“I don’t see how this is going to help, even a little bit,” a man was saying, running his mouth so fast he barely paused for breath. “We get him out to the woods and then what, man? The magic fairy nymphs take the poison or whatever the hell is in his system away and he lives for another decade?”
There was more mumbling followed by the motor mouth getting more upset. Stu was aware of three cars now pulling into the area. As far as he could tell in the low light, Mr. Stander wasn’t among them.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, man!” the motor mouth yelled. “Tell anyone what you’re thinking? We’re all confused as hell, here!”
People were piling out of cars and Stu lost count of how many there were. It was also hard to nail down faces in the dark, especially ones he was still committing to memory, but he did recognize Dave, the high school teacher. He was moving something with another man that was wrapped up in a sheet. It was far too long to be a human body, Dave thought.
The heavy whoosh returned and suddenly a different voice appeared from the other side of the campground.
“Aye!” the voice yelled, thick with what Stu identified as an Irish accent. “Good thinking. Bring him this way!”
“WHY!” the motor mouth yelled. “Are you a damn wolf doctor?”
Stu ventured a little farther past the trunk of the tree to take in the scene, but the scene had moved. The whole group was moving in a bunch, without any stragglers, into the woods and right past Stu. He repositioned himself and heard a few more words and phrases that made no sense to him as they passed. No one gave a glance backward, so he followed, being careful to make as little noise as possible.
The group was loud enough through their feverish and rapid conversation to make following easy and about ten minutes later they stopped by the banks of a small stream. Careful to keep his distance, Stu listened and, because it was better to be safe than sorry, undid the strap that held his gun securely in its holster.
“ … you’re his son. You should be the one to do it.”
“Does it matter that I don’t want to?”
“Not in the least.”
“But I can’t control it. Not like you can.”
“Look, I get it. I’m going to transform too and between me and your mates we’ll be able to take what we need and keep everyone safe.”
“If I lose it, my family is here.”
None of this made any sense from a logical standpoint, but Stu was reasonably sure something bad was about to happen. He started thinking about when to reveal himself and what he would do when that happened. He was a decent shot but he was alone, in the dark woods with a bunch of strangers doing something bad. To turn around now would draw more attention. He suddenly, and rightfully, felt trapped.
“Dave,” Stu heard the man with the accent say. “You have my word, my word, that I will keep your family safe. Trust me, I can destroy your ass if necessary.”
There was a smattering of laughter among the group and suddenly Stu heard an odd howling sound that he couldn’t identify. It warbled and faded into a sad moan and it chilled him, but for some reason, didn’t scare him. The sound was coming from whatever was underneath the sheet, which rose and fell sharply as something twitched underneath it.
“OK,” Stu heard Dave said. “OK. I’m ready. You go first.”
It was dark and Stu was scared and behind a tree, but by the light left in the sky and from the sounds of crunching and muffled screams, he put together that something unnatural and terrifying was happening thirty feet or so from him and he was struck with a full body desire to run. It was almost impossible to overcome, his feet begging, screaming to move, but his brain applying all the brakes they possibly could.
If he moved he would be seen.
•••
Conall had met them, in human form, the moment they arrived at the campsite. Dave was relieved to see him. The rest of the pack, not so much. But, they had worked through it and on their way into the woods Conall had told them the plan.
Packs were bonded, Conall told him, on a biological level. If you’re near someone when they transform for a long period of time, you “get used to them” in a very ingrained way. Werewolves or whatever you call them were vulnerable during the change and that, mixed with others being vulnerable beside them, created a mix of sorts.
“The long story short is that you can heal each other,” Conall said. “But only in the wolf form. We can’t change … what’s his name there?”
“Willie,” Dave said. “He’s my dad.”
“OK, then. We can’t change Willie back and if we did it could be a bad situation because I’m not sure what the bloody hell is wrong with him. Our best bet is to go out, have one of you transform and then …”
Conall paused, trying to come up with the words.
“Bleed a little, I guess.”
“You need blood?” Dave said, incredulous.
“Look, I don’t make the rules, Dave,” Conall said. “I’ve seen it work and I’m telling you if you transform and we take some of your blood and give it to Willie, it’ll fix everything from poison to losing an arm. It works. I’ve seen it.”
Dave fell silent and Conall, in an act of European sensibilities, came close to Dave and put his weighty hands on his shoulders.
“You can save your father, Dave. You can do it.”
So, off into the woods they went, all of them trudging across the suddenly cold plain of grass and leaves. Once they hit a clearing they worked it out—Conall would go first since he had more control. Dave would go second and the boys would work to try to keep him at bay. This was odd for several reasons, the biggest one being group transformation was the one and only way they had ever transformed. Going it alone was strictly forbidden for a number of very good reasons and here was Dave, about to break their cardinal rule.
Add to the situation the fact that Conall expected Dave to have some modicum of control after he transformed, and the whole thing seemed like a terrible idea to Dave. He pulled Josie aside and told her to take Dilly and leave, but Conall nixed it.
“Dave, you have my word, my word, that I will keep your family safe,” Conall said loud enough for everyone to hear. Trust me, I can destroy your ass if necessary.”
It was little comfort and Dave walked back to Josie and put his head over her left shoulder so they could whisper to each other.
“I’m worried about you,” he said.
“I’m not the one bleeding,” she pointed out.
“Willie’s an asshole.”
“No doubt. Willie’s your father and Willie is Dilly’s grandpa.”
“What if something goes wrong?”
“Things have already gone wrong.”
He took her meaning, macro and micro, and walked over to Conall.
“OK, I’m ready,” Dave said. “You go first.”
Conall kicked, fell and the group heard several loud pops and something akin to tearing. Less than thirty seconds later the Irish Wolf stood up, and immediately started sniffing the air.
“Someone’s here,” the wolf growled.
Quickly everyone started looking around until the Irish Wolf threw his nose, violently, in the direction of a bank of trees. Everyone took his meaning and began moving. JoAnn always carried a .38 in her purse and retrieved it.
“Just a second,” Dave yelled when he saw the gun. Then Dave raised his voice and yelled at the trees. “Whoever you are, please come out. If you don’t, I can’t promise your safety.”
Behind the tree, Stu had locked up for a second, but the sound of Dave’s voice shook him loose. Without giving it much thought he quickly shifted his whole weight from one leg to another, moving clear of the protective cover. Stu didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“Shit,” he heard Dave said.
“HE CAN’T BE HERE,” the Irish Wolf yelled, almost howling. “LEAVE!”
Dave quickly came up on Stu and held his arms out to keep everyone back.
“Stu,” Dave sa
id. “This is … awkward. But I’m going to get you out of here if you let me.”
Stu was getting his first, good look at the Irish Wolf and was doing the best he could to not shut down. The beast was large, but in the dark its eyes were the most prominent thing and they were full of murder. Stu was suddenly hyper aware of his body, his heart pounding very hard, his mouth producing more saliva than usual, his nose grabbing scents from the air, but he was almost oblivious to everything else. Dave might as well have promised him a lobster dinner and no funny business afterward.
“STU!” Dave yelled, snapping his fingers. “You gotta stay with me, buddy.”
Stu came around to consciousness but still felt nothing but fear.
“Do you see the nice guy over there next to the woman with the gun?” Dave asked. “He’s going to come and walk you back to the clearing, and you’re going to wait there. He’s going to make sure you wait right there. Then we’re going to talk. Is that OK?”
Wet mouth but dry throat, eyes stinging from how wide they were open, Stu managed a nod. Words were not coming anytime soon.
“OK,” Dave said. “Kenny, take him to your truck, please. Keep him there.”
“I heard you,” Kenny said. “JoAnn’s coming with me.”
“We might need her gun.”
“Then give it to someone else, she ain’t staying here when this shit goes down.”
“Excuse me, who said I’m not?” JoAnn said. “Just take him, Kenny. I’ll be fine. You’re in more danger than I am.”
“GO!” the Irish Wolf screamed, clearly struggling to not tear the intruder to shreds.
Kenny took the cue and put both hands on Stu’s shoulders, whipped him around and started marching him through the woods. If Stu was beyond words, Kenny had enough for both of them.
“This is the biggest goddamn mess I’ve ever seen, man. Irish dudes and cops and a fucking SWAT team and Irish dudes and Willie on his way out. This is not how I wanted to spend my evening, man. I had plans.”
“We don’t have a SWAT team,” Stu said, half under his breath, not sure what else to say.
“No, you don’t have a SWAT team, man. This was a different thing. We’re going to get you sat down in my truck and we’ll talk. Although, to be honest with you, I don’t have a real good grasp on this whole thing, man. I know about, like, seventy percent of what’s going on. Maybe less. Maybe sixty but that sounds like I don’t know anything.”
Stu was happy for the distraction and was led, happily, into the passenger seat of Stu’s truck.
A couple hundred yards away the Irish Wolf continued yelling.
“YOU BECOME WOLF!” it yelled, deep and guttural and pissed off. “NOW!”
Not unlike Stu, Dave had limited experience looking at a wolf when he wasn’t one himself, and the Irish Wolf’s screams were not putting him in a contemplative head space. He had a go-to thought for when he scratched involving pain—an injury when he was a kid where he busted his leg open. The panic of the bloody mess staining his socks and shoes got him started and the memory of digging deep and pulling himself home dragging one dead leg behind him usually got him over the falls and into the transformation. Conall had asked him to be both passionate and controlled as possible. Well, Dave thought, he was going to get one of those things.
The moment he made the decision to give up on control his brain flooded with thoughts he had pushed down. The confusion and pain of the past few hours melted and Dave suddenly remembered how he had found out about Josie’s infidelity, the moment he put the pieces together, the little clues that added up to one big hole that ate his heart, brain, and soul. He remembered when she tried to play it off, to call him paranoid and jealous. He remembered the lies he eventually trapped her in. He remembered how the most fundamental thing in his life was undone by something as trivial as sex, how the rock where his life had been built had split wide and dumped him into the foggy, cold, unforgiving sea.
He remembered almost losing his son.
He hadn’t forgiven her. He hadn’t forgotten. He hadn’t put his family before himself, he hadn’t done the good Christian act of forgiveness, he hadn’t let bygones be bygones and he sure as hell hadn’t gotten this out of his system. He had put a cap on it is all. He had suffered in silence and the Irish Wolf, that intruder, was going to know what it meant when that suffering exploded all over these woods and the state and the fucking world for all Dave cared.
Without even realizing it, Dave let out a scream, which was not his normal ritual, then collapsed, twitched and kept screaming all the way through the transformation. Dilly instinctively walked behind his mom and she reached out and took his hand. From under the tarp, the White Wolf let out a long whine.
It took ninety seconds or more of loud, violent thrashing and noise but the Lead Wolf eventually rose from the dirty, leaf-strewn ground. Steam rose off him and he turned to face the Irish Wolf.
Dave Rhodes was forty-two. He had first scratched at fifteen. The Lead Wolf had only been lead for a little over two years. It had been a hard, ugly fight but he had won and now, when he rose, he was as hungry as he’d ever been. Hungry for flesh. Hungry for battle. Hungry as fuck. He turned to face the Irish Wolf and if the stranger could have smirked, he would have. The lead wolf growled and wrestled the sound as if it caught in his throat and croaked out a word.
“Blood,” the Lead Wolf growled. Then, much louder, “BLOOOOOOD!” The two wolves leapt, hurtling toward each other with ferocious speed, claws out, teeth bared, intent unsheathed. Everyone ran for cover yelling and crouching as they went and as the wolves collided high in the air, lit by the moon, the force of their impact could be felt all the way back at an old rusted truck with the most confused and scared cop in the world in the passenger side, begging to be delivered from this new, fresh hell.
A SERMON BY THE REV. THOMAS RHODES
March 7, 1958
It’s a difficult thing to love your neighbor.
Sometimes your neighbor is petulant. Sometimes he is brash and braggadocian, engaging in all manner of prideful thoughts and actions. I know of one man who wooed and bedded his neighbor’s wife. Ask that husband if it’s easy to love your neighbor. I bet you, brothers and sisters, will all get the same answer. It is not easy.
Your family, that’s supposed to be another story. Your father and your mother, they are the ones who bring you into this world, that nurture you, that raise you up right in the word of God in a Godly household and if you stray, they are the ones who feel God’s spirit moving through you and put you back in line. Your brothers and your sisters – your actual brothers and sisters, not what we call each other every Sunday – your brothers and sisters are your first friends, your allies and your co-conspirators. [laughter]
If you’ll allow me, you know my brother and sister, Willie and Cindy. There they are, fourth pew from the back, like they always are. We grew up with a harsh father, Rev. Kane as you all knew him. He was a good man in his heart and from the pulpit but he could be a cruel man when his temper got the better of him, and because of that, Willie and Cindy, they looked up to me to protect them. I can see Willie smiling from here. I remember once we were playing in the living room and we knocked over the radio and broke it. This was the most expensive item in our modest house. A radio that brought the outside world into our home. We begged and begged mother for it and she talked good old Rev. Kane into it, even though it “could be used by the devil.”
We broke that radio. On accident, as children do sometimes. And when my father, the Reverend, came home he asked who had done it. I told him it was me and he took after me with a vengeance, yes he did. Willie … Willie even tried to talk some sense into my father and he regretted it. But, it was all over soon enough. We had dinner that night, as a family if I recall, me with an ice pack on my eye.
My point, brothers and sisters, is not to ask for your pity for me but to illustrate, in a real and substantial way, that loving your family can be just as hard as loving your neighbor. It can
be a brutal affair, family and Jesus, he knew it. And he knew why. Family can hurt you like no one else can hurt you because family are the ones who are your own flesh and your own blood and are supposed to be your own soul. Family are part of you that can betray you as no one else can – not a wife, not a friend, not an old Army buddy or the newest of lovers can hurt you like a family can hurt you.
But it can go the other way, too, can’t it? You know it can, brothers and sisters, you know it can. Because just as I stepped in front of a flurry of fists from the good Reverend for Willie and for Cindy, I know they would step in front of an oncoming bus for me if I needed them to. I know that the three of us have a bond so strong that my wife, the person with whom I choose to share my life, she’ll never equal it. Family is hard. But family is, sometimes, the only thing that can save us.
With that, consider today’s reading. Luke 14:26 “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own he cannot be My disciple.”
Think on that, ponder on that, brothers and sisters. Think of what Jesus is saying because this isn’t a verse with hidden meaning. This isn’t a puzzler. This is black and white, people of God. This is clear as clear can be and as plain and plain can be out of the mouth of Jesus himself. If you are to be my disciple, Jesus says, you must hate … hate your family. You must take that which is closest to you, that which feeds you and nourishes you, that which you value and you understand better than anything else on this Earth and you need to throw it away. Discard it. Leave it. Hate it. Jesus is saying compared to the best Earth can give you, compared to the most perfect and amazing love a human can offer, it is nothing, it is contemptible, it is rubbish compared to what being a disciple of Jesus can be.
Family is hard. Loving your neighbor is hard. But I look at you, my neighbors, and I look at Willie and at Cindy and I tell you with a swelling heart and tears in my eyes that it is worth it. It is worth every heartbreak and every betrayal and every wrong turn and every misstep to be your neighbor and to be your brother and to be your sister. It is worth it. It is worth it.
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