Chapter 269 Lucia's Concern
POV: Lucia | The Shelter, Rookeries
I am five years old and I understand more than adults think I understand, which is a thing I have known for approximately two years and which I have not told most adults because telling adults that you understand more than they think produces a specific response in adults that is not useful, which is that they become more careful about what they say around you and therefore you understand less, which is the opposite of what I want.
What I understand right now is that the adults are frightened and that the frightened quality is different from the frightened quality they had five years ago, which I do not remember but which Isla has described to me and which has the quality of something I know the shape of from the stories even if I do not know it from experience. The current frightened quality is quieter and more internal, the frightened quality of people who have built something and who are watching it be threatened rather than the frightened quality of people who are in the middle of something already happening.
Isla is at the medical desk when I find her, which is where Isla is in the mornings, and she has the concentrated quality she has when she is managing something complex, which means she is doing two things at once, the desk thing and the managing thing, and I sit on the stool beside the desk and I wait for the concentrated quality to reduce before I ask my question.
"Why are people fighting about Finn?" I say, when the quality reduces. "He's nice."
Isla looks at me with the expression she uses when she is deciding which version of a true thing is the right version for me specifically, which is a calculation I can see her doing and which I have come to understand means the full true thing is coming rather than the reduced version that adults produce when they have decided children cannot manage the full version.
"Grown-ups have complicated rules about who gets to be in charge," she says. "And some grown-ups think Finn should be in charge because of who his father is, even though Callum has been doing the job for five years and doing it well."
"That doesn't make sense," I say.
"No," she says. "It doesn't. But the rules that don't make sense are often the ones that people protect most carefully, because if they admitted the rules don't make sense they would have to change them, and changing them is hard."
I think about my own position, which I understand in the way that I understand things, which is completely and from the inside, because my position is the thing I live in rather than something I observe. I am probationary. This is the word that the adults use when they think I am not listening, which I always am, and probationary means that my being here and being recognized is not settled but is something that continues only as long as certain conditions are met, and the conditions include Callum being Alpha and the Rookeries being autonomous and both of those things now have a question mark over them in the form of eighty wolves in the East End with a seven-year plan.
If Finn becomes Alpha and if the people who want Finn to become Alpha control what Finn's Alpha position means, then the probationary conditions change and the change has a specific direction, which is toward the traditionalist position, which is that born wolves and pureblood wolves should lead and that hybrid children on probation are a problem rather than a community member.
I have been a community member my whole life and I have not thought about whether I am one, which is the specific privilege of not having to think about it, and now I am thinking about it, which is a different kind of thinking from any I have done before.
"What if Finn becomes Alpha?" I say. "Would they still want me here?"
Isla looks at me with the expression that tells me the full true thing is definitely coming because the reduced version would be insulting to what I just asked.
"Some of them wouldn't," she says. "The ones who are using Finn's claim to push their own position about what the pack should be. Those people do not want you here regardless of who is Alpha." She looks at me directly. "But Finn is not those people. Finn is a seven-year-old who told Parliament that Uncle Callum earned his position and that earning matters more than being born to something. He is not the tool they are trying to make him."
I think about Finn, who arrived three days ago and who looked at everything in London with the quality of someone for whom everything is new and therefore everything is interesting, and who sat in the shelter courtyard and counted the pigeons and told me their specific flight patterns, and who has Cormac's jaw in the way that I have Valentina's eyes, which is to say something of someone who is not here is visible in someone who is.
"We're both supposed to be something," I say, thinking about it while I say it rather than before. "Let's just be friends instead."
It is an idea rather than a plan and I do not know yet what it produces, and I am thinking about it in the way I think about things that I do not have a framework for yet, which is slowly and from multiple directions, and I am still thinking about it when the thing happens.
I do not decide for it to happen. It is not a decision. It is the specific thing that happens when a body has something in it that is larger than the regulatory framework currently managing it and when the thing encounters a strong enough feeling to bypass the framework, and the feeling is the specific feeling of being afraid and safe at the same time, which is the feeling of sitting with Isla thinking about belonging, and my body produces in response to that feeling something I have not produced before.
The wolf ears arrive first. I can feel them rather than see them, the specific shift of the cartilage that is not the same as the full transformation and which I have never done before. Then the fangs, which are not wolf fangs but the specific sharper quality of vampire dentition, which also I have never done before.
Both at once. Which nobody has seen before. I know this from Isla's face, which has the specific quality of a medical professional encountering something outside their existing category system, the specific careful quality of someone who is very deliberately not panicking.
I look at Isla.
"Is that supposed to happen?" I say.