Evie
“How long have you been here?”
The dock creaks, the swallow song melds together into a dull murmur, while the water rustles through the grasses at water’s edge.
“Since Evening Song,” he says from the Adirondack chair at the end of the dock. “I wasn’t sure whether you meant on the dot of Moon in the Endeberg Notch or Moon in the Endeberg Notch-ish.”
“You have no idea where the Endeberg Notch is, do you?”
He shakes his head.
Resting my elbow on the arm of the chair, I lean down, pointing to the last mountain of the northern range and the notch between it and the pile of rock that was too small for our ancestors to bother giving even one of the unimaginative names they specialized in. Westdæl, the West Place. Norþdæl, the North Place. Endeberg, the End Mountain.
“The moon’s coming up now. Right there.” I pluck at something sticking to my lashes. “You won’t see it if you don’t look.”
“You have…” He touches his own eyelashes, then reaches his hand toward my cheek. “Should I try?”
I close my eyes, feeling the edge of his hand anchored cool on my cheek, his thumb and forefinger gentle as though I were something precious that needed care. He is close enough for me to feel his warm breath eddy against my skin. When I open my eyes, he is holding a black straight hair on his thumb.
“Do you want it?”
“Why would I?”
“To make a wish.”
“A wish?”
Now it’s his turn to close his eyes. He takes a deep breath and blows. “It’s a human thing, making a wish on an eyelash.”
“Does it work if you make a wish on a guard hair?” I free my hair, sliding the wide band into my pocket. “Because that was a guard hair.”
Then I reach for the hem of my shirt, pulling it over my head. It’s still covering my eyes when I hear Constantine suck in a deep breath and stumble. When the shirt is off, he is squatting behind the Adirondack chair, his back to me.
I lower myself naked into the water and paddle around, my nose high in the air like wolves do, until I hear the splash of a body on the other side of the dock.
I look toward the Great Hall, making sure that the Pack is safely dispersed through the more distant parts of Homelands where prey is more plentiful.
Constantine emerges from the water, his head back, hair streaming, water cupped and glistening in the valleys and indentations made by bone and muscle. I reach for the dock, pulling myself farther away.
He swims in a broad, lazy loop around me. I watch what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. It looks easy enough but when I push off from the dock, I founder and return to the steady churning with four limbs, running through water like wolves always do.
“That’s called the dog paddle,” he says and twists away when I snarl at him for using the d-word. “You need to stretch your legs out like one of those birds.”
“Geese?”
“No, not geese. I know geese. They shit on August’s old compound. I’m talking about the ones that have long beaks and long legs, and when they fly, you can see their legs stretched out behind them.”
“Heron?”
“Maybe that’s it.”
I imagine a heron, legs and beak almost a straight line, my arms spread out, flapping above it all until I sink and I churn my way back to the surface, Constantine’s voice echoing in my head.
“You have to keep your legs up,” he says when I reemerge. He holds his arms stretched toward me. “Here. Take my hands.”
I turn away and try again, but as soon as I stretch out my legs, my back arches and my legs sink down. This time when I come back up, he is at the dock, his back to me, staring toward the fireflies flittering around the honey locust.
“Is it because I’m not Pack?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m asking why you won’t ever let me help you. Not now, not yesterday when you were hurt, not before when all I was trying to do was pick up some stupid papers—”
“It’s not because of who you are.” I grab hold of the edge of the dock. “It’s because of who I am. You don’t understand wolves. The Pack is so strained, so skittish; they get combative if they think there isn’t a firm hand at the top directing them.” Pups chase something through the blueberry bushes behind the Boathouse. “My Beta is an engineer. She once said the Pack is like an arch and the Alpha’s the keystone, making sure that pressure is directed. But if the keystone fails, the arch crumbles.”
They skitter to a stop as a squirrel scrambles up into the birch tree.
“I am not a wolf.”
“No.”
“And you are not a stone.”
I say nothing.
“So is there any way that I could pick up some fallen papers or hold your hand without it signaling the end of the world?”
A bat zigzags low over the water in a flash of leathery wings and he holds his hands out for me with a slow, lost, asking smile that doesn’t make sense on his hard face, but still I let go of the dock and take his hands and…
The world doesn’t end.
It is easier to stretch my legs out like a heron. I start to kick slowly. I feel the currents stirred by his legs as he pulls me along until I start kicking faster and bump into him. Hair in my eyes, I hold on to his shoulders, thick and broad and hard under my hands, while my legs float forward and my thigh brushes his knee.
A shudder runs through me that has nothing to do with the cold, and he pushes my wet hair away from one eye, his palm rough from working with wood on my cheek, his mouth open, but with no breath, there are no words, just the unspoken question.
Would the world end?
The moon rises above the mountains to the east and shines on both the water and on my fingers silhouetted on his shoulders.
I push away from him across the surface of the water. He’s hovering not far away. I feel it in the way the water ripples against my skin. I don’t want to be watched. I need a little time when no one is looking to me for anything so that I can think.
Pulling my legs and arms in tight, I let my body descend into the dark and silent deep where there is no Great North, no forever wolves, no humans, no Shifters, no Constantine, no nothing.
Then it is really and truly just me.