Comfort the Wolves

4. Lavender and Wax

Miss Finn circumvented all main roads—perhaps to keep their conspicuously large Thomas from prying eyes. Thomas, for his part, was making very little effort to blend in; his face was twisted in something between disgust and disbelief and he kept a handkerchief pressed firmly to his nose.

Not that Ivan blamed him much for the latter. The streets were so thin and the walls so bloated with age, they trapped their reek of waste in the river's steam, like water misting under a closed watch face. The smells layered on the roof of his mouth until all he could taste were acrid days of drink and bile.

"You know, Miss," Thomas said, angling his shoulders to fit between the buildings. "I wouldn't have said your neighbourhood was... well, posh, before. But this place here puts a lot into perspective."

Miss Finn had stopped at the end of the alley. The light came in that direction, silhouetting her shoulders and high-collared neck amidst the foul-smelling fog.

"I mean," Thomas continued, kicking a mouldy poster to the side. "I'm pretty sure the devil himself wouldn't- oh, hell. Look at that. Is that a corpse?"

"Thomas," Ivan's voice was tired. He saw the line of Miss Finn's shoulders crease with tension. "Be polite."

"It is a corpse," Thomas confirmed. "You both just stepped over a corpse. No second thought about it. I mean, what sort of place—"

Miss Finn turned, her skirts brushing the alley's blistered paint and stirring the fog in a way that had her scent reaching back towards them. Thomas cut himself off; Miss Finn, in this squalor, smelled like a lifeline, like the only air they should be breathing.

"Thomas, love," she began, doubling back in slow strides. The sun filtered through smog as if through coffee paper: blurring her face, but sketching in gold the line of her jaw and curve of her lips. "Let's try to keep your tourism notes a little more private, eh?" she suggested through her teeth.

Thomas swallowed. His handkerchief fluttered with his nod.

"Where's your corpse, then?" She stopped where he had been pointing and considered the body under the fog, curled against the wall with a bottle in hand.

Miss Finn sighed and gave the body a good kick. "Hey, Greg," she called, loud enough to startle Thomas. She kicked the man again, "Greg Nancy. You in there?"

The corpse groaned and swatted at her ankle.

"Not a corpse, then." Miss Finn gave Thomas a smile sweeter than her scent. "Sorry to disappoint, love." The smile became a baring of teeth and she turned back around. Ivan stepped against his wall to let her through.

Thomas gave his beta a look behind her back, seeking solidarity.

Ivan reached up and eased the handkerchief away from the pup's nose. "The Miss is right," he said, and tucked the handkerchief into the wolf's breast pocket. "Real people live here. Like..." Ivan looked down at the body between them. "Like Greg Nancy, here. So watch how you go."

He left Thomas to navigate his feelings about the corpse on his own, and followed Miss Finn out the alley and across the street to the chipped red paint of her altar's door.

While it was small and smelled of mildew and candle wax, the altar was pleasant in comparison to the alley: a little haven in the sewage.

Strips of the morning came through three windows, curving light around solitary kneelers. Two candles flickered like watchmen on either end of the altar. And behind that holy table, a mosaic of a woman and child spread welcoming arms in faded colours. The mosaic moulted in flecks of tile, but Ivan found the look in the woman's eye rather comforting.