Ekaterina Sedia - Running with the Pack

It came home to me that I was trapped, too, not because I was stupid or ignorant or poor, but because I was an Ap Howell.

I could never leave. I could travel, even go away for school, at least as long as Grandfather was still alive. But my ancestors had blood-oathed our family to this town, to this land. It was, it always would be, the center of the compass of my life. I didn’t blame my many-greats grandparents for what they’d done. I’d read their accounts, knew that most of a Welsh village had followed them here to Virginia. They’d wound up on an uninhabited stretch of the James River, their resources exhausted.

My grandparents went into the forest alone. They begged the spirits to guide them to a place where their folk might take a living from the land. In return, they made an offering of their own blood and the blood of their descendants, pledging that we would watch over the land and the folk they brought to it.

They called it Landfair. It had everything the spirits promised—timber, fertile topsoil, and underground waters that called the dowser’s rods and filled wells with deep, cold water. There were beds of a fine clay for pottery, and, at last, on the piece of ground my grandparents had claimed for themselves, the best slate in the county. It had been nearly two hundred years, and the land still gave a living. And we gave it us.

Me.

It must have seemed well worth it, when the place was new, before inbreeding and the ills of time and place ate away at it. It’s still a pretty place. But it’s become a place where too many people cling to ignorance as though it’s something to be proud of, a place those graced with intelligence and ambition only want to leave —as Athena had, as ’Rion would.

While people like Rob stayed, to poison what was left.

Rage rose in me like a cleansing wind. I lifted my wolf’s head, from the forest floor, my ears flattened to damp the noise of their boasting and laughing. I turned my mind to my purpose.

I wanted to scare them, hurt them, but not at risk to myself. I knew my quarry would not have come to the forest unarmed. There were few local households that did not possess at least one gun. Most boys owned a shotgun or a rifle of their own before they hit puberty, and a gun was a practical precaution against the feral dog packs that roamed the area. Rob was the leader of this pack of thugs. He would have brought a gun as symbol of his status. The other two would have switchblades or hunting knives. I was fast—here, in this forest, supernaturally fast—so the blades did not worry me too much. But the gun had to go. It may be that there are Shifters out there who can only be harmed by silver. I’m not one of them.

I crouched in the shadows and let eyes and nose search, until I was certain there was only one single shotgun, a melange of oil and rust, steel and gunpowder, lying carelessly among the empty beer bottles. It looked old and smelled badly kept, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work.

My mother had never found her wolf, but she had come to us a witch. I had inherited her sensitivities with the stronger gifts of the wolf. The Deadfall whispered to me, heavy with the potential for magic. The ground had been fed with lightning, semen, and blood, and those powers had knotted themselves into the deep, secret history of the ancient roots, the centuries of summer leaves that had fallen and been turned to loam. I called on my blood-bond with the land and took a little of that potency into myself, the raw power stoking the magic that ran ancient and deep in my blood.

I was shadow silent, so swift across the clearing that only Lee startled. Then I was gone, a brindled darkness beneath the heavy branches of a moon-flowered dogwood, the gun in my jaws. I dropped it where the shadows were deepest, buried it with dirt and leaves.

“What was that?” Lee said uneasily. “I saw something.”

“Squirrel, or a rabbit, maybe.” Rob said. “Nothing that matters. Everybody knew we were gonna be here. Nobody’ll mess with us.”

“We will fear no evil, ’cause we are the meanest sons-of-bitches in the valley,” Jeth laughed. Jeth was smart enough, but he was a follower, a perfect mark for Rob’s stronger personality. “Relax, Lee. Have another beer.”

“I saw something, and it wasn’t no damn squirrel,” Lee muttered. He took the beer Jeth tossed him, but his eyes moved uneasily over the shadows. Kinder people in town called Lee “slow.” The more sharp-tongued said his mama had dropped him on his head one too many times. But he wasn’t too stupid to know when he was the brunt of a joke, and he was big enough and strong enough to ensure that people didn’t make fun of him more than once. I thought there was more to him than people gave him credit for. Maybe school gave him trouble, but he trusted his own eyes.

I ghosted around behind them, considering. Maybe I couldn’t make them feel the humiliation ’Rion and I had suffered, but I could give them a taste of the terror we had felt, and the pain. My gift did not carry in my bite. Let them feel my teeth.

I lifted my muzzle and howled, putting into the sound all my rage and all my loss.

The night answered.

One of the wild dog packs, I thought—one of the reasons I was forbidden the forest beyond my Family’s protection. But my throat was full again even as I thought it, vibrating with the strange double harmony of the wolf, that quality that makes a pack of six sound like a score, and a score like a hundred. And again, I was answered.

The boys were cursing steadily now. Rob was scrambling on hands and knees, searching for the gun among the empties and not finding it. Lee had pulled a branch from their small campfire and was thrusting at the shadows shaped by the jumping flame. Jeth gripped a six-inch hunting knife, trying to look everywhere at once. “Dammit, Rob, get the fucking gun!”

“I can’t find it!”

“Rob,” Lee hissed, “we got company.”

Eyes began to shine in the darkness between the trees.

Instinct carried me, a long leap up onto the highest point of the fallen giant oak. My fur bristled to make me look larger, my tail high and bushed as I growled. My place. My prey. Growls answered me, and the pack leaders slipped into the ring of firelight.

There were two of them, Dobermans, tails and ears chopped to stubs. I knew them for dangerous animals. They’d killed pets and food animals, even attacked people, and had evaded several attempts to hunt them down. Once they’d guarded a junkyard. One day the owner had locked the gate and walked away, leaving the two dogs to starve or survive on rats and rainwater. They’d escaped. Half-feral already, before long they led a pack of desperate, discarded hounds and mongrels, turning them as vicious as they were.

The three boys had frozen; if they had run, the feral pack would have given chase. Dogs gone feral are far more dangerous than wild wolves—they’ve learned that without their weapons, men are easy prey. Rob was crouched in the dirt, his right hand clenched on a beer bottle, his face pale and sweating in the wan light. Lee was crouched so close to the fire he was almost in it, and Jeth and his knife were trying to become one with the tree trunk. They weren’t going anywhere.

I jumped down, landing lightly, answering the challenge presented by the Dobermans with a display of size and dominance. They were litter mates who worked as a team, but I was a big wolf, 110 pounds, in good condition and perfect health. They were thin, ridden with parasites and poorly healed wounds.

They were also experienced fighters. They could have torn me to shreds, but they didn’t know that.

I was a born Alpha. I had come into my wolf when I was eleven, at the first breath of puberty, without rite or ritual. Maybe I had never fought in earnest, but my father and grandfather had run with wild wolves, and they had taught me how to bluff.