Furr

by Axel Howerton

  “What are you doing in there?”

  I jump three feet higher than I would have thought possible. “Jesus!”

  Bob is outside, shaking his head at me.

  “Come on, kid. No time to screw around. We gotta go see your aunt.”

  I’m choking on my own heart.

  “Aunt?”

  “What I said, isn’t it?”

  “I thought my aunt was dead.”

  “Different aunt. Great-aunt.”

  I’m still asking questions and still getting very few answers as we rumble up the mountain road.

  “Arthur’s wife?”

  “Sister.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Raigan.”

  “Like the kid in The Exorcist?”

  “I don’t know, Finn. Ray-ginn. Raigan.”

  He pulls in at the first cabin where the boys live.

  “Does she live with Kevin and Jamie?”

  Bob shushes me, waves me out of the truck and behind the cabin, into the trees. He hands me a map drawn on a piece of paper towel, gives me hushed instructions to hike in through the trees, find the waterfall, the little cabin on the far side of what he calls “the spout”.

  “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “Can’t let them know you’re back, or how to get to Raigan’s. You burn that map once you get there, hear? Magus has been looking for it for a long time, but old Raigan, she has powers too.”

  “Again with the fucking powers? Is everybody up here a witch, or a fucking magician? Werewolves and powers? Next thing, you’ll tell me to watch out for vampires.”

  “No, but there might be some angry bucks in there, your cousins have been picking them off in this part of the woods, but there’s a couple of mean bastards yet. And beware the frumious bandersnatch, eh?”

  “What does that even mean?” I ask, hopeless for a real answer as I watch Bob slink off, out of the trees, look around, and then bop on back to his tow-truck as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

  He looks through the trees and gives me a wink and a finger to his lips as he passes.

  I hear rustling in the trees behind me and turn to find the two young wolves watching me again.

  They turn their heads, as they did the night before, signalling me to follow. This time I go.

  I tromp through the woods behind them, watching in wonder and envy as they hop and bounce over the brambles and scrub and dips in the ground that trip me up every second step. They stop every few minutes and wait for me to catch up. I’m out of breath, covered with a thousand scrapes and cuts from every stray branch and sticky burr that I pass, but every step further into the woods makes me stronger, more sure, and more committed to follow them.

  We come to a steep incline that turns into a rocky outcrop. I watch them bound carefully up the rocks, pausing to make sure I’m still behind them. They both cast green eyes out over the forest, down onto the clearing and the big house. I get the feeling that they’re checking to make sure that we’re not seen. We circle the outcrop until we’re shielded again, then continue the climb up, clinging to a narrow path around what’s little more than a cliff. I’m terrified to look down, but I’m also increasingly confident, almost amazed at how sure-footed I am as we pick our way up the mountainside. We finally reach the top of the cliff, standing far above the forest, and they lead me on, until we come to a crack in the mountain, where the stream flows down from above, rushing into the crevice and cascading down to the forest floor below. Just past the falls, on the opposite side of the stream, is a cabin. A single tiny cabin, almost invisible in the trees, a willow-wisp of smoke rising from its chimney. As we come to the stream, the young wolves jump and splash, cavorting and leaping over each other in the cool water. I look for stones big enough to hop across and, finding none, resolve myself to wet socks, and wade in and across.

  The cabin, when we reach it, smells of spices and burning pine, rich smells like cinnamon and apples. There are dozens upon dozens of little carved things hanging from the trees, totems and charms, swaying in the wind, rattling together like an orchestra of bones. The little wolves take up spots on either side of the cabin door—lookouts, or little furry gargoyles. They snuff at me, nod toward the door. Telling me where to go.

  I kick off wet boots and wring out the water from my pant legs, feeling the cold numbing my toes and running up the bones of my shins. I knock lightly.

  “Aunt Raigan?” I whisper.

  The door opens, seemingly of its own accord, and the old woman is sitting across the gleaming gold of the cottage, swaddled up in a blanket in a rickety-looking rocking chair, a shotgun across her lap.

  She sniffs at the air, wrinkled old face puckering up at the smell of me.

  “Finn Bar MacTyre,” she says, her voice thick with the Irish brogue that used to slip into my mother’s voice.

  “Aunt Raigan?” I venture a few steps into the room, wondering at the flickering candle and fire-light that seemed to glow from every corner, wondering at so much fire in a house of sticks, especially one inhabited by a blind old woman. And she was most certainly that. I watch her rise from her chair, head pointed in my direction by the nose, eyes milky white and wandering in no particular direction. I jump across the room to help her out of the chair.

  “Let me help you.”

  She swats me away with a clawed hand that shoots out from the blanket faster than I would have thought possible, and with far more strength.

  “You just watch yourself, child. Think just because I’m a hundred-and-fifty-seven I can’t take care of myself? I’ve lived up here on the mountain by myself for damn near a century, boy!”

  She lets me take her arm anyway, and I walk with her to a high wooden bench that runs the length of one side of her hovel. It’s covered with tools and bits of wood, hunks of half-worked metal, rough-hewn figurines and charms. She takes my hand, feeling around my palm as if she’s looking for something in the lines.

  “Hmm. How can you be that old, yet have not had a full change? You poor soul. How mad you must be. Every seven. That’s the rule, boy. Did that mother of yours not teach you? Damn fool girl, never was one for heritage or knowledge. Starting with that damned idiot you were named for. He brought ruination on us all. Fionn Bharr the Great, he thought himself. Ruined two families he did, and opened the door for our destruction at the hands of those pretenders down there. The magician and his mad dog.”

  She picks up what looks like a coin, a large silver coin, and presses it into my palm.

  “This is for you, Finn. Keep it against you, always, yes? It’ll ward off the machinations of the dark magic that poisons our home now.”

  I look closer at the medallion. One side is hammered and pocked like the moon, same as the one I saw on Emma’s neck, the other has three roughly carved wolves, baying into the night.

  “The maidens of the moon,” Aunt Raigan says from behind me, as she settles herself back in her chair and under her blanket.

  “From the south, three sisters fair

  Ran athwart the gloom

  Dressed of fur and fierce of tooth

  The maidens of the moon.”

  The words tumble from my mouth as I think it, not meaning to recite the poem, but unable to stop myself.

  The old woman giggles from her spot by the fire.

  “Very good, young Finn. Very good. You know the story then?”

  “My mother, I think she used to tell that poem to me when I was very young.”

  “Bah!” she says, waving an arm across the air in front of her. “Your mother never paid attention to a damn word I told her. I used to sing that song to you, when you were a boy. In the big house, on a summer’s day, you and Emma were just wee. Still, even then, the family was wasting. Your grandfather broke the rules, then your father. Then Sean and Oonagh. Cursed they were, by the arrogance of Fionn Bharr.”

  “I don’t . . . Arthur told me something about my grandfather. He killed someone?”

  Aunt Raigan rocks b
ack in her chair and looks at me with her cloudy eyes, seeing me without sight.

  “Your grandfather thought a great deal of himself. He married our cousin, Bradach, even though he never loved her. She gave him four pups—your father and Oonagh, Emma’s mother, among them. But he was never happy, your grandfather. Never complete. He wandered, he fell into the wilds of his lust and his appetites. He was always eating, and drinking. Loved the whiskey he did. Loved the girls, too. Village girls. Never get enough, that one. And then he had the damn fool idea that he could ignore his nature, that he could leave the Gift behind and live whatever life he wanted. He ignored the change, he fought his nature, and that poor girl paid for it, when the madness took him.”

  “The madness?”

  “We’re ancient, boy. And the true nature of a Strong Wolf must be respected. If ye don’t let that wolf out to run, it seeps into your dreams. Eventually it feeds your nightmares, gnashing at the teeth to get out. Hold it prisoner long enough and it’ll escape, come what may. I’m surprised you’ve not suffered it into total madness by now, boy. Seven years, that’s the rule. Every seven, the madness peaks and there is no denying it, lest it devour you whole.”

  “Seven years from when?”

  “From the first change. It’s like the human changes. When you become grown full and your body changes, blossoms into womanhood, or manliness.”

  “Puberty.” Say, around fourteen. Mad with lust and rage, lonely and terrified. Then seven years later when a full nervous breakdown puts you in the mental ward. Then back in the nuthouse before thirty, and yet again, another seven years later, attacking women in the street, puking up fingers, nightmares full of blood.

  “She never told you, did she?”

  “No,” I say, feeling sick in the pit of my stomach. A roiling ocean of bile threatening to bubble to the surface. How did my own goddamn mother let me go through that four times over and not say a goddamn word?

  “What happened to the rest? My father, Emma’s parents?”

  “Much the same, but they didn’t have doctors filling them with filthy drugs to keep them calm.” It seems like she winks at me, but I can’t tell if it’s a twitch or a dig. “Your father, he meant well, but he was confused. He thought Fionn Bharr had given in too much to his nature, and tried to subdue it in himself, not seeing that he was following the same path to destruction. He was lucky, and wasn’t consumed by the madness, only changed.”

  “Is that why my mother took me away? He went mad?”

  She shoots forward in her seat, claws swiping at the air.

  “Your mother was the biggest fool of all! She left because she was selfish and vain. She was a princess in her own little imagined kingdom. She wasn’t special enough here, and she wanted to be beautiful and desired and worshiped by men. Rose, she was named, but she could never live up to the beauty of Oonagh, or Siobhan for that matter. She was too damnably stupid to realize it was because she was all twisted up with envy and foolishness. Your father’s madness was only an excuse to escape.”

  “Yes.” It’s all I can manage.

  “The others tried to emulate your father, as he was the Alpha once Fionn Bharr was gone. Once your mother left, the rest all tried to hold back the nature. Sean and Oonagh, poor Emma’s mother and father, they went the worst. Tore each other to pieces.”

  “After my mother left? But I was there, hiding in the room. I saw it. I’ve been having nightmares about it my whole life.”

  “The third eye, boy. You and Emma, you were paired. Had you stayed, you two would have been the next generation to lead the families. Should have been mated and raising your own family a long time ago. That’s what keeps us strong.”

  “But I was there!”

  “You saw it through her eyes. Felt her pain. No doubt she called out to you. You were her mate. Probably still lingers, despite the years and confusions, eh? Despite the intruder, and his dark curses.”

  I think about Emma, imagine her pressed against me, her warmth on my skin, a deep smile on her face, and in her eyes. The eyes of the girl from my dreams, but in the face of the woman.

  “Mated? Jules said something about being mated with me.”

  Raigan huffs and crosses her arms.

  “Julia? That girl is the most troubled yet. Broken and filthy with anger. I taught her the secrets. Taught her the ancient magic, and what does she do? Goes running to that foul conjurer, the very one that killed her parents, and begs for favour, she does.”

  “Magus killed their parents?”

  She leans forward, the shrouds on her eyes floating like dark clouds over the moon.

  “Of course he did. And your father. Magus, and that rabid dog of his.”

  I’m standing, muscles tensed with new energy, rage boiling up inside me, rising up into my ears, roaring like a furnace.

  “Sit down, boy. There’s no vengeance to be had . . . yet.”

  I grip the medallion tight in my hand and, much like Arthur’s cane, it soothes me, cooling my veins and bringing me back to my senses. I sit and open my hand to look at the trinket.

  “How? How does this work? Arthur’s cane? It’s the same thing? What? Magic?”

  “Yes. The oldest magic. I told you, boy. We are ancient. That’s the secret that Magus is seeking. He wants to find our power and take it for himself. There are few magical things as powerful as real, natural transformation. He could take that power and raise him an army like no other. He could live for another hundred years on what he might steal from just one of us. Once he figures out how. He thinks he can twist it and turn it into something that will make him invincible. There are other ways to become a wolf, some of which he used himself to worm his way into this family. Then he enchanted your Emma, and Julia. Magus, he’s strong, but he’s not ancient.”

  “And Arthur?”

  “My brother has my protection. As do you now, long as you keep that trinket on your skin.”

  She produces a leather strap and runs it through a small hole in the medallion, hanging it loose around my neck. Confidence and calm spread through me. My head clears, and my focus becomes sharp.

  “I tried to protect the girls as best I could,” Raigan continues. “Magus was able to counteract it. You’re all more vulnerable without the pairing of a mate, and without a proper leader. Mostly he’s used the folly of youth—the hunger of the young—pretty things and vainglory, drink and drugs and the promise of more. You’ve seen that hunger. The very same that took your mother. I see it in the age of your eyes, boy. Long years lost, eh?”

  “Yes,” I reply.

  Her eyes reach in and pull at that ache deep inside of me.

  “It’s like a hollow scream deep inside, always begging, pleading, dying for . . . something. And you can never find that thing, can you?

  “You made it through the other side, Finn. You’re here, and wiser than you think. And now that you’ve seen those demons, you’ve fought and lost, and drowned those hungers—and survived—you are the best chance we have to survive. Let you be the last of the circle of madness. Let you bring the strength back to Binn Connall. Maybe now that you’re back, maybe Emma . . .”

  She drifts off into her thoughts, finally seeming as old as she looks.

  “What about the boys?” I ask. “Kevin and Jamie.”

  “Good boys. Such very good boys. I fear for them the most,” she says. “Magus has no need of them—they’re too young to mate, too smart and too strong to be turned to his own uses. If he leaves them to grow, they become a threat. If he kills them now, he would surely lose his pet. Julia would be overcome with rage. But soon, Finn. Soon, I fear. The dog would surely love another trophy or two.”

  “They’re just kids!”

  “And the smartest of us in a thousand years, but I fear they won’t survive the coming storm. Whatever happens, you protect those boys.”

  “How do I . . . I mean, what can I do?”

  “First thing you need to do is take the change, the full change, and let the Strong Wolf
come home. Then you find your mate, and bring that strength back to Bensonhall. Maybe then, if Emma is freed, and Julia can see the error of her ways . . . Then, perhaps, the strength of all three could stand against Simon Magus and his killer.”

  “Airitech . . .”

  “Yes, boy.”

  “But sisters fair, maidens of the moon . . . they were slaughtered, speared through.”

  “It’s a bloody poem, boy. Just a story, and two-thousand years old. But so are the Strong Wolves. That damnable magician, he’ll underestimate you. He came into a broken house and hid in the rubble, picking away at ruins. He’s a thieving coyote in wolf’s clothing.”

  “Skinkuk.”

  A strange expression takes her face, twisting and crawling over her yellowed and broken teeth.

  “Yes!” she shouts, throwing her fists in the air. “You listen to old Bob Dylan. He’ll show you the way. We wouldn’t be nowhere without the Ktunaxa.”

  She pops out of her chair, again, far faster than I would have thought possible, and she’s at my ear, whispering, telling me the secret of the Strong Wolves, the secret of our clan.

  “Now go, the boys will tell you what you need to know, young Finn.”

  She pulls me down to kiss my face, then shoves me toward the door.

  “Fare thee well, Finn Bar. And give ’em hell, my boy.”

  Kevin and Jamie are waiting outside, green eyes gleaming in the darkness.

  27

  THE LITTLE WOLVES lead me further into the woods, away from the cabin, away from Bensonhall, until we come to a tiny clearing, no more than twenty feet of a circle. The moon is bright and full overhead, cascading down into the grass around us and lighting up the night with silver.

  They circle me a few times, walking me into the middle of the clearing, then they jog around to face me.

  I watch as they hunch forward, muscles tensing under the fur, a grey smoke rising from them like steam. They twitch and groan, snarling in pain as their skin comes away in ribbons, spinning out and whipping around them in tendrils, mixing and dissolving into the grey smoke that covers them. I can see their bones reform, their muscles reshape around them. They both lurch backwards, up onto their knees, and then they’re standing, the smoke recedes and pales, resolving itself into white skin and blonde hair.