Wilder

Wilder 

We did not have an alpha. Never had.

That was the whole rule, really. No single voice deciding for the rest of us. Whatever the choice, it got made at the fire, together, and it did not 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. He wasn’t the type to exaggerate, and that alone made the fire go quiet.

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

“Infected with what?” someone asked. Mera, I thought, though it was hard to tell voices apart with the wind pulling smoke sideways across the circle.

“A sickness. 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?”

Yunga shook his head. “Once it starts, there’s no pulling them back. You kill them, or they kill you.”

That set the whole fire moving. Voices climbed over each other: “We should move camp.” “Stay and wait it out.” “Put three valleys of distance between us and Marek’s territory before whatever this was learned our scent.”

Doran let it run a while before he raised a hand and the noise dropped enough for him to be heard.

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

“Marek’s group did not know either,” someone muttered. Doran did not answer that. 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, and in all that time I had never once seen fear sit easily on him. It did not sit easily that night either, but he wore the absence of it so well that most of the circle believed him.

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

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. Held my gaze a beat too long, the way he always did, as if the extra second might make the question land differently. 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 pinned me against a tree and tried to kiss me. I’d shoved him hard enough that he went down into the leaves, and I’d run the rest of the way back to camp without looking behind me. I hadn’t told anyone but Doran, and even that had taken me two days to work up to.

He’d laughed when I finally said it, not unkindly. “The old wolf.” Shaking his head, as if that explained everything by itself. Then, gentler, when he saw it hadn’t landed as a joke for me: “You don’t owe him your company just because he keeps offering for it.”

I’d asked, half joking because the real question embarrassed me, whether it was my fault somehow. Whether I gave off some invitation I did not know I was giving. Doran looked at me a long moment before he answered, the kind of look that told me he’d been waiting for the question longer than I’d been asking it.

“Wilder. You’re still young, but you need to understand that the way you look matters.” He paused, choosing his words the way he chose everything else—slowly, carefully. “Your white fur is beautiful in the moonlight, and your blue eyes are a rarity among wolves. Those things may not help you hunt, but some males will always want exactly that—something unique, something they can claim as theirs.”

He paused again. “In Yunga’s case, there’s something else drawing him to you. You’re young. You haven’t seen much of the world yet. You have no one to compare him to.”

“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.”

I never liked what he’d told me, and I liked it even less because of how plainly he’d said it. I became a healer because of the way the others treated me. No one wanted to hunt alongside a white ghost who stood out so clearly against the darkness of the forest.

Fortunately, herbs did not care what color you were or how young you were. Senna, the old woman of our village, was the one who introduced me to their secrets—what each herb could do and how much was needed.

“No need,” I told Yunga now. “I’m going with Doran.”

It wasn’t true. He let it go, as easily as he’d offered, and that ease should have told me something, though I did not think to wonder why until much later.

I left at first light, before the camp had fully woken, my breath showing white in the cold. The ironwort grew best in the rock shade, where the ground stayed damp through summer even when everything around it turned to dust. In my other skin I was white from nose to tail, except for the black mark on my forehead.

I filled both satchels slowly, checking each stem before I cut it. Lost more time than I meant to over a patch of valerian I hadn’t seen wild in two years, kneeling in the wet moss long after my knees had gone numb, because good valerian was worth a cold morning.

By the time I started back, the sun was already low, longer shadows stretching across the trail than I liked.

I heard the howling before I saw the smoke. Not hunting calls. Sharp, cut off mid-sound, over and over, the kind of sound a throat makes when it isn’t choosing to make it.

I ran.

The trees thinned and I smelled it before I saw it, smoke and something under the smoke, copper and wrong, thick enough to catch at the back of my throat. I hit the edge of camp and stopped so hard my claws tore ground.

Yunga stood in the middle of the dead fire. His coat had never been gray, never brown, pale, near-colorless, the fur of something old past anything any of us could measure. Now it was black as pitch, all of it, and his eyes burned orange, like coals someone had set into his skull.

I watched him bite Senna. She went down, thrashed hard enough to kick up dirt, got back up with the same eyes.

It wasn’t one sick wolf anymore. Six, seven, moving through camp like a single starving animal wearing too many bodies, and every bite made another one just like it. I saw Old Tem go down under two of them and not get back up at all. I saw the fire scatter into embers where something had knocked through it.

Someone shouted my name. I did not turn toward the voice. I was already looking at the shape coming toward me across the camp, and some traitor part of me was still hoping.

Doran was already coming. Or the shape of him, same build, same way of carrying his shoulders low before a charge, the walk I would have known blind in a crowd of a hundred wolves. His coat had gone black as the others. His eyes burned that same wrong orange. Nothing in the way he moved still belonged to the wolf who’d raised me, and still I stood there a half-second too long, waiting for some flicker of him to surface and prove me wrong.

It did not come.

The satchels slid off my shoulder. I did not feel them go.

I shifted where I stood, bone snapping into place fast and wrong, pain arriving in pieces my body did not have time to register properly, and I was running before it had finished sorting itself out.

I ran until my lungs tore. Ran until the trees became something I felt my way through more than saw, branch by branch, root by root, bark scraping fur off my shoulder in one long stripe I wouldn’t notice until later. Behind me I heard more of them, two sets of paws, maybe three, closing a gap I no longer had the strength to hold. The ground dropped and rose and dropped again under me, and every stride cost more than the last one had.

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

Rock at my back. A low wall of it, too high to clear in the state I was in, moss slick under my pads where I tried and failed to find purchase. My chest heaving. My legs shaking under me hard enough that I had to plant them wider just to stay upright.

There was no jumping it. There was no more distance to buy.

I turned to face what was coming.

Doran broke the treeline first, and for one useless second I looked for my father in him anyway, some hitch in his stride, some flicker in the orange that meant the wrongness hadn’t taken all of him. It wasn’t there. His lips were pulled back from teeth that had closed around a hundred rabbits and never once around me, and now they wanted my throat the same as they’d wanted every one of them.

Senna came out of the brush behind him, low and fast, a snarl building somewhere under the orange in her eyes. Olneck followed at a slower pace, almost lazy. He was the best tracker in our pack, and he never needed to hurry. He always found what he was looking for.

Three of them. One of me. A wall at my back I couldn’t climb and no ground left to give.

Doran lunged first. I dropped low on instinct, felt the wind of his claws pass over my spine close enough to lift the fur, and came up already turning to find where Senna would land.

I understood, in that last clear moment before all three of them reached me, that I was about to fight for my life against everyone I’d ever called family.