“I guess I assumed it was because of the Great Hall?”
“It was Holm Pond. With an L. A holm is a little island. This is the little island. We still call it the Holm, even though the name of the pond was changed a long time ago. That is not our home.” She points with her chin in the direction of the Great Hall, now almost entirely dark except for the moth-spangled light leaking from one window. “That is just a stage set where we learn to play our parts and say our lines.”
She lifts her eyes to the sheltering forest and the distant mountains beyond. “Our home is there.”
I look out toward the woods that when I first came here seemed monolithic, undifferentiated. Menacing. Viewing it now under the star-strewn obsidian sky, I know better. I’ve seen the countless tiny accommodations life makes with life under its graceful living arches, stained with moonlight and green leaf-light and echoing with a thousand prayerful sounds. Now it seems like the sanctuary of a church whose tenets and rituals I am only just beginning to understand.
“Before, when I thought I was human, I lived on a cul-de-sac. There was a mountain that we could see from the rear window of our little house. We always kept the window covered because whenever my mother looked out to it, something snapped inside her. She would stand there, frozen, until my father led her away. Then late at night, she would tell me stories about someone who went into the forest and got lost. Not just lost their way, but lost something else. Their souls, I guess. I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to explain herself or warn me.”
I scrape my hair back from my forehead.
“They always started out the same way: ‘In the forest stark and grim live unspeakable things.’”
She bends her head to the side, no longer looking across to these mountains and these forests.
“Was your mother a wolf?”
“She was a housewife.”
The Alpha rubs her thumb over the arch of her eyebrow. A tiny drop of water curves around her cheekbone.
“I ask because we have stories about the Eisenwald—the Ironwood—where Pack come from, and those stories always start the same way: ‘On ðære wald stearc and grim, alifde ðæt ðæt unasecgende sceolon.’ But ‘stearc and grim’ doesn’t mean ‘stark and grim.’ It means ‘strong and fierce.’ Protective.” She looks back to the distant trees. “And it’s not ‘live unspeakable things.’ It’s…” She hesitates, her mouth open, her jaw moving slightly while she looks for the exact translation. “‘Are lives that must be unspoken,’” she finally says. “That must always be secret.”
She rocks to the side, finding a stone under her thigh.
“It meant us. Wolves. Our lives are the secrets protected in the forest strong and fierce.”
She tosses the rock far into the water. It jostles the moon’s path along the surface.
“How can you be mated to a house?” she asks after the rings have faded back into the lake.
“Mated to…? You mean housewife?” She nods. “She wasn’t married to the house. It only meant…” I stumble trying to come up with something that will explain Maxine Brody, recording secretary for the bake sale committee of the Rainy River Elementary PTA in terms that the Alpha of the Great North Pack will understand. “It only meant that the house was her territory.” She turns her head toward me again, her cheek resting on her arms crossed above her knees, silent, one eyebrow raised. “That’s a very small territory.”
I manage a half smile.
“Everyone I talked to after she…” I was going to say “passed away” but I refuse to insult the Alpha with something so hackneyed and I refuse to pretend that Maxima, who was shot and immolated, went gently.
“After she died, everyone said that she’d been a very strong wolf. Her name was Maxima.” I don’t know why I tell her, but it seems important. “She wanted to hide us, my father and me, from August. She did such a good job of hiding everything that I assumed we were human until the day she burned the brownies and turned into a wolf.”
I have resin on the pads of my fingers. “There’s nothing like a rumor of wolves to find out how many of your neighbors have guns.”
Every year, my mother bought Thin Mints from Mr. Gallantin’s daughter, though she didn’t like our neighbor. She never said so, but I could tell by the hard look in