locked my jaw and it’s going to take me a minute before I can find the key.
“He attacked Magnus,” Eudemos says, helping Magnus up, suddenly his great protector. Magnus looks at me, his mouth open, a look of confused betrayal in his eyes, and now I have no choice but to unlock my jaw and explain to him that I’m not trying to deprive him of this new self. I am not jealous of what he has become without me.
“No forever wolf,” I exhale raggedly. “Not like Varya. He was…” Without thinking, I begin to roll my shoulder, not even the one that’s disconnected, but it’s enough and I grunt from the pain.
Evie purses her lips and squats down in front of me. “Tristan? A hand?” She helps me sit up, looking almost apologetic. I want to tell her that it doesn’t suit her at all, looking apologetic. Tristan’s hands find my elbow and wrist. A blindingly painful twist later, I understand the apologetic look. As my shoulder pops back into its socket, my eyes are blurred and my breathing shredded.
My ass hurts, too, and sticks to the floor.
“Is that true, Magnus?” Eudemos looks at him. “Tell me that’s not what you were doing?”
“But…” He looks around at his echelon for an explanation. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
The Alpha raises her eyebrows at the 14th’s Alpha.
“I…I…forgot?” Eudemos says with a sigh and begins to unbutton his shirt.
“Just so there is no misunderstanding,” the Alpha says, looking pointedly at Julia and Magnus, “the Iron Moon takes us as she finds us and makes us wilder. If we are in skin, she makes us wild. If we are wild, she makes us real wolves. Forever wolves.”
“But you don’t know if that would happen to us,” Cassius says. I notice him for the first time, standing silent and largely hidden in the corner behind the staircase. He is still dressed.
“I don’t know. If you’d like to find out, no one will stop you from changing now,” she says, making it clear that Cassius as a real wolf would be less objectionable or perhaps dead and either way a better outcome for the Pack.
Using my good arm, I push myself up from the floor. I start back for the 7th, but Eudemos blocks my way with his broad and frankly inhumanly furry chest. My fingers are tingling and my arm definitely weak. If he comes at me again, I’m going to have one chance to knock him out. I can’t raise my left arm high enough to protect against a return blow.
He doesn’t hit me. He just stands looking at me expectantly, then spreads his arms out at his sides. Evie is watching. So is Silver, sitting on the floor next to Tiberius, pups crawling over her naked skin. “If you’re going to bite him,” Silver says, bending down to look at the sun’s progress, “you need to do it now.”
“Bite him? I don’t want to bite him. Why would I bite him?”
“He attacked you without provocation. By law, you may bite him and he cannot retaliate. Although the law places no strictures as to where, by custom, we avoid the cock and nose.”
Eudemos’s neck and shoulders are surrounded by thick fields of hair. His cheeks too. Whorls of it surround his nipples and belly button. His cock has shrunk into the surrounding overgrowth, perhaps worried about my understanding of the law and even more, my understanding of custom. Just looking at him, I feel bits of sweaty hair lodged between my teeth.
“You said ‘if’ and ‘may’… I’m presuming that means I don’t have to?”
“No, but the Pack will not tolerate grudges or resentments tearing at its fabric. Misblod ageat sculon ðy læs wyrmsan. Bad blood must be spilled lest it fester.”
“I’ll pass,” I say and head back to the 7th, chuckling to myself at the thought of August here. August who not only tolerated bad blood but encouraged it, every trifling grievance or imagined slight, so as to keep all his people sniping and snapping at one another. With exaggerated irony, August called it “our happy home,” though the compound was in reality a pit fight with company cars.
The Alpha bends down, peering through a window at the sun touching the ragged, tree-lined horizon. A gold disk framed by a valance of orange and purple clouds. “It’s almost time,” she says, straightening up. Those few remaining Pack still in clothes peel them off, adding them to the neat piles belonging to the