by Maria Vale
Now I don’t.
By the time I reach the edge of the dock, the children are gone, tumbling in the grass surrounding a crumpled blanket that is empty except for a few plates of food.
The Alpha is alone, sitting with her arms wrapped around one knee, the other foot tracing patterns in the water. I grab at the corner of the dock, pretending that I don’t feel the tiny waves lapping against my nipples. That water isn’t tracing paths down the muscled curve of her calf. That if my mouth forms the word Alpha, her name won’t emerge instead.
Evie.
“Are you getting out?” she says.
No, I’m not getting out. I’ve got an erection the size of a two-by-four stuffed into 80 percent cotton and 20 percent Spandex.
It’d frighten the children.
“I think I’ll swim a little more,” I say. “Not far. Just near the dock.”
Someone calls to her and she pulls her foot out of the water. I reach for it, unthinking, but stop before I touch her.
“Would you teach me?” she says, looking over the broad expanse of water. “Teach me how to swim like that? Away?”
Oh, Evie.
“Yes,” I say, hoping my voice is neutral but knowing it’s not.
“Alpha!”
Why can’t they leave her be? Just for a moment?
“Tomorrow night,” she says quickly and quietly. “When the moon is in the Endeberg Notch.”
She leans forward, cupping her hand into the lake, then scrubs her neck and face with handful after handful of cold water. “The juveniles have made a picnic,” she says, louder this time. “If you wait too long, there will be nothing left but avocado-and-jelly sandwiches.”
The water drips down her skin and onto her shirt. Her nipples are tight underneath. I smile my unthinking smile while using my thumb to slide the crown of my immoderate cock down beneath my waistband.
Mustn’t frighten the children.
Poul is almost at the dock. The Alpha puts both hands on the worn wood, then pushes up with a sigh. I’ve never said a word to him, but that does not stop me from hating him. Hidden by the water still murky from churning feet and paws, I slip under the dock, creaking beneath Poul’s weight.
“Alpha,” Poul says. Through the slit between the planks, I see her stand utterly still while he leans in to sniff at her neck.
“Alpha,” he says again, more urgently. “You smell like—?”
“I smell like pond water.” She slaps irritably at the air near his nose, like she’s swatting away blackfly. “I’m getting something to eat.”
A little water drips from her body onto the dock, through the planks, and onto my upturned face. Through the scent of wood and wolves and forest and fur is one I haven’t smelled before. I suck it in one breath after another, trying to figure out what it is, like a word that remains just beyond my grasp, until suddenly, I know. It is granite covered by the delicate stems of bright-green moss. A forest in miniature, a fragile world growing on bedrock.
The scent of Evie imprints itself on my brain.
On the grass, the children pluck at the uncomfortable bright fabrics confining their skin. Others, in their barely contained wildness, tussle and wrestle and lick and bite. I wish I could say that there is forgiveness enough for the strange and the unworldly, but I’d be lying.
Heading back out into the water, I wait until everyone is gone and nothing is left but the peculiar avocado-and-jelly sandwiches made by these strange and beautiful children.
They are delicious.
The sandwiches, I mean.
* * *
The next morning, I take a newspaper on a long wooden rod from the bracket along the library wall that’s filled with them and settle into the sofa in front of the cold fireplace, coffee and cranberry-and-pumpkin-seed scone slathered with butter at hand.
I tap the scone on the plate so I won’t have to sweep up the loose crumbs.
There’s a serendipity to reading these physical objects and the news that is not filtered for my taste by predictive algorithms. Wolves have already marked things that they think are of use to the Pack, like the business article about tech stocks or a vulnerable state senator or a potentially worrying invasion of feral pigs into Upstate New York. At least three wolves have circled the article, adding a superfluous SWINE!!!
Before long, I hear the endlessly irritating monotone bellyaching. I brush the crumbs from my hands, put my plate in the bin, and hang up the newspaper. In the basement, I lean against the metal cage of dry storage and wait.
“What are you doing here?” Cassius whispers as soon as he sees me.
“She’s not coming.” I keep my voice neutral.
“It’s that shit Lorcan, isn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just balls up his fist and circles around, looking for something to hit that isn’t going to hurt him back, but this is not a place of soft surfaces so he then stops again in front of me.
“That fucker won’t let me near her.” He picks at a callus on his hand. “Look at this.” He shows me his roughened palm. “You know what I’m doing? Laundry. I’ve got a fucking degree from U of T, and I’m doing laundry.”
“Elijah is a lawyer. He’s got to have at least two degrees.”
“Elijah’s a dog. He doesn’t know any better except to fetch and sit and lie down.” He finally peels the yellowed skin off. “I hear they got you banging out chairs.”
I can almost feel the crunch of bone against the heel of my palm. Feel the soft pop of eyeballs beneath my thumbs. Hear the gagging. Smell the blood. Benches, asshole. I make fucking fine benches.
“Hunh,” I say, though even that noncommittal grunt takes effort.
“I’m sick and tired of being told what to do,” he says.
“What? Like August didn’t tell us what to do?”
“That’s not the same thing at all. He paid us. Good money, plus people knew I was somebody when I worked for him.”
Somebody making the world safe for cabbages.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Something August said about cabbages.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? We are trapped here in the middle of a jungle, no way out, nobody knows where we are, and you’re talking about cabbages?”
“More to the point, nobody cares.” I reach my elbow around to stretch the cramping in my back. “Besides, what would you do if you did?”
“Did what?”
“Get out, Cassius. Our skills are not readily transferrable, and August isn’t going to be writing any letters of recommendation.”
He looks at me with the sly expression of an idiot discovering a thing that everyone else has already learned and discounted.
Don’t say it, idiot. Don’t say it.
“August wasn’t the only Leveraux out there.”
I told you not to, but you said it anyway.
“Cassius, we never spent much time together, but I’m going to do you a favor anyway. You don’t know her.”
“I met her once. With my parents. She was pretty and made me cookies. Oatmeal and raisin.”
“Just because she bakes cookies doesn’t make her a good person. She killed her brother. Cut him into tiny pieces, and he was a better fighter than you will ever be.” I rub the ball of my thumb. “You are August’s man. Never underestimate the power of her hatred.”
“That’s exactly what I’m counting on because I can give her the one thing that she hates more than August.”
The cold creeps up my back, and when he says it—when he says, “I can give her this Pack”—it takes my heart like frostbite.
* * *
Otho was the only person I talked to about my mother. “She was a powerful wolf,” he said, like every Lukani who’d known Maxima. “A little like Drusilla in some ways.” I waited for him to say something else, but
he just went back to cleaning guns. He was fanatical about making sure every gun was cleaned, zeroed, and loaded, so we did that a lot.
He wasn’t a big talker and wouldn’t say more than he felt like at the moment he felt like it.
Finally, when it was all done and he’d slid his .44 in his shoulder holster, he said, “Never try to make a powerful woman small.” He cupped his hands together into a ball and made as though he was pressing the air inside. “There’s only so small you can make them before they”—he shot his fingers apart into the air—“explode.”
I looked at the prominent scar at the base of his thumb.
“Kind of like stars that way.”
And that was all he said.
When I found him in the steam room of his health club in Toronto, that was the only part that was intact, the fleshy muscle of his thumb, with the scarred-over bite. The distinctive marker left by Mala, the wolf who had made Drusilla feel small.
Chapter 23
Evie
“How long have you been here?”
The dock creaks, the swallow song melds together into a dull murmur, while the water rustles through the grasses at water’s edge.
“Since Evening Song,” he says from the Adirondack chair at the end of the dock. “I wasn’t sure whether you meant on the dot of Moon in the Endeberg Notch or Moon in the Endeberg Notch-ish.”
“You have no idea where the Endeberg Notch is, do you?”
He shakes his head.
Resting my elbow on the arm of the chair, I lean down, pointing to the last mountain of the northern range and the notch between it and the pile of rock that was too small for our ancestors to bother giving even one of the unimaginative names they specialized in. Westdæl, the West Place. Norþdæl, the North Place. Endeberg, the End Mountain.
“The moon’s coming up now. Right there.” I pluck at something sticking to my lashes. “You won’t see it if you don’t look.”
“You have…” He touches his own eyelashes, then reaches his hand toward my cheek. “Should I try?”
I close my eyes, feeling the edge of his hand anchored cool on my cheek, his thumb and forefinger gentle as though I were something precious that needed care. He is close enough for me to feel his warm breath eddy against my skin. When I open my eyes, he is holding a black straight hair on his thumb.
“Do you want it?”
“Why would I?”
“To make a wish.”
“A wish?”
Now it’s his turn to close his eyes. He takes a deep breath and blows. “It’s a human thing, making a wish on an eyelash.”
“Does it work if you make a wish on a guard hair?” I free my hair, sliding the wide band into my pocket. “Because that was a guard hair.”
Then I reach for the hem of my shirt, pulling it over my head. It’s still covering my eyes when I hear Constantine suck in a deep breath and stumble. When the shirt is off, he is squatting behind the Adirondack chair, his back to me.
I lower myself naked into the water and paddle around, my nose high in the air like wolves do, until I hear the splash of a body on the other side of the dock.
I look toward the Great Hall, making sure that the Pack is safely dispersed through the more distant parts of Homelands where prey is more plentiful.
Constantine emerges from the water, his head back, hair streaming, water cupped and glistening in the valleys and indentations made by bone and muscle. I reach for the dock, pulling myself farther away.
He swims in a broad, lazy loop around me. I watch what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. It looks easy enough but when I push off from the dock, I founder and return to the steady churning with four limbs, running through water like wolves always do.
“That’s called the dog paddle,” he says and twists away when I snarl at him for using the d-word. “You need to stretch your legs out like one of those birds.”
“Geese?”
“No, not geese. I know geese. They shit on August’s old compound. I’m talking about the ones that have long beaks and long legs, and when they fly, you can see their legs stretched out behind them.”
“Heron?”
“Maybe that’s it.”
I imagine a heron, legs and beak almost a straight line, my arms spread out, flapping above it all until I sink and I churn my way back to the surface, Constantine’s voice echoing in my head.
“You have to keep your legs up,” he says when I reemerge. He holds his arms stretched toward me. “Here. Take my hands.”
I turn away and try again, but as soon as I stretch out my legs, my back arches and my legs sink down. This time when I come back up, he is at the dock, his back to me, staring toward the fireflies flittering around the honey locust.
“Is it because I’m not Pack?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m asking why you won’t ever let me help you. Not now, not yesterday when you were hurt, not before when all I was trying to do was pick up some stupid papers—”
“It’s not because of who you are.” I grab hold of the edge of the dock. “It’s because of who I am. You don’t understand wolves. The Pack is so strained, so skittish; they get combative if they think there isn’t a firm hand at the top directing them.” Pups chase something through the blueberry bushes behind the Boathouse. “My Beta is an engineer. She once said the Pack is like an arch and the Alpha’s the keystone, making sure that pressure is directed. But if the keystone fails, the arch crumbles.”
They skitter to a stop as a squirrel scrambles up into the birch tree.
“I am not a wolf.”
“No.”
“And you are not a stone.”
I say nothing.
“So is there any way that I could pick up some fallen papers or hold your hand without it signaling the end of the world?”
A bat zigzags low over the water in a flash of leathery wings and he holds his hands out for me with a slow, lost, asking smile that doesn’t make sense on his hard face, but still I let go of the dock and take his hands and…
The world doesn’t end.
It is easier to stretch my legs out like a heron. I start to kick slowly. I feel the currents stirred by his legs as he pulls me along until I start kicking faster and bump into him. Hair in my eyes, I hold on to his shoulders, thick and broad and hard under my hands, while my legs float forward and my thigh brushes his knee.
A shudder runs through me that has nothing to do with the cold, and he pushes my wet hair away from one eye, his palm rough from working with wood on my cheek, his mouth open, but with no breath, there are no words, just the unspoken question.
Would the world end?
The moon rises above the mountains to the east and shines on both the water and on my fingers silhouetted on his shoulders.
I push away from him across the surface of the water. He’s hovering not far away. I feel it in the way the water ripples against my skin. I don’t want to be watched. I need a little time when no one is looking to me for anything so that I can think.
Pulling my legs and arms in tight, I let my body descend into the dark and silent deep where there is no Great North, no forever wolves, no humans, no Shifters, no Constantine, no nothing.
Then it is really and truly just me.
Chapter 24
Constantine
Where is she?
I tried to give her space because it’s what she needs. It’s what I need too. Get away from her. From everything: the twist of the attenuated muscle that leads to the graceful fillip of her collarbone. The way the water clings to her hair like diamantine on velvet. The way she arches her back, trying to push her legs higher, and her perfect ass comes above water dotted with tiny goose bumps.
Every word I said to her—kick, breathe, straighten, bend—was a broken substitute for the words I
wanted to say.
Lick, breathe, suck, open, come.
So I put distance between us, checking on her with each pass as I spiral outward. Then at one turn, I look for her and see neither her nor a trace of her on the water’s smooth surface. I watch for seconds and minutes. Don’t be an idiot, I tell myself.
She’s strong. Nothing could happen to her.
The Great North cannot bear the loss of another Alpha.
She’ll be back up soon, I tell myself.
The lake remains huge and dark and smooth, and it makes me panic in a way that no riptide or undertow ever could and I dive deeper and deeper until my lungs are about to burst, not because I give a fuck about the Great North, but because Constantine can’t bear the loss of Evie.
Finally, I see her above me. A silhouette picked out in the moon, legs crooked, arms tight. Only her hair spreading around her in a rough crown. I rush up, dragging her with me to the surface. Twice, I’ve seen people being rescued from rough seas off the Maritimes, and in both cases, they coughed and struggled. Evie doesn’t do either, and I suppose that should have given me a clue. Instead, she leans back, breathing steadily, her hands floating loose on the water, her head against my shoulder, her eyes shining as she watches the sky drift past.
I swim for the shore opposite the dock, both because it is nearest and because it is farthest from any Pack. If they can’t accept the idea that someone might carry her coffee cup, who knows what they would think if they saw her being rescued.
Except she’s not being rescued. As soon as we reach the other side of the lake and her feet touch the bottom, she grabs for a slim tree that bends precipitously over the water, pulling herself onto the shore with a hop. Her arms bent, muscles beside the wings of her shoulder blades form a V angled toward the runnel of her spine that leads to two shadowy dips, one on either side above the perfect curve of her ass. The tear along her ribs.
