not just because she’s strong but because she has the willingness to sacrifice. Wolves have to know that their Alphas won’t go letting what they want get in the way of what the Great North needs.”
The clearing opens onto a long, low hall with a patchwork peaked roof of gray and beige shingles.
“I hope Sten hasn’t locked the door,” Ziggy says, and I try to remember where I heard that name.
This place is less like a workshop than a cathedral to wood. Light streams in from clerestory windows tucked high under the eaves and at either gabled end. Instead of pews, there are workbenches with massive vises. Instead of featuring stained glass and ex-votos, the walls are decorated with collections of wood and metal tools, carefully curated into things that cut, things that bang, things that carve, and things that smooth. The altar wall is built-in pigeonhole storage filled with rolled papers.
And officiating over it is Sten.
I have never seen Sten—never heard any description of him. All I know is the fear in Tiberius’s voice and that is enough. The Great North are enormous, but the man who thumps toward us is a giant even among them. He wears what I can only imagine is an XXXXL and TALL that still strains across his chest. Carhartts that had been golden brown but are faded to beige and splotched with wood stain and teak oil. His hair is powdered with sawdust, and he smells like creosote and linseed.
He is carrying two hammers. One is a mallet that looks like a mailbox atop a flagpole but is made out of wood and bears the scars of many banged things.
The other is the cross peen hammer I’d used to crush teeth. This he holds in front of him like a crosier.
But you’re going to tell Sten about the hammer.
The other wolves move back while Sten stalks toward me, twirling the mailbox around like an ancient wrathful god of mead and/or smiting.
“Swines tord,” says Ziggy and steps away.
With a sigh, I stand back, watching Sten come. Dominant leg. Patterns. The range of his swing and the drop at the end of it. Wasted energy. The catch in his left shoulder. Then I remember the little piece of pink paper that, in all the confusion, I’d forgotten to give to Ziggy. I pat at my jeans before finding it in my breast pocket.
Sten stops in front of me, bending his head to look at the pink note sticking to my finger. His mallet drops to the floor with a thud; it stands by itself, handle upright. Sten takes the note from me, caressing it tenderly with his thumb, then he turns the paper and reads it. Ziggy looks over his arm, angling his head so he can see it with his one whole eye.
Sten’s anger deflates like air from a slashed inner tube. He sniffs the note, then slides it into his chest pocket, patting it reverently.
“Door,” he says, in his first word of the day.
A wolf hurries over to slide a thick bolt into steel brackets, a blunt and impassable blockage.
Sten heads back, putting the offending cross peen hammer in its place on the wall and swinging his cudgel. He rummages through the pigeonholes.
“What did it say?” I ask Ziggy.
“You didn’t read it?”
“I did, but except for the word ‘benches,’ I didn’t understand anything.”
“Henh,” he says with a curious nod that could have meant anything. “She wrote ‘Genog med bitli,’” he says with a chuckle. “Means ‘Enough with the hammer.’”
Sten returns with a roll of paper and sets it on a huge pile of two-by-fours at the front. He swings his mallet in a fast arc that ends in a dainty tap on the paper, then says what I discover will be his last word of the day: “Bench.”
Within seconds, the wolves are gathered around the two-by-fours, rolling out the piece of paper. One runs to get pencils from a container; another levels and tape measures. I watch them, heads together, drawing calculations and angles on the wood.
I keep looking toward Sten, waiting for… I’m not sure what I’m waiting for, but more. I’m used to August, who gave very long and very detailed directions toward an outcome only he knew. Take this duffel to this place at this time. Do not talk to anyone. An iced-mocha metallic Lincoln Continental will be parked on the southwest corner. A man with the tattoo of a raven’s claw on his cheek and a black Tom Selleck