Chapter 7
Willa
The morning Callum finds out is the morning he is supposed to be running with the younger wolves at dawn.
I have packed him a breakfast — two egg sandwiches and an apple, the way I used to pack his lunches in Maine — and he is gone before six in the morning with his pack and his shift-clothes and the new boots Kael bought him last week when the old loaner boots from the clubhouse finally fell apart.
He kisses my cheek on the way out the door.
He calls Kael uncle now, for the first time, not as a title but as a thing he is trying out, and Kael, asleep in the next room because Kael has slept here every night for nine days now, raises a hand from under the quilt without opening his eyes and says, be careful, kid, and Callum grins and goes.
I think it is going to be a normal day.
I do not know — I do not know that one of the older prospects, a man called Webb who has been drinking too much since his wife left him in November, has decided he is going to sit at the bonfire the previous night and tell a story he is not supposed to tell.
I do not know that Callum, who is supposed to be running with the younger wolves, has cut the run short to grab a coffee at the clubhouse and has walked into the back hall just in time to hear Webb wrapping up the story for the second telling, with embellishments, in a voice he is using because he thinks he is being clever and because he does not know there is a seventeen-year-old standing behind him on the threshold.
I find out at nine in the morning.
Della is at the door. She is out of breath. She has walked too fast across the compound. She is holding the porch rail for support and she says, Willa, Willa, go to the clubhouse. Go now. Callum knows.
I do not need her to finish the sentence.
I grab my coat. I do not put it on. I run. I have not run since Maine and my body remembers how, badly, and I cross the compound in less than two minutes with my coat in my fist and Della shouting after me to wait, to slow down, and I do not wait and I do not slow down.
I see him at the gate of the clubhouse.
He is sitting on the steps of the porch.
He is in his shift-clothes — the loose sweats and the t-shirt the wolves wear when they are going to be coming out of their fur and need to dress fast — and he has his hands flat against the wood of the steps on either side of him.
He is white. His mouth is open. He is breathing in short, sharp bursts.
He is not crying. He is — he is doing something worse than crying.
He is sitting very still on the porch and his eyes are looking at nothing and the gold is flickering up under the brown in long uncontrolled waves and I can see, even from twenty feet out, that his shift is right at the surface and he is going to lose hold of it.
"Callum."
He looks up.
He looks at me.
His face — God, his face. I have known this face since the first ultrasound.
I know every angle of it and every micro-expression.
I know what it looks like when he is afraid and when he is sick and when he is lying about whether he has finished his homework.
I have never seen this face before. This face has not existed before today.
This face is the face of a child who has just been handed an adult truth without the gradual scaffolding a child needs to climb up to it, and who has dropped the truth and the truth has shattered all over the porch.
He says, "Mom."
I say, "I know."
"Mom, did you — did you know."
"I knew, baby. I have always known. I am — I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you a long time ago. I'm sorry."
He stands up.
He is shaking. The shift is right there, right at the surface. His hands are flickering — fingers lengthening, retracting, lengthening — and his shoulders are starting to broaden under the t-shirt and there is a sound in his throat that is not language.
I say, "Baby, breathe. Breathe. Hold the shift. You don't want to shift on the porch."
"Mom, where is he."
"Who."
"Kael."
I do not — I do not want to tell him. I do not want to send him in the direction of Kael in this state. But I know my son and I know that if I do not tell him he is going to find Kael anyway and I want — I want to be with him when he does it. I want to be in the room.
"His office."
Callum is past me before I finish the word.
He is moving fast. He is shifting and unshifting in flickers as he moves, a young wolf in distress unable to hold his form, and I am running after him and Della is behind me running too and the three of us cross the compound to the back of the clubhouse and Callum throws the back door open and goes down the hall and pushes open the office door without knocking.
I am right behind him.
Kael is at the desk. He has his glasses on.
He has a coffee in his hand. He looks up when the door opens and he sees my son's face and his own face changes — goes still, goes alert, goes to the place where I have not seen it go since the first night, the wall going up not against me but around himself, around the room, around the boy in the doorway, the calm wall of a man preparing for a thing he has known was coming.
He sets down the coffee.
He takes off the glasses.
He stands up.
He says, "Come in. Close the door."
Callum is — Callum is half-out of his skin. He says, "You killed my father."
He says it loud. He says it in a voice that is splitting open. The wolf in him is right there in his throat and his eyes are gold all the way through now and his hands are forming claws against his sides.
Kael does not move from behind the desk. He says, "Yes."
"YOU KILLED HIM."
"Yes."
"YOU —"
The shift takes him.
It is not — it is not a chosen shift. It is the involuntary half-shift of a young wolf who is too upset to hold human form, the same kind of shift he had on the kitchen floor in Maine.
His face elongates. His shoulders break their seams. His hands distort.
He is — he is caught between forms again, mid-shift, and the noise that comes out of him is the noise of a thing in pain, and I cry out, and Kael — Kael moves.
He comes around the desk. He moves fast. He gets to Callum before Callum can complete the partial shift, and he wraps his arms around my son's half-shifted body, and he pulls him against his chest, and he holds him.
Callum fights.
He fights the way a wolf fights — twisting, snapping, scrabbling — and his half-formed claws rake down Kael's forearm and tear through the sleeve of his flannel and open three red lines along his skin.
Kael does not flinch. Kael holds him. Kael says, very low against the top of Callum's head: easy, kid, easy, breathe, you're not going to hurt me, you can't hurt me, easy.
Callum shifts. Half shifts. Shifts again. His face is human, then half-wolf, then human, then half-wolf, in three-second cycles, and Kael holds him through every cycle with his arms locked around my son's chest and his face pressed against my son's hair.
I am — I am behind them. I am in the doorway. I cannot move. Della is behind me with one hand on the small of my back, holding me in place because I would have moved if she had not.
Callum is making sounds. They are not words.
They are the sounds of an animal that does not know what to do with its grief.
They are also — they are also a boy crying.
I can hear, under the wolf, my son crying the way he cried at four years old when he fell off the dock and could not get out of the water alone, and Kael is holding him and saying, I know. I know. I know.
It takes a long time.
It takes maybe ten minutes. The shifting slows.
The shifting slows and slows and finally Callum, with one long shuddering breath, settles back into human form, and his face is back, and his hands are back, and his shoulders are back, and he sags in Kael's arms and Kael — Kael lowers him to the floor of the office and Kael goes down with him, and the two of them end up on the wood floor with Callum's back against the front of the desk and Kael on his knees in front of him, and Callum is sobbing into his hands, and Kael is bleeding from the forearm and is not paying it any attention.
I cross the room. I sit down on the floor next to my son.
I put my hand on his back. He turns toward me and he buries his face in my shoulder and I hold him and I look at Kael over the top of his head and Kael — Kael does not say anything.
He does not move. He sits on his knees in front of us with his bleeding arm at his side and his face very still, and he waits.
Callum cries for a long time.
I let him. I do not try to soothe him out of it. I let him cry. I have spent seventeen years protecting him from the thing he is finally crying about, and now that he is crying about it I am going to let him cry for as long as he needs to.
When the worst of it has gone out of him, he lifts his head.
His face is swollen. His eyes are red. He looks at me. He says, "How can you be near him, Mom. How can you stand it."
I take a breath.
I had not — I had not rehearsed this. I have rehearsed every other version of this conversation in seventeen years and not this version, not the version where my son is on the floor of a clubhouse office with his mother and his uncle on either side of him and he is asking the question I have asked myself for seventeen years.
I say, "Because I decided that carrying the anger was heavier than putting it down."
He looks at me.