through the empty space. His head whips around and he lets go, the jolt as bright in his eyes as the pink hand mark is on his cheek.
She tries to clamber up the Alpha’s rock, a futile assault on a stone that is too high for her.
“You killed him,” she screams, falling back, blood and broken nails indistinguishable at the tips of her fingers. “The only decent person in this hellhole, and you killed him!”
The Alpha cocks her head to the side as though seeing her for the first time. Then she jumps down lightly, landing on the grass near the man’s head. “He’s not dead,” she says, toeing him with her foot.
“Breathe, Arthur.”
And he does. As his chest expands, something pulses and glistens through the rips in his skin. The muscles at his jaw are working overtime, and he swallows convulsively. His left hand raking through the grass, retracing the same area as though he is looking for something.
Julia falls to her knees and pats the ground like she understands. Like she knows what he needs. Finally, she finds that little green pinecone and puts it back in the palm that is marked with the sharp imprint of it. Arthur balls his hand into a tight fist. Perhaps the small pain he can control helps him bear the much larger pain he can’t.
A man behind me offers someone a ride as far as Boston, saying something about detours and the HOV lanes on I-93. Turning, I realize that most of the werewolves have already disappeared back into the forest, taking with them their observations about traffic and bosses and missed breakfast, all of which would sound banal in an office building around a box of doughnuts but are disconcertingly cold-blooded in a swampy clearing where a man lies eviscerated.
“He needs help,” Julia whispers to the disappearing Pack. “Why won’t they help you?”
Arthur shakes his head, then touches her hand, pressing the pinecone into her palm as though it were something precious rather than another seed for another tree in a place that already has too many of them. She wraps her fingers tight around its thorny shape as though she thinks it’s precious too.
The werewolf turns his head away with a strained smile, looking back toward the bald peak of a mountain far to the west. Julia stares at him, helpless, before taking off the maroon blanket. She holds it in midair, trying to decide where to put it so that it will not touch his shredded skin. Finally, she shakes it out and wraps it around his hips and legs.
Chapter 5
Evie
“Beta,” I say to Tara, who follows somewhere in the silent dark. “Send Lorcan, Eudemos, and…and Elijah to my office.”
At the Great Hall, pups play in the corner where Tiberius lies changing behind one of the Adirondack chairs. Usually Tiberius would have found an isolated spot, but I have smelled his temper and know how hard this Iron Moon spent in skin has been for him. I avert my eyes, a kindness we give each other during the change when we are neither in skin nor wild, when our faces contort and drool, when our hips narrow and shoulders thicken and fur sprouts out in strange places.
John runs to me, his forepaws on my calves. I pick him up and mark him. Like all pups, he takes the belonging he needs before struggling away, back to clamber over his sire’s writhing body.
John.
Wolves don’t have time for regret, but sometimes anger bubbles up and I feel myself growing angry at Ronan, the wolf who brought the Pack to August Leveraux’s attention. Angry at John for letting Tiberius come. Angry at Tiberius for staying. Angry at myself for being weak after my lying-in. Unable to move quickly enough to get away when August’s men came. Angry with John, my mate, our Alpha, who distracted them and got himself killed, leaving me to deal with everything that came after.
The screen door slaps closed behind me. There were two things John dreamed of fixing. One was the junkyard, that five acres of land that sits like a carbuncle in the middle of our territory. The owner had refused every offer of payment out of spite, and then out of spite, he sold it to August, who promised we would never have it.
The other thing John wanted to fix was the Great Hall itself. “It’s not so much a Great Hall,” John had said, “as a Fair-to-Middling Hall that will never change because