Chapter 8

I still sleep wild too. The fascination with sheets doesn’t happen until Pack have spent some time Offland. Usually during college. They come home for the summer and start mumbling something about blackfly, but really they’ve just gotten used to beds and sheets and pillows for their heads. They wear pj’s.

And every summer, some of these wolves in sleep’s clothing bunk down in the Boathouse.

The Boathouse has three narrow bays. Two at water level shelter a motley collection of boats: a paddleboat and two rowboats, a catamaran that needs some repairing. Kayaks and canoes hang on the rough-planked walls. Between those bays is a narrow room with a high-pitched roof and shallow clerestory windows. Shoehorned into the back is a tiny shower room that never quite airs out and always smells a little musky.

Next to it under a single small window is the kitchen, though kitchen seems like a strong word for a hot plate and a sink. The only thing that passes for refrigeration is the hatch in the floor that opens onto a rusted basket where Offlanders keep their stores of Vernors and A&W chilling in the cold waters of Home Pond.

The furnishings are similarly spare: a functional pine desk, a rocking chair, a couple of old lamps with damp-stained shades, two long pullout beds with sun-bleached cushions, and an ancient warped chest that serves as a footrest and coffee table. Every year, the summer wolves leave piles of summer reading wherever they settle, so there are plenty of new books and magazines.

“Where should I put these?” Ti asks, holding up his little stack of clothing.

Putting the books on the floor, I open the chest/coffee table. He drops his clothes to one side, I suppose leaving room for me. “D’you mind if I take a shower?”

I shake my head. And stare at the empty space in the chest.

I’m not sure there is any point in unpacking. This time tomorrow, I’ll just pack it all up again. I will go my way, and this man, the root of my misery, will go his way and—

“What’s this?” asks the root of my misery, a bottle in his hand.

“Shampoo?”

“It’s dog shampoo.”

“It’s what we use. I know humans like to disguise themselves with artificial coconut and fake freesia, but if you do that here, no one will recognize you.”

He takes a long look at the label before disappearing into the shower.

What a crappy wolf.

When he comes out, a towel wrapped around his waist, the steam billows out around him.

“Turn around.” He circles his finger in the air. “It’s too small in there to get dressed.”

I look out the french doors that open onto the dock, with its two big Adirondack chairs and the countless claw marks of summer wolves who race across the wood before launching themselves into the pond.

And the reflection of the man standing naked behind me, briskly drying his shaved head.

The paddleboat creaks and jostles whenever the water is disturbed. The first frost will come before long, and then Home Pond will be covered with what looks like crumpled and smoothed foil.

“Tiberius Leveraux, huh? If I Google you,” I blurt out, “what will I find?”

“Nothing.” He moves on to his well-muscled arms. “If I Google ‘Quicksilver’ whatever it was…”

“Nilsdottir.”

“If I Google ‘Quicksilver Nilsdottir,’ what will I find?”

“Nothing. Wolves don’t leave traces. Humans do. You say you’re human, so I should find something.”

“No.” I can’t tell from the reflection if he’s actually grimacing or if it’s just the way the light shines from the surface of the pond on the other side of the glass. “Like you, we can’t go to doctors or hospitals, so there are no birth certificates or medical records or social insurance numbers. But in every other way—all the ways that count—we are human.”

He dries his left calf and thigh.

“What is a social insurance number?”

“Canadian. Like social security.”

He moves to his right leg.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Twenty-seven. How old are you?”

He rubs his back.

“Two hundred seventy moons.”

“What’s that? Like, twenty-two years?”

“A little more. Did you go to school Offland?”

“We don’t have a territory like you do, but yes. I went to McGill. You?”

“No. And…”

He dries between his legs.

“And…and what did you do after?”

“I was in human resources management.”

“Is that a job you do for your Pack?”

He hangs the towel over the door. I hold my hand to the window, covering his reflected body.

“Sort of. There aren’t enough of us to make a Pack”—soft cotton sweats swish against his just-damp skin—“so it’s more like a company that employs a lot of humans.”

“And you challenged the head of this company?”

“Not the way you think of it. I didn’t want to take over. One day I got sick of it. ‘Mongrel’ whispered one too many times, and I lost my temper.”

He picks up his sweatshirt.

“Why do you want to know all of this now? Why not yesterday or the day before or this morning?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because it didn’t feel real before and I thought there would be more time. But there isn’t. And now I’m here seeing everything I’ve lived with and I’m about to lose.”

“What makes you think we’re going to lose?”

He pulls his sweatshirt over his head, and I stare for too long, until his head emerges from the collar and those eyes catch mine, and I shake a little, though I’m not cold. “It’s a question,” he says, “of who needs it most.”

“Needs what?” I think I’ve lost track of the conversation.

“To win. Isn’t that what we were talking about? I need it. Otherwise, I’m a hunted man with no home and no country. Is there a bed?” he asks.

I lift the hand-darkened and tooth-chewed rope handles on one of the benches to the storage with bed linens underneath.

“And what would you do,” he asks, “if you weren’t here?”

One sheet? Is that what they like? I try to remember what my own unused bed in the juvenile wing looked like. I think maybe there were two. I pull out two, and Ti doesn’t seem to blink.

Whenever I’ve been struck by a worst-case scenario, I’ve always held out hope for the little Pack on Manitoulin that was so desperate for members it would take anyone, or so the gossip went. No challenges or fights or unmated wolves. When I mentioned it a few months ago to Kayla—casually, of course—she said the gene pool of that Pack hadn’t been stirred for over two centuries. “Solid Deliverance territory,” she said.

With one more jerk, the sofa pulls open into a queen-size bed.

“I’m not strong enough to be accepted into another Pack. I think…I think I’d probably go someplace with, like, no people, someplace with musk ox. Have you ever had musk ox? It’s supposed to be delicious. Anyway, I’d probably go and turn and never turn back.”

“Permanently?”

“Hmm. You know, become an æcewulf.” But I can tell by the look on his face that he doesn’t, in fact, know. “All the Iron Moon does is makes us wilder. If we are in skin, it makes us wolves. But if we are already wild, it takes us a step further and makes us æcewulf. A real wolf. A forever wolf.”

“And you can never change back?”

“That’s why it’s called ‘forever.’”

“Jesus.” Ti shakes out the bottom sheet. “Wouldn’t you miss it? Being human?”

“I’m not human. I’m in skin. Not the same thing. Anyway, not really.” I run my hand along the worn softness of the sheets. “Maybe the way things feel against my skin. Wind. Water. This sheet. It is different, and I guess I’d miss that.” I hold out one end of the top sheet to him, and his hand slides against mine.

Jerking back from the sharp jolt of his touch, I let go of the sheet. It floats down, almost perfectly covering the bed. I hide my burning face deep in the storage chest. “One pillow or two?”

“Two,” he says. He moves with more wolflike grace on two legs than he ever could on four and grabs the single knife from the butcher-block stand in the “kitchen.”

A second later, the knife hits the floor. I jerk upright. The still-quivering knife has cut through the neck of a long, striped snake.

“You killed a milk snake?”

Ti kneels down beside the poor constrictor.

“Yes, and you’re welcome.” He pulls the knife out and turns to the sink to wash it.

“It’s a milk snake, Tiberius. Probably just sleeping in the sheets. Wow. It’s a big one, though. Hope you’re hungry.”

“What do you mean ‘hungry’?” he asks, drying the knife.

“Well, you gotta eat it.”

He puts the knife back in the butcher-block stand.

“Are you crazy? I’m not going to eat that.”

“You’ve got to. We’re not allowed to kill anything we don’t eat. Pack law.”

“I’m not eating a snake.”

“You killed it. You eat it.”

“No.”

“Fine! I’ll do it.” It’s got to be three feet long, and just looking at it is making my stomach hurt. “You do know that I just ate a whole muskrat, and I don’t even like snake.”

Stripping, I toss the decapitated constrictor over my naked shoulder and march to the honey locust at water’s edge to change, because I don’t want to have to eat this mess of milk snake and clean up the floor afterward.

When I finish with the snake, I pull at the door with my teeth. My claws click across the floor, and Ti looks over the edge of the book he’s claimed from the pile left by the summer wolves.

“Did you do it?”

I turn over on my back, stretching my three good legs straight above my distended tummy. I flip over again and turn to the book I’d left on the floor. Lying down, with my paws on either side of the book, I stretch my hind legs akimbo, because the pressure of the cool wood against my belly makes the dull weight of muskrat and milk snake feel a little better.

The page crackles as I turn it with my damp nose.

“Well, Toto,” Ti says, scratching his eyebrow. “I do believe we’re not in Kansas anymore.”