by Maria Vale
From the outside, the Alpha’s cabin is no larger than any of the other wolves’. It isn’t posh on the inside either. One large room with a kitchen area and tiny bathroom in the back. In the front, a staircase leads to a sleeping loft up above though she has her mattress in the middle of the lower floor. Maybe because she doesn’t want to stumble up and down the narrow steps every time her wolves need her.
Next to it is a sturdy sun-bleached blue twill sofa with a flattened pillow to one side. Immediately next to it is a white painted desk with a chipped edge and a faux-colonial side lamp. Where everything else is spare, this is cluttered with two mugs: one holds nothing but a dried tea bag. I’m not a bitch, it says. I’m THE bitch. The other is made of speckled enamelware and holds pens, pencils, and a ruler. A manila folder with the word DONE scrawled across it is next to a large printing calculator and rolls of replacement paper. Another manila folder that says nothing but is full to bursting takes up the middle cushion.
“Rawp?” a pup calls from the back, followed by another, and then the whole tiny pack chimes in. They are in the kitchenette. I’ve never really been back here. Partly because it’s farther than the bathroom and partly because there is a small table with two seats that’s hard to see without imagining Evie sitting across from the man I know only as an empty wolf skull and a flannel shirt that smells like stony absence.
Aside from that small table and those two chairs, there isn’t much: a hot plate, a sink, an electric kettle.
The pups are gathered around, some sitting patiently, staring at the long, open shelf above the counter. Others are propped with their front paws on a lower cabinet, yipping and barking at me.
Hard to imagine what they’re so excited about. Dish soap. A stack of kitchen towels. It takes me a minute to realize that the white, blue, and yellow tin that says Chesty Potato Chips in fact holds antlers.
I pull it out. “Antlers?”
The pups keep looking at the same place and barking to make clear that they’re hunting something better than antlers. I pull down the Chesty Potato Chip can. And there it is: a glass canister with orange sticks like the one that was my puppy pity prize when I first came to Homelands. I now know the cheese chews are about as tender as steel radials but surprisingly tasty. The pups run around in circles, yapping.
Pulling out two, I toss them toward the main room, but the motion disturbs Nils, who jerks, whimpers, and starts to pee again. I aim him toward the sink while he is still low-flow.
“Well, this is certainly not going to work,” I tell him, grabbing a couple of dish towels from the shelf above. Something heavy falls to the counter.
There in the middle of the counter with its turquoise and beige boomerangs and round burn marks left by the teakettle is a phone. It has a shimmering red-gold cover and a cursive J set in rhinestone. It is like an alien landing on the worn midcentury-modern Formica.
I feel around the towels until, tucked in the back, I find Magnus’s phone, mine, and what must be Cassius’s. I’d assumed that they’d been destroyed or were in a distant landfill or locked in a safe, not hidden behind a stack of faded gingham like the key to the liquor cabinet belonging to parents who don’t trust the babysitter.
Unlike Julia’s glitz, my phone is all business. The case is black, slip-proof, drop-tested, and resistant to pressure, water, blood, bile, and vomit. The phone is called the Titanix Thunderhead. It has a max-power 18,000mAh battery that would have given me fifty days of standby talk time even if the phone hadn’t been turned off.
Piss-proof, too, as I discover when Nils startles again and lets out a swallowed cry that sounds like wrorc and another little dribble. I aim him back to the sink.
When he’s done, I drape a towel over his penis because I no longer trust him. Rinsing off my phone, I push the power button.
I have three bars and only one hand, and that one has been calloused thick by all the hammering and sawing, making it hard to manipulate the little buttons that were once second nature. Finally, I find what I’m looking for.
Twice I watch the video that purports to teach how to rig an emergency diaper with two dish towels (for absorbency) and a T-shirt (to keep it in place). Putting Nils on the mattress, I start my adventure in DIY diapering surrounded by those pups who have suddenly lost interest in the cheese chews.
Endlessly curious, they nose everything, especially the phone, which Nils has, after all, marked. Then one snuffles at the screen and switches to a video about Minecraft skins. “Hey,” I say folding the towel in thirds, “that is not helping.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Between the pups and the piss and the phone, I hadn’t noticed the door opening or the pups looking toward it. Or even that one close to me who has dropped his cheese chew and stares at it guiltily.
“Who are you talking to?” Evie says, at once furious and despairing. A second later, she barrels into me. I grab her thigh and twist, trying to get her away from Nils. The pups start barking loudly, the baby whimpers, and Evie seems intent on ripping a window into my chest.
I try to protect myself and Nils, whose body has rolled into the indentations made by two enormous adults thrashing next to him. There’s a sudden, excruciating pain in my big toe that makes me jump, and Evie takes advantage of it to jam her forearm into my throat.
“Who. Are. You. Talking. To?” she demands again, holding my phone with its now-blank screen in her free hand.
With one hand buttressed against her forearm, trying to keep my trachea from being soldered to my spine, I flail around with the other, fumbling to get my thumb to the little spot that will unlock my phone. By the third time, I hit the circle and swipe. After what seems like an eternity, she lets up the pressure on my windpipe and I curl on my side, gagging up my lungs.
“What is it?” she asks, holding up a picture of a wan, cheery woman, diapering a smiling dead-eyed doll.
Things are swimming in front of my eyes, my lungs feel like punctured balloons, and my toe is simultaneously on fire and being crushed by pliers because a pup has inserted her tiny needle teeth into either side of the joint.
Sucking in one discordant breath after another, I jab my finger frantically at Nils. “Dpr!”
My dizziness is joined by a cool tingling, and blood returns to my brain. “Diaper,” I repeat and she plucks at the clunky folds of dish towels held together by my T-shirt. “Look.”
The phone has gone black again, but I disable the lock before handing it to her. She hesitates.
“Look, Evie. Look at everything.” I flick through texts, emails, search history, maps. Showing her that the last call out was to Tiberius the day August died.
Nyala growls deep in her little throat, sending vibrations through her fangs and into my joint. I lean forward, inserting my fingers gently into her mouth. She growls again and tightens her jaws. I suck in a sharp breath through clenched teeth.
“Liðe, Nyala. Liðe.” The pup looks up with her bright, dark eyes, watching as Evie scoots around and rubs her thumb across the pup’s muzzle. “Nyala, let go.”
Her teeth slowly loosen in an agonizing grinding between the bones.
“Constantine…” Evie says, holding the phone gingerly in her hands, her finger absently tracing circles on the back. “I…”
“Whatever you say, don’t let it be ‘sorry.’”
“I should have trusted you.”
“No you shouldn’t. You have too much at stake to trust any of us. I have done so many things…” I close my eyes as though that will do anything to erase the draining horror of it all. “I am not a good man, Evie.”
She turns her head until her cheek is soft against my hand. “Why didn’t you just bring Nils to the Great Hall?”
“Do you know anything about babies?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. We haven’t had one since… Since a long time. Do you?”
“A little more than nothing. You clearly had something on your mind.” I cross my arms in front of me and count out four fingers on each of my biceps. “You still do.”
She leans against me, her shoulder brushing mine. Then she pulls down Nils’s lower lip, revealing his two tiny, square teeth.
“How long will he be like this?” I ask.
“Depends. When they’re this young, they don’t understand the change. They don’t know what a trigger is or how to use it to change back. And they don’t have the language to be guided through it, so unless he accidentally triggers it again, he’ll be like this until the Iron Moon.”
She touches Nils’s naked tummy and the little belly button folded like an eye.
“What have you gotten yourself into, mattalinga?”
“Mattalinga?”
“Little maggot. It’s what we call them because they’re soft and squirmy and they piss wherever they are.”
Even chuckling sends a shock through my toe, and I cross my foot against my thigh to examine the bloody puncture marks.
“Does it hurt?”
“Excruciating. Who knew that puppy teeth in the joint of the big toe could be so painful?”
“You know it is just a—”
“Flesh wound. I know. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”
She leans back against my shoulder, smiling distractedly as I rock back and forth, my hand on her calf.
“A hiker saw a gray wolf on the edge of Westdæl,” she finally says. “Took a picture. It’s not good, easy enough to dismiss as a coyote. Thea is investigating in her official role.”
She watches my thumb stroking her wrist for a long time.
“We need that land,” she says with a vague wave toward that westernmost peak and the ripped-up range to the north. “The forever wolves won’t share with us, and they shouldn’t have to. They will also den. Next spring or the spring after, they will start to form a pack of their own. If they wander…” Her voice breaks. “We hoped maybe Tiberius would inherit, but August never had a will.”
“Can’t say as I’m surprised.” August’s imagination was profligate when it came to the deaths of others but sterile when it came to his own. Even after he was shot in the neck, he refused to hear any talk of what might happen after his death. “Après moi, le déluge,” he’d said.
“Tiberius is going to contact August’s mate, Drusi—”
“No!”
“What?”
I twist around, grabbing her arms. “Have you called her, Evie? Have you talked to her?”
Nils makes an alarmed sound in her arms. “It’s the weekend again. Elijah says her lawyer’s offices will be closed and we should try tomorrow.”
“Listen to me and promise me, promise me, you won’t try to contact Drusilla.”
“We are wolves; we don’t make promises. We say what we mean. We need that land, Constantine. Tiberius only wants that. He won’t contest anything else.”
“Tiberius doesn’t know anything about Drusilla. Right now, the only Lukani who know Tiberius is alive are here. You have to come up with a different way of getting it. Create a shell company that specializes in shale or paper products or something. That’s how August bought it in the first place. But do not let Drusilla know about Tiberius. And don’t let her know about the Great North.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Don’t fob me off with ‘It’s complicated,’” she says sharply. “I am the Alpha of the world’s last great wolf pack. Everything is complicated.”
I scratch at the old scars on my ankles.
“Constantine?”
“I’m trying to think where to start.”
“At the beginning. I find that’s usually best.”
I don’t go all the way back. Some of it is from before I was born, but I tell her what I learned from Otho about how Lukani settlements used to straddle the boundaries between men and the wild. It allowed us to be mostly human but to occasionally indulge our more bestial natures without human interference. As humans spread, eating up the land, they pushed the wild into smaller and smaller spaces. Our settlements, too, and that was when August saw an opportunity to consolidate the Lukani and his own power. He traveled among the settlements, warning that the time of the wild was over. We needed to make a decision: to stay as we were and die or to give up the thing that made us less than human and take the money and power and security that came from being men.
“Before, we were more like the Great North. Women leading, men leading, but at the time August was amassing power, that wasn’t going to work with humans who were not used to negotiating with women. So, he said, our men would have to lead and make decisions and the women would…not.
“He had an ally. Drusilla. She was the leader of settlements in the western part of the country, but she tied herself to him. Otho said his sister truly loved August. She went everywhere with him, and while he talked to the men, she ‘convinced’—and I use that word loosely—Lukani women that while they would not be the face of power when dealing with humans, they would retain absolute power where it counted most, at home.
“I don’t know how long it took. Three years? five? Not that it matters. What matters is that one cocktail party at a time, the Lukani females were domesticated. Those that weren’t domesticated were dead.”
I don’t tell her about my parents. About how I’d always been introduced as Maxima’s son. How the older men all had some story about my mother, none of which involved the excellence of her brownies but instead were about the sharpness of her mind and her teeth.
There was something about Drusilla that reminded me of the worst parts of my mother. She was wound so tight. Her clothes were stiff on her body. Her hair was in curls that felt hard if you touched them. The house smelled like bleach and ammonia. Her domestic power was not only absolute, it was tyrannical.
I was there when Mala came, bringing the wild with her, and that was when Drusilla learned the limits of her domestic power, because August, who was a tamer to his bones, was obsessed.
Mala wore clothes only occasionally. Wore shoes never. She bit.
“You?”
“No, Otho, Drusilla’s brother. Julia’s father.”
Mala’d taken off her clothes to shift, and Otho grabbed her hair, telling her to stop. August said nothing. He watched as Mala kicked his brother-in-law in the balls and then bit his hand hard enough to take out a chunk at the base of his thumb.
Otho pulled out a gun, but August…August was like a sleepwalker. None of us existed anymore: not Otho, not me, not Drusilla. Mala was all he could see. I remember it. He said nothing, just touched her cheek. She leaned into it and then he rubbed his face to hers and when he went to the back, she followed. I was a teenager and I knew what was happening. Drusilla followed them into the bedroom, and when she came out, she was another person.
There’s only so small you can make women before they explode.
And Drusilla, who had been made very small, exploded into something very dangerous.
August wanted power, but Drusilla wanted destruction. She traded in the most insidious drugs. She not only didn’t care if people died and communities were destroyed; she craved it. Her pain made her need the pain of others. Even August was afraid of her. Mala died in childbirth; August told her that Tiberius died soon after. She killed her own brother for staying with August.
Evie leans against me.
“Do you think Drusilla knows where Homelands is?”
“I know she doesn’t. Because if she did, you would be dead.”
Chapter 31
Evie
Shifting from foot to foot, Constantine holds the cold little maggot tucked tight and warm against his body while I open up the Crapton group on WhatsApp.
“Who’s Craptin?” he asks.
“It’s not
Craptin. It’s Crapton. As in, we have a crap ton of lawyers. I was tired when I set up the chat group. Obviously not something I want to share with anyone.”
Nyala yips loudly. She’s got her paws on Constantine’s calf. “I’m still pissed at you,” he says, but he scoops her up anyway.
“Does Drusilla go by Leveraux?”
“They never got divorced, but I think she uses her maiden name, which is Martel. Drusilla Martel. The last names are all fake, used to placate the humans, so it hardly matters.”
I tell them not to make any contact with Drusilla Leveraux/Martel and I use the shouty caps that are the closest virtual equivalent to an Alpha call. Within seconds, the Crapton responds with a thumbs-up emoji, the closest virtual equivalent to submission.
“Keep up, Wulflingas.” A voice like a muffler malfunction wafts across the stream separating my cabin from the Great Hall.
“I forgot I told Leonora she could bring the class to see Nils,” I whisper hurriedly. It’s too late for Constantine to get out unseen.
I sit down, the waistband of my jeans digging painfully into my abdomen. I unzip the zipper, then hold my arms out for Nils. Constantine kisses me quickly, before limping to the chair, a chaste distance away.
“How do eet win is two teefs?” asks Gyta.
“Good question. Did everyone hear? Gyta asked how a maggot eats with only two teeth. Watch the stream, Adrian. That’s why Tara bought the regurgitated food. Who has the baby food? Leofric? Don’t drop it.”
Leonora opens the screen door, holding it for children and pups and mosquitoes.
“Shoes,” she barks and our awkward children bump into each other like balls in a pachinko machine, trying to drop their shoes into the old milk crate. They come over to the mattress, eyes lowered for that customary second the presence of the Alpha requires.
Leonora puts her hand on Leofric’s back. He steps forward, reaching inside a cloth bag.
“We gotses peas,” he says. “And we gotses”—he pulls out another, studying the label—“oatmeal and bananas and we gotses…”
