apple into his mouth and wipes at the juice that runs down his chin. He dries his fingers on his thighs.
He kneels down. “Hello, Magnus. My name is Tristan. I’m what passes for a doctor in these parts.”
“What do you mean ‘passes for’?” Constantine surges forward, instantly protective.
“He did his residency at Massachusetts General,” I say, “where he specialized in internal medicine and sarcasm.”
“It’s really more facetiousness than sarcasm, Alpha.”
“That doesn’t matter: it’s a human habit and it confuses the Pack.”
“Well, wolf,” Tristan says, taking a few quick diagnostic sniffs. “What seems to be the problem?”
Magnus looks warily at Constantine.
“Let him see, Magnus. If he hurts you, I will kill him.”
“Ahhh, hyperbole.” Tristan peers into the narrow opening of Magnus’s mouth, then pulls a pen light from his shirt pocket. “That’s another thing we don’t get nearly enough of at Home…lands…” His voice falters and he purses his lips, looking at the crooked teeth stained with blood. At the drop falling from a canine.
“I need him in Medical,” says Tristan, standing once more, all sarcasm and facetiousness gone.
“Eudemos, help him.”
The Shifter starts after them before I manage to raise myself from the floor. I shoot out my hand, grabbing his ankle, and he freezes as I feel the ridged skin under my fingers, then look for the brown and burgundy scars around his ankle that I know will be there.
“I fell,” he says, pulling away from my hand.
“Hunters have set enough snares on Homelands for me to know a ligature mark when I feel one.”
With his toe, he nudges the hem of his jeans down, and at that moment, Magnus groans, the sound carrying both through the open window and from the connecting wall between my office and Medical.
“You have to believe we are trying to help,” I say. “There aren’t enough wolves in the world for me to be careless of even one.”
“Really? How about the ‘wolf’ you ripped open and left to die? Or was that too deliberate to be careless?”
“Arthur,” I say coldly, “is paying the price for your interference in the Pack.” Our former Deemer, the dog who betrayed us to August, would have been found guilty under the law, but the Iron Moon was almost here—hunters were almost here—and we didn’t have time for for-speakers and against-speakers and the casting of stones into the Thing, the way of our law. So Arthur took it upon himself to kill the Deemer, knowing the penalty was death.
I pick up my cup, holding it tight as though I’m trying to warm my hands, even though it is, as always, cold.
“Humans say even a wolf’s kindness is cruel. We say even a wolf’s cruelty is kind. Silver had just been made Deemer. Killing Arthur would have been the easy way out; it would have followed the letter of the law. But…” I take a sip of frigid coffee to disguise the break in my voice before I start again. “But the law required he be punished, so Silver found a way that satisfied the law and allowed him to live.”
When I set down the mug, he looks at the cartoon deer and the words The buck stops here. Maybe he will find it funny. Erika had written me a note explaining the joke—dollar = buck, male deer = buck—but I have never quite understood it. Wolves are not known for their sense of humor.
“How old is he?”
“Magnus? I don’t know. Not exactly. He hasn’t grown much since I found him in the youth center.”
“What is a youth center?”
“A detention facility,” he says. “In western Canada.”
Leonora has a whole pamphlet translating the words humans use to protect themselves from uncomfortable ideas: Passed away. Downsized. Enhanced interrogation. Detention facility. “So he was in a prison for children?”
“He’d been living on the streets. Stealing. They had to put him somewhere.”
The pups have found a spool of garden twine and are chasing it around the grass, unwinding as they go. This close to Home Pond, there is no need for supervision but they are never truly alone. No wolf would allow one of their own to end up in a prison for children, so it can only mean that his pack is dead.
“Has he always been sick?”
“Yes,” Constantine starts, then hesitates. “No, not like this. At first, it was his teeth. It would come for a few days but then subside. Now it’s spread to his stomach and his joints. His skin sometimes. It’s hard for him to eat.”
He looks at something on