That’s one. It’s how we describe being in skin.” I do not chide him for thinking we are ever human. This is not the time for it. “It means alone, singular, the feeling of being cut off from the world. But when we are wild, we are not alone. We are ourselves, but we are also one with the land and the Pack. Then we say we are manigfeald, manifold and complex.”
A wren flies by, a silvery twig in its beak.
“That’s what it feels like, Mags. I was not a monster, whatever August said. I was myself but more. I was the seaweed moving in the rock pond, the salt air, the hearts of birds hiding in beach grass. I was part of something bigger. Maybe that’s why August couldn’t bear it, having us change. It’s so much easier to control something small.”
Slowly and painfully, Magnus pulls a hand up and points to his chest with a rickety finger.
“No, it was not your fault. You were worried and who else could you turn to? But everything that happened…that was all on August.”
Constantine crosses one leg over his knee, rubbing the mutilated skin of his ankle.
Magnus’s eyes wander in their orbit until they finally focus on me. He blinks once, his eyes so dry I can almost hear the lids scraping against his cornea.
“Should I get Tristan?” I don’t say it in my usual clipped Alpha way. It was just a blink after all. He swallows once, though there’s nothing to swallow, and opens his mouth. I wait for him to say something, but he can’t and nods instead.
I head out to find our doctor.
“Tristan!” I call as soon as the door is closed behind me.
“Hew, Affa!” Tristan answers from the kitchen, a dusting of cheese popcorn on his chin.
“It’s time.”
He takes one more handful of cheese popcorn.
“Have you ever considered that if you hunted something bigger than bunnies, you might not be hungry all the time?”
He wipes his hands together, then holds them up. “What do you see?”
“Cheese dust?”
“Under the cheese dust, though, you see a surgeon’s hands. No hoof-crushed proximal phalange, no fang-torn abductor pollicis. And that, my Alpha, is why I am—and will always be—a bunny hunter.”
I rub the bent ring finger of my right hand against the scarred base of my thumb.
“It’s time, lads,” Tristan calls into the library. “Bring that with you. This may take a while.”
He holds the library door wide while Tiberius backs out carefully, carrying one side of a half-played Scrabble board with Eudemos on the other side, a shallow, often-taped box tucked under his arm.
“Hold it while I get a cart,” Eudemos says as soon as we arrive in Medical. A moment later, he returns with a cart that rolls easily across the polished cement, jostling only once as it hits the drain recessed into the middle of the floor.
“So,” says Tristan, tying on a rubber work apron over his clothes. “Where’s the patient?”
“There’s the patient,” says Eudemos, setting the Scrabble board on the stainless-steel dressing trolley. “He’s the one on the bed.”
Tristan sighs and fishes around in a pocket. “May the moon save me from the literalness of wolves. Yes, Eudemos, I was aware. Anyone else want a Tic Tac?”
Only the Shifter holds out his hand to take the two pale-green pills of wintergreen that for every wolf is a shameful signal that one has visited Medical for a flesh wound.
As soon as Tristan has finished scrubbing his hands, he tells Magnus to “hop” down. The Shifter slides his arms under Magnus’s body, and when he lifts, he almost sends Magnus flying, overcompensating for weight that simply isn’t there.
Tristan retrieves a plastic sheet from a drawer and shakes it out. I take the other side.
“Support his head,” Tristan says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. The Shifter says nothing; I’m not sure he could. His mouth is so tightly clamped shut I can hear the grinding of his molars. He lifts Magnus’s shoulders so his head falls against his own broad chest.
Once the plastic sheet is tucked in, the Shifter sets him down. He disentangles the light blanket, settling it once again over Magnus’s laddered ribs, his chest rising fast and shallow, his skin mottled with bruises like a windfall apple.
What have I done? his eyes seem to say as though he knows I’ve asked this same question over and over.
What his voice says is “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right now.” It is the first of