trigger is or how to use it to change back. And they don’t have the language to be guided through it, so unless he accidentally triggers it again, he’ll be like this until the Iron Moon.”
She touches Nils’s naked tummy and the little belly button folded like an eye.
“What have you gotten yourself into, mattalinga?”
“Mattalinga?”
“Little maggot. It’s what we call them because they’re soft and squirmy and they piss wherever they are.”
Even chuckling sends a shock through my toe, and I cross my foot against my thigh to examine the bloody puncture marks.
“Does it hurt?”
“Excruciating. Who knew that puppy teeth in the joint of the big toe could be so painful?”
“You know it is just a—”
“Flesh wound. I know. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”
She leans back against my shoulder, smiling distractedly as I rock back and forth, my hand on her calf.
“A hiker saw a gray wolf on the edge of Westdæl,” she finally says. “Took a picture. It’s not good, easy enough to dismiss as a coyote. Thea is investigating in her official role.”
She watches my thumb stroking her wrist for a long time.
“We need that land,” she says with a vague wave toward that westernmost peak and the ripped-up range to the north. “The forever wolves won’t share with us, and they shouldn’t have to. They will also den. Next spring or the spring after, they will start to form a pack of their own. If they wander…” Her voice breaks. “We hoped maybe Tiberius would inherit, but August never had a will.”
“Can’t say as I’m surprised.” August’s imagination was profligate when it came to the deaths of others but sterile when it came to his own. Even after he was shot in the neck, he refused to hear any talk of what might happen after his death. “Après moi, le déluge,” he’d said.
“Tiberius is going to contact August’s mate, Drusi—”
“No!”
“What?”
I twist around, grabbing her arms. “Have you called her, Evie? Have you talked to her?”
Nils makes an alarmed sound in her arms. “It’s the weekend again. Elijah says her lawyer’s offices will be closed and we should try tomorrow.”
“Listen to me and promise me, promise me, you won’t try to contact Drusilla.”
“We are wolves; we don’t make promises. We say what we mean. We need that land, Constantine. Tiberius only wants that. He won’t contest anything else.”
“Tiberius doesn’t know anything about Drusilla. Right now, the only Lukani who know Tiberius is alive are here. You have to come up with a different way of getting it. Create a shell company that specializes in shale or paper products or something. That’s how August bought it in the first place. But do not let Drusilla know about Tiberius. And don’t let her know about the Great North.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Don’t fob me off with ‘It’s complicated,’” she says sharply. “I am the Alpha of the world’s last great wolf pack. Everything is complicated.”
I scratch at the old scars on my ankles.
“Constantine?”
“I’m trying to think where to start.”
“At the beginning. I find that’s usually best.”
I don’t go all the way back. Some of it is from before I was born, but I tell her what I learned from Otho about how Lukani settlements used to straddle the boundaries between men and the wild. It allowed us to be mostly human but to occasionally indulge our more bestial natures without human interference. As humans spread, eating up the land, they pushed the wild into smaller and smaller spaces. Our settlements, too, and that was when August saw an opportunity to consolidate the Lukani and his own power. He traveled among the settlements, warning that the time of the wild was over. We needed to make a decision: to stay as we were and die or to give up the thing that made us less than human and take the money and power and security that came from being men.
“Before, we were more like the Great North. Women leading, men leading, but at the time August was amassing power, that wasn’t going to work with humans who were not used to negotiating with women. So, he said, our men would have to lead and make decisions and the women would…not.
“He had an ally. Drusilla. She was the leader of settlements in the western part of the country, but she tied herself to him. Otho said his sister truly loved August. She went everywhere with him, and while he talked to the men, she ‘convinced’—and I use that word loosely—Lukani women that while they would