by Ware Wilkins
Tears are in my eyes. They’ve probably been there all along, but the dawn breeze is picking up and blowing them loose, freezing them to my cheeks. In Ingrid’s leather jacket I’m warm enough, but no clothing can protect you from an emotional chill. That’s bone-deep.
Abe’s jaws open and I shut my eyes. The soft crunch of fur and bone crackles and Alec’s keening finally stops. All of the wolves howl and I’m right there in it, listening to their cry that’s loud and painful and fills me with an anguish I don’t even understand.
Benji steps away from me and clears his throat. “If someone will lead me to a shovel, I’ll dig a spot where you want him. You can stay wolf as you say goodbye to Alec.”
Abe sits on the snow, blood on his muzzle. His yellow eyes are unflinching as they stare at me. Another wolf breaks from the ring and pads away, Benji following him.
“I’m sorry, Abe.” I’m not sure which part I’m apologizing for. All of it? For being so wishy washy? Self-centered? For causing him pain? For this new life? There’s no words that I can say, really, beyond “sorry,” so I don’t try to.
Benji comes back with a shovel, but he’s moving slowly, his steps labored and lethargic. The twinkle of early morning sun on the snow breaks me from my own dark regrets. “Benji! Don’t be stupid. Get inside and go to sleep right now. The sun is out!”
“Gotta help,” he says, but his voice is cracking.
“I’ll dig the hole.”
“You hated Alec.”
“I care about you, I care about Abe, and in the end, Alec was doing the best he could. I’ll dig the hole. I’ll help wherever they need it. You go sleep now. I’ve got the queen’s car.” Shrugging out of my coat, I jump a bit to drape it over his head, giving him a bit more cover. “Can you drive?”
“Wait, you have whose car? Nevermind. You can explain that to me after dark. If it’s the queen’s, there will be blankets in the trunk.” I toss him the keys.
He leaves me with the shovel and a pack of wolves grieving their leader. The shovel feels large, but then again, I’m petite. I’ve been awake for too long and I’m out of bone magic completely. Everywhere I look, blood-red spots dot my vision. It doesn’t matter if that’s my memories of the night’s fighting or exhaustion.
“Where would you like him?”
Abe scratches right next to Alec’s body, so that’s where I start digging. It takes a long time. The ground is frozen. The soil near Alec’s house is that dreadful mix of rich black earth for a few inches, then unforgiving red clay underneath. Soon I don’t miss the leather jacket, my sweat dripping like ice water, while my arms and legs burn from effort.
When the hole is dug, a few wolves come over and push Alec in with their snouts. Then all of them turn around and use their back legs to cover him, kicking at the piles of soil I’d heaped around the hole as I worked. After they’re finished, the grave stands out, it’s red mound raised above the white, powdered ground.
Abe leaves first, heading toward the house. I follow, though not too closely, unsure of what comes next. He begins to shift, and I refuse to turn away. It’s hard to watch. It’s noisy. His bones snap and break and mend in a disjointed process, rearranging themselves into his human form. The fur shakes and shivers before pulling back in. His face is the hardest thing to see, the snout smashing in, the teeth shifting and crowding again, and all the time his eyes stay squeezed shut against the pain of it.
“That will get better for him,” Henry says behind me. I glance over my shoulder. He’s shifted, as have a few of the others. They’re setting about cleaning up the remains of their fallen pack members, as well as the dead hunters. Henry’s naked, but it isn’t the first time I’ve seen him in the nude. I look back at Abe as he walks on two feet into the house, his glorious ass shining in the morning light. I’ve seen a lot of naked men in the past twenty four hours, and I’m sad the circumstances have removed any possibility of me finding joy in that fact.
“Shifting will? Or being pack leader?”
He moves beside me and throws an arm over my shoulder. I realize I’ve been shivering since I stopped shoveling, too exposed and lacking in werewolf heat. His body is like a radiator and I welcome the comfort.
“Both, probably. Alec had been working not to go chase the alpha in his territory. I’m not sure he could have stayed away from Abe much longer. Instincts are too hardwired in us, you know?”
“I don’t know, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Nothing’s ever easy around here.”
He lets out a low, dry laugh. “Ain’t that the truth. He’s going to need a lot of time here. Being a pack leader is something few of us are prepared for, and he’s--”
“Basically a baby. Oh, geez, Henry. Are all of you going to be okay?” Is he going to be okay? Is there even an okay possible after all of this?
“Maybe. I’ve never seen anything like this. Hunters usually come solo. Rarely in a pair. But this,” he waves to the lawn strewn with bodies, “is unheard of. And they were so strong.”
“They were high on bone magic.”
“Jesus.” He whistles. “How do you know that?”
A shiver takes hold of me, long and violent, until his arm tightens around my shoulder, offering more support. “It happened at my apartment first, and then at the vampire nest.”
“Why the hell were you at the vamp nest?”
I press my palms into my eyelids until I see spots of color in the dark. The pressure is a decent distraction from the trauma fatigue that’s setting in. “The queen had a toothache.”
Henry shakes his head. “Only you, Sadie. I bet Abe’s dressed and ready to talk now.”
“I love that you gave him time for modesty while you’re all ‘hang out with your wang out’ over here.”
“When you’ve been in a pack as long as I have, you get over nudity quickly. I’ve gotta help the others. This mess… it’s--”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “I know.”
Abe’s inside of Alec’s study. The door is cracked and I can see the outline of his shape through it. Knocking softly, I step in. “Is now a good time?”
His sigh is rough and shaky. “Right now I’m not sure there’ll ever be a good time, Salty.”
Shutting the door behind me, I go to the fireplace. It’s morning, but the chill of the night has my fingers swollen and numb. There’s already wood stacked neatly in the place, a long lighter on the mantle. One click is all it takes for dry kindling to catch, and in moments, we’re bathed in the warm glow of a small fire.
Squatting, I hold my hands to the flames, gritting my teeth through the pins and needles that accompany the blood rushing back to my fingers.
Abe sits heavily in a wingback chair. It’s the one Alec used, large and leather, able to comfortably support the powerful bodies. I move a foot back from the fire and sit cross-legged on the rug, unwilling to leave the comfort of the heat.
“I guess you don’t have to worry about me being driven out of Grimloch,” Abe says, fingers scratching at his beard, like he can still smell and feel Alec’s blood there.
“Now I can worry about you for a whole host of other reasons.” I inch closer to his leg, needing to touch him but scared of the reception I’ll get.
“I thought getting kidnapped and turned was the worst day of my life,” he says, staring at the fire. Its orange glow dances in his eyes. He needs a haircut, his hair long past shaggy and bordering on mountain hippie. It’s the kind of thing that I would have teased him for before, but now I just want to comb my fingers through it and tell him it’ll be okay.
Biting my lip, I risk putting a hand on his knee. His quadriceps flex, but he doesn’t move away from my touch. It’ll have to be enough. “I’m so sorry about Alec.”
“He tried to take too many on.”
“That sounds like him.”
There’s no reply. We sit for a long time, watching the flames and warming up. My stomach growls, and I know I need to call Uncle Oliver and Ingrid and let them know what’s hap
pened, but this stillness feels so rare, so sacred, I’m loathe to end it.
Just when I know I can’t push the moment further, Abe shifts in his chair. He scoots along to its edge, lowering himself to the floor so that we’re close, hip to hip. My stomach twists.
“Abe, I’m so sorry about Benji. I shouldn’t have slept with him.”
His jaw clenches, the vein near his temple pulsing. “Now that I have some perspective, Salty, I’m not mad you slept with him. Well, I am, but that wasn’t the issue. It’s the secrecy. You had plenty of times you could have mentioned he was interested, and that you might be, too.”
I draw my knees up and rest my chin on them. “No offense, Abe, but we’ve had a weird thing going. I went from wanting you for years, to maybe possibly going to have you, to not having you again for months. Then it was so hot between us, and you scared me a bit when you started to shift. I felt guilty about what happened to you, and like it was my job to make you better. It’s hard to love someone and also feel obligated to fix them, I guess. So Benji offered something easy, you know?”
He nods. “In times like these, easy is mighty appealing.” He reaches over and grabs my hand. “The bone magic was a whopper of a lie, though.”
“Yeah, it was. That’s on me, and I’m sorry. I can tell you all my reasons, but in the end, I think I have an addiction that feels almost impossible to beat.” Our fingers are laced together, skin dry and warm. The roughness of his calloused palms is soothing to me, his thumb stroking circles on the web of my thumb.
“So I have to learn to lead a pack, and you have to get magic sober. Where does that leave us?”
Not so long ago, this sort of question would have sparked an immediate and terribly naughty sequence of fantasies in my mind. Now, though? I can only see the fire in front of me. I can feel my hand in his. I can barely think past we’re alive and what’s coming for us next. It’s the old crush, the one formed of years of habitual yearning, that answers. “We could try harder. Start with a date, maybe, like normal people.”
“We’ll never be normal, Salty. Never.”
Something cracks inside of me. It doesn’t hurt as much as I expected it too, but it does leave me feeling more empty. “Is that a no, Abe?”
He releases my hand and wraps a heavy arm over my shoulder, tugging me into his chest. I rub my cheek in the flannel he has on, deeply inhaling his wild, masculine scent. Relishing the strength of his embrace, and trying to pay attention to every detail of this thing I’d wanted for so long. “Tell me,” he says, his voice rumbling through his chest into the ear I’ve got pressed there. “What is it about me you want? What’s so attractive about me that you’re willing to endure what will probably be months, if not years, of moody werewolf with too much on his shoulders? What is it about me you fell in love with?”
There isn’t a rush of feelings so much as memories. I take my time, filtering through them, trying to pare away the instinctual answers and get to the truth. I recall high school Abe, with his football uniform and dashing smile and blond hair. Or how he looked the first time I saw him in his uniform, with its tight pants and shiny badge and stupid hat. Abe made that hat look good, and that takes a special kind of handsome. His grin, when he teased me and gave me a hard time. Watching him care for others and support his friends and community and wanting that for me. He was so steady at a time when my parents had been murdered and I got tangled up in magical debt and my life felt out of control.
“I think I might not have ever loved you, Abe. In reality, we barely know each other, right? Like, you knew who I was, and you had a vague understanding of my life, but we were never in the same circles or anything. Grimloch’s so small, though, that if you see someone your whole life--”
“You think you know them,” he offers gently, letting me know I’m not offending him with this revelation.
“Exactly. So I watched you all that time, and I fell in love with you, because there couldn’t be a better poster boy for All-American small town hero. You were nice, and strong, and you were normal. I’d just made the terrible deal with the tooth fairy, and my parents had been murdered. My best friend is a psychic stripper. I didn’t think I could ever have normal, and it made you desirable. The golden ticket out of the clusterfuck of my life.”
He grunts. “No need to sugar coat or anything. It’s only my feelings at risk here,” he jokes.
My laughter comes from a deep place. It’s full and rich with release. I laugh so hard my ribs hurt, and I double over, which pushes Abe into his own fit of laughter. We pound the floor. We wipe tears that won’t stop coming. We gasp for air, desperately trying to find a moment to get a grip, only to lose it entirely and descend into the hell that is a giggle fit that won’t end.
My heart is ten pounds lighter when I’m able to pull myself together. Abe wheezes and manages an almost straight face. “We shouldn’t be laughing,” I admit. “Not after everything that’s happened.”
“When things get bad, Sadie, and I trust you know that they’re real bad now, laughter is about the best thing we can do.”
My smile hurts my cheeks, it's so big, and I wouldn’t change a thing. “Well, what about you? What made you want me?”
“Honestly?” He drags a hand through his hair.
“Honestly,” I assert.
“Those purple panties. We were in those cages and scared to death and you stripped down to those sexy purple panties--”
“Abe, you jerk--”
“I mean, I didn’t think it was possibly to pop a boner while kidnapped and half beaten to death, but that part of me worked just fine when you started doing that spell.”
“I can’t believe you.” I snort.
He shrugs. “You’re right. It wasn’t that.”
“What was it, then?”
“When I thought you were doing kinky stuff with three dudes. I walked away thinking ‘if she’s open to that, I bet she’d let me put my--’”
My hand clamps over his mouth. “Don’t you dare, Abraham Murray. I’m just going to tell myself it was my wit and charm that reeled you in, and you were pining for me for almost as long as I did you.”
“That’s not too far from the truth.”
We turn to face each other. He reaches out and cups my face in his hands. He looks at me with something akin to longing… but not love. Then Abe kisses me, soft, the kiss I’d always pictured first. His lips move over mine gently, his tongue sneaking out to tease, but he doesn’t take it further. It’s nice. It’s sweet.
It’s definitely goodbye.
When we break apart, we grin at each other. “We might’ve been real good, Salty.”
“Yeah, probably. We still can be, just as friends. Right?”
“Oh, for sure. Just don’t break out those purple panties around me, or I might not be able to stay a gentleman.”
“Still no answer?” Abe asks me as he sits in front of his computer and I loudly curse at my phone.
“No. It’s a signal issue. I’m texting her, too, because maybe those will go through?”
“Doubt it. Your uncle is pretty remote, even for Grimloch. Cell service is flaky in his neck of the woods.”
Which I know, having grown up there, but we always used a land line. Oliver stopped paying for it after I moved out. Apparently he only had it because he assumed a teenage girl needed a phone. In his defense, he wasn’t wrong.
I’m frustrated, though, because I hate to think of them worrying about me. Worst case scenario is Uncle Oliver deciding to drive over to the nest to get me, see the carnage there, and go all black magic on sleeping vampires before they can tell him where I am. While I wouldn’t miss the queen, I would regret that the nest had been killed for no reason, and I’d regret losing the protection of the nest for Ingrid.
Poor Ingrid. In her hormonal state, she’s probably worried out of her mind. If Uncle Oliver doesn’t go to the nest of his own volition, he might be pushed into it as an excuse to get away from Ingrid’s anxiety. He’s never been great
with girls or crying.
When I get back, I’m going to hug her so hard. And when I work on Dale next week, I’ll charge money, not teeth, and take her out for a super nice dinner. It won’t fix everything, but temporary feel-goods are still feel-goods.
“You don’t have to wait for the vampire,” Abe adds. “One of the pack can take you in a car.”
“I’m not off the hook for important, soul-bearing conversations, yet. I don’t want to desert Benji.”
Abe makes a very sheriff-like noise. It’s this grunt that’s sort of hmm… and huh and aha! All smushed together. “Your apartment building burned down. They’re looking for survivors, since no remains were found. You’ll need to call the fire department.”
I swoon for a moment before sinking onto the bed in Abe’s bedroom. He’s been searching online to see how Grimloch made sense of all the bad that went down last night. He’s in full law-and-order mode and I appreciated it until now. But he hears me and is by me in a second.
“What’s wrong?”
“Um, you just said my home is burnt to the ground. My home, Abe.” All of my clothing, my things, gone. Oh, God, my specially imbued dental chair that made my job so, so much easier is destroyed. “Ingrid and I don’t exactly have savings, you know.”
He rubs my back. “I’m sorry, I was being insensitive. That really sucks. At least renter’s insurance will help off-set it, and I can help you navigate that.”
Renter’s insurance? My giggle is maniacal--high pitched and a titter, really. “What kind of responsible adult do you think I am?”
His face pales. “You don’t have insurance?”
“Nope!” More laughter.
“This isn’t funny, Sadie. Do you have savings?”
Now I’m in danger of another laughing spell and I just don’t have energy for it. Squeezing his shoulder, I shake my head. “Weren’t you the one who said to laugh when things get bad?”
