Evie
Shifting from foot to foot, Constantine holds the cold little maggot tucked tight and warm against his body while I open up the Crapton group on WhatsApp.
“Who’s Craptin?” he asks.
“It’s not Craptin. It’s Crapton. As in, we have a crap ton of lawyers. I was tired when I set up the chat group. Obviously not something I want to share with anyone.”
Nyala yips loudly. She’s got her paws on Constantine’s calf. “I’m still pissed at you,” he says, but he scoops her up anyway.
“Does Drusilla go by Leveraux?”
“They never got divorced, but I think she uses her maiden name, which is Martel. Drusilla Martel. The last names are all fake, used to placate the humans, so it hardly matters.”
I tell them not to make any contact with Drusilla Leveraux/Martel and I use the shouty caps that are the closest virtual equivalent to an Alpha call. Within seconds, the Crapton responds with a thumbs-up emoji, the closest virtual equivalent to submission.
“Keep up, Wulflingas.” A voice like a muffler malfunction wafts across the stream separating my cabin from the Great Hall.
“I forgot I told Leonora she could bring the class to see Nils,” I whisper hurriedly. It’s too late for Constantine to get out unseen.
I sit down, the waistband of my jeans digging painfully into my abdomen. I unzip the zipper, then hold my arms out for Nils. Constantine kisses me quickly, before limping to the chair, a chaste distance away.
“How do eet win is two teefs?” asks Gyta.
“Good question. Did everyone hear? Gyta asked how a maggot eats with only two teeth. Watch the stream, Adrian. That’s why Tara bought the regurgitated food. Who has the baby food? Leofric? Don’t drop it.”
Leonora opens the screen door, holding it for children and pups and mosquitoes.
“Shoes,” she barks and our awkward children bump into each other like balls in a pachinko machine, trying to drop their shoes into the old milk crate. They come over to the mattress, eyes lowered for that customary second the presence of the Alpha requires.
Leonora puts her hand on Leofric’s back. He steps forward, reaching inside a cloth bag.
“We gotses peas,” he says. “And we gotses”—he pulls out another, studying the label—“oatmeal and bananas and we gotses…”
“It’s ‘we have,’ Leofric. We have peas. We have oatmeal and bananas. Just put the bag on the desk.” When Leofric heads over to the desk, Constantine takes the jars, then whispers to him, indicating his shirt.
I can’t hear what he says, but Leofric, who had been wearing a Toronto Blue Jays jersey tucked into long johns, comes back pulling the oversize shirt out and letting it fall loose and wrinkled to his thighs. I’m not sure why it matters, but I trust Constantine in this. As Leonora says, the difference between a human child and a wolf in children’s clothing is a game of inches.
Soon they are tumbling around me, nuzzling my arm, bopping noses with Nils, licking the bloody cartilage of his ear, teething gently at his feet.
Gyta keeps sniffing around Nils’s belly.
“Seegodshiffa’shtnonisbutt,” she says.
I look to Leonora, who hesitates.
“One more time, Gyta?”
“Seegodshiffa’shtnonisbutt!”
Opening her quilted bag with a pearl-studded handle, Leonora pulls out a pair of glasses and a handkerchief. With meticulous care, she starts to rub the lenses, which are big and round and exceptionally flimsy. They’re not real—wolves don’t need glasses—but Leonora uses them as a teaching tool and a way of buying time while she tries to pick apart the words spoken by one of our otherworldly children navigating a tongue that is too thick, teeth that are too flat, and cheeks that are too confining.
After one more concentrated swipe, a look of realization breaks across her face and she sets the glasses on her nose.
“Ah! He has a Shifter shirt on his butt!”
“Gea! Seegodshiffa’shtnonisbutt!” Gyta says excitedly.
“Thank you for reminding me, Gyta. Avery, do we have our present for the maggot?”
Avery holds out a log of cloth. Inside are several shirts and dresses, the mismatched culling of whatever was smallest in dry storage. Surrounding them are white cloths.
Then all the wolflings—pups, First Years, juveniles—creep closer, watching me examine the careful cutting and awkward stitching that transformed the wine- and bloodstained damasked linen of hunters into diapers for maggots.
I gather them to me, my pups and children, and they press their faces into mine, taking the comfort that is their birthright. The sense of belonging. The promise of protection.
Leonora is the last to lean in, her cheek cocked to the side, waiting for her turn. Then she trundles the children and pups out of the cabin. Only a few will return to the Great Hall, where they will try to sleep alone on a bed in the paralyzed walled-in air.
The rest will eat a meal of beaver liver and snuggle together under the night trees, snuffling into each other’s fur.
“Should I go too?” Constantine stands at the door. “I put the food on the table at the back.”
I shake my head, signaling for him to pull the thick inner door closed, so my wolves will give me a little privacy. “I could,” I admit quietly, “use some help.”
A little smile, a little nod, and Constantine closes the door and heads back to the kitchen, returning with a spoon and a bottle of squash.
Maybe Nils smells it and it makes him hungry. Or maybe it makes him furious to find he’s been downgraded from beaver liver to watery orange glop. Whatever the reason, he has suddenly found his voice, an unfortunate amalgam of the high, whiny pitch of a human and the endless lung capacity of a wolf.
When he finally takes the spoon, he gnaws at it with his back jaws, even though he has no teeth there, simply because that’s what he’s used to. Each mouthful is a struggle, and all I can think is: Come on, Nils. Can’t you do this on your own?
I stifle a yawn and realize that my back has begun to sag. Almost as soon as I straighten up again, my shoulders curve forward. Then Constantine is there, scuttling behind me, sitting with his feet under my ass and his shins on either side of my spine. Something to lean into until Nils is finished.
Then he reaches around front to take the bottle from me. He touches the front of my T-shirt.
“Did you spill…?”
He looks at the swath of red on the underside of his arm.
“Evie?”
“Shh. It’s nothing.” I put the sleeping Nils down on the mattress and lie next to him.
“It’s not nothing,” he snarls. He lifts my shirt and stares at the cut, but he doesn’t recognize it for the joyous thing it is.
“I will fucking kill whoever—”
“Me, Constantine. I did it.”
“You what?”
I swallow another yawn. “It’s…complicated.”
“I’ve spent way too much of my life not questioning anything because I didn’t care enough to wonder why. Now I care. So guess what? You don’t get to fob me off either.”
Nils burps loudly and settles back in, the awkward T-shirt/dish towel diaper Constantine created drooping low.
“I want to understand, Evie.” His hand stretches out like a guardian of pale gold above the gash cut into my skin by ancient tradition.
“Two wolves from the 9th were mated.” My hand flows down his arm like water. “So there was a Bredung. A braiding. It connects the mated wolves to each other, to the land, and to the Pack. The braid is made from the hide of our deer, tanned by the bark of our oaks.” I spread my fingers. “It is drenched with the seed and sex of our mates.” He spreads his. “And it is coated in the blood of our Pack.”
He looks down at our interlaced fingers.
“Your blood?”
“Yes. My blood.”
He looks at the thin slash low on my belly. I think it opened up again when I tackled him. John was Alpha long enough to be covered with the scars of his office. I have only the one. There will be others now that the weather is warm and the blackfly are gone. He lays his free hand across it, like he is trying to mend something that isn’t broken.
“It’s a good sign, Constantine.”
“How is this good? You already give them everything—your time, your strength, your happiness, your self, and now…now you give them your blood?”
“It is what the Pack—”
“I don’t care about the Pack,” he snaps loudly. “I only care about you.”
And there it is, the proof that I can’t ignore. He’s not pack. Sometimes, I almost think I could forget, but then he says something like that and reminds me of how little he understands what we are.
“Then you know nothing.” I stare at his hands, one interlaced in mine, the other on my belly. “To care only about one wolf means you are careless of the rest. Humans… There are so many of them, they can afford to have small, selfish loves. We can’t.”
I let go of him, pushing his hand away, pulling my shirt down. I suppose I’ve always known that this was a diversion. The pain tears through anyway.
I straighten the sheet across my shoulders and pillow my head on my bent arm.