Wilder

We didn’t have an alpha. Never had. Free wolves didn’t mean wild wolves, whatever the packs to the south liked to believe about us — it meant no single voice decided things for the rest. Every choice that mattered got made at the fire, together, and it didn’t matter if you were gray with age or barely past your first shift. A pup’s word carried the same weight as an elder’s, if the argument was good enough.

That night, the argument was Yunga’s.

“I went to trade with Marek’s group. Furs for salt.” He turned a piece of wood in the flames, not looking at anyone. “One of theirs went mad. Attacked without warning. They killed him before he could do worse.”

Nobody interrupted. I’d known Yunga for years — a trader, not one of ours by birth, old enough that nobody could say which free pack had raised him, or where he’d come from before he simply appeared one winter and stayed. He wasn’t the type to exaggerate, and that alone made the fire go quiet.

“Then another turned. Bitten by the first, earlier that day. They called him infected.” He looked up. Something in his face made my stomach tighten before he finished. “They killed him too. Same way.”

“Infected with what?” someone asked.

“A sickness. That’s all they knew. Makes a wolf go wild. No fear, no limits. Doesn’t recognize its own pack.”

I leaned forward. “Did they say if it can be treated? Any sign before it turns, anything that works against it?”

Yunga shook his head. “They didn’t know. Once it starts, there’s no pulling them back. You kill them, or they kill you.”

The fire dissolved into argument — move camp, stay, put distance between us and Marek’s territory. Doran argued hardest to stay. He’d raised me since I was six, since the day his hunting party found me sitting in the ash of another camp, the only one left breathing. Fear had never sat easily on him, and that night was no exception.

“We’ve stayed through worse,” he said. “We’re not Marek’s group. Whatever found them doesn’t know we exist.”

We stayed. Nobody wanted to give up the ravine, the ironwort, the winter stores we’d already half-built.

Yunga caught me before I turned in.

“I heard you’re going for ironwort tomorrow.”

“I am.”

“I could come. Two sets of eyes are better than one, especially now.” He said it easily, but he held my gaze a beat too long. I’d lost count of how many times he’d found some reason to appear wherever I happened to be going — the stream, the eastern ridge, now the ravine.

The last time he’d come with me, he’d pinned me against a tree and tried to kiss me. I’d seen enough in the pack to know exactly what he wanted the moment his mouth pursed like that. I’d shoved him hard enough that he’d gone down onto the leaves, and I’d run the rest of the way back to camp without looking behind me.

I’d gone to Doran afterward, not entirely sure what I was asking him to solve.

He’d laughed, not unkindly. “The old wolf,” he said, shaking his head, as if that explained everything. Then, gentler: “You don’t owe him your company just because he keeps offering for it.”

I’d asked, half joking, whether it was my fault somehow — whether I gave off some invitation I didn’t know about. Doran looked at me for a long moment before he answered.

“Wilder, you’re still young, but you need to realize by now that the way you look matters,” he said. “Hair pale enough to pass for white in low light. Eyes the color of a clear sky in winter. I know a white coat is worth nothing on a hunt — it gives you away before the prey ever catches your scent. But that’s not the same thing as saying the rest of you isn’t worth looking at. Some males will always want exactly what makes you useless to the rest of us. Yunga’s one of them. It isn’t only the color that draws him. It’s how young you are.” He paused. “And how little you’ve seen. You’ve got nothing to measure him against. No one to compare him to. That works in his favor more than any of the rest of it does.”

“But Doran,” I said, “what am I supposed to do about that?”

“Whatever you want,” he said. “Push him into the dirt if that’s what it takes. Just don’t let him convince you it’s a fair trade because you don’t know any better yet.”

I never liked what he’d told me, and I liked it even less for how plainly he’d said it. Most of Doran’s hunters hadn’t wanted to take me out with them, and I’d told myself for years it was only the fur. It was easier to believe that than to sit with the rest of what he’d just told me.

So I became a healer instead. Herbs didn’t care what color you were, or how old.

“No need,” I said to Yunga. “I’m going with Doran.”

It wasn’t true. Doran had told me long ago I could do as I pleased, and I used that freedom now as a shield against Yunga’s company rather than a reason to seek Doran’s. It would be morning before Yunga had any chance to check, and by then the lie would have already done its work.

He let it go, as easily as he’d offered.

I left at first light. The ironwort grew best in the rock shade, where the ground stayed damp through summer. In my other skin I was white from nose to tail, except for the black mark on my forehead, close enough to a star that it had given me my name before I had any say in it.

I filled both satchels. Lost time over a patch of valerian I hadn’t seen wild in two years.

By the time I started back, the sun was low. I heard the howling before I saw the smoke.

Not hunting calls. These were sharp, cut off mid-sound, over and over.

I ran.

I reached the edge of camp and stopped.

Yunga stood in the middle of the dead fire. His coat had never been gray, never brown — pale, near-colorless, the thinness of fur that comes with age past anything any of us could measure. Now it was black as pitch, all of it, and his eyes burned orange, like coals.

I watched him bite Senna. She went down, thrashed, got back up with the same eyes.

It wasn’t one sick wolf anymore. Six, seven, moving through camp like a single starving animal, and every bite made another one just like it.

Someone shouted my name.

Doran was already coming toward me. Or the shape of him — the same build, the same way of carrying his shoulders low before a charge. But his coat had gone black as the others’, and his eyes burned that same wrong orange, and there was nothing in the way he moved that still belonged to the wolf who’d raised me.

The satchels slid off my shoulder. I didn’t feel them go. I shifted where I stood, bone snapping into place fast and wrong, and I was running before the pain had even finished registering.

I ran until my lungs felt like they’d torn. Ran until the trees became a blur I wasn’t seeing so much as feeling my way through, branch by branch, root by root. Somewhere behind me I heard more of them — two sets of paws now, maybe three, closing the gap I no longer had the strength to hold.

My legs gave out on the incline before I understood I’d stopped choosing to run.

I found rock at my back — a low wall of it, too high to clear in the state I was in, my chest heaving, my legs shaking under me. There was no jumping it. There was no more distance to buy.

I turned to face what was coming, and I understood, in that last clear moment before they reached me, that I was about to fight for my life against everyone I’d ever called family.