Constantine
Many years ago when I was a boy living on a cul-de-sac, I got a toy compass in a cereal box. This was back in the day when children could be trusted not to eat toy compasses in cereal boxes. There was something wrong with it. The needle didn’t have the magnetic paint that would have made the end point feebly north so my mother threw it away, saying she would not have broken toys cluttering up the house. I retrieved it, though, because it pointed in whatever direction I tilted my hand. It pointed me the way I wanted to go.
This one—this tool of an outdoorsman who is probably even now wondering why six lawyers are harassing him for simple trespass—points toward a woman. Tall and ramrod straight with eyes the color of amber and honey.
I know it doesn’t really, not any more than the arrow points to her desk or to the window or to the mountains that August thought he could breech like Hannibal. Except standing in his way was this woman.
The door opens and a man sticks his head in. “Alpha?” he says and tells her about some meeting but as soon as werewolves see that the door is open, they flood in asking for her to decide, to tend to, to care about, to be responsible for.
She pulls a pencil from behind her ear. A spiral of black hair catches on the metal cuff holding the eraser, and when she yanks it loose, the hair bounces back, framing her eye and her cheekbone. She lifts her eyes to mine, and for one moment, I see the woman beneath and I wonder when was the last time someone tended to her.
“Alpha?”
The woman disappears and the Alpha is back. I return the compass to her desk because it is not going to tell me where I need to go.
Across the hall from the Alpha’s office is a wide doorway that opens onto a kitchen with slate floors, an enormous stone trench sink, an industrial stove, and a refrigerator. Three werewolves sit frozen at a big sanded table before mountains of chopped carrots and onions and celery. Another stops, a huge pot of water in midair.
As soon as I turn away, the cleavers thump against wood, the pot hits the stove with a clang and a splash.
The hall ends in a back door leading to a cleared area filled with vegetable gardens and cold frames and puppies playing with a dead squirrel. One tosses it into the air with a quick flick of his neck while another grabs it and springs away. Others wait, their little legs shaking and shivering for a chance to pounce and squeal and bite and tussle.
It’s like watching children at a game of keep-away, except in the end, someone eats the ball.
When I put my hand on the lever, an enormous wolf comes out of nowhere and leans heavily against the door, fur squashed against the metal mesh. He licks his paws, but the meaning is clear.
In the other direction, past the kitchen and the Alpha’s office, is a big room that I had noticed before. Lined with half-empty bookshelves, the room is occupied by a group of small children nestled together watching a man with colored and numbered tongue depressors as he tries to extract a blue stick from a boy’s teeth. “Soft mouth, Edmund,” he says. “Soft mouth.” Seeing me, he kicks the door closed with his foot.
The hall opens onto an enormous space with raw beams above broad floorboards dappled by the jade light leaking in through the trees outside. A breeze blows through the open windows, bringing the whisper of rustling leaves and tussling birds. It’s huge but not in the way of August’s cavernous cathedral ceilings and double-height windows that had nothing to do with need and everything to do with signaling that he had the money to build and heat more space than he needed.
This is huge in the way of a place that is meant to accommodate very many very large people.
The far end of the room is occupied by long, heavy tables that smell of beeswax. When we first arrived, they had been surrounded by flimsy metal chairs, but now those are all folded against one wall.
At the near end, a huge fieldstone fireplace is surrounded by a mismatched trio of worn and clawed sofas and secondhand lamps. A well-chewed shoe drops to the floor, narrowly missing my head. Above me at the top of a set of stairs, a little furry head pops out from a birch-branch balustrade. The puppy looks at me and then at the shoe and barks. I pick up the shoe. The puppy barks again. I draw back my arm and throw. With a quick flick, the head disappears, followed by a thump and the scratching of claws on wood up above.
Then Magnus screams.
Doors that had been closed now open as werewolves turn alarmed toward the room with the closed door just past the Alpha’s office.
When I crash through the door, Tristan turns toward me, his latex gloves coated in blood. Magnus’s eyes are huge above his gore-smeared face. I hear his garbled voice behind me as the doctor’s body slams into the floor, his head between my hands, until someone enters the room and gathers me up in arms like iron.
What are they doing to Magnus?
“I am trying to help him,” the doctor says, feeling the back of his head.
“Magnus,” the Alpha grunts, “tell him.”
“He can’t, Alpha. He’s got film in his mouth.”
“Get it out. While I still have him.” She holds me so tight, my shoulder blades rub together.
Trapped between her hardness and her softness, I strain when the doctor reaches into Magnus’s mouth. Magnus whimpers as Tristan pulls out a white tab covered with blood.
“That’s it, Shifter. I needed an X-ray.” He turns his laptop around, dislodging a pile of heavy stationery embossed with TRISTAN RASMUSSON, MD, FACS, which slides to the floor.
Dr. Rasmusson clucks with annoyance, stepping over the puddled pages to retrieve a damp cloth. He gives it to Magnus, signaling for him to wipe his face.
Magnus dabs weakly at his mouth, then falls back, the white paper lining the bed crackling under him as he turns on his side, the cloth to his mouth. All the fight seeps out of me.
“Alpha?” The doctor picks up his laptop, bending his head to the other side of the room, away from Magnus’s racked body.
I pull a blue cotton blanket up to cover Magnus’s distended shoulders and his swollen joints and bony vertebrae, the guilt I feel is almost nauseating. I can’t pretend this is anyone’s fault but mine.
“Shifter?” the Alpha says.
I pull the blanket up farther, less for Magnus’s sake than to hide the unpleasant truth that having promised to protect him, I had let him become this.
“Shifter?” she says again and I head numbly to where the two of them stand over a cart with shallow drawers and a small tray of metal instruments.
Balancing the laptop next to the tray, Tristan pulls up a complicated patchwork image of black and shades of gray.
He patiently points out the flat ridge of Magnus’s teeth and the jagged roots. Then the second set of roots on top of them that are sharp and high and curving deep into the line of his upper jaw, a bare millimeter from a charcoal-gray cavity. I try to blink away the image, but I can’t.
“He’s always had toothaches,” I finally manage to say, knowing full well how inadequate it sounds.
“This is not a toothache,” the doctor says. “This is a face on the verge of disintegrating.” He closes the computer and opens one of the shallow drawers, dropping what looks like an oversize wire stripper on the paper-lined surface.
“What happened to his claws?”
“Claws? I told you. He’s never changed, so he has never had claws. He’s got some kind of genetic condition with his nails?” I can’t stop my voice from raising up in a question.
Tristan closes the drawer and holds it shut for a moment, then he turns around, arms crossed in front of him, assessing me.
“There’s nothing genetic about it. Someone wanted to stop him from changing, so they pulled out his claws until he did. Stop.”
He keeps looking at me expectantly, like he’s waiting for a denial but he knows all the facts are lined up on his side. I don’t bother. Somehow, I’ve always known. Not that his claws were pulled out, but that I’d been lying to myself, pretending that the troughs on the bare skin of his nails and the blood on that white pen I’d lent to the haunted boy in Burnaby could be explained away by a rare human ailment found on Google.
Everyone thinks—thought, they’re all dead now—that I must remember the day my mother changed. Who wouldn’t? One day, she’s the reserved, OCD but otherwise unexceptional Maxine Brody of Evergreen Terrace. Recording secretary for the baked goods committee of the Rainy River Elementary PTA. The next day, she’s a wolf the size of a VW.
I didn’t remember.
I remembered the smell of burning brownies, the homework on the floor around her, but nothing else. Nothing except for her thumbs. The way the nails grew and thickened and darkened, folding to a point. The way the digit migrated up her wrist.
Someone tore that claw out of Magnus’s living flesh.
“Tristan, give us time.”
The doctor looks at me warily, all smart-assery gone. He bolts away, his laptop clutched to his chest like a breastplate.
Something touches my hand, my skin. “Let it go.” Gentle and secure and strong. “See what you’re doing and let it go.” I don’t feel the blood itself dripping down the side of my hand or the bent and broken steel jammed into my palm.
“I didn’t do it.” I pull the long, sharp tweezers out and drop them to the tray, flexing my hand.
“I know you didn’t,” she says. “I’ve dealt with enough humans to know what a lie smells like.” She picks up the broken metal and wraps them in a paper towel.
“I didn’t even know he looked so…sick. He always wore thick clothes and… I don’t know.”
She heads over to a bin in the corner of the room. When she puts her foot on the pedal, the cover thumps against the wall, then the broken tweezers hit the bottom of the bin.
“It’s so weak,” she says, straightening out the blue paper liner on the cart. “The word ‘change.’ Makes it sound like putting on a costume.”
She rubs her shoulder.
“In the Old Tongue, the word is eftboren. It’s…” Across the room, metal scrapes on metal as Tristan draws the thin curtain around Magnus. “Again born? No, reborn. It’s why we live so long, because our bodies are constantly dying, and with each change, they are renewed. Reborn.
“Without the change, Magnus is not being reborn. Without the change, he is only dying.”