Constantine
Do you have a mate?
Why did I laugh when she asked me that? It’s a perfectly rational question. Is there someone who is going to come looking for you? Is there someone you dream of escaping to?
There were some who tried to convince me: The one who glanced coyly at advertisements for engagement rings. And the one who cooed endlessly at babies. Then there was that blond with the grating habit of sharing real estate listings for little houses on little squares of grass on little cul-de-sacs inhabited by little women growing littler each day, staring blankly through the delft-pattern curtains.
Gnawing on raw tongue as they dreamed of a forest stark and grim.
Each time, my throat grew tight at the sight of them. I couldn’t bear to hear their voices; even their texts made my skin crawl. Sometimes they would come to the compound inquiring after my health, and August told them women were not allowed here, slammed the door, and looked at me with a sly smile. One player to another.
August thought he understood everything, but one thing I knew that he never did, was be afraid of women made small.
* * *
I no longer walk to Carpentry. Instead, I run, chased by a ravenous black cloud that cuts away skin and teethes on blood. Every morning, Inga waits by the door, ready for the last of the echelon to run in. By the time Sten shouts “Door!” Inga has already slammed the bolt into place against wolves from other echelons who pound on the stout door. Through the window, I see blood streaming down their pleading faces.
“Sten!” they scream, leaving scarlet handprints on the glass.
Sten walks slowly toward the door, picking at his teeth with a splinter, and pulls down the sun-bleached green shade.
Blackfly season is here.
No amount of blood or screaming convinces Sten, but a few days later, Sten himself runs to the front, flicking the thick plank to the floor like a twig. He stands looking eagerly through the trees, one foot tapping excitedly on the floor. I crane my neck, seeing her moving fast and unhurried like a hand through water.
“Shifter?” Järv says, waiting for me to pull at the bucksaw that had defeated me when I first came to Homelands. Now, I work at holding my back so my spine doesn’t seize up. I know how to pull and stretch out, taking from Järv on the other side and relaxing when he takes from me.
The Alpha steps in, peels off the deep hoodie, and shakes out her hair. She motions Ziggy and Sten to the side, whispering something to them. Ziggy answers, looking at me. Then Sten tilts his head to the side, a wide-eyed, expectant look on his face. The Alpha lightly taps the mallet he holds in front of him. Sten puts it down quickly and bends low toward his Alpha. He shivers, but when the Alpha leans in, her hand to his skull, and rubs her cheek gently against one side then the other, Sten—gruff, monosyllabic, hammer-smiting Sten—sighs contentedly. The Alpha lets him stay, snuggling and snuffling into her touch, until he is done and heads back to his table. He does it with a smile, his mallet swinging jauntily at his side.
Taking the stretch of elastic wrapped twice around her wrist, the Alpha smooths back her hair, first one side, then the other, securing it with the band so that it spreads out like a halo around her face.
The fucking blackfly got her. They’re not bloodsuckers like mosquitos; they are flesh tearers, opening up the skin to get at the blood underneath. Blood runs down from the side of her forehead to her jaw.
She stands behind Järv, who relinquishes his spot, his eyes lowered. Taking a deep breath, the Alpha rolls out her shoulders, stretches her neck, curls her hands securely around the wooden grip, and lifts her eyebrows toward me.
Are you ready?
My fingers loosen and curl tighter around the smooth wooden handle. I pull.
She pulls back hard. I don’t know why she is here and no one else is asking. Maybe she does this sometimes, takes a little break to be just one of the Pack. After a few more furious drags, I wonder if it’s something else. Some visceral need to do something physical. To pull and tear and smell the scent of sawdust warmed by the friction.
Wordlessly, Järv slides wood into place for us. Equally wordlessly, Ziggy picks up the pieces as they fall.
As we pull at each other, it’s like a conversation without words. Are you strong enough? Yes. Yes I am. I don’t know for what. But yes.
She pulls and I give. She gives and I pull. A slight cramping builds along the inside of my shoulder blade. I drag her arms toward me, she drags my arms back. I watch her body move, coiling and uncoiling, muscle and sinew tracing graceful arabesques along her arm and her shoulder.
Wood drops to the floor with a hollow thunk until the slight cramping is a solid agony, but I refuse to stop. If what she needs is to take her anger and turn it into work, I will keep going until something burns.
Yes, I am strong enough for anything.
A gilding of sawdust picks out the damp between her breasts and mingles with the blood that drains along her jawbone and down the side of her neck to her collarbone. Black scars peek out from the narrow strap at her shoulder.
I’ve seen other bite marks on other wolves in the Bathhouse. I’ve seen males bend over females in the woods. Her scars are old, given to her by John when he was a man. Each tug on the bucksaw makes my body respond to hers. What kind of shit am I to look at the faded marks left by her dead mate and think about the feel of her skin against mine, licking the marks at her neck like I could erase them with my tongue.
Suddenly, she stops. Taking a thin, clean rag from one of the small piles of them used to wipe sweat or stain or excess wood glue, she wipes off the sawdust, still looking at me quizzically. She drags the sweatshirt back on, pulling the hood up high, the sleeves down low. Then she thrusts her hands deep into the front pockets. Järv opens the door and she exits quickly, heading in the direction of the Great Hall and her office and whatever thing waiting for her there that is more maddening than the swarms of blackfly.
Unwrapping my blistered hands from the grip, I head to the window. She’s already gone, leaving nothing behind but a rippling of leaves and branches in her path.
That and half a dozen idiot wolves banging one another’s backs while they bend over, howling with laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
Ziggy rubs his hands on his pants, then rubs his tearing eyes and taps his nose.
“You smell,” he says, tapping his nose, “like a juvenile.”
Shit. I bend my head to my armpit, inhaling a deep breath.
“Not there, Connie. Here.” And Ziggy cups both hands over the fly of his pants.
I look down at the heavy salute straining against my zipper.
Then a terrible thing occurs to me about the Alpha’s cocked head and questioning gaze.
“Do you think she…knows?” I whisper to Ziggy.
“You don’t get to be Alpha if you don’t know wolves.”
“But I’m not a wolf.”
“If I smelled that smell on a turtle”—he slams the table with another hiccupped chuckle—“I would still know what was going on in his turtle brain and his turtle cock.”
Oh god. I rub at my eyebrow and then my eye and then my mouth, staring out the window at the wall of green where she disappeared, her enigmatic smile now humiliatingly clear.
“Nothing to be embarrassed by. Every unmated male would cover the Alpha if he had the chance. But since only dominant males have that chance, most of us don’t go all”—he makes a dismissive tchck, flipping his index finger high in the air—“all oop-richte. That’s when”—he points to the bulge in my pants—“your penis is—”
“I got it.”
I’m grateful when Sten thumps his hammer on the floor. He doesn’t do it hard, but the sheer weight of it vibrates through the floor and up into the table. Everyone stops and turns expectantly toward him. The problem is Sten is very good at getting everyone’s attention but has no idea what to do with it once he has it.
He grunts at Ziggy.
“Rupf,” says Ziggy, foundering around for where to start. “So we have to… I mean, the Alpha… Wait, no. So humans have these things up in the north,” Ziggy starts.
“Humans have lots of things up north,” Inga says.
“These things have wheels and are very loud on weekends.” He says weekends with a special preening emphasis like a child with a new word that none of his friends know.
“What’s a weekend?” Järv asks, dubious.
I edge slowly away toward the far back corner of the room where there is a huge worktable with two big bench vises holding a massive plank.
And that is where I am, fly unzipped, rearranging my bent and aching penis, when Ziggy turns to me and asks me to explain weekends to a batch of curious werewolves.
* * *
They are all in my dormitory. Every single one of the 7th Echelon has come into the place I have come to think of as my own. They pick up everything—library books, clothes, toothbrush—and sniff at it.
Because of blackfly, we won’t start work until after Evening Song, so the Alpha wanted us to get some sleep. Here. Which is why the entire echelon is sniffing and stripping.
Ziggy holds the tube of toothpaste to his good eye.
“I don’t like the liver flavor,” he says with a frown. “Tastes like—”
“Out. I’m taking a shower.”
It doesn’t matter that there is a passel of wolves separated by the thin door; I fist my cock as soon as I get into the shower. Leaning my forehead against the tile, I remember the amber fire of her eyes, the sawdust gathered in the curve leading down to her—
Evie.
I turn off the water, waiting for my breathing to slow as I watch the evidence of my release swirl away down the drain.
Stumbling out of the shower, I dry off while chewing on a Teeny Greeny Breath Fresh Teeth Treat. Dressed, my hair finger combed, I come back out to the wolves wild and gathered in a furry puddle on the floor.
Ziggy is chewing on the strip of birch bark I’d been using to mark my place in a thick tome about the Salem witch trials that I’d gotten from the lupine library. I lift my mattress, sending him scrabbling frantically to the floor along with my piled blankets, then I lie down, open the book, trying to remember where I’d left off reading the night before. Trying to ignore the shuffling and contented sighs of the wolves beside me.
I can’t find my place.
Grabbing my pillow, I leave my book and lie down on the piled blankets on the floor. Beside me, jaws pop in a yawning whimper. Paws scrabble in hunting dreams against the wooden floor. The musty, musky smells of fur and wheezed wolf breath mix with the breezes and the rustling of leaves and calling of birds and the humming of crickets and all the lulling sounds of life being lived in summer.
* * *
After Evening Song, we load the trucks with shovels and picks and chains and start the long drive to undo what I spent so long doing.
I wasn’t there when August bought this huge tract of land, but I was certainly there when Daniel Leary, August’s human consigliere, passed a manila envelope to a state administrator. I stood silently behind Leary, my hand on the back of the commercial-grade chair, looking at a rust stain on the threadbare carpet. After Leary explained the need to speed along permissions and reports, the man hesitated.
They all do, the first time. My job was to raise my eyes when he hesitated. As soon as he saw the crumpled steel chair back, he slid the envelope into his desk drawer.
Then he began talking nonstop about area jobs and progress and improvements to the land. Like they all do.
The first time.
Ostensibly, everything was done to prepare for a pipeline from shale plays in Nova Scotia to points south. In reality, August wanted to tear a path into Homelands. He put me in charge of the human work crew, and when two of them had to be decommissioned, I drove the excavator that tore through the land at the edge of Homelands myself.
This was the last stretch we cleared. August didn’t want the Great North knowing what was going on until it was too late to start the slow remedies of law and lobbying.
At the top of the access road, Ziggy pulls the truck to a stop. Wolf after wolf jumps down from the truck, hitting the ground with a heavy squelch. Since I was riding the hump, I am the last one out, landing next to a circle of dumbfounded Pack. Their backs are silvery in the headlights of the truck, long shadows stretching out across a field of mud, exposed stones, and wood chips. There is a deep, silty pond near the middle, left by the stump of a particularly big tree. A few more stubborn stumps remain: those we cut low, drilling in holes filled with potassium nitrate. A dead bird lies moldering near the roots of one.
I stare at the ruined desolation of muck and sawdust, all brown and gray except for that same muddied yellow excavator. The wind smells like rust and iron and diesel, like blood in a wound that will never clot.
Ziggy squats next to a sapling bent into the mud. When he tries to lift it, it snaps off in his big hand. He stares at it, distraught, then he strides toward the gap between the mountain to the west and the range to the north. It had been filled with loose rock until the very end. When the hunters were celebrating their upcoming trophies and the Great North lay helpless as the Iron Moon took hold, the excavator ripped open access to Homelands. The bearded devastation of Ziggy’s face does nothing to disguise his heartbreak. I stand next to him, looking over the dark profile of Homelands like I had on that first night when it reminded me of my mother’s warning about forests stark and grim.
“The Alpha said to wait for her,” Ziggy says without looking at me. “She doesn’t want us to start until she is here to watch over the forever wolves.”
“I’ve never understood the purpose of the word ‘sorry.’”
I feel just how small a word sorry is and I don’t say it. Instead, I push up my sleeves and dig my fingers deep under the rough edge of a huge stone, ripping it from the dirt. Then I stumble toward the gap and drop it. That’s all the 7th needed to wake them up from the shock, and soon they are all carrying small boulders, looking like the grainy school video of ants moving things many times their weight that I had watched back in the days when I assumed I was human.
As I drop another stone, I catch the Alpha watching us, her eyes glowing between the trees.
Sorry, sorry. Regrets and pity.
Then she turns away. I strain, listening vainly for any sound of her.
“Time to get started,” Ziggy says, clapping the dirt from his hands. He starts barking out orders, making clear that he didn’t become Gamma of the 7th based solely on his expertise in obscure werewolf movies.
We start with the pickaxes, digging a groove around the culvert so the claws of the excavator’s bucket will be able to get a grip. I’d forgotten that we’d run out of the corrugated galvanized steel and been forced to use the much thicker steel gas pipes. I clamber into the excavator.
The cab has been sealed tight for weeks now and stinks of stale corn chips. In the storage box is a handful of beef sticks, grease seeping to the bottoms of their packages. A bottle in the door drink holder says Sprite but smells of cheap vodka. The key is under the safety beacon.
Turning it on, I dig around until the teeth of the bucket hit the culvert and the cab shimmies. Something bangs against the side window. At first I think it’s a tree limb, but then it happens again, and when I stop, Ziggy opens the door and pulls himself up.
“They’re coming.”
“Who?”
“Listen,” he says, hunched over. “Where’s the passenger seat on this thing?”
“It’s an excavator, Ziggy, not an Uber.”
He folds his big body, filling up whatever airspace is in the cab, his ass jammed halfway out the window.
“Go. Go. Go!” he yells, gesturing down the access road.
I’m about to ask Who? again but then I hear it, the unmistakable roar of ATVs in the night. Not just one either. I twirl the seat around, lock it in, and bounce down the dirt road.
Three sets of lights bounce around wildly, the beams painfully bright in my eyes. Only when I see how fast they’re coming do I turn on the forgotten twenty-inch light bar stretched along the top of the cab. How is it that I’d been working all this time in the dark and hadn’t noticed?
With the light bar on, they see me. One ATV blasts on a custom horn that sounds like a fake siren. “I’ll deal with this,” Ziggy says.
“You?”
“I’m the Gamma. It’s my responsibility,” he says and he throws himself against the door. Something pops, metal clangs against metal, and his body falls to the ground, the door swinging drunkenly on its one remaining hinge.
“Turn around!” Ziggy shouts, waving his arms over his head while jogging toward the lights. “There are no humans allowed.”
Ah, shit, Ziggy. I kill the engine.
“What do you mean ‘humans’?” says a man in a red-and-black pleather jacket and a helmet with an ogre’s face that says Gremlin.
I reach for the beef stick and jump down.
“I mean no other humans.” I can almost hear a stack of mimeographed printouts from some ancient human behaviors class blowing off the desk of Ziggy’s brain.
“What my brother is trying to convey in his own inimitable way”—I start to peel the greasy plastic wrap from the shriveled brown rod—“is get the fuck off our property.”
“This is your property?”
I take a bite from the stick, chewing slowly. I’ve eaten these before. Have they always tasted like aluminum? “I represent the owner.”
“The owner’s dead,” says Gremlin, taking off his helmet. He pushes his hand through thinning blond hair stuck to his scalp.
“And Canadian,” says a younger, watery-eyed version of Gremlin, as though being Canadian made August even less of a threat than death.
The third man takes off his helmet with red devil horns painted along the sides. He’s about Gremlin’s age but stockier. His face is a mask of broken blood vessels and there’s a bruise across his cheekbone. All signs of the kind of man who indulges in macho posturing at bars in the minutes before last call.
Yips and soft barks come from the direction of the Great North’s territory. The sound is so clear to me, but none of these men seem to be able to hear and suddenly all I want is to have them gone. I will not have them near Homelands.
I pop the tail end of the beef stick into my mouth, crumple up the empty plastic wrapper, and toss it into the Red Devil’s ATV.
“What the fuck?” he yells, looking for the trash I threw onto his muck-covered floor.
He can’t find it in the shadows. He turns around, tossing his jacket over the seat, and rolling up his sleeves. There is a tattoo of a skull with a tongue of fire.
The other two remove their jackets with the usual knee bouncing, pointless stretching, and air boxing of men who haven’t spent their lives fighting and have no idea how tedious it is.
Ziggy moves beside me. I know he’s fought—I’ve learned enough to know that’s the way wolves move up in their echelons—but his fists are clenched around his thumb like a child, and I realize for all his size and power, he’s probably never fought in skin.
“Hold back. You come if you see I need help,” I say, knowing full well that I won’t.
“What the hell happened to your face, freak?” the Red Devil shouts, pointing at Ziggy.
Ziggy steps back into the shadows, his hand to his cheek, and something inside snaps like a dry twig and kindles something I haven’t felt for a long time. I feel it take root and burn, and then I lean into the fire of being angry.
Red Devil swings at me with his helmet, but helmets are bulky and Red Devil hadn’t counted on air resistance, allowing me to hit him hard in the armpit. When his arm goes limp, I hit him in the temple with my elbow. There is a soft crack and he goes down.
“Get the fuck up.” I drag the unconscious man up from the ground, shaking him. Trying to force him to fight me because it was over too fast. I am only barely aware of the two other men coming behind me. I throw the Red Devil’s prone body at them and, as they stumble back, crack the two Gremlins’ heads together. I stride back over to the Red Devil, but Ziggy steps in front of me.
“That’s enough,” he says, grabbing my arm. “The Alpha will not have it. Killing humans just brings more humans. Help me toss them in the truck.”
I help him toss them in the truck and drive them to the edge of the road. I soak them in cheap vodka as a finishing touch.
“What is a brother?” Ziggy asks on the way back.
“What?”
“A brother. You told them I was your brother. I don’t know what it means.”
“It means having the same mother and father.”
“But we don’t have the same mother and father.”
“No, neither do Magnus and I. It was really just a way of warning them, in a way that humans would understand, that I would fight for you.”
“Like Pack, then,” he says.