by L. A. Jones
Aradia stared him down like she was at the final table of the World Series of Poker.
Roy burst out laughing. “You’re really serious?” he asked as he laughed. He kept it up for a while, but Aradia kept her face stony straight.
"Aradia," Roy began while holding up his hand. "Look, I don’t know what drugs you’re hopped up on, but I’m sure once it's worn off you’re really going to laugh about this."
"Roy, I saw you," Aradia stated.
"Saw what?" Roy asked.
"I saw you as a wolf last night. I read your mind, I figured out who you were in your wolf form, and just a few minutes ago I saw you transform back into a human. I know for a fact that you are a werewolf!"
Roy opened his mouth to argue once again, but then clamped it shut after her words reached him. “What do you mean you read my mind?"
Aradia had considered not telling Roy about her own powers, but after all the freaky stuff that had happened, she decided that it was better to take the gloves off and be perfectly honest with him.
"I said I read your mind. I probed it. It’s something I can do. That's how I knew you were the wolf that attacked me."
"Attacked you?" Roy repeated.
His gaze fell upon her left arm. All of a sudden, his face turned as white as a sheet of high gloss printer paper.
Aradia expected him to deny it even more furiously, but instead he rushed her and grabbed hold of her shoulders.
"My God, Aradia, I am so sorry. I am so very sorry, but I swear to God I did not mean to turn you. Don’t worry, though, I won't abandon you. I will help you adjust to your new powers, okay? I’ll introduce you to the others of the pack. We will protect you, and teach you our ways. It will be hard, and it’ll take some adjusting. You will be fine, though, I swear!"
"Roy...Roy...Roy...dang it Roy, would you shut up!" Aradia shouted in the middle of Roy's ranting.
Roy's look of pity only deepened. He felt a bit like a policeman who had taken a bullet for a child, a child who instead of thanking him, had turned around and bit him. He was hurt, but she had no understanding of her situation. He couldn’t help but pity her.
"I’m sorry, Aradia," Roy responded. "You were right though. I am a werewolf. And now, so are you. I was just trying to let you know that I was willing to help you get used to it."
Aradia’s head spun. “Okay,” she said. “First things first, we need to get out of here.”
“We need to talk,” Roy said.
“Walk me home. We can talk on the way.”
“Um…” he said, glancing down at himself, bashful for the first time in the conversation.
“Fine, I’ll walk you home. Let’s go.”
They headed for the rear door. “Hey,” Roy said before she pushed it open. “You don’t suppose this is alarmed or anything, do you?”
“Hmm,” she replied. “I don’t think so.”
She pushed the door open. Neither of them heard anything unusual, but they hurried for the tree line just the same.
"I’m sorry, Aradia, but despite what you may have read in books and stuff, it really only takes one bite or scratch from a werewolf to turn you."
Aradia responded, "Do you remember biting me?"
Roy had the decency to blush. He shook his head and said, “No, I don’t know. I don't always remember what I do when I transform. Most of the time I can control it okay, but on a full moon…"
Aradia didn’t know what to think. A werewolf? Really? She sighed and asked, "How long does it take for the bite to heal?"
They crept through the woods as they talked. Roy led the way, as Aradia had no idea how to get to his house. They stayed out of line of sight of the road. Dawn had broken, and Aradia wanted to explain being out with half-naked Roy almost as little as she wanted to explain being out with unconscious werewolf-Roy.
He replied, "It won’t heal until the next lunar cycle, when you undergo your first change. Until then it will… well, it’ll be pretty nasty. Why?"
Aradia had taken the opportunity in the jail cell to retreat her arm, replacing the impromptu bandaging with a more thorough one. It had been a couple hours, but she had an idea of what to expect. "Well Roy, feast your eyes on this." With that, Aradia ripped the bandaging off her injured arm and held it out for him to view.
It did not look good. Her arm was red, puffy, and swollen. Her veins were clearly visible beneath the skin which had become pale and almost translucent. Upon first glance, an observer would think she needed immediate and emergency medical attention.
Roy looked at it more closely than that, though. He saw that the puncture marks made by his fangs and bicuspids had closed and scabbed over. The flesh around the edges of the wound was less ragged and distressed than he’d have expected. It was quite a trauma, but her body was managing to repair it.
"But how?" he managed in shock. "I mean, I am sure I bit you..."
"You did," said Aradia solemnly, nodding to the bite.
"But a werewolf bite can't possibly heal like this. It will stay open and raw until the next cycle."
“Can this mean I won’t be a werewolf?” she asked him.
“I… I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe. I’m not an expert on this kind of thing. Aradia, how?”
"Well," she replied, "I did say I read your mind. I also knocked you out while you were still in your wolf form. I don’t think a strong healing factor is that big of a deal, all in all."
Roy walked on in silence, completely stunned.
Aradia was feeling much better. Roy was right, she couldn’t be sure of anything until the next cycle, but her fate was no longer sealed.
She’d finally broken through Roy’s barriers and gotten him talking, and she wasn’t about to let him stop now. Coolly she asked, “So are you going to tell me what the hell is going on, or am I going to have to go all Michael Vick on you again?"
“These dog jokes are going to get old real fast,” he replied. He did allow a cautious grin at Aradia's joke, though, and added, "Okay, I’ll tell you what you want to know, but on one condition."
"Name it," said Aradia, eager to finally get answers.
"Full disclosure. I tell you everything about me and my kind, you promise to tell me what you are."
"You mean you'll show me yours if I show you mine?" asked Aradia, coyly raising an eyebrow.
Roy snorted and said, "Yeah, something like that."
"Okay," said Aradia.
Roy was a little taken aback. “I’d expected you to be a bit more hesitant at revealing your secrets.”
Aradia just shrugged and said, "Roy, if I’ve learned just one thing, it’s that it's better to tell the truth, especially to your friends, and we are friends, aren't we?"
Roy stopped and looked Aradia square in the eye. He said, "Rai, not only did you stop me from killing anyone but you personally put me someplace safe and stayed by my side the entire night." His eyes grew tender and locked intimately with hers.
Aradia just shrugged casually and said, "Hell, the real reason I stayed was because my dad’s office is in the same complex. I’ve done a lot of tidying there recently. I was worried you might wreck the place."
Roy, crestfallen, asked her, “Really?"
"No," she said with a teasing smile, and nudged him to start walking again.
He grinned his goofy ear-to-ear grin and Aradia asked, "So are we friends or what?"
Roy smiled even wider and affirmed, "Definitely."
"So, tell me why my best friend is a werewolf."
He took a deep breath. "Ok."
It took approximately two hours for Roy to explain everything to her. They reached Roy’s house long before he was done with his tale. He took a quick break to dart inside for some clothes. He returned promptly and picked up where he’d left off.
He was indeed a werewolf, and he was not the only one Aradia knew. All four of his brothers were werewolves, as was his father and presumably his mother. He really wasn’t sure on his mother, because she had left right after
his youngest brother was born.
“Why don’t you just ask your dad?” Aradia asked.
“We don’t really talk about her much. Dad gets upset, and my brothers and I hardly remember her. Most of us don’t remember her at all.”
“Why do you think she was probably a werewolf, then? Because you all are werewolves?”
He shrugged. “I dont know. Many people say only pure bloods can make offspring werewolves.”
“So do you think your bio-mom was a werewolf?” she pressed.
“It’s just… uncommon… for a hidden to mate outside his kind.”
“His kind,” she repeated distastefully.
He raised his eyebrows. “It is how it is, Aradia. You’re the one who asked.”
She sighed. “I know I did. Go on.”
He explained that his pack included his brothers, father, cousins, aunt, and uncles. It was basically his entire family. “Except for the Ortega branch,” he added.
She paused at the name. “You mean Officer Ortega?”
He nodded. “They’re not werewolves. I’m not sure how we’re related, to be honest. By marriage through a great-aunt, or something like that.”
“I thought you said werewolves only mate with other werewolves?”
“I said it was uncommon to be otherwise. Not unheard of though.”
Together he and his werewolf relatives were known as the SilverMoon pack. The moniker stood to reason, given that they pretty much lived at the diner as if it were a second home.
Roy explained that he was a full-blood werewolf, meaning he’d been born one. Aradia, if she were a werewolf, would be an initiate. Roy reluctantly admitted that initiates are generally looked down upon in werewolf culture.
“Hey, you said ‘hidden’ earlier. What did you mean?”
“That’s what we are, all of us. Rai, there aren’t just werewolves living in Salem. We’ve got vampires, fairies, shapeshifters, gargoyles, unicorns, elves, gnomes, and plenty of other things you didn’t think existed living here too.”
“Why haven’t I noticed them before?” Aradia asked. “Why hasn’t anybody noticed them? How can we have fairies and werewolves running around in secret? I feel like it should be on the news, or something.”
Roy's face grew serious the moment she made that remark. He then said, voice quiet, “There is a generic name for our people. All of us. Humans call themselves the human race. My race of people and the other races like mine are together the hidden race. That’s what I meant earlier when I said ‘hidden.’ We call ourselves that because the highest, most important law we have is that we must remain hidden from the human world.”
Aradia asked why she had not met any hiddens when she lived in Arizona.
Roy explained, “Many hiddens choose not to live among the humans. Instead, they live in their own separate communities, even cities, where only their kind dwell.”
“But not Salem?”
He chuckled. “No, not Salem. The hiddens out west are old school. They keep to themselves. Most places, really. There are some more progressive hiddens though who choose to integrate.”
“With other hiddens?”
“More with humans. There’s some of that everywhere, really. Hell, you might have had a faerie or a vampire in your class and not known it. Some places there’s more of it than others.”
“Salem?”
“Hidden central,” Roy explained. “Salem, Paris, Tokyo, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Beijing… a few other places. It’s a growing trend the last century or so.”
“Who else that I know is a hidden?”
“Well, just about every third student at Salem High is a hidden.” Disdainfully he went on, “Dax and the Coppertone boys are vampires. Tristan’s a fae.”
“Fae?”
“That’s what they call themselves. They think it sounds cooler than fairy.”
Aradia snorted, thinking how ironic it was that a jerk like Tristan could be a fairy. Ironic, she thought to herself, and yet strangely satisfying.
“Most hiddens you meet will be fae, werewolves, vampires, or shapeshifters.”
“You said there were a bunch more?”
He shrugged. “It’s kind of a regional thing. Like humans. Most humans from a certain place look a certain way. They talk about having different races themselves.”
Aradia nodded, finding the analogy helpful. “But all sorts of people came to America.”
“And even in America, anybody who isn’t white is called a minority. Depending on where you live you’ll mostly have some combination of people who are white, black, Latino, or Asian.”
She nodded again.
“Hey, why did you stand me up?” Aradia asked unexpectedly.
“Huh?”
“I’ve been wondering. It seemed kind of funky, and now that I know about the whole hidden thing, maybe I can get a straight answer.”
His brow furrowed while he tried to connect the dots. Then he saw it. “Oh, the day I met you.”
“First day of freshman year, lunch. You said you’d meet me, then you never showed. Where were you? Something hidden?”
“Yeah. My brothers were chewing me out.”
“Why?”
“For racing you.”
Aradia thought that over. “You’re not allowed to take part in sports?” she asked, although she had a good idea of what he really meant.
“Nah, we can, we just can’t go all out. It’s not a hard and fast law. Honestly we don’t have many of those. But staying hidden is the key. Running like that draws too much attention.” Ashamedly he said, “I let myself be a showboat.”
“Hmm,” was all Aradia replied. She knew exactly what he meant. Ever since that day, De Sylva had been pestering her to join the Track and Field team. Of her own accord, to protect her own secret, she’d actually made sure not to run at her full capacity in front of the coach again. “Maybe that’s a good policy. Okay, tell me more about hiddens.”
He continued dispensing information. Aradia found plenty of it distasteful, but she absorbed it all. One thing she found truly interesting was that, according to Roy, he was not allowed to associate with other types of hidden.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I’m a werewolf,” he replied, as if that was a full and complete answer.
“Before you said hiddens in Salem are more progressive.”
“We are. We don’t wage wars with each other,” he replied, quite seriously.
“You said you integrate.”
“We do. We go to school together, some of us work together. We make an effort to generally get along, when we have to. But we don’t hang out or go to barbecues on weekends.”
“But why not?”
“Aradia, I have my people to worry about. I can’t jeopardize my pack by associating with those who are not. I would risk exposing us all to danger!" Roy answered.
Aradia drew away from him. She said, "So basically, you are not allowed to hang with other hiddens because they are different."
"Exactly," said Roy. Aradia was silent. Upon reflecting on what he’d just said, he added. "No... no... wait, it’s not like that."
"Then what’s it like, Roy?"
"Well, um," Roy hesitated before explaining. "With other werewolves, you share a kindred spirit. You are of the same people. Even with different packs, we’ve all got the wolf in us. You understand one another. With people who aren’t werewolves, they don’t know anything about you. They live differently than we do; they obey different laws and sometimes disrespect our way of life. They call us 'animals' or 'mutts.' It’s just how it is."
"Seems to me, Roy, that while we of the human race have gotten rid of segregation, your people still practice it."
Roy snorted disdainfully. "There’s a big difference."
“Yeah?” she replied sarcastically.
“Yeah,” he said, anger rising. “My people are segregated for good reasons. For safety, our own and everybody else’s. Yours were simply ignorant bigots.”
Aradia had had enough. She was tired of arguing. Instead she made a mental note that this was an issue she would need to confront again, when she knew more and was better prepared.
She then got up and said, "Okay, Roy. Whatever you say."
"Hey!" Roy snapped. She shot a warning glare at him. He clamped his jaw shut and seemed to suddenly realize he was yelling. “Hey, Rai, I’m sorry. I, uh… so soon after a change, we can get a little heated.”
“Werewolves?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s… well, it’s something you’ll have to learn about us, if you want to still be my friend.”
She sat back down and took his hand. “Roy, of course I still want to be your friend. But lose the whole ‘kind’ thing.”
“It’s not that simple, Aradia.”
“Maybe not. But make an effort, okay? For me?”
He thought about it. “Okay,” he agreed.
“I have another question for you,” she said. “At the party, we were talking about Dereck, you remember that?”
“Yeah. Sure I do.”
“I felt like you were keeping something back. You seemed dead certain about why nobody was talking to the authorities, but I didn’t buy your explanation for why. Was it a hidden thing?”
He nodded. “It’s… well it’s our highest law not to let detailed knowledge of our kind out into the human population.”
“That just doesn’t make any sense to me, though,” she replied. “Humans know all sorts of supernatural stuff.”
“Mistakes get made over time,” he replied. “More recently, the hidden community’s engaged in an active campaign of spreading disinformation. That way if somebody finds something real out…”
“Plausible deniability,” Aradia said.
Roy nodded.
“So you think that’s why nobody who knows anything is talking.”
“And no hidden who knows anything will talk, not if that information might lead the police to knowledge of the hidden race.”
“What’s your take on the murders, Roy?” she asked. “From a hidden perspective.”
“I’m not really following too closely, but look, it’s one of two things. Either a human’s committing the murders, or a hidden is. If it’s a human, I’m not much help to you. But let’s say it’s a hidden. Then you’d need to stop thinking of this as a human crime, with human motives. The killer isn’t trying to evade human authorities. He’s trying to evade hidden ones.”