Constantine
There is a bit of dark jam and butter on her lower lip, but she sucks it clean, then darts her tongue out to check her mouth for stains of summer fruit.
Oh god, I am not okay.
She starts down the hall because of course someone needs something done. She’s got these jeans, they must be old favorites, worn and soft with holes at the left thigh just big enough for a flicker of brown skin as she walks away.
She stops to listen to someone in the library.
Turn around.
At the threshold of her office, a wolf stretches up his head and she leans over to mark him.
Look at me.
She responds with a terse wave of her hand to someone in the kitchen.
See me.
She disappears into her office.
Evie.
The door closes.
When a wet nose touches my ear, a broken breath hisses from my throat. Magnus brushes his chin on my shoulder. Everything about him looks so much stronger now. The small, sunken wolf with the dusty lackluster fur and rheumy eyes is now large and strong with fur that is light gray on top and dark gray underneath. His eyes are the same, though: true blue, the color of cloud.
Magnus was ripped up by the transition to wolf, so Tristan wants to wait until his bones are strong, his body is fully recovered before letting him become human again, though honestly I know by the way he cocks his head to the side and scratches under his chin that whatever he becomes whenever he becomes, it will not be human.
He turns over on his back and bends his hips back and forth, his paws high in the air, his mouth open on white teeth. His tortured paws have healed, and the claws are not as sharp as they were when they first emerged. Sanded down, I suppose by running across granite. He stays on his back but stops wiggling, looking at me from his upside-down eyes. His forehead touching my leg. We were never very demonstrative. Partly because so many things hurt him. Partly because that wasn’t who I am, though it feels less strained to pat him on the belly or scratch behind his ears.
One of the pups runs up and starts to clamber over Magnus’s face. Aside from a gentle snap at the pup’s leg scraping his jaw, he does nothing while the pup sits on his muzzle and tries to catch Magnus’s ear flickering teasingly out of reach.
“Is there an oatcake with jam?” I say to Järv.
“Peach or mulberry?”
“Mulberry.”
Järv passes one down to me on the floor, then he and Ziggy launch into a discussion of mulberry trees somewhere on Homelands. How ripe they are, how abundant. Who is still small enough to climb high into the branches and jump up and down while wolves below hold out sheets and blankets waiting for the berries to rain from heaven and be turned into another batch of summer jam.
Magnus’s ear pricks up, and a second later, he flips over, trotting toward the door. Without a backward look, he puts his paw on the lever of the door, pushes his nose through, his body slithering after.
“That note,” says a voice above me. “It’s for Julia, isn’t it?”
My eyes travel upward toward the messy blond ponytail towering above me. I jump up. Don’t like being towered over.
“Yes.”
He holds out his hand for it, and as I have no skin in this game, I give it to him.
As soon as he reads it over, he hands it back. “What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to give it to her?”
I start to wonder if the Alpha was wrong about him. It would make sense after all: a girl like Julia always needs a protector—Otho, August, Cassius, and now this man, the latest in a long line.
“Why? Do you have a thing for her?”
“Me?” He says it with his lip curled back like I’d just accused him of kissing a tapeworm. “I’m the Alpha of the 12th Echelon of the Great North. Why would I have a thing for her?”
“What do I know? She’s very…decorative?”
“Decorative?” He scratches an eyebrow with his pinkie finger. “You knew Varya?”
“We talked a little. I watched her rip orifices in body parts that don’t usually have them. But I wouldn’t say I knew her.”
“She was my Shielder. I asked her to be my mate. You know Varya well enough to understand I have no use for the merely decorative.”
His fingers go to the rubber band holding back a ponytail. When he pulls it out, his blond hair brushes his shoulders.
“I miss her,” he says. “But she was so strong that I didn’t have to be. Now I do. I’m not saying that Cassius is anything like Varya, but I do see a little of myself in Julia. Letting someone else bear the responsibility for decisions that should be hers.”
Behind him, Julia talks animatedly to Arthur, who listens closely before answering. As soon as she sees me heading toward her, she drops her eyes to the table, pushes her plate away, and sits on her hands so she won’t have to look at or take the paper with “JULIA” written clearly on the top. Maybe she hopes that it and I will go away, that I will take responsibility for the decision, so that she can say to Cassius that I never gave it to her and technically it will be true.
But I’m not her indulgent uncle or her indulgent father, and I can stand here forever with the stupid piece of paper. When she looks to Arthur, he says only, “It’s for you.”
Her lips quiver and grow tight, and when she grabs the note from my hand, she keeps the steel-gray birthright of her eyes hard on mine while she rips it to shreds and throws it on the floor.
“And yes,” she says to Arthur, “I know I have to sweep that up.”
He chortles and she smiles a big smile with lots of teeth that makes her cheeks look fat like Cassius always warned her it would, and I know that Cassius has misread the signs and doesn’t understand that the man he should be worried about is not the Viking with the ponytail, but the slim man with the brown hair who splayed himself naked on the damp ground, his jaws clamped shut, his eyes wide open, waiting to be ripped apart by wolves.