by David Boop
I gaped at him. “I should do what now?”
“You live in a cage,” he said furiously. “That isn’t a right thing for anyone, let alone a lovely woman such as yourself. McQuincy is not your alpha. You don’t have to be under his thumb.”
“You don’t know a thing about me,” I shot back. “Last time I left this cage, two good men died.” And a third not-so-good man, who probably deserved what he’d gotten, but the other two most certainly had not warranted being half-eaten by a wild animal. “I’m in here for people’s safety, as well as my own. What do you think would happen if the law got wind of what I am and what I’ve done? They don’t hang women very often, and I’m not sure it would kill me in any case, but it for sure would not be pleasant.” I turned to go to my bedroom. “Good evening, sir.”
“I control myself, and know who I am, during my shifts. Even on moon nights.”
His words dropped on my head like a bombshell filled with silver shrapnel. I froze. “How?” I choked. The full moon was in two days. I dreaded it.
“The local Indians, the ones who carved the rock art hereabouts and then disappeared?” We’d all seen that art, and it was the subject of much discussion. A lot of the pictographs were obviously people and local wildlife, but others had humanlike bodies and horns or antlers, and I’d seen one or two with bizarre big-headed creatures with spindly bodies and huge eyes.
“Turns out they were carving their life stories.” He stepped closer to the window. “And those creatures have the power to make it so you’re still yourself as a wolf.” He held his hand out in entreaty. “They helped me, Miss Channie. Let them help you.”
I raised my chin, skeptical. “And why should I trust you? You smell almighty strange, but that doesn’t necessarily signify you’re telling me the truth.”
“Point taken.” Ramon touched the brim of his hat. “I’ll be right back.” He stepped away into the shadows. A minute or so later, I heard a wet-sheet-tearing sound as his muscles and bones stretched and snapped into new configurations, along with a pained grunt, and his scent intensified on the breeze. Then he padded back into view—on all fours.
I stared, a bit openmouthed, as he reared up on his hind legs and rested his forefeet on my window ledge. Wolf-Ramon was black, shaggy, and splendid, the size of a large pony, with the same warm brown eyes he had as a human. His tail waved gently, and his tongue snaked out and gave my hand a careful lick. He was completely under control.
To not be a murderous, raging monster… My breath caught. I wanted that more than anything.
When I let my breath escape, it came with a sob. It was too good to be true. I lived in a circus, and I’d heard all about deals of that nature. They were generally made at a crossroads with contracts signed in blood. My soul was already stained by the things I’d done with the wolf in charge; I didn’t need to further blacken it by walking into a situation like this with my eyes wide open.
Ramon drooped his ears and tilted his head. I reached out and petted his broad forehead, and his tail sped its tempo. See? he asked. I could understand him as well as I understood Jolee. I wondered if he could talk to his horses. Perfectly safe now.
“And you can change back when you want?”
In answer, he dropped down and trotted off to the shadows where he’d left his clothing. After a few minutes, he came back, dressed as before. “Except during the full moon, I can change at will. You have lovely hands and a kind touch, Miss Channie.”
Dangerous hope kindled in my chest. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. I couldn’t help but ask, though. “What’s the catch? What’s it cost?”
He shrugged with one shoulder. “Far as I can tell, it doesn’t cost anything. They said something about feeling responsible, some kind of experiment gone bad, and wanting to fix it.” His teeth gleamed in the nearly full moonlight. “Then one of them bapped the other one upside the head and called him an idiot.”
That didn’t sound like normal demons, at any rate. “And what if it doesn’t work?”
“Then I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Even back here, if here is where you truly want to be.”
I thought it over. What did I have to lose, really? “Let me get some actual clothing on.” I donned trousers, a long-sleeved blouse, and a pair of knee-length boots, practical for riding in the desert. Back at the window, I let out a shrill whistle. Jolee and the rest of the monkey-clowns came swinging across the roofs of the trailers, hands to feet to tails and back. They stopped chattering when I put my finger to my lips. “Unlock my door, Jolee, please and thank you,” I said.
She cocked her head to one side and let out an interrogative cheep, asking if I was sure. When I said I was, she and the others had the door open quicker than it takes to tell it. I stepped into the cool outdoors, free for the first time since I could remember, and shivered a little, rubbing my arms.
Ramon stepped up beside me with his nostrils flaring, and I turned to face him, skittish. I caught his scent again, horse and leather and honest sweat, with the wolf overlaying it all, but serene. It was more soothing than it had a right to be, and I didn’t quite trust it, but I was committed now. My heart pounded.
“Where are we going?” I asked, a bit breathless.
“Out into the desert a ways. Freckles can take us.” A black appaloosa gelding with a spotted white patch across his hips and a bald face whickered at us from the shadows where he was ground-tied. Ramon led me up to him and introduced us. “This is Miss Channie, Freckles. We’re giving her a ride. She won’t eat you.”
I certainly hoped not. The horse snuffled my blouse and bumped my chest companionably. I’d never had a horse react like that to me before. It was nice. Ramon mounted, then reached down and helped me up behind him.
Freckles had a smooth rocking-horse gait that effortlessly ate miles. I hadn’t been outside like this in ages, able to enjoy the stars and the wild scents. It filled me with heady longing. To be able to do this anytime I wanted…
Ramon reined Freckles in, and I realized I’d been daydreaming. I blinked, and my cheeks warmed. “Sorry,” I said. “I probably should have tried to hold up a conversation.” I slid off the horse’s back and looked around.
“That’s all right,” Ramon said. “I know what it’s like to get out of a prison when you’ve been locked up through no fault of your own.”
I decided not to comment on that. It was his story to tell when he felt like it, really. We’d stopped beside a dry wash with a cliff face to our right, surrounded by twisted cedar trees, red and white rocks, Indian paintbrushes, and red-flowering barrel cacti. The desert was stark and beautiful, with the scents of bighorn sheep, deer, coyotes, and ravens wafting through the air. An eddy of breeze rustled through the bushes and bunch grass. A screech owl called.
“I could live here.” I hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but it was true.
“Well, I surely do like it,” Ramon answered.
Before he could say any more, a trio of creatures stepped out of a hole in the cliffside I could’ve sworn hadn’t been there before. I inhaled and took an involuntary step back, because they were like nothing I’d ever seen, except in the local rock art I’d noticed through my window riding past to our camp spot.
One was square and blocky, a good seven feet tall, with enormous hands and horns like a Hereford range bull. The second was shorter and slimmer; his body was broad at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, and he sported a set of antlers that would have put a trophy mule deer to shame. The third was shorter yet, with a bald, bulbous head, spindly body, and huge slanted black eyes. They smelled of juniper and prickly pear, like they’d tried to mask their underlying otherworldly musk with local odors, but had only been partly successful. I decided to call them “Bull,” “Antlers,” and “Big Eyes” unless they gave me other names to work with. I wondered if I’d be able to pronounce them if they did.
“What are they?” I whispered to Ramon.
I flinched when Big Eyes answered. Its—his—voice was rough, like
he gargled rocks for fun, but perfectly understandable. “We were sent here to study your world.” He shot what I could have sworn was a glare at Bull. “Not to interfere with it.”
Bull’s mouth pulled down at the corners. His voice was smoother; maybe he only gargled pebbles. “How many times do I need to apologize? I keep telling you, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” Big Eyes reprimanded. “We can’t just say ‘science’ and call that acceptable.” He waved a hand at me. “Clearly. Why you had to tie it to the lunar cycle and work in a silver allergy is a question for the ages. Not to mention the wolfsbane effect. Really?”
“I published a monograph about it.” Bull sounded sulky, of all things. “The humans are better off with wolf blood and accelerated healing.”
“Oh, yes, just ask them.”
I hadn’t expected sarcasm from them, but there it was. It amused me.
“If I could fire you, I would.” He turned to me. “My apologies for my colleagues’ idiocy. I presume Ramon brought you here to repair what they mishandled.”
“That was the idea, yes,” I answered cautiously. “He said you can’t turn me completely human again, but you could give me the same control he has when he’s wolfed.”
“It is, unfortunately, the best we can do. But we owe it to you and are more than happy to help.”
“It’s better than what I have now, isn’t it? What do I need to do?”
“Follow us, please.” The hole in the cliffside reopened, and they led Ramon and me into the sort of laboratory that our circus magician had only dreamt about in his most demented imaginings. The walls and floor weren’t roughhewn from the cliff, as I’d expected, but were smooth and white. Cabinets and tables of shiny metal surrounded us on three sides, with an adjustable chair in the center of the room. Bull waved me into it, and I sat down gingerly. Its comfort surprised me.
Antlers spoke for the first time. Her voice, distinctly feminine, sounded like birds twittering, but I understood just fine. “May we take some of your blood? It may help us arrive at a permanent cure rather than these half measures.” She hastened to add, “It won’t hurt.”
I nodded, a little overwhelmed, and she held some kind of small glass vial against the inside of my elbow. A few seconds later, it was full of my blood. I hadn’t felt a thing, and Antlers thanked me.
Meanwhile, Bull retrieved a sort of shiny metal crown-like affair and fitted to my head. Big Eyes affixed a wire harness to that, tightening toggles to it and then flipping switches on a machine with dials that hummed to life. Lights blinked on it, a few of them amber, but most lit red. Antlers made a “hmm” noise, turning knobs and pressing buttons. The crown tingled, and my hands tightened on the armrests of the chair. “Is it supposed to do that?” I asked.
“The problem with what they did was, it skewed your brainwaves in just the wrong way when you turn lupine,” Big Eyes explained. “What we’re doing here is tipping them back into a correct pattern. It will feel a little odd.”
I looked to Ramon for reassurance, and he nodded. “Tingles and buzzing.”
“Then it shouldn’t hur-urt? Ow!” I doubled over as an electric shock of agony speared through my body from head to toes and back again. Then I was too busy trying to breathe to concentrate on anything else except the feeling of fur sprouting, and my bones and tendons stretching in a familiar and horrifying way.
I shifted.
“No…” The word was a tortured groan forcing its way through my lips. My face shoved outward into a snout. Ramon rushed over and laid a hand on my shoulder, and the creatures made “oh shit” noises and moved with urgency. I couldn’t see what they were doing, however, because I squeezed my eyes shut as pain ripped through me again and again, while I lost my sense of who I was…
Again.
“Miss Channie. Stay with me,” Ramon urged. “I’m right here.”
I barely heard him through the roaring in my pointed ears. Panting, I gripped the armrests tight enough to warp them, claws erupting through my nailbeds. My clothing tore, unable to take the stress of my larger body suddenly stretching the seams.
Gradually, the pain eased to an ache and then faded altogether. I blinked a few times, straightening from my doubled-over position and swallowing hard through my still-tight throat. “What. What was that?” I asked.
I couldn’t read the creatures’ faces, but they stared at me in what I could only describe as a nonplussed fashion. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Bull said as Antlers took the crown off my head.
I blinked some more, and my hands came into focus. Or, rather, my paws came into focus.
I turned them back and forth in front of my face. They weren’t quite paws, either, stuck in some sort of in-between form. I glanced down at my body. It, too, was between wolf and human. A patting of my head with my strange-feeling paw-hands revealed that I had a half-snout and short, furred ears, and human hair its normal length down to the middle of my back. My breasts, nothing to write home about before, had mostly disappeared.
“What did you do to me?” I whispered. My voice was distorted by the changed shape of my face.
A slip of paper spooled out of a slot in a cabinet, and the Big Eyes tore it off and read it. His eyes closed. “You’re the first female we’ve done this with.”
“And?” Ramon asked. “I mean, she’s beautiful, hermanos, but she can’t walk around like this.”
“Her hormones apparently affect how the procedure works. I’m afraid—” He stopped, and started again, voice lower. “I’m afraid she’s permanently stuck like this.”
My stomach clenched, and I gritted my fangs. “You mean,” I said between them, “that you can’t reverse it?”
He stared at the floor. “I’m sorry.” The other two wouldn’t look at me either.
Ramon’s hand squeezed my shoulder, which I realized was bare. I was half again my normal size, and none of my clothing had survived the experience. I kicked my boots off.
“Miss Channie,” Ramon said. “You’re still yourself.”
He was right, but so what? “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I snapped, spearing him with a steely glare that made him remove his hand and step backward.
“No, chamaquita, I suppose not.” He lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “What do you want to do now?”
I wanted to throw myself on the floor and weep bitter tears. But that was a show of weakness I didn’t have the luxury of indulging, especially when I realized that Ramon’s wolf scent had intensified.
“I reckon I have to go back to the circus. Act might need to change.”
I rose heavily to my feet, wobbly until my tail moved instinctively to steady my balance. My new body should have been clumsy, but it moved with deceptive grace. “Thank you for trying,” I said to the creatures. “Even if it ended up like…this. I appreciate the effort.”
This was a lie. They’d turned me even more monstrous. Any hope of a normal life lay in shattered wreckage on the ground behind me as I left. Grief for what I’d lost bowed my shoulders, and a single sob tore its way from my throat before I controlled myself. No crying. Not now. Maybe not ever again.
Ramon trailed behind me to where he’d ground-tied Freckles. “Back to the circus?” he asked, mounting up and gathering the reins. “Really?”
I gestured at myself. “Like you said. I can’t very well walk around towns looking like this. At least at the circus, I’m employed and fed.”
“They don’t treat you very well.”
He wasn’t wrong, but what choice did I have?
We started back. I loped effortlessly beside Freckles. The horse, blessedly, was no more bothered by me half-wolfed than full-human. I was hungry, but not excessively so, not like I always felt during a normal shift. My fingers flexed as I ran. “Well. Maybe things will change now that I’m in control.”
“I hope so. Otherwise my own wolf might have to have a word with your ringmaster.”
I glanced up to s
ee him frowning thunderously, and remembered what he’d said in the laboratory. “You really think I’m beautiful? Even like this?”
“Mamacita, if you knew what my wolf wanted to do with you, you’d tear off my cajones and feed them to me.” He glanced at me. “It is not a typical beauty, but, yes, I find you very magnifica.”
“With” me, he had said. Not “to” me. It was a tiny distinction that made an enormous difference. I wasn’t pretty even as a human—I knew this about myself, having seen a mirror—and nobody ever spoke to me in such a manner, especially after finding out what I was. It was new and pleasant to have a man notice me that way, though I felt my face warm. Apparently I could still blush, even like this, though no one would know but me. “Thank you, Ramon.”
“Someone should say it.” And then he clamped his lips shut and said no more until we got back to the circus encampment.
Jolee awaited us at my trailer. She chattered and leaped to my shoulder, and I froze at what she told me. “Ramon, you should go—!” I shouted.
Eb and some of the roustabouts waited in the shadows.
Two of them roped Ramon off of Freckles from either side, yanking him backwards onto the ground. A third bound him in silver chains, leaving him heaving for breath, helpless.
Eb had a silver chain waiting for me as well, and he lassoed it around my shoulders and arms, paralyzing me before I could turn to run. He dragged me to my trailer and locked me to the bars, sneering. “Well, look at you. Did you really think you could leave us that easily, Channie? With this?” He turned and aimed a vicious kick at Ramon’s ribs. “You dare to kidnap my star attraction?” More kicks. The roustabouts started getting their licks in, too.
“Stop it!” I struggled against the chain, but the silver held me just as fast as it always had. “Leave him alone, he didn’t kidnap me, dammit, Eb! Damn you—”
Ramon was paralyzed by the silver too, unable to defend himself at all. His head snapped back with the force of one kick, and the reek of his blood tainted the air. The roustabouts laughed.