Wolfsong (21 page)

“No,” he said again. “You’re wonderful just as you are.”

I wondered if this is what it felt like to have a father who loved you enough to stay despite all your faults.

ELIZABETH SAID,
“There is no one else I would have picked for him. Ox, you will do wondrous things together. He will be a leader, and as an Alpha, he will put the pack above all else. But remember that you’ll always be his heart and soul.”

MARK SAID,
“I knew. From the very first day, I knew that you were made for something great. I am proud to call you my friend and pack.”

CARTER SAID,
“I hope you’re ready for werewolf stamina. Like, for real. You’re going to be sore. For
days
.”

KELLY SAID,
“I really wish I hadn’t heard Carter say that. I need to pour bleach on my brain. For
days
.”

I DREAMT
of wolves and a bloodred moon. They sang to me and I took their songs and made them my own. I ran with them on four legs and my heart thundered in my chest. I could see and smell and hear everything and it was all green, green, green and Beta orange and Alpha red. The colors fit against the song and we
sang
because we were
pack pack pack
.

“UH, OX?”
Mom called as I got ready for work. The sky was starting to lighten outside.

“Yeah?”

“I think it’s started.”

“What?” I tucked in my shirt as I walked down the stairs.

She was on the porch, the front door standing open. I came up behind her.

She said, “At least he kept it off the porch like I asked.”

A fat rabbit lay on the grass, throat shredded, eyes wide and sightless. Blood pooled underneath it, tacky and dark. Flies buzzed around it, landing on stiff paws.

“I’m not eating that” was the first thing I said.

Mom elbowed me in the stomach. “He might be listening!” she hissed at me.

“I mean. Uh. Wow. That looks so good!” I was almost shouting.

“Subtle, Ox.”

“A werewolf is courting me with a dead rabbit. There’s nothing subtle here.”

“Couldn’t have been flowers,” she muttered as she slid on her rubber boots by the door.

“He gave you flowers,” I reminded her as she stepped down the porch.

“I meant for you,” she said. She bent over and grabbed the rabbit by the ears, pulling it up off the ground. It came up with a low crackle, grass stuck to the underside. “Courting. I swear.”

“Why are you
touching
it?” I said, sounding horrified.

“We can’t
leave
it here,” she said. “He’ll be offended.”

“I’ll be honest. I’m already offended.”

“Quick,” she said as she walked by me into the house. “Look up rabbit recipes on the Internet before you go to work.”

“You’re dripping on the floor!”

“It’s just a dead rabbit, Ox. You sound hysterical.”

“I sound
hygienic
.”

I wasn’t very good with Internet stuff, so I googled “what to do when your future werewolf mate/boyfriend/best friend courts you and brings you a dead rabbit.”

First, there was a lot of porn.

Then I found a recipe for Maltese rabbit stew.

It was delicious.

The stew, not the porn.

The porn was weird.

GORDO SAID,
“So. You just got a basket of, like, eighty mini muffins delivered to you.”

I said, “Mini muffins?” and I looked up from a tire rotation I was doing on a 2012 Ford Escape.

“Uh. Yeah. Like, eighty of them.”

“That’s a lot of muffins.”

“Lynda from the bakery brought them over. Well, actually, her son did because the basket was too heavy for her to carry.”

I sighed.

Gordo narrowed his eyes. “Dreamy sigh,” he accused.

He followed me into his office.

Sure enough, there was a basket of mini muffins. The biggest basket I’d ever seen.

I knew what this was.

It didn’t count as hunting. Not that I was complaining. I didn’t think Gordo would appreciate dead animals at the shop.

There was a note in an envelope.

It said
Shut up. This totally counts as hunting.

I sighed again.

“Ox,” Gordo said.

I said, “So. Mates are a thing, huh?”

And he said, “
Ox
.”

“YOU’RE JUST
a
child
!” he shouted at me later after the others had gone home. It’d been building all day.

I said, “I’m twenty-three years old, Gordo. I haven’t been a child in a very long time.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do you even know what this means? What you’ve agreed to? This is for
life
. When the wolf attaches, it is for
life
.”

“I know.” Thomas had told me. I might have had a minor meltdown, but that was yesterday. Today was different.

“And you still agreed? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Funny,” I said. “I thought this was
my
life. Not yours.”

He started to pace in front of me. “How the fuck am I supposed to protect you if you keep doing these things to yourself?”

“I can protect myself. I don’t need you or anyone else to do that for me.”

“Bullshit. You know I need—” He cut himself off with a growl.

“You need me. I know.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.” He slammed his palm against the desk.

“Gordo.”

“Fuck off, Ox.”

“He’s going to be the Alpha one day.”

“I don’t care.”

I pushed on anyway. “He’s going to need a witch.”

He reeled like I’d struck him. “Don’t. Don’t you dare.”

“What the hell happened to you?” I demanded. “Why do you hate them so much?”

He laughed bitterly. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It does if you’re always going to be like this. Look, I know you’re worried about me. That’s what you do. But you have to trust me. I already have enough doubts as it is. I can’t have them from you too. I need you, man. To have my back.”

He pounced on those words, of course. “Doubts? Then why are you even doing this?”

I said, “Not about him. About me. What if I’m not good enough for him? What if I can’t be what he’s going to need?”

He stopped his pacing and his shoulders sagged. “Ox, you can’t think like that.”

I snorted. “Yeah? It’s actually pretty easy to.”

“Your father did this to you,” he said with a scowl. “I should have kicked his ass when I had the chance.”

I looked up in surprise.

“I don’t like this,” Gordo said. “At all. But I’m going to say it anyway, okay? Anyone should count their lucky stars if they got to call you their own. I am not giving you my approval because it doesn’t matter to you anyway. Nothing I can say matters at this point.” His voice cracked. “But he had better treat you like you hung the moon or I will tear him from this earth.”

I reached out and squeezed his shoulder, trying to stop my knees from buckling. Of course everything he said to me mattered. How could he think otherwise? I said, “Gordo. Gordo. His wolf. He gave me his wolf. The stone wolf.”

Gordo smiled sadly. “I figured he did. When he came to see you?”

I shook my head. “The day after I met him. When he was ten. I didn’t know what it meant. They said I had a choice.”

And there it was. That look on his face. That
fear
.

He said, “Even then?”

I said, “Even then,” and of course, “Gordo.
Gordo
,” because a realization struck me and I was so fucking
blind
.

“Yeah, Ox.”

“Did…?” I almost stopped. But then, “Mark did. Didn’t he? Gave you his wolf.”

The tattoos on his arms flared briefly as he hung his head.

I rubbed my hand through his hair. It was getting long. I needed to remind him to get it cut. He’d forget so many things if I didn’t tell him.

He said, “Yeah. Yes.” He coughed. “He did. And I gave it back.”

WE WERE
running at the full moon.

The wolves surrounded me as the trees whipped by.

They whined and yipped and lived and laughed.

Joe kept crowding me closer and closer. He was almost as big as Mark now. When he became the Alpha, he’d be the size of Thomas.

We came to our clearing. The others spread out ahead, chasing each other. Nipping at paws and tails.

Joe didn’t leave my side.

He told me once that when the wolf took over, all human rationality left. He could understand and he could remember, but it was on a baser level, all animal and instinct.

He was still Joe, but he was a wolf.

Who apparently decided I didn’t smell enough like him.

He rubbed his torso over my legs and thighs.

He pressed his head and snout against my chest and neck, dragging his nose across my skin.

Carter and Kelly approached, wanting to play.

Joe growled at them, a rumble that came out as a warning.
Stay away
, it said.

They cocked their heads at him and lay down flat.

He turned back to me and
whuffed
in my ear and neck.

Carter and Kelly scooted forward slowly.

Joe ignored them because he’d found something interesting to sniff behind my ear.

They inched closer.

Joe touched his nose to my forehead.

They scooted closer.

Joe turned to glare at them.

Carter yawned, as if bored.

Kelly put his head on his paws.

Joe turned back to me.

“You’re being dumb,” I told him.

He bared his teeth at me, shiny and sharp.

I batted him across the snout.

I said, “I’m not scared of you.”

Carter and Kelly sprang forward, rubbing up against me on either side.

Joe snarled at the both of them, eyes flashing.

They just laughed at him.

Later, they hunted.

I lay on my back, watching the moon overhead.

The air was warm and I was happy.

HE KILLED
a doe and dragged it out of the woods to lay before me.

Its tongue hung out of its mouth, eyes wide and unseeing.

I said, “Seriously?”

He preened, muzzle caked with blood and grime.

“Seriously,” I sighed.

HE SAID,
“When I found you, I thought you were the entire world.”

He said, “I gave you my wolf because it was made for you.”

He said, “When Jessie came, it broke my heart.”

He said, “I tried to like her. I promise. And I do. I did.”

He said, “But I hated her. I hated her so much.”

He said, “When you broke up, I ran into the forest and howled at the moon.”

He said, “And then I smelled men on you.”

He said, “I smelled them on you and I had to stop myself from tearing you apart.”

He said, “I wanted to tell you to wait.”

He said, “I wanted to tell you that you needed to wait for me.”

He said, “But I couldn’t. Because it wasn’t fair to you.”

He said, “And then Frankie came and I… I don’t know. I never thought….”

He said, “You confuse me. You aggravate me. You’re amazing and beautiful, and sometimes, I want to put my teeth in you just to watch you bleed. I want to know what you taste like. I want to leave my marks on your skin. I want to cover you until all you smell like is me. I don’t want anyone to touch you ever again. I want you. Every part of you. I want to tell you to break the bond with Gordo because it burns that you are tethered to someone besides me. I want to tell you I can be a good person. I want you to know that I’m not. I want to turn you. I want you to be a wolf so we can run in the trees. I want you to stay human so you never lose that part of yourself. If something were to happen to you, if you were about to die, I would turn you because I can never lose you. I can never let you leave me. I can’t let anything take you from me.”

He said, “Richard told me things. Terrible things.”

MY BREATH
caught in my chest. My hand froze in his hair.

Stars shone overhead. The grass felt cool at my back. Joe’s head was heavy on my stomach. I looked down at him. His eyes glittered back up at me, dark and more feral than I’d ever seen them.

I could have said, “Hush. We don’t need to talk about him.”

I could have said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. He can’t touch you.”

I could have said, “I’ll find him and kill him for you. Tell me where he is.”

What I said was “Did he?”

I didn’t know if that was the right thing to say.

Joe let out a shuddery breath. “Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“Ox.”

“Yeah?” I managed to say through the rage and murder in my heart.

“It’s okay.”

Of course he could smell it. I wonder what scent anger had. I thought it probably burned.

So I said, “Okay.”

“You need to know. Before.”

“Before?”

He turned his head slightly and rubbed his nose against my side, along a rib. “So you know. Everything.”

“You’re not broken.”

He said, “You don’t know that.”

I said, “I do. You’re alive. If you can take another breath, if you can take another step, then you’re not broken. Battered, maybe. Bruised. Cracked. But never broken.”

He said, “Richard told me that my family didn’t want me anymore, that they’d given me to him and wanted me to bleed.”

I had to stop myself from howling a song of despair.

He said, “Richard said that it was my fault that it was happening. That if only I’d been a better son, if only I’d been a better boy, none of this would have happened. He said that they hated me because I wasn’t the Alpha they wanted. That I was too small. That I wasn’t a good wolf. That I didn’t deserve to be Alpha because I would cause the pack to break apart and everyone would die. And it would be my burden to carry.”