Silver with a mystified blink, forgetting momentarily that as wise as my Deemer is in matters of the law, she failed Introduction to Human Behaviors four times.
Finally, Constantine fought for us, so what makes him dangerous?
The sick Shifter groans again, caging his face in his hands.
“Magnus, shut the fuck up,” Cassius yells.
Before the last sound fades, Constantine’s elbow cracks against Cassius’s throat, fast as a rattler strike, which partly answers that question.
Julia sobs something about going home.
I slip into the sequestering trees silvered by moonlight, knowing they never will.
Chapter 2
Constantine
“I’m sorry, Mr. Leveraux. I didn’t know who they were.”
“August,” he said. “Call me August. You misunderstand me. I could not be more pleased.” He gestured dismissively toward the man with his arm in a sling and the other with the swollen jaw. They had handled me roughly, pushing me into a car. That much I remember; the rest, not so much. “How old did you say you were?”
“Nine. Ten in…” I couldn’t remember how many days it was supposed to be. “Soon. My mother knows. She is making me brownies. Where is she?”
He didn’t answer my question but instead asked one of his own.
“Do you know how we came to this land?”
My mind had been fragmenting, all certainty gone.
“Focus,” he said.
I hadn’t been able to focus on anything. Nothing large anyway. Tiny details were there: The squeak of the oven door. The tear of a paper towel. The running water. My mother’s distant expression. The way she lay down on the floor. My math homework floating from the table, landing on the linoleum beside her. Her thumbs shriveling. Migrating up her wrist, her nail twisting and darkening into a claw. Calling down to the basement where my father had his workshop.
“Something’s happened to Mom.”
My father’s step fast and loud up the stairs. His pump-action rifle in one hand, a scrap of paper in the other. I wobbled helplessly as he shook me, repeating something over and over. “Focus,” my father said. “Call this number and tell whoever answers that you are Constantine, Maxima and Brutus’s son. Someone needs to get you before the humans do.”
I stared at the frayed and discolored piece of paper while my mind circled in helpless fugues. I wasn’t Constantine. I was Connor. The brownies were burning. Her thumbs. Who were Maxima and Brutus? The guns. Police sirens. Before the humans?
“Run,” the man on the other end of the line had said. “Stay hidden. We will find you. We will always find you.” As the handset left his mouth for the cradle, he yelled to someone. “Get August. Maxima and Brutus are dead.”
Click.
True to his word, men did find me and handled me roughly.
“Do you know,” August started again, his limited patience gone, “how we came to this land?”
My unraveling mind landed on my father’s advice that when conversation falters, turn to cars. Cars were always a safe topic.
“Chevrolet?”
“No,” August said, his face closed.
“Where are my mom and dad?”
“We’ll get to what happened to Maxima and Brutus in a minute.”
“Their names are Maxine and Bruce.”
He studied me with those bright, terrifying eyes that sought out dissimulation so often and so well. “Whatever else she was, your mother was not Maxine.”
I would have argued that he could look it up in the minutes of the Rainy River Elementary School PTA, except that there was something about his repeated use of the past tense that had broken my ability to speak.
She was.
She was not.
“Nous sommes Lukani,” he said. “C’est notre devoir de dompter le sauvage qui nous entoure, comme nous l’avons dompté en nous-mèmes.” August looked at me again for signs of comprehension, and finding none, he translated.
“We are Lukani. It is our duty to tame the wild without, as we have always tamed the wild within.”
He stared off into the distance, rubbing his finger along his lower lip. “It makes us strong,” he said. I should be proud, he said. Ever since Romulus and Remus left the woods, the Lukani have been domitores terrae, the subduers of lands. Our happy group—he called us that, “Our happy group” or “Our merry band,” as a way of mocking the fact that we were anything but—arrived from France as défricheurs to tear down the great forests of Canada. Not to build ships or houses, but simply to clear the trees, extirpate the wild.
To make, he’d said, the New World safe for cabbages.
“Now, sadly, there is so little wild left that you will never understand the pure joy of taming it.”