“Follow her,” Tiberius commands. The wolf turns with two rapid hops and slides into the woods, dissolving between the trees like a shard of moonlight.
In the forest stark and grim live unspeakable things.
My mother’s voice has faded over the years, but the warning is still there and I hesitate at the boundary. One more step and I leave this borderland where there is at least enough sky to coax out a rim of flowers and head into the realm of unspeakable things. Then Tiberius pushes me and I stumble in.
“Hey, Ti, ease off. Remember, I was the one who called you. I was the one who warned Varya—”
“Stop,” he says. His eyes glow green and creepy in this low light. “How do you know her name?”
“Varya’s?”
“Yes, how do you know her name?”
“She told me.”
“Why would she tell you?” he asks again with increasing urgency.
“Because I told her mine? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.” He flinches, jabbing his gun sharp into my back. “Careful of the kidneys, Tiberius, and for fuck’s sake, put the safety back on.”
He looks into the pitch-black woods with an unreadable expression and shakes his head.
I see nothing but the forest stark and grim where there are unspeakable things.
August’s compound was on the coast. Aside from a few scraggly plants, there was nothing but the wide sky and rock ground flat by the pounding ocean. It felt light and open. Not dark and secretive. Here I can feel the insistent moving and growing and living and dying. Leaves shake overhead. Liquids dribble. Branches crack dry as old bone or bend almost in half before slicing through the air and hitting whoever is behind in the face. Things stalk us through the canopy as fast and quiet as secrets. Whatever moonlight manages to leak through the leaves moves in dappled waves, making the forest floor shift, precarious and uncertain, and for the first time, I truly understand August’s obsessive need to chop it all down.
I’m so focused on keeping Magnus from falling that I miss the fact that we’ve arrived at an opening that’s more than one tree in diameter and I can actually see the starlit sky and ground and a long log cabin sitting atop stone footings.
The pale-gray wolf stands to the side of the stairs leading to the porch. In the dark, Cassius misses a step and trips forward.
“Watch it,” he snaps when he sees Julia watching. As though he thinks she is somehow to blame.
“Sorry,” Julia answers miserably. As though she thinks so too.
Tiberius signals for us to go in and then slides down the length of the peeled-log support, his gun held loose between cocked knees.
Holding the screen door open for Magnus, I take one last look back toward the spiked fringe of trees. That’s when I see her.
I’d seen her once before when I came with Lucian to lay out August’s proposal. Join with us—become like us—or die.
While Lucian made threatening noises at a bush, my eyes wandered to eyes glaring in the dark. They were gold… No, not gold: gold is all glitz and surface. They were like amber, like fire. And when she stepped out from the tree line, fire eyes glowing against black fur, I already knew that we were wasting time. This was the beating heart of the pack, and we had nothing to offer her.
August talked about the Great North with disdain, claiming that the Pack were throwbacks, refusing to acknowledge that there was no longer room for the wild.
But when I looked into those eyes, I knew that she, at least, understood exactly how the world had changed, how tenuous their existence was. And that she would fight for it anyway.
“Close the door,” Cassius says. “You’re letting moths in.”
The latch snicks. I lean against the frame, looking one last time across the dark to the unblinking fire of her eyes.
There are moths gathered around two dim flame-shaped bulbs that do little more than make the shadows darker.
Magnus is already collapsed on one of the bottom beds of the bunks arrayed against the long walls on either side. The mattresses and pillows are bare, but sheets and plaid blankets are draped over the railings at the end. He stares sightless at the exposed ticking of the mattress above him, his feet hanging over the edge. I begin to pick away at his knotted, mud-encrusted laces.
He had none when I first saw him in the visiting room of the juvenile center. I was checking in