Then he added with a theatrical sigh and a hand to his chest, “So we have to make do with harnessing the darkness in men’s souls. It’s…a poor second.”
He laughed at that, and though I was young, I understood there was nothing pure or joyful about it.
“Cookies?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Leveraux,” I said, though I didn’t like oatmeal and hated raisins.
“Drusilla. Call me Drusilla.” She reminded me a little of my mother. Tight and neat, her head a mass of symmetrical gold coils. “Leveraux is for humans.”
“Thank you, Drusilla,” I said, gagging on the name and the raisins.
“So this is the one,” she said, touching my shoulder and pinching my arm, not in the way of someone giving comfort to a lost boy, but like I was horseflesh or a prize fighter.
“Lovely. I think we can make something of him,” she said to August before turning to go.
August watched her, all ruffled apron and tight skirt and stockinged menace.
“Mr. Lever—August? My parents?”
“Oh yes, of course. Well…” He clapped his hands together, brushing away crumbs of oatmeal. “Your father shot your bitch mother and then drove them both off a bridge where they conveniently immolated. So.” He held the plate toward me. “More?”
With a clap and a cookie, my childhood, my family, and my humanity were gone, and my career of making the world safe for cabbages began.
* * *
Magnus has never been this bad. He’s always been unwell. It started with toothaches that would come and go, but now they come more often and go less frequently.
Because we are not human, I couldn’t take him to a doctor. I’d tried, dragging Magnus on a lengthy car ride to visit a dentist in Ottawa. Dr. Spassky’d been skimming from August and would be dead in the morning, so what was the harm in having him take a look at Magnus’s teeth in the afternoon? Except that shit Lucian killed him before I even got Magnus in the chair, so that was the end of that.
Now the pain is spreading to his joints, his stomach, even his skin. Now he clings to the side of the car, whimpering with every thump.
“Where are we going?” Cassius asks, his voice still rough from my elbow to his trachea.
“When the Iron Moon is done,” Tiberius says, “the Alpha will decide what to do with you.”
After passing through a huge slatted gate, we arrive at what looks like the parking lot on the last evening of the county fair. The ground is churned into mud, and cars are crammed in haphazardly as though deserted by fairgoers afraid they are going to miss the fireworks.
“She can’t walk on this,” Cassius says as soon as he gets out. “It’s going to ruin her shoes.”
Tiberius’s arm darts forward, jamming the muzzle of his gun into the soft V of Cassius’s lower jaw.
I move Magnus behind me. Bullets in skulls make for unpredictable trajectories.
“Look up,” Tiberius commands. “What do you see?”
“Trrs?” Cassius hazards, unable to move his jaw.
“The moon. And not just any moon.” His mouth is close to Cassius’s ear. “That,” he growls, “is the Iron Moon. For three days out of thirty, when the moon is pregnant and full and her law is Iron, the Pack must be wild. I should be wild, but I’m not because I have to fucking babysit you. So whatever it is, figure it out yourself and do not make me speak to you again.”
His head snaps up, his nose twitching, his eyes abstracted, distant. He swivels toward the trees and a pale shadow in the woods that coalesces into a light-gray wolf. It moves closer with a quick lurching pace, one hind leg curled up against its torso.
Tiberius must have smiled when he was an infant, though I don’t remember. Certainly he hasn’t for twenty-five years or more. Not since he lost his baby teeth and his father watched in horror as the needle-sharp canines peeked out of his gums and kept growing longer and longer. August made sure his son didn’t smile again after that.
Now, though, he smiles, broad and bright for this gray runt. This was clearly the wolf August meant to take when he arranged to have his grandchildren kidnapped. Instead of this small, light-furred wolf, the dim-witted human Lucian recruited had drugged and abducted a monster and brought her to our compound.
When Varya woke up, she became a tall woman with black hair, eyes the color of granite, the grace of a raven, and a look of death about