Constantine
It will not be like last time.
Even in broad daylight, I knew the Iron Moon was coming, I felt it in Evie, a kind of dangerous edge. In the Pack’s increasing industry as they sealed everything up and turned it off. Mostly it was in a kind of electric anticipation. The inability to sit still, constantly checking the sky, scratching at necks and arms and backs as though if they scratched hard enough, they would tear through that imprisoning skin.
The evening comes like one of those dreams where you’re sitting in class or a meeting, but then someone calls on you and you stand up only to discover that you’re naked from the waist down. The only difference is I am naked from the waist down and from the waist up, and everyone else is naked too. Flagrantly, unashamedly naked.
There is way too much touching going on.
Where is she?
“Connie? Were you even paying attention?”
“Fine, fine,” I say, distractedly folding my clothes.
Ziggy chuffs a dry raspberry of exasperation. “So it’s fine, fine, if Tiberius shoots you?”
“What?” My T-shirt and boxer briefs go on top.
“I knew you weren’t paying attention. If you don’t change when we do, Tiberius. Will. Shoot. You. Won’t be the first time we’ve had to sand bloodstains out of the floor.”
A pup wobbles across the back of the sofa, pausing for a moment before launching herself onto a pile of adults.
“Ooof,” says the pile.
“Why aren’t the pups changing?”
“They don’t have to,” Ziggy says with a shrug. “The Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. The pups are already as wild as they can be, so she leaves them alone.”
I put my folded shirt on top of the pile of denim, sweats, sleeveless flannel, as well as the occasional Offlander linen shirts and summer-weight wools that belong to the 7th.
I smooth the stack, feeling the absence at its heart.
Where is she?
Then a subtle tension runs through the Pack. It’s not that they look to the door, though some do. It’s just they know she’s coming. I do too. I no longer have to see her to know as surely as if her head was leaning against my neck, as if her hand was on my heart, as if I was gathering her to me in the cold of an Adirondack summer night.
There are a few words exchanged with returning Offlanders, but not many. The 7th’s two Offlanders have been pacing anxiously back and forth for an hour, their pent-up wild scraping at the walls of their skin.
“Wes þu hal, Erika,” Ziggy says to one of them, a woman with red-brown hair standing at the window, staring at the sun. She whips her head around, teeth bared, before turning back to press her hands to the glass, her feet jittering on the floor.
All around us, men and women pace nervously, shaking out their legs and arms, bending low so they can check the sun’s progress through the window. It’s not setting quickly enough for them, but to me it seems to plummet from the sky.
The 14th Echelon crowds into one of the few remaining spots.
And for the first time since that horrible moment in Medical, I see Magnus in skin. I know it’s him, even though he looks nothing like he did. Before, he’d been a scrawny teenager among giants. A marionette with flopping distended joints and wooden gestures. It’s as though his body had stopped growing at the age of his last change, and now in the past weeks, it has raced ahead, making up for lost time. He has a fucking beard. Chest hair.
If I ever wanted proof that he doesn’t need me, here it is.
He looks around the room, and when he catches sight of me, he smiles, his teeth bright with only one slightly snaggled canine. He curls his arm around his front, his fingers reaching for that spot at his back, and begins to roll his shoulder blade.
If the Iron Moon finds us wild…
I hit Magnus fast and bring him down hard, pressing his back flat to the floor, my hand cradling the back of his head. Eudemos, though, who has bones made of lead, is not careful and hits me like he wants to hurt me. The scaffolding of my body cracks and groans. My left arm trapped against the floor pops loose from its place at my shoulder and I scream.
“Stop!” Evie yells, jumping for Eudemos before she remembers who she is and where.
“Stop,” the Alpha commands.
Someone’s got their teeth in my upper thigh. I can’t see who but if it was painful going in, it’s even more painful coming out. Eudemos lifts his body from mine, and when my lungs can inflate again, the agony in my shoulder joins up with the torment in my fingertips.
“What’s going on here?” the Alpha demands, looking at me, but pain has locked my jaw and it’s going to take me a minute before I can find the key.
“He attacked Magnus,” Eudemos says, helping Magnus up, suddenly his great protector. Magnus looks at me, his mouth open, a look of confused betrayal in his eyes, and now I have no choice but to unlock my jaw and explain to him that I’m not trying to deprive him of this new self. I am not jealous of what he has become without me.
“No forever wolf,” I exhale raggedly. “Not like Varya. He was…” Without thinking, I begin to roll my shoulder, not even the one that’s disconnected, but it’s enough and I grunt from the pain.
Evie purses her lips and squats down in front of me. “Tristan? A hand?” She helps me sit up, looking almost apologetic. I want to tell her that it doesn’t suit her at all, looking apologetic. Tristan’s hands find my elbow and wrist. A blindingly painful twist later, I understand the apologetic look. As my shoulder pops back into its socket, my eyes are blurred and my breathing shredded.
My ass hurts, too, and sticks to the floor.
“Is that true, Magnus?” Eudemos looks at him. “Tell me that’s not what you were doing?”
“But…” He looks around at his echelon for an explanation. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
The Alpha raises her eyebrows at the 14th’s Alpha.
“I…I…forgot?” Eudemos says with a sigh and begins to unbutton his shirt.
“Just so there is no misunderstanding,” the Alpha says, looking pointedly at Julia and Magnus, “the Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If we are in skin, she makes us wild. If we are wild, she makes us real wolves. Forever wolves.”
“But you don’t know if that would happen to us,” Cassius says. I notice him for the first time, standing silent and largely hidden in the corner behind the staircase. He is still dressed.
“I don’t know. If you’d like to find out, no one will stop you from changing now,” she says, making it clear that Cassius as a real wolf would be less objectionable or perhaps dead and either way a better outcome for the Pack.
Using my good arm, I push myself up from the floor. I start back for the 7th, but Eudemos blocks my way with his broad and frankly inhumanly furry chest. My fingers are tingling and my arm definitely weak. If he comes at me again, I’m going to have one chance to knock him out. I can’t raise my left arm high enough to protect against a return blow.
He doesn’t hit me. He just stands looking at me expectantly, then spreads his arms out at his sides. Evie is watching. So is Silver, sitting on the floor next to Tiberius, pups crawling over her naked skin. “If you’re going to bite him,” Silver says, bending down to look at the sun’s progress, “you need to do it now.”
“Bite him? I don’t want to bite him. Why would I bite him?”
“He attacked you without provocation. By law, you may bite him and he cannot retaliate. Although the law places no strictures as to where, by custom, we avoid the cock and nose.”
Eudemos’s neck and shoulders are surrounded by thick fields of hair. His cheeks too. Whorls of it surround his nipples and belly button. His cock has shrunk into the surrounding overgrowth, perhaps worried about my understanding of the law and even more, my understanding of custom. Just looking at him, I feel bits of sweaty hair lodged between my teeth.
“You said ‘if’ and ‘may’… I’m presuming that means I don’t have to?”
“No, but the Pack will not tolerate grudges or resentments tearing at its fabric. Misblod ageat sculon ðy læs wyrmsan. Bad blood must be spilled lest it fester.”
“I’ll pass,” I say and head back to the 7th, chuckling to myself at the thought of August here. August who not only tolerated bad blood but encouraged it, every trifling grievance or imagined slight, so as to keep all his people sniping and snapping at one another. With exaggerated irony, August called it “our happy home,” though the compound was in reality a pit fight with company cars.
The Alpha bends down, peering through a window at the sun touching the ragged, tree-lined horizon. A gold disk framed by a valance of orange and purple clouds. “It’s almost time,” she says, straightening up. Those few remaining Pack still in clothes peel them off, adding them to the neat piles belonging to the wolves in their echelons. Other wolves double-check that the windows are fastened shut. Pack on the floor clamber over one another, noses touching, open mouths clashing, forming a wild chain.
Not Cassius though. He stands stock-still in the corner like a golem carved from the clay of bad blood and petty resentments. Elijah plucks at Cassius’s clothes, obviously telling him that he needs to strip, but Cassius ignores him, his eyes focused on Julia, willing her to turn and see his sullen expression.
She might have done it once. It used to be as though she could feel him looking at her, telling her to stop whatever she was doing. And she would, turning to him with a bright and anxious smile.
Maybe she is still aware of him because she turns slightly, offering him an even more decided view of her back while her focus is entirely on Arthur, who arrived late and is folding his clothes, piling them on the table. Then he turns toward Julia, his elegant naked body scarred by the claws of wolves and he smiles at her. Cassius’s hands clench into fists.
The Alpha moves in front of Cassius, blocking his view of where Julia makes room for Arthur so that when he sits, his naked hip slides against hers. He pulls his knees up, props his chin on his forearm, turns his head toward her, listening.
The table beside the sofa explodes toward the wall where Cassius has kicked it. Julia freezes, one hand fisted, the other pushing her hair behind her ear.
“Pick it up,” Evie says quietly, but since the pack is silent, it’s easy to hear.
Cassius looks at her, his lips writhing. Then he torques his body, his shoulder twisted, his fist clenched, telegraphing his attack. I know this, but I don’t feel one single bit of protectiveness. Not like I do when some wolf plucks at her sleeve, or sets papers in front of her to sign, or needs a decision about discipline. Or when Poul sticks his nose in her—
Cassius’s body slams against the wall, struggling against Evie’s forearm at his throat.
—because I know Evie is perfectly capable of protecting herself from those she doesn’t like. It’s the ones she loves that she is so vulnerable to.
Tiberius stretches and reaches behind him, gathering a Glock and a magazine. With a practiced action—slide, magazine, slide—puts his gun to Cassius’s forehead. Evie lets go and Cassius drops into the flagstones of the fireplace, howling in frustration.
At that moment, one sharp ray of light breaks through the window. Shimmering with dust motes and stray wolf hairs, it picks out the details of Evie’s body—the slope of her breast, the sharp angle of her hip, the long silk of her waist, damasked with the healed scars.
Standing straight, she turns to her Pack. “Eadig waþ,” she calls in that particular voice and the resonance scrapes across my skin.
“And be yourself not hunted!” the huge, naked wolfish congregation roars back.
“And be yourself not hunted,” I whisper to her, my teeth a dike against the ocean of words I want her to hear.
She moves quickly toward her echelon and my heart beats harder. We are so careful otherwise, but she might sit close to me and I might touch her here in the open, seen by everyone. She picks her way toward the bit of floor that is unoccupied because I refused to have Ziggy’s naked, hairy thigh against mine.
“Gamma,” she says with a nod toward Ziggy as he moves over.
The light leaking into the room turns from orange gold to purple to gray.
“Remember,” she whispers urgently, her head bent near her arm so that even the sharp-eared wolves can’t hear. “It will not be like last time.” Her eyes run down my torso. “And don’t worry about the erection. It will go away during the change. They always d—” Her arm flails out and her body seizes and she starts to fall. I catch her just in time to stop her from tumbling to the floor.
Her head twitches against my chest and her body churns in my arms. I lay her down, pushing her hair back. It starts small, with the dullness in her gold eyes, the ripples riding across skin. Sheltered in the cave of my body, Evie slowly changes: her soft nose lengthening, her beautiful mouth stretching and thinning around the length of her jaw, her bones turning almost rubbery as they bend and lengthen and contract. The tip of a wiry whisker pokes out from her brown cheek.
All around me, bodies are churning, except for two, standing near the fireplace. One of them pointing a gun, eyebrows raised, lips pursed. The other at the muzzle end, wearing a furious, calculating expression and a stretched-out T-shirt from St. Elizabeth’s College of Nursing.
I lay Evie down, and because it’s too late to hide anything, I curl down around her.
I put my mouth to her neck, feeling the muscles thicken under my lips.
It will not be like last time.
I presume parents are the ones who have “the talk” with their children. I had no parents so I, lucky boy that I was, got to have the talk with August.
There is a place in every Lukani, August had said, and before he went any farther, I had wrapped my arm around my ribs, my fingers feeling the spot near the floating rib on my left side that felt equally like pleasure and shame.
“Don’t go looking for it,” he’d said as soon as he saw me. “It lets the monsters out.”
I dropped my hand and “the talk” was over. I knew better than most Lukani my age what those monsters were. Years went by before I was tempted again, but by the time that moon rose from the North Atlantic, so cold and large and necessary, I was no longer worried that there was a monster inside me. I was now terrified that there was nothing but a big, empty, monster-shaped space.
Cassius yells something at Tiberius, but the sound is already indistinct in my itching ears.
It will not be like last time.
The Great North Pack is not like the Lukani, who came from France to rip up the forests of Canada and make the land safe for cabbages. And though he had never used an ax himself—not on a tree, in any case—August was in his soul a défricheur, a clearer of the land. An extirpator of the wild.
With the last of my dissolving agency, I let my arm drop around Evie’s waist, sorting through that Alpha scent of the entirety of the Pack for the growing scent of granite and moss that is all her.
It will not be like last time.
Tiny crystals float in front of my eyes and swirl together, blinding me. Bones soften and unknit, tissue unravels, skin tingles and itches as fur erupts. Organs rumble and rearrange themselves and my mind drops, like a dreamer jerking on the verge of sleep.
My ankles narrow and ache, whether from phantom pain or actual damage, I don’t know. Last time, I hadn’t known what was happening. I was still dressed, though my pants had fallen off or maybe August had them removed. I still had on the shirt that fell in front of my face so I could see nothing. But as a wolf, I could smell.
It will not be like last time.
I could smell Magnus, hear his ragged sobs. I know now why Magnus had always been able to find me, but I wish that one time he hadn’t found me in that secluded beach in the middle of the change.
It will not be like last time.
Terrified, he had run for August, who had me strung up by my back feet, or rather paws, from the single tree of the old compound as a lesson to anyone who might feel inclined to forget who we were.
“Nous sommes Lukani. C’est notre devoir de dompter le sauvage qui nous entoure, comme nous l’avons dompté en nous-mèmes.”
We are Lukani. It is our duty to tame the wild without, as we have always tamed the wild within.
I don’t know how long I hung there, blindly swaying when the wind or some asshole poked at my body.
The Lukani knew that was not a wolf hanging there. They knew that if August didn’t kill me, I would take revenge on everyone who had spit at me, who had jabbed at my genitals, who had made me bleed. They gave me a wide berth. The humans didn’t. Magnus tried to keep them away, but he was young, and without me looming behind him lending him power, he had none of his own. August knew he would have to replace the humans once my ankles healed and I was able to walk again, but it amused him to tame the wild with these disposable employees.
It will not be like last time.
Eventually, my ears begin ringing, a welcome change from deafness. The door slams and I move my jaw, trying to pop my ears. Sound and smell begin to overwhelm my brain. Eyes closed, nose stuffed into the crook of the leg that was once an arm, I try to block out as much as I can in order to make sense of what’s left. It takes time to identify the soft rhythmic clacking of claws and the infinitesimal creak of the floor. I pick out snufflings as wolves smell one another, the sound of fur shaking.
A damp nose touches mine. Bop. I open one eye, then the other. This time when I open my eyes, I realize that we are the last two wolves left in the Great Hall, except for another huge black one still changing under the watchful eye of the small silver wolf, who circles him, shaking out her back leg.
And a beige wolf writhing around inside a baggy shirt that reads St. Elizabeth’s College of Nursing.
I try to stand, pushing off with my hands, but forget that I have neither hands nor feet and fall backward on my coccyx. On my tail. I have a tail. Evie starts toward the door, then looks back at me expectantly. I can’t follow her. Even through the walls, I can tell that what’s out there is too much.
Evie chuffs and closes her jaws around my long nose and pulls, dragging me stumbling and sliding toward the outside and all the chirping and whispering and barking and things that don’t make any sound at all, but reverberate through the hollows of my skull.
Scents hit me like physical objects made of damp earth and crushed grass and old char and moldering pine and still water.
Evie licks forcefully at my eyes. Opening them mournfully, I catch the brightness of the stars and the rim of moonlight reflected on the torn veil of low, gray clouds and the flash of a wolf appearing in the ragged tree line who says, “Excuse the interruption, Alpha. The Pack is already running toward the High Pines, where there is news of prey.” That is what I understand, though the only sound from his mouth is Growp?
Evie sighs and bops her nose to mine. I bop back, understanding that she can’t babysit me. I’m grateful that she’s not there when I start down from the porch. That first step, as they say, is a doozy. My tail flashes in front of my eyes; the sharp edges of the stairs hit my spine. Finally, I end up face-first on the grass.
With a lurching hop, I pull myself up, my feet planted shoulder and hip width apart. Stupidly, I try to move the front feet first, then the two back ones, hopping forward a few inches before collapsing. I follow with a couple of other combinations that are only slightly better. Finally, I hit on the most reasonable progression of right front and left back forward followed by left front and right back.
Every step I take in the forest seems to release a maelstrom. The scratched surface of the rock, the broken stem of fern, the rapid heartbeat of some small animal I can’t see. Wind tells me so much as it sweeps across my fur (Fur!) and tells me its direction and whether it is saturated enough to mean rain. I feel north.
Beyond the damp woody edges and white flowers with broad heart-shaped leaves is a rotting log with an alien-looking flower sprouting from it that smells sugary and sparkles in the moonlight. Because my nose is now so appallingly long, I jam it right into the middle of the flower, getting its stickiness all over my muzzle. I slap at it with my long, flat tongue. It is sweet and my tongue is soothing on my fur.
Something uncoils from under the log, long and thin with a bright line running the length of its back. Without thinking, forelegs and hind propel me straight up as it writhes away, whip fast. The less I try to define what is around me, the more I understand of the continuum of life between what is seen and what is spoken.
The path that had been no path at all is now supremely clear to me, like the bioluminescent tide I had seen one night in Jamaica, except more complex. I take my time exploring, circling in ever-wider paths, bumping against new things, though whenever I circle close to Home Pond, I smell Cassius, followed by a changing escort. I catch sight of him once, sullen and furious in the bedraggled, muddy French terry he wore defiantly but no longer has the fingers to get rid of.
I recognize Magnus by the fragrance of juniper and black walnut. He has crisscrossed this place before, sometimes with his echelon, sometimes alone.
Tiberius and Silver are like two strands of a helix, weaving in and out but inexorably bound. Julia and Arthur, though, are always together. JuliaAndArthur, JuliaAndArthur, JuliaAndArthur.
Hardly a minute later, the sun rises, garish and too nosy by half. I stay away from any opening in the canopy, following the scent that is green and earthy and musky and flowering and stony and majestic and wild. Stone and moss. The Alpha is everywhere at once. I imagine her even now dispensing justice and comfort and protection and discipline. I follow a scent that is like earth and woody mushroom and I only now recognize is Ziggy. The 7th moves too quickly for my stumbling steps. In frustration, I throw my head back and howl. It isn’t a real howl, just an oww suddenly truncated because I run out of breath. Wolves check on me, gray and silent shadows in the trees.
Evie, I want to say but my tongue is long and thin and rests limp on sharp teeth between slashed cheeks. Where is Evie?
Eventually, I track the 7th down to where they are quarreling with the 13th over a kill.
My mouth open, I suck in the clean, rich, coppery smell and my stomach rumbles. A female from the 13th shoots me a toothy snarl that almost looks like a smile when I get too close to the hind leg she has dragged off to eat in peace. She lunges at me, then returns to gnawing at the last bit of flesh with her back teeth, her eyes trained on me, until the Alpha barks softly and the 7th begins to move away.
She circles around us, making it clear that we have a mission, and suddenly the 7th is focused and alert, moving as one. Or rather one and a floundering bit. Their noses close to the ground, they stop occasionally at a tree. In the distance, near the southwest perimeter, one woofs quietly. The Alpha trots away, but when I make to follow, Ziggy leaps in front of me, stretching his jaw halfway between a yawn and a reminder that he can fit the better part of my head between his teeth.
The Alpha returns almost immediately, scurrying low to the ground, then bounding twice and racing around the whole 7th. As she moves among her echelon, they crowd close, sniffing at her head and neck. Their back paws prance excitedly in the earth.
They spread out on either side of a rocky hollow, the remains of a dry riverbed. I stay behind, unsure what all the excitement is about, though the wind tells me that there is something with an earthy, musky smell. Animal, yes. Male, I think, but there the similarity to the buck we left behind ends.
Then it crashes through the trees, squealing, frightened, and angry, slipping on the exposed rocks of the riverbed. Sound and smells echo confusingly in the hollow, and Ziggy wags his head side to side, trying to see the thing, only to be blindsided as it charges straight toward him, its upturned nose dotted with mud and grass. Its brown tusks curled around its upper lip.
A fevered excitement spreads through my body: skin prickles, a shiver runs down my spine as muscles contract, and then without thinking, I lunge forward. Armed with nothing but my virgin fangs, I grab hold of its thick, bristled hide at the hump of its back. My bite isn’t deep enough, and the feral pig’s (SWINE!!!) huge head twists and churns, his dull tusk ripping into my skin. He swerves from side to side, trying to shake me, but I hang on, because that is what I have to do to feed my wolves.
A demon in black fur tears from behind a tree and slides under the pig’s jaw, taking his throat deep in her teeth, and with a ferocious pull of her jaws, tears it out. The squealing stops though his legs keep churning, slowing until air and earth are warm and damp and heavy with the smell of blood and the 7th opens him up, teeth clacking against the rib cage, claws ripping through the tough hide.
My shoulders relax, the dull throbbing pain at my chest replaced by a much more visceral need, one I would never have admitted to myself before.
There was a reason August sent Cassius and not me to shepherd the hunters. He’d tried that once, taking me with him to a hunt party. I’d been very young and he’d given me a knife, because he didn’t want anyone to see me use a gun. I was a kid; my job, he said, was to be “disarming.” Then one of the assholes shoots a big cat in the gut, but the guy’s tired and wants to go home. August said if I was so worried about it, I could take care of it myself, challenging me. Put up or shut up.
He didn’t like it when I came back spattered with blood.
“A real hunter”—I remember how cold his eyes went—“keeps his blade clean.” It wasn’t phrased as a command, but everything August said was a challenge or a command or a criticism to make clear who was the big man and who was small.
An orphaned child with no one else in the world, I obeyed but there was something about watching me lick the gore from that knife that made him narrow his eyes and frown. He never took me again.
I say “something” as though I don’t know exactly what disturbed August that day. It wasn’t the bravado or the defiance, both of which he could understand.
What bothered him was that I had enjoyed it.
And I enjoy it now: wedged in between furred and powerful bodies, taking still-warm life from this death that we created together.
Once the echelon has taken what we want, the Alpha calls for other members of the Pack to come for any scraps. Ziggy noses around the blood at my chest, his long tongue lapping firmly but gently at the gash, but I stumble back, my lips pulled away from my sharp teeth, a growl rumbling from my throat.
Circling round and round, the 7th lie down, some alone in a tight circle, but more in scattered piles, chuffing and huffing as they pillow their heads on the legs or backs or distended bellies of their packmates.
Evie finishes grooming her muzzle with her front paw, then she stretches back into her haunches and, after one luxurious shake, throws her head back and begins the low resonant howl of evening call. Her ears circle, catching the responses of her Pack floating over the contours of the mountains and valleys, skimming streams and ponds. Only when she is sure that the Great North is safe does she stop, turn around three times, and lie down.
And only then do I lie down a few feet away, full and content.
I have killed for bacon.