like him? When she said I should grow out my beard, was it because it would keep my face warm during the winter or because it would make me look more like John?
“Are you fucking me because I look like John?” I close the door behind me.
It’s taken me the better part of the day to find her in her office alone. She is looking between something on her laptop and a spreadsheet on her desk. She makes a mark with her pencil and looks up at me with genuine confusion.
“What?”
“Are you fucking me because I look like your dead mate?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Elijah says I look like him. Like John. I want to know if that is why you’re fucking me.”
She closes her laptop and turns around, looking me up and down.
I spread out my arms.
What do you see, Evie?
“I have no idea if you look like John,” she says with a shrug.
“How can you not know?”
“Because that’s not the way we think.” She breathes deeply, her nose flared, her head turned, listening at the door. “I have to sort something out,” she whispers hurriedly. “But meet me in my cabin later and I’ll try to explain.”
Now even I can hear the creaking of the floorboards.
“When?”
“When the moon”—she holds up one hand like a mitten—“is in the Endeberg Notch.”
She taps her finger webbing between her thumb and forefinger, and as she does, Poul opens the door. Alpha once again, she dismisses me with a nod.
I do not try to accommodate his girth in the doorframe, punching into him with my shoulder.
* * *
“Close it,” she says.
The screen door is already closed, so I push the heavy wooden door closed as well. I’ve come to realize that closing both doors is what she does to signal wolves to give her a tiny modicum of privacy.
“I don’t know what Elijah is talking about,” she says, opening a narrow closet under the stairs to the sleeping loft, “but he has spent most of his life Offland, and sometimes he thinks more like a human than he does like a wolf.” She digs around inside the dark, finally pulling out what looks like a waxed suit bag, the kind of thing that usually holds a tux waiting for those twenty pounds to disappear and wide lapels to return.
I hope it’s not a wedding dress.
Evie opens the zipper and reaches in, gently extracting not formal wear but a beat-up old flannel shirt with green and gray and black plaid.
“You want to know what John looked like; I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you whether his features were symmetrical or the angle of his jaw was square or whether his hair curled.” She moves her hands in the air. “I think maybe it did. I know nothing about his eyebrows or the shape of his lips.”
Her fingers run along the aged cotton and she brings it to her nose, taking a deep breath, before holding the shirt out to me.
“I am not putting that on, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t want you to put it on. I’m trying to help you understand what he was like. I don’t know if you two look alike, but a wolf knows that you are not at all the same.”
After staring at it for a few moments, I take it loosely in one hand. Evie pulls her fingers to her nose, indicating that I should sniff her dead husband’s sweaty shirt. I am, understandably I think, reluctant, but she pushes it closer, insistent. Go ahead. I exhale, hold it to my nose, and breathe in deeply. Then I shrug and shake my head. It’s exactly what I’d expect a man’s sweaty shirt would—
Wait.
A second breath and a third and he’s there. Not the shape of his nose or the color of his eyes or the curl of his hair. But in my mind, he is there, cool and stony and unchanging.
I close my eyes and breathe in again.
Protective and remote.
A mountain dressed in Beyond Salvation Army flannel.
“Do you see?”
I know she doesn’t mean see, in that narrow human sense of photons hitting my eyes. This is just one of those ways in which words fail us. I don’t see him, but I know him. I know what he was like. I feel his strength and I feel his remove.
“Yes.”
“John’s brother was Alpha. His father was Alpha. He was born into a pack—the only pack—that had known security for generations. The only threat to