Constantine
Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
I ate well during the Iron Moon. Feral bacon. Leftover turkey. Frog: it looked like it would be cool and refreshing, an amuse-gueule, but it wasn’t and I will not make that mistake again.
Cassius clearly ate nothing and falls on the serving platters like a… I’d say “wolf,” but it hardly seems appropriate. He always sits in the same corner of the 9th’s table, hunched over his food as though it’s the only thing that matters, but I see the glint of his eyes as they sweep the room, watching. I see the way he turns his head, listening.
I don’t disguise the fact that I’m watching him. He doesn’t acknowledge me, beyond a malicious smile. When he is done, two wolves who had been lying unseen on the floor follow him out.
Poul hovers behind the Alpha, and even though I know that when she did what she wanted to, she did it with me, it still makes me angry that he is allowed to touch her openly and I am not. To leave traces of his DNA on her cheek and take hers onto his. Just because he is Pack and she is his Alpha.
Her top lip flickers upward, showing her canine, but then purses tightly, the only sign of her exasperation.
“Why doesn’t she like him?”
“Who? Pass the bread.”
“Poul, Ziggy.” I push the big basket toward him. “Why doesn’t the Alpha like Poul?”
He tears off a piece of black bread. When he looks toward the 10th’s Alpha, he frowns.
“Before Quicksilver, the noseless dog”—Ziggy spits three times, puuh, puuh, puuh—“was our Deemer.” I remember the body of the man with the small hole in his chest. The one whose face had been gnawed by the Alpha so he would wander alone for eternity. Dog, Tiberius had said, spitting less symbolically, followed by a forceful kick to the spleen.
“Some of the Alphas followed his”—he spits again—“lead. Poul was one.”
A dark-red stain seeps across my vision, watching the 10th’s Alpha hovering around her, his nose to the face I have held in my hands. His cheek near the ear that has heard my whispered groans. His chin to the velvet mouth that I have tasted.
His very presence marking her like one of the hundreds of No Trespassing signs ringing Homelands, because he is a strong wolf and would fight off any other males who might be interested.
The whole Pack sees him, and everyone knows he sided with the shit who planned to take over the Pack once August’s hunters tore its heart out. Tore her out. But the Alpha doesn’t flinch as his breath touches her hair.
The membrane covering my eyes ripples in time with the hollow lapping at the walls of my skull. I stumble over the bench, out the door, down the sloping lawn, and to the solace of water that shimmers bright and colorless as mercury.
I stretch out, letting my back absorb heat from planks that have been warmed by the sun and textured by wolf claws, bending my arm to protect my eyes from the too-transparent sky and overly bright sun. The variety of calls that bounded across Homelands when I first came here has quieted. Now it’s just the hollow thocking of a woodpecker.
Wolves are nearby. I can’t see them or hear them, but I feel them watching from the cool and subtle forest. Before I can ask what they’re looking for, a tremor runs from the soil into the timbers of the dock with a heedless thumping louder than that of even the biggest wolf.
“Cassius.” I don’t move the arm bent across my eyes.
He sits next to me.
“I’m not doing that again,” he says.
I recognize an opening salvo for what it is and say nothing, hoping he’ll go away.
A boat bumps against the side of the Boathouse.
“I hear you swum all the way to the other side,” he says conversationally, trying another tack.
“Swam,” I answer less conversationally.
Just because I have my arm cocked over my eyes doesn’t mean I don’t catch the way his eyes narrow and his jaw tightens. Or the way he manages to corral the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth into a smile. “That’s right, ‘swam.’ I hear you swam all the way to the other side.”
Something disturbs the water, sending minute waves into the water plants at the edge. What do you want, Cassius? What is so important that you would let me chide you like that?
“Did you hear the cars?”
The bells that had been chiming are now warning tocsins that race across the landscape of my brain. I think about those last meters I swam, Evie’s head against my shoulder, pretending she needed to be rescued though we both knew she didn’t. Did I hear the road? I have no idea. It was the last thing on my mind.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t make it that far. And just so you know, I’ve seen you swim. There’s no way in hell you could make it that distance, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He stills for a long time, staring out over the water, then the wood creaks and he leans in close enough for me to feel his breath. “Just so you know, you’re not one of them. You never will be,” he says, his tone quiet and petty.
My fingers feel the splintering planks of the dock. I’ll measure it tomorrow. Tell Sten we need to fix it.
“What do you want, Cassius?”
He knows I meant it rhetorically, but he answers it anyway.
“I’m doing you a favor,” he says. “I’d hate to see you humiliated when you find out that the Alpha has no interest in you beyond the fact that you look like her dead husband.”
“What?”
“I heard Elijah say it. When he thought I wasn’t listening.” Cassius’s malevolence grows once he sees he’s fingered a sore spot. “He said you look more like him than ever. Now that you have the beard.”
I touch the edge of my lip.
For winter, she’d said.
I don’t know when Cassius left. I only notice the hole left by the absence of the watchers in the woods.
* * *
I’m jealous of a dead man. Did he really look like me? Or rather, do I really look like him? When she said I should grow out my beard, was it because it would keep my face warm during the winter or because it would make me look more like John?
“Are you fucking me because I look like John?” I close the door behind me.
It’s taken me the better part of the day to find her in her office alone. She is looking between something on her laptop and a spreadsheet on her desk. She makes a mark with her pencil and looks up at me with genuine confusion.
“What?”
“Are you fucking me because I look like your dead mate?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Elijah says I look like him. Like John. I want to know if that is why you’re fucking me.”
She closes her laptop and turns around, looking me up and down.
I spread out my arms.
What do you see, Evie?
“I have no idea if you look like John,” she says with a shrug.
“How can you not know?”
“Because that’s not the way we think.” She breathes deeply, her nose flared, her head turned, listening at the door. “I have to sort something out,” she whispers hurriedly. “But meet me in my cabin later and I’ll try to explain.”
Now even I can hear the creaking of the floorboards.
“When?”
“When the moon”—she holds up one hand like a mitten—“is in the Endeberg Notch.”
She taps her finger webbing between her thumb and forefinger, and as she does, Poul opens the door. Alpha once again, she dismisses me with a nod.
I do not try to accommodate his girth in the doorframe, punching into him with my shoulder.
* * *
“Close it,” she says.
The screen door is already closed, so I push the heavy wooden door closed as well. I’ve come to realize that closing both doors is what she does to signal wolves to give her a tiny modicum of privacy.
“I don’t know what Elijah is talking about,” she says, opening a narrow closet under the stairs to the sleeping loft, “but he has spent most of his life Offland, and sometimes he thinks more like a human than he does like a wolf.” She digs around inside the dark, finally pulling out what looks like a waxed suit bag, the kind of thing that usually holds a tux waiting for those twenty pounds to disappear and wide lapels to return.
I hope it’s not a wedding dress.
Evie opens the zipper and reaches in, gently extracting not formal wear but a beat-up old flannel shirt with green and gray and black plaid.
“You want to know what John looked like; I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you whether his features were symmetrical or the angle of his jaw was square or whether his hair curled.” She moves her hands in the air. “I think maybe it did. I know nothing about his eyebrows or the shape of his lips.”
Her fingers run along the aged cotton and she brings it to her nose, taking a deep breath, before holding the shirt out to me.
“I am not putting that on, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t want you to put it on. I’m trying to help you understand what he was like. I don’t know if you two look alike, but a wolf knows that you are not at all the same.”
After staring at it for a few moments, I take it loosely in one hand. Evie pulls her fingers to her nose, indicating that I should sniff her dead husband’s sweaty shirt. I am, understandably I think, reluctant, but she pushes it closer, insistent. Go ahead. I exhale, hold it to my nose, and breathe in deeply. Then I shrug and shake my head. It’s exactly what I’d expect a man’s sweaty shirt would—
Wait.
A second breath and a third and he’s there. Not the shape of his nose or the color of his eyes or the curl of his hair. But in my mind, he is there, cool and stony and unchanging.
I close my eyes and breathe in again.
Protective and remote.
A mountain dressed in Beyond Salvation Army flannel.
“Do you see?”
I know she doesn’t mean see, in that narrow human sense of photons hitting my eyes. This is just one of those ways in which words fail us. I don’t see him, but I know him. I know what he was like. I feel his strength and I feel his remove.
“Yes.”
“John’s brother was Alpha. His father was Alpha. He was born into a pack—the only pack—that had known security for generations. The only threat to their safety was the occasional random hunter. I needed that when I first came to the Great North frightened and angry and alone. I was always grateful to him. Respected him. We were together because we were the two strongest wolves and that is what was expected. You…you are nothing like him.”
Stretching out the collar of my shirt, I pull it up over my nose and inhale.
“That’s not going to work,” she says. “None of us can read ourselves.”
“So what am I like?” I ask, pulling the shirt down again. “What was it you say we all smell like? Carrion and iron?”
She leans forward, mouth open, the alae of her nose flared, and breathes me in deeply. A tiny smile plays around the corners of her mouth, then she lets go of the breath with a sigh.
“Steel and carrion. Though for a long time, you smelled like ash. Like land that had been burned over. Now you smell”—she sighs—“nice. Like water and the life at water’s edge.”
Nice. Like water.
Not sure I like the sound of that.
“And Poul?” I don’t like the way I say his name either.
“Poul?” She shrugs, then opens her mouth, her tongue feeling the smooth fronts of her teeth. “Slate.”
Iron straps begin to tighten around my chest. “Do all Alphas smell like rock?”
“What are you talking about?”
“John smells like the mountain; you smell like granite; Poul, like slate. It’s—”
“And if you hit slate at the wrong angle, it splits. These words are nothing. They are just attempts to describe a thing that can’t be described.”
“Still, that’s some coincidence, don’t you think?”
She takes John’s shirt back, hanging it carefully on the hanger. “Humans have a lot of ceremonies where they all get together. Leonora says it’s because they aren’t truly joined the way we are. Anyway, our rituals are mostly private. Quiet. Like the one when I became Alpha of the Great North Pack. Every Alpha has done it: we go to the safe Offland, where we keep our most precious documents and a few things. Very few. But in this safe, in a drawer, in a ziplock bag is our most precious object. We keep it inside a tightly sealed gold box.” She screws her hands, her muscles working as she remembers some kind of effort. “I really had to work that thing to get it open.”
“So what’s inside? Like a crown or something?”
“What use does a wolf have for a crown?” She fits the waxed bag back into the back of the closet.
“I don’t know. What use does a wolf have for a gold box?”
“Gold doesn’t oxidize. It won’t change the scent of the fabric inside. Of the”—she waves her finger back and forth at her neck—“the neckerchief our first Alpha wore when she put on skin and breeches to negotiate for Homelands. When it was all over, she wiped her fingers on it. You can still see the ink stains.” She puts her hand to her face. “I laid my cheek against it. Taking a little of her and of every other Alpha that has come before me and leaving a little of myself. It’s what we do to substitute for being marked by our predecessor because no Alpha dies of old age.”
She leans her cheek against her hand as though still feeling the frayed piece of stained cloth. “There has never been an Alpha stronger than Ælfrida and she smelled like water. Like you do. A mountain is strong, but water will still turn it to sand.”
I try to say her name, but those steel bands around my chest are so tight that my voice is broken. I don’t care about being stronger than a mountain, I don’t care about Poul or John or any of it. All I can hear are her words pinging around my skull, so matter-of-fact.
Because no Alpha dies of old age.
I want her to live until any chance of me surviving her has long passed. I’ve found a woman who is big enough; now I will move heaven and earth to make sure that the world is big enough for her. I push her against the door, my arms bent on either side of her, the great mass of my shoulders curving to give her protection that she would never admit to needing.
I don’t want to make the world safe for fucking cabbages. I want to make the world safe for her.
Holding her head in my hands, I let my eyes run over her face again and again, indulging in the simple, jealous pleasure of knowing what she looks like.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at you.”
She smiles and lifts her chin. “And what do you see, Constantine?”
I tell her some things. Not everything. I tell her about the elegant curve between her forehead and the line of her nose. I tell her about the long arabesque that leads from her narrow chin to the wide back of her jaw, down the sinew of her neck. I don’t tell her that the finial is created by the bite marks left by her dead mate.
I tell her about the black brows that bend upward like the wings of a seabird, but I don’t tell her how they are so often pulled together in worry. I tell her about the high, full cheeks the color of burnished oak. I do not remind her of the scar she got trying to save a friend who didn’t know she needed saving. I tell her about the filigree of tiny curls making their escape to frame her forehead. I tell her about eyes the color of amber. I do not say that like amber, they hold inside them the memory of lost lives.
I tell her about the soft cushion of her lips lined in bronze fading to the mauve of an evening sky at the center. I do not tell her how it pulls me in like a bee to nectar.
Instead, I show her. My mouth rough against her, my tongue pressing through her death-dealing teeth to the silken hollows of her mouth. With my knee, I push her knees apart while my cotton-covered cock presses against the fold between her legs. She rocks against me. Cupping her ass, I pull her up, pushing deeper in my possessed dry humping until her eyes go hazy and she pushes me away hard.
I’ve seen that look before: the little half smile, the dreaminess around her eyes, but still focused. Her thumb traces the dark line of hair to my waistband. A small thing, the scrape of her finger on my abdomen, until her thumb presses under the elastic tightness, the back of her nail catching on the ridge of my crown.
She smiles at the involuntary jerking, doing it again as her fingers scrape along my back, sliding my boxers down, one hand rubbing along my cock, the other gliding along my ass. She bends her leg, her foot pushing down until I am naked, her knee against my inner thigh.
She writhes against me, a low hum vibrating deep in her chest. I put my hand on her sternum to capture it and respond with a growl of my own. Her nipple sweeps across the thin skin at the inside of my wrist, igniting a burn that travels up my arm, circling my heart. My hand flows down her breast, cupping underneath, my fingers outstretched. I catch her nipple between my lips, knowing now the perfect balance of pressure and gentleness until she groans and moves, flexing hips against me, leaning hard into the aching ridge. I pull away just enough so I can slide my cock not in but between. She clutches her legs together, forcing every hard needy inch of me closer. Her fingers clutch at my ass.
And when she is nearly there, when her mouth is soft, her breathing hard, and her eyes unfocused, I finally dive in, feeling the powerful ripples of her coming pull out my own.
I watch her sleep and know that what I want is beyond simple lust that can be slaked by a coming or two. This is marrow deep, and no matter how much seed I spill inside her, the need will still be there.
Forever.