Moonglow

by Michael Griffo

  There’s that name again. “A what?”

  “You haven’t Googled it yet?”

  “I couldn’t even remember it! It’s not like it flows off the tongue you know.”

  “Of course it does, Amaterasu Omikami. If you can master Dominy Robineau, surely you can pronounce my new name.”

  “Can’t I just call you Jess?”

  “Well . . . I guess so,” she replies, a bit miffed that I don’t want to call her by her formal name. “But write it down so you don’t forget this time.”

  Quickly, I search the pockets of my jacket for a pen or a pencil, but come up empty-handed. “I don’t have anything to write with.”

  “Oh must I do everything?” Jess mock-complains.

  She pulls out a missalette from the wooden rack hanging from the back of the pew in front of us and turns to the back cover, which has no writing on it except for a stamp at the bottom of the page that reads, PROPERTY OF ST. EDMUND’S CHURCH. Using her index finger as a pen, she writes out the name Amaterasu Omikami, and even though glittery yellow sunshine replaces blue ink, I’d recognize her handwriting anywhere except for one slight change.

  “Aren’t you going to dot the i’s with smiley faces?” I ask.

  “Even I have to admit that would be overkill,” she replies.

  Our gigglaughs and cackles are interrupted when she suddenly throws my body onto the pew and screams, “Get down!”

  I flatten myself onto the pew, but that doesn’t seem enough for Jess.

  “Get lower!” she demands. “On the floor!”

  The urgency in her voice is enough to make me follow her orders, but she isn’t taking any chances, and I feel her hands lift me off the pew and place me on the floor. Next thing I know I can feel Jess on top of me, and I’m covered in a shroud of sunlight. I want to ask her why she’s covering me with her body since she said I’m the only one who can see her, but then I remember her disclaimer; humans can’t see her. So if she’s hiding, does that mean there’s another nonhuman in the house? Lifting my head slightly, I see that it’s worse. There’s an ex-boyfriend in the house of worship.

  I’m not sure where he came from, but Napoleon walks right down the center aisle, past where we’re hiding, and then presumably out the front door. About thirty seconds after the door slams, I finally feel Jess lift off of me and sit back down on the pew. She’s not only become otherworldly, but overly cautious too.

  Sitting next to her I’m not sure what to ask first, so I go with what I think will be the most obvious question. “Is Napoleon human?”

  “That I cannot say, Dominy-san,” she answers cryptically. “And don’t read too much into that. I have rules I have to follow now.”

  “But you’re not sure,” I say. “Otherwise why would you knock me to the floor?”

  For the first time Jess looks away from me, a bit of her mystical glamour fading. “I may have forgiven you for killing me, Dom, but stealing my boyfriend’s heart is another story.”

  How can she not know the truth? I’m in love with Caleb. I never once felt anything for Napoleon, and even if I did, I would never have acted upon it.

  “I know all that!” Jess scolds, apparently reading my mind once again. “But the fact remains that my boyfriend wanted to be your boyfriend, and while he was kissing me he was probably thinking about kissing you! And you know what, Dom? That sucks!”

  It does suck, and I completely agree with Jess, and if I ever needed any stronger proof that this creature sitting next to me is in fact my best friend, I just got it. It’s the confirmation I needed that no matter how bad things get, my life is worth fighting for.

  “Thank you, Jess.”

  “For what?”

  “For doing what you’ve always done,” I reply. “For saving my life.”

  Chapter 26

  Everywhere you look there’s snow, but all I can see is sunshine.

  I haven’t told anyone about my encounter with Jess. I want to keep it our secret, our connection, our invisible string, but I have to keep reminding myself to temper my good mood so my friends don’t think I’m starting to lose my mind. They’re adapting better than I expected to the fact that I’m possessed; I’m not sure how they’d react if they thought I was starting to crack under the pressure.

  As promised, I Google Amaterasu Omikami and have to clasp my hands over my mouth when I scream in delight. It’s absolutely perfect. Jess has morphed into some kind of Japanese sun goddess. Who knows how and who cares why. The beauty of it is that Jess is finally living her dream of being part of Japanese culture, and I refuse to believe that the sun plays an arbitrary part in her afterlife. It has got to be an important clue, since I’m being controlled by the moon, and now my best friend is a deity of the sun.

  Everything’s going so well that I start to avoid one-on-one conversations with my father. I don’t want him to try and convince me that we have to reverse this curse. If I didn’t think it was ludicrous before, I definitely think so now. If the curse is broken, not only will I have to go through life without my father, but also without my best friend. It’s too much, and I’m not going to do it. We’re just going to have to take Operation Big Red to the next level and learn how to defeat Luba at her own game.

  Unfortunately, that’s a lot easier said than done. A week before the next scheduled full moon comes the first strike against my strategy.

  “Bad news,” Caleb announces at the lunch table. “My father’s found out about us.”

  “Couldn’t you tell us that after I finished my meat loaf?” Archie asks. “How can I enjoy it now?”

  “Dude, I thought you guys would want to know.”

  On either side of me, Arla and Nadine grab my hands, equally stunned by the news that clearly hasn’t penetrated Archie’s thick skull. “He knows about me?” I ask, although my voice sounds more like it’s pleading.

  “Sorry, Domgirl,” Caleb says, grabbing my hands away from Arla’s and Nadine’s grips from across the table. “He knows that somebody’s been using the old APC; he doesn’t know why.”

  “From now on, Caleb, could you lead with the positive?” I ask.

  “And never drop a bomb like that again without blowing out the fuse first,” Arla adds.

  “And, Archie, do you think you could act a little more concerned?” Nadine finishes.

  Shoveling a forkful of meat loaf and mashed potatoes into his mouth, Archie is unrepentant. “Above all else this be known, Nay,” he says. “My hunger comes first.” Turning to Caleb for backup he asks, “Right, bro?”

  “If you know what’s good for you, Caleb,” I say, “the only thing you’re going to tell us is what your father’s newly acquired knowledge means in terms of the next full moon.”

  Be careful what you ask for, Dominy; the truth isn’t always the easiest thing to hear.

  “We have to find a new holding place for you,” Caleb responds. “Turns out the state wants to sell the land where the APC is located, so they did a routine walk-through and found evidence that the building’s been occupied lately.”

  “They didn’t find anything that links it to Dominy or her dad, did they?” Arla asks.

  “No,” Caleb assures us. “But they know it’s being used, which is why they’re tearing it down.”

  “What?!”

  I have no idea whose voice is loudest since we all scream at the same time. The girls at the table next to us turn around, curious if our verbal explosion will lead to something more interesting, but luckily after a few seconds their interest wanes and our conversation can continue.

  “When, Caleb?” I ask. “When are they planning on destroying the place?”

  “Um, sometime tomorrow.”

  “Great! So there goes the perfect solution.”

  “Dom, it was far from the perfect solution,” Nadine says. “You got out twice while you were there. Maybe this is exactly what we needed so we could regroup and come up with a better plan.”

  Logical thinking can be so annoying, even i
f it leads to the practical application of finding a solution to a problem. After spending a few hours sitting around Arla’s living room while her dad is on night patrol, we’ve come up with a plan B.

  “Does your dad still have that small cage he was going to use during the first transformation?” Nadine asks.

  “I guess so,” I reply. “Unless he sold it on eBay or something.”

  Ignoring my snarky comment, Nadine continues. “Bring that cage to my family’s cabin and transform there. I’ll make sure no one decides to make a spontaneous trek out to the place.”

  “But if Luba can unlock the cage at the APC,” Arla says, “what makes you think she won’t be able to pick the lock from a cage bought at Home Depot?”

  “And what makes you think Dominy won’t be able to break out of it,” Archie adds. “She-wolf be strong, yo.”

  “First of all, Archie, don’t ever say ‘yo’ in my presence again,” Nadine demands. “And second, we’ll finally see if these little suckers will make a difference.”

  As sort of a voilà moment, Nadine pulls out of her bag a syringe that she swiped at The Retreat. She’s been collecting them, but we haven’t used them yet. First we thought the industrial-strength cage at the APC would contain me, and then we got too wrapped up in trying to videotape Luba setting me free, so that we sort of forgot. Correction, logical thinking is sometimes exactly what a Wolf Pack needs.

  “What’s in that thing?” Caleb asks. “I mean, will it be safe on Dominy as, you know, a human?”

  “Of course it’ll be safe,” Nadine chafes. “It’s lorazepam. We use it on patients all the time. In fact it’s safer than most sedatives because it’s a short-term benzodiazepine drug.”

  “Thank you, Nurse Nadine,” Archie jokes.

  Okay, the inside of the syringe might be safe, but what about the outside. “Isn’t the needle made of silver?” I ask.

  Smiling smugly, Nadine proves that she’s thought of everything. “Nope, stainless steel,” she answers. “Even though it’s not a bullet, I didn’t want to take any chances.”

  “Nurse Nadine, be smart, yo!” Archie adds, but corrects himself when Nadine jokingly glares at him for once again using the word yo. “Sorry, but yo really be smart. And may I also suggest that we throw some rib-eye steaks into the cage as well?”

  “What do I need that for?”

  Before Archie answers, I sadly figure it out.

  “If Nurse Nadine’s lorazepammie doesn’t do the trick and you wake up in the cage all werewolfy and hungry,” Archie explains, “the rib-eyes might satisfy your craving so you don’t try to break out.”

  Push, push, push the bad imagery from my mind and focus on sunshine. It’s hard to do especially when everyone around me knows that Archie’s suggestion, as gross as it sounds, is really quite smart. But not as definitive as Caleb’s final contribution.

  “And remember, your dad will have his Taser on him,” he reminds us. “So this time nothing can possibly go wrong.”

  Oh yeah, Caleb, tell that to Mother Nature, who personally delivers strike two.

  Just because it’s late March doesn’t mean Nebraska can’t be hit by a severe off-season snowstorm. Just because my father is the sheriff of Weeping Water doesn’t mean he can’t be called out of town on business. And when those two events happen at the same time, it means that my father will be out of town during the full moon.

  “Dominy, honey, I’m really sorry,” my father says, his voice as fragile as the cell phone connection.

  “That’s okay, Dad,” I lie. “We’ve got it all under control.”

  I had already told my father about our backup plan, and he thought it was the only viable solution. Of course he wanted to project manage the affair, but in his absence Caleb will have to do. In order to make sure no one’s parents freak out that their kid is missing all night, we pull a scam that’s been working for decades. It’s worked in all the old sitcoms I’ve watched; I hope it works in real life as well.

  Caleb told Archie’s parents that Archie was going to spend the night at his place and vice versa. Nadine and Arla did the same thing with theirs. I told Barnaby that Arla and I were spending the night at Nadine’s and not Arla’s in case he decided he wanted to crash the sleepover party and pal around with his track idol, so instead he’s going over to Jody’s. Since Jody’s dad has like a 100-inch flat-screen TV in their basement, Barnaby jumped at the chance to spend another night there.

  On our way to the Jaffe family cabin, it seemed like the storm was getting worse every second. Visibility was so lousy I don’t think Jess and her godlike sunshine could make a difference. Following Caleb’s Sequinox, I drove my father’s Bronco slowly, very slowly, in fact, because even though I have driving experience, I don’t yet have my driver’s license. My father’s been letting me behind the wheel—with him in the passenger seat, of course—for years, so I know what I’m doing, but I didn’t want to get pulled over for speeding. Unfortunately, no matter how slowly I drove, every bump I went over made the cage rattle in the flatbed. No chance of tricking my mind into thinking I was en route to a fun snowy getaway. Thankfully Nadine’s got East Coast manners and kept quiet during the ride; nothing she said would’ve made me feel less miserable.

  It takes Archie and Caleb almost thirty minutes to rebuild the small cage, probably twenty minutes longer than necessary because they keep drinking the hot chocolate Nadine made that Archie’s spiked with some chocolaty liqueur, which of course I couldn’t have because I was going to be injected with a sedative. Childishly, it reminded me of when Charlie Brown goes trick-or-treating and all his friends get candy and he gets a rock. Instead of drinking a sweet, creamy liqueur, I get a tranquilizer.

  But lying in the cage after being injected by Nadine, I don’t feel any different. Shouldn’t I feel like I’m about to fall into a deep sleep? Shouldn’t it be just like when I had my tonsils out? There’s no reason that I should still be alert and aware and afraid.

  No matter how scared I may feel, it’s nothing compared to what my friends are going through. I can’t say that I’m used to my human-to-werewolf transformations, not by a long shot, but I know what to expect. They don’t.

  “Her bones are snapping in two!” Arla screams.

  “Her skin! It’s disappearing!” Archie’s voice dovetails over Arla’s.

  “Oh my God! Her neck is breaking!” Caleb’s cry disturbs me the most. I guess I expected him to have taken a peek at the videotape, but even if he did, it’s nothing like seeing it up close and personal.

  When the change is complete, when I’m sharing my soul with this other thing, I feel different. Part of me wants to take control; the other part wants this wild animal to lead the way. The only thing my entire body can agree on is how much smaller my space is. I can barely move in a circle without hitting the bars of this cage, and there’s only an inch or two of free space above my head. I don’t like it, and I don’t want to stay here. So I won’t.

  The cage shakes frantically when I lunge forward, growling roughly, and by the second time it flips over so one of the sides is now on the floor. Screams and chatter fill the air, voices asking what’s happening and what should they do, pieces sound like they’re shouting in my ears, others as if they’re being spoken from a great distance away. They sound exactly like I feel—one second I feel in control, and the next I’m lost within this wolf. I have no idea who is going to end up in control when I get out of this thing. And it’s only a matter of time before that happens.

  Wildly I pounce onto the bars, howl at my incarceration, ram the cage into furniture, the walls, people. No matter what it takes, I will get free, and I have no idea why these stupid humans haven’t figured that out yet.

  The first bar snaps easily from the base, and I grip the metal spoke in my mouth and twist it back and forth until it breaks free altogether.

  “She’s getting out!”

  I throw my entire body into the side of the cage and ram it into the wall several times. Splin
ters of wood shower down on me, the squeak and the clash of metal against wood almost deafening until the next bar breaks apart, this time from what is now the top part of the cage. I stop moving, and these people stop screaming, because we all come to the same conclusion at once. The hole in the cage is now big enough for me to squeeze through.

  I take my time making my exit. Why rush it? No one can stop me; might as well make it an event, instill in them the kind of fear that will make their blood taste that much more bountiful. But which one? Which one should I taste first?

  The white one, the brown one, the tall one with the yellow hair, or the one with the silver mist clinging to her skin? Such decisions. Opening my mouth I run my tongue over my teeth, and the brown one clings to the one with yellow hair. Yes, I’ve seen him before, and he’s gotten away from me. This time he won’t be so lucky.

  “Archie,” my next meal speaks. “The steaks, they’re in the corner.”

  The one made of pure white skin turns to his right. “She must’ve kicked them out of the cage.”

  For a few seconds he disappears from my view, but when I see him again he’s holding two pieces of raw meat. Thick and overflowing with blood. I can feel the saliva build up in my mouth like a pool of hot rainwater, and I lick my lips again, this time to wipe away my own juices and not for show.

  “Hand them to me, Arch.”

  Slowly, the meat is handed from one male to the other. I howl as a few drops of rich, red blood fall to the floor, and I watch as the golden-haired one walks across the room. I follow him with my eyes as he stands in front of the door and opens it. They’re playing a game with me. I know that; I know what they want from me, but I don’t care. I want to taste that meat. I want to suck the blood and gnaw on the bone until I’m weary, until the hunger-need passes through me.

  The door is halfway open; the meat is dangling in the air, a long, thick droplet of blood hanging, clinging to the meat as strongly as I’m still clinging to my desire to feed. The blood-drop swings in the air tenuously as the door is opened wider, when suddenly it falls to the floor and splatters into the air. I can smell the blood flying toward me, and I can’t wait any longer; I’ve waited long enough.