Chapter 7

As inefficient as it is, we will walk to Home Pond on two legs.

Me, I need nothing more than water, a good cedar stump, and a bunny. But humans… Ack. Humans need tents against rain and clothes against wind and fire against cold and food against hunger and other stuff against other eventualities—and then they need a backpack to put it in and a back to carry it on.

We—I—pack slowly. A slow breakfast. A leisurely wash in Clear Pond.

A howl rumbles across the woods from Home Pond, telling me to get a move on.

I pull on the backpack, and that’s when it hits me with all the force of a bull moose that a crappy wolf and a crippled wolf really have no chance against Solveig and Eudemos, and I will almost certainly be exiled, not in three months’ time but now.

I will never see our land again.

And all I can do is see it. It is beautiful: the dark green of the spruce and the occasional early red of the overeager sugar maples, but it still lacks the depth and dimension it has when I’m wild.

I can hear geese and hawks and woodpeckers. But the under-leaf scrabbling of mice and the under-bark burrowing of beetles and the faraway bolting of a rabbit are gone. I can’t smell how the sky will change. I can’t smell the fear of the squirrel as it races up the tree. In my skin, the rot of the bog stinks, but when I’m wild, I can smell the heady promise of new life inside the decay.

“Did you lose something?” Ti asks, tightening the straps of his backpack.

Too soon, I hear the sounds of home. Wood chopping, a screen door slamming, voices calling, a car starting. Pups mewling and barking and screeching those high-pitched screeches of a trodden tail or a too-hard bite.

I can’t help but slow down, straining against the inevitable, like the future is on a leash that I can control.

Voices drop, and the sound of wood chopping stops. Someone shoos the pups inside.

Varya strides toward us, a heavy ax balanced in her hands. She’s the one who’s been chopping wood, and her skin is slicked with sweat. She sniffs the air warily. Varya came from a Pack that dissolved into chaos under pressure from hunters. She never speaks about what she saw, but she is a stickler for laws and hierarchies.

Others are gathering behind her. Most are carrying something. A rake, a lacrosse stick, a butcher’s knife. Those who aren’t simply rest their hands on oiled sheaths at their waists.

My people are a wall of strength, the result of genetics and generations of breeding toward power. Every one of them—every male, every female—towers over me and weighs twice what I do.

Ti’s expression barely changes. It helps that he’s bigger than any of them. His chest slowly expands as he breathes their scent deep into his lungs. The Pack merely sniffs, reluctant to get too much of that almost-human Shifter smell.

With a small flurry of activity, the Pack makes way for a man who is nearly as tall as Ti. His thick chest strains against the worn flannel shirt. He wears jeans and heavy work boots. He is bare-handed.

“The gun?” John asks.

“Threw it into the bog.” I carefully avoid the question of who did the throwing.

“Still smells like steel,” our Alpha says, rubbing at his nose. “Solveig and Eudemos?” he asks someone over his shoulder.

“They’re on their way,” Tara responds, coming up from the back.

John nods before lapsing into the uncomfortable silence of waiting. The intimidating stares of the Pack only make that silence louder and make me more anxious.

“So…when were you thinking?” I ask John.

“We have to wait for Solveig. To coordinate schedules.”

I nod, trying to look as though I know what it’s like to have a “schedule” that must be “coordinated.”

Varya taps the poll of the ax in her palm, her eyes boring so hard into Tiberius that I’m doubly grateful when I hear Solveig’s fast tattoo coming toward us.

“Sorry, John. I came as soon as I could.” She glances warily at Tiberius.

“I don’t think we have to wait for Eudemos to get the formalities out of the way.” John turns to me. “Silver?”

I push my shoulders back and stand upright, because our rituals may be ancient and formulaic, but they still deserve all the dignity that a runt in a BU Terriers sweatshirt can give them.

“Solveig Kerensdottir. By the ancient rites and laws of our ancestors and under the watchful eye of our Echelon, our Pack, and our Alpha, we, Quicksilver Nilsdottir and Tiberius—

“Wait… Ti, what’s your last name?”

“Leveraux.”

“Uh, yeah…so under the watchful eye of our Echelon, our Pack, and our Alpha, we, Quicksilver Nilsdottir and Tiberius Leveraux, seek to add our strength to the Great North Pack and prove ourselves worthy of a place at your table. With fang and claw, we will attend upon you tomorrow at… What do you think? 2:00?”

Solveig reaches into her jeans pocket. “Hold on a sec.” She swipes the home screen on her phone. “I’ve got a lunch meeting at 12:30. Can we make it in the morning? Like 10:00? No, better 9:30. You know.” She shakes her head. “Road work on Route 9.”

“Okay, fine, then add our strength to yours and all that and… With fang and claw, we will attend upon you tomorrow at 9:30.”

Solveig squiggles her finger across the touch screen, then slips her phone back into her pocket just as Demos lumbers up behind her.

After a whispered conversation, Demos nods. Solveig takes the long way, walking around Tiberius and watching him carefully. He doesn’t move. Finally, Solveig says, “Silver” with a nod. “Shifter.” As she walks away, she whispers urgently to Demos.

“John?” I look briefly at John and then down again to the area between chin and chest as is right and appropriate when addressing the Alpha. “Since we’ll be here tonight and Tiberius”—my voice drops—“isn’t comfortable sleeping wild, I was wondering if—”

“Tara?”

“The Boathouse hasn’t been closed up yet.”

“Fine, use the Boathouse,” he says, turning to leave. “But, Silver? You need to get your things out of the juvenile wing.”

As soon as he goes, I start to make my way toward the Great Hall. I am small and familiar, and while my packmates don’t get out of the way exactly, I am able to thread through the beefy backs and bulging shoulders. They close behind me, blocking Ti, who stands with his thickly muscled chest pushed hard against the wolfish blockade surrounding him.

“Oh, for the love of…” I thread my way back, grabbing Ti with one hand and clearing a path with the other. I love my Pack, but sometimes the only thing they understand is an elbow in the brisket.

It’s not far to the outlying buildings of Home Pond. That’s what we call the pond and the Great Camp of nearly a hundred buildings scattered through the forests around it. Most of those are cottages for paired wolves. Others are work areas, like the Laundry or the Carpentry, but the heart of the Pack is the Great Hall. It is a huge, rambling two-story building of rough wood with a roof pitched high enough to slough off the thick snow of an Adirondack winter.

This is where we have meals when we’re not hunting. This is where we watch movies. This is where the pups live once they’re no longer nurslings. This is where the Grans, our elders, live too, because it’s warmer and the pups need someone to teach them Pack traditions and stop them from eating the banisters.

Until a few days ago, this was where I lived.

I hold the screen door to the Great Hall open for Ti. The inside smells of Pack, of their shoes and muck boots and cheese chews and damp jackets and fur and slobbery rope bones. When the door closes with a loud pop, my heart clenches.

Soon the screen door that protects the entryway from blackfly in the summer will be replaced by a solid storm door that will protect us from the shattering winds of winter.

The next door leads straight into the Great Hall itself. It’s huge, with a high cathedral ceiling, but I’ve never really thought about how big it is. To me, it’s just home. The walls glow warm in the late-afternoon light that streams through mullioned windows and dust motes before making diamond patterns on the log walls’ irregular surfaces. And though those logs were peeled more than a century ago, the scent of cedar is still there.

At the far side is the enormous stone fireplace, flanked by huge piles of wood and a big basket of kindling. Its grandeur is offset by the shabby plaid sofas at either side. No point in replacing them because the pups are always scampering across them, picking loops in the upholstery with their untrained claws and shedding uncontrollably in the summer.

Graceful birch trunks support the branch-banistered staircase that leads to the children’s quarters and the juvenile wing and where, until a few days ago, I spent my entire life.

Gran Jean stops me.

“Yes?”

Gran Jean’s known me since before my eyes opened. She taught me how to use the library. She was the one who told me that John didn’t like books left splayed. “It’s bad for the spine,” she’d said.

But wolves have little patience for sentiment. The past doesn’t matter; what matters is the position you hold in the Pack hierarchy right now. It doesn’t matter that once upon a time, when I was snug and secure in my mother’s womb, I was the much-anticipated offspring of the Great North’s Alpha pair.

Within the past few days, I fell from the 14th Echelon’s Kappa to nidling and then—pop!—I dropped right out of the bottom. I am fremde—a stranger, an outsider.

“John said I needed to get my things from the juvenile wing.”

Gran Jean eyes me like I’m some opportunistic Chihuahua making outrageous claims to kinship.

“John said,” I repeat.

“Juvenile wing and then out,” Gran Jean says, stepping aside to let us pass.

“Can we grab something from the kitch—”

“Are you Pack?”

“No,” I whisper.

“Are you guests of the Pack?”

“No.”

“Then no,” she says. “Juvenile wing, then out. That’s what John said.”

It still smells like the 14th Echelon, even though we cleaned and whitewashed the rooms before our Dæling in preparation for the 15th Echelon who now lives here. Most of my echelon have continued their own stumbling steps toward adulthood either Offland or in cabins. Ronan and I probably would have gotten number 98 or one of the other tiny satellite cabins occupied by the wolves nobody much wants to remember.

Ronan’s bunk is empty. Mine has been taken over by Avery. I know this because my old desk now has a purple cup with AVERY written on it in yellow swirls. Avery is a very strong, beautiful red wolf with dark mahogany markings, and while I remember her scent, I cannot bring to mind a human face. I’ve probably never seen her in skin.

Did she have to dump all of my stuff on the floor? There wasn’t much: some clothes and a couple of books that belong to me that I have, yes, left splayed, even though it’s bad for the spine. It all could have fit neatly on her bed. It’s not like she’s using it. I can tell by the quarter-bouncing neatness of all the beds that the new juveniles are still sleeping wild.

And now some pup has chewed the thumbs from both my mittens.

I toss my stuff into the backpack and then rifle through every drawer and every bag of every juvenile until they have all made at least one contribution to Ti’s dinner.

For myself, I will eat whatever the wetlands provide, as long as it’s muskrat.