“I’m not thirsty anymore.”
He led us around the park and into the city’s streets. I sent a quick text to Aggie telling her I’d meet her at home later, and felt a surge of excitement at the thought of how approving she would be of this unexpected rendezvous. I almost told her to come and meet us because doing anything interesting without her was unnatural to me, but I reminded myself that there would have to be some things I did alone. Mum’s words flashed unbidden into my mind. One of you will have to leave the other eventually.
We walked for a long time and the stranger was mostly easy to talk to, except a moment here or there when he changed the subject so abruptly I almost got whiplash. In these moments there was a streak of something in his eyes, a flash maybe of boredom? And then he launched us elsewhere and I was left scrabbling to get my bearings.
Soon he changed direction as sharply as he changed the subject, and we were in front of an apartment block, and without asking he went inside and waited for me to follow him.
I hesitated. Told myself this was too much, way too much of an assumption, and dangerous besides, but if I’m being honest it was only for a split second. The flare of adrenaline felt like fear but also a yearning for something, anything, and always there was my unyielding curiosity to outweigh the rest. This body of mine that sought and knew things I did not. So I followed him inside and let the elevator carry us to the top floor and then I followed him into his apartment. To have something of my own. To feel something I had not simply watched.
* * *
In the morning he drove me home. I still didn’t know his name. He still didn’t know mine. I was flushed with the heady tactile memories of the night, with the feel of the silk ties around my wrists, holding me to the bed, the feel of his mouth on my body, the rush of excitement this brought, the sense of inhabiting a different life.
As he pulled over in front of our house I was struck by the realization that I hadn’t told him where I lived.
Something went cold inside.
But a tiny quiet piece, the darkest of me, it already suspected, didn’t it? Didn’t I know in that first moment?
He seemed relaxed, a little impatient. He had to get to work. So when he kissed me it was with none of the slow, lingering passion of the previous night, but there was a different kind of familiarity, something that spoke of having done this before.
“Bye, kid,” he said. “Do me a favor and think of me today, okay? Think of me when you’re in the shower.”
I climbed out, dazed, and walked inside.
Aggie shouted to me from the kitchen. “Come. Now. Spill.”
I sat at the kitchen bench. Aggie poured the coffee from the percolator on the stove. “You look weird,” she said.
“I don’t actually know what to say,” I admitted. “It was … unexpected.”
Maybe I did tell him my address. I must have. I was distracted that morning. As the thought took hold I sank back into the thrill of it. “I don’t even know his name.”
“No fucking way.” Aggie threw her head back and howled like a wolf.
“Shhh,” I laughed.
Without warning the door to our little terrace opened and a person strode inside. It startled me, but then I saw it was him, the man, and a surprised smile filled me and things happened all at the same time, he said, “You left your phone in my car, kid,” and I said, “Oh,” and Aggie said, “Hello, handsome,” and for some reason we were both walking toward him and then he stopped and we stopped and we all just stared at each other as mutual horror dawned.
“Shit,” he said. He threw me a swift look, one that seemed to plead for something, for mercy, maybe. And then his eyes shifted, permanently, to Aggie. “I didn’t know,” he said clearly. “I didn’t know, Aggie. I thought it was you.”
Aggie looked at me, and I looked at her.
“He did,” I said. “He did think it was you. He never asked my name.”
We waited in agony for her response.
And she said, breaking my heart with her generosity, “Should we laugh? Or kill him?”
* * *
His name was Gus Holloway. He was Aggie’s new boyfriend, the one I hadn’t yet met because of his crazy work hours. He was thirty years old and played rugby every Tuesday night, and he was doing his residency at RPA Hospital. He liked six sugars in his coffee in the morning and drank Fireballs religiously, and he met Aggie because she taught his nephew Japanese. He broke rules. He was confidence personified. He could make her come with a look. He had seven sets of French linen bedsheets and changed them every day.
Those were the things I knew before I met Gus.
What I knew after that night were things I had no right to know.
And what I didn’t know. The things I didn’t yet know about him belonged deep in the ugliest recesses of his soul, in a place my mother had seen and tried to warn us about, only I didn’t listen to her, I never listened.
* * *
It was late when he finally left. I hid in my room, unsure how I’d ever face him again. They talked out there for hours, and then they did the other thing they apparently do all the time, the thing that probably meant they’d made up. How small and unworthy I must have been last night, compared to the passionate creature he normally had. How could he not have known?
Aggie came into my room and slid onto the bed beside me.
“He says he thought we were playing our game,” she told me. “Where we pretend to be characters.” She shook her head, then admitted, “We do play it sometimes. It started as a way to help me rehearse.” The amateur theater company she joined. That play she only got cast in because she could speak German.
I nodded, and didn’t know what to say.
Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe I didn’t either. I didn’t, not really. Not consciously.
I thought of the look on his face when he saw us standing next to each other this morning. There was no surprise in his eyes, only guilt.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Aggie. I fucked up.”
“We’ll share him.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I can’t imagine he’d say no.” She took my hand and squeezed; there was something feverish about her and she was really not joking, something had come loose in her head. “I don’t do anything without you. That’s not what we are. We share.”
I tucked her hair behind her ear. “Oh man. You have got to be the most generous and unhinged person on the planet.”
She laughed into my shoulder and I couldn’t tell if maybe she was crying.
“I can’t be with someone knowing you like him,” she said. “I won’t. I’ll dump him.”
“I don’t like him,” I said. “He got bored when I talked.”
She laughed through her tears. “He does that. He’s a bit of a dickhead, actually.”
15
She still howls, some nights. Number Six. Evan wanted to call her Ash, didn’t he? She howls for her mate, but now also for her strength, to define her territory, to stake a claim to it and ward off enemies. She teaches her babies to howl, defiant in the dark, growing stronger by the day. Soon she will teach them the hunt. They’ll have to learn early, for there is no pack to kill for them.
* * *
A town meeting in the school auditorium is called about the search for Stuart. Nobody is on the stage this time. Duncan is in his spot by the door, watching the crowd. This isn’t a cop-run meeting, it’s been called by Lainey’s brothers, who are huddled at the front of the audience. One of them, at least a decade younger than Lainey, goes to the microphone. “Thank you for coming,” he says. He can only be a teenager, but he speaks with clear and resounding confidence. “My brother-in-law has been missing now for two weeks. The police don’t have any reason to suspect that he’s taken off—they look for things like phone records and any debits from bank accounts, and there haven’t been any, and they have his phone too which was left at home, meaning it’s looking more and more like something’s happened to him. Whether it was an accident o
r not, somebody knows something, and we intend to find out. We’re offering a cash reward for any information you might have that could direct the police to Stuart’s whereabouts.”
Somebody in the crowd stands up. A woman. “You’re not going to get anyone coming forward, son. Not unless wolves can start confessing their sins.”
Oh fuck.
Evan is sitting beside me. He grabs my hand and squeezes it hard, less to comfort me than himself, I think. We’ve been hoping this day wouldn’t come.
“We all know what’s happened,” she goes on. “We need to put that poor man to rest but we’ll have to do so knowing his body’s lost.”
“Not lost,” someone else says.
“This is exactly what we knew would happen,” another voice says.
I get to my feet and stride to the microphone on the stage. “Do you mind,” I say to the boy, and he seems like he might argue, but shrugs and moves aside. “Before this gets out of hand,” I say clearly, “I would like to explain that if a wolf had killed a person, we would know. We would have found remains. Wolves don’t eat the stomachs of their kills. They crush bones but only to get to the marrow inside, which leaves shards. I can assure you, there would be something left for us to find. At the very least, blood, and a great deal of it.”
There is a heavy silence and I realize I have done nothing but disturb them further.
The meeting ends. But I’ve seen in their faces what I dreaded. They don’t believe me. They don’t care what I say. Something approaches, much like a storm. I will try to hold it back, but sooner or later their fear will surge. If no culprit is found, they’ll take to the forest with weapons.
* * *
Outside I call to Lainey, but she’s being jostled into a car by her brothers. There are five of them, and one of the older ones, not the kid who spoke, steps into my path. “Not now,” he says. “She’s tired.”
“I just want to see if she’s okay. My name’s Inti, I’m her friend.” The word comes easily, but is it true?
“We know who you are. She doesn’t need any more visions of wolves crushing bones, all right?”
I deflate. Lainey is staring resolutely ahead, and clearly doesn’t want to speak to me. I didn’t want friends when I got here, and now I wish I could be there for her but it doesn’t work that way. I made myself a force for conflict in her life. I made things worse. “I’m sorry,” I tell her brother. “I didn’t mean to conjure that. But you guys know that’s not what happened, right? Or else you wouldn’t be posting a reward.”
“We’re just covering our bases,” he says flatly. “None of us expects to have to pay that money.”
* * *
The wolf pups are about two months old, and have emerged from the den, scrawny and scruffy, with paws and ears too big for their bodies. They wrestle and play unceasingly, tripping over themselves and yapping with excitement. They’ve moved to a rendezvous point—where they’d hang out with the rest of their pack if they had one—not far from their den site, and luckily for me, it’s a visible grassy stretch amid sparse trees. I visit them most days, staying at a distance to watch without disturbing them. They know I am here. They can smell me from nearly three kilometers away. The more I come, the more used to me they will grow, which is exactly what I should be guarding against, and yet I keep coming, transfixed by them and also getting more frightened by the day that some hunter will step out of the trees and gun them all down.
Despite my own rules I have taken to thinking of Number Six as Ash. She watches over her pups until she is forced to leave them to hunt. Normally there would be other wolves here to babysit them, so I tend to stay during these times, hunkered down in a sleeping bag, though what I could do if hunters arrived I have no idea. Put myself between them, I guess—though at this point I’m not sure that would be much of a deterrent.
Human hunters are not the only threat the unprotected pups face. The Tanar Pack, strong with five grown wolves, isn’t far from here. They’ve been roaming, widening their territory. If they have a mind to stake this land they could turn up determined to kill the pups before they mature into wolves old enough to present threats. But no other wolves come, and the pups spend their time playing and sleeping, or practicing how to stalk and pounce on their siblings.
I’ve watched Ash return a couple of times, her belly swollen from gorging as much as she can because waiting for her are six hungry mouths. She is surrounded by her pups, who lick her muzzle to let her know they’re famished. She regurgitates the meat from her stomach and they gobble it up, fighting each other to get the larger shares. If they keep licking her mouth she sometimes growls to curb their greediness, and in the flash of dominance there can be no mistaking that this is a breeding female, a leader. Her pups back down immediately.
If they’re to survive, this young pack, Ash will need to recruit new members—wolves who can hunt with her, help her raise the pups, and help her fight off rival packs.
I can’t seem to leave them. It’s becoming a problem.
* * *
At home Aggie has made a vegetable lasagna, forced to use mainly mushrooms once I’d explained that it was beyond my powers to get a hold of eggplants in rural Scotland.
“You must have been cooking all day!” I say as she removes the foil and a heavenly smell hits me. She still hasn’t gone out to meet Gall. Probably a greater indication of her mental health than just about anything. She loves horses as much as Dad did.
Has Thirteen left the cage yet? Aggie asks.
“She goes in and out to find food. But no, not really, and Twelve—the young male from the Glenshee Pack—he’s been sniffing around.”
Is she in danger from him?
I hesitate, then nod. No use lying to her.
Close the cage.
“Lock her back in? No way, I can’t do that.”
I watch my sister cutting the lasagna and serving it onto plates. She’s mad at me. I try to explain. “She won’t survive if she can’t look after herself. If she fears him, she can run, or she can fight. But it’s no life being locked in a cage. Better she’s free to die.”
Aggie looks up at me. She’s stayed in there for a reason.
I shake my head and start eating. Around a mouthful I mutter, “Fear. It’s just fear and that’s weakness.”
I am not looking at her as she tries to sign something, so she shoves me hard to get me to watch her hands. You’re all clenched.
“What?” I snap, thinking I’ve misread some sign, but she makes the same words again. “What do you want me to say?”
Let it go.
“That’s rich.” I finish shoveling the lasagna into my mouth but I can no longer taste it. “I need to go out for a bit tonight.”
Boyfriend? she signs.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
Her eyebrows arch.
“I’ve been with the wolves.”
She glances at me skeptically. Then signs, It’s a blueberry.
“Huh?”
Aggie tilts her head. Your baby is the size of a blueberry.
Heat fills my cheeks. Any irritation I felt leaks away and I take her hand because of course she knows. “It doesn’t matter. I’m telling him tonight. That I’m not keeping it.”
You don’t have to tell anyone anything.
She’s right, that’s true. There is no real need to burden Duncan with this—I know he will agree with my decision, because he’s never wanted a child and explicitly told me so. Besides which, it’s not his decision to make. And yet I can feel myself being drawn through the woods to his cottage, and I know I need to tell him, only I’m not willing to dig into why I need to.
Whose is it? Aggie asks.
“No one’s. It was a mistake.”
Did he hurt you? she asks, and the question is what hurts, that this is what she has come to expect, and really, why wouldn’t she?
“No.”
Aggie considers me. Don’t do it for me. Because of me.
“It’s for me,
” I tell her. “It’s you and me, remember?”
Aggie hugs me fiercely.
“You and me,” I say again. A mantra to hold her pieces together, to hold mine.
* * *
There is still a mound, but if you didn’t know it was man-made you wouldn’t be able to tell. I pause by it, wondering what secrets the body down there holds. Living in the moment I found him, in the openness of his flesh, the emptiness of his eyes. I imagine crouching to press my hands to the insides of him, pushing them back where they belong and sealing him up, I imagine fusing his skin back together until his eyes open. I’d give anything to have dreamt that morning in the fog. I fantasized about him being dead but his death has brought only more trouble.
I sink to a crouch and think back, despite the nausea this brings. I try to conjure the memory of his body, try to notice something I might have missed, a wound unlike the others, something that could give me a clue, a push in the right direction, anything. If I could by some miracle work out who actually killed him, then I could absolve the wolves of blame. They’d be safe. I might not be, but that’s a different issue.
In any case, if Stuart had such a wound I didn’t see it. All I saw was blood and the insides of things I shouldn’t have been able to see.
I carry on through the dark forest. Returning along the path I took that morning, and so many instances before. Sound laps gently from Duncan’s little house. I hear it before I see its rosy light. I wasn’t expecting to socialize, but I steel myself and knock on the door anyway. “I’ll get it,” I hear a woman’s voice say and the insides of me drop out and I’m about to turn and run when the door swings open and I see Amelia.
“You look relieved,” she laughs.
“I … yeah,” I say. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She kisses my cheek and pulls me inside. “I didn’t know you were coming. This is a lovely surprise.”
“I just came to talk to Duncan, but I can come back.”
Once There Were Wolves Page 13