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Luke spots the doorway just as the rain turns from a drizzle to a downpour. It’s good timing, because between the rain and the darkness, the kids chasing them might not see where they go.
“Here, in here!” Luke hisses, and yanks Willie’s arm hard enough that it must hurt as he pulls them both in through the gap in the wall.
It’s crowded inside, and the smells hit Luke like a wall; sweat, excitement, money, aggression, wolves . For a moment the scent is so strong that Luke’s convinced they’ve somehow stepped into a den, that they’ve taken a wrong turn straight into one of the huge mixed-pack houses they’ve always heard urban legends about from the other foster kids.
But it’s not that. He doesn’t know how to explain that he knows, even before looking around, that there’s no pack here, no familial warmth, no mutual understanding. But it explains why the bouncer just inside the door sniffs them once and steps aside with a tilt of his head.
Always a half-step behind his nose, Luke’s other senses kick in after a brief delay. It’s so loud in here, lots of men’s voices, raised and emphatic and overlapping. The room they’re in is bigger than Luke realised at first, partially because it’s not very well lit and partially because there are so many people. The middle of the room is more densely crowded than the edges, though it’s hard to see why past all the bodies and in such dim light, especially when his eyes haven’t adjusted. Just like the bouncer outside, they get a couple of strange looks, but once their scents become obvious, they’re dismissed in favour of the excitement at the center of the crowd.
“Luke!” Willie breathes into Luke’s ear, pressing tight to his side, “I don’t know about this, it seems really intense in here, man.”
“We’re fine, and outside will be worse, remember?” Luke reassures him, noses Willie’s jaw to get a better sense of how he’s feeling. It’s hard to smell him over everything else in the room, but Luke thinks he’s curious, underneath all the nerves Luke already knew about. “Just stay behind me and stick close. I gotcha!”
“Okay,” Willie says, and squeezes Luke’s forearm with his hand before twisting his fingers into the back of Luke’s shirt. “Gotcha.”
Linked together by Willie’s grip on Luke’s shirt, Luke forges through the crowd, ducking between bodies where he can and gently shoulder-checking his way through where he can’t. He can feel Willie’s breath against his back, right on Luke’s heels, right where Luke likes him to be. There’s a sudden dip in the floor beneath their feet, and Luke can see that the next few layers of audience are stacked on broad, shallow stairs, toward a pit in the floor.
At first, Luke’s not sure what he’s looking at. Metal bars partially obstruct their view, too far apart and too large to be a real cage, but that’s still what Luke thinks of. Inside is what looks like a ragtag parody of a boxing ring, with ropes and a rugged, stained mat. There’s an announcer, yelling over the crowd so Luke only catches sounds rather than words or sentences, but his attention is drawn most of all to what’s going on inside the ring.
At first he thinks he’s watching a dogfight, but it turns out his senses are just confused. It’s two men, wiry and rough and ragged, who smell like wolves and fight like dogs. They’re ruthless with each other, biting and growling and tumbling, until one of them kicks up into the other’s stomach and he falls winded onto the mat. Luke feels Willie wince, feels the crowd surge with a roar around them, and his own excitement rises too, the adrenaline contagious and overpowering. When the guy who got laid out doesn't get back up, the announcer lifts the hand of the winner. It's still hard to hear him, but there's something about money that pricks Luke's ears.
"D'you think I could do that?" Luke asks Willie, half-joking and half-serious.
Willie’s face tells Luke which half his packmate is focusing on -- he's doing his unimpressed eyebrows and everything. "We should get out of here, Luke, c'mon. Even if we're wolves, this place doesn't seem like it's meant for teenagers."
As Willie's speaking, though, the gate at the back of the ring opens. The winner exits first and someone helps the loser hobble out after. Then, two new figures enter the ring, taking opposite corners to prepare. One of them is a guy that Luke guesses must be in his late 20s, maybe early 30s. He can't really tell, all adult guys look the same age until they're dad-age. But the other guy is smaller, leaner, wiry as hell, and he can't be that much older than Luke and Willie.
" He looks like a teenager," Luke points out.
"That doesn't make it better," Willie counters, frowning at the fighter, who's strapping one of his hands. "If we shouldn't be in here, he definitely shouldn't be up there. We should go before someone gives one of us some kinda contract, too."
"Where's your sense of adventure, Wills? It's usually so… lively." Willie bites his lip, and Luke sighs. "I just want to get a closer look. We'll go after this round, okay?"
Willie chews his lip for a moment longer, then looks up through his lashes, as if that’s going to catch Luke off-guard. He knows what Willie looks like when he’s trying to fake reluctance right before he caves, but it still makes happiness hum in his chest. The fight begins in the ring, the chime of a bell and the yell of the announcer and then the two guys begin to circle each other.
Just like Luke thought, Willie’s look of concern shifts sideways into an eyeroll, and he says, “Fine. But if we’re going to stay for this round, we should at least get a better view.”
“Yes!” Luke can’t help but cheer, slapping Willie’s back and pushing him forward at the same time. “Let’s go, c’mon, before they really get into it.”
They carve a path, though this layer of crowding is denser than the last, and as they step off the last of the stairs it gets much more difficult to see over everyone’s heads. Once they make it down that far it becomes clear that they’ll need to be at the front if they want to see anything at all, and until then they’re reliant on cheers and boos to figure out what might be happening. It’s easier, though, now that Willie shares his determination, now that they’re moving as fluidly as one creature, like they do when they hunt or when they used to curl up together to sleep as pups even after they’d been told off for sharing a bed.
From the glimpses Luke catches as they draw closer, it seems like the fighter their age has the upper hand, the way he’s moving all tight and controlled in contrast to his opponent’s wild swings. As they shoulder between two people right at the barrier, the fighter’s head whips around. It’s eerie; for a moment, as he stares into the crowd, Luke feels like he’s looking right at them.
Then the fighter gets clocked in the jaw. Luke cringes. It’s a hard hit, and he staggers back against the edge of the ring, scrambles to get his bearings. There are so many smells around Luke now, of the fight and the excitement as the crowd surges forward, but underneath it all Willie radiates shock. Luke hadn’t realised he was so invested.
“Luke,” Willie says, voice tight.
“I know,” Luke replies, “look, he’s getting back up.”
It feels like one second, Luke and Willie are watching the fighter shove the back of his hand across his busted lip, shaking out his shoulders, and the next, the other guy is on the ground. It happens lightning-fast, brutal and skilful, not the upper hand in competition that the fighter held earlier but a swift and easy victory. Luke has to watch it back in his mind to see how it happened, the way he’d knocked the other guy’s legs out from under him and landed a strike near his solar plexus at the same time.
The crowd around them is stunned briefly into silence before they erupt, loud enough that Luke winces and his ears ring, and he presses his shoulder closer to Willie’s. The announcer slips back into the ring to hold the fighter’s hand above his head, celebrating his victory. But the fighter doesn’t look happy, or excited, or relieved or angry or even neutral. His eyes are roving the front lines of the crowd and when they land on Luke again, they stop, staring.
It’s off, though. When Luke’s being stared at he usually has this shivers-down-his-neck feeling, his instincts telling him he’s being observed. It’s like the fighter is looking at him but through him, or not quite at him but…
He’s not looking at Luke.
Luke turns to Willie, rigid and still next to him. “Will?” he tries, over the crowd, and Willie doesn’t even glance his way. He’s staring back at the fighter in the ring, eyes wide, lips parted. It’s not just shock Luke smells now, it’s something else, lots of things, actually, none of them anything Luke has felt from Willie before. He doesn’t know how to separate them out from each other, just that Willie’s having lots of feelings Luke doesn’t understand. “Will, what’s going on? Who is that guy?”
Willie’s voice is almost too quiet to be heard over all the sounds around them, but Luke knows how to zero in when Willie won’t speak up. Still, he’s not expecting it when Willie murmurs, “He’s mine .”
It takes time for the crowd outside the ring to shuffle and move to other parts of the room, back up the steps, gathering around what look to Luke like gambling tables from movies, so he assumes that’s what they are. There must be a break between this fight and the next one, or maybe they’re over for the night. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that Willie won’t move, because he’s waiting for the fighter to leave the ring. Luke is feeling more exposed by the minute, as the crowd that hid them empties, but no amount of restless bouncing on the balls of his feet is going to do anything to change Willie’s mind. Strangely, with fewer people around, Luke feels more trapped than he did before.
They wait there as seconds turn into minutes, as the loser on the ground is carefully assessed by someone in a white coat and then helped to walk out of the ring. Then there are words exchanged between the fighter their age and some older wolf who smells angry and harsh, who gives Luke even more desire to turn tail and run.
“Just wait,” Willie pleads, “Luke, man, just wait.”
So Luke does, because Willie never asks him for anything.
The older wolf and the fighter finally leave the ring, alongside the announcer. They’re walking right past, and Willie bolts towards them before Luke can so much as grab his wrist to slow him down. “Shit, Will, ” Luke mutters, but chases him regardless.
“Can we help you?” the announcer asks, and the older wolf scoffs, Fans .
“Uh,” Willie says, as Luke slows to a stop next to him. “I...”
He seems dazed, staring at the fighter. This is the first proper look Luke has gotten at him, now that they’re up close, and he’s standing still, and they’re not being jostled by people all around them. His lip is totally busted from the hit he took, and there’s an angry red sprawling around his jaw that Luke can tell will be purple in no time. He’s all wire and sinew, veins clear in his forearms, and his hair is buzzed to his skull. There are dark circles under his eyes. He hasn’t glanced at Luke once, because he’s too busy staring at Willie.
It almost startles Luke when the fighter speaks. He has a strangely flat voice, deeper than Luke was expecting. “Nah, these are friends of mine. They’ll meet me out back.”
“Friends?” checks the older wolf, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.
“Out back,” the fighter repeats. It’s like Luke doesn’t exist, like Willie’s the only other person in the whole room. “They’ll meet me there.” Then he turns and stalks off to the door on the right, hardly even ginger in his movements.
The announcer and the other wolves don’t spare Luke and Willie another glance after that. They just disperse, one of them following the fighter out the back, the others disappearing to mingle in the room. The fighter leaves the door open, presumably for them, but Luke can’t really see inside.
Luke takes this opportunity to grab Willie’s shoulders and shake him as gently as he can in his confusion and overwhelm. “Dude! What is going on ?!”
“I just need you to trust me,” Willie begs, “I know him, I don’t know how, I don’t – I just know that I know him. I smelled him and something in me knew him.”
“Knew him?!” Luke demands. “Bro, how do you know he’s not just going to take us out there and kill us for distracting him?”
Willie shakes his head, urgent, insistent. “Please, you’re always telling me I don’t listen to my instincts enough, that I gotta be bolder, right? My instincts are so sure.”
Luke huffs and lets go of Willie to scrub his hands through his hair. This sounds so stupidly dangerous. This whole thing is stupidly dangerous. He doesn’t even know what they’re doing here, what he was thinking earlier. But Willie’s still looking at him, hopeful and steadfast. Like he hopes Luke will go along but like he’s going to go on his own regardless.
Shit .
“You’re sure,” Luke asks, but not like a question. He already knows the answer, after all.
“I’ve never been so sure,” Willie says. “I just gotta figure out how, but I know he’s mine.”
This time it’s Willie leading Luke through the door. Luke closes it behind them. If being in the empty space around the fighting ring felt exposed and trapped at the same time, it’s nothing compared to the sparse room that greets them, with scuffed wooden floorboards and dingy lighting. Doors line the back hall, all of them closed, no light spilling out from under their frames. There’s a small window in the wall near the ceiling in the far back wall, but it’s too narrow to crawl through and it’s barred over anyway. And it’s freezing .
Luke hates it in here.
It reminds him of the worst of the group homes, where he and Willie would bury their noses in each other’s puppy-soft fur and pretend they were in a den in a cave instead. In the present, Luke closes his eyes and pictures it, the den he constructed in his mind. The vines crawling up the wall, the drip-drop of water in a far-away tunnel, the scents and sounds of a dozen other wolves, anonymous hypothetical loved ones, shifting and sleeping around him, until he can almost feel their warmth.
Then he opens his eyes again, and he’s back in the strange wooden room, and he can feel Willie’s hand trembling slightly where it’s clasped in his own.
“Reminds me of Morris Avenue in here,” Luke mutters to Willie with an overdone shudder, aiming to sound light-hearted. “Remember how cold that room was?” Even with his attempt to keep his voice low, it seems too loud.
Willie frowns, but not like he’s unhappy. Like he’s mulling something over. “Yeah… I guess.”
There’s a pause.
Luke glances again at the barred window and feels his pulse thud uncomfortably. “Where do you think he went?”
“He’ll be here,” Willie says, which isn’t really the same thing as an answer to what Luke asked. “I can… I can smell him, still, I think. I don’t think he’s far off.”
To Luke, this room smells like dozens of stale wolves, and old blood, and sweat, and it makes his skin itchy. He doesn’t understand how Willie could pick up someone specific amongst it – Luke could barely pick Willie up in the crowd outside, and they’re pack, so of course Willie is easier for him to single out than anyone else. It must be a scent Willie knows well, if he can recognise it still even when he doesn’t know why.
For this same reason, Willie must be able to smell him approaching before Luke does; Luke smells Willie’s excitement roll off him, feels Willie’s fingers tremble more.
Then Luke smells him, too. He always hears humans talk about wolf scents like it’s clear what someone smells like – like strawberries, or a forest, or cinnamon, or whatever – but Luke can never quite define the difference between one wolf and another. Just that he knows a wolf from a human, and that some scents are brighter, or darker, or warmer, or colder. Like a room, he supposes, like a den.
What he means is that when Willie’s fighter opens the door at the other end of the hall and enters the room, Luke’s washed with something unexpectedly mellow and dim. Luke already knew they were a similar age, but the boy looks younger, here, smaller in this room than he did in the ring. He’s changed into a loose hoodie and sweatpants, and he’s cleaned up, no longer spilling blood down his face, and he smells nothing like Luke expected. Not bright, not cold, not sharp. Like afternoon sunlight through thin curtains.
Just like before, it’s like Luke doesn’t exist; the boy only has eyes for Willie. Stepping forward, Willie reaches his hands out toward the boy’s shoulders, but doesn’t quite touch him, hovers there instead. “You’re…” he starts, but he doesn’t say anything else.
The other boy reaches back. Luke refrains from the instinct to get between them, because he’s not trying to hurt Willie – all he does is grip Willie’s biceps as best he can in his busted hands, still staring, still searching his face. The scents swirl like paint in water until Luke can’t tell any of them apart, surprise and confusion and something deeper and older that Luke remembers through a haze, something from when he was very young.
Willie pulls the other boy into a hug, the way Luke would usually hug Willie, arms around the boy’s middle and chin on his shoulder, squeezing tight. The boy melts against him, makes a choked sound as he buries his face in Willie’s shoulder and heaves in a deep breath. In return, Willie presses his whole face into the boy’s neck.
Luke wonders absently if he ought to be jealous, but he can’t be, not really, not when Willie’s scent is shifting from baffled to overwhelmed with joy, not when they’re still hugging like that, like they’re trying to absorb one another. He can’t remember Willie ever being this excited, he doesn’t think – maybe when they became pack, but there was no undertone of shock then, nothing off-guard about it. They’d been too young to know how serious that decision was when they made it, even if it was the right one.
How could someone so important have existed in Luke’s packmate’s life, and they’ve never spoken about him? There are some things Willie doesn’t like to talk about, sure, but he loves to fondly reminisce about the past, about children who were nice to him in group homes before he and Luke met, about stray cats and teachers and games of chess with the one foster parent he ever liked. Willie makes friends wherever he goes, but Luke’s heard the stories so many times he thought he could’ve placed anyone they could run into.
Regardless, he can’t find it in himself to be anything other than curious, watching the way that they scent each other, the protective familiarity with which the boy cups the back of Willie’s head. The creepy room they’re in doesn’t matter at all to Luke, not anymore. When they finally move apart, it looks like it’s Willie’s doing – the other boy clings briefly before drawing back. His hands stay on Willie’s arms. It’s like he thinks Willie will disappear if he lets him go all the way. Willie looks at Luke over his shoulder and smiles, hopeful, relieved, nervous, all at once.
It seems like the correct time to introduce himself, maybe. Or maybe not. But Luke isn’t famous for timing introductions correctly, so he clears his throat, offers his hand and says, “Hey, man. I’m Luke.”
The other boy looks at Luke for the first time. At first his gaze skims over Luke’s face, then it drops to Luke’s outstretched hand. His expression makes it seem like he thinks Luke’s hand might bite him. Or like he might bite Luke’s hand. His scent turns a little acrid, burning, unfriendly. He’s still got his own hands on Willie’s arms, and he turns them slightly to put himself between Luke and Willie, as if Luke’s the stranger here. Luke feels his hackles go up, the instinct to growl rising in his throat, for the first time. He doesn’t even know this guy, and Willie is his pack, and Luke hasn’t done anything to deserve being treated like a threat.
“Hey,” Willie says softly, and Luke thinks he’s being chided before he realises Willie’s still talking to the boy, “he’s mine, okay? He’s good, he’s with me.” The boy still seems uncertain, but he steps back slightly, to let Luke into their little circle. “I’m… I’m Willie.”
“ Willie ,” says the boy, like he’s testing it to see if it tastes like something he knows. “I’m – I was Robert, I go by Bobby.”
Abandoning the handshake gesture and letting his hand fall back at his side, Luke shoots a confused look between them. “Wait, so… you do know each other, right?”
“Yeah,” Willie says, and the smile spreads back across his face. “Yeah, but…”
“A long time ago,” the boy – Bobby – explains. “In the system.”
“When we were puppies,” murmurs Willie. “He kept me warm in the winter.”
Bobby just nods, rubs Willie’s arm with his hand like he thinks maybe Willie’s still cold, after all this time.
“Can we sit down?” Willie asks, even though they have nothing to sit on but the floor.
Bobby drops into a cross-legged seat, says, “Yeah. The other guys will all be in the ring for a while. Or at the bar after. I got time.”
Willie grins. “I feel like I have so much to tell you.”
They sit until Luke’s ass goes numb from the cold wooden floor, but he doesn’t regret a moment of it, seeing Willie so alight, seeing Bobby slowly breathe easier, the hostility in his scent fade again. Willie talks a lot, at first, about all the good stuff with none of the bad, because he’s Willie. He talks about Morris Avenue without talking about the cold, and about Smith Street without mentioning the kid who kept stealing their food and tried to cut Willie’s hair off in his sleep.
Bobby talks, too, eventually. Not as much, but more than he had before. He’s been fighting here for most of the year. They pay okay and it’s somewhere to sleep. He left where he was before, and he doesn’t really say why and Willie doesn’t ask.
Instead, Willie talks about meeting Luke with a glow in his voice that makes Luke glow back, the love in him too big for his chest, talks about how they became pack so that they couldn’t be separated.
“Right,” Bobby replies, hushed. “So you could stay together. Yeah, that makes sense.”
Luke can tell there’s more here, more that they could discuss, but he can hear footsteps, smell people moving around outside, and something tells him they’re running out of time. Luke doesn’t pride himself on being observant, not usually, but he knows enough about this to make a decision. He can see the point of impact on Bobby’s jaw turning a horrendous violet in the center. He can feel the barred window glaring down at him. He knows that Bobby’s important to Willie.
What else does he need? The answer seems obvious.
“So you don’t have any pack?” he checks again with Bobby, who narrows his eyes but nods, once.
“Never have. I do okay on my own.”
Luke takes a deep breath to calm his excited jitters. “You could join us! I’d – I’d be happy to do it, and then you and Willie won’t get split up again, and we can – it’ll help with the fighting, and–”
“Luke,” Willie interrupts. Not unkindly, but a little wide-eyed, and Luke stops mid-ramble, collects himself.
“I’m just saying. It’s on the table.”
Bobby… does not look excited like Luke would have hoped. Instead he smells nervous, even though his face hasn’t changed. “Look,” he starts, stiff, “no offense, but I don’t need an alpha around to do this. Like I said, I’m fine on my own. And I don’t know you.”
Luke deflates. That makes sense, as much as he doesn’t want it to. It seemed like such an easy call when he and Willie sat foreheads pressed together in his tiny bunk at Morris Avenue, when Willie knuckled tears away from his eyes and whispered that he didn’t want Luke to go away , ever. Their choices had seemed so clear.
He guesses things get more complicated as you get older.
“But I’m glad you came here tonight,” Bobby continues. Crestfallen as Luke is, that does buoy him, so he looks back up, and Bobby’s definitely talking to both of them, not just to Willie. “You, uh. The others will be coming back here soon.” He doesn’t explain, but Luke gets that prickly feeling in his neck that suggests they should be gone before that happens. “Do you guys have phones, or something? Here, I’ll give you my number.”
They swap phones around their little circle and then get to their feet. Luke helps Willie up, even though his instinct is to help Bobby, who’s still clearly sore from his match earlier. Luke takes another look around the little room, and asks, “Where do you sleep?”
“In the back,” Bobby answers, without gesturing to let Luke know which door ‘the back’ might be.
Willie seems reluctant to leave, and Luke is too, but voices down the hall turn all their heads, and Bobby says, “Follow me.” He opens one of the many doors and ducks down a short corridor. There’s a divot to the left that looks like a small laundry room, but Bobby passes it to open a door directly ahead. To Luke’s surprise, they’re abruptly outside in the night, on a little set of fire escape stairs down to the street.
Like he can’t help himself, Willie goes back in for another hug. He catches Bobby a little off-guard, but he hugs back anyway, and Luke sees that expression on his face again, the very faint echo of shattering apart.
Willie says, “I’ll call you.”
Bobby says, “Okay.”
“Like, tonight.”
Bobby snorts. “Okay.”
Luke knows Bobby’s right, that they don’t know each other. But Willie knows Bobby, and it still feels bad to leave him here on his own, especially when it sounds like he’s been on his own for awhile. It sits wrong in Luke’s stomach, like when he eats something dubious in wolf form and shifts back too fast. He wants to grab Bobby and drag him home with them, or grab Bobby and push them all back inside.
Instead, all he does is watch Willie and Bobby pull back from hugging again, and return the nod Bobby offers him. Then, all too quickly, Bobby disappears through the doorway, a dark shadow outlined by the light of the hall, and closes the door behind him.
“Feels wrong to leave,” Luke says, just because he needs to say it. If his voice inside was way too loud, out here it sounds small and feeble, like the night air whisks it away.
“Yeah,” agrees Willie, tucking himself into Luke’s side, the way he does like second nature. Luke scents him, which is like, first nature, or something. “He’s still mine, though. I can feel it. And we’ve found him now.”
We have , Luke thinks, and thinks about how he might feel if he and Willie had been torn apart before they were old enough to make it stop. Then he has to think about something else, because just imagining it hurts too much. He squeezes Willie extra close, nips his ear just to hear him laugh, and promises himself that they’ll fix this, they’ll find a way. “Let’s go home.”