their safety was the occasional random hunter. I needed that when I first came to the Great North frightened and angry and alone. I was always grateful to him. Respected him. We were together because we were the two strongest wolves and that is what was expected. You…you are nothing like him.”
Stretching out the collar of my shirt, I pull it up over my nose and inhale.
“That’s not going to work,” she says. “None of us can read ourselves.”
“So what am I like?” I ask, pulling the shirt down again. “What was it you say we all smell like? Carrion and iron?”
She leans forward, mouth open, the alae of her nose flared, and breathes me in deeply. A tiny smile plays around the corners of her mouth, then she lets go of the breath with a sigh.
“Steel and carrion. Though for a long time, you smelled like ash. Like land that had been burned over. Now you smell”—she sighs—“nice. Like water and the life at water’s edge.”
Nice. Like water.
Not sure I like the sound of that.
“And Poul?” I don’t like the way I say his name either.
“Poul?” She shrugs, then opens her mouth, her tongue feeling the smooth fronts of her teeth. “Slate.”
Iron straps begin to tighten around my chest. “Do all Alphas smell like rock?”
“What are you talking about?”
“John smells like the mountain; you smell like granite; Poul, like slate. It’s—”
“And if you hit slate at the wrong angle, it splits. These words are nothing. They are just attempts to describe a thing that can’t be described.”
“Still, that’s some coincidence, don’t you think?”
She takes John’s shirt back, hanging it carefully on the hanger. “Humans have a lot of ceremonies where they all get together. Leonora says it’s because they aren’t truly joined the way we are. Anyway, our rituals are mostly private. Quiet. Like the one when I became Alpha of the Great North Pack. Every Alpha has done it: we go to the safe Offland, where we keep our most precious documents and a few things. Very few. But in this safe, in a drawer, in a ziplock bag is our most precious object. We keep it inside a tightly sealed gold box.” She screws her hands, her muscles working as she remembers some kind of effort. “I really had to work that thing to get it open.”
“So what’s inside? Like a crown or something?”
“What use does a wolf have for a crown?” She fits the waxed bag back into the back of the closet.
“I don’t know. What use does a wolf have for a gold box?”
“Gold doesn’t oxidize. It won’t change the scent of the fabric inside. Of the”—she waves her finger back and forth at her neck—“the neckerchief our first Alpha wore when she put on skin and breeches to negotiate for Homelands. When it was all over, she wiped her fingers on it. You can still see the ink stains.” She puts her hand to her face. “I laid my cheek against it. Taking a little of her and of every other Alpha that has come before me and leaving a little of myself. It’s what we do to substitute for being marked by our predecessor because no Alpha dies of old age.”
She leans her cheek against her hand as though still feeling the frayed piece of stained cloth. “There has never been an Alpha stronger than Ælfrida and she smelled like water. Like you do. A mountain is strong, but water will still turn it to sand.”
I try to say her name, but those steel bands around my chest are so tight that my voice is broken. I don’t care about being stronger than a mountain, I don’t care about Poul or John or any of it. All I can hear are her words pinging around my skull, so matter-of-fact.
Because no Alpha dies of old age.
I want her to live until any chance of me surviving her has long passed. I’ve found a woman who is big enough; now I will move heaven and earth to make sure that the world is big enough for her. I push her against the door, my arms bent on either side of her, the great mass of my shoulders curving to give her protection that she would never admit to needing.
I don’t want to make the world safe for fucking cabbages. I want to make the world safe for her.
Holding her head in my hands, I let my eyes run over her face again and again, indulging