“Shh. It’s nothing.” I put the sleeping Nils down on the mattress and lie next to him.
“It’s not nothing,” he snarls. He lifts my shirt and stares at the cut, but he doesn’t recognize it for the joyous thing it is.
“I will fucking kill whoever—”
“Me, Constantine. I did it.”
“You what?”
I swallow another yawn. “It’s…complicated.”
“I’ve spent way too much of my life not questioning anything because I didn’t care enough to wonder why. Now I care. So guess what? You don’t get to fob me off either.”
Nils burps loudly and settles back in, the awkward T-shirt/dish towel diaper Constantine created drooping low.
“I want to understand, Evie.” His hand stretches out like a guardian of pale gold above the gash cut into my skin by ancient tradition.
“Two wolves from the 9th were mated.” My hand flows down his arm like water. “So there was a Bredung. A braiding. It connects the mated wolves to each other, to the land, and to the Pack. The braid is made from the hide of our deer, tanned by the bark of our oaks.” I spread my fingers. “It is drenched with the seed and sex of our mates.” He spreads his. “And it is coated in the blood of our Pack.”
He looks down at our interlaced fingers.
“Your blood?”
“Yes. My blood.”
He looks at the thin slash low on my belly. I think it opened up again when I tackled him. John was Alpha long enough to be covered with the scars of his office. I have only the one. There will be others now that the weather is warm and the blackfly are gone. He lays his free hand across it, like he is trying to mend something that isn’t broken.
“It’s a good sign, Constantine.”
“How is this good? You already give them everything—your time, your strength, your happiness, your self, and now…now you give them your blood?”
“It is what the Pack—”
“I don’t care about the Pack,” he snaps loudly. “I only care about you.”
And there it is, the proof that I can’t ignore. He’s not pack. Sometimes, I almost think I could forget, but then he says something like that and reminds me of how little he understands what we are.
“Then you know nothing.” I stare at his hands, one interlaced in mine, the other on my belly. “To care only about one wolf means you are careless of the rest. Humans… There are so many of them, they can afford to have small, selfish loves. We can’t.”
I let go of him, pushing his hand away, pulling my shirt down. I suppose I’ve always known that this was a diversion. The pain tears through anyway.
I straighten the sheet across my shoulders and pillow my head on my bent arm.
Chapter 32
Constantine
Small.
I hadn’t really thought this through.
In my fantasies of a woman who hadn’t been made small, I somehow still expected that I would be her center of gravity and she would fall into orbit around me. When I look at the blood on my hand, I know that’s not really an option.
I remember the way Eudemos licked away Magnus’s pain when he first changed. When I kneel beside Evie and lift the hem of her shirt, she opens her eyes, tired and wary. The muscles of her torso tighten as I take a deep breath and bend down toward her waist. I am tentative at first—I don’t want to hurt her—cleaning the spilled blood smeared by the T-shirt. She is still tense under my hand, and I try to remember the way Eudemos had done it, with faith and commitment that made it seem like a kind of blessing.
Looking at her skin, I take a deep breath and press my tongue to the gash itself, tasting the coppery blood. I try to read her, stroking her, comforting her, loving her in the way a wolf would until finally her body begins to relax. Stroke by stroke, I feel her both coming apart and knitting together under the gentle pressure of my tongue, this unspeakable intimacy, this benison.
Evie eventually falls asleep with Nils on one side. Even in the middle of the summer, the nights can be cold here and wolves don’t like to be cut off from the outside, so all the windows are open. I pull the blanket from the back of the sofa and shake it out, letting it settle over the two of them.
A small animal scuttles up a tree and a night bird’s wings flap hard in pursuit, pulling fir-scented