I can see the muscles along his jaw working. “August called him a pet. A child grows up, he said. Leaves. Not a pet.”
There’s a dull silver disk next to the juveniles’ practice SATs. He stares at it, turning it slowly.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“This? It’s a… It’s a compass,” he says, picking the thing up. “It tells directions. So…” He holds it on the flat of his hand. “So, that’s north.”
I look down at his hand. “What’s north?”
“Where the arrow is pointing.”
There is a circle with the letters and an attenuated diamond. Half of the attenuated diamond is painted red. We can smell north. Hear north. Feel north. Taste north. “Why would someone need an arrow to tell them north?”
“In case you need to go north. Or south or any other direction.”
I need to go toward prey, away from hunters. To water, away from fire. To my wolves. I don’t need to go north.
“Hmmph.”
“So why do you have it?” he asks.
“A hiker dropped it last moon.”
He turns it around, examining a dark smudge on the back.
“We didn’t eat him if that’s what you’re thinking. We watched him until the Iron Moon was over and then when we had thumbs and Wi-Fi, we filed for injunctive relief.”
“Alpha?” Ove sticks his head in to remind me about the divestiture meeting but as soon as the door is open, wolves start to crowd in with questions about discipline and firewood and insurance premiums. Some I can answer immediately, others I need to think about, but wolves need decisiveness, so I simply tell them they will have to wait while I take one of the awkwardly cut pieces of scrap paper the Year of First Shoes make as they practice using fingers.
I pull out the pencil from behind my ear.
The Shifter stands, his hand stretched in front of him, staring at me.
Chapter 6
Constantine
Many years ago when I was a boy living on a cul-de-sac, I got a toy compass in a cereal box. This was back in the day when children could be trusted not to eat toy compasses in cereal boxes. There was something wrong with it. The needle didn’t have the magnetic paint that would have made the end point feebly north so my mother threw it away, saying she would not have broken toys cluttering up the house. I retrieved it, though, because it pointed in whatever direction I tilted my hand. It pointed me the way I wanted to go.
This one—this tool of an outdoorsman who is probably even now wondering why six lawyers are harassing him for simple trespass—points toward a woman. Tall and ramrod straight with eyes the color of amber and honey.
I know it doesn’t really, not any more than the arrow points to her desk or to the window or to the mountains that August thought he could breech like Hannibal. Except standing in his way was this woman.
The door opens and a man sticks his head in. “Alpha?” he says and tells her about some meeting but as soon as werewolves see that the door is open, they flood in asking for her to decide, to tend to, to care about, to be responsible for.
She pulls a pencil from behind her ear. A spiral of black hair catches on the metal cuff holding the eraser, and when she yanks it loose, the hair bounces back, framing her eye and her cheekbone. She lifts her eyes to mine, and for one moment, I see the woman beneath and I wonder when was the last time someone tended to her.
“Alpha?”
The woman disappears and the Alpha is back. I return the compass to her desk because it is not going to tell me where I need to go.
Across the hall from the Alpha’s office is a wide doorway that opens onto a kitchen with slate floors, an enormous stone trench sink, an industrial stove, and a refrigerator. Three werewolves sit frozen at a big sanded table before mountains of chopped carrots and onions and celery. Another stops, a huge pot of water in midair.
As soon as I turn away, the cleavers thump against wood, the pot hits the stove with a clang and a splash.
The hall ends in a back door leading to a cleared area filled with vegetable gardens and cold frames and puppies playing with a dead squirrel. One tosses it into the air with a quick flick of his neck while another grabs it and springs away. Others wait, their little legs