Wolfsong

  It was just Joe and me then.

  He sat on his haunches, watching the last lick of flame, the last burst of sparks.

  I sat beside him, leaning against his side.

  He huffed out a breath as he towered over me.

  I pressed against him harder.

  He snorted, eyes flashing.

  The heat from the pyre began to fade away.

  And still we stayed.

  Night birds cried.

  An owl called.

  I said, “I’m here.”

  Joe scratched the grass with a giant paw.

  I said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

  His ears twitched.

  “We’ll figure this out.”

  He whined in the back of his throat.

  “We have to.”

  He bent his head down, running his nose along my cheek. My neck. Behind my ear, huffing his scent onto me like he hadn’t done since he’d become the Alpha.

  I loved it.

  And him.

  But I couldn’t say it. The words stuck in my throat.

  So I hoped he felt it in my scent. Because that was all I could give.

  It should have stopped there. That should have been the end of this terrible day.

  It wasn’t.

  Other words found their way from my throat, saying the very last thing I should have said.

  But I was buried then. In anger. In grief.

  So I wasn’t thinking about what could happen.

  Just what I wanted.

  I said, “He took from us.”

  I said, “He took part of our pack away.”

  I said, “He hurt us.”

  I choked, “He took my mom.”

  Joe began to growl.

  I said, “He’s gone.”

  I said, “We have to find him.”

  I said, “We can’t let this happen to anyone else.”

  I said, “We can’t let this happen again.”

  I said, “We have to protect the others.”

  I said, “And we have to make him pay.”

  And that was it. Later, I would realize that was it.

  That was the moment we began to say good-bye.

  into the bones/losing you

  I STILL didn’t see it coming.

  Maybe I should have.

  But I didn’t.

  THEY LEFT us. After a while.

  The strange wolves. The ones I didn’t know.

  They left back to wherever they came from.

  But not before they held their secret meeting once more.

  I couldn’t even find it in me to ask questions.

  To give two shits about who they were.

  I stared at the closed door.

  And walked away.

  THEY LEFT and all was quiet.

  Carter and Kelly spent hours upon hours in the woods, restlessly moving through the trees. If they didn’t come home at night, I’d find them in the clearing, lying flat on their stomachs near a section of burnt grass, tails thumping to a beat only they could hear.

  Elizabeth would disappear for long stretches of time. I never followed her. I never found out where she went.

  Mark stayed on the porch, scanning the tree line. I knew what he was looking for, but I didn’t think it would happen. Richard was gone.

  And he would stay gone because of Gordo. Gordo, who spent the days that followed shoring up the wards he’d placed around Green Creek. Now that he was pack again, he could access areas of his magic that had been blocked to him before. I could feel the pull of it every time he did something different, that strange sensation that felt like walking down the stairs and missing the bottom step.

  Joe stayed in his father’s office.

  I tried to keep all of them together.

  I lay with Carter and Kelly in the grass. Under the stars.

  When Elizabeth was in the house, I made sure she ate.

  I stood on the porch next to Mark, running my fingers through his fur, watching.

  I followed Gordo around, watching as he muttered under his breath, keeping an eye out to make sure no one in Green Creek saw the way the tattoos moved along his arms. He said it wasn’t necessary. That no one would find out. I went anyway.

  Joe barely spoke to me, even when he was human and even when I was at his side.

  I didn’t understand what he was going through. I didn’t understand what Thomas had given him. I didn’t understand what it meant to be the Alpha. All I could do was hope that I could be enough as his tether.

  Of course, any courting he’d been doing before had stopped.

  I didn’t mind. I knew there were other things he had to focus on. More important things.

  ONE DAY I went to work, just to do something different.

  Gordo wasn’t there. He was with Joe, talking about things I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  I might have glared at both of them. They’d stared back with blank faces.

  I might have also slammed the door on my way out of the house.

  I wasn’t proud of that.

  So without any better idea of where to go, I went to the shop.

  I stayed off the main street. I didn’t want anyone to stop me. To try and talk to me. To offer condolences. I was sick of condolences.

  It probably didn’t help that I was pissed at Joe and Gordo, even though I tried very hard not to be. But they’d never kept anything from me. Not since I found out about witches and wolves. For the most part, anyway.

  But when I saw the shop for the first time in days, some of that anger lessened. It dampened the sadness. I thought maybe this was going to be an escape. At least for a little while.

  I walked into the shop. The bell on the door to the waiting room rang overhead. It caused my heart to ache a little, but in a good way.

  “I’ll be right out!” a voice called from back in the shop.

  I knew that voice.

  My throat closed. Just a little.

  “Welcome to Gordo’s,” Rico said, coming into the waiting room. He was running a rag over his hands, trying to remove the oil under his fingernails. There was the sweet scent of coconut oil on the rag, which Rico swore by. The rest of us used soap and water. Rico said there was no accounting for taste. “How can I help—”

  Then he stopped. And stared.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hi. Hi, Rico.”

  “Hi.” He snorted and shook his head. “Hi, he says. Hi, like he’s some little—get your ass over here, Ox.”

  I got my ass over there.

  The hug was good. Really good.

  “It’s good to see you,” he whispered, arms around me tight.

  I just nodded into his neck.

  Then he dragged me back into the shop.

  There were a couple of cars up on the lifts.

  The radio was blaring Tanner’s country music, something about a man and how all his exes lived in Texas, but he hung his hat in Tennessee.

  Tanner himself was under the hood of a 2012 Toyota Corolla. It looked like he was replacing the timing belt, singing along with the radio.

  Chris was running a diagnostic check on a truck, squinting at the computer screen, even though his glasses were sitting on top of his head. He’d said he hated how he looked in them.

  I took in a deep breath with the smell of grease and grime and metal and rubber. It was the same when I’d been a kid, coming in with my daddy, Gordo offering to buy me a pop from the machine.

  It was just missing the man himself.

  But that was okay. He was busy now.

  “Look what the gato dragged in,” Rico said.

  They looked up.

  I waved awkwardly.

  They were on me before I could even take a step back.

  They laughed. They held me. They rubbed their fingers over my head. Through my hair. Their arms went around my shoulders. They pressed their foreheads to mine. They told me I was a sight for sore eyes. That they’d missed me. That they were going to work me to the bone when I was ready.


  I couldn’t find the words to say what I wanted. Sometimes, when your heart gets so full, it takes away your voice and all you can do is hold on for dear life.

  I WALKED home at dusk.

  There was no one waiting for me on the dirt road.

  I’d expected that.

  But it still stung.

  The fading sun shone through the trees.

  I ran my hand through the tall grass that grew along the road.

  I wondered where I was going.

  What I was doing.

  How long it would take before I could breathe freely again without this weight on my chest.

  How long it would take before my pack wasn’t so fractured anymore.

  How long before Joe would talk to me again.

  To any of us, really.

  I wondered many things.

  I stopped in front of my house.

  My house. Not the one at the end of the lane.

  I stared up at it.

  I told myself to keep walking.

  To go to the Bennetts. To stay there like I’d been doing for the past week.

  I needed to check on them. To make sure they were okay. To make sure they had eaten something, at the very least. I couldn’t let the wolves go hungry.

  So imagine my surprise when I found myself at my own front door, my hand hovering above the knob. I told myself to walk away.

  I put my hand on the doorknob and twisted.

  It didn’t move.

  I didn’t understand.

  And then I realized it was locked, and we never locked the door. Not even after my father left because we had no reason to. We lived in the country. The house at the end of the lane had been vacant, and then it had been inhabited by wolves. There had been no crime, there had been no monsters to come out of the forest at night.

  Not before.

  It was change and my hand shook with it.

  I didn’t have my keys. I didn’t know where they were. I never needed—

  We’ll put it here, my mother whispered. In case you ever need it.

  The spare.

  She’d put a spare key under the porch, hidden underneath a rock.

  She’d shown me one day when I was nine. Maybe ten.

  I was down the porch and reaching under it before I had another thought.

  I couldn’t find the rock. Dead leaves and spiders, yes, but not the fucking rock—

  My knuckles rapped against stone.

  I pulled it out of the way. It fit in my hand the same way the one in the forest had. The one I’d struck Richard with. It—

  There was no key.

  I took a breath.

  Shook my head.

  Looked again.

  It was there. Just a little bit in the dirt. A potato bug lay curled against it, shell shiny and gray.

  I took the key and realized the last person to touch it had been my mom.

  Dad had never used it. He never needed it. If he came home late, stumbling out of his truck, lost in a fog of beer, the door had always been open.

  I’d never used it. I came home from school. From work. From the library. From a walk in the woods where I’d felt Thomas’s territory humming through my veins.

  She’d been the last one to touch this key.

  I remembered the day I’d held my own work shirt for the first time, my name embroidered in careful stitches.

  I remembered the first time I’d held Joe’s hand, the little tornado who said I smelled of pinecones and candy canes. Of epic and awesome.

  This felt just as important.

  I climbed the steps again to the house.

  I put the key into the lock.

  The tumblers clicked.

  I twisted the key.

  I pressed my forehead against the wooden door and breathed it in.

  The light was fading behind me. Shadows were stretching.

  I took the key from the lock and put it in my pocket to keep it safe.

  I turned the doorknob and opened the door. It creaked on its hinges.

  The shadows were deeper in the house. I took a step and was assaulted with the smells of home, of furniture polish and Pine-Sol. Of spring flowers and autumn leaves. Of sugars and spices. It smelled warm, but it was there, wasn’t it? That odor of greasy pennies, undercurrent to the smell of home. Because this wasn’t a dream. I could feel the pain in my chest so surely that I knew.

  I closed the door behind me.

  It was dark in the house.

  I was going into the kitchen. Or upstairs. To her room. Or my room. I needed new clothes. I’d been wearing Carter’s for the last week, and even though I smelled like pack, I needed to smell like me. It was a plan. A good one. I’d go upstairs and get a change of clothes, a few changes, and then I’d—

  I was in the living room.

  I was told how it would be.

  One of the strange wolves had told me.

  He’d said, “I’m sorry. We tried. We tried to clean it as much as we could. But the… it soaked. Into the wood on the floors. It—”

  It was there. A dark stain, the edges of which were ragged. It had been scrubbed. It had been power washed. It had been scraped. But they couldn’t get it all.

  My mother’s blood had soaked into the bones of the house.

  But that was only fair. Because she was part of it. This was her home and she had died—

  I was out on the front lawn, on my hands and knees, retching into the grass. The bile splashed hotly against my hand, near my thumb. I croaked out a wet moan, a string of saliva hanging from my bottom lip.

  In some distant thought, I felt a ping of fear.

  There was a roar, much deeper than I’d ever heard it before.

  That ping became a clamoring.

  I heard the breath of a large animal.

  The sounds of great paws upon the earth.

  He was there as I retched again.

  There was the snap and creak of bone and muscle and then Joe was before me, hands frantic, rubbing down my back and arms, as he said, “Ox.”

  “Joe,” I groaned, spitting away the bitterness in my mouth. “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine—”

  “I could feel it,” he said, voice cracking. “Through everything. In the house it’s hard to see because everyone feels the same way. It’s over everyone. But then you weren’t there and I couldn’t remember where you were and I felt it. It was like being stung on every part of me. I could always feel it before, but nothing like this. There has never been anything like this. Like you.”

  “I don’t—”

  “This must have been what he felt like. My dad. All the time. Because you’re mine—my pack. It’s… Ox. It’s so big, I don’t know what to do with it.”

  And it was weird, hearing him like that again after a week of near silence. Because he sounded like he did when he was a kid, just a kid who hadn’t spoken in fifteen months and who had climbed me like a tree to demand to know what that smell was. It righted me, barely, but somehow.

  He was quiet as I rocked back on my feet and tried to catch my breath. His hand was in mine, not caring that it was sweating and bile-slick.

  He said, “Why did you go in there?”

  I looked up at the sky. Night was overtaking day. It was orange and red and violet and black stretching above us. I saw the first hint of stars. The first slight curve of the moon.

  “I had to,” I said. “I found the key and I had to.”

  “You can’t go in there alone.”

  “It’s my house.”

  Joe’s eyes flashed. “I am your Alpha.”

  And there was a tremor that rolled through me at the redness in his eyes, a need to bare my neck and obey, a whisper that grew into a storm. It yanked at the thread that connected us until I was shuddering with it, until I had to grind my teeth together just to fight it back. I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over.

  It didn’t last long. Because Joe pulled it back.

  He said, “Oh fuck. I’m sorry. I’m
so sorry.” His eyes were wide and he looked so impossibly young.

  “Don’t do that to me,” I said hoarsely. “Ever again.”

  “Ox, I. We—I didn’t mean it. Okay? I swear to you, I didn’t mean it.”

  He squeezed my hand so hard I thought my bones would break.

  “I know,” I said. Because I did. That wasn’t who he was. None of this was who we were. Everything was so fucked. “I know.”

  He looked miserable, this seventeen-year-old kid who now had everything resting on his shoulders. But there was anger in him too, low and pulsing, and I didn’t know how to stop it. Mostly because it resembled my own.

  He said, “You can’t go back in there. Not by yourself. Not until we—”

  “You can’t fix this,” I said as kindly as I could. “Not now.”

  He flinched away, but I held on to his hand.

  “Ox, I—”

  “I didn’t mean it like you think.”

  “You… you don’t know what you mean.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Everything is weird right now.”

  “I know.”

  “But we’ll fix this.”

  “I know.”

  “We will,” I insisted.

  He looked away. “We need to talk, Ox. I’ve… made a decision. About this. About everything. I need you to…. We just have to talk, okay?”

  And I felt cold.

  WE STOOD in Thomas’s office. All of us in the pack. It was the first time the wolves had all been human at the same time since the night Richard came. The fact that we all stood together was not lost on me, especially since Gordo was with us too.

  Gordo, who apparently had a place in the pack now. Something had happened the night Thomas died, something that bound him to the Alpha, just like the rest of us. I didn’t know if it was his magic, the changing of the Alpha, or a combination of both. Gordo wouldn’t talk about it. In fact, none of them would talk about it.

  I thought there was a very real chance they all knew what this was about except for me.

  Elizabeth looked pale and wan, an afghan wrapped around her shoulders.

  Carter and Kelly were frowning, standing side by side near Joe.

  Mark was looking out the window, arms across his chest.

  Gordo leaned against the far wall, staring down at his hands.