by A. L. Tyler
“Annie—”
“Vince!” I yelped, leaning down to help him up. “It’s going to be okay.”
Charlie had already snapped his fingers, and the door was fixed. “I reinforced it. Annie, you need to put him back inside.”
But Vince’s hands were already growing hair, and he dug them into my arms, refusing to let go.
“I can’t go back in there…” he mumbled under his breath. “Don’t make me go back in. It’s not natural. It will kill me…”
“I can’t help you,” Charlie growled at me. “Shove him back in before we have a real problem here!”
I pushed him back gently until his heels hit the frame of the portal door. His eyes snapped up to meet mine. They were pulsing red and angry, but when he spoke, only the desperation came out.
“You have to kill me!” he said, his voice already growing hoarse. “You have to kill me…!”
“Annie!” Charlie snapped.
I shoved him once hard in the chest and sent him sprawling back onto the floor. Charlie shut the door before he could get back up.
“We’re going to need a second door next month,” he mused, his gaze wandering uncertainly over his creation. “I don’t actually know how he got through this one. The silver should have burned his skin off first.”
I went back to the viewing hatch, cracking it open just enough to catch a breath and a snort from the wet-nosed snout on the other side before he growled and clawed and let out a howl that made me shut the hatch in alarm and sent a shiver up my spine.
I leaned back against the door, even as it started to shake and bump with his attempts to rip it open once more.
“That was the illness talking,” Charlie made a feeble attempt to reassure me. “Are you buying it when I say that?”
“No,” I said.
“Good. Because you shouldn’t. And this is only the beginning.”
Charlie turned to go.
“Is he going to…” I wasn’t sure how to say it, but I had to know. “Could he kill himself? Is there a way, and do you think he’ll try?”
Charlie frowned as he stared at me, then turned to face me and crossed his arms. I could hear movement in the room above us, and I knew that Gates and Lyssa had come to inspect the situation.
“He might try,” Charlie said. “Do you want me to stop him? Or at least try?”
His moral ambiguity was starting to concern me, because I felt like the answer should have been obvious. That was, unless Charlie knew something that I didn’t.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “If he tries, I want you to stop him.”
He pursed his lips and took a breath through his nose, and I knew he was considering how much he wanted to tell me.
“Spit it out.”
“This is going to get bad, Thorn. And it’s not going to get better.”
“It’s already bad.”
He weighed his words carefully. “It will get worse. All I am saying is that you need to think of this as a terminal illness. He will die with it, and he will likely die because of it. You’re taking away his choice to end his suffering.”
“Walter deals with it,” I said, crossing my arms and refusing to accept his point.
“Walter is different,” Charlie said. He looked up the stairs to where Lyssa was standing. “Do you know about them?”
“About who?” I asked.
It was getting too hard to talk over the racket that Vince was now making as he tried to claw his way free from his cell. Charlie put a hand on my back and encouraged me back up the stairs, closing the hatch behind us with a heavy look.
I sat down on the bed, and Lyssa and Gates came to sit with me.
“Werewolves run in packs,” he said simply. “And much as you might expect, they usually run in families, but the ailment isn’t passed down genetically. They pass it on to their children through a bite or a scratch soon after birth. They grow with it, and their predecessors care for them and teach them how to cope. Walter has had a lifetime of experience living with this condition. He’s adapted to it in a way that Vince won’t ever be able to do.”
With Vince downstairs, reacting as any caged animal would, I couldn’t believe that any parent would willingly do this to a child.
“Why would they do that?” I asked.
Charlie looked at Lyssa, but she looked away. He looked back at me. “Revenge, mostly. Someone in their past saw a loved one killed for magic stock and they wanted to fight the warlocks, but they couldn’t because any warlock is more powerful than a human. So they acquired the curse to make themselves strong enough and passed down the vendetta from generation to generation. It’s a religion to them.”
Too many thoughts clouded my mind right then, ranging from musicians and painters that managed to adapt to becoming deaf or blind to the fact that it wasn’t my call to make. It should have been Vince’s call, but I couldn’t let him kill himself without feeling complicit in the act. I would be an accessory to murder, or maybe a little more, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t in his right mind anymore. I was the reason he had been bitten, too, and that only added to my personal responsibility to him.
“That would have been very helpful information when we first met Walter,” I said dryly. “To let me know that werewolves make it their life mission to kill warlocks, and he assumed I was one.”
“I can’t read a werewolf’s thoughts,” Charlie replied, narrowing his eyes. “I knew he didn’t like the look of us, but we didn’t do anything to threaten him. I thought he would spread the word that a demon was in town, and we might get a visitor around the full moon and we would explain ourselves. Going from zero to biological warfare is a fast escalation, even for a werewolf.”
I nodded. My thoughts were finally starting to iron themselves out into a plan. “Okay. Okay, maybe we can still fix this. If I could talk to Walter, maybe we could ask him to take Vince into his pack, and then he could teach him—”
But Lyssa was already shaking her head. “No, Annie, you don’t understand. They can’t help him anymore. When Charlie said biological warfare, he meant it. Werewolf kids grow up with this, and that’s why they have immunity to some of the more troubling aspects of it. Vince doesn’t have that.”
I frowned at her. “You said it was the right choice to do this.”
“And I still believe that,” she said. “We should do everything in our power to help him. But I think you need to understand what we’re up against, and I think you need to respect that he might not want to live this way.”
I stared down at the hatch in dismay.
“Even if you could talk to Walter,” Charlie said, softening his tone, “Stark got to him first. I don’t know how, but he did, and he’s out for blood. You can bet he’s already filled Walter’s head with ideas about us. We won’t find help for Vince there.”
I closed my eyes, knowing that he was right but hating to admit it. I didn’t know what to say or feel anymore, because we had been so close to fixing things before. We had just decided that Stark was going to take Gates’ curse, and then things would go relatively back to normal. And then Vince had showed up.
And now he had a curse that could never be lifted.
I had trouble wrapping my mind around the finality of it, even though it hadn’t happened yet. I had been spinning plates ever since meeting Charlie, trying not to let each delicate soul touched by my summoning a demon fall or break. I had saved Jennifer. Rosie had been spared. I was on my way to fixing things for Gates.
And now Vince had a death sentence. There was nothing to be done.
“Annie…?” Gates asked.
“Fine. I get it.” I lifted myself off the bed, refusing to look any of them in the eye. “I understand now. We’re not letting him kill himself like this, though. We’re keeping him alive until after the full moon, and then we’re explaining this to him. All of it. I want you to tell him what his life will be like, and when he’s Vince again, he can decide.”
And with that, we d
idn’t talk about it anymore. We went about our lives, eating and sleeping and watching television, and Lyssa taught me what she thought were the important aspects of protection charm creation. Charlie corrected her, and I wrote it all down in a notebook, and he told me he would find a way to help me practice. He thought I was going to need them in the future.
Vince went in and out of his wolf form with less frequency as the full moon approached, and more than once he asked, then demanded, and finally begged me to kill him. I still went down and sat with him three times a day or more, staring at the open viewing hatch. Sometimes he looked back at me with terrified, desperate eyes, and other times he snarled or panted and paced.
I didn’t know what I was looking at, exactly. I had failed him somehow, and I felt like I needed to really feel it. I wanted to brand the sting of what I had done to him into my mind forever, because I couldn’t afford to do this to anyone else.
This was irreparable damage, and I wanted to see every moment of it. I lost sleep staying awake to listen to him clawing his hands bloody against the walls. After a time, the confinement made him neurotic and he started to chew his fur from his body in red, saliva-soaked clumps, and I still watched.
I cried for him, and because of him. I worried about whether or not he would be human again if he managed to kill himself, and if his body would bear the marks of his self-inflicted mutilations. I wanted to give a body back to his family if that happened, but I knew I couldn’t do it if he was torn to pieces. Or worse, if he was still a wolf.
I pictured myself having to bury him in the ground in the wild, alone with Lyssa, Charlie, and Gates. I couldn’t put him in an unmarked grave like he was my dead pet dog. I couldn’t do that to him, or to his family.
The full moon came, and Lyssa told us to take the charms and carry them with us, next to our skin, until we could bury them somewhere secret. No one could ever know where we put them, and as long as we never told, we would be safe from Stark’s meddling.
The morning after the full moon was one of the most fearful of my life as the three of us stood outside the apartment door. Charlie sat just inside, having resumed life as a cat to allow Gates to return home for a few weeks and explain things to her mother. He had arranged her backstory for her.
All that was left to do was leave the apartment.
“You’re sure this will work?” she asked Lyssa.
Lyssa nodded at her, then looked at me. “You’re sure you want me to go?”
I was never more sure in my life. If there had been a way to make sure that the two of them went back to their families and never came back, I likely would have done it. But I had already asked Charlie, and they were too involved. Stark knew about them, and they were probably already on his list. There was no more harm to be done. Leaving now wouldn’t save them.
Gates was leaving with an additional charm for her family, similar to the one that Kendra had put on my dad. Lyssa was taking another to use on Vince’s family. As long as they never found out about the existence of demons, they would be safe from them.
Lyssa went out to her car and drove away. Gates went to a bus station to make her way home.
I went out and drove to a place, took a walk, and eventually I dug a hole. I won’t say where. I try not to even think about it anymore. I said a silent prayer, and put the charm in it, and covered it back over.
And then I went back to my apartment. Classes started the next day.
Chapter 5
Vince came out of his psychosis that night. When I asked, Charlie blinked his cat eyes and reset his little apartment in the basement back to the way it had started.
Seeing him in a heap on the floor, in the middle of all the normalcy, was beyond surreal. He was at least ten pounds lighter than before, and I fretted that we hadn’t been giving him enough food. Charlie reassured me that he had offered everything he could think of, even live rabbits, but the wolf had refused.
“Wild animals aren’t meant to be in captivity,” he apologized.
Now dressed in sweatpants and a tee-shirt, Vince wordlessly accepted my help as I pulled one of his arms across my shoulders and steadied him as we walked up the stairs. I set him down at the table. With a vacant expression and sunken cheeks, he watched me go into the kitchen to fix dinner.
I opened the refrigerator to get a few things, and when I turned back, I found Vince standing at the window, looking out at the street. The sun was setting, and his eyes were fixed on the moon just rising over the horizon. For a moment, I worried.
“He’s fine, Thorn…” Charlie said quietly, jumping up onto the countertop next to me. “We only have to worry about the waxing moon.”
“This goes on,” Vince said quietly. “This is going on in the world right now, and people don’t know about it. And the world keeps going. What day is it?”
I got a glass of water and offered it to him, going over to stand with him by the window.
“Sunday,” I said. “Classes start tomorrow.”
He turned back to the street, taking three large gulps of the water. “I didn’t buy my textbooks yet.”
Without even thinking, I looked meekly over my shoulder. “Charlie…?”
“Right,” he responded. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something appear on the table, but I didn’t actually look to check. I had faith that the textbooks were there.
I turned back to see Vince analyzing me with a frown.
“Is this normal for you?” he asked, looking down at the water before finishing it.
I raised my eyebrows, and went back to the kitchen to give him some space. I got together what I needed to make a salad.
“No,” I said, finally able to look at him again. “Even as far as normal goes, for me, you’re my first werewolf. Was it… um, very bad? The room, I mean?”
I instantly regretted asking the question. I had been trying to level the playing field by showing him that he had some knowledge that I didn’t. It had never failed to brighten his day in the past, but this was different.
He went back to the table and sat down, sighing. He gave me a long look, and didn’t say anything.
It upset me more than I would have thought. I had hoped that he might have forgotten some of it, or at least felt somehow disassociated from his time as a wolf, but he remembered it. I felt my hands start to shake, and I had to put down the knife I had poised over the lettuce.
My cheeks flushed, and I turned away, trying to breath, and trying to stay calm. The last thing that Vince needed right now was to see me panicking, but I couldn’t stop the knot rising in my throat.
“I think grass might help next time,” he said suddenly. I closed my eyes as he continued to talk, and relief washed over me. “A window would be nice. A real window, I mean, because I think the lack of fresh air really got to me. That might not be possible, but still.”
He had walked over, standing next to me in the kitchen, and I barely managed to hold back the tears gathering in my eyes.
“We could go to the sandwich place instead, if you want.” He offered it like it was nothing. “If my wallet’s still around, I’ll pay. It’s the least I can do for you after staying here all week.”
I was breathing deep and shaking my head, hardly able to believe that he could still manage to even act normal after what had happened.
“I’ll need my phone, too,” he said, looking over his shoulder and back toward the bedroom. “I promised my mom I would call her when I had a chance, but she knew I was going to be busy getting ready and settling in the week before classes.”
I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say to someone who could be so broken in one moment, and so nonchalant the next.
“I know you were there,” he said. He looked away, uncertain. “It didn’t look any easier for you. So I just thought, sandwiches might be easy…”
I couldn’t help myself, and I pulled him into a hug, which he hesitantly returned.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
He patted
me on the back, and I let him go. “For what? This wasn’t your fault.”
“For still being you, after all of that.” I ripped a paper towel off the roll by the sink and used it to dab at my eyes. “Gates hasn’t been the same since… Gates got turned into a cat. Did I tell you that?”
“Your sister told me,” he said, leaning back against the edge of the counter.
I nodded, wiping my nose with the paper towel before tossing it in the trash. “She hasn’t been nearly as loud-mouthed since it all happened. I kind of miss it.”
He cracked a smile, shifting, and I was once again reminded how much weight he had lost. “Do you remember when that teacher asked her if her name was a weird Mexican thing, and she called him a—?”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning through my tears. “I remember.”
“And then she kept calling him Mr. Bunker for the rest of the year?”
“Yeah,” I laughed.
He smiled at me. “I’m glad she’s not lost in Hungary. Or dead, I guess, is what most people were saying. Come on, let’s go get dinner.”
“Oh—!” I stopped him just as his hand landed on the door, and rushed over with the protection charm that Lyssa had left for him.
I explained what he needed to do, and why. Charlie added an addendum to look out for Walter, or any of his kin, who might be around. Vince brushed off our warnings like they were nothing, though I could tell from the look in his eye that he was paying very close attention to how the charm needed to be used. He asked me to meet him back at the sandwich place by the apartment in an hour so that he would have time to find a place to bury the charm.
I spent that time changing my clothes five times, and then trying to do my hair without it looking like I had actually done it.
“You just saved his life,” Charlie called from the living room, where he was lying on the couch and watching the news. “He’s seen you right out of bed. You’ve seen him naked—”
“Covered in fur!” I corrected.
“—Do you really think he cares what your hair looks like?”