Eyes of the Wolf

48

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I apologized. Supposedly, we were waiting for all the Neosporin to stop being sticky on my skin, but it had long since been dismissed and I was still sitting on the counter while Chris leaned against the wall. I wondered if the ointment ever dried.

“It’s fine,” she dismissed. Her cheeks were still red from crying, but other than that, it would’ve been hard to guess. She was the kind to get it all out and then get over it. “Drake said that he wouldn’t be surprised if the pack kept you from telling me what you were going through.” Her voice dropped. “And I heard that the pack takes its secrecy pretty seriously. He said that they would’ve killed you if you’d told.”

Despite the tone, I knew that there was a question in there. “That seemed to be the understanding, yeah.” I couldn’t help grinning sarcastically. “Now look at how I’ve ended up.”

“I really don’t know why he attacked you,” she said, her lips pursing. “He told me when we saw you by the shed that that was you, so it’s not like he didn’t know.”

“When did he tell you what he was?” I asked.

“When I heard you were dead.” Her mouth skewed sideways, the tell that she was chewing the inside of her cheek. “I called him and told him, and he came over and I was pretty upset, and then he asked if they’d found your body.” She shrugged. “I told him no, and he told me that he didn’t think you were dead, then.”

I leaned back against the mirror and winced as I felt myself stick. A clear, gluelike film was still there when I pulled away, and we laughed as I started cleaning it with tissue and water.

“You’ve gotten pretty okay with nudity, huh?” my friend teased when I threw it away. I blinked, taking a minute to remember that, no, I wasn’t wearing a shirt. And it didn’t bother me.

“Kinda comes with the territory, I guess,” I laughed.

“So clothes don’t Change with you, huh?” Chris said, grinning along with me.

“No. Though I still don’t like going around naked around guys. Still not comfortable with that.”

“Is anybody?”

“A lot of the born ones. They don’t seem to care.”

“Huh.”

“I can’t believe Drake is a wolf.”

“Probably an easier time than me,” she said. “You’re a wolf too.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I teased. “And you don’t have the nose that should tell you he’s a wolf. I do.”

“You only saw him once since then.”

“But I knew about wolves when I met him.” I paused.

“I wonder if he knew that,” Chris whispered, her eyes going wide with my same thought. I shrugged.

“He could probably smell it on me,” I said. Chris laughed.

“I always forget about that. Do you have the…extra senses when you’re huma—” She cleared her throat, sobering. “When you’ve got two legs?”

I blinked, surprised at the amendment, but replied, “Sorta. They’re stronger when we’re wolves.”

She nodded, then was silent for a bit. It was weird, having anything even remotely similar to an awkward silence with Chris. I shifted my back a little. Still wet.

I saw her grin in my peripheral vision. “That stuff’s just gonna stay sticky, isn’t it?”

I smiled wryly. “Seems so.” Then I shrugged again. “I can throw on an old cami or something—won’t matter if it gets covered in goop.”

She hummed agreement absently, a short, iffy note. Then she looked at me and asked warily, “So what happened with Niko?”

She didn’t know?

Of course she didn’t know. Drake wasn’t part of my pack, so he wouldn’t have known about Niko’s banishment, or even that we had broken up. I couldn’t remember if I had told Chris that we had. Things around then had been so hectic, everything was fuzzy except my last moments as a human. Those I would never forget.

So I filled her in as best I could. No, I hadn’t told her about breaking up with Niko, though I had asked her for advice the day before. Apparently she’d been half terrified that the breakup had gone terribly wrong. (“Well, even if I didn’t know he was packing paws, I knew he had a violent family. Some people don’t lose that.”) Everything else was news to her, and her horror at Niko’s betrayal was parallel to mine. I told her about Iago as well, since we were already talking about the problems as a whole. The fact that he’d been considerate enough to save my father’s bird still tore at something within me. When she heard about his banishment, her lips tightened together again.

“I don’t know if I’m happy about that, or sad,” she confided slowly. “I’m glad he’s not interfering and causing trouble with you anymore, but he and I were friends, you know?”

“I know,” I said. Her green eyes snapped up to mine and she hugged me tightly. “I’m so sorry, Maya. This has to be so hard for you to go through. It’ll be okay, though. It’ll all turn out fine.” She stroked my hair and gave a harsh laugh. “This is all my fault, isn’t it?”

“How on earth is this your fault?” I pulled away from her and looked at her, bewildered. She looked away.

“I’m the one that forced you to start dating him.” She looked down at herself. “I’m all sticky, now.”

I shook my head. “Well, yeah, but…” I scrambled for the words that would verify my standing on the subject. “I liked him, too. It’s not your fault. I fell for him and didn’t get out while I could. It’s not your fault.”

:o3

As we’d discussed, I came out in a worn camisole. I knew I didn’t look as gruesome as I had now that everything had stopped bleeding, but I still wasn’t in the best of shape. Drake and Adam looked up from the table, apparently having been in some sort of deep, illuminating discussion. Drake had slimy stuff all over him too, and I wondered if he had applied it himself, or with help. I suppressed an unexpected growl. Drake glanced up at us, the shaggy brown hair in his face making a poor attempt at masking concern for Chris. I wondered if tears had a smell. If they did, I hadn’t noticed.

“All set?” Adam queried, his voice conveying a sort of positive impatience. I hadn’t heard that tone before, and I cocked my head to the side at him. Wolf subconscious again.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“You’ll come back around later, right?” Drake said to Adam, who nodded.

“We should, but if there’s a problem, we’ll call.” My packmate stood.

I guess we’re leaving, then, I thought. I turned and hugged Chris goodbye, then waved briskly at her boyfriend. He smirked and raised his own hand, then dropped it. I opened my mouth, closed it, and nodded. Then we left.

:o3

We walked as humans back to the truck, not bothering to shift since we were no longer sneaking around anymore. Adam still looked starstruck.

“What’s up with you?” I finally asked him, wondering if he’d actually answer me. He looked at me and smiled.

“Drake’s like me,” he said. I blinked.

“He’s half, too?”

Adam nodded and looked toward the station, still about a mile away. “I didn’t think I would ever meet someone else like me.”

“Is there a big difference between someone with one and two parents?”

He shrugged. “I guess so. I’ve always had the extra senses, but I’d never changed ‘til my late teens. Normal born wolves are shifting back and forth by a very young age.”

I remembered my first encounters with Summer. “Is that all?”

I watched him finger one of the chains on his borrowed pants. He didn’t seem to notice he was doing it. “Well, I’ve heard that I don’t stay consistent with dominance cues.”

“Who told you that?”

“Blaze. Apparently I’ll act dominant for a moment, and then switch to the behavior of a lower wolf. He told me it confuses wolves, and it gets me ostracized.” He laughed. “And it’s not like I can fight for a higher standing—I’m one of the smallest in the pack.”

“Just because you’re small doesn’t mean you’re weak,” I grumbled. He looked at me in surprise, and then laughed when he got it.

“I’m not saying you are. But a pack usually respects bigger wolf forms, and you’re not exactly challenged by many in wolf size.”

I grunted in acknowledgment, but veered the subject away from my wolf vs. human. “So why do you switch all your cues?”

“I don’t even notice I’m doing it. One minute I’m fine, and the next I’m ass over teakettle in the dirt with teeth in my neck.”

“When has this happened?”

“I’ve learned to avoid it,” he said dismissively. “I just don’t understand all the dominance games, so I try to keep out of them.”

He always had acted deferential around other wolves, I knew. Even when I was human, he acted lower than the others. Niko had sneered at him so much—because he truly believed Adam to be a lesser wolf?

But he had challenged other wolves. The first night I had ever seen wolves, he had stood up to Blaze and Niko to protect me. Why?

Then I was reminded of how Chris had censored herself when talking to me, and it disturbed me. How she had stopped herself from saying I was human. Why was that bad? I had always thought of this as my human form, ever since I had been Changed. Before then, with Niko and everybody involved with the wolves. Was it so odd that we wouldn’t think we were human when we were in our wolf forms? But we had human brains, didn’t we? I wasn’t sure.

Or what if it wasn’t even that? What if she thought that we weren’t human at all anymore? That the wolf was entirely who we were? Who I was?

“Are we human, Adam?”

I felt his eyes search me. “Do you think we aren’t?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always thought that this was being human,” I said, spreading my arms. “But are we really?”

Adam’s gaze blindly searched the sky. “What else would we be?”

“I don’t know. I guess werewolf.”

“But not like the horror movies.”

“Right.” We hit the curb of the station, and we moved to the truck. When we got in and it was running, Adam frowned.

“You don’t think we’re demons or anything, right?”

“I hadn’t thought we were,” I told him. Then I thought about it. “Are we?”

He laughed harshly. “I know there are several people who would say we are. All those same people who want to ban Harry Potter and think rock and roll is devil’s music and all that.”

“What do you say?”

“I say that I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know how God thinks.”

I set my jaw as I digested that. “I don’t think the born wolves are evil. To make somebody born to a living as something fated for hell doesn’t sound like a very nice God to me.”

“If you read the Old Testament, God isn’t always nice.” We pulled out onto the road. “For all we know, we’re all doomed to hell.”

“That’s a nice thought.” That was something that disturbed me. And what would we have done to deserve that? “Do you think that’s true?”

He sighed, his fingernail rasping against the stitching of the wheel again. “I don’t know. But I wonder why he would have made us this way. Surely there’s a reason.”

I watched the sideview mirror. Nobody was behind us. Trees and grasses whipped by.

“And what about the bitten wolves?” he said. “What would they have done to deserve damnation?”

I closed my eyes, remembering my Change. “We want to live.”

“Huh?”

The pain had been unbearable. My body had torn open like a birthday present, hope for life disappearing fast. I had refused to die, had fought my call to go with my father to the next place.

“I didn’t want to die. I thought I was, but I didn’t want to go yet. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to die yet.’” I leaned back into my seat. “Was that wrong?”

“I don’t think so,” Adam said, frowning hard at the road. It was impossible to know what he was thinking at that moment. When the road straightened, he leaned his arms on the wheel and placed his chin on his hands. “I think there’s hope for us, Maya. There has to be.”

“Because we’re human?”

He lifted his head off the wheel and sat up again. “I think so. We still think as humans in our wolf forms, anyway, so our humanity can’t be dismissed by a change of body, right?”

“Do you think like a human as a wolf?”

“Yeah.” He looked at me. “Don’t you?”

“Sort of. I know I can think like a human if I try, but it’s never easy for me. Mostly it’s another set of instincts driving me forward, with a sort of awareness of what my human side would want. It’s like it’s a wolf that shares my memories, and is really intelligent about knowing those memories and desires, but it’s still a wolf.”

Now Adam was really frowning. “I’ve never gotten that impression. I’ve always had a lot of control over myself when I Change. It’s like I can trade in slow and sensually stunted but vocal to get fast and aware.” He looked at me with interest. “When you’re human, do you get the same feeling in vice versa?”

I nodded, not having to think about it very hard. The wolf side had influenced my behavior and my reactions to many things.

“I wonder if that’s because you’re full wolf,” he mused.

“Maybe.” I didn’t want to talk about this anymore.

Adam seemed to have the same thought as me. “Drake really didn’t mean to attack us, by the way. He panicked.”

“He knew who I was, didn’t he?” I snapped, suddenly irritated anew.

“Yeah, but he didn’t know how much the wolf mentality had changed you. And he didn’t know me. He thought that we might be there to get Chris because she knew who you were.”

“I would never turn on Chris like that,” I objected in low tones. The memory of lunging at her in rage made my blood run cold, and I added, “Not deliberately like that.”

“She shouldn’t have jumped in front of you like that.” I was skeptical. “Even a human when fighting and high on adrenaline will turn on a friend. That she tried to stop you in your wolf form was almost suicidal.”

“I hate going nuts like that,” I growled.

“You’re a dominant wolf. And you saw a threat to your packmate. I don’t blame you for getting protective. Dominant wolves have an instinct to protect pack from outsiders.”

“Yeah, but…”

“It’s a normal instinct, Maya. A lot of the wolves in the pack are like that.”

“But I wanted to kill him!” I bit my lip immediately after saying that. I hated admitting it, but it was true, and I hated it that truth too. My eyes burned. I shut them, my head turning away from the driver’s seat.

The car slowed to a stop.

“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. The gesture was hesitant, but I understood the sentiment. I didn’t think I deserved his comfort, though.

“You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Killing is wrong.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t killed anybody.”

“I’ve tried. Three times I’ve tried, as hard as I could. I tried to kill that wolf in my house, I tried to kill Spine, and now I’ve even tried to kill Drake!” I curled in on myself, my clothes sliding disgustingly over my still-gooey skin but I didn’t care. Saltwater was trickling down my face, and I felt Adam slide closer and rub my back with one of his hands. I smelled his anxiety, and knew that guys really got nervous when girls started crying around them. Convoluted as it was, it only made me cry harder.

“Control will come with experience, you know that, right?” he whispered to me. “You’re a strong girl, you’ll get control over that part of your wolf. You’re still pretty young. It’ll get better.”

I didn’t answer. I hated trying to talk while I was crying. An insane urge to turn left and cry on him came over me, but I quashed it, knowing that if I did so I would be incredibly embarrassed.

Why was there so much crying going on today anyway?

Finally it stopped, and I snuffled for a bit and wiped at my eyes to try and clear everything off. I felt like I was treating my face like a whiteboard.

Adam mutely handed me a tissue, and I wiped off my nose. I hated being such a messy crier. He patted me twice on my back. “It’ll get better,” he repeated sympathetically.

“Thanks,” I said, hating how whiney my voice still sounded. Then I looked at him, recalling something he had said a few minutes before. “You know I think of you as a friend, right? You’re not just my packmate, you know.”

He smiled. “Thanks Maya.” Then he turned and put the truck back into gear and flipped his left signal on to pull back onto the pavement. “Let’s get you home.”