.22 LR with a suppressor is the best choice for a silent kill at intermediate distances—that this is Eudemos. His eyes on Magnus, he moves, crouched close to the ground, his shoulders rolling. I watch him carefully as he sniffs at Magnus’s feet, his paws, and then he starts to lick. Magnus kicks at him with short jerky blows, but Eudemos growls and keeps licking. I can feel Magnus stiffen, until with each stroke at his tortured paws, the tension eases. His eyes close and his head sways until he collapses back against me. Eudemos moves on to the next paw and the next and the next, and each time, the tension and resistance at the beginning is shorter and the relief more pronounced.
After, Eudemos moves closer, holding his muzzle next to Magnus’s. He does nothing, but I can feel the tension until Magnus lowers his eyes and his head, and with his tongue, Eudemos cleans away the blood that I with my blue paper towel could not.
Benison. A blessing, a benediction. 3, 1, 1…9 with a double-word score…18.
When he is done, Eudemos pushes his head under Magnus’s chin resting on my thigh, thumping him once, twice, three times until Magnus starts to hobble up, awkward and stumbling. He turns to look at me but underestimates the length of his muzzle and bops me in the eye.
The forest twinkles with the green lights of wolves’ eyes gathering closer as Magnus struggles toward them. As he swings his head back toward me, his eyes are a little closer than the rest but in all other ways the same. Glowing green in the dark.
Trusting neither the steadiness of my voice or my smile, I lift my hand. Then all the green lights turn and the wolves close around him.
I stare at the matted boughs for a long time.
Chapter 13
Evie
I watch Constantine, sitting against the beech tree, his knees bent, one hand raised as though waiting for the wolf to return. He never will, or rather he will, but he won’t be anything like the Magnus he knew.
“Have you had dinner?”
“No,” he says, still looking in the direction where Magnus and Eudemos and the 14th disappeared. “Not really.” He gets up and brushes off his pants, trying to seem casual.
“Neither have I. Come.”
He hadn’t gone far from the Great Hall, just far enough to carry his wolf into the wild. It’s pitch-black now and he relies too much on his eyes. I can tell by the way his hesitant pace picks up as soon as he catches a glimpse of the soft glow spilling from the kitchen window.
The dishes have been washed and put away, and the counters are cleaned except for big bowls of bread dutifully rising under towels made from flour sacks.
“You okay with cereal?” I ask, setting my coffee cup down on the table. It’s a big one with a blood-spattered moon, howling-wolf silhouette, and the words Lone Wolf in clawed bloodred letters.
“Anything.”
I reach for a yellow box on a high shelf. My shirt rides up, I know because I feel the summer cool through the window rolling across the groove of my spine and the softness of my belly, and when I turn back, Constantine looks stricken or caught out or something. He drops his eyes to his hands splayed out on the table.
“Bowls are in the cabinet nearest the door. Spoons are in the drawers to the left of the sink.” He opens the door to the cabinet and peers in for far longer than is needed to get two bowls from the random hundreds of them we have.
I get out the milk and close the refrigerator door with a flick of my hip. Constantine busies himself gathering the spoons, then putting them on the table along with the two mismatched bowls.
As I open the box, he switches the bowls, taking away the one that is a scratched remnant of a huge cache of beige industrial porcelain and pushing toward me another one with gold-green interior like the striations of an iris.
I wait for an explanation, but he doesn’t give one.
“Weetabix are for wolves,” I say, surprising myself.
“What?”
“Something a friend used to say.” John. John was the friend who used to say it, but I still find it hard to say his name. “It always made him laugh. I have no idea why.”
“It’s kind of funny,” he says.
“Is it? Wolves find humor difficult to understand.”
“I don’t want to mislead you. It’s not really funny, but it is odd.”
I