“We are,” they say.
I’d cry if I could, but I can’t. I’d howl if I could, just to say Me too, but I can’t.
All I can do is nudge the huge mound collapsed in a damp hollow of the Clearing. Early fall nights in the Adirondacks are too cold for humans, especially lightly clothed, partially eviscerated ones. It takes a few nips to find a good purchase on his jacket, then I lock it between my jaws. I don’t like the plastic taste, but I pull anyway. In fits and starts, I move his inert bulk to a slight rise where it’s not so damp, but there’s no way that either the jacket or I are going to be able to make it much farther.
After pulling on the jacket to cover as much of his body as possible, I curl around him, giving him the warmth of my body.
The moon shines down on the Clearing. This is a place for a Pack, not for a single wolf on her own, and it feels exposed and huge and empty. Not to mention damp.
A coyote creeps closer, picked out by the moon. I jump up, straddling the body with my shoulders hunched and my fur bristling so I look larger. I growl in the way John would—or Tara or Evie or Solveig or any of dominant wolves would—and hope.
The coyote hesitates and then retreats. I settle back, covering more of this man’s big body with my smaller one. As I drop my head to his broad chest, a warm sigh ripples through my fur.
I wish the loon would shut up.
Chapter 3
The dull, steady pressure against my cheeks wakes me at the same time as the yellowthroat’s high, insistent call. Widdiddy, widdiddy, widdiddy, wid. That pressure is the first sign that the Iron Moon is finished with me. My upper arm stretches and the muscles at my shoulder blades tighten, broadening my chest. As I shake out my hands, the metacarpals shrink and the forearm lengthens and the fur disappears, sucked back in, until nothing is left but a pale, almost-invisible dusting. A few loose silver hairs dance away in the breeze.
The hip with the tendon that is too short pops back into place. It hurts at first, but as I walk the Clearing, the last remnants of pain and numbness subside, and my leg moves freely again.
Despite the pain and the bum leg, no one loves being changed more than I do. I love the freedom and the crush of sounds and smells. I love the close and quiet connection to my Pack. I love the stillness of the cold Adirondack night constrained by nothing but my own fur.
I’d change back to wolf right now, if I wasn’t in such desperate need of fingers and a voice. I feel the heat emanating from the Shifter and poke around the wound. Too much of the gash is clotted by the material of his jacket, and peeling it off will reopen the wound. But still, I can’t feel new bleeding.
I need saline. And bandages and suture and antibiotic. Probably lidocaine, because humans are cowards, and Tristan says the bigger they are, the louder they scream when they see a needle. I need blankets and clothes.
“Hey. You,” I whisper.
A short breath.
“Hey! Wake up.”
One eye opens slightly, then the other.
“Runt?” he croaks and then, “Water.”
Of course he would need water. I pat at my naked hips like I might magically find a pocket with water in it. It’ll take me at least an hour to make the run to Home Pond and back, and that’s too long.
His jacket tasted like plastic and is probably waterproof. I start to pull at a sleeve; since much of the front is shredded, I just need to tear hard at the back. Holding the neck still, I continue the rip along the sleeve.
“Whatyoudoon?” he slurs, trying to move my hand.
“Getting you some water.”
He protests weakly.
“I’ll be back in a second.”
Clear Pond is big and smooth and fed by innumerable springs. Stretching out on the overhanging rock, I fill the sleeve with the clear water away from the weedy edges. It won’t hold much, but it’s the best I can do. As soon as I siphon the few ounces left into the Shifter’s cracked lips, he passes out again.
I know I have to move fast, and moving fast requires reversing the whole process I went through earlier. Taking back the pain that will shoot through my hip and leg, because even a three-legged wolf is faster than a human.
Heading from Clear Pond toward the mountains, away from the low-lying damp, I take the shortcut up through the tangled forests of young spruce and fir and paper birch. The early autumn sun is swept before dark clouds, and one of the frequent short rains starts in with its thick drops that make the bald hardpan slippery. I skitter down until I reach the mix of maple and beech behind Home Pond.
Long time ago, before the Pack was lulled into a false sense of security, an earlier generation dug a long tunnel that led from the basement of the Great Hall into the forest. In case of emergency. Gran Sigeburg told me about it, as she rambled on about a long-ago party thrown by her echelon and how all the juveniles escaped from the Alpha’s fury through the tunnel. I think the moral of her story was supposed to be that you can never escape a furious Alpha, but the tunnel was the part that stuck.
I’d found the end of the tunnel in the root cellar, but the other end was blocked. I scratched through the ferns and duff until I found it and came back with hands and an ax and hacked away the spruce root that had grown over it. Like all children, I liked the idea of sneaking and used the tunnel from time to time to get in and out of the Great Hall. Then I got older and more persnickety about spiders, and since nobody really cared where I was or when, I figured I might as well just use the damn door.
There were two spruces: one big one and a small one. If you crouch down low like I am now, the tip of Whiteface is centered between them. I scratch around in the forest litter until I feel the hollow scrape of wood.
I didn’t remember the space was so narrow, but I was smaller then and perhaps the taproots that broke through the tunnel roof were a little smaller as well. As soon as I get to the cellar, I squeeze through the light trapdoor and lay myself down, rolling my shoulders and letting the change twist through my body once more.
The doors to the storerooms in the basement are close together in the narrow hallway. As soon as I open the broad wooden door of dry storage, I hear the hum of the dehumidifiers. The open metal shelves are filled with carefully marked bins of clothes. Popping open one of the smallest ones, I find a pair of athletic pants, a Henley, and a hoodie for myself. The Shifter is huge, but so are my people. In one of the several boxes marked XXXL (and Tall), I find a pair of sweatpants, a Big & Tall flannel shirt, a bright-red sweatshirt, and a bulky anorak. Not stylish and not much, but it’ll have to do because the clothes already take up more than half of the big backpack.
Dried apples, ground corn, matches, miso, protein bars, lentils, hazelnuts. Then cooking equipment, a collapsible water carrier, a tarp. I also nab the single bedroll, a sleeping bag, and the pop-up tent the pups use when they play Human.