HOWL OF THE GODWOLF

What The Quad Knew

Rhys got me out of there before campus security showed up asking questions nobody in that bathroom was going to answer honestly. He didn’t say anything in the elevator down, or in the walk back to my dorm, or for the first ten minutes after he’d sat me down on my own bed and put a towel around my bleeding hand like it was the only useful thing he could think to do with them.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay. We’re going to talk about this like adults, and you’re not going to tell me it was nothing, because I was in that hallway before I got you out, and I felt something too. Everyone did. It went through the whole building.”

“I don’t know what that was.”

“I do.” He said it quietly, like the words cost him something to hand over. “My grandmother used to tell me stories. Every pack family has some version of it — the old ones, before the corporations, before the estates. A name that isn’t a rank. Something the bloodline is supposed to answer to, if it ever wakes up.” He looked at my hands, my eyes, the crack still visible in the porcelain two floors up in his memory. “Liveth. That’s the word she used. I thought it was a bedtime story.”

“Bedtime stories don’t put six people on their knees in a bathroom, Rhys.”

“No,” he agreed. “They don’t.”

We sat with that for a long time, the two of us, in a dorm room that suddenly felt too small for what had just happened inside it. Somewhere outside my window, I could hear something I hadn’t noticed before, now that I knew to listen for it — voices, low and murmuring, gathering on the quad below in numbers that had no reasonable explanation for a Tuesday night. I didn’t go to the window. I didn’t want to know yet how many there were.

My phone buzzed on the desk. My father’s name on the screen, the fourth call in twenty minutes I’d been ignoring.

“You have to answer that eventually,” Rhys said.

“I know.”

“He’s going to know something happened. People like your dad always know.”

He was right, in the way he usually was, in the specific and infuriating way of best friends who’ve watched you make the same mistake enough times to see it coming before you do. I picked up the phone on the fifth call, and my father’s voice came through before I’d even said hello, low and clipped and using the tone he reserved for board meetings that had gone catastrophically off script.

“Julian.” A pause, and in it I heard something I had never once heard from Marcus Kade in twenty years of being his son. “Tell me what happened in that library. And tell me the truth, because I am already hearing three different versions of it, and none of them are things I know how to fix.”

I looked at Rhys. Rhys looked at the window, at the murmur of voices gathering below it that neither of us had an explanation for yet.

“I don’t think this is something you can fix, Dad,” I said. “I think it’s something that already happened.”Rhys got me out of there before campus security showed up asking questions nobody in that bathroom was going to answer honestly. He didn’t say anything in the elevator down, or in the walk back to my dorm, or for the first ten minutes after he’d sat me down on my own bed and put a towel around my bleeding hand like it was the only useful thing he could think to do with them.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay. We’re going to talk about this like adults, and you’re not going to tell me it was nothing, because I was in that hallway before I got you out, and I felt something too. Everyone did. It went through the whole building.”

“I don’t know what that was.”

“I do.” He said it quietly, like the words cost him something to hand over. “My grandmother used to tell me stories. Every pack family has some version of it — the old ones, before the corporations, before the estates. A name that isn’t a rank. Something the bloodline is supposed to answer to, if it ever wakes up.” He looked at my hands, my eyes, the crack still visible in the porcelain two floors up in his memory. “Liveth. That’s the word she used. I thought it was a bedtime story.”

“Bedtime stories don’t put six people on their knees in a bathroom, Rhys.”

“No,” he agreed. “They don’t.”

We sat with that for a long time, the two of us, in a dorm room that suddenly felt too small for what had just happened inside it. Somewhere outside my window, I could hear something I hadn’t noticed before, now that I knew to listen for it — voices, low and murmuring, gathering on the quad below in numbers that had no reasonable explanation for a Tuesday night. I didn’t go to the window. I didn’t want to know yet how many there were.

My phone buzzed on the desk. My father’s name on the screen, the fourth call in twenty minutes I’d been ignoring.

“You have to answer that eventually,” Rhys said.

“I know.”

“He’s going to know something happened. People like your dad always know.”

He was right, in the way he usually was, in the specific and infuriating way of best friends who’ve watched you make the same mistake enough times to see it coming before you do. I picked up the phone on the fifth call, and my father’s voice came through before I’d even said hello, low and clipped and using the tone he reserved for board meetings that had gone catastrophically off script.

“Julian.” A pause, and in it I heard something I had never once heard from Marcus Kade in twenty years of being his son. “Tell me what happened in that library. And tell me the truth, because I am already hearing three different versions of it, and none of them are things I know how to fix.”

I looked at Rhys. Rhys looked at the window, at the murmur of voices gathering below it that neither of us had an explanation for yet.

“I don’t think this is something you can fix, Dad,” I said. “I think it’s something that already happened.”