Hammered
people who were without dependents to care for and who were on the verge of death. They also had to be dying at home in a rural area rather than in a hospital. We could not afford to give our existence away.
Few people matched my criteria, but wolves saved eight people that year who otherwise would have died of influenza. None of them was Scandinavian.
There was a Native American man and a Mexican one, two Chinese women, a German teenager, a thin boy from India, a girl from England, and an immigrant from the Philippines who’d already lost the rest of his family to the virus. They were all lovely people and fantastic wolves. They enriched the lives of my entire pack, but especially Rannveig’s.
She and I turned out to be very different wolves, you see. I was very dominant and she was quite submissive, despite her occasional flirtations with adventure. I could not take her for a mate, because she was incapable of behaving as an alpha, and the Pack would never accept such a submissive wolf in a leadership position. In fact, while everyone liked her, no one in the Pack wished to be her mate. So I was very glad for her sake when she fell in love with the man from the Philippines.
His name was Honorato, and he was finally able to relieve her of two centuries of misery. I am telling you, she was a new person once they paired off. Her earlier ideas about being damned faded, for how could such love be permitted to those who were damned? For the first time, she began to view her wolf as a blessing rather than a curse. If Úlfur had not chosen us centuries ago, she never would have met Honorato.
But Úlfur, though dead for hundreds of years, found a way to reach out and ruin her happiness from beyond the grave. That cold air I’d felt when he died—that was the Valkyries choosing him to join the Einherjar in Valhalla. I am sure of it. And there, while preparing for Ragnarok day after day, he must have distinguished himself enough to draw the attention of Thor. And once he gained that attention, he used it to turn a god into an assassin.
Ten years ago I took the entire pack on holiday in Norway. We visit someplace special every year, and since most of the Pack was of Norwegian or Icelandic background, they wanted to visit the homeland. We were to be there for a week, hunting and playing and indulging our wolves. On our third night there, the night of the full moon, the eight dear friends I’d saved in 1918—including Rannveig’s husband—were struck down by lightning bolts. All the Scandinavian members of the Pack were left untouched. And I stress to you that we were not out in a storm. The sky was only partially cloudy, and I knew immediately that this could not possibly have been some accident of nature. My proof came when Thor descended in his chariot and spoke to me briefly. He took care to hover out of the Pack’s reach.
He said, » Regards from Úlfur Dalsgaard, one of the finest Einherjar in Valhalla. He urges you to rethink your pack law regarding the recruitment of mixed races. « And then he laughed at us as we snarled and barked at him, enjoying how powerless we were to confront him. He flew away without saying another word, leaving us to howl and mourn.
Rannveig, as you might imagine, was devastated. The howling she did that night for Honorato, her murdered husband, still haunts me to this day.
Thor is not part of my pack. He will never be part of my pack, nor can he have any voice in what pack law says or doesn’t say. He had no business renewing a feud that I had justly settled long ago by sending Úlfur to Valhalla. And, from a human perspective, he had no business murdering people for any reason, much less for the color of their skin. There is nothing Úlfur could have offered him to make it worth his while, you see? He did it solely for his own entertainment. Can he therefore be called anything but evil?
Rannveig … well. She fell in battle two months ago against witches armed with silver knives. Though I miss her, I wonder sometimes if it wasn’t a mercy. She was suicidal after her husband’s death. I think she would have done it were it not for her wolf and her Lutheran faith.
And now you see why I must go to Asgard. I cannot kill Úlfur again—and even if I could, it wouldn’t help, since he learned nothing from the first time I killed him. But I can kill Thor to avenge eight lives and one woman’s heart, and I will. Then, perhaps, I will not hear the howling at night.
Except for
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