Only the Moon Howls

by Connie Senior

  “Hey, Dad, can I borrow your canoe to go into the village?”

  “I don’t know. Are you done with your homework?”

  The boy appeared in the doorway of the wooden cottage, looking exasperated, the paddle already in his hand. He was average in height for his twelve and a half years, but quite skinny, and his shoulder-length straight black hair was tied back with a piece of woolly sheepskin. “Yeah, yeah…” he mumbled in response to the question. “I guess I’m done.”

  “Well, let me see it and you can go.” The man the boy called “Dad” sat at a homemade table of raw pine in the center of the cottage’s living room. He was not quite old enough for the role, and he looked nothing like his “son.” He glanced up from the map and notebook on which he had been taking notes and gestured for the boy to pull up a chair.

  “Just a sec…” the boy mumbled, leaning the paddle against the wall and reaching for a sheet of paper tossed haphazardly onto the floor. He unfolded it now gently, and couldn’t hide the pride in his face as he gave it to his father. “Most people think the Earth gets in the way of the moon to cause the phases. But see, it’s when the Earth is between the sun and the moon that it’s full, and when there’s nothing in between that it’s new.”

  “Very good. And did you calculate the period using Kepler’s law?”

  “Twenty-seven point three days,” Bela replied proudly.

  “OK,” replied his parent in the tone of upping the ante. “So why don’t we have a full moon every twenty-seven point three days?”

  This question puzzled the boy, who sighed heavily. He wanted to be outside in the spring afternoon, not working problems in the cottage—but he didn’t want his father to outwit him, either. He reached for the text, which he’d left open on the table, interested in spite of himself. “If I could make sense of these pictures, it would help.”

  His father frowned. “There should be some 3-D glasses to help you see them,” he said thoughtfully. “I hope they haven’t been lost.” He picked up the book and flipped through the pages, then held it up and shook it.

  No glasses, but a small triangle of paper, looking as if it had been torn hastily from another piece, fluttered onto the table between them. A messy scrawl in green ink read, “9 pm SWHarbor, Toby.”

  The man stared at the note for a moment, then carefully folded it and stuck it into his pocket.

  There was a moment’s silence, then Bela’s curiosity got the better of him. He read English pretty well. “Who’s Toby?” he wondered.

  “An old friend,” said his father quietly, but with a hint of warning that he really didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Bela nodded wisely. Some of his friends had died, too. He picked up the book again and thumbed through it, as if it would tell him more about the past they couldn’t discuss. Coming to a sticker in the front, with a cartoon beaver and a name scribbled in faded ink, he read aloud, “‘Caleb J. O’Connor, Physics&Astronomy. What’s that all about? Is that you, Dad?”

  The man smiled, his eyes far away. “It was, yes.”

  “What’s IHTFP?”

  “`I Have Truly Found Paradise’—or alternatively, `I Hate This Fucking Place,’” the man chuckled.

  The boy snickered at the English and the profanity. “And why does the beaver look like it’s, um—?”

  The man peeked at the symbol, and smiled. “Throwing up? It’s not supposed to. One of my friends hexed it because he was mad that I’d gone off to the city and left him behind.”

  Bela rolled his eyes. “Mom told me you used to live in the city with humans, but I didn’t believe her.”

  Caleb laughed ruefully. “It’s true.” He tried not to let the bitterness show in his voice, but he wished Liszka’s concept of parental duty didn’t begin and end at the full moon. He’d never expected to find himself with a child to raise, but instinct and tradition made the youngest member of Pack Five Caleb’s and Liszka’s son as much as if they had borne him.

  He’d tried, countless times in the twenty-seven months since the boy had joined them, to convince Bela to return to his human parents. They didn’t want him, though, and neither did the schools in the villages around Stilpescu. There was still enough magical tradition around that everyone knew what the boy was.

  What did one do with a pre-teen werewolf? Caleb had always resented the town of Tribulation for keeping him away, but maybe it had been a good thing. In retrospect his human self had been far too much of a child to deal with the monster’s adolescence, and it was no wonder the Muscaturas had treated Bela more like a pet tiger than a son. He was better off here with adoptive parents who understood, who would just send him out in the forest to play if he got a bit growly. Liszka had no trouble controlling him as a wolf, either, even though his head would no longer fit in her mouth. The readiness with which Bela adopted them, calling them Mom and Dad and coming to them with his troubles, made Caleb feel both guilty and oddly gratified. He was pleased he seemed to be able to help Bela, but he felt bad that he had to take him away from his parents to do it, and that he couldn’t do more.

  At least Bela had constant companionship here at Grigore’s cottage, where some member of the Fives was always around, and where they all got together once a month. But the winters were lean and hard, and Caleb had spent many a long snowy night torn with guilt over his cozy fire and home-cooked meals. Mihail’s roast beef and venison stuck in his throat as he thought of his foster son out here in a cabin with a half dozen other starving werewolves. He trembled with worry and rage when he heard the werewolf-hunters tramping through the snow on a day after the full moon, and had done a few things to them that Alexandru would doubtless condemn.

  But if Alexandru knew, he didn’t let on. He had become monomaniacal in his search for the elusive Cuza, demanding that Caleb camp out with him in caves and attics and churchyards for days at a time, casting spells that mostly caught innocent bats. Last time he had cursed a crow out of the sky and, in a fit of paranoia, drove a stake through the poor bird’s heart.

  As spring slowly crept back to the hills, Caleb’s vampire-hunting duties became increasingly demanding. The worst of the cold was past, though, and the Fives were eating reasonably well. Caleb stopped being a den mother and focused mostly on the boy, trying to drop into the cottage often enough to teach Bela a little math, a sprinkling of botany, and hopefully some self-respect.

  “You know what, Bela?” he asked gently, somewhat appalled in the back of his mind at how much he sounded like his own parents. “You’re really smart, and if you study a little bit, you can be almost anything you want to be.”

  Bela laughed, his pencil scratching at the paper, a laugh that didn’t yet contain a teenager’s scorn. “You lived in the city,” he marveled. “Did you run away into the forest for the full moon?”

  “No, I just…just tried to stay indoors.”

  Bela pondered this, disbelieving. “Indoors? Dunno. I think I’d eat the furniture,” he admitted with a smirk.

  “Yes, well, I tried.”

  “Really?” His dad was full of surprises today. “So why did you… I mean…Why would you want to do that?”

  It wasn’t a bad question. “I suppose there were things I wanted to do, to learn, that made it necessary,” Caleb said after a pause. “Humans don’t…they don’t realize how important our one night is to us, and I didn’t know either.”

  Bela shook his head, his look of mild skepticism becoming replaced with one of total astonishment. “So you pretended you were human just like all the rest of them? And they didn’t hear you eating the furniture?”

  “They did. They thought it was the neighbors having a party.” He winced at the memory of his landlord discovering the holes in the wall. “And whenever I could, I would go back to the forest to be with my friends.” He touched the note in his pocket. “They don’t all hate us, you know.”

  “The wizards do,” said Bela darkly.

>   His father’s eyebrows knotted. “Maybe you’re right. I never told you this, Bela, but I left my country because I lost Toby, my best friend.” Seeing the boy watching him with rapt attention, he continued in a mild voice, “We used to do things together at the full moon, things using magic that we weren’t supposed to do. We broke through wards and went into the Reserve filled with monsters. There were other wards, too, ones protecting old mansions or parts of the forest. We couldn’t figure out their purpose—We broke these just for fun, and Toby continued to do it after I had gone off to the city. One night he got into an old house and let out…something: Everyone said he had let a vampire escape.”

  Bela nodded his understanding. “You’ve told me about the vampires in Maine that came over from Europe during the Second World War.”

  “Some even before that,” Caleb corrected. “In fact, from what I’ve heard, it may have been lucky that the Titanic went down, considering what was in steerage. But I don’t know if these were the vampires Toby found. They could have been more recent ones.” Caleb hesitated, unsure whether to repeat what he’d heard from Jonathan Hermann and the hints that Alexandru occasionally let slip. What did it matter if they were twentieth-century renegade Romanian vampires, as Alexandru had intimated? The end result was the same.

  “Did they kill the vampire?” Bela breathed.

  Caleb closed his eyes for longer than a blink. “No. The vampire escaped and bit two people and murdered two more. The local wizards blamed Toby for this, and executed him.”

  Bela slammed shut the astronomy book and gave voice to what Caleb couldn’t say. “They blamed Toby because he was your friend,” he growled.

  Unable to speak, Caleb stared at his own “homework”—a piece of paper where he had been carefully sketching the mountains and their passes into the surrounding towns. He still despaired of making Jupiter do his bidding, but had finally mastered a variety of moonwards of different shapes, sizes, and strengths. These grew weaker and stronger with the phase of the moon, which was exactly what he needed to keep humans and werewolves apart on only that one enchanted night. He had set the wards up on all of the known trails, but the Sixes still occasionally got into the village of Albimare, south of Stilpescu, to bite people. “Were they wrong to do this?” he wondered aloud, not wondering if this was too much moral complexity for a twelve-year-old.

  Bela frowned. “If they killed my best friend, I would bite them all.”

  It was dangerously close to the desire for revenge that had brought him to Romania, and Caleb was not prepared to explore it with his son. He brought the conversation to a halt by telling Bela that he could go into the village but, after a bit of squabbling, convinced the boy not to take the canoe. Making it fly was a very clever Air and Water spell that the Romanian boy had happily adopted from Maine, and Caleb was proud of him, but if any authorities spotted him it would be disastrous.

  “Why don’t you ride Patches?” he suggested. “Then no one will suspect anything.”

  Bela smirked sardonically, but went to swap the paddle for a pair of riding boots and bridle. Everyone believed that horses feared werewolves, but Pack Five had found that as long as the animals were kept in the barn at the full moon, they were none the wiser. Soon the boy was galloping down the mountain, and Caleb listened to the retreating hooves for a long moment before returning to his map.

  How could the werewolves be getting into Albimare? Descending the treacherous granite cliffs away from the paths was impossible even in wolf form, so they were using a route that he had not yet discovered. He knew they weren’t going into the village in human form and waiting for the moon to rise. If they did that where wards were in place, they’d be trapped there until noon the next day. The villagers knew this, and the werewolves knew the villagers knew it. This didn’t exactly make Caleb popular among his kind, but there wasn’t a pack in the mountains that dared to take on the well-nourished and disciplined Fives.

  No, they were entering the town as wolves. But how? Stilpescu appeared safe. No one had been bitten there since Bela. North of Stilpescu, where a gradual earthy trail led to a small farming community, his wards seemed to have held up as well—even the sheep stayed uneaten. There was a complex tangle of trails east of Stilpescu, leading from the Sixes’ territory toward human settlements. It was possible his spells had missed a spot, but in order to get to Albimare from there, the wolves would have to make a forty-mile circuit south through the foothills. To the east of Albimare were granite cliffs, which he had not explored further after a nasty fall on his second full moon in Romania.

  The long walk south was not out of the question for a wolf pack, but it was far for Caleb right now. He decided to investigate the cliffs first. Maybe they would hold the answer.

  14. Moonrise

  “Lamia? You out there?” A firm but worried male voice called into the trees as the sun set over the mountains. Clouds swirled behind the peaks in a fleeting display of neon pinks, oranges, and purples that morphed into the dead grays of late twilight.

  Brush crackled as the man pushed aside new spring growth, coming upon a woman standing quite still in a small clearing. Her back was turned toward him and her head was bowed as though she were staring at her feet. Like the man, the woman had black hair. Hers was long and braided in a thick plait that extended down her back.

  “We were getting worried about you.” He addressed her in English with flat American overtones.

  “I wanted to be alone,” she replied, also in English, but with a lilting Mediterranean accent. She turned to face him, but her eyes were hidden in the shadows of the coming evening. She stared at him curiously for a moment and then appeared to relax, a smile forming on her lips. “Really, Mike, I can take care of myself. You think a little first-year grad student needs protection?”

  He relaxed, too, forgetting whatever had made him apprehensive. “Naw. But this area is riddled with caves, and I—” he stopped as he drew next to her and saw what she had been looking at. “What’s that? Some sort of dead animal?”

  “A rabbit, I think,” she replied cautiously. “Maybe an owl or something got it. I guess you’re right, though. We should get back to the camp.” She brushed past him, finding a path through the trees. He wanted to say more, but followed her silently instead. They both halted as one howl and then several more echoed faintly from the distance.

  “There’s what ate that rabbit,” he said lightly as they continued to walk. “Dogs or wolves. Hey, maybe a werewolf. Didn’t that old guy say something to you about werewolves?”

  Lamia stopped abruptly and Mike nearly collided with her. She didn’t like the thought of werewolves and wished he hadn’t brought it up. He continued to pursue it, though.

  “You know, that guy who drove the truck with all our stuff? He was jabbering at you in Romanian for a while. How come you didn’t tell anyone you spoke the language?”

  “Well, I haven’t spoken it in fifteen or twenty years,” she answered as she again started up the path. “My grandmother was Romanian and I didn’t honestly know if I could still remember much.”

  “It was pretty handy, your being able to talk to him. I don’t think we would have gotten him to give us that extra tank of fuel for the generator otherwise.”

  “He just wanted more money, that’s all,” she said dismissively, but he didn’t seem willing to let it drop.

  “And he warned you about werewolves, right? I could really see that around here. You remember that old story from MIT about the dean who ran off to Romania to hunt monsters?”

  She regretted now telling the other students what the old man had said. She thought it would amuse them, a bit of local color, but she didn’t want to be reminded of it. Especially now, with the full moon rising in front of them.

  Of course, Mike picked up on this next, saying, “Tonight’s the night!”

  As if on cue, another howl interrupted him. Echoes reverberated for several seconds, telling her that it was close, much closer than before. She sto
pped again and turned to face him. “Please, Mike, let’s talk about something else, okay?”

  The howl had gotten his attention. He was willing, more than willing, to change the subject.

  She knew he was attracted to her, but she hadn’t decided what to do about it yet. It was common knowledge that she was sleeping with Carlo, one of the physics graduate students in their group at the university. But Carlo was back in Bologna writing his thesis. Besides, he was starting to irritate her. He seemed to think that because she went to bed with him he could run the rest of her life, too.

  Carlo was on his way out. She’d be stuck with three other students this spring and summer as they set up their high-energy physics experiment in the local caves. There were some possibilities: Mike, who looked Italian but was from New Jersey; Vijay, who was Indian with a degree from Cambridge and a very posh British accent; and the silent Taofang, who hailed from some unpronounceable place in China. Mike thought he was first in line, but she was leaning toward Vijay. He was quieter and seemed less likely to turn into a Carlo.

  Lamia sighed inwardly. She was here to start a thesis project on the physics of neutrino oscillations, collecting the nearly massless particles from collider beams in Italy. They were also setting up an apparatus to detect proton decay—though at a predicted rate of one data point per year, it would take at least a century to graduate on this project. The payoff if they saw proton decay was so great that they were all willing to take part in the experiment, though it sparked many jokes about the need for Undead graduate students.

  Maybe it would be better to concentrate on her work instead of her sleeping arrangements. She knew it would create all sorts of tension among the group and interfere with the work.

  And she loved the work. Until she started studying physics, she never realized the beauty of some of the most difficult of abstract concepts: the dance of subatomic particles existing in their own little realm, pure and not contaminated by the ugliness of the human world. She had had a pretty rough life up until now, which she didn’t talk about with the others. Maybe they suspected from all the languages she spoke that she’d bounced around at a few different schools, or maybe they didn’t think about it. This project was a chance to get away from her past, she hoped.