Constantine
It’s early morning by the time we are on the quiet country highway heading back to Homelands. Luckily, there’s no one around to notice the naked werewolves twitching nervously in the truck bed.
As we turn into Homelands, they leap away, the cab bobbing with each jump. As soon we reach the parking lot, Ziggy follows, leaving nothing behind but a pile of clothes slowly deflating on the driver’s seat.
Filthy and exhausted, I slam the door shut and start for the Bathhouse.
The Bathhouse is a large and mostly windowless building buttressed on one side by a woodshed and on two sides by a screened-in porch festooned with sprays of leafy branches hanging from the rafters. When I’ve been here before, long empty chairs have been occupied by naked werewolves, their sauna-heated skin steaming in the cool evening air.
Inside smells clean and damp and woody with overtones of eucalyptus and a smell I can only identify as damp feather pillows. I collect a towel and a brush and, on a whim, a bouquet of branches. In the shower, I scrub myself raw with the determinedly neutral shampoo they use.
There is a large mirror built into the tile of the shower room and spotted with black spots where water has condensed underneath. While I’ve caught sight of myself in it from time to time, I don’t do any real “gazing”: something to do with the dozen or so naked werewolves sniffing around my crevices and saying, “What is that smell, Egbert?”
The man in the mirror pulls his hair back same as I do. He stretches his lips over gritted teeth same as I do. I still can’t quite believe he’s me. All the emptinesses have been filled in. Even the gaunt hollows under my eyes and my cheekbones are gone.
I stroke the beard over skin that looks more golden than before. Or maybe that’s a trick of the gold trickling from the fogged window of the sauna.
Someone needs to turn the light off.
Among Lukani at the compound, menial labor was left to the humans. It was a point of pride.
“Someone needs to take out the trash.” “Someone needs to fill the ice-cube tray.” “Someone needs to turn off the light of the sauna and bank the stove.”
If there’d been a poll at the compound, I’d probably have been voted least likely to be “someone.” Exhausted as I am, I head to the sauna to turn off the light and bank the stove… Except when I open the door, water explodes into steam on hot rocks. The Alpha drops the ladle back in the bucket of water and sits down on the lowest of the ranged benches, a towel wrapped tightly around her. It’s unusually modest for pack.
“Close the door.”
I only then realize that I’ve been standing here a while, letting all the heat out.
“They’re wild,” she says, half question, half statement.
“Yes.”
“Glad.” She stares unseeing at the stove. “Will it work?”
“I think so. We’ll know better after a decent rain.”
“Hmm.”
“Alpha…” I pat my shoulders with the branches. “There was a little trouble with men who came. I—”
“Crushed their MTVs. I saw.”
“ATVs actually, but yes. The men too. A little.” I take down the branches so that I will have something to look at that isn’t her.
“I’ll tell the lawyers.”
“I doubt they’ll be any trouble. I don’t think there was any lasting damage, and men like that…three against one. They won’t report it. Point of pride.”
She starts to laugh, then draws up short, her face tight. “Still,” she says. “Lawyers.”
Feeling suddenly awkward, I continue my futile swatting with the dry branches.
“Here.” The Alpha holds out her hand, taking them from me. “I’ll show you. Turn around.”
She submerges the branches in the bucket filled with water next to the stove. The first thing I feel is the cool lash of water against my overheated skin, followed by the beat of stems. The caress of leaves. The green embrace of birch.
I drape my arm between my legs, hoping the friction from the rough towel will tame the bulge my exhausted mind could not have imagined a few minutes ago. It doesn’t, though, because she’s touching me. Maybe it’s not skin to skin, but her body is just there. A short branch-length away. My breath is pained and ragged as if I were actually being beaten, not lightly slapped around with birch leaves. My mind knows I should tell her to stop, but I’m spinning and my body won’t allow it. My skin is torn between the two, stretched to splitting like a thumb against an overripe plum.
“No…no more.” I twist around, taking her wrist. “Please.” I hear her breath, the thrumming of her pulse, the slight movement of her arm as she tries to stop the towel that is slipping down. The word echoing around my skull:
Please.
Please.
The towel had nothing to do with modesty. Nothing to do with hiding the soft weight of her breast above the curve of her waist. Not the sinewed muscle of her back ending in the perfect curve of her ass, but a ragged gouge that connects the two.
“I needed to stop her, the Gray,” she says, as much to herself as to me. “The jump went wrong.”
She doesn’t bother to cover herself now. With her free hand, she curls her arm around the back of her head and smooths her hair back from her cheek. She is so close to me that I can see tiny beads of sweat sparkle in the filigree curls at her hairline and another rip through the deep-brown satin of her cheek. Her tired eyes don’t leave mine, daring me to notice that she is not invulnerable.
All I want to do is gather her to me in this hot and silent place, where no one is calling to her, and touch my lips to those tiny sparkles at her brow and to the cut on her cheek and tell her it’s okay to be vulnerable, but I know that for her, it really isn’t.
“Long night,” I say, trying to make it light. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it out the door.”
“Sleep on the porch. Wolves do it all the time. Not so much when the…”
She wiggles her fingers in the air near her ear.
“Blackfly?”
“Hmm. Not so much when the blackfly are out. The chairs,” she says, “recline.”
“Would you show me? I mean when you’re done.”
“I’m done. I was sitting here because I was…”
Because she was tired but won’t admit it. I open the damper and sit beside her silently while the fire burns hotter and then dies. We close it down and turn out the light.
She stumbles on the way to the porch while I pretend not to notice. I forget the whole point of my flimsy excuse and lower my chair before she does. She gives me a wan smile.
I sit down.
Something barks out a loud, trilling yell.
“What is that?” I ask, stretching out.
After a moment’s hesitation, she lies down on her undamaged side, her head cushioned on her crooked arm.
“Raccoon,” she says.
There are no walls, only screens, and the wind kisses the still-damp hairs at the base of my neck. Wings flap suddenly from above. There is a growl and a scrabble and the soft sound of her breathing that eventually becomes deeper, lulled by the forest stark and grim that breathes in the flutter of wings and breathes out the death of prey, that breathes in the rot of old trees and breathes out the roots of seedlings.
Finally, the bow between her lips opens. Silently, I get up, returning to cover her with two clean towels.
Her mouth contracts to a tiny moue, a leg kicks free.
I reach across and pull a single tight zigzag of hair free from where it has stuck to her lower lip. Then I let my hand stretch across the narrow divide between us, my hand under hers.