by Maria Vale
Magnus chokes on a scream.
“All right, folks,” Tristan says. “It’s going to be a rough ride.”
I plant my feet and hold on to his ankles, making sure that Tiberius and Eudemos have a grip on his arms and shoulders.
“Hold firm,” I remind them, “but don’t break him.”
Blood starts to stream from Magnus’s mouth. His eyes are beginning to change. He’s blind now and deaf, too, unable to hear anything but the reverberations of the screams inside his skull.
“Shifter,” Tristan says. “You need to hold his head.”
He doesn’t respond to Tristan’s demands that he hold Magnus’s head. Instead he stares frozen at the bone, muscle, and organs as they slither under Magnus’s skin like snakes in a balloon.
“Constantine,” I say. It’s not loud or forceful or commanding like the Alpha voice. It’s quiet and wholly my own, but his head snaps up, instantly intent. “Hold his head.”
He exhales like a swimmer surfacing and takes hold of Magnus’s head. Tristan squeezes a metal clamp to keep his jaws open, then hooks a suction tube over that as well. He feels around with the fingers of one hand, followed by metal pliers in the other. Metal scrapes against bone, followed by a jerk, and something drops onto the metal tray. A bloody tooth, a dulled canine with perverted roots. Within seconds, something strong and sharp begins to push its way through.
Blood slurps through the suction tube.
Tristan yells something over Magnus’s choked howls and tosses scalpels to Tiberius and Eudemos and me. I hadn’t heard, but Tiberius must have. He holds Magnus’s shoulder down with his elbow, then bends his contorted arm and cuts deep into the tip of a mangled fingertip. As he moves on to the next finger, a slick claw pushes its way out from the blood and flesh.
What have I done?
I see something twisting under the skin of Magnus’s toes. Moving as quickly as I can, I slice along the line marked by his scars. At first, the cut is too shallow and the claw of one toe starts to twist and turn under the skin before I slice deeper, setting it free.
What have I done?
With each tooth, more blood streams into his mouth, too much for the suction tube to handle. To keep him from choking, Tristan gives Constantine a long length of rubbery pipe. “Like a straw,” Tristan yells. Constantine holds the pipe between his teeth, sucking out blood whenever Tristan dumps another deformed tooth on the tray.
All of us are slick with sweat and blood by the time Magnus has stopped struggling. The metal tray is littered with little semihuman teeth: half flat and enameled, half bone with monstrous curlicued roots.
“Alpha?” Tara stands at the door, signaling to me.
I roll my shoulders back to unleash the tension of what feels like hours spent hunched and straining, but in the end, all that effort was worth it because there is one more wolf. He is thin and weak and exhausted, but he is another wolf. I put my cheek to his bloodstained fur and whisper in his pointed ear.
“Wilcumeþ, wulf.”
Welcome, wolf.
Chapter 12
Constantine
Tristan says that Magnus must remain in this form for a while. How long, he can’t say, but his body is too weak to go through another change. It will take time spent wild to recover from all those years spent dying.
Nobody much feels like talking. Eudemos and I lift Magnus while Tiberius pulls out the blood-covered sheet and balls it up with Tristan’s discarded apron. He hands it off to two waiting werewolves to take to the laundry while Tristan helps slide a fresh sheet under him. Eudemos and Tiberius scrub the floor until only thin wisps of blood flow into the drain. Tristan washes the equipment.
I take a blue paper towel from a pile of them next to the sink and dampen it. Then I try to wipe away the blood and gore around his mouth and muzzle, but he whimpers and I stop, having gotten nothing but a few brown flecks.
“I’m leaving this for you.” Tristan holds up a big syringe, making sure that I am watching when he puts it next to the pitcher. “He needs water but be careful. He won’t know how to use his tongue.”
He heads for the door, his hand over the light switch. “Off or on?”
“Off.”
It seemed like hours ago that I first came to Medical, but the early summer sun has a few more degrees yet before it sets. The low light makes the room shimmer with the shadow play of leaves. Finally, one pale-blue eye, the color of thick ice, opens. “Sorry, Mags.” I don’t know what I’m sorry for. For his pain. For the lost years. For not having understood.
His tongue flaps loose, feeling for the points of his teeth. He breathes in through his open mouth and his nose wrinkles. Using the syringe, I drip water into his mouth. Most of it dribbles into his fur or onto the pillow, but he gets a little and closes his eyes again.
I open the window on the off chance that he will hear the heartbeat of birds, or the scent of the wind will make him feel like he’s part of something bigger and make it all seem worthwhile. Then I settle back onto Tristan’s rolling chair, my hand perched on Magnus’s foreleg, moving in time with the labored rise and exhausted collapse of this wolf’s chest.
There is a “B” tile on the floor. Two points.
Benison. Blessing. Benediction.
“You will thank me, Constantine of the Evil Look. In time, you will see it as a blessing.” August might be right, but not in the way he thought. If it weren’t for his broken promise, I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Varya. I would not have warned the Great North. I would not have brought Magnus here. “In time,” I will discover whether this was a blessing or if I’ve simply condemned Magnus to die harder.
As soon as the sun goes down, the Alpha howls, like she does every evening. I’ve never seen her do it, but I’ve heard it. The low resonance that just as it starts to rise is joined by other wolves right across Homelands. It rolls down the mountains and settles into the valleys, pulling the howls of wolves with it.
Constantine.
I play it over and over in my mind, the way it sounded on her lips, the way it lay down a path through the maze of guilt and anger. The way it shimmered like a silver string.
The way it led me out.
Magnus whines, stretching his nose toward the open window. His breathing seems a little stronger, and with each rise of his lungs, a claw scrapes against the plastic-covered mattress. This is not where he should be, not surrounded by the smell of antiseptic and the touch of plastic and the sound of metal and cement.
“I’ll be right back.” Taking two of the doctor’s blue paper towels, I fold them up, using one to prop open the door to Medical, the other to hold the screen door leading outside. For a moment, I stand in the cool air, my face up.
He is too easy to lift. I felt it before when I picked him up so the sheet could be changed. I move carefully so that I don’t jostle his carved-up paws or anything else. With a quick kick to the screen door, I dislodge the makeshift wedge and it closes behind us with a thunk. I left my boots, but at least I can feel the dips and hollows of the ground, the dampness and dryness, the changing density of the ground cover as I move deeper into the trees until I find a little space in front of a big trunk and slowly lower myself and Magnus to the ground. There’s a star-filled hole up above and a smattering of sucklings down below.
Magnus pats at my hand with his front paw, leaving blood on the cuff of my sweatshirt.
Once when he was very young, I told him to wait in the car while I ran an errand. Then we’d go to White Castle. I will never forget Magnus’s eyes when he stared at the cuff of my shirt, which had gotten not so much bloodstained as blood-soaked. There was no more talk of White Castle.
I was always careful after that to clean up, no matter what. Showered, clean clothes, because I needed to be sure that I’d gotten rid of every trace. But this is his blood, and I lay my hand on his thin shoulder and sit with h
im. Soon when the wind blows over his fur, it releases a raw fragrance that is both green and bitter.
He sleeps again.
I’m sorry, Magnus, for that. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry we sliced into your fingers and toes to make way for claws. I’m sorry we pulled your teeth out of your skull to make way for fangs. Most of all, I’m sorry for telling you that what was best for you, what you needed, was to be human.
Magnus’s eyes are closed but his ears start moving: one way during an outburst of song (whip, whip, whip, whippp), another way as bats flit across the oculus onto the stars, this way again toward the distant wheezing of frogs.
The next time they rotate, he lifts his head, staring expectantly over his shoulder until a burly gray-and-beige wolf emerges from the woods.
I know—as surely as I do that a .22 LR with a suppressor is the best choice for a silent kill at intermediate distances—that this is Eudemos. His eyes on Magnus, he moves, crouched close to the ground, his shoulders rolling. I watch him carefully as he sniffs at Magnus’s feet, his paws, and then he starts to lick. Magnus kicks at him with short jerky blows, but Eudemos growls and keeps licking. I can feel Magnus stiffen, until with each stroke at his tortured paws, the tension eases. His eyes close and his head sways until he collapses back against me. Eudemos moves on to the next paw and the next and the next, and each time, the tension and resistance at the beginning is shorter and the relief more pronounced.
After, Eudemos moves closer, holding his muzzle next to Magnus’s. He does nothing, but I can feel the tension until Magnus lowers his eyes and his head, and with his tongue, Eudemos cleans away the blood that I with my blue paper towel could not.
Benison. A blessing, a benediction. 3, 1, 1…9 with a double-word score…18.
When he is done, Eudemos pushes his head under Magnus’s chin resting on my thigh, thumping him once, twice, three times until Magnus starts to hobble up, awkward and stumbling. He turns to look at me but underestimates the length of his muzzle and bops me in the eye.
The forest twinkles with the green lights of wolves’ eyes gathering closer as Magnus struggles toward them. As he swings his head back toward me, his eyes are a little closer than the rest but in all other ways the same. Glowing green in the dark.
Trusting neither the steadiness of my voice or my smile, I lift my hand. Then all the green lights turn and the wolves close around him.
I stare at the matted boughs for a long time.
Chapter 13
Evie
I watch Constantine, sitting against the beech tree, his knees bent, one hand raised as though waiting for the wolf to return. He never will, or rather he will, but he won’t be anything like the Magnus he knew.
“Have you had dinner?”
“No,” he says, still looking in the direction where Magnus and Eudemos and the 14th disappeared. “Not really.” He gets up and brushes off his pants, trying to seem casual.
“Neither have I. Come.”
He hadn’t gone far from the Great Hall, just far enough to carry his wolf into the wild. It’s pitch-black now and he relies too much on his eyes. I can tell by the way his hesitant pace picks up as soon as he catches a glimpse of the soft glow spilling from the kitchen window.
The dishes have been washed and put away, and the counters are cleaned except for big bowls of bread dutifully rising under towels made from flour sacks.
“You okay with cereal?” I ask, setting my coffee cup down on the table. It’s a big one with a blood-spattered moon, howling-wolf silhouette, and the words Lone Wolf in clawed bloodred letters.
“Anything.”
I reach for a yellow box on a high shelf. My shirt rides up, I know because I feel the summer cool through the window rolling across the groove of my spine and the softness of my belly, and when I turn back, Constantine looks stricken or caught out or something. He drops his eyes to his hands splayed out on the table.
“Bowls are in the cabinet nearest the door. Spoons are in the drawers to the left of the sink.” He opens the door to the cabinet and peers in for far longer than is needed to get two bowls from the random hundreds of them we have.
I get out the milk and close the refrigerator door with a flick of my hip. Constantine busies himself gathering the spoons, then putting them on the table along with the two mismatched bowls.
As I open the box, he switches the bowls, taking away the one that is a scratched remnant of a huge cache of beige industrial porcelain and pushing toward me another one with gold-green interior like the striations of an iris.
I wait for an explanation, but he doesn’t give one.
“Weetabix are for wolves,” I say, surprising myself.
“What?”
“Something a friend used to say.” John. John was the friend who used to say it, but I still find it hard to say his name. “It always made him laugh. I have no idea why.”
“It’s kind of funny,” he says.
“Is it? Wolves find humor difficult to understand.”
“I don’t want to mislead you. It’s not really funny, but it is odd.”
I put two ovals of what looks like particleboard into each bowl. “I only ever take two. They get soggy otherwise.”
Then I pour the milk. He seems to be watching my arm, where the muscles overlap, rather than the milk over the particleboard in his beige industrial bowl. “Say when.”
“When,” he says.
I stop and screw the lid back on.
He breaks the biscuits up with the side of his spoon and looks through the window.
“When I was sitting with him,” he says, “Eudemos came and cleaned Magnus’s feet. The thing is I’ve only ever seen Eudemos human—”
“In skin.”
“In skin. Yes. I’d only ever seen him in skin. I’d never seen him as a wolf. But I knew who he was.”
“And you’re wondering how.”
“Yes. I guess.”
“Humans think that what is seen is all that is. That what is spoken is all that is said. But wolves know that life happens in the very crowded spaces between what is seen and what is spoken.” My spoon scrapes against the side of the bowl. “Ælfrida, the first Alpha, almost lost a wolf to the witch trials in Boston because he knew things that couldn’t be seen. She taught the Pack to be much more careful after that.”
I hold up the yellow box. He shakes his head. “I’m good,” he says.
“You recognized Eudemos the same way you recognized Magnus. Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
Sealing up the box, I put it back on a shelf of them.
“I think you are wilder than you like to admit, than you feel is right for a Shifter.”
“Lukani. We don’t use Shifter. It’s like ‘werewolf’ for us.”
I scrape up the few last flakes in the bottom of my bowl.
“What does it mean?”
“Lukani? Nothing. Not that I know of anyway. It’s just the name of a tribe in southern Italy that we’re theoretically descended from.”
“So that’s why you all have Roman names.”
“We don’t have Roman names. Romans had Lukani names. Romulus and Remus were Lukani; the wolf was their mother.” He drinks down the last of the milk. “Rhea Silvia, they called her: Villainess of the Woods.”
“Villainess?”
“Because she was a wolf, of course.”
I don’t exactly laugh, but I chortle, which is more than I’ve done since John died and I became Alpha and wolves no longer saw me but the Symbol of Pack Endurance.
Symbols of Pack Endurance do not chortle.
Constantine looks at me, smiling like a wolf settling in, waiting to coax something from its burrow, but I know exactly what happens to things coaxed out of burrows by wolves.
“You wash, I’ll dry,” I say, picking up th
e bowls and spoons.
He picks up my coffee cup.
“Leave it there,” I say. “I’m still working on it.”
“It’s pretty cold.”
“My coffee is always cold.” I take a sip before setting it beside the sink.
Pushing his sleeves above his elbows, he squeezes soap on a brush hanging from a hook on the wall. I shake out a towel. The window in front of us gives out onto the trees. Like all the windows of the Great Hall, it is open and the lungs of the forest pull air out, then breathe it back filled with cool and damp and balsam and fern and the murmurs and shuffles and yelps. He moves slowly, each circle coming close to my arm, not touching but heating the air between us long enough for me to miss it when it’s gone and anticipate its return like a breath, a breeze, the beat of a heart.
I pull my arm away.
“Do you think Magnus will be happier?” He hands me the bowl with no change of expression.
Staring out the window, I rub it dry.
“Do you think he’ll be—” He starts again.
“I heard you. I was thinking.”
When I finish, I hang the towel over the bar of the upper oven.
“Happiness seems like a luxury when you are trying to survive. But Magnus will belong and that is something. And that will not change.”
Staring out the window above the sink, the Shifter raps his knuckles absently against his chest with a slow and hollow beat.
Tock.
Tock.
Tock.
I pick up the big novelty coffee mug, tilt it back, and finish the icy dregs inside. I look at it for a while, at its blood-spattered moon, at its lone wolf.
“This”—I turn the thing upside down—“is empty.”
He looks at me, his brow drawn. He holds out his hand to wash it.
I slam it against the edge of the sink and it explodes into fragments.
“It’s not empty now.”
He stares at the black handle in my hand. I set it on the counter, brushing a few bits from my arm, then retrieve the wooden brush and dinged black dustpan from under the sink and begin sweeping the black and red and white pieces into the dustpan.