As Silver Is to the Moon

by R A Watt

  Someone was there.

  I’m not proud to admit it, but I panicked a little. A bead of sweat trickled down my cheek. Lightning occasionally illuminated the room from the front windows.

  Crap.

  Maybe someone needed help. Maybe someone was being chased by a wolf. Maybe it was the wolf. Except a wolf couldn’t knock on a door.

  But a werewolf could.

  I tried to laugh at myself to ease my own tension.

  On either side of the big wooden door was a floor-to-ceiling privacy window, with white curtains covering each one. I tried to look through the somewhat transparent lace, but I couldn’t see anything, just blackness outside.

  If whoever was there saw my movement, I would have no choice but to open the door.

  Chancing it, I ever-so-slightly moved the curtain aside to look out on the porch. I could see nothing until the next flash of lightning lit up the sky.

  A wrinkled, elderly woman sat in an antique wooden wheelchair outside our front door. The winds blew her long, white hair in all directions, but she was looking down.

  My head snapped back with my heart in my throat. Surely she needed help, but she almost looked scarier than some guy dressed in black. The image of her wheelchair and wild hair flying all about terrified me.

  How did she get up the steps, alone, in a wheelchair?

  I sprinted back down the hall, deciding to let my dad handle this. I ran into his room and sat on the edge of his bed, keeping the lights off.

  “Dad?”

  His covers were still up and tight on the bed. It hadn’t been slept in.

  Knock knock knock.

  The old woman was knocking on the front door again. It sounded as loud as a sledgehammer in the still silence.

  I ran across the hall but Suzanne was gone as well, her bed neatly made.

  “Dad? Suze? Honey? Where is everyone?” I whispered in the hall.

  Returning to my room, I looked out the window into the yard and saw Dad’s car was gone. Had he taken Suzanne and Honey into town?

  The outer screen door squeaked in this distance; the old woman was working the door handle as I crept back into the front room.

  I was terrified, standing there staring at the door handle. The poor lady must need help, but my instincts kept me from opening it.

  In a flash of lightning, her silhouette appeared smudged up against the privacy window—she was trying to look inside.

  Tap tap tap on the glass pane.

  My phone. I needed my phone. It was in my room.

  Taking less and less care to be quiet, I ran to the bedroom. Frantically searching, I found it on the floor, unplugged and dead. Feeling around in the dark, I grabbed the charger and plugged it in. I sat trembling on the bed, waiting for my phone to turn on.

  Lightning flashed.

  In that split second, the old woman’s figure was outside my bedroom window, which was impossibly high in the air. There was no porch beneath my window; it must have been six feet to the ground.

  Tap tap tap on my window. There was no curtain now to hide behind in my room. She was staring right at me. In the darkness, her hair whirled around in the wind, but her features were hidden by the night.

  I froze, shaking, unable to move.

  She was seemingly floating outside my window in her chair.

  Another flash of light, and this time her face lit up. It was gray, sallow, and wrinkled. But her eyes—they were wide open, looking right into mine. Her mouth was gaping in an insidious smile with crooked brown teeth.

  Reaching forward with a gnarled hand, she banged on the glass until it shattered, and she began to laugh. A horrible, chilling, demonic laugh.

  The rain was now blowing furiously into my room through the broken glass, and I sat frozen in fear, feeling the drops wet my face as she struggled to climb in the window.

  I couldn’t move.

  Chapter 10

  I blacked out, unable to see, but sensed her in my room. On me. Licking me.

  Her putrid, warm tongue prodded my lips, nose, and face. Then she let out a soft whine. I jerked my eyes open in the dark. My arms were able to move again, and I grabbed at the intruding face to push it away.

  Only it wasn’t the woman anymore, it was the familiar face of Honey. She was standing on my bed, whining and licking me.

  I tried to sit up, pushing her back, disoriented and trembling. The clock read 2:23 a.m. as I leaned over and turned on my reading light. Outside, the wind was blowing rain through the screen and I got up to close the window. Honey just sat there on my bed, looking at me with her head cocked sideways, as if waiting for me to say something.

  My face was wet from her tongue, but the back of my neck and hair was, too, and the room suddenly felt so hot that I just lied on top of the covers to cool off.

  The old woman. Her cackle. The way she looked at me.

  Into me.

  I was still shaking. It was pretty much the most terrifying dream I’d ever had. Even Honey’s presence couldn’t calm me down, and she always did. Jumping off the bed, I crept into the hall and looked in my dad’s room, his ever-present light snore echoing off the walls.

  Ditto for Suzanne, minus for the snoring.

  Honey followed me into the front room, and I looked out the window expecting to see her. However, everything appeared normal. I felt the lock on the front door and was surprised it wasn’t engaged. Given the situation, this startled me; but since moving to the middle of nowhere we hadn’t been as careful about locking up. It didn’t seem like we needed to here. I locked it.

  A drop of sweat slid down the side of my face as I strode back to my room. Gathering up the top blanket and pillow, I walked to Suzanne’s door with Honey following, and I opened it as quietly as I could. Honey and I curled up on the floor together, and I hoped sleep wouldn’t take me back to old woman. Suzanne would be upset when she saw me lying in her room, but dealing with her fury would be much more calming than being alone for the rest of the night.

  The dream, the move, this town. Almost nothing was going right. I missed my simple life in New York. A killer wolf was stalking me; my neighbor was weird and had important news for me. And now this nightmare was stuck in my head, replaying itself over and over.

  It was almost an hour before sleep finally came for me.

  Suzanne was a deep sleeper. Honey and I were able to sneak out of the room just before eight on Sunday morning, and she didn’t wake until almost ten.

  It took her an hour to get ready, and we borrowed Dad’s car for the short drive. Suzanne was happy not to walk and she didn’t ask questions.

  The day was warm and sunny. The clouds from the night’s storm were gone.

  A perfect California day.

  Mrs. Leclair greeted us at the front door and suggested we go for a hike. There was a trail out behind her house that she liked to take in the mornings. She asked Suzanne about herself and how she liked Santa Isadora. It was pretty boring.

  I was scanning the trees, half listening, and half watching for something to come out and charge us. I was far from over my fear of the wolf.

  Clasping her hands together, Mrs. Leclair spoke a little louder, maybe to get my attention. “So, I wanted to discuss something with you both. Something of the utmost importance and something that will be difficult to digest. I’m afraid there aren’t any alternatives. If there were, I would be inclined to seek them first . . .” she trailed off, looking down as she walked.

  “Can you both promise to just listen, keep an open mind, and humor me?”

  Suzanne looked at me, then nodded. “Sure, of course, Mrs. Leclair.”

  “Splendid,” she said with a smile. “It has been my experience in this life that people see what they want to see, know what they want to know, and accept what their mind is capable of accepting. Believe me; I have seen a great many things that are unexplainable. And my late husband knew of even more. And we would know, we devoted much of our lives to it.

  “Luc and I came here alm
ost eleven years ago, to this small town from a not dissimilar-sized town in southern France. Our job there was complete, you see, and it was time to move on. Are either of you acquainted with the term lycanthropy?”

  “Like-ah-who?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Lycanthropy. The supposedly mythic ability to change into an animal, such as a wolf. A werewolf, to be precise.”

  Suzanne let out a snarky laugh. “Sure. Like Team Jacob, right?”

  “Excuse me?” Mrs. Leclair asked in her velvety French accent.

  Suzanne shook her head. “Nothing. Was a joke.”

  Mrs. Leclair continued. “Anyway—and please, hear me out—lycanthropy exists, for better or for worse. There are werewolves in this world. Lycanthropes. And there is one right here in Santa Isadora, and he seems to have taken to you, Teavan. I know it was him yesterday.”

  I was confused, shaking my head. “Wait. You think werewolves are real, and that there is one here that has it out for me?”

  “More or less.”

  “And how do you know this?” I asked.

  “It was our job, that’s how. That’s why we moved here and left France. They generally self-police themselves, through a Franco/Italian organization called the Gencara. In some regions of the world, factions have detached and no longer follow historic protocol. You see, tens of thousands of suspected werewolves were hanged in Europe in the last five centuries. Of course, most were likely innocent people, but nonetheless, it caused obvious distress and the need for secrecy.

  “Secret divisions of the French Gendarmerie and the Italian Carabinieri joined forces in the early 1800s to form the Gencara, an organization meant to create and enforce rules and protocols to be followed wherever lycans moved around the globe. Keeping a low profile was paramount.

  “However, like any group of people, there were dissenters to the rules, for their own reasons or because they simply didn’t care. The Gencara’s enforcement was generally enough to control this, until they truly spread across the globe over the last one hundred and fifty years. Policing the tight zone of Europe was one thing, but the world is another matter.”

  It was my turn to laugh, and I wondered how crazy this woman truly was. “So there are werewolf cops patrolling for lawbreakers. And let me guess, they go into special prisons with no full moon visible?”

  Mrs. Leclair didn’t crack a smile and a shadow crossed her features as she realized we weren’t buying it. “I only wish this was a laughing matter, Teavan. Luc and I would have lived our life much differently had we been ignorant of all of this. And I wish I was, to be honest. The single, the only reason I’m telling you both is I think you have been targeted. It would never be my wish to open anyone’s eyes to this world if it weren’t necessary. Little good can come of it.”

  I threw a rock against the trunk of a tree about ten yards away, noticing her grim facial expression. Crazy or not, she believed it. “Okay, so who is it? And why has he targeted me? I don’t know anyone here.”

  Mrs. Leclair looked at me, then to Suzanne. “I fear it will be both of you, and possibly your father.”

  Suzanne snorted. “Why me? What have I done?”

  “It is nothing either of you has done, nor your father. It was your grandfather, Hubert. He was . . . like us. Doing the things that needed to be done. He died in the line of duty, so to speak.”

  Now I knew she was crazy. Grandpa died of a heart attack.

  “Yeah, except Grandpa died of a heart attack,” Suzanne said, voicing my thoughts out loud.

  Mrs. Leclair looked confused. “No he didn’t. The official story was that he was met by a mountain lion or pack of coyotes on a hike. Ask anyone in town.”

  “My dad told us that Grandpa died of a heart attack,” I repeated.

  “Well, maybe he said that to spare you the visuals. But I can assure you he didn’t. And my Luc, well, he just went ‘missing’, but I know very well what happened. He’s another unexplained Santa Isadora statistic.”

  We had circled around her property and her house was not far ahead. I looked over, continuing her game. “Okay, so why us?”

  “I’m afraid Hubert didn’t finish the job, and he upset the last remaining lycan in the target family. I suspect revenge on you is the best he can do to avenge his brother’s death at your grandfather’s hands,” she said.

  Suzanne smiled. “So what are we supposed to do, nail a cross to the front door? Get some holy water?”

  Mrs. Leclair pursed her lips, looking at Suzanne with a stern and grave expression. “Kill him.”

  Chapter 11

  Suzanne’s eyes bulged. “What? Find this wolf and kill it?”

  The woman nodded. “Or in his human form. That might be easier.”

  Blood rushed to my head; I couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “You want us to kill some guy in town so that he won’t get us first. Are you insane?”

  Suzanne threw her hands up in the air. “No, Teavan, she’s completely nuts. Or seriously deranged to suggest this. I have a better idea, Geneviève. We go to the sheriff, tell him about your story, and that you want us to commit murder.”

  “That would be a mistake, Suzanne,” Mrs. Leclair said, motioning with her hand for Suzanne to relax. “I’m afraid Sheriff Vincent wouldn’t approve of you killing his remaining son.”

  A shudder went through me as that sunk in. “Vincent? As in Bruno Vincent?”

  She looked at me and nodded. “Yes. That Vincent family.”

  Now, I knew this was all the ridiculous ramblings of someone maybe on the edge of dementia, but the mention of Bruno hit home. It made things a bit more personal. I explained to them about my run-in with him at school. “The weird thing was when Bruno realized who I was, he seemed very excited about it,” I said.

  “Hubert killed his older brother, Grayson. Despite numerous warnings, he’d been losing control of his needs and killing animals. Luc and Hubert warned him a few years ago, as he had no mentor. His father does not have the curse and doesn’t know about it. All their extended family remains in Louisiana, if there are any left that have the bloodlines, so the poor boy had no idea what was happening to him,” she said as we approached the front of her house.

  “Needless to say, he chose wrongly once he got the taste for blood. Unfortunately, the warnings meant nothing to him, and things began to escalate when a hiker disappeared. Luc aimed to have a final talk with the boy, explain the consequences of his actions. It wasn’t something he liked to do; it was always best to guide the young ones in the right direction. But that night was the last time I saw my Luc. But I know what happened.”

  I interrupted. “You think Luc went to warn the guy and got himself killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, how does Grandpa figure into this?”

  Mrs. Leclair wiped a tear from one of her eyes. “Well, Hubert planned and watched, and avenged Luc’s death early last year. He killed Grayson. But then, a few months later, he was found mauled on a hiking trail. I’ve suspected ever since that the younger brother, Bruno, also has the gene, but was just coming into his. I think he killed Hubert.”

  Suzanne rolled her eyes and shook her head with a smile. “Wow, well, you do know how to weave an interesting story! It has been entertaining, Geneviève, but I think we should be on our way,” she said, then looked to me. “Let’s go.”

  “Kids, there isn’t much time. He won’t give up, trust me,” she said, trying to block our path.

  “We’ll take our chances,” Suzanne chirped. “But one question: why us? Why haven’t you done something about it? Isn’t that why you are here?”

  Mrs. Leclair’s hands fidgeted. “I tried. I mean, I was always Luc’s support. I am neither a killer nor a fighter. But I did appeal to the powers that be, in their world. I begged them to fix things, make it right, but they only intervene when they must. In their words, things were settled here, and they would not assist. They told me to move on.”

  Suzanne’s eyebrow arched. “So, you want us t
o do what you couldn’t. Is that it? Get revenge for you?”

  “No! It’s not like that; it is you that are in danger.”

  Suzanne had a good point, I thought, as she turned in disgust.

  As we walked toward the car, Mrs. Leclair said, “What if I can show you proof?”

  Suzanne stopped. “Of?”

  “Well . . . it’s in the basement,” Mrs. Leclair said, motioning to the house and looking desperate.

  “Ah, no thanks,” Suzanne shook her head. “I think I’ve had just about enough; I’m going home. Teavan, are you coming?”

  I felt torn, wanting a ride home but also wondered what she had to show us. I was a mix of curiosity and still a little fear of Mrs. Leclair, but decided to take my chances. After all, it was the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon; surely the wolf wouldn’t be around if I biked home.

  “See you at home in twenty minutes,” I said to Suzanne.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, climbing into the car and turning the ignition.

  I turned around. “Okay, what is it?”

  Mrs. Leclair led me inside and opened the door to the basement, then flicked on the light, and we made our way down. There was a welcome coolness to the air. The room was mostly full of boxes and sheet-covered furniture. The floor was concrete. In a well-lit corner, there was a large workbench covered in tools.

  Assorted rifles and a few handguns rested on wall-mounted gun racks. She led me over to the bench and pulled over a wooden box, like the kind at my grandpa’s place that holds all his fancy old dining silverware. The inside was lined with blue velvet.

  There were three shiny bullets inside, each neatly placed in small individual holders, but the rest of the slots were empty. Knowing nothing about guns, I thought they looked pretty new.

  “These bullets were made here, by Luc. As you might guess, they are made of pure silver,” she said, noting my curiosity.