Rosa was lying in a bed of grass and flowers, the light of the early morning painting her skin. She was pale and pallid, having lost the luster of warmth that life had given her.

Levi thought he must be hallucinating again.

The worst part was the bruising.

The Santa Cruz pack had washed away the blood and the dirt, had cleaned her skin with wet towels and covered her body with a white sheet. But they couldn’t wash away the bruising, the sick green and purple that had seeped into her skin like ink spots on parchment.

He stood over her, gently rubbing his thumb across the soft skin of her hand. She was so cold...

“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” Arthur said quietly.

Levi didn’t reply. She smelled wrong. Like sunshine and rosewater and wildflowers, yes, but there was something missing. Something was lost in her scent when she died, the essence of her, gone to the wind.

“She made a choice,” Arthur said. “She chose you.”

“I know,” Levi croaked.

“She knew it was dangerous. She knew she might-”

“Shut your mouth,” Levi snarled at him, squeezing her lifeless hand.

Arthur went silent.

The grass fluttered in the wind, little waves across the clearing.

Tony sat a distance away, watching him. He could feel the man’s eyes on his back.

Levi could not remember what happened the prior night. He had vague impressions, still frames, blood-soaked, moonlit images. But nothing concrete. Tony had said that, when he walked into the camp, his eyes had been glazed and unfocused. Unresponsive.

He had clutched Rosa to his chest, unwilling to let her go, snarling at anyone that got too near.

She’d been dead before he’d climbed out of the creek.

The Santa Cruz pack had met up for a pack bonding night. A bonfire, drinks, a barbecue. Like San Francisco, they all got together when they could, all gathered to reaffirm their bonds and make sure everyone smelled like pack.

Tony said it was auspicious timing. Levi thought it was a bad omen.

He thought about Will, with his tarnished revolver. What had become of the San Francisco pack? To Elizabeth and Baxter, Jace and Rhea, the people who had helped him, who had protected him, who had shown him that being a wolf wasn’t an end, it was a chance at a new beginning.

Carlo, a man who was familiar and not, had picked Derrick up where he’d collapsed in the water. Carlo had brown skin, kissed by the heat of too many sunny days, and lines at the corners of his mouth where his smile had dug trenches, like a canyon carved by a river. He was a younger man, maybe thirty years of age.

He hadn’t had much reason to smile last night.

Derrick had been in bad shape. If the pack had not been gathered that night, he would have certainly died, lungs filled with his own blood. Instead, his life had been saved by wolves. Tanya was an orthopedic surgeon; Kyle had been a trauma medic in the Gulf War.

Derrick had enjoyed a few grey hours of painless sleep, soothed to unconsciousness by drugs, as they had worked.

Morphine, not elephant tranquilizer.

Arthur’s hand rubbed his back. The man didn’t say anything. His presence was comfortable, familiar, reassuring. Levi leaned against it and felt the barest pulse of something. A blue thread that tied them together, warm and calming.

Levi sat in the grass by Rosa’s feet and cried until he couldn’t muster any more tears.

Tony and Carlo helped Levi rebuild the bonfire. The cement platform had been some kind of art installation at some point, but it had long ago fallen to disrepair. Red and orange and purple graffiti danced in brilliant patterns across the charred surface, obviously recent work. Levi thought about a sunset on a quiet afternoon. He thought he recognized little motifs of wolves, howling, done in the artful swirls of a practiced graffiti artist.

Grafitti-ist? Was that a word?

The prior night’s bonfire was still smoldering on the platform, reduced to embers but with some life in it still. Levi, Tony, and Carlo stacked up wood and branches on the embers and gave the fuel time to catch.

“Who was she?” Tony asked.

Levi cleared his throat. Swallowed. Couldn’t think of anything to say.

Who was Rosa? Who was Levi to try to sum up her... her everything?

“The day we met,” Levi explained, willing his eyes to stay clear, because he’d cried enough. “The day we met, I found a cat lodged in a gutter pipe. I had been walking to my car, but I heard a noise, and it ended up being this angry tomcat wedged in a little tube. No one was home at the house, so I tried to get it out, and it hissed and thrashed inside the drainage pipe... But it wouldn’t budge.”

The fire grew, orange and flitting red, letting off pale white smoke into the morning air. The smell of it filled Levi’s senses.

“Then I jumped, because suddenly she was just... there. She kneeled next to me, inspecting the pipe. I didn’t even hear her come up. She smelled good. She smelled so nice that I didn’t even hear the first several words out of her mouth. And when I asked her to repeat herself, she gave me this wonderful smile, all teeth and green eyes...”

He shuddered, rubbing at his arms. Even standing next to the flame he felt cold, like the chill had seeped into his bones.

“She made me walk to the store and buy a stick of butter. Can you believe that? She made me go buy a stick of butter at the convenience store. Then grabbed the stick of butter, smeared it all over the edge of the drainage pipe... and just... popped the cat out.”

“She had just... held the cat in her arms. The big angry furball stopped thrashing, stopped snarling, and cuddled up to her like it was the most normal thing in the world. She said her name was Rosa. She said I had a very nice smile. She said I had pretty eyes, and that it was good of me to stop and help an animal in need.”

Levi looked down at the little red wolf painted on the concrete slab. Looked into its little eye as it howled.

“I asked her if she would like to get coffee with me. She said she’d love to. I asked her when she’d be free. She held out the cat and said that she’d be free as soon as I took my new roommate home.” Levi laughed, and it sounded like an empty thing.

“She was important to you,” Tony said. And it ached, because of course she was, of course she was important to him.

"Yes,” he said, voice quiet.

He looked up and managed to meet Tony’s eyes. Something thrummed under the surface, that thin blue thread that said “mine” and “ours” and “pack” and “family.” He looked back down.

“Do you think she got what she wanted?” Tony asked. “Do you think she thought it was worth it?”

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Levi didn’t reply. He didn’t need to wonder.

Levi had never received a gift so precious as Rosa’s answer to that question. It was his, now, to keep close to his heart.

They carried Rosa onto the pyre. All four of them. Levi, Tony, Carlo, and Arthur. She burned up, her ashes drifting off into the redwoods above, gone into the wind.

Carlo put a hand on Levi’s shoulder as her body turned to ash. Levi hugged him so tightly that he thought the man might break. Carlo rubbed Levi’s back in the way he always had, when they were kids, when they would run and play in the creek.

“You smell like him, a little,” Carlo muttered. “Creek water.”

“Do I? I guess that makes sense.”

“He’s really gone?”

Levi nodded against Carlo’s shoulder. It was weird, because Carlo was both familiar and not. A friend from a past life, Arthur’s memories bleeding into his own. He knew this person, but Carlo didn’t know him.

Still, it was nice.

They pulled themselves apart and Levi looked at the base of the fire as it burned down.

“Well. I guess you and I are best friends now,” Carlo mused.

“How do you figure?”

“Well, transitive property and all that shit. Obviously.”

Levi coughed, startled by the desire to laugh. “Don’t you start throwing math at me, I hate math.”

“Everyone hates math man; it comes with being alive.”

“I met someone who liked math. Once. I think he’s in an asylum now.”

Carlo chuckled. “Those don’t even exist anymore dude.”

“They built one, just for him, because liking math is insane. It’s called a university, and it’s a horrible place.”

Carlo socked him in the arm, and Levi grinned as he rubbed at the spreading soreness on his bicep.

“Carlo’s different,” Arthur said to him that evening.

He was sitting next to Derrick in an empty apartment. The Santa Cruz pack owned a few properties in town, a sort of pack trust so they could help their members when needed. They had moved a bed into this empty apartment, part of a complex the pack owned, so that Derrick would have somewhere safe to recuperate. The place had no furniture, aside from the bed, a little wooden chair that Levi currently occupied, and a standing lamp that flickered in the corner.

“He’s grown a lot,” Levi commented. Because he had, and Levi knew it, because so many memories had seeped into his head that he could barely tell them apart from his own.

“He’s matured,” Arthur agreed.

“Is that a good thing?”

Levi remembered, Arthur remembered, a boy who loved crass jokes, a boy with scuffed, knobby knees, covered in bandages.

“Carlo and Martin were my best friends,” Arthur said with a warm smile. “God, we used to cause so much trouble. Tony would chase us around, snapping at us, every time. You know those little paper firework poppers? The ones that you throw at the ground?”

“Snaps,” Levi provided.

Arthur nodded furiously. “Snaps. We would tape them down to the brake pedal on people’s cars. That way, when they pushed down on the pedal, bang!”

Levi laughed manically.

“Tony chased us around, snapping his teeth at us like an angry dog when we did it to him. He took it to our parents. Rich grounded me for two weeks, even though he admitted it was funny.”

“What about the-”

“The hats!” Arthur barked, reading his mind. Possibly literally. “Pack bonding night. Winter time, chilly out, everyone was wearing beanies. We stood by the path into the clearing-”

“And gave everyone special ‘pack hats’ to wear-”

“New policy!” Arthur beamed. “Tony’s orders. For bonding.”

“What did they say again?” Levi asked, just to hear his best friend say the words.

“They said ‘We’ve got fashion sense, we’re wear-wolves'.”

They both groaned, and it was good.

“So dumb,” Levi grinned.

“Not even a good werewolf joke,” Arthur beamed.

“How do you know if a werewolf is stupid?”

“Huh?”

“Howls at full glasses of milk.”

Arthur blinked at him. Then his eyes widened. “Oh! Because they look like a full moon.”

“You’re exactly who that joke is targeting.”

“You know,” Arthur complained, “I feel like I’ve been a comic relief character since that train hit me.”

“Died and went to clown school.”

“Shut up!”

They laughed again, and God, it was warm. It was everything. It seemed to stretch on and on, like the strife and terror and loss of the past week wasn’t tearing them to pieces.

“What about-”

“No-” Arthur wheezed.

“What about the time Martin filled water balloons with whipped cream?”

Arthur guffawed. “Tina was so angry! She looked like she was going to skin us!”

“She almost caught you too!”

“Ah, fuck, we had to climb the service ladder behind that grocery store to escape-!”

“You were up there for eight hours!”

“She wouldn’t give up!”

“She could smell you guys; she just couldn’t figure out where you were.”

It was a long while before they managed to stop laughing for long enough to breathe. Arthur wiped a tear from his eye.

“You’ve matured too,” Arthur mused eventually.

Levi gave a tiny smile, looking down at the carpet of the bedroom. The monitors attached to Derrick’s body beeped and ticked. Dust motes danced in the sunbeams flitting through the

“Is that what you call it?”

“I mean it when I say it.”

“If I’ve matured, it’s only because I’ve been acting like a child.”

“Maybe,” Arthur teased.

They were quiet for a few moments, listening to the beeping of the monitors, to the cars passing by on the road outside.

“Thank you,” Levi said.

“For what?” Arthur asked, even though he knew.

“Thank you for staying, Arthur. For... helping me get through this.”

“You’re my brother, Levi.”

Levi nodded. He glanced at Derrick, watched the shaking rise and fall of the man’s chest. “You have to go,” he said.

Arthur let out a small whimper.

“I-”

“Arthur, I’ve been holding onto you since the day you died. We can’t do that forever. I have to move on with my life, and you... you should be running with the moon. You should be running with your pack.”

Arthur let silence sit, heavy, in the air between them.

“My father always said that I needed him,” Levi said quietly. “He said that I needed a firm hand. That I needed guidance. And, in a way, he was right. I did need guidance. But I didn’t need the kind he gave me, Arthur. I didn’t need to be told how to live my life. I didn’t need to be regimented and structured, to be forced down a path. I didn’t need control.”

Arthur hung his head at Levi’s side.

“I needed someone to show me how to be happy,” Levi continued. “I needed someone to show me it was okay to be myself. To tell dumb jokes, to laugh, to run in the woods. I needed to be taught that it’s okay to be who I want to be, instead of who someone else wants me to be. You showed me that, Arthur.”

“I can stay,” Arthur said quietly, voice nearly a whisper. “I can hold on. If you need me. Rosa just died, Derrick is hurt, and I... I can stay.”

“I know you would stay if I asked you too,” Levi said, putting a hand on Arthur’s shoulder and marveling at the way it felt like it was real. Like the man had weight.

“Are you scared?”

Arthur thought about that.

“No,” he said at last. “No, I’m not scared, not of this. I’ve been ready since that night on the tracks. Life is... Life is life. It ends.”

Levi thought of the stars, dying one by one. Looking up at the sky was a glimpse into the past. The light traveled thousands, tens of thousands of years to hit his retinas. In that time, things changed. Stars died, collided with their neighbors, were born anew in the brilliant haze of stellar nurseries. One day, every star would die. Every black hole would radiate its energy into the void until it disappeared completely. Every planet would go cold all the way through and freeze in the black.

But they had time.

“I’m not scared of death, Levi. I’m already dead,” Arthur said softly, like the gentle beat of a drum. Each word was an impact, soft though it was. “But I’m scared for you. I’m worried that I’ll leave you when you still need me. That I’ll leave you alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Levi said, thinking of the warmth of the thread that tied them together. It buzzed, taut and wonderful, the rhythm of twin heartbeats playing across it. He thought of Elizabeth and Baxter, he thought of Jace and Rhea, of Will. He thought of a humid room filled with life, strangers eager to know him, to embrace him. He thought of Rosa, dragging him through the crowd. “I’ll have the pack. It’ll take some time to get used to them, to get to know them... but I’ll have the pack.”

Arthur chuckled, and the sound was suddenly strange in this place, where it had been normal only moments before. “Okay, Levi. Okay. But you have to promise me something when I go.”

“And what’s that?”

“Sing me home, Levi. Sing me home, and then live your life, the way you want to live it.”

“I can do that,” Levi said with a watery smile. He leaned back in the chair. The wood of it creaked. He heard Derrick breathe. He heard Arthur breathe. He let his eyes slip shut.