on Sergei, a human kid who’d worked as a lookout for August. I’d been told he was talkative, so I wanted to remind him of the very real consequences of saying…well, saying anything. That was when the bone-thin boy came in, haunted and hunched, his laceless shoes flapping loose around his feet.
He sat next to us. A woman—legal aid? Child Protective Services?—started chatting amicably, trying to get answers. The boy said nothing, just wrapped his arms around his waist and stared without seeing.
I’d said what I had to say to Sergei, but I kept him there. He always felt he had to fill the silence with words, though his words weren’t worth the sound it took to form them and I told him so.
“Excuse me, do you have a pen?” the woman asked. I remember her looking through her vinyl briefcase, the plastic cracking over the webbing. “I can’t seem to find mine.” The boy was looking at some piece of paper the woman wanted him to sign. She had set it on a legal pad because the table was made of metal mesh and was impossible to write on.
I gave her a pen. The boy’s right hand was fisted shut around his thumb. When it came time to sign, he didn’t unfurl his fingers, instead jamming the pen into his fist and scrawling awkwardly.
When he returned the white ballpoint to me, it was covered with blood. He grabbed it back, wiping it on his orange pants, smearing it more. He looked at it, then at me, and I felt his despair.
“It’s okay.” I took back the pen, waving it in the air in front of me to indicate that it was meaningless. The guard came and took him away, handling him too roughly.
He was already gone by the time I realized that the smell he had left on the pen was not human.
“Who is that?” I abruptly asked Sergei, who was at the top of the pecking order and knew everyone, but not this boy.
“John Doe,” he’d said. “No home. No family. No name.” Then he sliced his finger across his neck. “A born vic.”
It made me angry. That finger and that word. I knew what it meant to lose my family and my home and my name, but I was no vic.
I told Sergei that I didn’t want this kid to be one either. If Sergei wondered why, he knew better than to ask. He was nothing, a tool guarded by August’s name, but he knew how hierarchies worked. He knew that the guy at the top could be as arbitrary as he wanted. I was close enough to the top and arbitrary enough to make Sergei’s life immeasurably harder and very measurably shorter.
Sergei let the word out that John Doe was my brother. And when he got out, I called him Magnus and kept the lie. No one ever questioned me.
Not even August.
“Blanket, Mags?”
He blinks at me. “You feel them, right?” he whispers, pleading. “Tell me you feel them.”
Pursing my lips, I hush him like I always have so that no one would know that his mind’s not quite right and he sees a world that doesn’t exist.
He turns toward the wall. Then I spread the blanket over him and sit on the floor, boots still on, hands propped loose atop my knees. I don’t trust any of them. Not Cassius, not Tiberius, and certainly not any of the unspeakable things that live in the forest making noises like the clawing of broken fingernails on nylon or the rasping moans of dying lungs.
When I wake up, my leg is lead and my ass is cramped tight, a hazard of falling asleep seated on the hard wooden floor. I pull myself up, checking on Magnus, whose breath is sour but steady. Shaking out my leg, I check on Tiberius. He’s still on the porch, but he isn’t alone. Leaning back, he offers up his neck to the pale-gray wolf above him. She has her fangs at his exposed throat, and in the glow of the full moon, her white teeth scrape against skin the color of midnight. His hand spreads across her shoulders, his eyes are closed and he exhales, relaxing into her jaws.
Her eyes catch mine, and I feel like a pervert watching something unbearably intimate. I look away, catching the burning eyes of someone who knows what she’s fighting for.
A creak starts across the room, then stops, waiting for Cassius’s snores. In fitful starts and stops,