Chapter 14

“Over there.”

“Where?”

“On the sofa.” I nod toward the fireplace and the despondent four-year-old with the rich caramel skin, a shock of tight black curls, and SpongeBob pj’s. “Leelee,” I whisper. “Except for Iron Moons, she has to be in skin until November.”

She curls up, her knees against her chest, picking at the loose upholstery. I bring her a bowl of fried rice fragrant with cumin and onions and set it on the low table in front of the fire.

“You should really eat something, Leelee.”

“Don wan wice,” she says with that slurred diction our littlest children all have on the rare occasions they are in skin. “I wan squido. I awmos caughded it.”

“It doesn’t matter. You have to obey Pack law. That junkyard is well marked.”

I smooth her hair back from her forehead. “You know something, though? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a perfect midrun turn, and I’ve watched Kayla chase down a healthy adult weasel. You are going to be a great hunter one day. When you fell your first bear, will you give me a place at the kill?”

Leelee perks up a little, justifiably proud. “Lugs o’ hawd?”

“You kidding? Bit of heart and a couple of ribs, and I’m in heaven.”

“Me too. Bud I mosly lig lugs. Or libber.” Her lips smack together. Just the thought of bear liver makes her hungry, and she reaches for the bowl. I pull it away from her eager grasp. She’s too young to have eaten in skin, so I hand it to Ti for a moment while I snap a big napkin open and tie it around her neck, making sure to spread it over her entire chest. As soon as Ti passes the bowl back, she sticks her mouth straight in, snapping up the top bit with her teeth before digging at it with her hands.

I put the spoon in her fist and try to motion how it works. She looks at me skeptically, and then she pulls it to her mouth, using the spoon as a shovel until the rice is gone.

She wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand, licking it in turn.

Pups come up to her and nuzzle her and whine. Some lick at her, but when she doesn’t change, they give up and trundle out. When the little door that we put in the big doors swings shut behind the last pup, Leelee lies back against my thighs and stares forlornly at her hands.

“It’s not so bad, you know,” Ti says, holding her tiny hand in his big one. Though they soaked her thoroughly to get rid of the oil, there are still dirty spaces between her fingers. “There are tons of fun things you can do with your hands.”

“Lig whad?” she asks groggily. I stroke her dark curls as her head falls more heavily into my lap. Her feet squiggle against Ti’s leg.

Ti’s face is blank as he tries to imagine what hands can do that will make up for being a lonely little wolf. Then he looks at me.

Like I would know. I have no idea what children do except watch television.

“Poker,” he finally says. “Poker is fun.”

But Leelee is past hearing. Her breath has slowed and her leg shakes, like pups’ legs do. Ti volunteers to carry her upstairs to the children’s quarters. Since none of the beds are ever slept in, I choose one by a window facing Home Pond and yank the sheet and blanket off with a jerk before settling them loosely over her body.

It doesn’t matter. The moment her little body sinks into the softness of the mattress and she feels the unaccustomed weight of the blankets, she begins to flail.

We creep out as quickly as we can, heading past the pups curled together in their puddle of fur.

“Didn’t work.” Ti nods toward the Great Hall and the little girl staring through the window. “She’s awake.”

“It takes a while,” I say. “Learning how to sleep with walls and blankets and sheets and pajamas. It feels like a cage. But she’ll learn. And then she won’t be able to sleep without the cage.”

The caged wolf man stares long and hard at the caged wolf girl. She presses her hand to the window.

“Ti?”

He doesn’t move. I touch his hand.

“Ti? Do me a favor, will you?” He looks down blankly. “Run with me. Be wild and run with me. Please.” I throw my hoodie over a branch and then my shirt.

He starts to pick up my discarded clothes.

“Leave them.” I grab his arm and try to pull him toward the trees, but he’s too big and too strong and too stubborn.

“I already told you, Silver. No.”

I kick off my boots and leggings and stumble behind a yew, arching my spine, the knobs of my vertebrae extending and my shoulders bending forward and the thin dusting of hair thickening to fur.

There’s a hollow roar in my ears, a swirling blindness in my eyes, the nocking of the bones in my jaw. When it’s all over, Ti is standing on the Boathouse dock, looking distractedly over the streaky moonlight on Home Pond.

I grab his shirtsleeve in my teeth and pull.

“No.”

I grab the back of his sweatshirt and pull again.

“No!”

I smelled the longing of his wild when he watched Leelee in the forest. That was real. This isn’t. These are just more meaningless human words. Tiberius is meant to be a wolf. I know it. He has to know it too.

I grab the ankle of his sweats and pull hard. He starts to topple over, catching himself on the arm of the chair. When he falls to the dock, I drag at his pants.

“Cut it out!”

I chuff in annoyance and shift up, putting my head on his chest, trying to think how I can get him moving. He tilts his head back, staring once more at the moon on the water. So I open my jaws as wide as they will go and gently set them on either side of his neck. It’s what we do, and it means trust me. It means I see you at your most vulnerable and will not hurt you.

But he’s not Pack, and he doesn’t understand, and he shoves me away so hard that I fly off the dock and skid into the honey locust at the water’s edge.

Now he’s done it. My ribs are bruised, and one of those nasty thorns from the locust is sticking out of my hind leg right above the stifle.

“D’ooowww.”

“Sil,” he calls, running down from the dock. “Sil! I’m sorry… I just… I didn’t mean to…”

I try to pull at the thick end with my teeth, but the angle’s all wrong, and damn it hurts. When I look up, Ti is squatting down beside me.

“Shit, Sil. I really am sorry.”

I hobble away, hiding behind a hazelnut thicket, but he keeps following me.

“Let me see, will you? Let me help.” He holds out his hand toward me, and I nip him.

“Okay.” He shakes his hand. “I may have deserved that. But obviously we need to talk. And I can’t do it if you’re like this.”

I can’t change. There’s a thorn the size of a pencil in my leg, and until I get it out, I can’t change. I move further around the hazelnut.

“Are you really going to make me talk to a bush?”

It’s not a bush; it’s a thicket. And since I have every intention of keeping said thicket between us while I pull at the stick and seethe, The answer is yes. Talk to the thicket.

He sits down and doesn’t say anything at first, but Leonora says that the same way nature abhors a vacuum, humans abhor a silence.

“It’s just… Well, I don’t like anything at my throat.” He clears his throat. “Sil?”

What does he think I’m going to say? The thorn finally comes out, and I lick my wounded leg, but bending that way hurts my bruised ribs.

“You once asked what wolf would do this?”

I stop licking and peer at Ti through the little forest of twigs. He is sitting with one arm tight around his knees and the other absently tracing the ragged scarring at his neck.

“It was me,” he says. “I did it.”

I shift forward until I can see him more clearly, then drop my head on my front paws.

Ti stares at Home Pond for a while and then starts talking again. “Shifters say that changing is all about self-control. Either you have it or you don’t. We—well, they—have it. It’s what sets them apart from the Packs, makes them better.

“Better than humans too, by the way, because humans just are. They never have to fight to stay that way.”

When he extends his hand toward the thicket, I stiffen, but he only plucks at a tangle of my fur caught on the branches when he threw me. He brings it to his nose, then rubs it between his fingers, releasing the strands into the cool autumn wind.

“But…I never saw a Shifter struggle like I did. I mean, sometimes one of them would pick a fight for no reason, and that usually meant the itch to change was there, but an extra drink, an extra round with a punching bag, an extra woman, and it was gone. For me, it wasn’t an itch. It was something inside that clawed at my skin. Something that threw itself against my skull until I thought I would explode.”

He holds up his fingers and, with a single breath, blows the last bit of silver fur into the night.

“Sometimes I think I remember shifting when I was very young, though maybe it was a dream. Anyway, in that dream, I changed and felt…” He takes off his Outlast cap and scratches the short hair on his scalp. “I felt almost holy. I don’t know how to explain it. I remember my body dissolving. Every breath I took brought the world into me, and every breath I let out sent me into the world. Everything around me was so clear and so…so present, and I just wanted to run and feel… And feel.”

As he remembers, the scent of his wild seeps from his skin. I smell it, sharp and urgent and real.

“But then it happened again, and this time, I know it wasn’t a dream, because they caught me. You’ve seen me. I was young and didn’t really know how to move on four legs, and the other Shifters hunted me easily and dragged me back home. They thought it was funny, but my father was furious. From then on, before every Iron Moon, he locked me into a prong collar and chained me to the fence. Like a dog.”

Without even really noticing what I am doing, I leave the thicket and sit next to him, so close that when I breathe, my chest brushes against him.

Ti pulls a leaf from my fur. “I did this”—he lays his hand against the ruined skin at his neck—“trying to get that stupid collar off. For the next three years, I spent my Iron Moons chained to a tiny patch of dirt, until I finally understood that there was nothing holy about a necklace of beveled steel pushing into your throat. That there was nothing holy about being surrounded by the stink of your own shit. That there was nothing holy about a waterlogged column of canned offal in a dirt-encrusted food dish. That there is nothing fucking holy about loneliness and humiliation. You cannot begin to understand how much I wanted this thing inside me to die. I hated it. I hate it.”

I catch the glint of his glowing eyes. There is no wild in him now, only anger. His jaw is so tight that I hear the joint grind.

John once described the way humans divided their stories into three types: Man against man. Man against nature. Man against himself.

It’s so alien to us. After all, we are nothing without our Pack, our land, and our other sacred selves. But listening to Ti, I am struck by the unspeakable, lonely againstness of humans.

It took years to chain his wild and will take patience to unchain it. I lie down on my side and start to change, and the world disappears except for the tumult of my body until I am aware of the cold ground against my naked skin. Ti must have gone back into the Boathouse while I was changing, because he stands near me with dry clothes and my boots. As soon as I finish tying the frayed laces with the DIY duct-tape aglets, I turn to him.

“If you won’t run with me,” I say, “then walk.”

“Where?”

“Through the trees, into the mountains. Somewhere. Doesn’t matter. But remember, I’m not like you. In skin, I’m barely better than a human. You will have to be my senses. You”—I lay my hand on his chest—“will have to be my wolf.”

I have no plan, just my own wolf telling me that if Ti feels the wild outside, really feels it, that may open a window for the wild that is dying day by day inside him.

We walk silently. Ti reads the world around us, and I read Ti. He sees the root stick up under the rock. He hears the snake through the leaf litter. He smells the algae that will make the newly exposed hardpan of a drying riverbed slick.

Two wolves running together are synchronous. Partly because we are attuned to each other, but mostly because we are attuned to the world in the same way. We both catch the scent of Pack, the sound of water, the sudden flash of prey, and our bodies move as one toward it.

This is different. My human senses are more likely to mislead me in the dark of the night woods, so I have to let Ti lead me.

He started holding my elbow, steering me like a wheelbarrow, which I really don’t like. I shook him off and slipped my hand lightly in his. With his skin against mine, I can feel the slightest tightening of his muscles, the change in his heart’s rhythms. When he breathes longer, scenting something, I can hear it. I read him so clearly: his pauses, his sparked attention, the caution or sureness of his steps.

We emerge from the woods at a granite promontory that looks over the stillness of our land. The dark stretch of balsam below smells like heaven. When the clouds shift, I see the thin waxing crescent that means I have twelve more days before I can no longer hold this form.

I feel Ti watching me, and I make the mistake of looking into gold-flecked black eyes, more beautiful than night.

I have never been so profoundly aware of someone in my life.