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 the 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.
I dump the shards in the trash.
“Always hated that cup,” I say, sliding brush and dustpan back under the sink.