at necks and arms and backs as though if they scratched hard enough, they would tear through that imprisoning skin.
The evening comes like one of those dreams where you’re sitting in class or a meeting, but then someone calls on you and you stand up only to discover that you’re naked from the waist down. The only difference is I am naked from the waist down and from the waist up, and everyone else is naked too. Flagrantly, unashamedly naked.
There is way too much touching going on.
Where is she?
“Connie? Were you even paying attention?”
“Fine, fine,” I say, distractedly folding my clothes.
Ziggy chuffs a dry raspberry of exasperation. “So it’s fine, fine, if Tiberius shoots you?”
“What?” My T-shirt and boxer briefs go on top.
“I knew you weren’t paying attention. If you don’t change when we do, Tiberius. Will. Shoot. You. Won’t be the first time we’ve had to sand bloodstains out of the floor.”
A pup wobbles across the back of the sofa, pausing for a moment before launching herself onto a pile of adults.
“Ooof,” says the pile.
“Why aren’t the pups changing?”
“They don’t have to,” Ziggy says with a shrug. “The Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. The pups are already as wild as they can be, so she leaves them alone.”
I put my folded shirt on top of the pile of denim, sweats, sleeveless flannel, as well as the occasional Offlander linen shirts and summer-weight wools that belong to the 7th.
I smooth the stack, feeling the absence at its heart.
Where is she?
Then a subtle tension runs through the Pack. It’s not that they look to the door, though some do. It’s just they know she’s coming. I do too. I no longer have to see her to know as surely as if her head was leaning against my neck, as if her hand was on my heart, as if I was gathering her to me in the cold of an Adirondack summer night.
There are a few words exchanged with returning Offlanders, but not many. The 7th’s two Offlanders have been pacing anxiously back and forth for an hour, their pent-up wild scraping at the walls of their skin.
“Wes þu hal, Erika,” Ziggy says to one of them, a woman with red-brown hair standing at the window, staring at the sun. She whips her head around, teeth bared, before turning back to press her hands to the glass, her feet jittering on the floor.
All around us, men and women pace nervously, shaking out their legs and arms, bending low so they can check the sun’s progress through the window. It’s not setting quickly enough for them, but to me it seems to plummet from the sky.
The 14th Echelon crowds into one of the few remaining spots.
And for the first time since that horrible moment in Medical, I see Magnus in skin. I know it’s him, even though he looks nothing like he did. Before, he’d been a scrawny teenager among giants. A marionette with flopping distended joints and wooden gestures. It’s as though his body had stopped growing at the age of his last change, and now in the past weeks, it has raced ahead, making up for lost time. He has a fucking beard. Chest hair.
If I ever wanted proof that he doesn’t need me, here it is.
He looks around the room, and when he catches sight of me, he smiles, his teeth bright with only one slightly snaggled canine. He curls his arm around his front, his fingers reaching for that spot at his back, and begins to roll his shoulder blade.
If the Iron Moon finds us wild…
I hit Magnus fast and bring him down hard, pressing his back flat to the floor, my hand cradling the back of his head. Eudemos, though, who has bones made of lead, is not careful and hits me like he wants to hurt me. The scaffolding of my body cracks and groans. My left arm trapped against the floor pops loose from its place at my shoulder and I scream.
“Stop!” Evie yells, jumping for Eudemos before she remembers who she is and where.
“Stop,” the Alpha commands.
Someone’s got their teeth in my upper thigh. I can’t see who but if it was painful going in, it’s even more painful coming out. Eudemos lifts his body from mine, and when my lungs can inflate again, the agony in my shoulder joins up with the torment in my fingertips.
“What’s going on here?” the Alpha demands, looking at me, but pain has