that you just don’t like meat?”

“You know that’s not true. I brought you a bunny this morning.” I scratch at my back and yawn wide. “It was nummy. But that wasn’t really what you meant, was it? What you meant is, do you have carrion in that backpack?”

“Carrion sounds disgusting, but something that isn’t still breathing would be nice,” he says.

“Do you really not hunt?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“But you don’t eat what you kill?”

“No.”

“Now you see? That…that’s just a sin.”

“I think,” he says, scooping a finger full of peanut butter, “it depends on your perspective.”

He pops the peanut butter into his mouth.

“What a human. You kill without eating, talk without meaning, and turn without changing.”

“What do you mean turn without changing? What do you think I was doing crawling around on all fours?”

“You believe what you want, but you’re not really a wolf. You’re just a man in a wolf suit.”

I finally find the dinged aluminum bento box. “Here it is. Bacon.”

He opens the box and shakes the broken crumbs of dried marinated tempeh strips into his palm.

They were a lot longer when I put them in.