by Carrie Jones
“No, they wouldn’t,” I argue.
But it’s pointless. The sergeant wants to hear what happened to her. Kelsey is sitting up again and an ambulance is on its way. She tells us that she was held in a cage with Chrystal’s dad. He’d been abducted at the university, he said, while trying to find a professor friend of his. He didn’t see who did it.
But she saw. Kelsey’s voice becomes a whisper as she talks about the wolf. And then the men who helped him.
“When I woke up, I was in this closet. It was super small. There was duct tape over my mouth and around my wrists and ankles..”
“They like their duct tape,” Chrystal says.
Sergeant Mitchell gives her a look.
“So they open the door and drag us out. Then, they’re just throwing us into the back of a pickup truck and we all drove out to the woods somewhere. They yank me out and sit me next to this tree and just wrap even more duct tape around me. So now I’m totally stuck to this tree and they drive off with Mr. Lawson Smith.”
Chrystal makes a horrified noise and she keeps patting Kelsey’s leg. Galahad comes over and flops across Kelsey’s feet. She doesn’t even react. I think she’s in shock.
“Go on,” says Sergeant Mitchell.
“When we were in the truck, he told me the wolf was looking for you. He wanted me to warn you that you were the prize. That’s what he called it—the prize.” Kelsey’s voice shivers, but Chrystal doesn’t flinch.
“How long were you tied to the tree?” Sergeant Mitchell asks.
Sirens sound in the distance.
Kelsey shakes. She seems so tired. “Until, like, an hour ago.”
“And this was the closest house?” he asks.
She nods. “It felt like I walked forever.”
“Interesting coincidence,” Sergeant Mitchell says.
“I saw him change. He showed me. While we were at the tree. He stripped off his clothes and took several deep breaths, like he was getting ready to lift a heavy load, and then hair started to sprout all over his body. His arms and legs thickened, like someone was blowing him up. Like an air mattress or something like that. His face was contorted with pain. He fell to his knees first. His jaw got longer and I could see his teeth growing in his mouth. His mouth was like growing and moving to make room for the new shape. Then he fell flat on the ground, rolled to his side, and curled up in a fetal position for the rest of the change.
“Afterward, he stood up and howled. He ran off into the woods. I haven’t seen him since.”
“How did you get away?” Chrystal asks.
“A rock. I got a rock from the ground. It was under my butt and it was super uncomfortable. It had a jagged edge on it and I used it to saw through the duct tape. It took a so long because they used so much freaking tape to hold me against the tree.” She gulps her tea, refills her glass, then looks at Chrystal. Her hand is shaking. “I—I—I’d like to call my mom.”
* * *
The ambulance comes. Kelsey heads to the hospital. Mom will meet her there. Sergeant Mitchell takes a stern tone with Chrystal.
“Do not do anything stupid,” he orders.
“Of course not,” Chrystal lies.
The sergeant leaves. The sheriff’s two deputies who had remained in the yard most of the time get in their car and follow Sergeant Mitchell up our driveway.
“We have work to do,” Chrystal says. She goes to her dad’s work area and starts riffling through his papers. She pulls one out and shows it to me. “Start reading from the bottom. That’s my name and my mom’s. And my grandma’s. Every seventh generation they are in all caps. Mine is in all caps.”
She rubs her palms over her hair and pushes hard at her head like she’s trying to force something to go past her. “If you count the names between Adelind Gersten and Krimhilde Rothstein. There are six.”
“Krimhilde is the seventh,” I say, and I remember the email I read, what the werewolf said. “Seven generations?” I ask.
“Yes, Logan,” Chrystal says. “Now count the names between Krimhilde and mine. Six—I really am the seventh. Krimhilde Rothstein is my ancestor, and she was allegedly the mate of a werewolf. But she wasn’t.…”
“I don’t understand,” David says.
“I was on the phone with my mom and she laughed at the mate thing when I told her,” Chrystal says. “My mom laughs at most things like this, so I wasn’t—you know—surprised that she didn’t believe it, but she insisted this was wrong.”
“What was wrong? Your dad’s chart?” David asks.
“No. Who Krimhilde was. What she did,” Chrystal says. Her eyes have an almost fanatical gleam. I’ve never seen her like this before, honestly. “She wasn’t a werewolf’s mate. She was a hunter.”
“Ha! And you don’t even like guns!” David slaps his leg. It’s the most happy any of us has been in a long time.
Chrystal doesn’t crack a smile. “Not that kind of hunter. A werewolf hunter. She killed a werewolf.”
She pulls up a webpage that she’s bookmarked on her computer and there are words in another language and a sketch of a woman holding the severed head of a wolf. “I translated it.”
“So the werewolf isn’t trying to mate with you?” I ask. “He’s just trying to kill you? He’s going to an awful lot of trouble.”
“He’s playing me. He’s playing us. This is about revenge. He wants us as scared as possible, as betrayed as possible,” she says. “But there’s more. I know. I’m pretty sure I know who it is.”
Another click. The screen shifts to the same guy I sat with on the bench, the same one who gave me the blood.
“Holy—” David and Mr. Thompson and Mr. Davis swear simultaneously, which normally would be humorous, but not now.
“That’s who you talked to, right?” Chrystal asks me. “On the bench.”
“The professor? It’s been the damn professor. I told you that you can’t trust those professors,” Mr. Davis says. To be fair, Mr. Davis says you can’t trust anyone who doesn’t work with their hands. David starts to argue the point with him.
Chrystal holds up her hand to stop them. “According to my dad’s research, and this book I found”—she waves at a pile of papers on the corner of the desk—“a werewolf lives for about ten generations of men. That is to say, about two hundred and fifty years.” She pauses. “According to the translation of that story I just showed you, that werewolf had a child.”
“Whoa. Badass,” David says.
I glare at him, but Chrystal just nods.
She sifts through papers and moves a couple other books until she finds another battered book with an old library call number handwritten on the spine. She opens the book to a page marked with a purple sticky note and begins to read.
“‘It’s explained that these women,’ like my ancestor, ‘in order to preserve their health, suck the blood of men they have seduced. The men fall into a kind of lycanthropy. They are characterized by excessive body hair, index fingers that match the middle finger in length, and typically have hollow, mournful eyes and fingernails much thicker than the average man. At the waxing of the moon they are doomed to become beasts when God’s light vanishes from the land. Such a curse will last nightly until the waning of the moon leaves the sky dark. Being larger and stronger than the natural wolf, these creatures become “wolf-kings,” and their subjects must supply them with the finest meats.’ And that’s how it allegedly started.”
Chrystal turns the page. We all sit transfixed, waiting for her to continue.
“‘A story from the Balkans tells of one such witch, Lanya, who seduced and attacked a priest of the church named Heinrich Lanzkranna. This priest was a convert to Christendom and had risen to his current position through much pious devotion. Upon awaking from his cursed slumber and finding himself defiled, he cast off his priestly office and summoned the wrath of his old stone gods, cursing Lanya and her descendants so that in every seventh generation they can find no love save after they kill the beast he himself bec
ame. He then took Lanya as his wife and returned to the mountain village of his pagan youth.’”
She pauses and I have to speak up. “Wait! What does that mean?”
“It means Chrystal can’t love anyone until after she’s killed one,” David says. “Even I got that. But that’s totally stupid. Sorry. A lot of this is totally stupid.”
“I’m not arguing with you, but in this hyperbolic stupidity, there’s some truth. That’s the point. You have to look past the stuff that makes no sense, the hyperbole, and go find the nuggets of truth. Right? There’s more,” Chrystal says, interrupting David when he tries to speak again. “Let me finish. It says this German historian and preacher, Johannes Geiler, reports finding a written confession sent to a church in Hungary in which a woman admitted to being the bride of a known werewolf. In the confession, she said it was a curse of her ancestors that every seventh generation would kill the ruvanush—that means ‘wolfman’—or be killed.” Chrystal pauses and looks at each of us. “That confession came from Adelind Gersten, who said her mother and grandmother told her she was descended from a witch mother and sacred man of the mountains remembered only by the name Wolf-King.
“Then it says that, according to the tenets of the pagan belief system, the curse would continue until the last male progeny of the original ruvanush was destroyed. Then it says he will probably kill her. But that might not happen,” she adds quickly. “I mean, obviously, one of my ancestors succeeded. It’s just that the wolf she killed wasn’t the only one left.”
We all sit quietly for a moment, sipping our tea. Mr. Thompson has rejoined us. He breaks the silence to say, “I can’t believe this. I mean—I do. I’m not saying you’re a liar, girl, but—”
“Something about that doesn’t add up,” I say. “If these women had babies that were werewolves…”
“It sounds like a fairy tale for kids to me,” David’s dad says.
“Or an episode of Supernatural,” Chrystal adds, but her voice is strained. “Believe me, I know how it sounds.”
“But it’s our lives,” David says.
“Yeah. Or our deaths,” I groan. “Both of our dads’ lives are on the line, Chrystal. You know that, right?”
She nods. Her face is fierce like a warrior’s. “Oh yeah. I know.”
32
CHRYSTAL
“My plan? Well, that’s changed a bit now,” I tell them. There are all these men with guns in this tiny kitchen space. Add in the dogs, and I feel sort of claustrophobic. I get up and pace over to the sink before I turn around again and face them. They stand there, all different heights and shades of skin, and every single one looks tired and worried. They have identical expressions on their faces—like they are waiting for orders. I don’t have orders. I have thoughts. “I thought we could hunt him out and capture him before night, before he turns.”
“Why has the plan changed, then?” David asks. He’s impatient like me, much more alpha than Logan.
“Because of what Kelsey said…,” I start to explain.
Logan says it for me. “She saw him change during the day, which necessitates a much higher level of caution.”
“It means we can’t count on him staying human,” I finish. “But he’s still weak, right, Logan?”
He rubs at his ears, takes a big breath, and blurts out, “Most likely.”
“And on the bonus side, we know his name now, we know where he works, we know how to trace him—” I add.
“But…” Logan interrupts. He looks into my eyes. His are so beautiful. I want to stand next to him, touch his arm, anything to make sure he’s real. “If he knows that Kelsey escaped, then he also knows that we can find him at his normal haunts.”
“Exactly.” Mr. Davis leans back against the counter. Galahad whines for treats at my feet and Mr. Thompson tries to shoo him away. He doesn’t budge.
I turn to Mr. Davis and say, “So I’m bait again. Instead of surprising him, we have to lure him.”
For a minute we are all silent and thoughtful.
I start thinking aloud. “How do we make a cure? Do we know that? That’s the most important thing. That’s our primary objective; then our secondary objective is stopping him.”
“Primary objective? Only Logan would fall in love with a rocker chick who talks like a commando.” David looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. Logan elbows him in the gut.
“Th-th-the cops have rubbed off on me,” I stammer, motioning toward the cruiser parked outside. Logan shakes his head like he wants to kill David, but it’s really okay. I try so hard to be normal and logical and talk like a regular person, but sometimes I just fail. It doesn’t matter. I turn back to check on Mr. Davis, who looks like a wild man with his too-big, worried eyes.
David starts in on the Internet while Logan rushes through books. Mr. Thompson and Mr. Davis and I start looking too. Then Logan yells, “Got it!”
We huddle around him as he reads through a page of an ancient, smelly book. His finger points at lines as he talks. “For one dose? One person? A quarter of a cup.” He turns away, paces two steps, pivots, does it again, rubbing his forehead the way he does when he’s upset about something or deep in thought. “Yes, yes. Right. A quarter cup should do.”
David and his dad exchange a look. Galahad flops onto his side, wagging his tail.
“Here’s how it goes.” I rub Galahad’s side gently with my foot and say, “We are going to shoot him with animal tranquilizers. Mr. Davis said he can get us some of those, and a couple guns to shoot them. Then we’re going to shove him into the trailer. When he’s subdued, we’ll take some blood. When we’re finished … We’ll kill him with wolfsbane or silver bullets.”
“How?” Logan asks.
“We’ll use one of my dad’s needles,” I say. He has needles. He’s weird like that. He also has ancient texts and silver bullets and crosses and holy water. I pull one of Dad’s bags from under the table. It’s open from when I got into it earlier. I pull out a wooden box and open the lid to show the silver bullets. “Will these work in any of your guns?”
Logan pulls a bullet from the box and holds it up. “It’s a .30-.30,” he says, looking to David, who nods. Logan hands the bullet to him.
“So I should load up with these?” David asks.
“Yes,” I tell him.
“What if…,” Logan begins, then stops, thinking. I wait him out. “I have my bow upstairs. What if we squeezed some juice out of the wolfsbane onto one of my arrows and I shot him with it? Would that kill him?”
I shrug. “Probably. I don’t know.”
“What if we really kill him?” Mr. Thompson asks. “If what you say is true, and he’s really a man. Well, I mean, that could be seen as murder.”
I look him straight in the eyes. “Then he dies.”
“But there will be consequences,” Mr. Thompson says.
I swallow before I say, “There always are.”
* * *
I wash up before we go. Logan meets me at the top of the stairs, takes me by the arm, and says, “Chrystal?”
I stare up at him, at his big eyes and all-over-the-place hair. He’s washed off a bit too, but not a real shower. He’s just stuck his head under the faucet and put on new clothes. He looks a bit silly in a skater T-shirt, holding his bow, but adorable, too.
“What, Logan?”
He cocks his head. “Did you mean that? About killing Dr. Borgess?”
“He isn’t Dr. Borgess. He’s a monster. He has killed people. He has no qualms about killing people, about letting your dad die, about taking Kelsey, about killing women and cops. I knew he was creepy when I met him … I just … I trusted him to help us anyway. He played us so hard. I mean, seriously, when I met him he flat out told me the monster’s motive was vengeance. I was too busy being a skeptic to even realize he was actually giving us a hint.” I meet Logan’s eyes. “I hate that. And I hate that I resisted believing my dad for so long. If I hadn’t, maybe everyone would be safe. Maybe this would
have ended a lot earlier. I was just so stubborn and selfish. All I wanted to do was get to New York and to not believe, you know? It hurts to think I caused this.”
“You didn’t cause this. Dr. Borgess caused this. I caused this. I didn’t want to believe it either and I actually saw it and I still didn’t want to believe it.”
Someone coughs downstairs. There’s a low murmur of men’s voices. Mr. Davis has arranged for some other guys to watch the farm, but I figure if I’m not here, it’s pretty safe.
I focus on Logan. He wants so badly for everything to be good, for life to fit into poetry lines, for the landscape to be beautiful, and for the people to match that beauty. He reaches out and touches my hair. “What happened to the girl who didn’t believe in me, who didn’t believe in werewolves, who shrank away from the thought of violence?”
“She saw a monster, Logan. She saw a monster and she knows she has to stop it to protect the people she loves.” I kiss his cheek and hurry down the stairs before I have to look into his eyes again. “And once I do that, I will have a lollipop and play a little bass, and maybe we could actually kiss again, okay?”
He smiles and snorts out a laugh. “Okay.”
* * *
There’s a place in the woods, not too far from the Jenningses’ property. There are tree stands in multiple positions there. Tree stands are these wooden platforms where Logan and his dad and sometimes their friends will hunt deer. Because they are hunters, they have things that mask their human scent. They rub this stuff all over their clothes and bodies and hair. They did this back at the house, but they do it again now that we’re in the woods. The sun will set pretty soon, and if the monster is stronger in the dark, we have to hurry.
“Deer pee,” David explains, grinning. “Elixir of the hunting gods.”
“It’s gross, but it works,” Logan adds, smiling.
“Like him enough to hug him when he smells like deer piss?” David asks.
“If he smelled like deer poo, I would still want to hug him,” I say, and to prove it I wrap my arms right around Logan’s trunk, pressing myself against him. I whisper, “I wish I could stay here forever.”