“Let it go, Drusilla,” I say, hooking the thumb of my free hand through my belt loop to reduce the pressure. “They’re all dead. You got what you wanted. You—”
“Don’t,” she snaps. “They are not all dead.” A door creaks on her end. “And don’t you dare presume to know what I wa— I said stay out,” Drusilla yells away from the speaker.
There is a sharp crack at the other end of the line, and when Drusilla speaks again, her voice is calmer as it always is when she’s hurt someone. “So tell me where the mutts are, Constantine, and let me let you live.”
I hear a rapid-fire clicking and picture her, tapping at the mirror glaze surface of her desk, waiting impatiently for my answer, but I have nothing left to say to her. She knew who I was, but she knows nothing of the vast, uncharted land between who I was and who I am now.
The Titanix Thunderhead pops and crumples in my fist. A few pieces dribble from my hand as I remove the battery and fold the SIM card. I set them on the boulder.
“She doesn’t know,” I tell Evie as I pull off my shirt.
When the last of my clothes are folded in a neat pile next to the broken black case, I lie down, surrounded by the dry whine of the dog-day cicadas and the buzzing of bees at the nearby milkweed. A phoebe trills, then sings fee-fee-fee high among the shifting leaves of the lacework canopy. The black wolf lays her jaw on my shoulder as I give in to my wild. She will watch over me until I can join her.
Another of the lives that must be lived unspoken in the forest strong and fierce.
Terms used in the Legend of All Wolves
Æcewulf: Forever wolf. Real wolf. The Iron Moon moves Pack along the spectrum of their wildness. Pack who are already wild at the beginning of the Iron Moon are pushed further along and become æcewulfs. There is no changing back.
Banwulf: Bone Wolf. This is what the packs call the wolf tasked with announcing the end of days. The wolf humans call Garm. “Now Garm howls loud before his cave; the fetters will burst, and the wolf run free.” —Völuspá
bedfellow: A kind of mate-in-training. Since Pack couplings are based on strength, bedfellows must be prepared to fight challengers for rights to their bedfellow’s body: cunnan-riht.
Bredung: The ceremony by which two Pack are mated. It comes from the Old Tongue word for braiding and symbolizes the commitment of an individual to mate and to land and to Pack. The commitment is iron-clad.
Clifrung: Clawing. The harshest punishment short of death by Slitung in Pack law. A wolf who is clawed becomes wearg, an outlaw.
cunnan-riht: Mounting rights.
Dæling: The ceremony that determines both the initial hierarchy and pairings of an echelon. Since challenges are a fact of Pack life, this will change.
Eardwrecca: Banished. Packs are intensely social and exiles rarely survive.
echelon: An age group, typically of Pack born within five or six years of one another. Each echelon has its own hierarchy. Its Alpha is responsible to the Alpha of the whole pack.
Gemyndstow: The memory place. A circle of stones with the names of dead wolves and the dates of their last hunts.
Gran: An elder. The word does not imply blood relationship, as family ties are largely inconsequential in the face of the stronger ties of Pack.
Iron Moon: The day of the full moon and the two days surrounding it. During these three days, the Pack is wild and must be in wolf form.
lying-in: Pack’s mutable chromosomes mean that pregnancy is rare. When it does happen, the last month is fraught as pups change into babies and back again. The mother must change with them before her body rejects them. It is exhausting.
nidling: A lone wolf at the bottom of an echelon’s hierarchy. Because lone wolves are considered disruptive, the nidling is forced into a kind of indentured servitude to his or her Alpha pair. They rarely last long.
Offland: Anywhere that is not Homelands, the Great North’s territory in the Adirondacks. Offlanders return to Homelands only for the Iron Moon and the occasional holiday.
Pack: What humans would call werewolves. Pack can turn into wolves at any time and usually prefer to be in wolf form, but during the Iron Moon, they must be wild. These three days are both their greatest weakness and, because it binds them together, their greatest strength.