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I SAW her too.
I shouldn’t have. Rico was yelling at me to hurry up, papi, why are you such a slowpoke? Tanner and Chris were looking back at me, slowly pedaling their bikes in circles around him, waiting for me.
But I couldn’t move.
Because my father was in a car I didn’t recognize, parked on the side of the street in a neighborhood that wasn’t ours. There was a dark-haired woman in the driver’s sea
t, and she was smiling at him like he was the only thing in the world.
I’d never seen her before.
I watched as my father leaned forward and—
“Dude,” Tanner said, startling me as he pedaled back to me. “What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”
We left, the playing cards clothespinned to our bike spokes rattling loudly as we pretended we were on motorcycles.
I LOVED them because of what they were not.
They weren’t pack. They weren’t wolves. They weren’t witches.
They were normal and plain and boring and wonderful.
They made fun of me for wearing long-sleeved shirts, even in the middle of summer. I took it because I knew they weren’t being mean. It’s just how we were.
Rico said, “You get beat or somethin’?”
Tanner said, “If you do, you can come live with me. You can sleep in my room. You’ll just need to hide under my bed so my mom doesn’t see you.”
Chris said, “We’ll protect you. Or we can all just run away and live in the woods.”
Rico said, “Like, in the trees and shit.”
We all laughed because we were kids, and cursing was the funniest thing.
I couldn’t tell them that the woods wouldn’t be the safest place for them. That things with glowing eyes and razor-sharp teeth lived in the forest. So instead I told a version of the truth. “I don’t get beat. It’s not like that.”
“You got weird white-boy arms?” Rico asked. “My dad says that you must have weird white-boy arms. That’s why you wear sweatshirts all the time.”
Tanner frowned. “What’re weird white-boy arms?”
“Dunno,” Rico said. “But my dad said it, and he knows everything.”
“Do I have weird white-boy arms?” Chris asked, holding his arms out in front of him. He squinted at them and shook them up and down. They were thin and pale and didn’t look weird to me. I was envious of them, of their wispy, downy hairs and freckles, unmarked by ink.
“Probably,” Rico said. “But that’s my fault for being friends with a bunch of gringos.”
Tanner and Chris shouted after him as he pedaled away, cackling like a loon.
I loved them more than I could say. They tethered me in ways the wolves could not.
“MAGIC COMES from the earth,” my father told me. “From the ground. From the trees. The flowers and the soil. This place, it’s… old. Far older than you could possibly imagine. It’s like… a beacon. It calls to us. It thrums through our blood. The wolves hear it too, but not like us. It sings to them. They are… animals. We aren’t like them. We are more. They bond with the earth. The Alpha more so than anyone else. But we use it. We bend it to our whim. They are enslaved by it, by the moon overhead when it rises full and white. We control it. Don’t ever forget that.”
THOMAS HAD a younger brother.
His name was Mark.
