by Maria Vale
She looks into my eyes, lines between her brows, her lips pursed. “But you know I am receptive.”
“I don’t want you to be willing. I need you to want me”—I slide my hand around her cheek, my thumb on her chin—“the way I want you.”
The stillness is broken when an animal runs overhead and twigs and bark and needles are loosed from the canopy, falling down around us like snow.
Under my hand, I feel her head turn toward the Great Hall and the High Pines beyond as though weighing her responsibilities to her wolves against what she wants.
When she turns back, she doesn’t say anything, but she buries her lips in my hand, and suddenly, I am afraid.
I have always been selfish, fulfilling my own body’s needs. I didn’t bother to be good, because being good implied the desire for a repeat performance, of a relationship with its discussion of rings, the cuteness of baby cheeks, and the capital appreciation of real estate.
Now with a woman who could never be small, I wish I’d practiced more. All I have is a lifetime of reading people so that I could efficiently snuff out life, and I will use it to make sure this woman burns with it.
I put my hand to her breast. Cupping the soft weight underneath, I rub my thumb slowly across her skin, catching the tip. She sucks in a breath. I spread out my fingers, then I close them gently around her nipple, opening and closing until I feel the tremor through her body.
Then I bend down, tasting her, currant dark, currant hard, and currant sweet. Her body begins to move, swaying, unthinking, trying to get more skin to skin. Her knees buckle and she slides down against me and she lies against the pine-padded forest floor, releasing the scent of pine and rain as I stretch out against her, feeling her, reading her, listening to her, finding all those spots in the vast continuum between what is spoken and what is seen, where life happens.
Her eyes are closed, but I feel the tension of her body, her jaw tight, her back curved, forcing her torso toward me. The air between us thrums like cicadas in midsummer and she opens her thighs.
She puts her hand on my chest and I feel her calling all the wildness that I’ve kept in check, except for that one disastrous time.
I want every inch of my skin to touch her: chest, hips, thighs all pressed tight against her until I push my leg between hers to open her up and she pushes at me. My overloaded brain just barely manages to register the rejection of her hand and I twist away.
“I wasn’t stopping you,” she says. “I couldn’t see. I want to see.”
This time when I stretch my legs on either side of hers, I hold myself a little away on trembling arms. Head bent against mine, she watches as I slowly move back into place, nudging her open. Her mouth slack, the tip of her tongue touching the line of her teeth, she watches intently until I am poised trembling at her entrance. I move as slowly as my strung-out body will allow me, watching her want. I stop and withdraw, feeling her clench around me. Then I enter her again, a little farther this time. Each time, deeper until I slide all the way in and I am surrounded by heat and granite and moss and I am so deep that all we can see is the line where my hip touches hers.
She closes her eyes and we leave behind what is seen and what is spoken and enter that part of the continuum that is only felt. I push into her, changing the angle of my hips to find what makes her tighten around me. How deep she needs me to go until she groans my name and arches her back and I empty myself into her, only I am not emptied, because I am shattered.
And like that cup, I will never be empty again.
Chapter 25
Evie
“He’s a fool, Alpha. I can handle him.”
I can’t tell Elijah why, but I will not have any more argument. “Your Alpha,” I say, my voice resonating through my chest and skull, “would have Cassius watched. At. All. Times.”
Now Elijah lowers his eyes.
“You can’t trust Cassius,” Constantine told me last night. It was quiet, but I felt the vibration of it at the point where the top of my head fit under his chin and my ear pressed against his chest.
“I don’t.”
“If he were to escape, it would be—”
“Unfortunate?”
“Much worse than that.”
He stays quiet for a while, his lips pressed to the top of my head, his thumb caressing my shoulder. “I know you can’t kill him, so let me. Then you won’t have to—”
“We do not betray the spirit of our laws by circumventing the letter of them. He has not threatened the Pack, and we do not need him for food. But he will be watched and that will have to do.”
When I caught Constantine watching me at Evening Meat, I pressed my palms together, lips to fingers. He responded by drawing a thumb across his lower lip.
Then Tara asked why I was smiling.
The Pack cannot suspect that their Alpha is giving in to her most selfish instincts and fucking a Shifter, so I told her that I’d been remembering Sigegeat’s joke about how the 12 pointer bucked up his face.
It was a lie. Tara nodded. Sigegeat preened—the Alpha has recognized his comic genius, after all. Constantine walked stiffly toward the door and I tried hard not to watch him go.
When I get back to my cabin, he’s ready, tall and broad and naked.
“You have to stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asks.
“Like you are now.”
As the Alpha, I pretend that I don’t see him, the hunger on his face, his eyes following me, his mouth opening like he needs to close the space between us with words or his tongue.
As Evie, I am already half-naked by the time the door closes. We struggle awkwardly, our bodies pressed against each other as he slides his hands under my waistband and slides my pants down, not letting them fall but guiding them with his rough carpenter’s hands, tracing a path down my ass and my thighs until he is on his knees in front of me.
“Open for me,” he says, fingers opening up my thighs. It is a shock that leaves me speechless and breathless, the feeling of his tongue cool and broad and firm against my seam.
He says I taste like salt and earth and sweetgrass.
And after I come, my legs trembling like aspen leaves in summer, he lifts me and settles me down on the mattress in the middle of the floor that I put there because the pups like to jump down from the sleeping loft and I knew I would not be fucking anyone again for a long time.
I thought.
He enters me, my Green Man, smelling of life and water. I taste myself on his mouth while he moves slowly, each thrust a spark against tinder until I start to squirm again, my legs tight around his hips. His back curves and he slams in deeper, then he groans my name, quietly so that no wolves will hear.
Evie.
In the bathroom, I scrub hard, removing every last trace of him. Then I help him, removing the last trace of myself. He doesn’t like it, but what can I do? Humans see power as a license for self-indulgence. For wolves, power means responsibility. I am expected to do what the Pack needs me to do, and sadly, the Pack does not need me to be fucked limp by Constantine.
He scrubs his hair dry with the towel, then he stares bleakly into the mirror, feeling the stubble at his chin.
“You should let it grow out.” I curl my arms over his shoulders, looking at him in the reflection. “For winter.”
For whatever reason—beard, snow, or future—he smiles and turns to me, his lips to my cheek. “Tomorrow?” he whispers.
“Tomorrow is the Iron Moon. Tomorrow if I do this”—I bite lightly on his lip—“it will hurt. Tomorrow if I do this”—I run the tips of my fingers across his upright cock—“you will bleed.”
He cranes his head out of the bathroom, looking toward the path of light on Home Pond. His smile burns away, leaving nothing but the bitter scent of anger.
“What happened when you changed?”
He shakes his head, his jaw clamped shut. With the toe of one foot, he scratches absently at the ankle of the other. I’ve kissed those old ligature marks that ring the gold of his skin in dark and mangled mauve.
“Whatever August did to you, Constantine, it will not be like last time.”
Chapter 26
Constantine
It will not be like last time.
Even in broad daylight, I knew the Iron Moon was coming, I felt it in Evie, a kind of dangerous edge. In the Pack’s increasing industry as they sealed everything up and turned it off. Mostly it was in a kind of electric anticipation. The inability to sit still, constantly checking the sky, scratching at necks and arms and backs as though if they scratched hard enough, they would tear through that imprisoning skin.
The evening comes like one of those dreams where you’re sitting in class or a meeting, but then someone calls on you and you stand up only to discover that you’re naked from the waist down. The only difference is I am naked from the waist down and from the waist up, and everyone else is naked too. Flagrantly, unashamedly naked.
There is way too much touching going on.
Where is she?
“Connie? Were you even paying attention?”
“Fine, fine,” I say, distractedly folding my clothes.
Ziggy chuffs a dry raspberry of exasperation. “So it’s fine, fine, if Tiberius shoots you?”
“What?” My T-shirt and boxer briefs go on top.
“I knew you weren’t paying attention. If you don’t change when we do, Tiberius. Will. Shoot. You. Won’t be the first time we’ve had to sand bloodstains out of the floor.”
A pup wobbles across the back of the sofa, pausing for a moment before launching herself onto a pile of adults.
“Ooof,” says the pile.
“Why aren’t the pups changing?”
“They don’t have to,” Ziggy says with a shrug. “The Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. The pups are already as wild as they can be, so she leaves them alone.”
I put my folded shirt on top of the pile of denim, sweats, sleeveless flannel, as well as the occasional Offlander linen shirts and summer-weight wools that belong to the 7th.
I smooth the stack, feeling the absence at its heart.
Where is she?
Then a subtle tension runs through the Pack. It’s not that they look to the door, though some do. It’s just they know she’s coming. I do too. I no longer have to see her to know as surely as if her head was leaning against my neck, as if her hand was on my heart, as if I was gathering her to me in the cold of an Adirondack summer night.
There are a few words exchanged with returning Offlanders, but not many. The 7th’s two Offlanders have been pacing anxiously back and forth for an hour, their pent-up wild scraping at the walls of their skin.
“Wes þu hal, Erika,” Ziggy says to one of them, a woman with red-brown hair standing at the window, staring at the sun. She whips her head around, teeth bared, before turning back to press her hands to the glass, her feet jittering on the floor.
All around us, men and women pace nervously, shaking out their legs and arms, bending low so they can check the sun’s progress through the window. It’s not setting quickly enough for them, but to me it seems to plummet from the sky.
The 14th Echelon crowds into one of the few remaining spots.
And for the first time since that horrible moment in Medical, I see Magnus in skin. I know it’s him, even though he looks nothing like he did. Before, he’d been a scrawny teenager among giants. A marionette with flopping distended joints and wooden gestures. It’s as though his body had stopped growing at the age of his last change, and now in the past weeks, it has raced ahead, making up for lost time. He has a fucking beard. Chest hair.
If I ever wanted proof that he doesn’t need me, here it is.
He looks around the room, and when he catches sight of me, he smiles, his teeth bright with only one slightly snaggled canine. He curls his arm around his front, his fingers reaching for that spot at his back, and begins to roll his shoulder blade.
If the Iron Moon finds us wild…
I hit Magnus fast and bring him down hard, pressing his back flat to the floor, my hand cradling the back of his head. Eudemos, though, who has bones made of lead, is not careful and hits me like he wants to hurt me. The scaffolding of my body cracks and groans. My left arm trapped against the floor pops loose from its place at my shoulder and I scream.
“Stop!” Evie yells, jumping for Eudemos before she remembers who she is and where.
“Stop,” the Alpha commands.
Someone’s got their teeth in my upper thigh. I can’t see who but if it was painful going in, it’s even more painful coming out. Eudemos lifts his body from mine, and when my lungs can inflate again, the agony in my shoulder joins up with the torment in my fingertips.
“What’s going on here?” the Alpha demands, looking at me, but pain has locked my jaw and it’s going to take me a minute before I can find the key.
“He attacked Magnus,” Eudemos says, helping Magnus up, suddenly his great protector. Magnus looks at me, his mouth open, a look of confused betrayal in his eyes, and now I have no choice but to unlock my jaw and explain to him that I’m not trying to deprive him of this new self. I am not jealous of what he has become without me.
“No forever wolf,” I exhale raggedly. “Not like Varya. He was…” Without thinking, I begin to roll my shoulder, not even the one that’s disconnected, but it’s enough and I grunt from the pain.
Evie purses her lips and squats down in front of me. “Tristan? A hand?” She helps me sit up, looking almost apologetic. I want to tell her that it doesn’t suit her at all, looking apologetic. Tristan’s hands find my elbow and wrist. A blindingly painful twist later, I understand the apologetic look. As my shoulder pops back into its socket, my eyes are blurred and my breathing shredded.
My ass hurts, too, and sticks to the floor.
“Is that true, Magnus?” Eudemos looks at him. “Tell me that’s not what you were doing?”
“But…” He looks around at his echelon for an explanation. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
The Alpha raises her eyebrows at the 14th’s Alpha.
“I…I…forgot?” Eudemos says with a sigh and begins to unbutton his shirt.
“Just so there is no misunderstanding,” the Alpha says, looking pointedly at Julia and Magnus, “the Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If we are in skin, she makes us wild. If we are wild, she makes us real wolves. Forever wolves.”
“But you don’t know if that would happen to us,” Cassius says. I notice him for the first time, standing silent and largely hidden in the corner behind the staircase. He is still dressed.
“I don’t know. If you’d like to find out, no one will stop you from changing now,” she says, making it clear that Cassius as a real wolf would be less objectionable or perhaps dead and either way a better outcome for the Pack.
Using my good arm, I push myself up from the floor. I start back for the 7th, but Eudemos blocks my way with his broad and frankly inhumanly furry chest. My fingers are tingling and my arm definitely weak. If he comes at me again, I’m going to have one chance to knock him out. I can’t raise my left arm high enough to protect against a return blow.
He doesn’t hit me. He just stands looking at me expectantly, then spreads his arms out at his sides. Evie is watching. So is Silver, sitting on the floor next to Tiberius, pups crawling over her naked skin. “If you’re going to bite him,” Silver says, bending down to look at the sun’s progress, “you need to do it now.”
“Bite him? I don’t want to bite him. Why would I bite him?”
“He attacked you without provocation. By law, you may bite him and he cannot retaliate. Although the law places no strictures as to where
, by custom, we avoid the cock and nose.”
Eudemos’s neck and shoulders are surrounded by thick fields of hair. His cheeks too. Whorls of it surround his nipples and belly button. His cock has shrunk into the surrounding overgrowth, perhaps worried about my understanding of the law and even more, my understanding of custom. Just looking at him, I feel bits of sweaty hair lodged between my teeth.
“You said ‘if’ and ‘may’… I’m presuming that means I don’t have to?”
“No, but the Pack will not tolerate grudges or resentments tearing at its fabric. Misblod ageat sculon ðy læs wyrmsan. Bad blood must be spilled lest it fester.”
“I’ll pass,” I say and head back to the 7th, chuckling to myself at the thought of August here. August who not only tolerated bad blood but encouraged it, every trifling grievance or imagined slight, so as to keep all his people sniping and snapping at one another. With exaggerated irony, August called it “our happy home,” though the compound was in reality a pit fight with company cars.
The Alpha bends down, peering through a window at the sun touching the ragged, tree-lined horizon. A gold disk framed by a valance of orange and purple clouds. “It’s almost time,” she says, straightening up. Those few remaining Pack still in clothes peel them off, adding them to the neat piles belonging to the wolves in their echelons. Other wolves double-check that the windows are fastened shut. Pack on the floor clamber over one another, noses touching, open mouths clashing, forming a wild chain.
Not Cassius though. He stands stock-still in the corner like a golem carved from the clay of bad blood and petty resentments. Elijah plucks at Cassius’s clothes, obviously telling him that he needs to strip, but Cassius ignores him, his eyes focused on Julia, willing her to turn and see his sullen expression.
She might have done it once. It used to be as though she could feel him looking at her, telling her to stop whatever she was doing. And she would, turning to him with a bright and anxious smile.
Maybe she is still aware of him because she turns slightly, offering him an even more decided view of her back while her focus is entirely on Arthur, who arrived late and is folding his clothes, piling them on the table. Then he turns toward Julia, his elegant naked body scarred by the claws of wolves and he smiles at her. Cassius’s hands clench into fists.