It’s not an easy place for humans, but it isn’t an easy place for wolves either. The ground is uneven and tricky to negotiate. It’s also hard to distinguish scents because everything is masked, camouflaged by the thick smell of decay and sphagnum. Worst of all, there is too little cover. There are a few bushes without enough leaves and no trees at all except for a couple bleached and skeletal remains.
“Did you hear the cars?”
He must have heard about cars somewhere and squirreled the information away. I’m not sure he can hear in that form, but I certainly can in this and know we are too close to the world of men. I try to keep low, but it doesn’t help. Cassius sees me, and as soon as he does, he moves faster. Reaching into his pocket with his free hand, he pulls out my phone and pushes the power button. I find myself praying to the moon for a dead battery, but no, because it has a max-power 18,000mAh battery, it has fifty days of standby talk time even without turning it off, and because I’d wanted to prove to Evie that I would never do anything to hurt the Great North, I’d unlocked it.
Cassius holds my phone with his free hand and swipes at the screen with his thumb. Since he knows I’m here, I try to make up time, pushing off with my back legs, bounding over and over to try to clear the deep mud.
A truck roars past on a distant, invisible road. It’s so catastrophically loud to me, but Cassius still doesn’t hear. Distracted by the phone, he moves more slowly. I can almost feel him searching through my contacts.
Mud stings the thousands of tiny flesh wounds I’ve been accumulating during these weeks when I trained so hard so that I had a chance at a place in the Great North. That’s gone now. No point thinking about that now. I just have to keep slogging forward while Cassius takes floundering steps through the loin-high bog, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other tracing wide balancing loops through the air.
He alternates between panting and yelling. I can hear the panic, but I’m having trouble making out the words.
I bound forward again, but this time, I land in a deep sinkhole of mucky water up to my shoulders.
And Cassius…Cassius who could have kept on, Cassius who is within earshot of the road, Cassius who could have found help from humans, turns around because he has no real purpose. He is still that same golem carved from the clay of bad blood and petty resentments, and now he sees a chance to act them out on my helpless body.
My nose just clears the surface, blinking at Cassius silhouetted in the bright sunlight, that oar held high. He slaps the surface over and over. It hits me, too, but the bog absorbs enough of the force to protect my bones. I keep my head pressed to the side, trying to shake away the thickness enveloping my head and body and threatening to drag me down.
With every blow, he yells his hatred of wolves, of Julia, of trees, of the Alpha, of Arthur, of Lorcan, of Elijah, of Constantine…and for the first time, I realize he has no idea who is foundering in the mud in front of him. To him, I am just another gray wolf in a pack that is full of them.
As soon as the time for fighting begins, Otho said, the time for thinking is long over. So when my back leg finds a stone sticking out from the side, I grab the ledge with my front paws and push off with my hind paws. Scrabbling awkwardly up, I don’t bother to catch my breath but instead lunge at his leg and sink my teeth in, feeling the grinding of bone against fangs. It’s a better bite than I had for the feral pig. Cassius tries to shake me, then starts to hit at me with his paddle, but I hang on like a burr on fur in this sinkhole in a roadside bog, not because anyone told me to, but because I know I have to.
Even when he raised the paddle high. I feel the air eddy as it starts down, then it hits my shoulder and my front legs give out, but I don’t let go.