thirty when the moon is full and her law is iron, the Pack must be wild. However the Iron Moon finds us, she makes us wilder. If we are in skin, she makes us wild. But if we are wild, she makes us æcewulfas, real wolves. Forever wolves.
Varya and the Bone Wolf, the wolf she loved—loves—sacrificed their other forms to fight for us, while we writhed on the ground, neither wild nor in skin. Deaf, blind, paralyzed, and helpless.
The Alpha Shielder of the 12th Echelon had been made hard by memory. I choose to believe that she will be freed from those memories now.
As her call dies out, I throw back my head and answer. We may not be part of her pack anymore, but she will always be part of ours.
The Great North’s runt hobbles up beside me, and as soon as she does, Tiberius lopes over, falling to his knees in front of her. Eyes closed, he buries his face in her fur.
One of the four Shifters sitting on rickety chairs starts to move. Without standing, Tiberius exhales, pivots, and fires.
Wild, Tiberius is a terrible hunter. Much worse than Silver with her bad leg and small size. In skin, though, his shot hits the burly Shifter, grazing his shoulder.
“I told you to sit down,” Tiberius says.
“Do you have any idea how much this suit cost?” the Shifter says, plucking loose threads from the tear Tiberius’s bullet left in his shoulder pad.
“It would be easier if I killed them now,” Tiberius says without looking away from the Shifters.
I eye Silver. With Victor dead, the Pack needed a Deemer. There are older wolves and bigger, but no one who knows our laws and the needs of our wild selves better. Silver chuffs a long, disappointed breath, telling me what I already knew. Of course, it would be easier to kill them now, but if laws were easy and convenient, there would be no need for them.
The law says we can kill only for food or to stop an immediate threat to the Pack, and as much as I would like to get rid of these last Shifters, they did not side with the humans against us. One even fought on our side.
As for food…they smell like humans, and humans taste like plastic and mink and the grease trap at an all-you-can-eat mutton emporium.
Without moving my head, my eyes flicker toward the gun in Tiberius’s hand. I wrinkle my lip back from a single fang, and he slides it back into his waistband with a sigh.
But just because I’m not killing them doesn’t mean I will trust them. Shifters are different. They don’t have to be wild so they never are. The Iron Moon means nothing to them. They don’t have the same ties to Pack or land, and their wild is not sacred. It’s just another resource to be exploited as they battle with humans to be apex predators.
“You can’t trust them, Alpha,” says Tiberius, and he is half Shifter. He is August Leveraux’s son.
I lost my birth pack to Shifters. I have no intention of losing another.
Crystal shatters, and the solitary female Shifter screams.
She was cold, I suppose, so she’d tried to cover herself with the stained white length of damask, simultaneously knocking over a crystal flute and revealing the man with the hole in his forehead, centered like a third eye.
I’d forgotten about him. Another detail to be taken care of.
“That’s Julia. She’s August’s niece. Cassius,” he says, nodding toward the burly man, “is, I think, now engaged to her. She’s spoiled, he’s a fool. But Constantine’s the one you have to watch out for.”
I follow the direction of his eyes toward the two other men. I discount a smaller one who sits on a rock trying to hold back groans. He is frail and clearly in pain. The Shifter standing beside him, whispering too softly for me to hear, I recognize. He was here before, waiting for the blustering man to deliver August’s ultimatum to the Great North. He’d said nothing, but I’d noticed him anyway: broad-shouldered, long and lean and tightly coiled, like a rattler made man.
Usually I appreciate Tiberius’s terseness, but now I have too many unanswered questions and no way to ask them. What is wrong with the smaller Shifter? He looks sick, but I thought Shifters were like us, dying from bullets and traps and hooves, not from slow wasting disease.
And what is a niece? When he first said it, I’d looked toward