Words were written in blood on the wall.
YET ANOTHER FALLEN KING
Joe howled for hours that night.
WHEN THE sun rose the next morning, we all heard his voice whispering in our heads.
It said home and home and home.
four things/always for you
I WAS thirteen when I kissed Mark Bennett for the first time.
A month later, hunters came and killed most of our pack.
Things weren’t the same after that.
IT BAFFLED many people.
How a group of men could be killed by a pack of wild animals.
The men couldn’t be identified.
Bears, they said. Maybe it was bears.
But no animals—bears or otherwise—were ever found.
It became legend more than anything.
Within a year, people spoke about it less and less.
I KISSED Mark Bennett for the second time when I was fifteen years old.
Elizabeth was pregnant with another child.
Carter was walking and talking.
Thomas Bennett still had a haunted look about his red eyes, but he accepted his responsibilities as the Alpha of all.
Many men came to Green Creek. Wolves. From back East.
They followed Osmond, who bowed reverently every time Thomas stood before him.
“He’s an odd man,” Thomas told me once.
“He’s a kiss-ass,” I sneered.
Thomas’s lips twitched. “That too.”
“I don’t like him.”
“You don’t say.”
And that was that.
RICHARD WAS gone.
He left shortly after the hunters came.