Wolf in the Shadows, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2022 by Maria Vale
Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Craig White/Lott Reps
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
Excerpt from “The Fallen” by Linda Hogan used by permission of Coffee House Press, © 1993 in The Book of Medicines. All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To my mom, who walked her own path right to the end.
In our astronomy
the Great Wolf
lived in the sky.
It was the mother of all women
and howled her daughter’s names
into the winds of night.
—“The Fallen” by Linda Hogan
Prologue
Two days ago, I ate my fiancé.
I let that rumble around in my head to see if it stirs anything up. Guilt or heartbreak or regret, or anything, really, aside from the nausea that is only now subsiding.
There is nothing. Well, not nothing. I do have one regret.
I would have liked to go back to Monsieur Trenet, the terribly posh and oily on-site event coordinator at the Windsor Grand Montreal who had helped me spend ever greater amounts of my uncle’s money on personalized damascene linens with interlinked initials; on stippled mirrors cut to reflect the twinkling of hundreds of candles; on rows of ivy-encrusted chandeliers dripping with hothouse lilacs.
I would have liked to have seen his expression when I asked for my money back.
“Malheureusement, j’ai mangé mon fiancé, alors… Puis-je récupérer mon acompte?”
Unfortunately, I’ve eaten my fiancé, so…
Can I get my deposit back?
Chapter 1
Julia
This is not my native range.
I hug the dyed mink-fur bucket bag that normally comes in indigo but because they know me at the little shop in Montreal’s Mille carré doré, they put in a special order. Bright red, the color of sour cherries.
It was the color of Cass’s favorite shoes, the bright-red rhinestone-studded, knock-me-down-and-fuck-me sandals I bought at the D&G also at the Mille Carré.
For the final touch, I’d taken the spool of thread that I’d used to help match the dye on my bag to the girl at La Belle Dame sans Merci, and we spent a good part of the morning picking over colors until we settled on a glossy sour-cherry red.
“It’s called Irresistible,” the girl said, shaking the bottle as she knelt before my freshly scrubbed feet.
La Belle Dame is just off the Boulevard de Maisonneuve.
In the Mille carré doré, the Golden Square Mile, because that is my native range.
Not this. Not sitting on a thin mattress barely supported by the sagging springs of a bunk bed deaccessioned from some military training camp and now jammed against the wall in a damp cabin in the middle of a mud-and-bug-and-blood-and-wolf-infested hellhole.
I would scream but I’ve done it already and no one heard me or no one cared.
When Cassius told me we were going to New York for the weekend, I went ahead and got tickets for Hamilton. I made reservations at Masa. I’d already picked out a black shantung suit—high-buttoned, fitted jacket, bracelet sleeves—because New York theaters can be so cold, but Cassius poked around my closet looking for “something…sexier.” Eventually he pulled out this: a one-piece pantsuit with palazzo pants below, low-cut halter above. It is—was—beautiful. Made of a white silk that’s heavy as chain mail, it flowed like water around my curves.
It did leave my back bare, but when the theater AC became too much for me, I would be able to shiver and rub my arms, and Cassius would roll his eyes and give me his jacket, the satin lining still warm from his body, to protect my nakedness, and I would feel cosseted.
Last minute, I took off the earrings and put on the four-strand collar of the palest blue pearls. It is my favorite. I like the way it sets off my throat.
Except the next day when Cassius met me at Saint-Hubert Airport, he came not with tickets but with a half-dozen rich old farts and a pimped-out van.
It turned out I’d been misled. Instead of flying with him to New York City, we were taking the pimped-out van and the half-dozen rich old men to some hunting retreat.
“You promised me, Cass.”
“What I promised you,” he said through clenched teeth so we wouldn’t be overheard, “was a long weekend in New York. And we will be in New York.”
“You know I thought you meant the City. And why do I have to sit in the back with the old farts?”
“Because I’m the only one who knows where we’re going. And they’re not old farts, Julia, they’re contacts. Very useful contacts. This is a chance for me to get to know them, to prove myself so when August finally realizes that he won’t live forever and needs to groom someone to take over, I—we—are in a position to inherit.”
I felt used like I always do whenever Cassius talks about my uncle August. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t blame him: there are only so many jobs for werewolves in Canada, and my uncle controls most of them. I just wish Cass would leave me out of it.
“Be charming. I know you know how to do that. Then when we’re all done, I will take you to New York.”
“City.”
“Yes,” he said. “New York City.”
“I need to cancel my reservations. You know how hard they are to get, and I don’t want to be put on a list of no-shows.”
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t happy; I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to look like I am. I sat in the back and cooed and laughed and offered drinks while the old farts told me about the hunt my uncle had arranged for them. About how he’d stocked some ancient forest with game.
“Not game, Alfred. Predators are not game,” interrupted Clement, a septuagenarian I knew through my mother and whose cock got hard when I was fifteen but now that I was thirty-two was energetically flaccid.
“Of course they are, Clement. Anything I can shoot is game. You could be.”
I didn’t know what the feud between these men was about but I knew it was my job to distract them.
I told them how I’d never killed anything and couldn’t stand the sight of blood, then I lowered my head, bit my lip, and looked up at them through my lashes.
Every one of them—all but Clement—hurried to assure me that they would protect me from wolves. I smiled gratefully and shrugged diffidently and squashed any questions about what my uncle was up to.
Like I always had.
I was Irresistible all the way to a tent in the middle of mudville decked out like some vaguely rusticated wedding party with crystal that shone like Baccarat and
There was a lovely rich and meaty Bandol, though, and just as I was pouring another glass, the world turned upside down.
Two enormous wolves—one dark gray and one white—leapt on the tables and crunched on the hands of the old farts, the little bones making a snick! like celery sticks. These wolves stained the white damask tablecloths with blood, which I didn’t care about, and with that lovely rich and meaty Bandol, which I did.
There were gunshots and a man I didn’t know died, shot straight through the middle of his forehead. A puddled mess came out the back, staining the hem of my pants.
It matched my nail polish.
It was, I thought numbly, Irresistible.
It was the first death I’ve ever seen and I, of course, screamed. After that, I lost track of what happened. The old farts who hadn’t even been able to protect themselves from wolves disappeared back into the van, and it was silent except for the humming of the generators.
Then a man loomed in front of us, cold as night, holding a gun.
I knew nothing about Tiberius, except that he was supposed to be dead and that while my uncle August was his father, his mother was not August’s wife.
His mother was “a bitch.” That’s what my mother called her. I didn’t think anything of it, figuring it was just my mother’s general disdain for the hoi polloi until later I discovered that despite dressing like humans and talking like humans and going to school and work with humans, we were not, in fact, human.
The difference is that we Lukani don’t give in to our bestial natures. The werewolves do. During the full moon, they are forced to trot around on all fours and bark and sniff and eat raw meats. Sometimes, I hear, they do it even when they’re not forced to.
Tiberius, being Lukani like us, didn’t have to but was incomprehensibly angry about it. Shoving his gun into Cassius’s face and yelling about the “Iron Moon, the three days out of thirty when the Pack must be wild. When I should be wild but no, because I have to fucking babysit you.”
At first, I clung to the certainty that my uncle August would get us out of this mess, like he always did for every mess big or small, but then Constantine, his second-in-command, said that August is dead, which I can’t believe because August is too powerful to just die. Even when Tiberius shot him through the neck, he didn’t just die. Except Constantine insisted that he’d watched a werewolf kill him. No, that’s not what he said. What he said was he watched while “she shoved a metal bar through his throat,” as though a girl could kill August Leveraux.
Now, after three days, August still hasn’t come, and all that’s happened is I’ve gotten damper and colder and my feet hurt more and things—little birds and little animals—keep moving around and it reminds me of a horror movie about a cabin in the wood—in fact, I think that was the name?—that Cassius made me watch. He knew I hated horror movies, but he made me watch because one of the characters was named after me. Not Julia, which is my name, but Jules, which is what he calls me. That or “Baby.”
They made us walk through the woods. My D&Gs slowly turning my feet from Irresistible to Irredeemable.As I sat staring at the mess of broken blisters plastered with drying mud, the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen knelt in front of me like in some perverted retelling of Cinderella.
Slim, graceful, eyes the bright silver of summer water above high cheekbones, long sculpted nose. His upper lip is a little short above a full lower lip. The long stubble would look messy on anyone else, but on him, it was shadowing on carved elegance.
“I forget how humans feel about socks,” he said, looking up under long, dark lashes. “Is it like sharing underwear?”
I don’t know if I answered, but somehow, I ended up wearing socks still warm from his skin and comfortable, overlarge boots that are spotted and stained across the saddle with toes worn to a shine.
Then he stood, tucking his hair behind his ear. I stared at his long, pale, high-arched feet and Tiberius called him Arthur like the king and I tried to think of something to say to him that would show I was grateful but wouldn’t piss off Cassius.
I couldn’t.
The next time I saw him, he was splayed out on damp grass surrounded by hundreds of men and wolves. This time, his entire body was bare. He was slim and perfectly proportioned like a god, not one of the burly, chest-thumping, thundering gods. More like Dionysus, though he had a cock that was nothing like the discreet penises of classical statuary, and when someone whispered to him, he tucked it between his legs.
The bad feeling I had about whatever was about to happened got worse when a pale-gray wolf curled up next to him, its head under his chin, its paw on his shoulder.
And ripped him open.
From shoulder to hip, it ripped him open.
Then they all just turned their backs and walked away, while gore bubbled up across the beautiful man’s pale skin and watered the high grass. It was bright, I noticed, and sour-cherry red.
It was Irresistible.
At least there was someone screaming at the horror of it. It took me a minute to realize that the screams rattling around in my head were my own.
After that, it was all bad and blurred together until I ended up alone in this damp cabin on this thin mattress.
In the bathroom, on the wall above the enameled sink, was a tiny hand mirror hanging from a nail. Reflected in it is a woman I barely recognize.
With the damp corner of a towel, I dab away the taupe shadow that’s run into dark puddles under my eyes and into tiny lines at the corners.
My pantsuit—the one that was once a beautiful white silk, heavy as chain mail that flowed like water around my curves—is now stiff and stained with mud and that delicious meaty Bandol and the blood of the man who died and the blood of the man who dared to help me.
Plugging up the sink, I run cold water. There is shampoo in the shower that has a picture of a dog. I try not to think about it as I pour long streams of it into the slowly collecting water.
Tears pour in long streams to join it.
***
When I was little, my father took me to the Botanical Garden in Montreal. I had seen a slug there, and being too young to know better, I’d thought someone had torn a snail out of its shell and left it naked and dying.
My father didn’t know what I was crying about. He didn’t try to find out. He just gathered me into his strong arms and held me tight and called me Princess and told me that I would never have to worry while he was there.
Then when my father died, August came. He didn’t hug me, but when he saw how upset I was about the lobster tank, he raised two fingers in the air, and the entire restaurant was rearranged so I wouldn’t have to see my dinner flailing as it was fished out of the water.
“You have nothing to worry about, Julia,” he’d said. “I will take care of everything.”
Now August is gone too.
I turn off the faucet and swish my pantsuit around, feeling just like I had imagined that slug had felt, naked and vulnerable.
Opening my mink bag, I pull out my lipstick and with a shaking hand trace the familiar bow and curve of my mouth.
I suck my lips in and let them go with a pop.
Once again, they are sour-cherry red.
Irresistible.
Chapter 2
Arthur
I can almost hear her again. The urgency in Gran Sigeburg’s voice.
“If you are slighted?”
The fire will not burn.
“If you are angry?”
The fire will not burn.
“If you are in pain?”
The fire will not burn.
I was very little when I made that promise to her and to the whole of the Great North in return for my life.
Would you be proud of me, Gran Sigeburg?
Would you be proud?
***
A wolf’s claws are not retractable. We are not like cats padding around with little switchblades tucked up inside. Our claws scrape across rocks and dirt and wood so that when Silver clawed me, it wasn’t a clean razor slice. It was a ragged tear made with four dull screwdrivers.
