But even that fell away in the force of his vision. He saw a baby girl like Gianna, only with darker hair and luminous eyes. She’d have a laugh like Cat and a brain like his, and he wouldn’t try to monetize any crazy invention she came up with the moment she came up with it. She could play and play with endless resources and with a mother to make her go outside and put her paws in the dirt regularly and teach her magic that defied physics and the laws of the space-time continuum.
He felt his aunt’s presence beside him. She didn’t touch him this time. In fact, a pool of space was forming around him as all the wolves floated in and out of the kitchen to get their chicken.
“It’s time to come home now,” Nonna whispered.
He rounded on his aunt with almost a snarl, and the circle around them got a lot bigger a lot faster. Maria shuffled Gianna and Cat closer to the fireplace and started loudly listing every Italian vegetarian food she could think of, as if anyone on earth ate olive oil, olives, and lemons for a meal.
“Why did you send me here, truly, Nonna?”
“Because wolves in the city?—”
“What? Lose their sperm count? Lose their wolf? You don’t know why some kids have wolves and some kids don’t. No one knows that.”
Finally, she did touch him, gripping his hand. “Not a single child has shifted, Mateo. And you spend your days worried about the security of strangers’ money on the other side of the world while your own pack dies.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, understanding for the first time what she thought was going to happen to him in Colorado.
“That’s why you sent me here and not to Italy. You thought I couldn’t get online here. You thought I would work less and somehow mind the pack more.”
“You do hate your job,” Nonna said with confusion.
“I don’t.”
“You work all the time,tesoro, and you’re so exhausted. All you do is complain. All you do is see problems.”
“That’s the job. Literally, my job is to see the problems. And fix them. Do you like the money well enough? You spend enough. The one doesn’t come without the other.” He regretted his words the moment they left his tongue, but it didn’t stop him.
“There are one thousand rich assholes who can do that job to talk to China and solve their problems.”
“Wow, so Taiwan and China are different places, and a thousand?”
“A thousand. A dozen. One. Your pack needs you.”
Impulsively, he wrapped the old woman in a gentle hug. Even with shifter strength, she felt like a bird in his arms. “Nonna, even if I quit my job and never did another day’s work in my life…” He ignored the terrifying boredom that yawned within him. “There are no guarantees that there will be any more wolves. We just don’t know.”
He looked at Cat again, trying to parse his pack’s desperation and failure with the story she told of witches’ spells. Could a witch fix it? What would happen to the children of a woman with her own magic? He gasped, shocked by the implications.
The usual way an alpha guaranteed wolves was sleeping around with a bunch of different women and waiting to see whose kids shifted before marrying them. He was indifferent to the idea of a creator, but he was just Catholic enough to hate that. He didn’t believe enough to save himself, but surely, he should save his children for marriage.
He thought of Cat’s hand on Gianna’s cheek. He thought of the power running through her veins, the same magic that created shifters.
He left his aunt and stalked through the wolves toward her. “Would you like a tour?”
She blushed to the roots of her hair, which meant everyone else knew exactly what he was trying to say. He didn’t care.
The scent of roses bowled him over as he pulled her away from his family, straight past Nonna glaring daggers at both of them.
He wasn’t so lost to all sense to pull her immediately upstairs, so he walked her through the kitchen on the right side of the ground floor and then across to the basement, where there was more endless seating, and then all the way up to the top of the house to an attic window they could not see out of in the darkness.
She snickered as they looked out into the black.
“What?” he asked.
“I didn’t think you were really taking me on a tour. And no one else did either. Even your 90-year-old grandmother knew.”
“She’s eighty-eight, or thereabouts, and she’s my great aunt.”
“Why the tour?”
