by Maria Vale
“It’s ‘we have,’ Leofric. We have peas. We have oatmeal and bananas. Just put the bag on the desk.” When Leofric heads over to the desk, Constantine takes the jars, then whispers to him, indicating his shirt.
I can’t hear what he says, but Leofric, who had been wearing a Toronto Blue Jays jersey tucked into long johns, comes back pulling the oversize shirt out and letting it fall loose and wrinkled to his thighs. I’m not sure why it matters, but I trust Constantine in this. As Leonora says, the difference between a human child and a wolf in children’s clothing is a game of inches.
Soon they are tumbling around me, nuzzling my arm, bopping noses with Nils, licking the bloody cartilage of his ear, teething gently at his feet.
Gyta keeps sniffing around Nils’s belly.
“Seegodshiffa’shtnonisbutt,” she says.
I look to Leonora, who hesitates.
“One more time, Gyta?”
“Seegodshiffa’shtnonisbutt!”
Opening her quilted bag with a pearl-studded handle, Leonora pulls out a pair of glasses and a handkerchief. With meticulous care, she starts to rub the lenses, which are big and round and exceptionally flimsy. They’re not real—wolves don’t need glasses—but Leonora uses them as a teaching tool and a way of buying time while she tries to pick apart the words spoken by one of our otherworldly children navigating a tongue that is too thick, teeth that are too flat, and cheeks that are too confining.
After one more concentrated swipe, a look of realization breaks across her face and she sets the glasses on her nose.
“Ah! He has a Shifter shirt on his butt!”
“Gea! Seegodshiffa’shtnonisbutt!” Gyta says excitedly.
“Thank you for reminding me, Gyta. Avery, do we have our present for the maggot?”
Avery holds out a log of cloth. Inside are several shirts and dresses, the mismatched culling of whatever was smallest in dry storage. Surrounding them are white cloths.
Then all the wolflings—pups, First Years, juveniles—creep closer, watching me examine the careful cutting and awkward stitching that transformed the wine- and bloodstained damasked linen of hunters into diapers for maggots.
I gather them to me, my pups and children, and they press their faces into mine, taking the comfort that is their birthright. The sense of belonging. The promise of protection.
Leonora is the last to lean in, her cheek cocked to the side, waiting for her turn. Then she trundles the children and pups out of the cabin. Only a few will return to the Great Hall, where they will try to sleep alone on a bed in the paralyzed walled-in air.
The rest will eat a meal of beaver liver and snuggle together under the night trees, snuffling into each other’s fur.
“Should I go too?” Constantine stands at the door. “I put the food on the table at the back.”
I shake my head, signaling for him to pull the thick inner door closed, so my wolves will give me a little privacy. “I could,” I admit quietly, “use some help.”
A little smile, a little nod, and Constantine closes the door and heads back to the kitchen, returning with a spoon and a bottle of squash.
Maybe Nils smells it and it makes him hungry. Or maybe it makes him furious to find he’s been downgraded from beaver liver to watery orange glop. Whatever the reason, he has suddenly found his voice, an unfortunate amalgam of the high, whiny pitch of a human and the endless lung capacity of a wolf.
When he finally takes the spoon, he gnaws at it with his back jaws, even though he has no teeth there, simply because that’s what he’s used to. Each mouthful is a struggle, and all I can think is: Come on, Nils. Can’t you do this on your own?
I stifle a yawn and realize that my back has begun to sag. Almost as soon as I straighten up again, my shoulders curve forward. Then Constantine is there, scuttling behind me, sitting with his feet under my ass and his shins on either side of my spine. Something to lean into until Nils is finished.
Then he reaches around front to take the bottle from me. He touches the front of my T-shirt.
“Did you spill…?”
He looks at the swath of red on the underside of his arm.
“Evie?”
“Shh. It’s nothing.” I put the sleeping Nils down on the mattress and lie next to him.
“It’s not nothing,” he snarls. He lifts my shirt and stares at the cut, but he doesn’t recognize it for the joyous thing it is.
“I will fucking kill whoever—”
“Me, Constantine. I did it.”
“You what?”
I swallow another yawn. “It’s…complicated.”
“I’ve spent way too much of my life not questioning anything because I didn’t care enough to wonder why. Now I care. So guess what? You don’t get to fob me off either.”
Nils burps loudly and settles back in, the awkward T-shirt/dish towel diaper Constantine created drooping low.
“I want to understand, Evie.” His hand stretches out like a guardian of pale gold above the gash cut into my skin by ancient tradition.
“Two wolves from the 9th were mated.” My hand flows down his arm like water. “So there was a Bredung. A braiding. It connects the mated wolves to each other, to the land, and to the Pack. The braid is made from the hide of our deer, tanned by the bark of our oaks.” I spread my fingers. “It is drenched with the seed and sex of our mates.” He spreads his. “And it is coated in the blood of our Pack.”
He looks down at our interlaced fingers.
“Your blood?”
“Yes. My blood.”
He looks at the thin slash low on my belly. I think it opened up again when I tackled him. John was Alpha long enough to be covered with the scars of his office. I have only the one. There will be others now that the weather is warm and the blackfly are gone. He lays his free hand across it, like he is trying to mend something that isn’t broken.
“It’s a good sign, Constantine.”
“How is this good? You already give them everything—your time, your strength, your happiness, your self, and now…now you give them your blood?”
“It is what the Pack—”
“I don’t care about the Pack,” he snaps loudly. “I only care about you.”
And there it is, the proof that I can’t ignore. He’s not pack. Sometimes, I almost think I could forget, but then he says something like that and reminds me of how little he understands what we are.
“Then you know nothing.” I stare at his hands, one interlaced in mine, the other on my belly. “To care only about one wolf means you are careless of the rest. Humans… There are so many of them, they can afford to have small, selfish loves. We can’t.”
I let go of him, pushing his hand away, pulling my shirt down. I suppose I’ve always known that this was a diversion. The pain tears through anyway.
I straighten the sheet across my shoulders and pillow my head on my bent arm.
Chapter 32
Constantine
Small.
I hadn’t really thought this through.
In my fantasies of a woman who hadn’t been made small, I somehow still expected that I would be her center of gravity and she would fall into orbit around me. When I look at the blood on my hand, I know that’s not really an option.
I remember the way Eudemos licked away Magnus’s pain when he first changed. When I kneel beside Evie and lift the hem of her shirt, she opens her eyes, tired and wary. The muscles of her torso tighten as I take a deep breath and bend down toward her waist. I am tentative at first—I don’t want to hurt her—cleaning the spilled blood smeared by the T-shirt. She is still tense under my hand, and I try to remember the way Eudemos had done it, with faith and commitment that made it seem like a kind of blessing.
Looking at her skin, I take a deep breath and press my tongue to the gash itself, tasting the coppery blood. I try to read
her, stroking her, comforting her, loving her in the way a wolf would until finally her body begins to relax. Stroke by stroke, I feel her both coming apart and knitting together under the gentle pressure of my tongue, this unspeakable intimacy, this benison.
Evie eventually falls asleep with Nils on one side. Even in the middle of the summer, the nights can be cold here and wolves don’t like to be cut off from the outside, so all the windows are open. I pull the blanket from the back of the sofa and shake it out, letting it settle over the two of them.
A small animal scuttles up a tree and a night bird’s wings flap hard in pursuit, pulling fir-scented air in her slipstream followed by a breeze from the north, the lowing of a moose, and a clearing of the sky.
The flap in the door opens and shuts, and a pup sniffs around Evie and Nils with a low whine.
“Nyala,” I whisper so she won’t wake them. As soon as she jumps up on my chest, my toe throbs in recognition. She turns around and around. I put my hand near her so she has something to cuddle into. Then with a big yawn, she sneezes.
The moonlight breaks through the window and Evie sighs. Putting my free hand gently on her thigh, I feel the pulse of her skin. I smell the forest-infused scent of Nyala’s fur. I’ve been told over and over that wolves and pack and land are one, but words are slippery, and while I heard, I never did understand.
Not the way I do now as I watch the moon clear the trees of the Holm to hit the waters of Home Pond and almost weep for the magic of this place that has turned an island into a home.
* * *
In the morning, Evie took Nils with her, along with a bright-pink bag stuffed with the ad hoc diapers, the regurgitated food, and the too-large clothes. Even a maggot belongs to the Pack, and the Pack would take care of him as they did when he had four legs, sharp teeth, and a measure of independence.
The one thing she did not take was my phone. Not first thing in the morning when her foot caught it and sent it sliding across the floor. Not later when I put it into her hand and curled her fingers around it.
Its once-familiar weight now feels odd in my pocket. I take it out and look through the contacts, many of whom are dead: August is listed in my contacts as AAA. Unnamed but always first. Also Antony. Under the D’s is a 604 number. Drusilla, the Bitch of Vancouver.
A stick breaks and I cram the phone back in my pocket.
Cassius stands suddenly still behind me. Then he turns and drives something that I can’t make out high into a tree. Whatever it is, it’s sharp enough to make a pale gash in the bark.
A moment later, I smell the sap bleeding into this wound and another one already beaded with amber.
“They’re very protective of their trees.”
“‘They’re very protective of their trees.’ They don’t bother to look any higher on a tree than the height of a raised leg.”
“What are you doing, Cassius?”
“Marking a path. If I’m going to be trapped here forever, I need to be able to find my way around.”
I realize that at some point I slid my hand into my pocket, trying to disguise the shape of my phone under the shape of my hand.
My thumb feels around, turning it off, so no alerts or alarms will signal to him that there is a line to the world outside, then I slide back into the woods, watching him. Soon, two wolves appear on either side of me, watching, too, until the evening comes and Cassius heads in for Evening Meat.
“I don’t trust him,” I say to the gray wolf on my right.
She shows her teeth and opens and closes her jaws rapidly, making a soft clacking sound.
“Exactly. You going to movie night?”
Tara makes a little expulsive cough.
“See you there.”
Back at the dormitory, I look around for a hiding place. There isn’t one, really. The lack of any old stuff makes it hard to hide new stuff. In the end, like a kid at summer camp, I unzip my cotton pillow liner, slip the phone in, put the pillowcase on, and turn it upside down.
* * *
You think you know somebody.
From the beginning, I’ve known Ziggy was the Great North’s Number One Werewolf Star Fanboy. I don’t know if he’s the GNNOWSF because he runs the AV equipment during movie nights, or he runs the AV equipment during movie nights because he is the GNNOWSF.
Either way, he’s nuts.
“Bill Nighy is an English actor and Bill Nye is the Science Guy. They are not the same.”
“Plug these in,” he says, holding a cord out to me. “Then I’ll show you.”
As soon as I’ve set up the power strip, I come back. “Look, here they are side by side.” Ziggy turns the laptop toward me. “That is the same man. Sickly, they have…light hair and the rims around their eyes.”
“Glasses, Ziggy. And he’s not sickly—they’re not sickly—just thin.”
I’m not really arguing. I now know it’s pointless, given the difficulty Pack have with facial recognition. Strip away sound and smell and feel, and for wolves, it’s like trying to separate one stick figure from another.
Once speakers, projector, and screen are set up, I help other wolves distribute the rickety gold-toned party chairs with their bloodstained ecru cushions in rows with ample leg room on either side of the projector tripod connected to the computer.
We toss around large claw-picked pillows on the floor up front and bowls with water and the teeth-shattering sweet potato pucks that wolves like to gnaw. On the short wall to the right of the door is a table with napkin-lined baskets filled with peanut-butter muffins and popcorn. Chipped earthenware jugs are filled with water and iced tea.
There is no swinging door here, so pups jump their paws up on the screen, whimpering until someone opens up. A pup takes the corner of one of the large cushions between his jaws and drags it across the floor. An older wolf drops his cheese chew, clambers to his feet, and drags both pillow and pup back across the floor.
The door opens again, admitting a wolf dragging a slack Nils in his teeth, his legs dragging along the floor.
“Hey!” I grab at Nils and the wolf growls until I smack him in the jaw, not hard, but in the way of wolves making a point. He opens his jaws and drops the baby into my arms.
“How many times do I have to say this: don’t carry maggots in your teeth.” I smooth out Nils’s rumpled and spit-covered shirt. It would help if he complained about the rough treatment but he never does. I suppose he’s so used to being carried around by the scruff that it doesn’t occur to him that this is not natural. That he should be screaming and crying, not looking up at me with his big, dark eyes and the tip of his tongue sticking out from the corner of his two-toothed smile.
“And just how do you suggest picking him up?” asks Ziggy.
“Arms, Ziggy. Arms.”
Ziggy and the wolf exchange glances. The wolf shrugs, then starts to pick something out of his forepaw with his teeth as though to point out the hole in my logic.
I dampen a cloth with some cold water and wash the dirt from the front of Nils’s legs and the back of his feet, then drag another pillow over, angled to the side so he can be with the pack but not overwhelmed by the flashing lights on the screen.
Soon, the Meeting Hall is crowded. There’s a lot of posturing for the one remaining floor pillow. Magnus gets it until Elijah dumps him out, dragging it away for Thea. Ziggy is once again showing some female his comparison of Bill Nye and Bill Nighy; she lifts her hands up as though to say of course they’re the same. Several pups have joined Nils on his big pillow. Lying on him for a moment, then running off. Poor Nils raises his arm awkwardly after them. One juvenile taunts him by waving her tail in his face. He finally catches it and brings it to his mouth, though there is too much fur and it makes him sneeze.
In the third row on the left side, in the chair one over from the aisle sits Poul with his arm around an empty seat.
/> “Alpha.” I nod to Poul and sit down, feeling the warmth of his arm stretched around my back, smelling the scent of his slaggy armpit.
“I’m saving this seat for the Alpha,” Poul says, staring at me.
“And if she asks me to get up, I’ll get up. Until then, move your fucking arm.” I feel the strength, the warmth, and the hesitation in his arm as he tries to decide whether his status is more likely to suffer from giving in to my demands or staying seated with his arm curled intimately around a Shifter.
He taps his finger rapidly on the back of the chair before finally deciding to extricate his arm. Then to make it clear that he’s not giving in, he pushes his face close, his eyes boring into mine. I may not be a wolf, but I recognize a dominance play when I see it.
Removing my cheese chew to the hand carrying the iced tea, I rock onto the back legs of the chair and slam forward with fair to middling momentum. Poul backs up, his head raised, trying to stanch the bleeding.
The movie is about vampires and—what else—werewolves. It stars either Bill Nighy or Bill Nye. Even I can no longer tell the difference.
“…first Clan of Werewolves: A Vicious and Infectious Breed, unable to take Human Form ever again…Until he was born.”
Poul wipes his nose with his hand, wipes his hand on his arm, then looms over me until my knee meets his balls.
Not sure how he got to be Alpha if a seated man can best him without spilling his iced tea.
“Is that your answer then? You will not come with me, so you want me to stay here for you? Like this? Like an animal?”
Poul stomps off to the Deemer, who is in the process of shoving a handful of popcorn into her mouth. He speaks quickly and Silver holds up one finger, chewing carefully before taking a swig of water and saying a word or two. She turns back to the popcorn. Poul shuffles around so that he’s in front of her again, his mouth moving more, his finger pointed toward me. I can’t hear what’s being said, but judging from her expression, the Deemer does not seem to think that who sits next to the popular girl at movie night is a matter for the law.
