Carter huffed and put his paw on my hand.
“You need to take care of each other,” I told them. “And him. And if it looks bad, if it looks like the fight is too big, you take him and you come running. I don’t care if he’s the Alpha. Fight it. Fight him. You drag his
ass if you have to. You get me?”
They flashed their orange eyes at me.
I heard them whispering in my head.
They said things like brother and love and please don’t be mad at us please don’t hate us please don’t leave us, and I didn’t have it in me to correct them.
I wasn’t leaving them.
They were leaving me.
CARTER WAS dozing.
Kelly’s tongue was lolling out of his mouth as I scratched his ears.
Mark and Elizabeth came then. Elizabeth was a wolf. Mark was not.
He walked next to her, nude, shoulders hunched slightly.
I felt Elizabeth, but it wasn’t like Carter or Kelly. It was waves of pain and grief. It was a terrible sadness. She wasn’t green. There was no relief in her. She was deep in her blue phase now, and I didn’t know if she’d come out of it.
She lay at my feet and closed her eyes.
It didn’t take her long to sleep.
Mark sat next to me.
He said, “She’s going to stay like that, I think. For a while.”
“As a wolf?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He said, “It’s easier to process things. We can remember most everything when we’re wolves, but it’s different. It’s baser. Complexities are harder to understand. We deal in broad strokes. We can see the shapes of things. It’s harder to be more specific. It’s her way of coping. The sadness of a wolf isn’t the same as the sadness of a human. Mostly.”
I understood what he was saying. And I thought maybe that sounded like cheating. “I’m not a wolf,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“And my heart is breaking.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t shift it away.”
“It’s not any easier to deal with, Ox. It just makes it easier to understand.”
“I don’t think I understand many things,” I admitted.
He said, “Neither do I” and “We’ll need you, you know” and “You’re very important to us.”
“Why?”