The Worst Werewolf

by Jacqueline Rohrbach

  He could take care of Amber’s condition. Only healing her meant fully bonding. For him, fully bonding meant seeing himself through her eyes, knowing most of her thoughts. Knowing her thoughts meant constant misery. And then she might die by Mazgan’s hand. Horribly. The entire situation vexed him.

  Lavario’s hunger hooked its fang deep in his belly. An ungracious killer, it reminded him dallying was no longer his privilege. He could feed from her—healed or not—or wither away until he expired.

  He approached the bed where Amber slept.

  Garbling insults, she lashed out at something in her fevered sleep. Probably me, Lavario mused, or one of the other Varcolac wolves. He wrapped his hand in a cool cloth before touching her sweaty cheeks, patting them the way he’d seen concerned mothers do on television shows. Even in her sleep she flinched away from his touch. Even through the cloth of the rag, her subconscious found its way to him.

  In her dream rain fell on a roof, rushing off the nearly rotted shingles and pouring to the concrete below where it landed with heavy-handed irregular splatters. Children with their mouths open wide caught some of the water before it hit the ground. They were too young, too happy-go-lucky to care about things like bacteria. But Amber saw herself as full-grown. “Yuck!” she yelled down. Her condemnation only made the giggles louder. One of kids raised his hands to fling the dirty water Amber’s direction.

  Lavario smiled, happy because Amber was. Elated, he ran down the stairs with her; taking them one by one, two by two, three by three. Their gait was reckless, confident, youthful. The door opened, flinging wide. They bolted through it. And stopped.

  Blood ran from bodies and from the roof above. A monster that pretended to be a man played in it. Green eyes twinkled when he threw his head back and opened his mouth to drink. He looked at her and giggled in voice of a thousand slain children. Gracefully, each movement calculated, he pulled his body to the side so she could see her family strewn out on the ground below his feet.

  Alarmed, Lavario stumbled backward from the horrific images of himself. He shook off his foolish surprise. How else was she to see the werewolf who’d supposedly ordered the slaughter of her family? When she woke, she’d be with him until one of them died, constantly reliving the ordeal. Moved by pity he resolved to end her suffering. He tilted her head to the side. Fangs out, sharp and white in the lamplight, he bent over her throat.

  Kijo’s voice cut through the haze. “Earning your Boo Hag title.”

  “Yes, I…” Harsh words dried on his lips. “What is this?” He pointed at the large garbage bag she towed.

  “The rest of your punishment.”

  He waited for an explanation but got none. Hunger dulled his senses. To figure out the contents of the sack he had to sniff at the air around him like a common ally dog pawing through the garbage. Once he knew, he leapt to his feet. Snarling, he bore down on Kijo. Accomplishing nothing.

  She straightened a strand of his hair, smoothing the top so that the pointed ends all went the same direction. “You are more poodle than wolf.”

  He felt the weight of his fangs on his bottom lip. “This poodle has killed more wolves than you have years, Jun.”

  Kijo stopped grooming him and raised her lip a fraction above one tooth, more ironic than concerned. Her tone was as close to humor as she got when she chastised him in their old, familiar way, “You frenzy, Guardian Lavario.”

  He wanted to go back to the time when her saying this would have followed a pat on his cheek. He wanted it more than he wanted to live. The sentimentality nipped at his heels.

  “Feeling sorry for yourself?”

  “Yes,” Lavario answered his daughter.

  “You must be terribly inconvenienced.”

  “I have had better weeks.”

  “I imagine so.” Kijo glanced at Amber. As if on cue, the girl moaned in her sleep. “You would kill her—in her sleep no less—after what she endured to live?”

  “There is no need for her to suffer.”

  “True,” Kijo considered, “but she chose to fight. And you chose to save Jun.”

  Lavario wanted to keep the dialogue going. Talking to Kijo was as close to normal as he could get. Protracted arguments were not on his daughter’s itinerary. She left him to make his own decisions.

  Familiar magic worked its way through him. Lavario surrendered his control, allowed it to guide his hands as he mended Amber’s ailments. When her breathing was no longer ragged, Lavario opened his eyes and rubbed her head. His hand felt massive against her delicate brow. Curled up against one of the long pillows, hugging it close to her body the way children clutched teddy bears, Amber appeared peaceful.

  When she woke, her world would be nothing but constant uncertainty, continual change. Amber wanted to fight. He hoped she’d feel the same way once she woke.

  The bag Kijo brought in contained the body of Amber’s father.

  * * *

  Staging the scene as a wake rather than degradation worked for a day or two. Amber grieved. She held her father’s hand and thought about all the bad things she’d ever done to disappoint him. Last time they talked, he’d called her a whore for sleeping with a college boy. Spreading her legs, he’d said, instead of getting an education. Brokenhearted, she’d come home to mend their relationship. She was so wrapped up in what she could have said to bring peace that she forgot Lavario existed.

  Maybe she didn’t recognize him. To say he wasn’t quite what Amber remembered would have been an understatement. Hair, so carefully groomed when she saw him last, puffed at the top and clung to his neck in a nest of sweat and grime at the bottom. Green eyes, menacing in her dreams, were bloodshot, puffy and dull.

  She probably wouldn’t recognize herself either. As the body in front of Amber stopped being her father, the more it grinned and stank, she became manic. She talked gibberish, often wailing and slapping herself as though she were trying to come out of a dream. Fine bedding that was to be Tovin’s became sticky with sloughed off skin and rank from discharged body chemicals. His stupid thing. Let him live with it, Kijo had said. He assumed she meant the girl. How wrong he’d been.

  “Please,” she was in her begging cycle, “bury him.”

  “Soon,” he promised her even though he had no idea how much longer it would be.

  Grief became the squatter in Lavario’s chambers, laying claim to his space. Whenever he tried to reclaim himself, Amber would wail, or her father’s body would break apart, morphing into something newly hideous. Even when the head slumped away, Geri or Freki found a way to unite skull and neck once again. Remarkable for such stupid wolves.

  Humans in distress were a terrible burden, and putrefaction was a tiresomely long process. Sleep was the only peace he got. Otherwise, it was screaming, sobbing, and the stench of the dead.

  Grudgingly, Lavario applauded Kijo’s stratagem, even felt a bit of pride at the ingenuity of using the thing the Varcolac hated about him to destroy him. Nostalgia tugged. No matter how much he willed his feelings to be disapproval, hatred, or scorn, he could manage nothing outside of wounded love.

  Jun. Jun. Jun. He’d taught her how to be Varcolac instead of like him. He truly was a giant Boo Hag.

  A pot hitting the side of his head brought him back to the present. Amber shouted, “Bury him! Bury him you monster.”

  “I cannot,” he responded.

  She sneered at him. “Do you have a shovel?”

  He was dumfounded. “A shovel? No.”

  “Never mind. I’ll dig with my hands if I have to.”

  Lavario didn’t fully understand what she meant until she dragged the body out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: BURIAL

  Amber’s father, once proud and handsome, seemed to bump into everything. She tried to be careful at first, gently guiding him along by gripping his pant legs. Fear made her desperate. Grief made her clumsy. She came undone when she imaged him saying, This is your fault. Whore. Soon after, she sobbed while she yanked and pulled the body
down the hall.

  “Amber,” Lavario tried to pull her away.

  She shoved him.

  “Do you know where you are taking him?”

  “Go to hell,” she shot back. She stood up and walked past. Thinking she’d given up, Lavario prepared himself to drag the body back to his room. A minute or two later, she reemerged holding his linen curtains, the ones with the embroidered trim. Circumstances being what they were, Lavario still cringed when she tossed the delicate fabric on the floor and rolled her father onto it.

  She tied the edges to form a handle. It worked for about two seconds until the knot came undone and the body fluids soaked through.

  Varcolac wolves watched events unfold with various degrees of involvement. To them Amber’s suffering was a nuisance, an obstacle preventing them from going in a straight line to their destinations. Had she been the bloodservant of any other wolf, they would have used physical force to remove her. Being Lavario’s gave her more license. For now their fear of him outweighed their hatred. Amber didn’t know this. She still glared back at them in open defiance, going so far as to growl at one.

  Eventually, she had to admit defeat. She wasn’t strong enough to move the body on her own. Failure hit her full force. She couldn’t do right by him in life or in death. Crying, she sat down next to her father and told herself she couldn’t let the monsters see her fall apart. Tears came anyway, followed by sobs she tried to muffle by biting her hand.

  “Amber,” he gently touched her shoulder.

  She didn’t answer, only blinked away tears and grabbed her knees tighter to her chest.

  Lavario picked up the body and draped it over his shoulder. Smell and texture worked in tandem to nauseate him. He fought through his dizziness and made peace with losing another good suit. “Come with me, Amber.”

  When she failed to move, he walked away, leaving her to decide for herself if she’d see her task through. Being strong on her own was the only way she’d survive her ordeal.

  He was relieved when he heard her light, fractured footsteps behind him.

  All the hallways in the Varcolac complex were the same. Each room was sparse, devoid of personality. No pictures, no rugs, no curtains, very little furniture, and gray walls. The entire massive complex was like a construction zone or a part of an office building that should have been marked off with a semi-transparent plastic curtain. Lavario sensed Amber felt lost in the vast space and sure he was going to take her through the twists and turns only to ditch her and her father.

  “We are close now,” he told her as they started to climb.

  And then they arrived. She blinked her eyes when the afternoon sunlight hit her face. “What is this?”

  “My garden,” Lavario answered.

  The peonies were in full bloom, filling the area with their sweet, almost roselike smell. The flower reminded him of old southern graveyards filled with massive stone angels towering above the dead. It was an appropriate image for what they came here to do.

  He got a shovel from the shed. Before he started the grave, Amber grabbed the tool from his hands. This is my job, she thought but said nothing. Lavario surrendered the task to her.

  In the early part of the process, when she was full of certainty and renewed vigor, dirt got flung everywhere. Wide and wasteful, her movements were testament to the youthful belief in unlimited energy. As Lavario expected, the inability to pace herself cost her at the end. Hands bleeding, her breathing ragged, Amber finished the task fueled by stubbornness alone.

  She climbed up from the grave and brushed off at least two shovel scoops of dirt from her face, hands, and clothes. Moonlight outlined the waterlines on her face where tears and sweat merged. It made her brown eyes look black.

  She looked at the cloth covering her father’s body and swallowed hard. I can’t lift him, she told herself. An image flashed into Lavario’s mind, one of Amber’s father flopping into the grave the way sacks of grain hit the bottom of their barn. Those sacks would often split open.

  Lavario lowered his hand onto her shoulder. “I am here to help you lower him. It is time to say good-bye.”

  She’d been ready to put her father to rest but not ready to for things to end this way between them. She didn’t want to be alone in the world. She approached his body in small increments. Dragging herself toward the end of their time together felt like carrying her father’s weight all over again.

  Tentatively, she took the last few steps forward. Guilt tore through her, zigzagging though Lavario’s mind as well. She didn’t want to touch it anymore. Whatever her father was in life—a musician whose graceful fingers made art from air, a boxer whose fists cut through air like lightning to make thunder, an intellectual whose book shelves were, as he often said, like air to someone living under water—he wasn’t that now. He had no more breath left in him. Before her was a grotesque bacteria-filled mass stripping everything down to its frame. Inevitable but ugly.

  Lavario transferred the body to the grave. Although he offered to fill it in, Amber insisted the task was hers by right of blood. Pain laced with fatigue made the undertaking last until the sunlight crept in from the west. By then, she was on the verge of collapse. Stooped over, she used the shovel to create the illusion of standing tall.

  Lavario asked Amber, “Is there anything you would like to say to honor him?”

  Her thoughts broke through to Lavario. Absurd images of garden gnomes acting as a tombstone came to her. Those stupid creatures were scattered in their yard back home. Her father loved them, especially the ultra-cutesy gnomes with pudgy bellies and rosy cheeks. The notion of one standing vigil over the grave made her spit out a grief-filled laugh.

  Such thoughts felt inappropriate. She could see her stern-faced father standing beside her, saying something about responsibility. Guilty again, she searched for clever, meaningful words. None came to mind. She stood over him clutching a makeshift bouquet. “He was…” she started. Then stopped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: WRAITH LOCH

  Patches of sleep came and went. Nightmares plagued Amber’s rest each time her eyelids closed. Through her, Lavario experienced the terror and a hopelessness that came with being a captive facing an uncertain future. Relaxation was a scarce resource.

  And when she wasn’t having bad dreams, she was awake and plotting.

  Too afraid to verbally express her anger, Amber fantasized about the day she’d kill him. More than once he saw her standing over his dead body, kicking it in triumph. Sometimes in her visions, she sawed off his head and took it to her father’s grave. Wishful thinking.

  The more time she spent with him, the more her confidence waned, the more bad dreams she had. She thought about killing him a lot less and instead worried, “What’s going to happen to me when you die?”

  “My death is not certain,” he’d remind her

  She considered her lavish surroundings with a critical eye worthy of a Varcolac wolf. To Amber, his apartment was some type of museum library hybrid. Tasteful but old-fashioned. Lots of dark wood, carvings, drapes that cascaded down from the ceiling but covered no windows. And shelves and shelves of books. When he searched Amber’s mind for a description of himself, all he heard was snobby geezer with hoarder issues.

  The description rankled. He did not have hoarder issues.

  She opened his closet, going so far as to grope undergarments. Lavario raised a haughty eyebrow at the intrusion but said nothing.

  “What’s this divide for?” she knocked on the wood board separating his wardrobe.

  “Right side for nonwolf days, left side for wolf days.” She gave him a confused shake of her head. Exasperated that it mattered to her, Lavario sighed and explained, “When I believe a day will anger me to the point of transformation, I wear something from the left side. When I’m reasonably confident the day will be stress free, I select from the right. No need to ruin my nicer clothes if it can be avoided.”

  “That is… you are…” She puffed out her cheeks. “What’s g
oing to happen to me when you die?” It might have been amusing if not for her tear-saturated brown eyes.

  When he didn’t answer, she went back to mauling his possessions with her clumsy hands. His keepsake box with wolves, elk, and flowers carved into the sides crashed down on the floor. Amber flipped open the silver lid and rummaged through the contents. She pulled out a stuffed animal. “Is this a teddy bear? What’s a werewolf doing with a teddy bear?”

  Kijo’s. Lavario’s heart gave a painful squeeze, reminding him of what he’d lost. Though he’d done his best to preserve Mr. Bear, its white stuffing peeped out from behind ripping seams. One eye was missing. That happened centuries ago. He grabbed it from Amber more roughly than he intended.

  She glared and rubbed her hand. “You are the absolute worst werewolf.”

  He put the box and the bear on a higher shelf. Satisfied it was safe for now, he turned his attention to Amber and asked her, “And what is your idea of a good werewolf?”

  Lavario got the sense she knew what she’d said was ridiculous. She didn’t have many other werewolves to compare him to. Knowing this didn’t prevent her from doubling down with, “I dunno. Go out in the forest and eat campers.”

  Lavario sniffed. “Even the word campers smells bad, and I hate the forest.”

  “The worst,” Amber repeated with venom.

  “Come with me,” he gestured for her to follow. He took her by her elbow. Mindful of her tender skin and the strength of his own hands, he guided her until she followed on her own. They came to a wall.

  “A-plus wall,” she told him. “I really love how you accented the brick with wood. That’s going to get you a lot of resale value.”

  “Very amusing. Stay here.”

  He placed his hand in the center of the invisible door there. Magic opened it. He didn’t give Amber time to quip. Once again, he grabbed her elbow and pulled her along.

  Darkness didn’t hinder his vision. Amber fumbled along, sliding her hands along solid stone and shuffling her feet across the uneven floor. Instead of helping her, Lavario left her to find her own way. If she ever came back here, she’d need to navigate the terrain without him.