Axlam nodded. “I am the last of the pack to change. My mate’s scent touches my wolf. I smell his fear and his rage. I am missing. Our cub is missing. The Elf King blazes for Gerard and holds high that bright flame to illuminate his humanity.”
Could I help? I had no idea what to do.
She glanced toward the altar. “We are the only pack that runs with elves.”
I knew that. They were also the largest and most stable pack in the world.
“They do help.” She stared at St. Martin. “But the truth is that the politics of the run helps the elves just as much, maybe more, than they help us.”
All the magicals in Alfheim understood the symbiosis of the elves and the werewolves, though like most people, I’d held the belief that the elves held a stronger position than the wolves.
“We need to get you out of here,” I said. “Both you and Dagrun.”
Axlam’s wolf rammed the dome again. This time, she flinched.
She wasn’t controlling it as well as she usually did.
“The silver has weakened my hold,” she said. “I’m having an allergic reaction along with bleeding all over my coat.” She looked down at the wound. “Help me with this,” she said. “Rip the coat, but not too much. I still need it against the cold.”
My damaged insides, though still painful, had reformed into something passible as a shoulder blade, and allowed movement. I carefully ripped her jacket, but not so much that the sleeve fell off.
She removed the pins that held her hijab in place, and pulled off the scarf. Underneath she wore a second scarf, wrapped tightly around her head.
“It’s cold out, Frank,” she said.
I chuckled.
Axlam grinned. “Tie it around the wound.”
I wound the scarf tightly around her bicep and knotted it off just as her wolf slammed into the magic again.
“Help me stand,” she said. “The silver is making me woozy.”
I offered my hand. She took it, and together we exited the pew.
“The elves, like their gods, think they have all things wolf under control,” Axlam muttered.
She wasn’t wrong. We were all well aware of elven blind spots. I’d long believed one of the reasons Arne and Dag brought in strays was because we filled in the holes. We strays were strategic.
“He might have a revenge fantasy, but this magic,” Axlam waved her good hand at the dome, “it doesn’t care about me.” She took a step toward the altar. “Nor did his father.”
We also knocked into the pews. “Careful,” I said.
“I think you and I have that in common, Frank. Suffering at the hands of entitled men of hubris.”
I helped her toward Dagrun. “Aye, Axlam, this we do.” Though I fully understood why her strength and resolve needed to be so much stronger than my own. I could pass as one of those men of hubris. Axlam could not.
“Legend says the first werewolf was brought to heel by a god.” Axlam gripped my arm. “The wolf manifests when the moon obscures that god and unleashes the many rages of repression.”
Arne did say the magicals were born of the friction of mundane against the nature of the world. Las Vegas Wolf had described some of these frictions as new ways. And here was Axlam, a woman who’d been sucked into another culture’s old rage by an evil man.
But the first werewolf? The poor soul who originated the curse that Axlam, her husband, his brother, her son—all of the Alfheim Pack and every werewolf everywhere—carried? He was lost in the mists of time. Unlike the vampires who traced their origins to Vlad the Impaler, no one knew the first werewolf’s name. They did, though, know that werewolves have been with mundanes since the mundanes turned wolves into dogs.
Perhaps that first werewolf wasn’t a good soul. Perhaps he was. No one knew. But he did make the first Faustian deal with one of the Earth’s most primal gods.
Axlam paid the price to contain that dark canine magic every time she changed.
“Gerard and Remy have always suspected a major Wolf spirit out there. One bigger and meaner than all the individual cultural manifestations. There’s too much continuity between all of the variations of werewolf. We’re all pack, unlike the elves and the fae or the kami. There are a lot of different types of werewolves, but the magic is the same.”
I nodded.
“I feel it, Frank,” she whispered. “The World Wolf. I feel its presence every day.” We took another step toward Dagrun. “After Rose passed, did you ever feel her presence?” Axlam asked.
“Like a ghost?” Presences could mean all sorts of different things, when magicals were involved.
“Not a ghost ghost,” she said. “Not like the manifestations your brother sent after you when he showed up. I mean that memory presence, the kind you get when your memory of someone, your longing and your loss, hits the parts of your mind that build your perception of the world. That injection into reality of a very real part of you is, was, will always be your mirror of the missing.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I think so.”
“I felt that way for decades after his father bit me.”
I didn’t say anything. I let her speak.
“Werewolves—all of us—feel that all the time about the Wolf world-spirit. Sometimes it’s small. Sometimes it takes over. Sometimes it’s old school loup-garou. Sometimes it’s a teenager in a Kenyan refugee camp.” She steeled herself for another step. “That mirror, that very real part of me that is the World Wolf, is right here.” She tapped her chest. “And here.” She tapped her temple. “I am pack first, no matter who I am.”
Sometimes I felt that way about the presence of my father. I mirrored Victor Frankenstein the way Axlam mirrored the World Wolf, even though we didn’t mean—or want—to do so.
“That is why the elves do not have everything wolf under control.”
No, they didn’t.
“There is no room in the pack for those who steal and whine,” Axlam muttered. “No place for the conniving or the
