by Maria Vale
“Lovely. I think we can make something of him,” she said to August before turning to go.
August watched her, all ruffled apron and tight skirt and stockinged menace.
“Mr. Lever—August? My parents?”
“Oh yes, of course. Well…” He clapped his hands together, brushing away crumbs of oatmeal. “Your father shot your bitch mother and then drove them both off a bridge where they conveniently immolated. So.” He held the plate toward me. “More?”
With a clap and a cookie, my childhood, my family, and my humanity were gone, and my career of making the world safe for cabbages began.
* * *
Magnus has never been this bad. He’s always been unwell. It started with toothaches that would come and go, but now they come more often and go less frequently.
Because we are not human, I couldn’t take him to a doctor. I’d tried, dragging Magnus on a lengthy car ride to visit a dentist in Ottawa. Dr. Spassky’d been skimming from August and would be dead in the morning, so what was the harm in having him take a look at Magnus’s teeth in the afternoon? Except that shit Lucian killed him before I even got Magnus in the chair, so that was the end of that.
Now the pain is spreading to his joints, his stomach, even his skin. Now he clings to the side of the car, whimpering with every thump.
“Where are we going?” Cassius asks, his voice still rough from my elbow to his trachea.
“When the Iron Moon is done,” Tiberius says, “the Alpha will decide what to do with you.”
After passing through a huge slatted gate, we arrive at what looks like the parking lot on the last evening of the county fair. The ground is churned into mud, and cars are crammed in haphazardly as though deserted by fairgoers afraid they are going to miss the fireworks.
“She can’t walk on this,” Cassius says as soon as he gets out. “It’s going to ruin her shoes.”
Tiberius’s arm darts forward, jamming the muzzle of his gun into the soft V of Cassius’s lower jaw.
I move Magnus behind me. Bullets in skulls make for unpredictable trajectories.
“Look up,” Tiberius commands. “What do you see?”
“Trrs?” Cassius hazards, unable to move his jaw.
“The moon. And not just any moon.” His mouth is close to Cassius’s ear. “That,” he growls, “is the Iron Moon. For three days out of thirty, when the moon is pregnant and full and her law is Iron, the Pack must be wild. I should be wild, but I’m not because I have to fucking babysit you. So whatever it is, figure it out yourself and do not make me speak to you again.”
His head snaps up, his nose twitching, his eyes abstracted, distant. He swivels toward the trees and a pale shadow in the woods that coalesces into a light-gray wolf. It moves closer with a quick lurching pace, one hind leg curled up against its torso.
Tiberius must have smiled when he was an infant, though I don’t remember. Certainly he hasn’t for twenty-five years or more. Not since he lost his baby teeth and his father watched in horror as the needle-sharp canines peeked out of his gums and kept growing longer and longer. August made sure his son didn’t smile again after that.
Now, though, he smiles, broad and bright for this gray runt. This was clearly the wolf August meant to take when he arranged to have his grandchildren kidnapped. Instead of this small, light-furred wolf, the dim-witted human Lucian recruited had drugged and abducted a monster and brought her to our compound.
When Varya woke up, she became a tall woman with black hair, eyes the color of granite, the grace of a raven, and a look of death about her.
“Follow her,” Tiberius commands. The wolf turns with two rapid hops and slides into the woods, dissolving between the trees like a shard of moonlight.
In the forest stark and grim live unspeakable things.
My mother’s voice has faded over the years, but the warning is still there and I hesitate at the boundary. One more step and I leave this borderland where there is at least enough sky to coax out a rim of flowers and head into the realm of unspeakable things. Then Tiberius pushes me and I stumble in.
“Hey, Ti, ease off. Remember, I was the one who called you. I was the one who warned Varya—”
“Stop,” he says. His eyes glow green and creepy in this low light. “How do you know her name?”
“Varya’s?”
“Yes, how do you know her name?”
“She told me.”
“Why would she tell you?” he asks again with increasing urgency.
“Because I told her mine? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.” He flinches, jabbing his gun sharp into my back. “Careful of the kidneys, Tiberius, and for fuck’s sake, put the safety back on.”
He looks into the pitch-black woods with an unreadable expression and shakes his head.
I see nothing but the forest stark and grim where there are unspeakable things.
August’s compound was on the coast. Aside from a few scraggly plants, there was nothing but the wide sky and rock ground flat by the pounding ocean. It felt light and open. Not dark and secretive. Here I can feel the insistent moving and growing and living and dying. Leaves shake overhead. Liquids dribble. Branches crack dry as old bone or bend almost in half before slicing through the air and hitting whoever is behind in the face. Things stalk us through the canopy as fast and quiet as secrets. Whatever moonlight manages to leak through the leaves moves in dappled waves, making the forest floor shift, precarious and uncertain, and for the first time, I truly understand August’s obsessive need to chop it all down.
I’m so focused on keeping Magnus from falling that I miss the fact that we’ve arrived at an opening that’s more than one tree in diameter and I can actually see the starlit sky and ground and a long log cabin sitting atop stone footings.
The pale-gray wolf stands to the side of the stairs leading to the porch. In the dark, Cassius misses a step and trips forward.
“Watch it,” he snaps when he sees Julia watching. As though he thinks she is somehow to blame.
“Sorry,” Julia answers miserably. As though she thinks so too.
Tiberius signals for us to go in and then slides down the length of the peeled-log support, his gun held loose between cocked knees.
Holding the screen door open for Magnus, I take one last look back toward the spiked fringe of trees. That’s when I see her.
I’d seen her once before when I came with Lucian to lay out August’s proposal. Join with us—become like us—or die.
While Lucian made threatening noises at a bush, my eyes wandered to eyes glaring in the dark. They were gold… No, not gold: gold is all glitz and surface. They were like amber, like fire. And when she stepped out from the tree line, fire eyes glowing against black fur, I already knew that we were wasting time. This was the beating heart of the pack, and we had nothing to offer her.
August talked about the Great North with disdain, claiming that the Pack were throwbacks, refusing to acknowledge that there was no longer room for the wild.
But when I looked into those eyes, I knew that she, at least, understood exactly how the world had changed, how tenuous their existence was. And that she would fight for it anyway.
“Close the door,” Cassius says. “You’re letting moths in.”
The latch snicks. I lean against the frame, looking one last time across the dark to the unblinking fire of her eyes.
There are moths gathered around two dim flame-shaped bulbs that do little more than make the shadows darker.
Magnus is already collapsed on one of the bottom beds of the bunks arrayed against the long walls on either side. The mattresses and pillows are bare, but sheets and plaid blankets are draped over the railings at the end. He stares sightless at the exposed ticking of the mattress above him, his feet hanging over the edge. I begin to pick away at his knotted, mud-encrusted laces.
He had
none when I first saw him in the visiting room of the juvenile center. I was checking in on Sergei, a human kid who’d worked as a lookout for August. I’d been told he was talkative, so I wanted to remind him of the very real consequences of saying…well, saying anything. That was when the bone-thin boy came in, haunted and hunched, his laceless shoes flapping loose around his feet.
He sat next to us. A woman—legal aid? Child Protective Services?—started chatting amicably, trying to get answers. The boy said nothing, just wrapped his arms around his waist and stared without seeing.
I’d said what I had to say to Sergei, but I kept him there. He always felt he had to fill the silence with words, though his words weren’t worth the sound it took to form them and I told him so.
“Excuse me, do you have a pen?” the woman asked. I remember her looking through her vinyl briefcase, the plastic cracking over the webbing. “I can’t seem to find mine.” The boy was looking at some piece of paper the woman wanted him to sign. She had set it on a legal pad because the table was made of metal mesh and was impossible to write on.
I gave her a pen. The boy’s right hand was fisted shut around his thumb. When it came time to sign, he didn’t unfurl his fingers, instead jamming the pen into his fist and scrawling awkwardly.
When he returned the white ballpoint to me, it was covered with blood. He grabbed it back, wiping it on his orange pants, smearing it more. He looked at it, then at me, and I felt his despair.
“It’s okay.” I took back the pen, waving it in the air in front of me to indicate that it was meaningless. The guard came and took him away, handling him too roughly.
He was already gone by the time I realized that the smell he had left on the pen was not human.
“Who is that?” I abruptly asked Sergei, who was at the top of the pecking order and knew everyone, but not this boy.
“John Doe,” he’d said. “No home. No family. No name.” Then he sliced his finger across his neck. “A born vic.”
It made me angry. That finger and that word. I knew what it meant to lose my family and my home and my name, but I was no vic.
I told Sergei that I didn’t want this kid to be one either. If Sergei wondered why, he knew better than to ask. He was nothing, a tool guarded by August’s name, but he knew how hierarchies worked. He knew that the guy at the top could be as arbitrary as he wanted. I was close enough to the top and arbitrary enough to make Sergei’s life immeasurably harder and very measurably shorter.
Sergei let the word out that John Doe was my brother. And when he got out, I called him Magnus and kept the lie. No one ever questioned me.
Not even August.
“Blanket, Mags?”
He blinks at me. “You feel them, right?” he whispers, pleading. “Tell me you feel them.”
Pursing my lips, I hush him like I always have so that no one would know that his mind’s not quite right and he sees a world that doesn’t exist.
He turns toward the wall. Then I spread the blanket over him and sit on the floor, boots still on, hands propped loose atop my knees. I don’t trust any of them. Not Cassius, not Tiberius, and certainly not any of the unspeakable things that live in the forest making noises like the clawing of broken fingernails on nylon or the rasping moans of dying lungs.
When I wake up, my leg is lead and my ass is cramped tight, a hazard of falling asleep seated on the hard wooden floor. I pull myself up, checking on Magnus, whose breath is sour but steady. Shaking out my leg, I check on Tiberius. He’s still on the porch, but he isn’t alone. Leaning back, he offers up his neck to the pale-gray wolf above him. She has her fangs at his exposed throat, and in the glow of the full moon, her white teeth scrape against skin the color of midnight. His hand spreads across her shoulders, his eyes are closed and he exhales, relaxing into her jaws.
Her eyes catch mine, and I feel like a pervert watching something unbearably intimate. I look away, catching the burning eyes of someone who knows what she’s fighting for.
A creak starts across the room, then stops, waiting for Cassius’s snores. In fitful starts and stops, Julia creeps across the floor.
“Constantine,” she whispers. “Are you awake?”
“Hmm.”
“Shh. I don’t…I don’t want to bother Cass.”
She creeps closer, pausing with every step to make sure that Cassius is still snoring.
“They’re going to let us go, right? Cass says so. We didn’t do anything to them, so they have to.”
Julia was always protected from everything. She was never told and never asked where the money came from that had been laundered and rinsed and fed into her seemingly endless account. (“Import-export,” August said.) At her father’s funeral, we were told not to mention how he died. (“Heart attack,” August said.) She seemed utterly unconcerned with how a healthy, middle-aged man came to die of a heart attack, or why a healthy, middle-aged man who died of a heart attack warranted a funeral with a closed casket.
Afterward, when we went out to eat, the table was rearranged so that Julia wouldn’t have to see the crustaceans getting fished out of the tank when she ordered lobster.
Something about it has always bothered me. Not something. I know what bothers me. It’s that Julia was still being treated as a precious innocent when she was thirty while I was forced to fight adults for food at the age of nine.
“You mean aside from the killing, arson, and kidnapping, we’ve done nothing to them.”
“I don’t believe you for a second, and anyway, I never did anything,” she says, her voice simultaneously hushed and indignant.
“You drove a van of guns and hunters to their land.”
“That wasn’t me. Cassius was driving. I was just supposed to be entertaining. We were supposed to go to New York. I didn’t know anything.”
“What do you want, Julia?” I’m tired and she’s grating on my last nerve.
“Is Uncle August really dead?”
“A werewolf put a metal slat through his throat, so yes, he’s dead.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Who?”
“The werewolf.”
“No. I gave her a car.”
I feel the fringe of her blanket brush against my hand.
“Baby?” Cassius says groggily, snuffling around in his pillow. “Julia, what are you doing?”
She jumps away from me.
“I’m just trying to find the bathroom.”
“Hold on, I’ll be right there.” The dull thunk of skull against wood is followed by a muffled “Shit!”
“Sorry,” she says again and stands sniffling in the middle of the room until Cassius shuffles over to join her. Her voice is faint against his shoulder.
“Cass, we’re going to get out of here, right?”
He makes all sorts of reassuring promises about plans to escape, none of them true. We have no guns, no phones, no families, and with August gone, nobody who cares whether we live or die.
The difference is I don’t care. I had asked for one thing from August. Maybe if I’d asked for more I might not have been so surprised when he reneged. Anyway, I spent several weeks trying to figure out how to get myself and Magnus far enough away fast enough and with sufficient funds that even August Leveraux couldn’t track us.
That was when it started to dawn on me that following elaborately laid-out directions was not the same thing as having a plan. I scrapped all my half-baked ideas when Lucian abducted Varya. It didn’t matter whether my lupus ex machina had a plan, because she had something better. She had purpose. It radiated from her in wave after dark wave. She refused to give August anything—fear, respect, anything—until she whipped out the steel slat she had torn from its soldering under the bed in the room where we’d kept her and, with a graceful pirouette, pushed the bar still dripping with Romulus’s blood through August’s throat and gave him deat
h.
Why did I warn her about the hunters coming to the Great North?
I think because I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that inspired so much devotion in such a brutally hard woman. After she had gone, I stood looking at the dead men who had defined my past. Just for a few minutes. Nothing morose. Then I called Tiberius on his old number, and on the third ring, he answered.
It was warm during the day so we opened the windows, and when the drops hit the screens, they explode into cool mist. We pull the windows shut, fastening them by hooks and eyes so the sheets and blankets won’t get wet. When I go to close the door, I find Tiberius still sitting there, the rain streaming down his face.
From the tree line across from the door, a dark wolf-shaped shadow watches with flaming eyes.
Chapter 3
Evie
It always takes me time to come down from the Iron Moon, to coalesce and shove myself back into the outline of this two-legged form that is so much lonelier than being wild. John never complained about it, but he’d been Alpha longer. Trained to put his needs aside younger.
Through the open window of the Meeting House, I catch those last shirred breezes against my skin, hear the rustles of the summer canopy, smell the tangy musk of the deer leg the 8th brought for the pups. Holding on as long as I can to senses that dull with each passing moment.
Outside, Adriana bangs a sledgehammer against the dirt in the deep cleats of her boots, first one, then the other. She does it to warn the wolves inside that the Shifters are coming, as though they haven’t been loud enough slipping and tripping and falling and complaining the whole way from the dormitory.
They’ve scared off everything edible, and any wolf hoping to chase down a snack after the morning’s formalities will have to settle for a carrot muffin.
The stairs groan under their heavy steps. The largest one is moving fast. The female limps behind him, her steps having a sharp staccato like an ingrown claw. The tall one walks behind, shortening his stride to stay apace with the one who is sick.
Cassius, Julia, Constantine, and Magnus.
