They drove for over an hour. After about fifteen minutes of valiant effort on Alfie's part to get more than one-word responses out of Vivienne, he gave in and turned on the radio, which crackled in and out of reception as Nate drove.
Vivienne stared out the window. White pines and cedars gave way to eastern hemlocks, maples, and birch trees. Drifts of snow still lingered in the deepest shadows of the forest, especially where jagged heaves of granite jutted up through the forest floor and chopped the landscape into pieces.
Those were her favorite places to run, the spots where boulders and crops of bedrock made secret caves and little waterfalls, where moss grew thick to pad her paws when she leapt down from the top.
Once, she glanced forward. Nate's posture was relaxed, one big hand resting easy on the steering wheel, his elbow propped on the center console. He'd removed his canvas jacket but was no less broad in the shoulders without it.
In the rearview mirror, his eyes caught hers; that warm blackwater brown snaring her cold blue. The Two Hearted River running into Lake Superior.
She looked away quickly, heat in her chest and her cheeks.
Another forty minutes took them off the highway and back onto another dirt road. Signs of life appeared in fits and starts. A boarded-up little building with faded G ENER L TORE painted above it. A double-wide with smoke curling from the chimney, the last of the winter's store of wood stacked neatly on the porch.
More little houses and trailers popped up as Nate slowed down, the truck jostling in the potholes that felt knee-deep come springtime.
Vivienne saw a tiny log cabin with a garden bed in front that had been put to rest for the winter, brush and branches laid overtop and dusted with old snow. A few houses down, a rusted-out pickup stood on cinderblocks next to a swingset. On the porch of a newer trailer, a teenager sat and smoked. The boy lifted his chin as the truck passed, and Nate raised two fingers from the steering wheel in greeting.
They passed an all-service garage with a single gas pump outside. A small grocery store with a flickering light.
Nate had begun narrating. "Gathering Hall," He said, pointing to a large, single-story building in the center of town as he slowed the truck and turned left. There was patio furniture stacked under the awning outside and a corkboard behind glass plastered with papers.
"Bit of a catch-all. Pack meetings. Events. Community meals. The kids do school there in the winter when it's too cold to be outside."
"You have school for them?" Vivienne said, startled out of her determined silence. "Formally?"
Nate nodded, lifting his hand in greeting to another pack member who was walking down the street as he spoke. "We do. I know every pack does it differently," his carefully neutral tone wasn't lost on her, "but it was important to me when I took leadership that we modernize a few things. That was one of the first."
"No more 'Dick and Jane' at the dining table while Mummi slaps you with a spoon for laughing at Dick's name," Alfie said.
Nate smirked, then nodded down a side street. "Bar's up that way. Only one in town. Makes a good burger. If most of the pack isn't at the hall, they're up at Two Jacks."
Ahead was a house, the only two-story in town. Blue, bright once perhaps but faded in the way things do after the relentless churn of northern winters and summers to a more comfortable blue-grey.
The chipped white paint and sag in the front steps up the wraparound porch spoke of the countless feet that traveled to the double front entry doors. Box planters sat on the railings, empty but optimistic-looking all the same. A light was on inside.
"The big house." Nate said simply, shifting the gear into park.
"The alpha's house." Alfie clarified with a glance. "Perk of the job."
Nate grimaced. "Tell that to the damn water heater."
The two men pushed open their doors. Alfie folded his seat forward, and Vivienne climbed out, her legs stiff from spending so much time that day pent up. She looked up at the house, and the cold spring breeze that had played with her hair at the territory line welcomed her back, drawing its fingers across her throat, her cheeks.
The alpha's house, Alfie had said, using that modern word which was as inaccurate a title for Nate as it was for any of their wild kin.
Johtaja was proper and true. Or, more true at least. Not the nonsensical soup of Greek alphabet letters humans had arbitrarily ascribed to wolf social structures.
Some vironsusi loved to split hairs about it, but most, including Vivienne (and, apparently, Nate and Alfie), didn't see the point in fussing over semantics. They all knew what it meant. And it wasn't any name that gave Nate Greyson his standing.
A touch to her back, light and barely there through the layers of her jacket and her flannel beneath it, startled her. Nate lifted his hand, palm out. Peace. Behind him, Alfie had shouldered her bags once again.
Vivienne's heart was still racing, a rabbit's not a wolf's as she met Nate's gaze.
"Welcome home." He said.