Wolfsong (30 page)

THINGS MOVED
quickly after that.

The next three days were a whirlwind, the Bennett house filling with people I’d never seen before. They went with Joe and Mark and Elizabeth and Gordo into Thomas’s office and disappeared for hours, wolves all. They whispered quietly to each other, the ones I didn’t know. They eyed me as Carter and Kelly lay curled around me, still shifted, whining piteously as their feet kicked in whatever dreams they had. I didn’t let these strangers intimidate me. I stared right back.

I only got bits and pieces.

Richard had gone underground.

Robert Livingstone hadn’t been found.

Osmond, though.

Osmond had been a surprise. No one had expected him to switch sides. He too was gone.

It rankled them, the wolves. To know now that they’d had a traitor in their midst. Especially one as high up as Osmond. I didn’t blame them. But I certainly didn’t trust anyone I didn’t know in the Bennett house. I got the impression they were having a hard time trusting each other.

Elizabeth wouldn’t let me go back to my house. She said it wasn’t right. Not now. Maybe not for a long time. I stayed in Joe’s room. In his bed.

But Joe was never there.

They said it was a burglary gone wrong. That my mom had come home and interrupted someone at the house. I had an alibi, of course. I was with the Bennetts. The Bennetts, who everyone respected. Who everyone was in awe of. The town might not have understood them, but they understood the way they looked. The wealth they had. The things they’d done for the town.

The coroner said it looked as if my mother’s throat had been slit with a serrated knife of some kind.

I told the police we didn’t have anything of the sort.

It must have come from the intruder.

And where is Thomas?
the police asked.

Away on business
, Elizabeth said.
Out of the country. Will be for months.

Later it would be said that Thomas died of a heart attack overseas.

But for now, he was just gone.

When will he be back?
the police asked.

Hopefully soon
, she said.

Somehow, her voice remained even.

Outsiders couldn’t see the cracks.

But I could.

MY MOTHER
was buried on a Tuesday.

There was nothing special about Tuesdays, but it was the first day we were able.

The town mourned her along with us.

With me.

The preacher said placating things about God, and the mysteries of his plan. We might not understand why these things happen. All we can do is hope to know that things happen for a reason.

The sun was shining when she was lowered into the ground.

The pack never left my side.

Joe held my hand through it all, but we never spoke.

Tanner, Chris, and Rico were there. They pushed everyone out of their way and didn’t even bother trying to shake my hand. The three of them wrapped themselves around me and held on for dear life. There was a little flare of
something
from them that I felt crawl along my skin, but it was lost under the weight of what I faced.

Jessie was there too. She waited until she could stand in front of me. She whispered something I didn’t remember. Her lips pressed against my cheek, lingering and sweet.

Joe watched as Jessie squeezed my hand.

He looked away as she left.

Later, after I’d stood in line and let people cry on me and shake my hand and tell me how sorry they were, I stood above the hole in the ground where my mother lay. It wouldn’t be filled in until everyone left.

The pack stood away, amongst the trees. Waiting.

It wasn’t fair. None of this was.

I said, “I’m so sorry,” and thought about the day we’d lain on our backs, her in her pretty dress with the blue bows, and watched the clouds go by.

THOMAS WAS
burned on a Tuesday night.

There was nothing special about Tuesdays, but we’d already buried my mother that afternoon, and it was better to have it all said and done.

Those same people that had filled the house in the days that followed Richard’s attack now filled the forest. Some were in human form, but most had shifted into wolves. My pack had all shifted, aside from Gordo and myself. But we walked with them, Elizabeth and me on either side of Joe. The others brought up the rear. I curled my hand on Joe’s back and held on for all that I was worth.

No one spoke about God and his infinite plans. In fact, it was near silent as we watched Thomas’s body atop the pyre constructed in the clearing in the woods. The wolves gathered around me. My wolves. Everyone else kept their distance.

It was Gordo that started the fire.

As he approached the pyre, I wondered if Thomas had felt him as part of the pack before he’d taken his last breath. If he’d felt the witch come back at last. We hadn’t spoken about it. About what it meant. About what would happen now. I hadn’t even tried. There was a small resentment that they’d kept me out of that office, those secret meetings, but I pushed it away.

He placed both hands on the pyre.

His tattoos came to life.

He bowed his head.

There was a lick of fire underneath his fingers.

It caught the wood and the fire spread.

I stood there and watched him burn.

Joe led them, after.

It’s called a chorus howl
, Thomas whispered to me.
The harmonies allow any tricksters to think the group is bigger than it is.

And they did. They sounded like they were in the hundreds, rather than dozens.

Gordo had muffled the territory so no one in Green Creek would know. His magic was useful when he wasn’t trying to deny his place.

Still, I wondered if people in town could hear it. Or, at the very least, feel the passing of one king to another. They lived in the territory, after all.

I felt it. I felt all of it.

The fire was hot against my face.

The songs howled around me were as loud as I’d ever heard them.

They hollowed me out. Made my skin brittle and tight. I was a shell compared to what I’d been only days before. I didn’t know what to fill the space with. I didn’t know if there was anything
to
fill the space with.

The fire died down, eventually. Until it was nothing but ember and ash.

It’d be spread later throughout the territory.

But for now, the strange wolves left.

Our pack remained.

We inhaled the smoke and it filled our lungs until we coughed it away.

Gordo left then. Hands in his pocket, head lowered.

Mark was next. He headed away from the Bennett house, deeper into the woods. We wouldn’t see him again for two days.

Carter and Kelly left with their mother, one on either side of her, holding her upright as she stumbled, legs weak.

It was just Joe and me then.

He sat on his haunches, watching the last lick of flame, the last burst of sparks.

I sat beside him, leaning against his side.

He huffed out a breath as he towered over me.

I pressed against him harder.

He snorted, eyes flashing.

The heat from the pyre began to fade away.

And still we stayed.

Night birds cried.

An owl called.

I said, “I’m here.”

Joe scratched the grass with a giant paw.

I said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

His ears twitched.

“We’ll figure this out.”

He whined in the back of his throat.

“We have to.”

He bent his head down, running his nose along my cheek. My neck. Behind my ear, huffing his scent onto me like he hadn’t done since he’d become the Alpha.

I loved it.

And him.

But I couldn’t say it. The words stuck in my throat.

So I hoped he felt it in my scent. Because that was all I could give.

It should have stopped there. That should have been the end of this terrible day.

It wasn’t.

Other words found their way from my throat, saying the very last thing I should have said.

But I was buried then. In anger. In grief.

So I wasn’t thinking about what
could
happen.

Just what I wanted.

I said, “He took from us.”

I said, “He took part of our pack away.”

I said, “He hurt us.”

I choked, “He took my
mom
.”

Joe began to growl.

I said, “He’s gone.”

I said, “We have to find him.”

I said, “We can’t let this happen to anyone else.”

I said, “We can’t let this happen again.”

I said, “We have to protect the others.”

I said, “And we have to make him pay.”

And that was it. Later, I would realize that was it.

That was the moment we began to say good-bye.

into the bones/losing you

I STILL
didn’t see it coming.

Maybe I should have.

But I didn’t.

THEY LEFT
us. After a while.

The strange wolves. The ones I didn’t know.

They left back to wherever they came from.

But not before they held their secret meeting once more.

I couldn’t even find it in me to ask questions.

To give two shits about who they were.

I stared at the closed door.

And walked away.

THEY LEFT
and all was quiet.

Carter and Kelly spent hours upon hours in the woods, restlessly moving through the trees. If they didn’t come home at night, I’d find them in the clearing, lying flat on their stomachs near a section of burnt grass, tails thumping to a beat only they could hear.

Elizabeth would disappear for long stretches of time. I never followed her. I never found out where she went.

Mark stayed on the porch, scanning the tree line. I knew what he was looking for, but I didn’t think it would happen. Richard was gone.

And he would stay gone because of Gordo. Gordo, who spent the days that followed shoring up the wards he’d placed around Green Creek. Now that he was pack again, he could access areas of his magic that had been blocked to him before. I could feel the pull of it every time he did something different, that strange sensation that felt like walking down the stairs and missing the bottom step.

Joe stayed in his father’s office.

I tried to keep all of them together.

I lay with Carter and Kelly in the grass. Under the stars.

When Elizabeth was in the house, I made sure she ate.

I stood on the porch next to Mark, running my fingers through his fur, watching.

I followed Gordo around, watching as he muttered under his breath, keeping an eye out to make sure no one in Green Creek saw the way the tattoos moved along his arms. He said it wasn’t necessary. That no one would find out. I went anyway.

Joe barely spoke to me, even when he was human and even when I was at his side.

I didn’t understand what he was going through. I didn’t understand what Thomas had given him. I didn’t understand what it meant to be the Alpha. All I could do was hope that I could be enough as his tether.

Of course, any courting he’d been doing before had stopped.

I didn’t mind. I knew there were other things he had to focus on. More important things.

ONE DAY
I went to work, just to do something different.

Gordo wasn’t there. He was with Joe, talking about things I wasn’t supposed to hear.

I might have glared at both of them. They’d stared back with blank faces.

I might have also slammed the door on my way out of the house.

I wasn’t proud of that.

So without any better idea of where to go, I went to the shop.

I stayed off the main street. I didn’t want anyone to stop me. To try and talk to me. To offer condolences. I was sick of condolences.

It probably didn’t help that I was pissed at Joe and Gordo, even though I tried very hard not to be. But they’d never kept anything from me. Not since I found out about witches and wolves. For the most part, anyway.

But when I saw the shop for the first time in days, some of that anger lessened. It dampened the sadness. I thought maybe this was going to be an escape. At least for a little while.

I walked into the shop. The bell on the door to the waiting room rang overhead. It caused my heart to ache a little, but in a good way.

“I’ll be right out!” a voice called from back in the shop.

I knew that voice.

My throat closed. Just a little.

“Welcome to Gordo’s,” Rico said, coming into the waiting room. He was running a rag over his hands, trying to remove the oil under his fingernails. There was the sweet scent of coconut oil on the rag, which Rico swore by. The rest of us used soap and water. Rico said there was no accounting for taste. “How can I help—”

Then he stopped. And stared.

“Hey,” I said. “Hi. Hi, Rico.”

“Hi.” He snorted and shook his head. “Hi, he says. Hi, like he’s some little—get your ass over here, Ox.”

I got my ass over there.

The hug was good. Really good.

“It’s good to see you,” he whispered, arms around me tight.

I just nodded into his neck.

Then he dragged me back into the shop.

There were a couple of cars up on the lifts.

The radio was blaring Tanner’s country music, something about a man and how all his exes lived in Texas, but he hung his hat in Tennessee.

Tanner himself was under the hood of a 2012 Toyota Corolla. It looked like he was replacing the timing belt, singing along with the radio.

Chris was running a diagnostic check on a truck, squinting at the computer screen, even though his glasses were sitting on top of his head. He’d said he hated how he looked in them.

I took in a deep breath with the smell of grease and grime and metal and rubber. It was the same when I’d been a kid, coming in with my daddy, Gordo offering to buy me a pop from the machine.