Thomas said, “Dad, maybe we should—”
Abel flashed his eyes. Thomas fell silent. He looked back at me. “Do you understand?”
I felt sick. Nothing made sense. The raven was screaming somewhere in my head.
I said, “No.”
“Gordo,” Abel said. “You must rise. For your pack. For us. I must ask you to become the witch to the wolves.”
MARK HELD me as my grief exploded.
He whispered promises in my ear that I desperately wanted to believe.
But all I could hear was my mother’s voice.
You can’t trust a wolf.
They don’t love you.
They need you.
They use you.
The magic in you is a lie.
the second year/it was midnight
JOE STARTED speaking less and less as the second year dragged on.
It didn’t matter, though. We all heard his voice in our heads.
WE TOLD ourselves the trail wasn’t gone. That Richard Collins was still out there, moving. Planning. We kept our ears to the ground in case anything came up.
One night outside Ottawa, Carter disappeared for hours. He came back smelling of thick perfume, lipstick on the hinge of his jaw.
Kelly was angry at him, asking him how he could be so selfish. How he could even think of fucking some woman when they were all so far from home.
Joe didn’t say anything. At least out loud.
I lit a cigarette near the ice machine. The smoke curled up around my head in a blue fog.
“You gonna say something too?” Carter asked me after he’d slammed the motel door behind him.
I snorted. “Not my business.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I shrugged.
He leaned against the siding of the motel, eyes closed. “It was something I needed to do.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
I blew smoke out my nose. “What do you want me to say? That you’re right and Kelly’s wrong? You’re your own man and can do what you want? Or that Kelly has a point and that you should be thinking with your head and not your dick? Tell me, please. Tell me what you want me to say.”
He opened his eyes. They reminded me so much of his mother’s that I had to look away. “I want you to say something. Jesus Christ. Joe’s barely talking. Kelly is in one of his goddamn moods. And you’re just standing there like you don’t give two shits about any of us.”
All I wanted to do was have a fucking cigarette in silence. That’s all I asked for. “I’m not your father.”
That didn’t sit well with him. A low rumble rolled from his chest. “No. You’re not. He actually cared about us.”
“Well, he’s not here. I am.”
“By choice? Or because you feel guilty?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “And what the fuck would I have to feel guilty about?”
He pushed himself off the wall. “I don’t remember, you know? What happened when the hunters came. I was too little. But my father told me. Because it was my history. He told me what you did. How you tried to save—”
“Don’t,” I said coldly. “Don’t you say another word.”
He shook his head. “It’s my history, Gordo. But it’s yours too. You ran from it. From your mate. Mark didn’t—”
I was up in his face even before I knew I was moving. My chest bumped against his, but he stood his ground. His eyes were orange, but his teeth were blunt. “You don’t know the first goddamn thing about me. If you did, you would know that I was the one who stayed behind. I was the one who was left in Green Creek while your father took off with the pack. I kept the fire burning, but did any of you ever stop to think of what it did to me? You’re nothing but a subservient child who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”
He snarled in my face.
I didn’t flinch.
“That’s enough.” Joe stood in the open doorway to the motel room. It was the first time we’d heard his voice in days.
“We’re just—”
“Carter.”
He rolled his eyes and pushed past me, stalking back out into the dark.
We listened as his footsteps faded.
“You shouldn’t have interrupted us,” I told Joe coolly. “It’s better to have it out now than to let it fester. It’ll hurt more if you don’t.”
“He’s wrong, you know.”
“About?”
Joe looked exhausted. “You do care about us.”
He closed the door behind him.
I smoked another cigarette. It burned on the way down.
ANOTHER FULL moon. We were in the Salmon-Challis Forest in the middle of Idaho, miles and miles from any signs of civilization. The wolves were hunting. I sat next to a tree, feeling the moon against my skin. My tattoos were brighter than they’d been in a long time.
If I stood then and went to the SUV, it’d take less than two days to get back home.
Green Creek had never felt so far away.
A wolf appeared. Kelly.
He held a rabbit in his mouth, neck broken, hair matted with blood.
He dropped it at my feet.
“I don’t know what the hell you want me to do with this,” I told him irritably, pushing it away with my foot.
He yipped at me and turned back toward the forest.
Joe came next. Another rabbit.
“For all you know, this kind of rabbit is endangered,” I told him. “And you’re contributing to its demise.”
I felt a burst of color in my head, sunshine bright and warm. Joe was amused. He was laughing. He didn’t do that when he was human.
He dropped it at my feet.
“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered.
He sat next to his brother, facing the trees.
I waited.
Carter came, eventually. He was dragging his feet. He carried a fat gopher in his jaws.
He wouldn’t look me in the eye as he dropped it next to the rabbits.
I sighed. “You’re an idiot.”
He nosed the gopher toward me.
“But so am I.”
He looked up slowly.
“Stupid fucking mutts,” I said, and there was sunshine and pack and a tentative question of ??friendfriendfriend??
I reached out my hand.
He pressed his nose against my palm.
Then his tongue came out and he drooled all over me.
I glared at him as I pulled my hand back.
He cocked his head.
I cooked the rabbits.
The wolves were pleased.
I told them I wasn’t going to touch the gopher.
They were less pleased.
Their songs that night were still full of grief and rage, but they had a thread of yellow running through them.
Like the sun.
“WHAT ARE you doing?” Kelly asked me. Another night, another random hotel room somewhere in rural Washington. Carter and Joe were out getting food. We’d spent the past few nights sleeping in the SUV, and I was looking forward to a bed.
But first I needed to get rid of all the excess.
I stood shirtless in the bathroom, staring at the mirror, not recognizing the man who stared back at me. The dark beard on my face was quickly growing out of control. Black hair fell past my ears and curled at my neck. I was bigger too, somehow harder than I’d been before. The full tattooed sleeves on my arms looked stretched far wider than they’d ever been. Roses surrounded the raven, thorns wrapping around its talons. Runes and archaic symbols stretched along my forearms: Romanian, Sumerian, Gaelic. An amalgamation of all those who had come before me. Marks of alchemy, of fire and water, of silver and wind. They had been carved into me by my father over a period of years, the raven being the last.