“She told me,” he says, the stiff line-dried denim rasping against his skin.
It takes me a moment to remember my question.
“Here’s my problem.” A strand of hair has come loose from the band. I tuck it under and cross my arms across the back of the chair. “When she first arrived years ago, Varya Timursdottir told one wolf her name. The Great North’s Alpha. She never told anyone else. The rest of us found out eventually, but not from her. So why would she tell you? A complete stranger? A Shifter?”
He starts to pull the T-shirt over his head.
“I’m going to tell you what I told Tiberius. You’re going to have to ask her.”
Chin propped on my arms, I look toward Westdæl.
“I can’t,” I say, turning back to him. “She will never have the words to tell me.”
His head emerges slowly from the collar. “She’s dead?”
“You really do think like a human. Just because a life has no words doesn’t make it less alive. She is very much alive, but she is an æcewulf, a real wolf. A forever wolf.”
He arches his back, reaching behind to the fabric scrunched up high against his damp skin. The jeans hang low, framing the hollow of his hips and a gash of dark hair right down the middle.
“So she will never be human again?”
“She was never human, but no, she will never have thumbs or words again.”
He stands near me, bending down to follow the path of my eyes through the window, past the billowing crown hardwoods, past the sharp tops of pines toward the dawn glow of Westdæl’s bare top, home to the one other wolf who knew what it was to be an outsider, a teeterer on the edge of annihilation.
“How did it happen?” he asks in a quiet tone that almost sounds as though he wants to know. I’ve forgotten what that feels like, the give and take of conversation. John had me to talk to, but I have a Pack of worried wolves, and with them it’s all Alpha, reassure us, Alpha, decide for us, Alpha, direct us.
“The Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If she finds us in skin, she makes us wild. If she finds us wild, she makes us æcewulfas. Forever wolves. Varya became a forever wolf so that she could protect us when we were at our most vulnerable. So.” I squeeze my hand, feeling the thick scar at the base of my thumb. “I really can’t ask her.”
Plucking the towel from the floor, he shakes it out and heads to the bathroom.
“You said Shifters had done something to your pack,” he says, watching me in the reflection of the little mirror nailed above the sink.
I smooth the curve of my eyebrow.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know I don’t. You can probably guess it. Hunters. Wolves. Except, in my case, it was three Shifters and a small pack trapped by the Iron Moon. They had guns. We had teeth. Within a few minutes, my entire birth pack was dead except the pup whose scent was camouflaged in the cesspit.”
He lowers his head, hands grasping either side of the sink, one finger beating silently on the porcelain. “Three Shifters then. Three Shifters now.”
“My birth pack was tiny compared to the Great North. They had no experience of Shifters. We do.” I stretch my head to the side, trying to loosen my stiff shoulder. “I watched the three of you during the Iron Moon: Julia is weak, Cassius is a fool. You are the one Tiberius says is the most dangerous, the one who must be watched. But then why did the most guarded and careful wolf in the Great North tell you her name?”
He raises his head, looking at me in the reflection.
“Do you see my problem?”
After squeezing some toothpaste onto a toothbrush, he grimaces through a mouthful of beige foam. Looking at the tube, he spits and rinses. “Peanut butter? I don’t suppose you have some other flavor?”
“Answer the question.”
He rinses his mouth out twice more, then leans against the doorjamb, facing me. “When she first came to the compound, Varya’d been pumped with enough ketamine and fentanyl to kill a grizzly, and that’s not an exaggeration. But she would not give up. She was locked up in the basement, throwing herself against things, forcing herself to move. It was nothing but will, and the sound irritated the hell out of