“I’m brave,” I told her, and suddenly I needed her to believe me more than anything in the world. This felt important. She was important. “And I’m going to do good. I’m going to help many people. Father says so.”
Her eyes were wet when she said, “I know, baby. I know you are. And I’m very proud of you. But you don’t have to. I need you to listen to me, okay? I need you to hear me. It’s not—this isn’t what I wanted for you. I didn’t think it would ever be like this.”
“Be like what?”
She shook her head. “We can—we can go wherever you want. You and me. We can leave Green Creek, okay? Go anywhere in the world. Away from this. Away from magic and wolves and packs. Away from all of this. It doesn’t need to be this way. It could be us, Gordo. It could be just us. Okay?”
I felt cold. “Why are you—”
Her hand shot out and gripped my own across the table. But she was careful, as she always was, not to push back the sleeves of my coat. We were in public. My father said people wouldn’t understand the tattoos on someone so young. They would have questions they didn’t deserve the answers to. They were human, and humans were weak. Mom was human, but I didn’t think she was weak. I had told him as much, and he hadn’t responded. “All I ever wanted was to keep you safe.”
“You do,” I told her, trying my best not to pull my hand away. She was almost hurting me. “You and Father and the pack.”
“The pack.” She laughed, but it didn’t sound like she found anything funny. “You are a child. They shouldn’t be asking this of you. They shouldn’t be doing any of this—”
“Catherine,” a voice said, and she closed her eyes.
My father stood next to the table.
His hand came down upon her shoulder.
We didn’t talk about it after that.
I HEARD them fighting a lot, late into the night.
I pulled my blankets up around me and tried to block them out.
She said, “Do you even care about him? Or is it just your legacy? Is it just your goddamn pack?”
He said, “You knew it would come to this. Even from the beginning, you knew. You knew what he was supposed to be.”
She said, “He is your son. How dare you use him this way. How dare you try and—”
He said, “He is important. To me. To the pack. He will do things that you can’t even begin to imagine. You’re human, Catherine. You could never understand the way we do. It’s not your fault. It’s just who you are. You can’t be blamed for things beyond your control.”
She said, “I saw you. With her. The way you smiled. The way you laughed. The way you touched her hand when you thought no one was watching. I saw, Robert. I saw. She’s human too. What makes her so goddamn different?”
My father never answered.
WE LIVED in town in a small house that felt like home. It was on a street with Douglas fir trees all around it. I didn’t understand why the wolves thought the forest was a magical place, but sometimes, when it was summer and the window was open as I tried to sleep, I swore I heard voices coming from the trees, whispering things that weren’t quite words.
The house was made of brick. My mother laughed once, wondering if a wolf would come and blow it down. She laughed, but then it faded and she looked sad. I asked her why her eyes were wet. She told me that she needed to go make dinner and left me in the front yard, wondering what I’d done wrong.
I HAD a room with all my things. There were books on a shelf. A leaf I’d found in the shape of a dragon, the edges curled with age. A drawing of myself and Thomas as a wolf given to me by a child in the pack. I asked him why he’d drawn it for me. He said it was because I was important. Then he’d smiled at me, his two front teeth missing.
When the human hunters came, he was one of the first to die.
I SAW her too.
I shouldn’t have. Rico was yelling at me to hurry up, papi, why are you such a slowpoke? Tanner and Chris were looking back at me, slowly pedaling their bikes in circles around him, waiting for me.
But I couldn’t move.
Because my father was in a car I didn’t recognize, parked on the side of the street in a neighborhood that wasn’t ours. There was a dark-haired woman in the driver’s seat, and she was smiling at him like he was the only thing in the world.
I’d never seen her before.
I watched as my father leaned forward and—
“Dude,” Tanner said, startling me as he pedaled back to me. “What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”
We left, the playing cards clothespinned to our bike spokes rattling loudly as we pretended we were on motorcycles.
I LOVED them because of what they were not.
They weren’t pack. They weren’t wolves. They weren’t witches.
They were normal and plain and boring and wonderful.
They made fun of me for wearing long-sleeved shirts, even in the middle of summer. I took it because I knew they weren’t being mean. It’s just how we were.
Rico said, “You get beat or somethin’?”
Tanner said, “If you do, you can come live with me. You can sleep in my room. You’ll just need to hide under my bed so my mom doesn’t see you.”
Chris said, “We’ll protect you. Or we can all just run away and live in the woods.”
Rico said, “Like, in the trees and shit.”
We all laughed because we were kids, and cursing was the funniest thing.
I couldn’t tell them that the woods wouldn’t be the safest place for them. That things with glowing eyes and razor-sharp teeth lived in the forest. So instead I told a version of the truth. “I don’t get beat. It’s not like that.”
“You got weird white-boy arms?” Rico asked. “My dad says that you must have weird white-boy arms. That’s why you wear sweatshirts all the time.”
Tanner frowned. “What’re weird white-boy arms?”
“Dunno,” Rico said. “But my dad said it, and he knows everything.”
“Do I have weird white-boy arms?” Chris asked, holding his arms out in front of him. He squinted at them and shook them up and down. They were thin and pale and didn’t look weird to me. I was envious of them, of their wispy, downy hairs and freckles, unmarked by ink.
“Probably,” Rico said. “But that’s my fault for being friends with a bunch of gringos.”
Tanner and Chris shouted after him as he pedaled away, cackling like a loon.
I loved them more than I could say. They tethered me in ways the wolves could not.
“MAGIC COMES from the earth,” my father told me. “From the ground. From the trees. The flowers and the soil. This place, it’s… old. Far older than you could possibly imagine. It’s like… a beacon. It calls to us. It thrums through our blood. The wolves hear it too, but not like us. It sings to them. They are… animals. We aren’t like them. We are more. They bond with the earth. The Alpha more so than anyone else. But we use it. We bend it to our whim. They are enslaved by it, by the moon overhead when it rises full and white. We control it. Don’t ever forget that.”