Running with the Pack

DEADFALL KAREN EVERSON

My name is Olwen Ap Howell, and I am the last of a very old family.

That in itself is nothing special, I know. The American South is full of Old Families. People boast ancestors antebellum, revolutionary, colonial, lineage that traces back to English or European nobility. My family has its roots in legend, but I learned pretty quickly I had to keep quiet about it. Old families have their particular rules and expectations, here where tradition still casts long shadows. My family’s traditions are cloaked in secrets, and they throw shadows longer and stranger than most.

Secrets are tough for young kids. Mom drinks, or Dad lost his job. . . . Try “My Dad can turn into a wolf.” It gets more entertaining when you can turn into a wolf. You can’t share that, not even with your Best Friend in the Whole Wide World.

There are variations on the theme. Do not let anyone outside the Family see you Change into a wolf. Before you Change, hide your clothes, so they will still be there when you Change back.

Always remember where you hid your clothes.

Never, ever Run on an empty stomach. You may eat something you’ll regret later.

The rule I was thinking of breaking was another important one: The family does not deal with its enemies by trying to eat them.

Okay, I wasn’t really planning to eat anybody, but I knew that what I did want to do was a Bad Idea. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I didn’t see any way I could endanger my grandfather with what I was planning, and he was all the Family I had left. There was a limit to how severely I could be disciplined for my actions—after all, I was the Last Ap Howell. I belonged to the land, Blood-Oathed by my ancestors who had founded this town. I was necessary.

So was action on my part. Rob Merrow and his two friends had badly hurt someone I cared about, and they had gotten away with it. What went deeper than my sense of outraged justice, and what I would never have admitted to anyone, was that Rob had given me my first taste of true physical fear, and a vision of my future that had left me shaken and sick. I wanted to return the favor.

That night was my chance. Word had come through the high school grapevine that Rob and his crew were laying claim to the Deadfall. With the reputation they had, no one else would venture anywhere near the place. I would have them to myself, in the night and the forest. I would not be a prisoner inside my human skin, the way I had been when Rob and his crew jumped ’Rion and me.

The sun was well down when I crossed my private Rubicon, the dirt lane that separated my Family’s safely fenced private acres from the wild forest that still covered so much of our small town’s land. I hurried into the protecting shadows, heart thumping. I could already feel the wolf-fire turning my eyes to hot gold, the prick of canines growing longer and sharper in my soft human mouth. I could have held the Change back, but I was eager for my other self, my swift silence and sharp teeth. Sheltered by trees and a dense clump of dogwood I began shedding clothes, stuffing them into the pack I carried. My shoes went in on top and I just had time to hide the pack before the wolf rolled me under.

The world, all sense of time and place, was lost in the roil of the Change. There’s no real pain, but there is a moment that feels like drowning, of being lost in an element so foreign that survival seems impossible. From that chaos the Self bursts out like birth, flesh or fur, into a world rendered new. Touch told me less of fine texture, more of substructure that meant silence or sound beneath my paws. Sight told less of color and detail and more of mass and movement. Scent was multiplied and magnified into a revealed language of enormous complexity.

I lifted my nose. The spring breeze brought me the scent of the James River, even though it was ten miles distant. The Deadfall was near the river. A few miles was no matter. I set out in the wolf’s easy hunter’s lope, the night and vengeance stretched out before me.

The Deadfall was the name given to a forest clearing, older than I was, made when an enormous, ancient oak had been felled by lightning. The clearing had quickly become a beacon for the young. It was an easy hike from the road, but deep enough into the forest that even campfires were not readily visible. Lightning had struck the trunk seven feet from the ground, and the massive, ragged stump formed a kind of shelter, the humped roots a natural cluster of seats and tables, some of which had been whittled and carved to better serve those purposes. The enormous trunk sloped from the top of the stump for yards before coming to rest on the forest floor. A tarp tossed over the trunk and staked on either side made a satisfactory tent. Dogwood, wild rose, and redbud bordered the clearing, beautiful in the spring, but human use had kept the center clear of brush and saplings.

Rumor had it that the Deadfall had been a lovers’ trysting place at first, then a camping spot. For my own generation it had a more sinister reputation. Gangs like Rob and his crew gathered there to drink or do drugs or settle disputes with fists or knives. Other people stayed away then, unless they were looking for trouble.

I was looking to make trouble, so that was fine.

Rob and his friends were already drunk and noisy. I was careful anyway, but sneaking up on them was easy. I could have done it even in human shape. All three had their backs against the huge stump of the Deadfall, a good six-to-seven feet tall and at least that wide. The fallen trunk, still hanging from the top of the stump, stretched away like a broken gate to their right. It was easy to angle myself so that I could track them through the gap between the trunk and the ground. Their small fire deepened the shadows for me to hide in while it spoiled their night vision. Their firewood was too green to burn cleanly, putting up thick coils of smoke. My nose sorted the thick, layered scents of their camp: several kinds of burning wood, sharp sap and sharper lighter fluid, Wild Turkey and Budweiser, and the funk of sweat and piss.

The stink of their flesh and the sudden blare of their laughter nearly undid me, flooding me with memories so visceral that I shrank down onto the forest floor, nearly shocked backed into a girl. I bellied into the punk beneath the trunk of the Deadfall, shivering, holding tight to my wolf-shape while human memories rocked me, breathing deep the smell of ancient wood and damp humus while I remembered the stink of blood and violence.

They’d been waiting for us, Rob and his followers Lee and Jeth, hiding in the woods along a lonely stretch of Old Route 15. It was a road we’d walked together since grade school, me and Orion and his older sister Athena. But Athena had graduated and gone north to college to study pre-med. That left just ’Rion and me, a black boy with a white girl, walking and talking alone together.

I didn’t see much. There was a rush of motion when they jumped us, a rustle of grass and weeds against jean-clad legs, a muffled pounding of feet against the green verge. I had a glimpse of Rob’s face, grotesque with excitement, the bigger forms of Lee and Jeth flashing past, going for ’Rion. Then I was down, my face forced into the dirt and gravel of the road’s shoulder. My nose crushed sideways and soaked the dirt with blood. I could barely turn my head enough to get a breath. My right arm was pinned under my ribs, and Rob was gripping my left arm in both fists, using my own arm to hold my face in the dirt. Pain warred with outrage and disbelief. I was Olwen Ap Howell! My grandfather employed half the town. Bullying trash-talk was one thing—that was just high school. But I had never thought anyone would dare touch me, hurt me.

Rob had his full weight on me, and I couldn’t move. Even through my slacks and his tatty jeans I could feel his erection as he ground his hips against my buttocks. “Did I break your nose, bitch?” he growled in my ear. “Let’s see you look down your nose at a real white man with your pretty face all messed up. You Ap Howells, sitting on your pile of money, thinking you’re so much better than everybody else. Does the old man know you’re screwin’ the nigger help?” He pulled back on my arm and smashed it as hard as he could into the back of my head. I screamed and choked against the dirt.

He kept talking, all the things that Rob thought a “man” like him should be teaching me, but what was worse than the filth and pain and the struggle for breath were the sounds and the stink of what Jess and Lee were doing to ’Rion. He’d fought them, probably hurt them some, but they’d taken him down, and I could hear the thud of fists and feet hitting flesh and bone. Even with my own blood filling my nose and mouth with coppery fire, I could still smell my friend’s blood. Even with Rob panting in my ear I could hear the grunts and gasps of pain ’Rion tried to hold in. Then there was the crack of bone breaking, and finally, ’Rion screamed. Rob and his friends hooted with laughter, as if that high, helpless noise was the best joke they’d ever heard.

Then I was fighting myself, fighting my wolf, all my training telling me to keep my Family’s secret instead of defending myself and ’Rion. I fought, too, because part of me knew, if I loosed my wolf in the midst of all that pain and blood, I would kill all three of them.

A car saved all of us. Rob and the others ran. The driver—a black woman—stopped for ’Rion and me, took us home, where I lived and ’Rion’s mother, Iris, worked.

Grandfather took one look at my face, grabbed my nose and pulled it out straight. He didn’t say a word, and I bit off my shriek. We heal fast—but that doesn’t mean broken bones won’t knit crooked if they aren’t set straight in time. I had cuts and bruises all over my face and body, but I was what I was, and I as I washed blood and grit from my wounds they were already beginning to heal.

’Rion was the one who had suffered. He was cut and bruised all over, with two black eyes and a split and swollen lip. They’d broken his left arm and cracked some ribs. He gave me one look that told me to keep silent, and refused to say a word about who had hurt him until the doctors at the clinic were done with him and we were all home again.

“We’re not pressing charges,” he told his mother and my grandfather calmly. They argued, but he held firm. “If we take this to court it will only make things worse. The parents won’t think their kids did anything wrong. It’ll be like when you promoted Dad.” That shut even Grandfather up. Grandfather had promoted ’Rion’s dad over several white workers who thought one of them should have had the job. There were mutters of favoritism, among other things, and both our houses had been vandalized. A few months later, at the start of deer hunting season, ’Rion’s dad had been found dead in the woods, an “apparent hunting accident.”

“It’s only a few months until I graduate,” ’Rion said. “I’ll hang back when we’re walking home, so it won’t look like Olwen and I are together. I already talked to ’Thena and she says I can move in with her as soon as I’m done with school.” He looked down, unable to meet his mother’s eyes, or mine. But his voice was hard and bitter, and left no doubt of his intent. “Let the bastards think they’ve won. Who cares? I’ll be out of here, out of this God-forgotten town for good. Them? They’re too stupid and too ignorant to even know they’re trapped.”

His words hit like a blow to the stomach. I wrapped my arms around myself turned away, trying to hide my shaking and the tears that started in my eyes. I don’t know why, but I had always though ’Rion would stay, even after ’Thena left. Or maybe he—maybe we—would go away to school, but we’d come back. We’d grown up like brother and sister, but we weren’t brother and sister. I’d thought maybe our friendship might grow into something more when we got older. I thought that, no matter what, ’Rion would be one person who would stay here and help me make this town better.

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.

I skinned my lips back from my teeth, subtly longer and sharper than a natural wolf’s, stretched toes set with claws more like those of a bear than a wolf. Magic sang in my blood. See me! I am terrible and beautiful and wise. Accept me, and my power will be added to yours, and all that runs will fall before us.

The thinner of the Dobermans whined and dropped his head and tail, and then the other. One by one the pack stepped out—bluetick and coonhounds, a shepherd mix, and four of the dingo-like mixes that wild dogs seemed to breed back to—with heads and eyes dropped in submission. A good-sized pack, hunters all—and mine.

I swelled with the knowledge. For tonight, at least, I did have a pack, a pack who knew what it was to hunt and to kill. The Dobermans, I knew, would not hesitate at human prey. They had been headed that way on their own.

One of the Dobermans shifted his eyes behind me, and snarled.

I turned faster than the eye could see. I felt, I knew, that I was all that I had promised the pack. I was beautiful and terrible, my mane a nimbus, my eyes molten, my white teeth gleaming in that wet snarl that promises mayhem. The sight of me fixed Rob to the earth like a beetle pinned to a board, his eyes wide with terror.

The pack began to move, shadows with firelight gleaming in their eyes, closing ranks around me, asking with each movement, with the lips skinned back from yellow teeth, Is this the hunt? Is this the kill?

I stared at Rob, clutching his stupid bottle, and knew he was mine to take.

This is my place! I thought at him. This is my forest. This is my town! You hurt somebody under my protection, somebody good and kind and intelligent. I think you’ll go on hurting people until somebody stops you.

I can stop you. Here. Tonight.

I think I will.

I took a step, one step, and felt the pack tense around me, as if each hunter was an extension of my will. Was this what it was like, to run with the wild ones, to lead the hunt that was life and death? The three who had hurt Orion, who had driven him away, could die, right here, tonight. My tracks would be lost in the tracks of the pack, the tearing of my teeth and claws lost in so many wounds. Even my grandfather would not know, not for sure.

Rob Merrow looked into my eyes, and pissed himself.

“Oh, God,” he moaned. He’d dropped the bottle. His hands were raised in supplication. “Not me. Please. Take them, not me.”

He stank of fear. ’Rion had been afraid, too, had screamed when his arm snapped. But he hadn’t been afraid like this. Not like this.

Was this the bully on whom I had wasted so much hate? He was not worth hunting. Not worth the kill.

The thought shocked me. I hadn’t come here to kill. Had I?

A world without Rob could only be a better place. But Rob and Lee and Jeth were no threat to me, not here and now. It was one thing to kill in immediate defense of myself or of another. But murder was murder, even on four feet.

I couldn’t use this pack, my pack, to work a vengeance that was entirely my own. Maybe it was only a matter of time before the Dobermans, at least, went after a human being. But if I made them kill for me tonight, every person who could carry a gun would be out here, shooting anything on four legs. The wild dogs, too, were mine, like the forest, like the town, and tonight they had come to me of their own will. I owed them better.

And Rob and Lee and Jeth would become martyrs of a sort, their cruelty and their bigotry whitewashed, buried under flowers and candle wax. I owed Orion better than that. I owed myself better.

Stories and movies about werewolves always make the beast the killer. It kills without reason, without remorse, driven by blood lust.

It’s so easy to blame the wolf. But I understood then what the Family chronicles had been trying to teach me. The werewolf is dangerous because the wolf is a weapon—murder without apparent motive, the ultimate misdirection.

Bloodlust is human, not lupine. A wolf kills for food, for territory, or to protect the pack. I wasn’t hungry. The land spoke to me through my flesh and blood, indisputably, forever mine, whether I liked it or not. And murder here would destroy the dog pack, and destroy my grandfather.

The meanest son-of-a-bitch in the school had just wet his pants at the sight of me. It would have to do.

I took a step back and howled. For a moment I felt the pack trembling around me, surprised, perhaps relieved. After a moment I felt them relax. Muzzles lifted, and we sang, voices tumbling over and over the boys who crouched frozen and ignored in the dirt.

Then I turned and lead the pack into the forest, where we ran and hunted the plentiful deer beneath the gibbous moon.

On Monday it seemed at first that the night at the Deadfall had never happened. Rob, Jeth, and Lee were hanging out in the hall as usual, where I’d have to pass them to get to my locker. There was an added opportunity for humiliation because Thomas, a boy I actually liked, was just a little down and across the hallway, stacking books for his morning classes.

On the other hand, I’d seen Rob cowering and terrified. I snugged that image up against me like a shield and continued down the hall.

“Who let the dog out,” Rob sang, sniggering. He made woofing noises, then gave a poor imitation of a coyote howl.

Normally, I’d have hunched in on myself and scuttled down the hall to my locker. This time I just turned around and stared. I saw that neither Lee nor Jeth were wearing the sly, malicious grin that usually accompanied these little dominance displays. Jeth was looking at the floor. Lee’s lip curled in disgust, but he was looking at Rob, not me. And I understood I’d gotten my revenge.

I’d exposed their leader as a coward. And if he was a coward, what were they, who had followed him? I’d broken Rob’s hold. He wasn’t harmless—no one who will use violence and stealth to make his point is ever harmless. But, here and now, I’d stolen much of his power.

He had been raised to think that being white and male made him better than anyone who wasn’t. But even here, in this backwards Southern town, no black folks were going to step out of his path, and no girls of either color were going to want him just because their other options seemed worse.

Hell, he and his little crew had run from the young black woman who had stopped to help ’Rion and me. The thought made me grin.

Rob had noticed Lee and Jeth weren’t backing him. His grin went sickly, then turned thin and hard. He glared at me, but his posture was hunched, defensive. “Bitch,” he snarled at me, “what are you smiling at?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thomas scowling, pushing his books back onto the shelf while his long hands curled into fists. Part of me really wanted to let him come to my rescue, just so I could smile gratefully up into his beautiful brown eyes. And it would be satisfying to see sweet, bookish Thomas, who was also six-four and ran track, mop the floor with Rob.

But that way lay heartbreak, I reminded myself. Thomas was smart and sweet, which meant in a year he’d be gone, just like ’Rion. So I handled it myself.

I walked up to Rob, still grinning. I pushed into his space, the way an alpha wolf can crowd a subordinate, dominating by the simple act of not being afraid. And even though he was six inches taller than me, he cowered. “I was just thinking,” I said. “That if you are going to howl like that, you should at least do it right.” And I tilted back my head, and howled.

It wasn’t a proper wolf-howl, of course, but it was as close as a human throat can come.

And that whole noisy corridor went completely silent, as that sound rose up from me. Lee and Jeth went dead white, and for a moment I thought Rob was going to wet himself again. When I finished, I gave him a slow, satisfied smile. Then I walked away, feeling his eyes on me.

Just for a moment, I looked back, and let my eyes flash gold.