by Maria Vale
“You mean Poul?”
“Yes.”
Constantine folds the page carefully, lining up the holes made by Theo’s sharp teeth.
“Does he find what he’s looking for?”
“Alpha?” says Rieka, standing at the end of the row made by benches and wolf backs.
Letting out a pained breath, I push myself up again.
“No,” I say quietly.
Chapter 20
Constantine
There is a bit of dark jam and butter on her lower lip, but she sucks it clean, then darts her tongue out to check her mouth for stains of summer fruit.
Oh god, I am not okay.
She starts down the hall because of course someone needs something done. She’s got these jeans, they must be old favorites, worn and soft with holes at the left thigh just big enough for a flicker of brown skin as she walks away.
She stops to listen to someone in the library.
Turn around.
At the threshold of her office, a wolf stretches up his head and she leans over to mark him.
Look at me.
She responds with a terse wave of her hand to someone in the kitchen.
See me.
She disappears into her office.
Evie.
The door closes.
When a wet nose touches my ear, a broken breath hisses from my throat. Magnus brushes his chin on my shoulder. Everything about him looks so much stronger now. The small, sunken wolf with the dusty lackluster fur and rheumy eyes is now large and strong with fur that is light gray on top and dark gray underneath. His eyes are the same, though: true blue, the color of cloud.
Magnus was ripped up by the transition to wolf, so Tristan wants to wait until his bones are strong, his body is fully recovered before letting him become human again, though honestly I know by the way he cocks his head to the side and scratches under his chin that whatever he becomes whenever he becomes, it will not be human.
He turns over on his back and bends his hips back and forth, his paws high in the air, his mouth open on white teeth. His tortured paws have healed, and the claws are not as sharp as they were when they first emerged. Sanded down, I suppose by running across granite. He stays on his back but stops wiggling, looking at me from his upside-down eyes. His forehead touching my leg. We were never very demonstrative. Partly because so many things hurt him. Partly because that wasn’t who I am, though it feels less strained to pat him on the belly or scratch behind his ears.
One of the pups runs up and starts to clamber over Magnus’s face. Aside from a gentle snap at the pup’s leg scraping his jaw, he does nothing while the pup sits on his muzzle and tries to catch Magnus’s ear flickering teasingly out of reach.
“Is there an oatcake with jam?” I say to Järv.
“Peach or mulberry?”
“Mulberry.”
Järv passes one down to me on the floor, then he and Ziggy launch into a discussion of mulberry trees somewhere on Homelands. How ripe they are, how abundant. Who is still small enough to climb high into the branches and jump up and down while wolves below hold out sheets and blankets waiting for the berries to rain from heaven and be turned into another batch of summer jam.
Magnus’s ear pricks up, and a second later, he flips over, trotting toward the door. Without a backward look, he puts his paw on the lever of the door, pushes his nose through, his body slithering after.
“That note,” says a voice above me. “It’s for Julia, isn’t it?”
My eyes travel upward toward the messy blond ponytail towering above me. I jump up. Don’t like being towered over.
“Yes.”
He holds out his hand for it, and as I have no skin in this game, I give it to him.
As soon as he reads it over, he hands it back. “What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to give it to her?”
I start to wonder if the Alpha was wrong about him. It would make sense after all: a girl like Julia always needs a protector—Otho, August, Cassius, and now this man, the latest in a long line.
“Why? Do you have a thing for her?”
“Me?” He says it with his lip curled back like I’d just accused him of kissing a tapeworm. “I’m the Alpha of the 12th Echelon of the Great North. Why would I have a thing for her?”
“What do I know? She’s very…decorative?”
“Decorative?” He scratches an eyebrow with his pinkie finger. “You knew Varya?”
“We talked a little. I watched her rip orifices in body parts that don’t usually have them. But I wouldn’t say I knew her.”
“She was my Shielder. I asked her to be my mate. You know Varya well enough to understand I have no use for the merely decorative.”
His fingers go to the rubber band holding back a ponytail. When he pulls it out, his blond hair brushes his shoulders.
“I miss her,” he says. “But she was so strong that I didn’t have to be. Now I do. I’m not saying that Cassius is anything like Varya, but I do see a little of myself in Julia. Letting someone else bear the responsibility for decisions that should be hers.”
Behind him, Julia talks animatedly to Arthur, who listens closely before answering. As soon as she sees me heading toward her, she drops her eyes to the table, pushes her plate away, and sits on her hands so she won’t have to look at or take the paper with “JULIA” written clearly on the top. Maybe she hopes that it and I will go away, that I will take responsibility for the decision, so that she can say to Cassius that I never gave it to her and technically it will be true.
But I’m not her indulgent uncle or her indulgent father, and I can stand here forever with the stupid piece of paper. When she looks to Arthur, he says only, “It’s for you.”
Her lips quiver and grow tight, and when she grabs the note from my hand, she keeps the steel-gray birthright of her eyes hard on mine while she rips it to shreds and throws it on the floor.
“And yes,” she says to Arthur, “I know I have to sweep that up.”
He chortles and she smiles a big smile with lots of teeth that makes her cheeks look fat like Cassius always warned her it would, and I know that Cassius has misread the signs and doesn’t understand that the man he should be worried about is not the Viking with the ponytail, but the slim man with the brown hair who splayed himself naked on the damp ground, his jaws clamped shut, his eyes wide open, waiting to be ripped apart by wolves.
Chapter 21
Evie
My first Offland meeting as Alpha had taken so much preparation. For days, Tara had prepped me on questions of engineering; Josi, on questions of the law; Leonora, on how to handle humans. I needed to be able to answer every petty, pointless question so they did not have any excuse to inspect Homelands.
I’ve gotten better at it, better at lining up my facts, better at identifying what Leonora calls bullshit. But in the end, to protect my Pack, I have to know four times as much as all the humans in the room.
I unroll another map, holding it open with skunk skull from the shelf of First Kills, rehearsing my responses for the Community Wildfire Protection Plan meeting.
The chart with water pressures riffles and floats slowly to the floor in the suddenly bright air. At the window, I taste the coolness of the breeze and the warmth of the ground and the scuttling lacy clouds against blue.
I’m not the only one who feels it: Pack emerge blinking into the sunlight. They are ill-tempered and ill at ease. Days spent inside hiding from blackfly do that. Soon, they begin circling me, bodies shivering with need.
“Go! Go!” I say loudly. “Before it’s too late.”
And they go.
“Rinnaþ, wulfas,” I whisper to myself.
Run, wolves.
The wild bursts out of them, and in their excitement, thi
ngs are left undone. The stove is still on. The milk is out. A screen in the library is wide open. Clothes are strewn everywhere.
“Alpha,” says Leonora.
“Aren’t you going out running?”
“I thought we’d take this opportunity to go swimming, but”—the children are already pulling off shirts, whooping around, their arms waving in a premature celebration of nakedness—“we will need some adults.”
“I’ll arrange it.”
Arne runs back in, his back covered in pine needles.
“Forgot to turn off the stove,” he says.
“I did it, but, Arne, as soon as the 8th is changed, send them to Home Pond. Leonora is taking the class swimming.”
I squat down to pick up an armload of clothes.
“What’s happened?” says Constantine. “We were working and then everyone disappeared.”
“Blackfly don’t like strong winds and bright sun. It gives the Pack a chance to run.”
“Why’d humans hafta wear clowes t’go simming?” complains Edmund, coming up the stairs. “And why is the shit and pans so liddow?”
“Because humans think that by hiding evidence of their fucking, they can pretend they are more than animals,” she says. “The quicker you get dressed, the quicker we get to the water. Now, let’s see how well you’ve done.”
Edmund emerges from the stairs, pulling on a clearly uncomfortable blue-and-white-gingham bikini. Aella is wearing a pair of long shorts with skulls and a daisy-print tank top. Leofric has on a pink one-piece that covers the back but leaves the nipples exposed, which as I recall is acceptable because he’s male.
“Alpha? Would you like to comment on how the class has done?”
I wave her off. Those lessons were long ago, and I’ve forgotten everything save for that single arbitrary fact that while male nipples may be exposed, female nipples must never be.
She turns around. “Shifter, you will know,” she says.
“It’s Constantine, Leonora,” I say. Leonora pauses for a moment then her eyes flicker down, acquiescing. She starts again. “Well, Constantine, how has the class done?”
He had been watching me, a curious expression on his face, but now he reluctantly turns to the children. I know they’re not right. Their legs twitch, their dirty feet shivering in anticipation. They are unsure what to do with arms that until recently were used for running. And Margaret is really too old to be licking Oliver’s ear.
They hold their heads cocked to the side in hopeful angles.
He turns back to me. “Beautiful,” he whispers, a low hitch in his voice.
Then with a steadier voice, he tells Leonora that her charges are perfect.
Leonora’s eyebrows rise and her lips tighten in disapproval, but she shepherds them to the door, unwilling to keep them confined a minute more.
“No one on the dock until the adults come,” she yells.
“You know they aren’t,” she says without turning to look at Constantine.
“Aren’t what?”
“Perfect.”
“They’re only children,” he says.
“That they definitely are not.” One of our “children” has found a vertebra that has been picked clean; she puts it to her hind teeth, gnawing happily. “They are wolves. They have a hard enough time fitting in already. They don’t say what they don’t mean. They don’t ask things simply to make conversation. They sense things no one else does. They don’t understand things that everyone understands. Rainy!” she yells at a First Shoes who has reverted to running on her toes and fists. “Two legs!”
Rainy looks back, then pushes herself upright. It’s the angle of the slope that’s giving her trouble, but it can’t be helped. She must learn.
“You know what humans are like with anyone who is strange,” Leonora says, “and these children are as strange as they come.”
Something splashes, followed by excited yips and yells made by children who aren’t used to the form until one of the older ones calls out: “Tasha felled!”
Leonora starts to run, hampered by sandals. I run, too, hampered by the jostling of injured ribs, but Constantine races past me, wolf-fast on two legs. The children huddle to the side of the dock as his feet pound down the dock and he launches himself far out into the water, cutting through it like an otter.
At the edge of the dock, I lie down, my arms in the water where she should be, searching. Tasha isn’t even First Shoes and doesn’t know how to swim in skin.
The sun catches something bright in the churned water and I grab for it, pulling. My ribs scream even though she is being pushed up from below.
Constantine emerges as I gather her, tiny and coughing and terrified, into my arms, marking her over and over again until the shaking subsides.
His fingers grab hold of the edge of the dock, just below my bent leg.
“Coodn beethe,” she sobs.
“It’s not the same in skin. That’s why you have to learn. That’s why I told you to wait.”
I let my leg fall, feeling his fingers, cold and damp even through my jeans.
“I don’ wann be in thin. Don’ lig it.”
“It doesn’t matter what you like or want, you will do what you must. Like every Pack.”
Leonora is next to me now, in her bright-orange bathing suit, her handbag shaped like an oversize plum made of shining purple stones, bristling with antlers and cheese chews.
“Tasha, what do we say to the Sh—Constantine?”
I feel her tighten in my arms, her head raised to me for help, but honestly, I have no idea what Leonora wants from her.
“He saved your life. What do you say?”
“I don’ know,” she wails.
“‘Thank you,’ Tasha. You say ‘thank you.’ Wolflings, I have said this over and over, but I can’t emphasize how important it is. Humans are not Pack. There is no assumption of mutual support. A human may help another human or they may not. Because of this, there is always the expectation of gratitude. They will look very poorly on you if you do not say ‘thank you’ every time they perform any service, no matter how small or obvious.”
Licking away the last of the water dripping into Tasha’s eyes, I set her upright as the 8th emerges from behind the Great Hall, racing toward the water.
I lift my leg from Constantine’s hand, but one finger catches on the loose threads at the hole of my jeans. I lean back down, letting him free himself, and immediately regret his absence. Water beads on his hair and on his face, dripping down to collect in the notch of his collarbone, and I am suddenly, unaccountably thirsty.
“They’re coming.” He opens his mouth to say something to me, but whatever it is, there is no time to say it before Arne and other wolves of the 8th charge the length of the dock. At the end, they leap, paws extended, noses to the sky, before dropping with an unceremonious splat against the water.
Other wolves walk more daintily into the water’s edge.
Constantine’s sopping flannel shirt lands on the side of the deck with a damp splat, followed quickly by his pants. His hair swirls against his broad shoulders. He leans back, his throat long and exposed, the striations of the muscles of his chest glistening in the water. Upright once more, his hair smoothed back, he watches the children jump or wade in, all of them paddling around. It’s the littlest ones, the ones who aren’t used to the tiny squat noses, so unlike the longer muzzles, who have so much difficulty keeping themselves above water. There is a lot of coughing and flailing, but only for the moments it takes for an adult to swim closer. Then little fists curl around the long guard hairs and they lean their heads into the fur, their unfamiliar bodies swaying to the rhythm of their protector’s strokes.
Constantine swims around them, sleek and muscular, strong and fast, making ever-widening loops. He’s not guarding them anymore, not watching. He’s just a shining
hint of gold and dark heading out into the middle of Home Pond.
With a ferret-quick twist, he turns his body, spreads out his arms, and floats, far removed from everything.
“Should I send Arne?” Leonora says. “Before he gets too far.”
I raise my hand. Wait.
I stare after him.
Come back. Stay there. Show me how. Help me.
Where is this coming from? He’s an interloper, an outsider. He has no purpose in the Pack. I must choose someone like Poul. Or maybe Lorcan. Let them fight it out for cunnan-riht. For fucking rights. Between the two of them, it’s a rock and a hard place. A pot and a kettle.
John was my friend. We knew each other. I trusted him, and when he died, my heart shriveled and dried. Why is it when this, this…this Shifter looks at me, touches me, I feel just how parched I have become?
Lifting his head from the water, he combs his hair out of eyes with long fingers. He looks around like he’s only now realizing how far he’s gone. Catching my eyes, he starts back with a slow and exaggerated stroke, coming for me.
Chapter 22
Constantine
Fuck, it’s glorious. Spring fed and cold, but nothing like the frigid rough seas off the coast of Nova Scotia. After the numbing shock comes an almost blissful thaw.
Water flows through my hair and over my skin. Stroke by stroke, it covers me, coddles me. The liquid thickness buoying me, making it easier to forget, to get away, to go loose to my very bones. Everything is erased except the pleated shadows of summer sun rippling across my closed eyes and the wash of water as my arms slice through the surface.
I flip over, my chest to the sun, my back to the deep. Warm on top, cold underneath. The splashing near the dock has subsided to a gentle slosh that licks my body and whispers against my ears.
Eventually, I lift my head, realizing just how far I’ve gone from the distant yips and voices at the dock. Combing my hair from my face and the water from my eyes, I see the Alpha at the distant dock, her eyes fixed on me.
Next to her, Leonora watches tensely.
With a slow and exaggerated backstroke, I start back so she will understand that I am not making a break for it. At the compound, I dreaded the moment when some asshole would shatter the sky with a .460 Magnum, so there would be doubt that I was being summoned from the water that took me in and made me part of something bigger. I hated each stroke back to the rocky beaches and whatever smug Lukani had been sent to fetch me. I hated feeling myself growing smaller.
