tiniest touch—”
The glasses meet in the middle and shatter.
“Wes hæl!” shout the laughing adults, toasting with their sturdy earthenware and pewter mugs.
Only the Alpha is not laughing. Her head is bent close to the doctor’s. When her eyes catch mine, she looks tired.
Chapter 11
Evie
He knows. He’s already pushed away the chair, shoving his way shoulder first through laughing Pack distracted by the juveniles.
Tristan stands abruptly. “I’m going to get something to eat, Alpha. I have a feeling it’s going to take a while.”
“Tell Eudemos and Tiberius to be ready as soon as I call.”
Tristan lowers his eyes and heads to the table where the 14th Echelon, Magnus’s echelon, are sitting.
“Is it Magnus?” the Shifter asks, threading through the tables.
I push vegetables and rice onto my fork with coconut-curry-soaked bread.
“Tiberius says you were August’s right-hand man.” I say, taking a bite.
“Is that a question?”
“No. But this is: If you were his right-hand man, why were you not the one to bring the hunters here?”
“I never went on hunts with him. He preferred to use my talents elsewhere.”
“It had nothing to do with Magnus being sick?”
He doesn’t answer and I swallow, trying to remember the last time I had hot food. In skin.
“And when the Great Hall burned down? Was Magnus sick then?”
He takes a seeded rye roll from a bowl of them. “There were enough men going. Besides, August needed someone to stay with him.”
“You’re not answering. Was Magnus sick? Was he often sick during the Iron Moon?”
He tears apart the roll with a puff of steam and caraway and pops it, soft and warm, into his mouth.
“I’m not a werewolf. I don’t pay attention to lunar phases.”
“You may not be a wolf, but Magnus is, and he can’t help but pay attention. The moon has always called to his wild but now the smell of fur, the smell of blood, the sound of the hunt, Evening Song. Everything in Homelands calls to him, and resisting it is tearing him apart.”
“So let me take him out of here. I—”
“That is not what he needs.” I wipe the last bit of curry with a piece of bread. “Taking him away may slow his decline, but it’s not enough. He refuses to change and that is what he needs to stop dying.”
He takes off down the hallway and I disentangle myself from the chair and run after him. I didn’t have a chance to warn him that Magnus looks worse. I push past Constantine. Tristan and I had just changed the bed liner, but it’s bloodstained again.
Because Magnus is not drinking anything, his body has shrunk, his joints are even more distended, his skin hangs from his bones, stiff, dry, and crinkled like parchment. I pour out a glass of water from the sweating earthenware pitcher. Leonora has contributed a straw from her collection of human artifacts.
Magnus screws up his eyes.
“Try, wolf. Try.”
He does manage to open his mouth, not to drink but to grind out one withered sound.
“Con?”
The Shifter pulls himself together and moves toward Magnus. “I’m here,” he says, setting his hand gently on the sick wolf’s hair, but even that is enough to make Magnus whimper.
When the Shifter looks at his palm, it is covered with dark hair.
“You’ve looked better, Mags,” he says. It’s meant to be humorous, but the crack in his voice is not. I roll Tristan’s stool toward him and slide the water closer so the Shifter will remember to try to make Magnus drink.
A shiver runs up Magnus’s back and across his shoulders. “Is there another blanket?” Constantine asks.
“We tried. The weight is too much for his skin.”
Rolling Tristan’s stool closer, Constantine sits with his hands tucked under his arms. “Oh god, Mags. What have I done?”
When Magnus gives Constantine a labored smile, his chapped lips split and bleed.
“I should have talked to you after…well, you know. After what happened. But you didn’t want to and I thought it was probably best to leave it like that. Leave you afraid of changing. I mean, you saw what August was capable of and I’d been with him forever. He actually needed me.”
Magnus manages a weak smile, just enough to show the bloody ridge of his teeth.
“So now I do have to talk to you and I don’t really know how. I don’t have the words for it, but they do. Varya did. She had words for what it felt like to be human and to not be human. But I’ve forgotten them.”
He raises his eyes to mine.
“Anfeald.