Constantine
She handed me a note written on a bright-pink sticky at the door. “Give this,” she said, “to my grandma.” I moved toward her just as she reached out her hand, but because we both moved at the same time, what had been perfectly judged becomes misjudged and her fingers scrape across my chest. She pulls her hand away, looking surprised at her fingertips fisted tight against her palm. It lasts only a second then is gone, her expression becoming closed and guarded again.
“Alpha?”
As soon as the door closes behind her, I lower myself to retrieve the pink square. It says STEN on one side. On the other, BENCHES and then words I can’t understand. I sound them out as best I can, but I know none of them are her name.
“Hey, get out of the way.”
Dazed, I look up from where I am kneeling on the floor, a pink Post-it pressed to my nose, as a werewolf comes out of the kitchen with a huge earthenware bowl that smells of garlic and lemon and thyme. Other werewolves stand impatiently behind him bearing more plates and bowls. I jump up to let the line of werewolf caterers through.
The Pack is already filling up the Main Hall. They clot around the table, a greedy crowd grabbing serving spoons and spilling food and snarling at each other. The Alpha’s office door slams open and she strides down the hall. The werewolves look at one another but they’re crowded too close together to get away.
“He, He, Wulfas!” she says, banging the hilt of her dagger against the huge table three times—thoom, thoom, thoom. Before she even fits the knife back in her sheath, a line has formed and the wolves shuffle forward, their heads bowed sheepishly.
I see Julia near the front of the line. She’s clean at least. Dressed in running pants and a long-sleeved blue T-shirt that says I BELIEVE IN BUFFALO, even though I would lay long odds on her ability to find Buffalo on the map. When she gets to the head of the line, she stops. A woman beside her pushes a plate into her hand and points her toward the food. She hesitates again, threading the plate through her fingers, looking hesitantly over her back. The woman says something to her, and Julia starts to fill up her plate.
“Get in line or get to your table,” says a voice. Turning around, I see a woman with a whole mob of werewolves crowded behind her, waiting to get in line.
“I’m looking for the Alpha’s grandma.”
She blinks a couple of times until a man next to her elbows her with a snort. Finally, she turns around. “Hey, Sigegeat,” she says. “Shifter here says he’s looking for the Alpha’s grandma.”
Werewolves who are human start to laugh. Those who are not skitter out from under the tables, tails tucked in away from the stomping feet.
A man with rusty hair stands at another table, thumping heads as he moves between rows of laughing men and women. It isn’t until he reaches the head of the table where all the platters of food are that I get a good look at his face. He is a squat, broad man with a brownish-red beard and wild unkempt hair that obscures much of his face. Much but not enough to hide the several star-shaped scars along the top of his cheek.
“It’s Gamma, Shifter, not Grandma. I am Sigegeat Guthlacsson, Gamma of the 7th Echelon of the Great North.”
“It’s Constantine, Ziggy, not ‘Shifter.’”
One by one, the voices stop until the room goes silent and wolves run to sit down like children caught out at the end of a game of musical chairs.
“Come,” Ziggy says, pulling at my arm. He points to the table where he had been and where the Alpha quickly takes a seat, soup sloshing up the side of her bowl.
“What is—?”
“Now.” He pushes me down and lowers his head over the empty plate in front of him, his hands nervously plucking at the edges of his napkin.
Other wolves bow their heads over their plates, and even the Alpha sits, bent over, prodding at the contents.
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.