but when they showed up last night, Leonora theorized that they had been celebrating the weekend, the two days out of every seven that humans put aside for mischief.
If that is true, she says, then they should return tonight as well.
The lawyers are not optimistic. It’s not our land, they say, and since our land is “unimproved,” nothing that lives here has any legal right to complain.
Not the frogs at Clear Pond, or the beavers or the deer or the coyotes or the big horned owl or the little saw-whet. Not the rabbits loudly warning one another about the presence of wolflings.
“Pups these days.” I lean back against the birch trees. “Did we ever not know how to hunt bunnies?”
In the distance, a door slams. Something large and fast begins moving this way. The pups go silent, hiding until Gran Jean signals the all clear.
There’s nothing to worry about except the clumsiness of their bunny hunting.
The Shifter stands at the tree line to the south. He turns his head like he’s searching for a noise. I wait, silent, my hand protecting the smooth bone beside me.
“Alpha?” he says, jogging barefoot over the long grass. He gestures toward Clear Pond and the windblown roots and lumpy hillocks that are home to a thriving rabbit colony. “Didn’t you hear it?”
“Didn’t I hear what?”
“It sounded like a pup screaming.”
“It wasn’t a pup. The pup was hunting. A rabbit was screaming.”
“A rabbit? Rabbits don’t… Rabbits scream?”
“Hmm. Watch where you’re stepping.”
He freezes, looking down to where my hand lies protectively over the skull that has been stripped of fur and skin by the passage of time and beetles. Bleached bright and white as a mushroom, John’s razored teeth and hollow eyes stand out in sharp relief against the dark ground and the shadow of my fingers. Grass has grown up between his jaws.
The Shifter steps back.
“Is that…”
“John. My mate.”
Constantine hadn’t been here. I know because every Shifter who came that night is dead, killed by wolves or by Tiberius. A single human escaped, though he left half his face in Silver’s mouth.
“Your mate,” he repeats distractedly.
“Yes. He was killed here. Then the coyotes ate him.”
The Shifter begins to slide down against the smooth, speckled bark of an alder, then stops at an awkward halfway point.
“Do you mind?”
I shake my head and he slides the rest of the way down.
“I am,” he says and hesitates, pulling his knees up and away from the damp ground, “sorry.”
I pluck a blade of sweetgrass from between John’s jaws, hoping that I do not disturb his running through the Endemearc, the wolves’ last hunting ground.
“I’ve never understood the word ‘sorry.’ It seems to mean both regret for something you have done and sympathy for something over which you have no control. Regret and pity. To us, it seems either you have power over your actions, in which case ‘sorry’ is a poor excuse, or you have no power, in which case ‘sorry’ is unnecessary.”
“What is this?” he says, twirling a blade of grass between his fingers.
“That is cottongrass. It’s nothing. This”—I hand him the fragrant stems—“is sweetgrass. Wolves like it. Settles the stomach.”
He takes it from me and bites down tentatively.
“Do you have a mate?” I ask, and he barks out a sharp laugh.
“No.”
Another piece of sweetgrass between my teeth, I try to remember my human behaviors classes. I was still a juvenile when it became clear that John and I would be an Alpha pair—and eventually the Alpha pair—and would never need more than the most rudimentary understanding of human courtship rituals.
“Is it because you are not decorative enough?”
When he coughs, his breath is the heady green of summer.
“I’m plenty decorative,” he says as soon as the coughing stops. “It’s handsome, by the way. Pillows are decorative, men are—I am—handsome.” He straightens his spine, rolls his shoulders back, then stretches out one leg, bending his foot so his thigh tenses. His eyes shoot to mine to see if I notice.
Of course I’ve noticed that his shoulders are broader, his thighs stronger, his ass tauter. The hollows under his eyes and between his hip bones have filled out. His skin is gold, his hair is longer, tousled after his run through the woods and peppered with leaves and twigs, making him look like the Grenemann, the Green Man, the dangerous protector of forests.
I rub my hand against the smooth bone. John never felt dangerous. My earliest memories of my time with the Great North are intertwined with memories of him.