by Maria Vale
I hear something now, a faint wheezing on the stairs outside, labored and slow. Eyes flicker to the Alpha. She manages to squeeze a spoonful through her jaws before they clamp shut again.
I watch her long throat move as she forces herself to swallow.
Whatever is outside takes another step and stumbles.
The Alpha stares at the spoon in her bowl, seemingly unable to take another bite.
My body tenses, preparing for whatever thing is coming that has the power to silence the entire Pack.
A huge wolf emerges from under the table and whimpers, burrowing its head into the Alpha’s arm. She scratches it behind the ears.
The door begins to open, first a sliver, then a narrow gap, then a space just wide enough to admit Arthur, the man who should by all rights be dead. No one else seems to notice him. Instead, they all continue to look bleakly at their plates while he struggles toward the front table, his fists tight at his sides, his shoulders back, his chest hunched in an awkward S-shaped contortion of pride and pain. His eyes are dark and deep in his bloodless skin. His breathing is shallow.
The only person who looks at him is Tiberius’s wife, the silver-haired werewolf who ripped him open. Then she lowers her chin slightly and he responds in kind.
At the main table, Arthur grabs the edge for support. When he does, his elbow hits a heavy bowl with a narrow base that wobbles against the thick wood, emitting a hollow, careening sound that makes the silence so much louder.
The plate in his hand shakes, so he sets it down on the table while he begins to serve himself. Dark lines of blood seep through his T-shirt.
A chair hits the floor with a metallic bang and Julia walks toward him, oblivious of everything else: of the fallen chair, of the sudden surge of noise, of Cassius’s shouts.
I barely know Cassius and never liked what little I knew. He insisted that being Julia’s fiancé made him part of the inner circle and, with Tiberius gone, August’s heir. He said little about Julia herself except to say that “she could’ve been a model.” That he said so often and so inevitably that it has colored the way I’d seen her. There she is. Julia CouldaBeenAModel.
As she pushes her way through the werewolves, her diffident expression, constrained demeanor, and cramped posture melt away like ice cream on summer asphalt, and for the first time, I see something beyond Otho’s daughter and August’s niece and Cassius’s CouldaBeenAModel.
I see a woman who no one else here knows. A woman with the shoulders, jaw, furious gray eyes, and deadly determination of August’s estranged wife. Otho’s homicidal sister. Julia’s aunt.
Drusilla.
The Alpha doesn’t bang her knife again. Instead, she looks pointedly at the man with the little blond ponytail sitting at the head of Julia’s table. As soon as he catches her eye, he rushes forward like an actor who had gotten so swept up in watching a play that he forgot he had a part in it.
Wiping his mouth on a faded dish towel, he points Julia back to the table. She ignores him. He takes both her shoulders and turns her around, once again directing her to sit down. Then Julia hurls herself at him.
She is not a fighter, that much is clear, but raw, desperate fury in a strong body should never be discounted and Ponytail is caught off guard. He stumbles backward and Julia moves next to Arthur, holding out her hand for his plate.
The man turns toward her, flinching as his shoulders shift. Shaking his head with a sad look on his face, he whispers something to her, and just like that, the Bitch of Vancouver is replaced by the woman with the apologetic expression who lets herself be led back to her seat by the man with the blond ponytail. She looks worriedly toward Cassius, who glares at her.
Someone claps hands and barks out a forceful “Eyes here,” and every werewolf looks toward the single table off to the side that was not set with mismatched Corelle and industrial ceramics but with white linen and candles and porcelain. A woman—Leonora—outfitted in a bedazzled red dress, her shoulders bulging broad and strong from under the tiny rhinestone straps, looms over a small group of teenaged werewolves, all tugging on uncomfortable formal wear.
“Gently,” she says.
“They’re not going to make it,” Ziggy whispers to the woman next to him.
“There’s always a first time,” she says.
It takes me a moment to realize that the teenagers are lifting champagne flutes in a kind of slow-motion toast, while Leonora keeps up a steady patter.
“Slowly…slowly. Now, you’re not banging them together, not clinking, not tapping. Just the tiniest touch—”
The glasses meet in the middle and shatter.
“Wes hæl!” shout the laughing adults, toasting with their sturdy earthenware and pewter mugs.
Only the Alpha is not laughing. Her head is bent close to the doctor’s. When her eyes catch mine, she looks tired.
Chapter 11
Evie
He knows. He’s already pushed away the chair, shoving his way shoulder first through laughing Pack distracted by the juveniles.
Tristan stands abruptly. “I’m going to get something to eat, Alpha. I have a feeling it’s going to take a while.”
“Tell Eudemos and Tiberius to be ready as soon as I call.”
Tristan lowers his eyes and heads to the table where the 14th Echelon, Magnus’s echelon, are sitting.
“Is it Magnus?” the Shifter asks, threading through the tables.
I push vegetables and rice onto my fork with coconut-curry-soaked bread.
“Tiberius says you were August’s right-hand man.” I say, taking a bite.
“Is that a question?”
“No. But this is: If you were his right-hand man, why were you not the one to bring the hunters here?”
“I never went on hunts with him. He preferred to use my talents elsewhere.”
“It had nothing to do with Magnus being sick?”
He doesn’t answer and I swallow, trying to remember the last time I had hot food. In skin.
“And when the Great Hall burned down? Was Magnus sick then?”
He takes a seeded rye roll from a bowl of them. “There were enough men going. Besides, August needed someone to stay with him.”
“You’re not answering. Was Magnus sick? Was he often sick during the Iron Moon?”
He tears apart the roll with a puff of steam and caraway and pops it, soft and warm, into his mouth.
“I’m not a werewolf. I don’t pay attention to lunar phases.”
“You may not be a wolf, but Magnus is, and he can’t help but pay attention. The moon has always called to his wild but now the smell of fur, the smell of blood, the sound of the hunt, Evening Song. Everything in Homelands calls to him, and resisting it is tearing him apart.”
“So let me take him out of here. I—”
“That is not what he needs.” I wipe the last bit of curry with a piece of bread. “Taking him away may slow his decline, but it’s not enough. He refuses to change and that is what he needs to stop dying.”
He takes off down the hallway and I disentangle myself from the chair and run after him. I didn’t have a chance to warn him that Magnus looks worse. I push past Constantine. Tristan and I had just changed the bed liner, but it’s bloodstained again.
Because Magnus is not drinking anything, his body has shrunk, his joints are even more distended, his skin hangs from his bones, stiff, dry, and crinkled like parchment. I pour out a glass of water from the sweating earthenware pitcher. Leonora has contributed a straw from her collection of human artifacts.
Magnus screws up his eyes.
“Try, wolf. Try.”
He does manage to open his mouth, not to drink but to grind out one withered sound.
“Con?”
The Shifter pulls himself together and moves toward Magnus. “I’m here,” he says, setting his hand gently
on the sick wolf’s hair, but even that is enough to make Magnus whimper.
When the Shifter looks at his palm, it is covered with dark hair.
“You’ve looked better, Mags,” he says. It’s meant to be humorous, but the crack in his voice is not. I roll Tristan’s stool toward him and slide the water closer so the Shifter will remember to try to make Magnus drink.
A shiver runs up Magnus’s back and across his shoulders. “Is there another blanket?” Constantine asks.
“We tried. The weight is too much for his skin.”
Rolling Tristan’s stool closer, Constantine sits with his hands tucked under his arms. “Oh god, Mags. What have I done?”
When Magnus gives Constantine a labored smile, his chapped lips split and bleed.
“I should have talked to you after…well, you know. After what happened. But you didn’t want to and I thought it was probably best to leave it like that. Leave you afraid of changing. I mean, you saw what August was capable of and I’d been with him forever. He actually needed me.”
Magnus manages a weak smile, just enough to show the bloody ridge of his teeth.
“So now I do have to talk to you and I don’t really know how. I don’t have the words for it, but they do. Varya did. She had words for what it felt like to be human and to not be human. But I’ve forgotten them.”
He raises his eyes to mine.
“Anfeald. That’s one. It’s how we describe being in skin.” I do not chide him for thinking we are ever human. This is not the time for it. “It means alone, singular, the feeling of being cut off from the world. But when we are wild, we are not alone. We are ourselves, but we are also one with the land and the Pack. Then we say we are manigfeald, manifold and complex.”
A wren flies by, a silvery twig in its beak.
“That’s what it feels like, Mags. I was not a monster, whatever August said. I was myself but more. I was the seaweed moving in the rock pond, the salt air, the hearts of birds hiding in beach grass. I was part of something bigger. Maybe that’s why August couldn’t bear it, having us change. It’s so much easier to control something small.”
Slowly and painfully, Magnus pulls a hand up and points to his chest with a rickety finger.
“No, it was not your fault. You were worried and who else could you turn to? But everything that happened…that was all on August.”
Constantine crosses one leg over his knee, rubbing the mutilated skin of his ankle.
Magnus’s eyes wander in their orbit until they finally focus on me. He blinks once, his eyes so dry I can almost hear the lids scraping against his cornea.
“Should I get Tristan?” I don’t say it in my usual clipped Alpha way. It was just a blink after all. He swallows once, though there’s nothing to swallow, and opens his mouth. I wait for him to say something, but he can’t and nods instead.
I head out to find our doctor.
“Tristan!” I call as soon as the door is closed behind me.
“Hew, Affa!” Tristan answers from the kitchen, a dusting of cheese popcorn on his chin.
“It’s time.”
He takes one more handful of cheese popcorn.
“Have you ever considered that if you hunted something bigger than bunnies, you might not be hungry all the time?”
He wipes his hands together, then holds them up. “What do you see?”
“Cheese dust?”
“Under the cheese dust, though, you see a surgeon’s hands. No hoof-crushed proximal phalange, no fang-torn abductor pollicis. And that, my Alpha, is why I am—and will always be—a bunny hunter.”
I rub the bent ring finger of my right hand against the scarred base of my thumb.
“It’s time, lads,” Tristan calls into the library. “Bring that with you. This may take a while.”
He holds the library door wide while Tiberius backs out carefully, carrying one side of a half-played Scrabble board with Eudemos on the other side, a shallow, often-taped box tucked under his arm.
“Hold it while I get a cart,” Eudemos says as soon as we arrive in Medical. A moment later, he returns with a cart that rolls easily across the polished cement, jostling only once as it hits the drain recessed into the middle of the floor.
“So,” says Tristan, tying on a rubber work apron over his clothes. “Where’s the patient?”
“There’s the patient,” says Eudemos, setting the Scrabble board on the stainless-steel dressing trolley. “He’s the one on the bed.”
Tristan sighs and fishes around in a pocket. “May the moon save me from the literalness of wolves. Yes, Eudemos, I was aware. Anyone else want a Tic Tac?”
Only the Shifter holds out his hand to take the two pale-green pills of wintergreen that for every wolf is a shameful signal that one has visited Medical for a flesh wound.
As soon as Tristan has finished scrubbing his hands, he tells Magnus to “hop” down. The Shifter slides his arms under Magnus’s body, and when he lifts, he almost sends Magnus flying, overcompensating for weight that simply isn’t there.
Tristan retrieves a plastic sheet from a drawer and shakes it out. I take the other side.
“Support his head,” Tristan says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. The Shifter says nothing; I’m not sure he could. His mouth is so tightly clamped shut I can hear the grinding of his molars. He lifts Magnus’s shoulders so his head falls against his own broad chest.
Once the plastic sheet is tucked in, the Shifter sets him down. He disentangles the light blanket, settling it once again over Magnus’s laddered ribs, his chest rising fast and shallow, his skin mottled with bruises like a windfall apple.
What have I done? his eyes seem to say as though he knows I’ve asked this same question over and over.
What his voice says is “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right now.” It is the first of several lies he tells Magnus, though “No one is going to hurt you” is the most egregious of them.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that if I were you,” says Tristan, drying his hands and taking out a pair of rubber gloves. “Because this is most definitely going to hurt.”
“Tristan.”
“Ah, yes,” Tristan says. “I forgot I was supposed to be upbeat and solicitous. Well, young man, if we are lucky, they will all be flesh wounds and that will have to be solace enough.”
I stand at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, staring at my doctor and wondering if Torquemada was still alive and teaching bedside behavior at Massachusetts General. Tristan sketches out the procedure, adding a cheerful coda. “I believe,” he says at the end, “that your bones are still flexible enough to bend and not shatter. I hope.”
There isn’t enough honey in Homelands to make what needs to be done palatable.
“Now let’s see,” Tristan says, pulling his gloves on with a snap. “Where do you think you put your wild?”
Magnus looks confused.
“Have you ever had a twinge somewhere on your body and thought, That felt nice or different or like I could really suck down a blood pudding?”
Magnus shakes his head once.
“Mine,” Tristan continues, “is right behind my knees. I have to be very careful picking up pens. You know once,” and he prattles on with that story about when he dropped a fork during Evening Meat, hyperextended his knee, and flopped muzzle first in a huge Crock-Pot of black beans.
He leaves out the part where John and I plucked him from the casserole, salvaging our costly doctor, if not the frijoles.
The entire time, he pokes and prods Magnus, looking for a reaction.
For a while, the only sounds are Tristan’s whispered suggestions and the comments about the viability of words coming from the Scrabble players.
“Wait, ‘benison’?” Eudemos cranes his head to look around. “That’s not a word. ‘Venison,’ that’s a word.”
“Of course ‘Rhos’ is a word. Like Kari and Per are both Rhos.”
“I won’t fight you over ‘Rhos’ but I will not yield on ‘benison.’”
“If I’m right, it’s the same as last time?”
“Why does it always have to be beaver liver? I don’t even like beaver liver.”
“But we both know who does.”
“Just look it up,” Tiberius says. “I’m not wrong. You can deliver it to her yourself.”
Eudemos takes out his phone and begins with thick clumsy fingers the long process of jabbing and erasing the tiny buttons.
The Shifter and I turn Magnus on his side so that Tristan can continue to poke and prod and Magnus can continue to suffer. The Shifter settles his hand on mine, and when I catch his eyes, I see a mirror of my anxiety, both of us anxious about the promises we made to Magnus that neither of us can keep.
Wolves live in a world of touch: we bop noses to say Chase me, bite ears to say Listen to me, put teeth to throat to say Trust me. Set muzzle to neck to say Want me. Drape paws across shoulders to say Comfort me.
I don’t remember the last time someone tried to comfort me.
“Hunh. ‘Benison: a blessing, a benediction.’ Who knew?”
“I knew. And that’s 3, 1, 1…9 with a double-word score…18. You writing it down?”
Tristan’s stool shoots across the floor. “Alpha!” he cries, clinging to Magnus’s flailing body. Tiberius and Eudemos jump up, spilling Scrabble tiles across the floor.
The Shifter and I are already shoulder to shoulder, holding on to Magnus until the jerking stops and his body curls in on itself like a fern.
“It’s here,” Tristan says, pointing to an innocuous spot two inches below Magnus’s right shoulder blade.
“I’ll take his feet. You two take his shoulders and arms. Shifter, you’re at the top.”
In his last act as he loses all agency to the change, Magnus’s frightened eyes seek out the familiar face above him. The Shifter opens his mouth, straining to say something. Finally, he gives up, resting his hand gently on Magnus’s cheek instead.