by Anna Roberts
“Come on home, skitty kitty,” she said. “Full moon’s comin’.”
4
The basement smelled like raw meat. When Gabe first flicked on the light Blue had nearly screamed. There were three headless, footless animals hanging from hooks in the ceiling, their bellies slit wide open and guts scooped out, baring the bloodstained bars of their ribs.
“Lambs,” Gabe had said. “We tried it with all the juicy bits inside but we just wound up with blowflies.”
The basement was smaller than Gloria’s; they had soundproofed it with complicated layers of drywall and stuffing. The cage itself was a sturdy construction reinforced here and there with scaffolding poles welded around the edges. Joe had draped a tarp between his end and Gabe’s; he’d made it clear he didn’t care for an audience.
Gabe stood naked in his half of the cage, securing the locks. “We keep them well out of reach,” he said, with the matter-of-factness that made Blue feel as though she was losing her mind. “One time I accidentally ate the key. That was fun.”
He turned back to her, oblivious to his nudity in a way he never was in the bedroom. She kept waiting for him to laugh and point and tell her that he’d got her good, she’d totally believed he was a werewolf, ha ha. But he didn’t. He was already acting like an animal who had never even understood the concept of being naked.
“Are we good?” he said, peering through the bars of the cage.
She nodded, although she wasn’t. The whole thing felt unreal. If it hadn’t been for Gloria she would have written off all the other things she’d seen as some kind of fever dream caused by bad lobster.
“It’s gonna be about three days,” said Gabe. “The first night of the full moon is always the worst. It hits you like a truck that first night, but after that it starts to taper off a little, like it wears off and your body starts remembering it was supposed to be human. If Gloria’s gonna go back, I’d put money on her going back at the end of the full moon, when the wolf’s at its weakest.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t get close to us when it tapers off, okay? We may look more docile, but we’re not. Sometimes I’ll go back on the third day but just toss me a blanket and leave me be; I may look human but I still won’t be quite right in the head until the full moon is over.”
She nodded again. Joe sighed behind the tarp curtain. He stretched out a hand, dropping his clothes outside the cage like some strange parody of a girl in a burlesque show.
“Here, let me get that for you,” said Blue. She averted her eyes as she gathered up the t-shirt and jeans, but she still caught a glimpse of a long white leg and the curve of Joe’s butt from the side. She stepped back and started to fold his things.
“If you want to walk away,” said Gabe. “I’m not going to hold it against you.”
“I know that.”
“Good. I just want to make sure we’re clear,” he said. “Because this is gonna hurt.”
“Can’t you take something for the pain?”
He shook his head. “I’ve seen too many junkie werewolves,” he said. Sweat stood out on his upper lip. Joe cleared his throat loudly, as if he were trying to hide another noise that was trying to make its way out.
“Is this it?” said Blue. She thought they would have more time. Or that this just wasn’t real.
Gabe dropped to his hands and knees, arching his back the way she sometimes did to alleviate the worst period cramps. “Yeah,” he said, his breathing already ragged. “Yeah, I think so.”
Joe let out a low grunt of pain.
“Good luck, buddy,” said Gabe, through hitching breaths. “See you on other side.” He lowered his head between his shoulders and the shape of his spine suddenly looked all wrong, the shoulder blades sticking up at strange angles.
“Poor fucking kid,” said Joe, out of nowhere, and for a moment Blue thought he was talking about Reese, the last thing she wanted to think about.
“He’s okay,” said Gabe, speaking clearly, although his back looked like something deformed, something hopelessly broken. “He’s...with Eli....” There was a sickening crack. “...and Charlie.”
“Charlie?” Joe stuck his head around the tarp, his face red and contorted with pain. “You left Stacy’s kid with Charlie?”
Gabe shuddered. He looked up but he may as well have been looking right through Blue; he had that empty look she had seen on the faces of the dying, when there was nothing in the world but pain, and comfort was so far out of reach they might as well have been in hell. His spine was stretching, creaking, as if invisible hands were pulling it out from the bottom; he was growing a goddamn tail.
Joe slid back behind the blue tarpaulin, his body falling against it so that it pulled taut at the top. “You gotta get him,” he said, gasping for breath. “Can’t leave the kid with Charlie.”
“Little too late for THAAAATTT...” Gabe’s voice broke into a scream as he arched against the pain. The thing inside him was twisting his hips apart and up, swiveling his legs in their sockets. He sobbed, panting through it like a woman in childbirth, but the next crack and crunch seemed to squeeze his belly tight and he vomited into the drain at the corner of the cage.
Blue stood rooted to the spot, her hand over her mouth. She was crying but she had no inclination to wipe away the tears, no desire to see anything any more clearly than she did right now. She hated that thing inside him, hated it for hurting him so bad, hated it almost as much as the sickness that had twisted her mother into someone she no longer knew.
The tarpaulin gave way and fell to the floor. Joe lay in the middle of it, a pale, almost unrecognizable tangle of hurt, twitching flesh. His long thighs sprawled open but his belly was already covered with thick, tawny hair. Some of the fur looked wet and she realized what that new smell was, a tang of ammonia added to the slaughterhouse smell of raw meat and fear sweat. She might have done the same if she had had anything in her bladder.
Gabe raised his head again. One of his eyes was red with burst blood vessels and she knew when she saw it that she had already had enough. But he could never have enough and she couldn’t do a single damn thing to ease his suffering. He stared at her as if he was trying to see her through water, his eyes crazy with pain. When he reached for the bars of the cage she saw that his fingers had fused together and his thumb hung at an odd angle, as if it had been broken.
He wheezed and she realized his chest was being constricted. She thought she heard him speak, but she couldn’t be sure over the sound of her own heart and Joe’s cries of agony - “Get. Out.”
Oh, it was so shamefully easy to do what she was told now. She thundered up the stairs and closed the door tight behind her, just as the screams were turning to howls. Her stomach churned and she stumbled across the little living area and into the kitchen just in time.
She ran the tap, rinsed, spat and rinsed again. The sounds were muffled now, but she could still hear them – hurt animal noises, whimpers and foxlike barks. It was his thumb that stuck in her head most of all; strange that it should be so considering the terrible violence done to the rest of his body, but every time she thought about that bent, dangling thumb the sickness rose again in her throat.
A glass on the surface still held the impression of his lips. She leaned on the edge of the sink for a while, just staring at it. He didn’t have lips any more. Or hands to lift a glass.
It went quiet. She listened to the steady chirr of the cicadas, the wind ruffling the leaves in the yard. Her spine felt as though it was trying to crawl out of her body in sympathy with the men down there, like the gaps between her vertebrae were itching and swelling with the same crackling, tearing force that had pulled Gabe and Joe’s bodies into the shapes of wolves.
I am wholly spirit. In the spaces inbetween.
Was Yael the force? Grayson had said it was likely a pack spirit, but who knew? He’d left before Blue had had the chance to ask him more.
She switched on the light, half expecting it to swing like one in Gloria�
�s hallway. But there was nothing, just a fleshy tang on the air that could easily have been gusting up from the slaughtered lambs in the basement. Joe’s phone was on the table and she picked it up, half guilty, half defensive.
It wasn’t locked and she was relieved to see he hadn’t deleted Grayson’s number; whatever beef they had was obviously not as bad as the one Joe had with Charlie.
Blue took the number and cleared away a couple of old coffee cups. She filled the sink without thinking and washed up the odds and ends, feeling as though her mind had floated off to the edge of the world. She scrubbed the sink, plumped cushions and stacked magazines, all the while trying to keep her eyes from wandering to the basement door.
Even the animal noises had fallen silent now.
Her legs started to shake again, but her feet took her where her mind didn’t want to go. She kept seeing them in pieces – the wet fur on Joe’s belly, the blood in Gabe’s eye, that awful broken thumb that made her spine feel soft and her toes curl in her shoes. She had never really processed what she’d seen in Gloria’s bedroom. It had looked so much like a special effect from a movie – the legs of a fat, naked man and the top half of a distorted wolf, parts of him looking like they had been turned inside out.
When she opened the door she saw red and ribs, and for a hideous, jolting second she thought that’s what had happened, but then she realized it was just one of the lambs, pulled down from its hook. She heard smacking and crunching and as she stepped slowly down she saw a brushy dark tail.
It was obviously Gabe. The big, blond colored wolf lying on its side – that had to be Joe. Gabe was smaller, his fur so dark it was almost black. He didn’t turn but he growled softly as Blue approached; he could smell her coming.
He padded over to Joe and nudged him with his nose, but Joe just lay there, his flanks gently heaving with exhaustion.
Blue took another step down. The stair creaked under her foot and Gabe spun around, the fur of his back bristling, his teeth bared. She ran back up the stairs, and it was only when she closed the door behind her again that she realized one of his fangs had been chipped.
There was nothing she could do. That was the worst part, the weirdest part. She was alone in their house and all she could do was wait for them to turn back.
She shut off the basement light; it felt strange to do it but Gabe had told her to. She checked the doors and windows were all locked up tight and then let herself out, locking up behind her as if the place were empty.
When she got back to Gloria’s place the lights were off. Another seemingly uninhabited house, although Blue knew Stacy was in the basement with Gloria. And maybe there was something else. That spirit, that Yael. Had it really gone or was it waiting the way Grayson had said? Sulking, waiting to roar.
Blue turned on the lights. She opened the basement door and looked down, to see Stacy perched on top of an upturned beer crate, leaning over a half played hand of solitaire on the floor. Gloria was a short distance away, paws in front of her, lying on her belly.
“Nothing?” said Blue.
“Nah. For one moment I thought she might, but it turned out to be just gas.”
Gloria huffed through her nostrils, scattering the cards on the concrete. “Fine,” said Stacy. “I was getting bored anyway.” She gathered up the deck and got up, a hand on the small of her back. She wore an expression of fearsome concern and Blue turned away quickly, frightened that she might cry again in the face of Stacy’s sympathy.
“You wanna get a drink or something?”
“Are you kidding?” Stacy stumped up the stairs behind her. “I would just about shank my own grandmother for a rum and coke right now.”
“A bad day for grandma,” said Blue, hiding her face in the fridge.
“Not really. I doubt she’d feel it. She died in 2005.”
Blue fumbled in the old clunking icebox, fishing out the trays from the fuzzy ice at the back. Her tears cooled on her face, but she couldn’t keep her shoulders from shaking, and she knew there was no hiding it.
“Hey,” said Stacy. “Are you okay?”
Blue sniffed hard and shook her head. “No. But don’t let me cry.”
“Why not? You can cry if you want.” Stacy reached out and – with an all too maternal click of her tongue – folded Blue into a bird-boned hug. “It’s okay. This is all fucked up; it’s normal to cry.”
Blue swallowed her tears quickly. “Is it? I don’t know what’s normal any more.”
“Well, that’s probably because you’ve never dated a werewolf before. Give yourself a break; you’re on kind of a learning curve here.”
Blue unwound a series of paper towels from the spool and dried her eyes, angry with herself for reacting this way. “I have no business crying like this,” she said, more forcefully than she meant. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now.”
Ten miles away Stacy’s son had just gone through the same thing. And it was one thing to cry because your boyfriend just turned into a werewolf but another to think about your child going through it, that little thing you were hard-wired to soothe and protect.
“Yeah, I’m trying not to think about that too much,” said Stacy, and that was that. She ran the tap and rinsed the ice tray under it. “Goddamn it, why doesn’t Gloria just buy a refrigerator with a fucking ice maker already?”
“I doubt she could get store credit right now,” said Blue, and the words hung in the air for a split-second, before they caught one another’s eyes and by some unspoken agreement decided to find them funny.
Oh, it felt better to laugh. Deranged, but somehow a saner way of releasing tension than tears. The whole thing was nuts; her landlady was currently a wolf and she was dating a werewolf. And having weepy drinks with another werewolf’s mom.
“It sucks you in,” said Stacy, sloshing Bacardi over furry ice. “Werewolf drama. Half the reason Mom freaked out when I got pregnant with Axl was that I got pregnant by Eli.”
“She knew he was a werewolf?”
“My dad was one,” said Stacy, carefully topping off her glass with soda. “But it’s just one of those things; people don’t ask because it’s not their business. Keys people know not to stick their noses in – at least the poor ones don’t. They know they might accidentally stick it something real bad. Something that won’t let them sleep at night.”
“Like what?”
“Drugs,” said Stacy. “Immigration. Lycanthropy.” She took a swallow of her drink, the clink of the ice ringing out like a sigh against the sticky heat of the chirping, palm-edged night. “You don’t poke at these things any more than you’d go around poking gators in the eye; it’s just not a smart thing to do.”
Blue nodded and drank. It tasted like nectar and went down too easy.
Stacy smiled at some recollection and shook her head. “It’s hard to get out once you’re in it. And I guess I was in it from the start. I remember I said to my mom that I could have got out – left the Keys, married some Joe Blow from the suburbs and gone to live in fucking Tampa or Orlando or whatever – but that I still had it in me. I was still a werewolf’s daughter, even if I got French tips and a soccer mom car and a seat on the PTA. And there was still a good chance I’d give birth to werewolves. Can you imagine that shit in the ‘burbs? Axl would already be seeing three different counselors and taking twelve kinds of pills while they tried to get to the bottom of what was wrong with him. At least down here he gets treated like a white-trash write-off by those people who expect him to be dysfunctional. They’re not gonna bother him in life much, beyond handing him Ritalin and complaining he’s being disruptive when he says he can’t tell red from green.”
“Right,” said Blue. “Easier to fly under the radar.”
“Exactly. There are two reliable ways to stay out of sight in this world. One is to make enough money to shut yourself away like Howard Hughes, and the other is much easier – be poor enough that nobody gives a shit what happens to you.” Stacy took another drink and p
eered shrewdly at Blue. “Although I guess I’m preaching to the choir here.”
“Me and New Orleans,” said Blue, and held up her to glass to clink it. She poured out fresh fingers of rum. “Did you ever want to leave? The Keys, I mean?”
Stacy screwed up her nose. “Nah. It’s too fucking cold, for one. And why would you turn your back on cheap fresh lobster? The werewolf thing’s a pain in the ass, but so are a lot of things. My mom acted like it was the end of the world; said the only way it could be worse is if I’d got pregnant by Charlie Silver.”
“What’s the story with him?” asked Blue, realizing as soon as she asked that there was no way to probe too deeply. The last thing Stacy needed to hear was that Joe had warned them about leaving her kid with Charlie. “How come he’s so...off?”
“Off?”
“Off. On. I don’t know. I get the impression he left Islamorada under a cloud.”
Stacy set down her glass and sighed. “Yeah, I don’t know everything about that,” she said, stretching her skinny arms above her head. There were red marks on her elbows where she’d leaned on them. “Although I’m guessing it was probably a series of little screw ups rather than one big thing. That’s just Charlie’s style. He’s one of those people who wears everyone down. Like, you give him a million chances not to fuck up, but he goes and fucks up all the same. And then you forgive him, because God knows he can be charming...”
“Really? I found him kind of awful. Abrasive.”
“He was probably nervous,” said Stacy. “Or high. When he’s wound up tight he goes into a sort of overdrive and yeah – I get it – he can be like nails on a chalkboard. But he can be funny. Hilarious, actually. There was always an edge to him, but that was exciting when we were younger. Dangerous. Whenever there was a party everyone was always waiting and hoping that Charlie would show up.” She gave a sheepish smile. “Mostly because he usually had drugs, it has to be said.”
Maybe it was the booze, but Blue relaxed a little. That made sense; you wouldn’t want a fifteen year old around a druggie. Perhaps that was what had Joe had meant. “Like what?”