Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,27

in the halls. Clara had the window open to let in a breeze and cleanse the room from the day’s gathered odors—chalk and mildewing dictionaries and teenageboy odors.

Clara had looked up and he was there, dressed in dark jeans, a denim jacket with patches of his favorite metal bands sewn on. His long hair, washed and feathered, glistened. “Seth? I didn’t even hear you come in.”

“Can I ask you something?” His hands were in his jacket’s pockets as he came toward her. “Why’d you come here?”

“We needed a job.”

Seth frowned. He was studying her hand, the missing fingers. Most of the students couldn’t stop staring, but Seth only seemed curious. “You told us your mother died in a car accident.”

She nodded. She hadn’t told the full story, just enough to satisfy their curiosity. The unexpected blizzard. The woman with the baby in the backseat. The only bits of the story she knew, really.

“My mom died when I was a baby, too. She only held me once.”

“I’m sorry.” And this was something she had not expected, either: the way the students came to her after class to talk about such things.

“She had lupus. She had been really sick a long time.” He swallowed. “You remind me of her, pictures I’ve seen.”

“I do?” Clara wasn’t sure what to say. She thought of the notes and was relieved on one hand that he might think of her in such a way. Maybe that was the connection between them, both missing mothers, both longing to hear a mother’s voice. Feral, like her.

“I’ve got lupus, too,” he said. “I found out a few years ago.”

She didn’t know what it was, just that it could cause great pain. Hadn’t it killed Flannery O’Connor?

“That creative response you asked for … there’s something I don’t get about these people.”

“Go on,” she said, grateful for the change of subject.

“All the gods die in Ragnarok, right? It’s like the end of everything. So what’s the point?”

“The point? You mean of living?”

“Living even when you know it’s all going to go to shit, no matter what you do.”

She decided to ignore the profanity. Seth’s class was blunt spoken, and early on as a substitute she had developed tin ears. “I guess the point is to make sure your death matters. To die heroically so you can enter Valhalla. To do something of worth.”

Seth’s Adam’s apple danced in his throat. He stepped forward and took something from his jacket pocket, an object wrapped in tissue paper, and placed it on her desk.

“What’s this?”

He glanced toward the hallway and then at her. “Mrs. Warren, you need to be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just watch yourself,” he said.

Clara stood.

Seth was walking away, his gaze to the floor. Clara unwrapped the tissue paper to reveal two hand-painted miniatures, the kind used for Dungeons & Dragons. The first miniature had the legs of a human, but the shoulders turned muscular and hairy and were topped with a leering wolf’s head. A werewolf. The second figure had auburn hair, like Clara, and wore a long sweeping gown, her mouth open as though speaking a song or spell. A priestess. Each figure was exquisitely detailed and painted in bold colors. The priestess clutched a staff in her left hand. Clara felt sure if she studied it under a magnifying glass she would see two fingers missing, cleaved by an X-acto knife. She wrapped the miniatures in the tissue paper and put them away in her drawer. It was only later that she remembered Yggdrasil and the story of the two children, Lif and Lift-hrasir, who survive the end of the world by hiding in a tree. Of Balder coming back from the dead, and the sons of gods who witness the green world made again.

It didn’t matter anymore; he was dead, and Clara had failed him or worse maybe even given him some kind of false valor to do something horrendous. His blood was on her hands. And now there was someone out there who agreed, who had put the drawing under her doorjamb like an accusation. Hadn’t she been teaching children about doom?

The boy’s father had been here and gone. Seth cut the word “wergild” in his desk, and as he had done so, had he known his father would come to her with it? A blood debt. Had he meant that this wouldn’t end with his death, that it might trigger something worse? She remembered him, what was good in him, and she was more confused than