Ch. 34

The house smelled like gunpowder and rot, a perfume thickened by the dead winter air and the blood soaking every threshold and stripped wall. Someone, probably Cas, started a fire in a barrel in the foyer; it filled the space with dangerous heat and a sense of ritual. Within the hour all the new wolves, Teagan's and Carolina's, had claimed territory: the foyer, the kitchen, the old den with the pool table whose felt had been burned away to the naked slate. Lyra lit candles on every sill, and Briony raided the pantry for anything edible, casting tins of beans into a communal pile on the kitchen counter.

Carolina thought they would sleep, or crash in a heap and let exhaustion do its work, but Xander had other ideas. He vanished into the yard, came back with armfuls of scavenged wood, and began, without invitation, to board up windows and jury-rig barricades. The frenzy caught, and soon everyone was in motion, fixing—no, resurrecting—the place. Lyra used a crowbar to pry nails from half-collapsed banisters, while Briony and Marcus tried to drag the old piano into the parlor so "someone musical," (Briony’s words) could play something mournful and grand.

Cas found a bucket of white paint in the basement and began, with a kind of psychotic delicacy, to stencil crude wolves and teeth and hearts onto the slats of the front porch. When Carolina passed, he grinned. "If you gotta own a place," he said, "might as well decorate."

By midnight the house looked less like a siege scene and more like a squat lifted from a fable: tapestries of old bedsheets nailed to the stairwell, strings of Christmas lights looped over the splintered arches, candle wax pooled on every surface. Someone hung a "No Solicitors" sign upside down over the entry. Briony, half-drunk on found whiskey and the sheer delirium of survival, organized a contest to see who could balance the most empty soup cans on Xander’s shoulder before he finally noticed. (The answer was seven; Xander's response was to sweep Briony onto his back and do laps around the staircase, wolf-whistling until everyone was forced to join in.)

They didn’t talk about what came next. Not yet. There was too much to do in the now: wounds to clean, makeshift beds to arrange, the body count to tally and quietly memorialize. Carolina took long, slow inventory, her hands steady even as the inside of her skull thudded with memories. She patched up Lyra’s fresh stitches and sat with Teagan, who nursed a broken rib but still had opinions about the correct placement of the mattresses in the grand hall.

At dawn, the world outside was blue and icy, foam at the edges of the glass. Xander found Carolina in the kitchen, arms coated in flour, trying to reanimate a can of biscuit dough. He watched her from the doorway, still and grave in that way he had when he was happiest.

“We did it,” he said, softly.

She thought about correcting him—about how nothing was ever finished, how everything would have to be rebuilt again, and again, and again. Instead, she flicked a cloud of flour at his face and said, “You’re going to freeze your ass off if you don’t get those windows tight.”

He smiled, wide and wolfy. “Yes,Luna.”

Later, the entire pack gathered on the stoop, feet dangling over the porch edge, watching the sunrise lick the city into gold.

Briony leaned her head on Carolina’s bony shoulder and asked, “What now?”

Carolina looked at her people, stitched and bruised and perfect, the house behind them breathing in the hope of its own repair. She heard the city below them, alive with new rumor, its old queens finally unseated, the future a wild, unbroken thing.

She shrugged. “We keep it. We keep all of it.”

And for the first time in her memory, she knew it was true.