Se connecterCody“Hi! Sorry, I know it’s early. Is this okay?”Sloane’s voice comes out of Rafe’s phone all bright and bubbly, like she’s calling to tell him he’s won a cruise.“For you? Sure,” Rafe says.Under my right hand, Mato’s stomach tenses. He’s stopped chewing.“I keep thinking about what you told me the other night,” Sloane says. “That Cody’s been crazy about Mato for years? Do you know how many?”Rafe told Sloane fucking Tremblay that I’ve been in love with Mato for years.He glances at the two of us, at my hands up Mato’s shirt, and he doesn’t look even slightly guilty. He looks like he’s just been caught being popular.“Can I call you back on that one? I’m at work.”“Absolutely! And think about the sit-down, okay? I’d love to get you on tape. Honestly, you’re the only person out there who’ll even say hi to me.”“Talk soon,” he says, and hangs up smiling.“How does Sloane have your number?” I ask.“I gave it to her.” Rafe slides the phone back into his coat. “After I heard your old bo
Mato“You’re hooking it to the wrong end,” Rafe says.I’m flat on my back on the track under the pack’s plow truck, with a chain in one hand and a face full of road salt, and he’s looming over me with his hands shoved in his coat pockets.“I’m hooking it to the frame,” I tell him. “The front end’s got a plow blade on it. If I pull from there, I tear the blade off, and you’re helping Finn clear the streets with a shovel until spring.”“I’m just saying, I’d have gone from the front.”“I know. That’s why I’m the one under here.”Finn got the plow stuck at five this morning, halfway along the north track, nose down in a drift the wind had piled across it overnight.He left it there, walked home and posted a photo of it in the pack chat with a crying face emoji. After that he went back to bed.Dax answered it ten minutes later with two names, mine and Rafe’s, and a laughing face emoji.He knows exactly what a morning on a frozen track with Rafe is bound to do to my mood, and he thinks it’s
Cody“Lift with your knees,” the driver tells me, while he lifts nothing with anything.His name’s Gord, it says so on his jacket, and he’s been leaning on the back of his moving truck all morning telling everybody about his lower back.He’s got a disc that slips if he looks at a couch too hard. He gets paid by the hour, and the puck drops at seven, so we better be done before then.“Rafe said he has guys that will do the unloading,” Gord says.“We’re the guys,” Finn tells him, jogging down the ramp with a box under each arm, the happiest man in Northern Ontario.First thing this morning Rafe posted in the pack chat. Moving day! Truck’s at the gate at nine. Bring gloves. Smoked brisket sandwiches for everyone who helps.Nobody replied and he didn’t follow up with anyone directly, he just assumed. A whole bunch of wolves showed up anyway, because he’s funny, he flirts with grandmothers, and he’s promised to feed them.Now there’s a moving truck from town parked in the street, and a hum
MatoI don’t actually think I can move.My knees stopped reporting in a while ago, there’s a cupboard handle digging into my spine, and I’ve been hard for so long it’s less of a condition now and more of a personality. None of it matters. He said don’t move with his face in my neck, grinning, so I’m staying put.He slides off my thigh and kneels up between my legs, on a floor that’s going to need serious mopping after this, with his hair flattened on one side from hiding in my neck.“Up,” he says.“You just said don’t move.”“Now I’m saying up. I want you standing for this.”He’s got plans for me, and I’m not about to argue.Getting off a floor at my size takes a hand on the counter and a crack from both knees like somebody breaking kindling. I’m not aging like a human, they don’t ache, but the joints still have something to say.Cody watches the whole performance from down there with his chin up, enjoying it.He reaches up, takes my hands off my hips and puts them on the counter behi
Cody“Thanks, Mom,” I say.It comes out warm and polite, exactly like the guy on the podcast, and I’m smiling so hard at Mato’s shirt that my cheeks ache.“Have you eaten yet?”“Just about to.” The beef’s stone cold in the pan by now and nowhere near done. “Love you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”“Love you too!”I hang up before she can say anything else nice to me.I reach up, shove my phone in the cutlery drawer myself and slam it shut so hard it rattles.My face is still doing the smile. I make it stop.Mato hasn’t moved. His hands are on my hips, and he’s watching me like I’m a stretch of road he’s pretty sure has black ice on it.“Don’t,” I tell him, the second he opens his mouth. “Don’t you dare ask me if I’m okay.”“I wasn’t. I was going to say you need sustenance. You haven’t eaten anything since breakfast except half a block of cheddar.”“Cheddar’s a food group.”“Not in this house, it isn’t.”“If the next word out of your mouth is dinner, I’m moving back onto your couch.”He thin
Mato“Hide this from me,” Cody says, and slaps his phone down on the counter next to the stove. “Somewhere I’ll never find it. I mean it.”He’s checked it every time I’ve turned my back since I walked in the door. Before I got home, he grated an entire block of cheese for two people. There’s a mountain of it on the cutting board, and it gets smaller every time I look, because he keeps eating it by the handful.Sloane said the episode goes up today. She didn’t say what time, and he’s been anxiously pacing the house all afternoon waiting for it.Under all that cheddar, he smells terrified, and he’s working very hard to look like he isn’t.I pick the phone up, open the cutlery drawer and put it face down on top of the forks.“Oh, come on,” Cody says. “That’s the first place I’d look.”“Because you’re a werewolf and you can smell where it is. But we both know you’d check my pockets first anyway.”“Well, obviously. But that’s just for fun.”He grins at me, cheeky as hell, and for about a s
DaxThe wolf wants to turn around.He's wanted to turn around since I cleared the fence, and he isn't being quiet about it, because quiet isn't a thing he owns.He just keeps shoving the same word into the back of my skull like a toddler with a doorbell.Ours.Ours, ours, ours."He's a hunter," I t
NoahThree weeks I've been hunting this wolf, and tonight, finally, he does me the courtesy of holding still long enough to kill.Big of him.He's at the tree line where Northgate's fence gives up and the real woods start, and he's shirtless.Obviously. He almost always is.Cold's got nothing to sa
DaxThe thing's in pieces at our feet and my body's still waiting for round two.I never come down off a kill clean. My blood's still up, ears still straining, every muscle still voting to hit something else.I don’t think it’s a werewolf thing. It’s an adrenaline thing.So when the wolf decides to
NoahThe wolf hits it like a truck, and the thing barely rocks.Wrong.Two hundred pounds of Alpha at a dead run should fold anything with a spine.This rotten thing takes the hit, slides back a boot-length in the dirt, and swings an arm the size of my leg.The wolf has to wrench sideways midair to







