by Maria Vale
“Any coffee to go with this?”
“No, but we’ll get water on the way.” He taps something hollow in his breast pocket.
“Water” turns out to be a stream. The hollow thing is a flask, which he fills and throws to me before leaning down, the blade of his hand holding back the leaves, and drinking straight from the stream.
I knew Tiberius from the beginning. When he was born and when he was small and when his teeth came in. First two flat little teeth at the bottom, then flat little teeth on the top. Some more flat little teeth to the side, then slightly before he turned two, his canines came in right on schedule only they didn’t stop. August had already killed the human nanny who had seen his son turn into a puppy one day and hadn’t stopped screaming.
Eventually, August had trained him never to turn into a puppy, which was very hard. After that, training him never to smile came easy.
Now when Tiberius straightens up, his fangs glisten unhidden. Water drops from the tips, disappearing in the trickling stream.
“We better get going,” he says, and within seconds, he has turned into a vanishingly small spot of red-and-black plaid. When I catch up to him, he puts his finger to his lip, draws a broad horizontal circle in the air, then flicks his thumb. Following his eyes, I see a striped snake that looks to be five feet long. More if you add on the long, fluffy tail and small gray feet protruding from his mouth.
I circle around behind the snake, looking for something, anything. I pick up a stone.
“What are you doing?”
“You told me to”—I put my finger to my lips—“be quiet”—I repeat his circle in the air—“sneak around”—I slice with my thumb at my neck—“and kill it.”
“What I told you was to be quiet”—he put his finger to his lips—“avoid”—he circles his finger in the air again—“and get away.” He flicks his thumb over his shoulder. “Finger across the throat means ‘kill it.’ If you kill something on Homelands, you have to eat it. I don’t like snake. And that’s a lot of snake.”
I watch the snake move awkwardly away, its jaw and neck stretched tight over the squirrel, the tail dragging beside it like a tattered boa.
“You’re telling me you gave up that penthouse in Centre-Ville to drink from the ground and eat snakes?”
“No, I’m telling you I gave up a penthouse in Centre-Ville to not eat snakes.”
Tiberius’s expression dulls, then his eyes close and he turns his head slightly as though pinpointing something.
“We need to go.”
I keep up as best I can until the bright-green leaves give way to dark-green needles. The ground is cushioned under my feet by more needles and fewer bushes and vines. A wolf lopes past, sniffs the base of a tree, then sneezes delicately and licks its nose.
“There,” Tiberius says, pointing to a spot of bright blue. At first, I think it’s breathing, but when we get closer, I realize that it’s simply the wind slipping under a blue tarp held down by rocks. One corner has come loose and folded itself over part of the body.
“Body” is perhaps an overly generous description of this random collection of pieces: a single arm, two legs. Only one of which has a foot with a gray and black sagging sock. A rib cage with a bit of uniform.
“I take it that’s the dogcatcher?”
“Hmm.”
“But you’re not eating it?”
“We didn’t kill it. The Bone Wolf did.” He swings two fingers from eye to eye, and though he doesn’t say any more, I know exactly who he means, because if anyone deserved a name like “Bone Wolf,” it was the white one with the mismatched eyes who came out of nowhere looking for Varya.
“We leave bodies here for the coyotes, but now deer are flooding in from the lands up north. They have never had predators and”—he shakes his head like a disappointed Sunday school teacher eyeing a dirty picture—“the coyotes are getting picky.”
There is another body here, but it’s not the man with the hole right in the middle of his forehead. This one is large, naked, and intact except for a small gouge beneath his sternum and a larger gap where some animal has gnawed away the middle of his face.
“Looks like the coyotes at least started on that one.”
“That wasn’t coyotes.” He sends the body flying off the tarp with a sharp kick, then begins to wrap the remains of the dogcatcher. “That was the Alpha. This is the dog who betrayed us. She ate his nose so that he will be unable to find the Endemearc, the Last Lands, and will wander forever without pack or territory. Always hungry and always alone.”
Tiberius spits three times at the large, pale body with the dark-purple postmortem lividity on ass, legs, and upper back. The dead werewolf’s head is bent awkwardly and his eyes are open, pleading above the gaping hole where his nose had been, like someone who has only just understood what a vast desert loneliness is.
Tiberius slings the dogcatcher over his back, and we walk on until we reach a spot where ferns and grasses have been flattened by repeated three-point turns. Tiberius reaches into his pocket for keys, and with a push of the button, the back of the muddy burgundy Range Rover glides up, releasing the sick, sweet smell of death.
He dumps the blue tarp on top of the guide whose head ran into a bullet, and I clamber into the passenger seat beside Tiberius, while he starts the car and opens the windows.
Before putting on his seat belt, he lifts his gun from the holster and makes sure that I see him putting it into the cup holder in the door.
“You have Magnus. Where is it that you think I want to go, Tiberius?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t believe in leaving anything up to chance.”
Something stabs into my ass: I feel around, retrieving something that looks like a sawed-up piece of driftwood.
“Antler,” says Tiberius. Before I can throw it out the window, he snatches it from my hand and starts gnawing on it with his back teeth.
“That’s disgusting.”
I start searching around the side of the seat, looking for the lever that will allow me to get a little more leg room. There’s change on the floor. I pop the three quarters and a dime into the cup holder.
“The Alpha says you helped Varya kill my father.”
Buttressing my feet against the floorboard, I plop the last dime in the cup holder while watching Tiberius’s hands in case he reaches for his gun. He didn’t care for August much, but I don’t believe in leaving anything up to chance either.
He does move but only to stretch out his left hand, his thumb hooked around the steering wheel. His ring finger bends crookedly to the side, and there is a star-like scar in the middle of his hand.
I was there when Tiberius tried to kill his father. I was there two days later when a dog spike was pounded into Tiberius’s palm on August’s orders.
“All the rest were mercenaries. My father always said Lucian would turn on him if he was less afraid and someone paid him a quarter more. I told the Alpha to keep an eye on you because you were the one most loyal to him.”
Finding two more coins, I drop them into the cup holder.
“So what changed, Constantine?”
Under the floor liner are three quarters.
“I asked him for one thing. A promise, but he broke it.” One of the quarters turns out to be a Susan B. Anthony dollar.
“What promise?”
The coin falls with a dull metallic clap on top of the change I’ve accumulated. I can’t find anything else.
“I made him promise never to turn Magnus into me.”
Tiberius frowns.
It was the only thing I’d ever asked of August. I hated going to him hat in hand, so I remembered every word. “I don’t know why,” he’d said. “You are so good—so very good—at what you do, but yes, I promise not to turn Magnus into you.”
He held to it until we started losing men
to his disastrous obsession with the Great North. Then he didn’t.
“You promised.”
“I promised not to turn Magnus into you,” he’d said coolly. “But he was never going to be you; he will, however, learn to do what you do.
“Oh dear. Constantine has that evil look. You will thank me, Constantine of the Evil Look. In time you, will see it as a blessing. You were never going to let him grow up but now he will. Now, he will earn his fucking living.”
Tiberius chews thoughtfully on his antler, his elbow on the open window frame.
“Do you remember that time in Hamilton?” he finally says.
“Yes.”
“We stopped somewhere. A bakery maybe? I don’t remember exactly. All I know is you said you wanted to get something for Magnus.”
“Hmm-hmm.” I do remember how magnanimous August was in 2014. When he’d destroyed the last of his opposition in the crucial port in Ontario. “Go, go,” he’d said when I said I wanted to pick up something for Magnus. “Here,” he’d added, peeling off a couple of brown-gold bills with Robert Borden on them as he always did to signal his pleasure. I never took the money. In my tortured imagination, the line between being a warrior and being a thug was drawn in cash.
“As soon as you left the car, Atticus asked why Magnus never had to go with us, even though he was older than I was.”
“I noticed you waited until Constantine was out of the car before you asked,” August had apparently said. “Does that mean you are more afraid of him than you are of me?”
Tiberius says Atticus tripped over himself trying to assure August that he was not afraid of me at all.
“You should be,” August said. Or at least this is according to Tiberius. “I know how to control all of you. Wipe that look off your face, Lucian, before I slice it off.
“See? It’s really just a matter of fear, greed, and tits, but not Constantine. I am a dangerous man because I know exactly what I want and have the means to get it. Constantine has nothing. And a man who is empty, who wants nothing, cares about nothing, is so much more dangerous than you can imagine. Magnus is the leash I use to control him. Leave him be.”
August’s real power was that he knew people too well, knew how to exploit their weaknesses. I made him nervous because he couldn’t figure out that my loyalty, my willingness to follow whatever order he gave me, was lethargy. He never did understand the abyssal weight of emptiness. How hard it was to move. Magnus didn’t tether me. He just gave me a reason to put one heavy foot in front of the other.
I remember squeezing into the back of the car and snapping at Atticus to move over. He’d responded with a loud “fuck off,” which I now realize was playing to August. Everyone laughed until I broke his arm with my elbow, then ate a chocolate walnut brownie while staring out the window, the little white box balanced carefully on my knees.
“And you? That combination of fear, greed, and tits didn’t work with you,” I tell Tiberius.
“Don’t fool yourself. I was exactly the same as all the rest.” Tiberius rubs the leather necklace at his throat between his finger and thumb. “Until I wasn’t.”
“What is that?” I nod toward him with my chin. “Your necklace? I’ve seen it on other werewolves.”
“Not werewolves. We are ‘wolves’ or ‘Pack.’ And this is not a necklace either. It’s a braid, the sign of a mated wolf.”
I lean against the window, catching sight of myself in the rearview mirror. I really do need a shave. “Bit of a cliché, no? Big man tamed by the love of the little woman?”
Tiberius slams on the brakes, sending my head whipping forward. “Call her runt, she is one. Call her bitch, she’s that too. But don’t ever call her a ‘little woman.’”
He signals the driver behind him to go on.
“And she didn’t tame me,” he says, looking in the rearview mirror. “She made me wild.”
* * *
We head toward the Allagash River for old times’ sake. Revisiting the hilarity of our shared heritage, but at the end, when we’re handling the detail work, Tiberius becomes uncharacteristically anxious.
“Be careful of the hammer.”
“What?”
“You’re going to ding it up.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I shake some more teeth from the ziplock bag onto the granite rock. “Go into some town and ask if they’ve got a cutting board? What has gotten into you?” When I hit the teeth with the hammer, they pop like peppercorns.
“Here.” I throw him another ziplock bag, this one filled with fingers. “Why don’t you go find some crayfish.”
Tiberius catches the fingers without comment but cringes again when the hammer hits the stone.
“You going to feed the crayfish?”
“Yeah, I got it.” He grabs the bag of fingers. “But you’re going to tell Sten about the hammer.”
* * *
We stop at a coffee shop on the way back. As we enter, a bell rings. It’s old, attached to a curved piece of metal that jostles when the door opens.
It was Otho, Julia’s father, who taught me to read the room before doing anything else. I check out the two men at the Cup ’n’ Cake. One has the jacket sag of someone with a concealed weapon. He leads with his left foot, his coffee in his left hand. Ex-military. He’s hanging around, flirting with the girl at the counter who is helping the second man—glassy-eyed, sloop-shouldered, and beyond even the small hope required for flirtation.
There are no cameras, even though the tip jar is filled with change, meaning people pay with cash. There is an open back door. Paths worn into the linoleum lead down to the basement. The music there is loud. No one would hear anything. Not that I intend to do anything. It’s just habit.
The girl at the counter is carefully pressing down the plastic lid on a cup of coffee. She hands it to the hopeless man, along with his change. Small coins, judging by the sound they make on the scratched countertop, but he doesn’t bother to pretend he can afford a tip and scrapes that little bit back into his hand, turning his back on her and her tip jar.
“What can I get for you?”
“I’ll take a coffee and a brownie,” I say.
“Two coffees,” Tiberius answers. “Forget the brownie.”
“I’m going to use the bathroom,” I say while the girl scoots away to get coffee. He looks suspiciously toward the back door.
I head into the bathroom to wash my hands and the coins I retrieved from the cup holder. There are no towels, just an asthmatic blower. I toss my coins from hand to hand.
The girl sprays the countertop with glass cleaner, keeping her bright-pink rhinestone-studded nails hyperextended away from the damp cloth. One takeout cup sits on the counter. Tiberius is leaning against the wall, blowing on the other.
I stand at the counter and stare down at the pastry case.
“And I’ll take that brownie,” I say. “Double chocolate.”
Putting away her blue spray, the young woman reaches for a thin sheet of wax paper and snaps open a small, white paper bag. She has a tattoo on her wrist that says Justin and a necklace that says Brandon and a biddable expression. I smile my usual nonsmile and leave her staring at the big handful of damp change, scraped from the floor of a werewolf’s Range Rover.
Back in the car, I prop my feet up on the dashboard and stare out the window. The wheels on smooth concrete sound like a whispered spray.
Tiberius makes a sharp turn onto the narrow dirt road with deep trenches on either side. Here, below a rusty sign that reads PRIVATE DRIVE, she watched us as Lucian stopped to report back to August. She couldn’t have seen me through the tinted glass, but still I swear she stared at me, her fire-colored eyes glaring at me. Pitting herself against all of us.
“So, Ti?” I ask, breaking off a piece of brownie, trying to sound casual and disinterested. “Lucian said the Alpha�
�s name once, but I’ve forgotten and—”
“There is no possible scenario in which you could ever need the Alpha’s name.”
I brush an invisible crumb from the front of my shirt, trying to pretend that the spat-out you doesn’t matter.
“You want some?” I ask, lifting the bag to him.
His eyes flicker toward me. “Wolves don’t eat chocolate.”
I break off a big piece and wave it around with a flourish. “Good thing I’m not one, then.” Then I pop it into my mouth and bite down so hard I think I’ve cracked a molar.
* * *
My stomach is cramping.
Maybe it really is the chocolate.
Or maybe it’s the fact that with every foot up this bumpy dirt road, I get farther and farther from the bright-blue sky and a world that has been sanded down for my convenience. Tiberius makes a sharp turn, and the last ribbon of blue sky dissolves into the sullen overcast green. Through the open windows, I hear a short yip. Silent shadows ripple beside us, dissolving into dark trunks and reappearing later.
Silver opens the gate, because now that it is no longer the days of the full moon, werewolves have fingers.
As soon as Tiberius jumps down from the cab, a flurry of silver hair flies into his arms, making soft growling noises. She sniffs at him, smelling his head, his neck, his chest, then rubs her face against his, like she can’t get enough of the feel of his skin.
They drop me off at the main building then disappear into the trees, Silver’s legs curled around his hips, her dirt-rimmed feet crossed above his ass.
They call it the Great Hall, but there’s nothing truly “Great” about it. Especially not the entry, which is really just a mudroom filled with neatly arrayed boots—muck and work—along one side and children’s shoes along the other. There, a boy sits on the floor trying to tie his shoe. He’s almost the age I was when I lost my parents and my humanity, too old to have such trouble tying shoes.
He stops for a moment, using ass and heels to shuffle over to my boots. He rocks forward, sticking his nose in the opening.