Constantine
Fuck, it’s glorious. Spring fed and cold, but nothing like the frigid rough seas off the coast of Nova Scotia. After the numbing shock comes an almost blissful thaw.
Water flows through my hair and over my skin. Stroke by stroke, it covers me, coddles me. The liquid thickness buoying me, making it easier to forget, to get away, to go loose to my very bones. Everything is erased except the pleated shadows of summer sun rippling across my closed eyes and the wash of water as my arms slice through the surface.
I flip over, my chest to the sun, my back to the deep. Warm on top, cold underneath. The splashing near the dock has subsided to a gentle slosh that licks my body and whispers against my ears.
Eventually, I lift my head, realizing just how far I’ve gone from the distant yips and voices at the dock. Combing my hair from my face and the water from my eyes, I see the Alpha at the distant dock, her eyes fixed on me.
Next to her, Leonora watches tensely.
With a slow and exaggerated backstroke, I start back so she will understand that I am not making a break for it. At the compound, I dreaded the moment when some asshole would shatter the sky with a .460 Magnum, so there would be doubt that I was being summoned from the water that took me in and made me part of something bigger. I hated each stroke back to the rocky beaches and whatever smug Lukani had been sent to fetch me. I hated feeling myself growing smaller.
Now I don’t.
By the time I reach the edge of the dock, the children are gone, tumbling in the grass surrounding a crumpled blanket that is empty except for a few plates of food.
The Alpha is alone, sitting with her arms wrapped around one knee, the other foot tracing patterns in the water. I grab at the corner of the dock, pretending that I don’t feel the tiny waves lapping against my nipples. That water isn’t tracing paths down the muscled curve of her calf. That if my mouth forms the word Alpha, her name won’t emerge instead.
Evie.
“Are you getting out?” she says.
No, I’m not getting out. I’ve got an erection the size of a two-by-four stuffed into 80 percent cotton and 20 percent Spandex.
It’d frighten the children.
“I think I’ll swim a little more,” I say. “Not far. Just near the dock.”
Someone calls to her and she pulls her foot out of the water. I reach for it, unthinking, but stop before I touch her.
“Would you teach me?” she says, looking over the broad expanse of water. “Teach me how to swim like that? Away?”
Oh, Evie.
“Yes,” I say, hoping my voice is neutral but knowing it’s not.
“Alpha!”
Why can’t they leave her be? Just for a moment?
“Tomorrow night,” she says quickly and quietly. “When the moon is in the Endeberg Notch.”
She leans forward, cupping her hand into the lake, then scrubs her neck and face with handful after handful of cold water. “The juveniles have made a picnic,” she says, louder this time. “If you wait too long, there will be nothing left but avocado-and-jelly sandwiches.”
The water drips down her skin and onto her shirt. Her nipples are tight underneath. I smile my unthinking smile while using my thumb to slide the crown of my immoderate cock down beneath my waistband.
Mustn’t frighten the children.
Poul is almost at the dock. The Alpha puts both hands on the worn wood, then pushes up with a sigh. I’ve never said a word to him, but that does not stop me from hating him. Hidden by the water still murky from churning feet and paws, I slip under the dock, creaking beneath Poul’s weight.
“Alpha,” Poul says. Through the slit between the planks, I see her stand utterly still while he leans in to sniff at her neck.
“Alpha,” he says again, more urgently. “You smell like—?”
“I smell like pond water.” She slaps irritably at the air near his nose, like she’s swatting away blackfly. “I’m getting something to eat.”
A little water drips from her body onto the dock, through the planks, and onto my upturned face. Through the scent of wood and wolves and forest and fur is one I haven’t smelled before. I suck it in one breath after another, trying to figure out what it is, like a word that remains just beyond my grasp, until suddenly, I know. It is granite covered by the delicate stems of bright-green moss. A forest in miniature, a fragile world growing on bedrock.
The scent of Evie imprints itself on my brain.
On the grass, the children pluck at the uncomfortable bright fabrics confining their skin. Others, in their barely contained wildness, tussle and wrestle and lick and bite. I wish I could say that there is forgiveness enough for the strange and the unworldly, but I’d be lying.
Heading back out into the water, I wait until everyone is gone and nothing is left but the peculiar avocado-and-jelly sandwiches made by these strange and beautiful children.
They are delicious.
The sandwiches, I mean.
* * *
The next morning, I take a newspaper on a long wooden rod from the bracket along the library wall that’s filled with them and settle into the sofa in front of the cold fireplace, coffee and cranberry-and-pumpkin-seed scone slathered with butter at hand.
I tap the scone on the plate so I won’t have to sweep up the loose crumbs.
There’s a serendipity to reading these physical objects and the news that is not filtered for my taste by predictive algorithms. Wolves have already marked things that they think are of use to the Pack, like the business article about tech stocks or a vulnerable state senator or a potentially worrying invasion of feral pigs into Upstate New York. At least three wolves have circled the article, adding a superfluous SWINE!!!
Before long, I hear the endlessly irritating monotone bellyaching. I brush the crumbs from my hands, put my plate in the bin, and hang up the newspaper. In the basement, I lean against the metal cage of dry storage and wait.
“What are you doing here?” Cassius whispers as soon as he sees me.
“She’s not coming.” I keep my voice neutral.
“It’s that shit Lorcan, isn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just balls up his fist and circles around, looking for something to hit that isn’t going to hurt him back, but this is not a place of soft surfaces so he then stops again in front of me.
“That fucker won’t let me near her.” He picks at a callus on his hand. “Look at this.” He shows me his roughened palm. “You know what I’m doing? Laundry. I’ve got a fucking degree from U of T, and I’m doing laundry.”
“Elijah is a lawyer. He’s got to have at least two degrees.”
“Elijah’s a dog. He doesn’t know any better except to fetch and sit and lie down.” He finally peels the yellowed skin off. “I hear they got you banging out chairs.”
I can almost feel the crunch of bone against the heel of my palm. Feel the soft pop of eyeballs beneath my thumbs. Hear the gagging. Smell the blood. Benches, asshole. I make fucking fine benches.
“Hunh,” I say, though even that noncommittal grunt takes effort.
“I’m sick and tired of being told what to do,” he says.
“What? Like August didn’t tell us what to do?”
“That’s not the same thing at all. He paid us. Good money, plus people knew I was somebody when I worked for him.”
Somebody making the world safe for cabbages.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Something August said about cabbages.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? We are trapped here in the middle of a jungle, no way out, nobody knows where we are, and you’re talking about cabbages?”
“More to the point, nobody cares.” I reach my elbow around to stretch the cramping in my back. “Besides, what would you do if you did?”
“Did what?”
“Get out, Cassius. Our skills are not readily transferrable, and August isn’t going to be writing any letters of recommendation.”
He looks at me with the sly expression of an idiot discovering a thing that everyone else has already learned and discounted.
Don’t say it, idiot. Don’t say it.
“August wasn’t the only Leveraux out there.”
I told you not to, but you said it anyway.
“Cassius, we never spent much time together, but I’m going to do you a favor anyway. You don’t know her.”
“I met her once. With my parents. She was pretty and made me cookies. Oatmeal and raisin.”
“Just because she bakes cookies doesn’t make her a good person. She killed her brother. Cut him into tiny pieces, and he was a better fighter than you will ever be.” I rub the ball of my thumb. “You are August’s man. Never underestimate the power of her hatred.”
“That’s exactly what I’m counting on because I can give her the one thing that she hates more than August.”
The cold creeps up my back, and when he says it—when he says, “I can give her this Pack”—it takes my heart like frostbite.
* * *
Otho was the only person I talked to about my mother. “She was a powerful wolf,” he said, like every Lukani who’d known Maxima. “A little like Drusilla in some ways.” I waited for him to say something else, but he just went back to cleaning guns. He was fanatical about making sure every gun was cleaned, zeroed, and loaded, so we did that a lot.
He wasn’t a big talker and wouldn’t say more than he felt like at the moment he felt like it.
Finally, when it was all done and he’d slid his .44 in his shoulder holster, he said, “Never try to make a powerful woman small.” He cupped his hands together into a ball and made as though he was pressing the air inside. “There’s only so small you can make them before they”—he shot his fingers apart into the air—“explode.”
I looked at the prominent scar at the base of his thumb.
“Kind of like stars that way.”
And that was all he said.
When I found him in the steam room of his health club in Toronto, that was the only part that was intact, the fleshy muscle of his thumb, with the scarred-over bite. The distinctive marker left by Mala, the wolf who had made Drusilla feel small.