“Shifter,” Tristan says. “You need to hold his head.”
He doesn’t respond to Tristan’s demands that he hold Magnus’s head. Instead he stares frozen at the bone, muscle, and organs as they slither under Magnus’s skin like snakes in a balloon.
“Constantine,” I say. It’s not loud or forceful or commanding like the Alpha voice. It’s quiet and wholly my own, but his head snaps up, instantly intent. “Hold his head.”
He exhales like a swimmer surfacing and takes hold of Magnus’s head. Tristan squeezes a metal clamp to keep his jaws open, then hooks a suction tube over that as well. He feels around with the fingers of one hand, followed by metal pliers in the other. Metal scrapes against bone, followed by a jerk, and something drops onto the metal tray. A bloody tooth, a dulled canine with perverted roots. Within seconds, something strong and sharp begins to push its way through.
Blood slurps through the suction tube.
Tristan yells something over Magnus’s choked howls and tosses scalpels to Tiberius and Eudemos and me. I hadn’t heard, but Tiberius must have. He holds Magnus’s shoulder down with his elbow, then bends his contorted arm and cuts deep into the tip of a mangled fingertip. As he moves on to the next finger, a slick claw pushes its way out from the blood and flesh.
What have I done?
I see something twisting under the skin of Magnus’s toes. Moving as quickly as I can, I slice along the line marked by his scars. At first, the cut is too shallow and the claw of one toe starts to twist and turn under the skin before I slice deeper, setting it free.
What have I done?
With each tooth, more blood streams into his mouth, too much for the suction tube to handle. To keep him from choking, Tristan gives Constantine a long length of rubbery pipe. “Like a straw,” Tristan yells. Constantine holds the pipe between his teeth, sucking out blood whenever Tristan dumps another deformed tooth on the tray.
All of us are slick with sweat and blood by the time Magnus has stopped struggling. The metal tray is littered with little semihuman teeth: half flat and enameled, half bone with monstrous curlicued roots.
“Alpha?” Tara stands at the door, signaling to me.
I roll my shoulders back to unleash the tension of what feels like hours spent hunched and straining, but in the end, all that effort was worth it because there is one more wolf. He is thin and weak and exhausted, but he is another wolf. I put my cheek to his bloodstained fur and whisper in his pointed ear.
“Wilcumeþ, wulf.”
Welcome, wolf.
Chapter 12
Constantine
Tristan says that Magnus must remain in this form for a while. How long, he can’t say, but his body is too weak to go through another change. It will take time spent wild to recover from all those years spent dying.
Nobody much feels like talking. Eudemos and I lift Magnus while Tiberius pulls out the blood-covered sheet and balls it up with Tristan’s discarded apron. He hands it off to two waiting werewolves to take to the laundry while Tristan helps slide a fresh sheet under him. Eudemos and Tiberius scrub the floor until only thin wisps of blood flow into the drain. Tristan washes the equipment.
I take a blue paper towel from a pile of them next to the sink and dampen it. Then I try to wipe away the blood and gore around his mouth and muzzle, but he whimpers and I stop, having gotten nothing but a few brown flecks.
“I’m leaving this for you.” Tristan holds up a big syringe, making sure that I am watching when he puts it next to the pitcher. “He needs water but be careful. He won’t know how to use his tongue.”
He heads for the door, his hand over the light switch. “Off or on?”
“Off.”
It seemed like hours ago that I first came to Medical, but the early summer sun has a few more degrees yet before it sets. The low light makes the room shimmer with the shadow play of leaves. Finally, one pale-blue eye, the color of thick ice, opens. “Sorry, Mags.” I don’t know what I’m sorry for. For his pain. For the lost years. For not having understood.
His tongue flaps loose, feeling for the points of his teeth. He breathes in through his open mouth and his nose wrinkles. Using the syringe, I drip water into his mouth. Most of it dribbles into his fur or onto the pillow,