my hand. I set it on the counter, brushing a few bits from my arm, then retrieve the wooden brush and dinged black dustpan from under the sink and begin sweeping the black and red and white pieces into the dustpan.
I dump the shards in the trash.
“Always hated that cup,” I say, sliding brush and dustpan back under the sink.
Chapter 14
Constantine
I hate that she had to walk me back to the dormitory like one more thing she has to take care of.
“Someone will pick you up in the morning,” she says, and when she turns away, I almost call after her. I would except I can’t bear to hear another querying “Alpha?” even if it’s in my own voice.
She walks off without hesitating through the dark and the trees, and I wonder how she can possibly see where she’s going.
“Humans think that what is seen is all that is. That what is spoken is all that is said. But wolves know that life happens in the crowded spaces between what is seen and what is spoken.”
I turn on the lights and then turn them off again. Without the lights, the shadow of a moon-framed tree still seeps through and sways back and forth across the floor. I walk across the dark room, trying to feel the way the floor settles, listen to the echoes of wind against the walls, smell the rhythm of slightly musty bedding interrupted by the scent of slightly musty pine needles on the forest floor.
Taste the new toothpaste the Alpha promised.
Ah. Liver.
I rinse my mouth and brush again with water, then look at the dark silhouette of my head in the mirror.
Someone will pick you up in the morning.
That was what Drusilla said to her brother the day she left. She’d stood in the doorway, everything about her stiff and perfect as she held her compact and outlined her mouth in dark red. Her hand shook, and her lower lip sprouted a bloodred barb. She didn’t bother wiping it away.
Behind her, the driver waited with her suitcases. She was leaving but she gave Otho one day to choose. His sister or August.
The next morning, Drusilla’s driver came to fetch him, but Otho stayed with August. It was his only choice. Still, he had seen something in his sister’s face that made him afraid. Over the years, Otho had made himself a master of situational awareness, though he died in the end by his sister’s hand.
People who don’t know think situational awareness means being aware of everything, which is just bullshit. It’s a total focus on things that matter—cover points, ambush positions, escape routes, weapons of opportunity, the stress tolerance of men—and a complete filtering out of things that don’t.
The problem is, Homelands is nothing but the things that don’t matter. Rocks and trees and birds and mud and bushes and weeds and things that slither between the bushes and weeds.
Wolves know that life happens in the crowded spaces between what is seen.
Closing the door behind me, I step out into the forest stark and grim and all the things I cannot see.
* * *
“I was supposed to pick you up from the dormitory.”
“As you can see, I found my way here.”
I don’t tell Ziggy how much time I spent wandering around completely and utterly lost before finding my way back to the cabin or that I woke up to the sound of a bird that sounded like a rusty swing—Whe-heee. Whe-heee. Whe-heee—and spent the next hour finding my way to the Great Hall, a walk that has taken ten minutes when accompanied by the Alpha.
“So,” he says, sitting next to me, dropping a plate piled high with green eggs. “I got to ask you: Do you know Leo Fafard?”
Ziggy turns out to be very talkative for a wolf. He is also desperately curious and desperately clueless about Offlands, which includes every place that is not the Great North’s territory. In Ziggy’s impaired imaginings, Offlands is about the size of Delaware, populated entirely by a quirky subsection of celebrity.
“Should I?”
“He was the star of WolfCop,” he says.
“So you’re saying he’s an actor.”
“I’m saying he was the star of WolfCop,” he repeats with an excess of emphasis.
“I met Idris Elba in the bathroom at Citizen in Toronto.”
“Unh-unh,” he says and continues to push his green eggs onto a fork with a piece of dark bread.
“And Meryl Streep in Croatia.”
He looks thoughtfully into the distance. One eye has a deformed iris and a cloudy pupil and I’m guessing is