Kelly eventually sat next to him.
Carter did too, all of them staring at the phone, listening to the sounds of home.
WE DROVE along a dusty back road, flat green fields stretching out all around us. Kelly was behind the wheel. Carter was in the seat next to him, window rolled down, feet propped up on the dash. Joe was in the back with me, hand hanging out of the SUV, wind blowing between his fingers. Music played low on the radio.
No one had spoken in hours.
We didn’t know where we were going.
It didn’t matter.
I thought of running my fingers over a shaved head, thumbs tracing eyebrows and the shell of an ear. The low rumble of a predatory growl building in a strong chest. The way a tiny stone statue felt in my hand for the first time, the heft of it surprising.
Carter made a low noise and reached to turn up the radio. He grinned at his brother. Kelly rolled his eyes, but he had a quiet smile on his face.
The road stretched on.
Carter started singing first. He was off-key and brash, loud when he didn’t need to be, getting more words wrong than right.
He was alone for the first stanza.
Kelly joined in at the refrain. His voice was sweet and warm, stronger than I would have expected. The song was older than they were. It had to come from their mother. I remembered being young, watching her flip through her record collection. She’d smiled at me peeking around the corner in the pack house. She’d beckoned me over, and when I stood by her side, she touched my shoulder briefly and said, “I love music. Sometimes it can say the things you can’t find the words for.”
I looked over at Joe.
He was staring at his brothers in awe, looking more alive than I’d seen him in weeks.
Carter glanced back at him. He grinned. “You know the words. Come on. You got this.”
I thought Joe would refuse. I thought he’d go back to staring out the window.
Instead he sang with his brothers.
It was quiet at first, a little wobbly. But as the song went on, he got louder and louder. They all did until they were shouting at each other, sounding happier than they’d been since the monster from their childhood had reared his head and taken their father from them.
They sang.
They laughed.
They howled.
They looked at me.
I thought of a boy with eyes of ice telling me that he loved me, that he didn’t want to leave again but he had to, he had to, his Alpha was demanding it, and he would come back for me, Gordo, you have to believe I’ll come back for you. You are my mate, I love you, I love you, I love you.
I couldn’t do this.
And then Joe put his hand on mine.
He squeezed, just once.
“Come on, Gordo,” he said. “You know the words. You got this.”
I sighed.
I sang.
We were all hungry like the woooooolf.
We drove on and on and on.
And in the furthest recesses of my mind, I heard it again. For the first time.
It whispered pack and pack and pack.
I KNEW it was coming. Every text, every phone call got harder to ignore. It was a pull toward home, a weight on our shoulders. A reminder of all that we’d left behind. I saw how much it hurt Carter and Kelly when they heard their mother had finally shifted back. How much it pulled at Joe when Ox asked questions he couldn’t answer.
Mark never said anything.
But then I never said anything to him either.
It was better this way.
Which was why I didn’t argue too much when Joe first said, “We have to ditch the phones.”
His brothers put up a fight. It was admirable, going against their Alpha. They begged me to tell him no, to tell Joe he was wrong. That there was a better way to go about it. But I couldn’t, because I was dreaming of wolves now, of pack. They didn’t know what I did. Hadn’t seen the way the hunters had come to Green Creek without warning, come to the house at the end of the lane to deal in death. We had been unaware. Unprepared. I had seen Richard Collins fall to his knees, the blood of his loved ones staining the ground around him. His head had tilted back and he had screamed his horror. And when the new Alpha had put his hand on his shoulder, Richard had lashed out. “You did nothing,” he snarled. “You did nothing to stop this. This is your fault. This is on you.”
So when Joe turned to me, looking for validation, I told him he was being stupid. That Ox wouldn’t understand, and did he really want to do that to him?
But that was all.
“It’s the only way,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
Joe sighed. “Yes.”
“Your Alpha has spoken,” I told Carter and Kelly.
I took their phones.
They slept badly that night.
The moon was just a sliver when I opened the motel door and stepped out into the night.
A dumpster sat at the edge of the parking lot.
Joe’s phone went in first. Then Carter’s. Kelly’s.
I held mine tightly.
The screen was bright in the dark.
I highlighted a name.
Mark
I typed out a text.
I’m sorry.
My thumb hovered over the Send button.
Like the earth. Like dirt and leaves and rain—
I didn’t send the message.
I threw the phone in the dumpster and didn’t look back.
spark plug electrode/little sandwiches
I WAS eleven when Marty caught us sneaking into the garage.
I didn’t know why I was so drawn to it. It wasn’t anything special. The garage was an old building covered in a layer of grime that looked as if it’d never be washed away. Three large doors led to bays with rusty mechanical lifts inside. The men who worked there were rough, dip tucked firmly in their cheeks, tattoos covering their arms and necks.
Marty himself was the worst of them. His clothes were always stained with dirt and oil, and he had scowled constantly. His hair was thin and wispy, sticking up around his ears. Pock scars marred his face, and his rattling cough sounded wet and painful.
I thought him fascinating, even from a distance. He wasn’t a wolf. He wasn’t imbued with magic. He was terribly, painfully human, gruff and volatile.
And the shop itself was like a beacon in a world that didn’t always make sense to me. Grandpap was a couple of years in the ground, and my fingers itched to touch a torque wrench and a dead blow mallet. I wanted to listen to the purr of an engine to see if I could hear what was wrong with it.
I waited until a Saturday when no one else was around. Thomas was with Abel, doing whatever Alphas and future Alphas did in the woods. My mother was getting her nails done in the next town over. My father said he had a meeting, which meant he was with the dark-haired woman I wasn’t supposed to know about. Rico was sick, Chris grounded, Tanner on a day trip to Eugene that he had bitched about for weeks.
With no one to tell me no, I went to town.
I stood for a long time across the street from the garage, just watching. My arms itched. My fingers twitched. There was magic in my skin that had no outlet. Grandpap’s tools had mysteriously disappeared after his old lady killed him, my father saying they weren’t important.
And just when I’d gathered up enough courage to cross the street, I felt a little tug at the back of my mind, a simple awareness that was getting more and more familiar.