Chapter 20

Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 21 days

Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 21 days

She didn’t come back Friday either. The thought that Janine might have extracted herself from my life with so little effort on my part is a small but very real adornment to my day.

Most of the day is spent running and rerunning my backward calculations: Thea will be at Penn Station at 4:43 p.m., which means she boards the train in Amsterdam at 1:20 p.m., which means she left home maybe at noon. I keep my phone in my pocket, compulsively checking her train’s progress on the Amtrak app.

At 4:15 p.m., I can’t wait anymore. “Penn Station,” I tell the cabbie, then throw myself back against the cold vinyl. The cab’s smell is a stifling combination of chicken, hot dust, and the adhesive backing of duct tape.

“Keep the windows open, please.”

The streets are crowded with pre-weekend traffic. I pay the driver and run the last mile.

Passengers are already pouring from the doors of Thea’s train by the time I get there. I search through the masses of little humans, sniffing my way through jasmine and the leathery scent of fear and caramel mocha and tobacco and Jamba Juice and salty misery until I hit the musty smell of damp earth and my spine tightens, pulling me like a leash toward the tall woman with the long, black hair who is just out of reach, swerving in and out of the crowd. When she reaches the escalator, I’m blocked in at the bottom, and all I can see is her hair licking against her back.

“Thea, stop.”

She turns and looks for me, and when she finds me, she smiles, her body relaxing. There is no “hand” at all. Just the courage to be open and joyous in a world that always seems so calculating.

At the top of the escalator, she stands to the side, shrugging her worn canvas backpack a little higher on her shoulder, and waits until I finally get to her. I can’t help but pull her up while she slides one arm around my neck and the other around my back. Her body pressed against mine, she raises her face to me. If Penn Station didn’t serve as Hell’s Vestibule, I would mount her right here.

Grabbing her hand, I race for the street, throwing my body in front of a cab and helping the elderly couple out. “My treat!” I shout as I bundle Thea in. I give the cabbie my address, tell him to take the West Side Highway (“Yes, I know it’s out of the way”), and cram a handful of twenties through the partition. Then I slide the window closed. Someone has scratched HOME into the plexiglass.

Thea straddles my lap, and when I look down, her eyes follow mine to the enormous bulge bent to the side. She chortles against my mouth, and I find myself laughing, something I haven’t done for so long that the memory of it feels like a dream.

“If you don’t move me,” I whisper, “I am going to break.”

She slides her hand down and under, rearranging, but she doesn’t let go, and with every curve and halt of the cab, her hand jerks a little, and this part of me that simply could not get heavier and thicker does.

I run through the lobby with Thea’s backpack held to my front so as not to offend civilized humans for whom sex is something that is best kept offstage.

At the door, I fumble with the key, then open it wide, suddenly anxious. I’ve never had anyone in here, and last night, when I tried to imagine it through her eyes, it was so sterile: the asbestos-white carpeting that I never walk on, the hard, narrow sofa I’ve never sat on, the white resin cast of coral that I’ve never known the purpose of, the glass-front refrigerator that holds nothing but batteries and ice and an untouched bottle of pricey vodka left by the broker.

The two dozen roses I bought from the twenty-four-hour deli—hoping they would add a little life and color—have remained perfectly tight and symmetrical. They smell like paper.

This isn’t home, I want to say. My home, my real home, is rich and complicated and alive. Stretching up the great folds of mountains are forests that are old and baroque with the huge roots of ancient blowdown surrounded by the opportunistic suckers stretching to take their elder’s spot in the sun. Lichen and moss fight over massive rocks, and water carves tortured paths and it’s all bent and crowded and even the boggish smell of rot stinks of new life.

She leans against the wall, untying her boot. “It’s very…clean,” she says, seemingly at a loss for anything else. Just then, she loses her balance, dropping her boot. Little flecks of dried mud and leaf fly across the pale wooden floor. She grits her teeth.

“I’m sorry,” she starts to say. “Do you have a broom…”

No.

I don’t want to clean it up. I don’t want her to be sorry for bringing something real into my life. I envelop her, my back shielding her from all this crappy nothingness, and her body relaxes into mine, lengthening against me. Her hands slip around my neck and my waist, her lips brush my cheek, the sunken wound near my nose, my eye. My mouth.

My tongue breaks in, at first just tasting the sweet bitterness of mint and coffee. My hand struggles with the button at her jeans.

“Let me,” she says. She doesn’t pull her body away from mine but slides her hand down between us. I press closer so that when her fingers twist against her button, that twisting rubs against my crown. When she pulls at her zipper, her hand glides down to the root and rests momentarily against the heavy weights beneath.

Then she lets go, and I hook my thumbs through the belt loops on either side of her jeans and hold them still while Thea shifts her hips, holding me around the waist, so I’m tight against her. By the time she’s finished with her shifting and pulling, I’m hurt and achy. Then she crosses her hands in front of her sweater, and when she pulls it over her head, she looks at me with an expression of pure lust.

Humans apparently categorize lust as a sin, like wrath or sloth or envy or anger or those others that I’m forgetting right now. We understand those; they have consequences for others.

But lust? That overwhelming need to please and be pleased? How is that a sin? How is it anything but pure?

Thea clearly has little experience with ties and snorts in frustration when the knot grows too tight to get the tie off. All the civilized buttons and cuff links and knots that lock up my body.

I grab the tie and pull it over my head, then slide my hands under each placket and tear, sending little shirt buttons scurrying under the radiator in the process. I squeeze two fingers between skin and French cuffs and yank at those, freeing my wrists. My pants follow. Pinked, hand-sewn, bespoke, ripped, destroyed, and beyond repair—and I could not care less, because I am naked with the Goddess of the City of Wolves in my arms, against my skin. I pull her up until her thighs are wrapped around my hips.

“Wait, I’ve got to get a condom.”

“I’ve got dozens.”

“Dozens? I find that both really reassuring and really not,” she says.

“I didn’t say how many dozens. I’ve just always been very careful.” I don’t want to be careful with her. I want to feel her slick grip on my cock and come in vast waves until she is inundated with me. I just don’t know how to explain that STDs and pregnancy are not a worry, will never be a worry, because I’m a werewolf and she’s not.

In a few steps, I lay the Goddess of the City of Wolves on my bed. She refuses to let go. “No, you don’t,” she says, and her legs tighten against me, pulling me lower until my erection is trapped between my belly and her rolling hips.

She sighs happily, with no sign of calculation or coyness or guile. This isn’t a transaction. It’s just…sweet, feral joy.

Her body shivers under me like aspens do in the late fall. With my mouth and teeth, I nip and suckle at her skin, sinking lower and lower until I feel her pulse under me like the warm blood of a fresh kill.

Something is rising in my blood, something old and terrible and wonderful and very, very untamed. I reach for the drawer of my nightstand while I still have the wits to do it.

“You’re panting,” she says, watching me fumble with the damn condom.

“What?”

“Breathing fast. Wheezing, even. Do you need help?”

“Just maybe don’t watch so closely?”

“If that’s what you need,” she says, and she turns away, raising her hips and her perfect ass in the air and ohmygodican’tfeelmybrain.

I lunge. The only thing that stops me from taking the cord of her neck in my teeth is the thick waterfall of black hair. I lay across her back, gasping.

Thea watches me over her shoulder. Watches me pull back from the spot where shoulder and neck join.

She forces her hips tighter against me until I am positioned at her entrance, my body shivering. “Do what you need to, Elijah,” she whispers, her head to the side. “Trust me to take care of myself.”

Silly human doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But then, with a gentle sweep of her hand, she sends her hair tumbling down to one side, leaving exactly the spot I’d been looking at completely exposed.

My wild takes hold, and I strike. She startles, like even our females do sometimes, then stills, the muscle of her shoulder tightening under my teeth. I growl softly against her skin, to reassure her.

Her head cocked slightly to the side, she seems to be considering what she feels. There is no safe word between us. If she tells me to stop, I will stop. However much I don’t want to, I will stop.

Then she relaxes against my teeth, and all I can do is hold on, keeping her in that tight balance between pleasure and pain. She shudders as my fingers explore, making sure she’s ready for me. And then big and heavy and hard and near breaking, I take her.

Shattered, I watch Thea fall asleep, watch her kick off the blankets in this overheated apartment, leaving just a corner of the sheet covering her waist. On her side, her legs drawn up, revealing the seam of her body, which seems so inexcusably strong and terrifyingly vulnerable.

Is that what love is for humans? Is that where it lives? At the juncture of strength and vulnerability? Wolves don’t think that way. We join strength to strength. We have no room for weakness.

But here—I lie down next to Thea, my chest tight against her back, my thighs around hers, my arm over her waist and bent up across her torso—I understand that there is enormous strength in vulnerability.

When Thea wakes up, I am still watching her, my head propped on my crooked elbow. She smiles at me, and I know I have lost all hand.