I Shot The Alpha

Gerald started it.

Of course he did. At twelve-forty on a Tuesday morning, the first noise to come through my bedroom window was a Muscovy drake losing his entire mind, and Gerald has never once in his life let another living thing have the spotlight.

The rest of the ducks joined in. Then the chickens behind the shed started up, and chickens don’t normally involve themselves in duck business.

I was out of bed before I was properly awake, still in the three-dollar thrift-store flannel I’ve slept in every night since I moved here.

Jeans off the floor. Boots on, laces flapping. Headlamp off the hook by the door. I got the shotgun out of the hall closet and the shells out of the blue Danish cookie tin on the top shelf, where they live because every burglar in America knows those tins only ever hold sewing supplies.

Three deadbolts on the back door. I flipped them in the dark without looking.

People in Carrow Creek think all my locks mean I’m frightened out here. What they mean is I’ve called the county sheriff at night, and I know exactly how long forty minutes is when you’re the one waiting for it.

I’d lost three hens in five weeks. Foxes, I’d told myself. Then last Thursday the camera on the shed caught a shape crossing the back field at two in the morning, blurry and far too big, and I’d told myself coyote. Then I’d deleted the footage so I’d stop watching it.

I shouldered the back door open and the night hit me like a wet dish towel. Humid. Frogs going off in the pond. My birds screaming murder.

The beam swung across the yard. Woodpile. Clothesline. My pickup. The duck run.

Two wolves.

My brain offered me coyote one last time out of habit, then gave up, because coyotes don’t come up to your hip. These two would’ve come up to my ribs. One was black. The other was pale enough to throw my headlamp back at me. They were tearing into each other against the side of the duck run hard enough to make the wire bow in and out like it was breathing.

Ferals.

Had to be. No real pack wolf comes brawling on an omega’s property at one in the morning. Everyone in the district had heard the stories this year. Calves gone. Fences torn open. A guy out past Mount Barrow who went to check his trapline last winter and never came home.

Every pamphlet the county printed about it had the same paragraph in bold at the bottom. Unmated omegas in outlying areas are strongly advised to relocate to pack accommodation during periods of feral activity. I’d used mine to line the chicken coop.

I brought the gun up.

And couldn’t tell which one to shoot.

They were one thrashing shape in the light, fur and teeth and mud going everywhere. The pale one had its jaws in the black one’s shoulder. The black one twisted loose and slammed it into the fence posts. Gerald was flapping at the wire, hissing at both of them, clearly convinced he could take them.

“Get back, you idiot,” I told him.

The pale wolf broke away and turned its head toward me.

It looked straight down the beam. Animals caught in a light get startled. This one didn’t. It looked at me like it had known my name for a long time.

Then the black one launched.

It came out of the dark on my side of the run, huge, fast, all teeth, and it was coming at me.

I fired.

The shot slapped off the shed wall and came back twice. The black wolf let out a yelp—an ugly, high sound, far too close to human—and went down hard in the grass beside the woodpile. The pale one was already gone. One second it was in my light and the next the woods had swallowed it, and all I heard was branches whipping shut behind it.

My ears rang. The ducks finally shut up.

“Okay,” I said to nobody. “Okay. Good. Great.”

I pumped another shell into the chamber and walked toward the woodpile. The beam wobbled all over the grass, because my hands had decided they were done being steady for the night. I told them to knock it off. They ignored me.

The black wolf lay on its side, panting. Blood soaked into the grass under it, black under my headlamp. The back leg was a mess.

Up close it was ridiculous. Its head was the size of a feed bucket. One paw could’ve covered my whole face.

I’ve put down animals before. Horses with shattered legs. Dogs clipped by semis out on the highway. You don’t make them wait. I raised the barrel.

The wolf opened its eyes and looked up at me.

Ferals have flat eyes. Nobody home. I’ve seen photos in the county pamphlets, and I’ve seen one dead in the bed of a pack truck in town, and the eyes are always the worst part—like looking into a puddle.

These eyes were furious.

Then it started to change.

I’ve watched a lot of things come out of a lot of bodies in my job, and nothing prepared me for bones deciding to become different bones. The spine drew in. The legs pulled and lengthened with a sound like someone snapping green sticks inside a sack. Fur slid back under skin, and the skin was brown, and the paws were hands, and the hands dug into my lawn as the last of the wolf went out of him on a long, filthy snarl.

A man.

A very large, very naked, very pissed-off man, bleeding into my grass.

“Oh,” I said.

He pushed up on one arm. His shoulders filled my entire beam.

“Did you,” he said, slowly, “just fucking shoot me?”

I lowered the barrel about an inch. “…Possibly.”

"Possibly."

“It was dark.”

“You’ve got a light on your head.”

“YOU WERE EATING MY CHICKENS!”

“I was killing the thing eating your chickens!”

The frogs carried on in the pond. Somewhere behind me, Gerald made a noise of deep personal offense.

“…Oh,” I said.

I looked at the duck run. The wire had a long belly bent into it where they’d hit, but it had held. Gerald stood on the other side with his wings out, glaring at the naked man on my lawn as if he’d won the fight personally.

He dropped his forehead onto his forearm and said something into the grass that I’m fairly sure was every swear word he knew, in alphabetical order.

Then he lifted his head again, and the headlamp caught his face full on, and I knew it.

Everybody in the district knew it. It was on the laminated notice at the county office—the one telling you to report feral sightings to Tallowood Pack. It turned up in the Carrow Creek Courier every time a boundary dispute got settled. Maude had a photo of him pinned to the clinic bulletin board from the charity dog show, holding a chihuahua in a pink tutu and looking like a hostage.

Heavy brows. Short black beard. Eyes so dark they looked black, and aimed at me with enough heat to strip paint off a barn.

Derek Morse.

Alpha of Tallowood. Biggest pack between here and the Canadian border. Other alphas called him sir, and they meant it.

And I’d shot him.

He rolled onto his side to get his knees under him, and the light followed, because I’m a professional and I check wounds. That was how I found out exactly where the shot had gone.

Back of the left thigh. Up. Further up.

Right across the ass.

Twenty-odd pellets, sprayed from the meat of his thigh up over one cheek, each hole leaking a neat dark bead. Nothing near an artery. Nothing that was going to kill him.

Just deeply, catastrophically undignified.

I’ve stitched a bull terrier’s face back together at three in the morning without cracking a smile. This was harder.

I pressed my lips together.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re about to.”

“I’m assessing the wound.”

“You’re assessing my ass.”

"That’s where the wound is!"

He got one knee planted and tried to stand. The leg took his weight for about half a second before it told him exactly what it thought of that idea, and he went back down on one hand with a grunt that sounded like a truck door slamming.

I stepped in and offered my shoulder.

He looked at it as if I’d offered him a live snake.

“I don’t need—”

“You’ve got most of a box of shells in you. You need.”

“Do you have any idea who I am?”

“I’m getting a strong feeling.”

He grabbed my shoulder anyway and hauled himself upright, and I learned very quickly that the man was built like a gun safe. My knees nearly went. He smelled of blood and wet fur and cedar, and he was so hot through my flannel he could’ve been running a fever.

“You shot the Alpha,” he said, into the top of my head.

“I shot a wolf.”

“I was the wolf.”

“Sounds like a branding problem.”

He went quiet. I risked a look up.

He was staring down at me as though I’d grown a second head, and I’d swear every pellet in his backside was staring along with him.

I had the words ready. Something about how he could’ve barked, or waved, or not been the size of a pickup at one in the morning beside my ducks. I had my mouth open for it.

Then his head snapped toward the treeline, and every muscle in him went still.

I’ve seen stillness like that in a working dog, right before it breaks for the field. The whole body stops asking questions.

I swung the headlamp after his gaze.

At the edge of the woods, low down between two jack pines, a pair of eyes caught the beam and threw it back at me green.

Wolves run from gunfire. Everything runs from gunfire. I’ve watched a whitetail clear a six-foot fence at the sound of a car door.

This one hadn’t moved an inch.

It wasn’t watching him.

It was watching me.

Derek Morse’s hand tightened on my shoulder. When he spoke again his voice had dropped low and flat, and that was so much worse than the shouting.

“Get inside,” he said. ”Now."