I pushed past Gordo and Thomas. I didn’t have time for them.
Carter and Kelly were at my sides, tongues lolling from their mouths. Mark was behind me, his nose pressing against my back.
Another wolf lay on the ground, almost as big as Mark, and I thought Elizabeth. She was colored like her sons, grays and blacks and whites. She raised her head at my approach and her eyes were the same, so beautiful and blue, and I remembered her telling me how she was done with her green phase. She had laughed and spun me in a circle, flecks of paint on her hands.
They were the same, but I could see the sadness in them.
“I don’t….” I shook my head.
“She can’t hear you,” Gordo said quietly from behind me. “There’s an earth ward around them infused with silver. It blocks out all sound and smells.” There was another flash of green, and in the moonlight, I could see slashes in the earth forming a circle around Elizabeth.
“They’re trapped?” I was horrified.
“By choice,” Gordo said. “It’s safer for Joe as he is right now. It blocks out everything except for his mother.”
I took a step toward Elizabeth, but Gordo grabbed my arm, holding me back.
“You have to listen,” he said. “Before.”
“Before?”
Elizabeth never took her eyes from me. They flashed orange. I couldn’t see Joe and my head hurt.
“We have… we need something. Anything. A thing that keeps us holding on to our humanity.” Gordo’s grip loosened on my arm, but he didn’t let me go completely. There was an almost electric quality to the touch and I wondered if it was the tattoos. Or him. Or whatever this was. “Magic takes a lot out of you. It can pull you places you never thought it could go. Dark corners that are better left alone.”
“And wolves?”
“Wolves need it to remind them they’re part human. Especially born wolves. It’s easier for them to get lost in the animal. And they do, without something to tie them to the rational world.”
I said, “Nothing about this is rational,” and my voice was rough. I felt like I was tipping into something I couldn’t come back from.
Gordo cut through the panic. “Joe will go feral, Ox. He’ll go feral if he doesn’t have a tether. Usually it’s pack or family or an emotion like love and a sense of home. It can be anger and hatred, but at least it’s something. He doesn’t have it now. It won’t happen today. Or tomorrow or maybe even a year from now. But if he can’t be tied to his humanity, then one day he’ll go feral and he’ll never change back. And a wolf without a tether is dangerous. A… decision would have to be made.”
A flash in the dark, a memory from before. About tethers. “Mark said….”
Gordo knew. He sighed. “Yeah. He did. You’re my tether, Ox.”
“When?”
“When you turned fifteen. When I gave you the shirts.”
“I didn’t feel any different.”
You belong to us now.
“Yes, you did.”
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“It just happened,” he pleaded. “I never meant to—”
“Can I be both?”
“Both?”
“To you and him.”
“I don’t… maybe. If anyone could, it’d be you.”