only slowly subsiding and the new cedar we used is still too strong. It will all gentle over time and eventually be like that other hall, thick with the scent of pine and turkey feathers and sweetgrass and deer musk and wolves.
Then there will be less to remind us of what we lost to the Shifters. Not of the hall—that’s just a thing, ultimately—but of the lives: Solveig Kerensdottir, Orion Tyldesson, Paula Carlsdottir, Celia Sorensdottir.
And John Sigeburgsson.
I miss so many things about him. As the two strongest wolves of our echelon, our mating was long assumed, but he was my friend even before and I miss that more. He was so confident in his decisions. In a way, that is what I miss most of all: the certainty born of a long line of Alphas in a pack that had been unchallenged and undisturbed for 350 years. Such certitude is harder as an outsider guiding a pack that finds itself suddenly exposed and vulnerable.
The door closes.
The floor creaks as it settles. I take a deep breath, turning to face the inevitable Alpha? that will announce whatever problem or question or need requires my position’s attention.
But the Shifter says nothing. He stands silent in front of a window that gives out onto birches charred the night the Great Hall burned. If they had not leafed, we might have cut them down, but they did and now they dapple the room in the pearl-green light of summer.
His gaze feels like a physical weight. He asks for nothing and I feel uncomfortable, like I no longer know how to deal with someone who doesn’t have a problem that needs to be signed or read or arbitrated or disciplined. So I go back to setting out the chairs. There are not as many tables out as there are for the Iron Moon Table, the one meal when the whole Pack is together and in skin, but with enough places for the two-hundred-plus Homeland wolves. I open two chairs and another two and—
“Don’t you have people to do that?” he finally asks.
“Neither.”
“Neither?”
“There are no ‘people’ here, only wolves, and I do not ‘have’ them.”
A cable tie has popped loose from the chair in my hand. I set it aside. They were never meant to be anything but a temporary solution.
“We took care of the bodies.”
“Hmm,” I say, heading over to the corner and the ridiculously ornate, glass-front china cabinet, another temporary solution that hails from Sten’s storage and before that from an earlier gilded age when the Pack first bought the Great Hall and its surrounding buildings.
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“I get enough questions without answering questions that aren’t asked.” Fishing around in the back of the leftmost shallow drawer, I extract two cable ties.
He coughs out a broken laugh. “August would’ve expected a detailed report so that he could be sure everything had gone according to instructions.”
I thread the cable ties through the teetering joint and pull them tight. “Yes, well, wolves are not employees; an Alpha is not a boss. Tiberius would have told me if there was a problem.”
Then I set the jury-rigged chair down. It will hold a while longer, but it is time to start on something more permanent. I will tell Sten to start work on—
“Alpha,” says Soli, carrying the quarterly tax estimates due June 17.
“Alpha,” says Tara, bringing proposals for the renegotiated flight plans from Potsdam Municipal Airport.
“Alpha,” says Gran Jean, trailed by Gyta and Adam. Jean crosses her arms in front of her and says nothing because Adam is favoring his hind leg, so I already know.
“It’s the second time, Gyta.” She is young still, not even fifty moons. Pups that age are not expected to be much in skin, so we don’t have clothes that fit her. She plucks at the outsized shirt and pants held up by a bungee cord. “You will be in skin until the next moon.”
“Bwedonsaranix, Apa! Bwedonsaranix.”
“It doesn’t matter what he did,” I say, partly because I have no idea what she’s saying, partly because it genuinely doesn’t matter. We’ve been through this once before. “Wolves do not bite sleeping packmates. Wolves wake wolves up, then they bite them. Ongiet?” Gyta doesn’t reply, and her lower lip trembles.
“Do you understand?” I repeat, and this time, she nods.
“Apa?” she says plaintively, cocking her head to the side. I bend over her, touching her face, rubbing first one cheek, then the other, letting her rest in the crook of my shoulder