He must have been changing back when a classmate saw him crouched over the body. Before Axel knew he was there, the boy took off and named him to the police.
The Five decided to help. They killed another girl while Axel was in jail. They didn’t let Vivian know their plans; they must have thought she’d object.
And I would have, she thought, but she wasn’t sure.
“How could a boy be covered in fur? How could a human inflict such wounds?” the family lawyer pleaded for Axel. The new killing while Axel was locked up proved there was a wild animal on the loose. Axel had merely discovered the body, then had panicked and run. The case was dismissed.
But someone from town believed the witness’s tale of a wolf that turned into a boy, and late one night the inn and outbuildings burst into flame in six different spots, and black acrid smoke hid the moon.
In the 1600s, her ancestors had fled from werewolf hysteria in France to the sparsely settled New World, and by the end of the century had settled in wild Louisiana. In nineteenth-century New Orleans the Verdun triplets broke the ban on human flesh and the pack moved in haste to West Virginia, where they were joined by the remnants of a German pack from Pennsylvania. Last year the forbidden appetite had won again, and the pack took flight from the hills that had been its home for one hundred years and arrived refugees in the Maryland suburbs-five families plus assorted others crammed into Uncle Rudy’s run-down Victorian house in Riverview. With luck, no one would follow them here; they could mark new trails.
The house on Sion Road had emptied out gradually as the others found jobs and places to stay, until it held only Vivian, Esmé, and Uncle Rudy. Vivian had thought that by this time they would have made plans for the future, but now the whole pack seemed to be crazy, her mother included. With more than half of them dead, no one knew his or her place anymore. There was constant squabbling. Survival depended on their blending in while they organized and decided where they would move and settle for good, but at any moment the pack was likely to explode in a ball of flying fur. They needed a leader badly, but no one could agree who.
Blend in, she thought.
If only I could.
Last summer she had hid in her room and slept mostly, and in the early hours of the morning, the time when wolf-kind come home to shed their pelts, Vivian would hear her mother crying inconsolably by her open bedroom window for someone who would never come home again.
By the time her junior year started, however, Vivian had begun eating almost regularly, and Esmé had found herself a job as a waitress at Tooley’s, a local dive. Gradually it wasn’t so hard to make it through the day. Vivian was no longer exhausted when she walked in the door at three-thirty, and the schoolwork began to make sense.
She started to look longingly at the groups of kids laughing together around the flagpole after school.
At first she thought, Why would I make friends with people who would kill me if they knew what I was? What if I give myself away?
But the yearning continued. It was then she realized that she didn’t know how to make friends.
She had always had the pack around her, the pack that now hid in their separate dens. There were always pack kids. She had never had to reach out for company, company was always there. The Five were still around, of course, but now she couldn’t bear to be with them, and they could never be just her friends now, anyway. They all saw her as a mate-be nice to one, and the others would sulk and snap. Fight, fight, fight, that’s what paying attention to them meant.
I want other friends, she thought. But no one seemed to want her.
She stood in front of her closet mirror in her T-shirt and twisted this way and that.
What’s wrong with me? she wondered.
There was nothing the matter that she could see. She was tall and leggy, like her mother, with full breasts, small waist, and slim hips that curved enough to show she was female. Her skin was gently golden; it was always golden, sun or not, and her tawny hair was thick and long and wild.
So why was it that groups of girls stopped talking when she approached them at school and answered her openings with terse words that killed the conversations she tried to start? Was she too good-looking? Was that possible? Was that the threat they saw? She was a beautiful loup-garou, she knew-the Five howled for her-but what did human eyes perceive?
The boys nudged each other when she passed; she’d seen them out of the corner of her eye. They noticed her. And she could understand why one or two might blush and stammer if she talked to them. There were always shy boys who would die if any girl noticed them. But where were the bold ones?
Male or female, they resisted her. Could they see the forest in her eyes, the shadow of her pelt? Were her teeth too sharp?
It’s hard not to be a wolf, she thought. She missed the mountain slopes where humans were far apart and the pack was close, and she hardly ever had to pretend.
I don’t care, she thought, twirling around.
I don’t need humans. I still have the pack, and we’ll be moving on again soon.
But she did care. The pack was in shreds, and in the midst of these humans she was wolf-kind- loup-garou
-and this made her an outsider and unwanted.
But they would like me if they took the time to know me, she thought.
They just don’t know me.
She flung herself onto her bed and stretched her legs in the air to admire their sleek curves, holding her hips to brace herself aloft. She stretched as hard as she could, toes pointed, fingers reaching, muscles in sweet tension, almost as sweet as the change to fur. “I am strong,” she whispered. “I can run with the night and catch the dawn. I can kick a hole in the sky.” And she struck out with a foot to prove her words. Then curled into a ball.
She missed her father-his advice, his comfort. She bared her teeth at the familiar pain.
From where she lay, she could see the unbroken wall she’d cleared of furniture and the mural she’d started to console herself and to make this room hers.
Jagged, thick blacks made the forest a wild thing, texture on texture; the painted moon shone fiercely. There was red slashed into the dark-eyes, blood.
Loups-garoux ran through the pooled moonlight on a night in her people’s ancient past. The stories said that by ritual, sacrifice, and sacrament, they opened their souls to the Forest God, the great hunter who took the shape of the wolf. To reward them for their devotion, his mate, the Moon, gave them the gift to be more than human. Then they could throw aside the pelts of hunted animals and grow their own, abandon their knives of flint and use their teeth. Their children’s children’s children still carried the beast within, and all were subject to the Moon.
In the center of the mural was where she would become part of the night, where she would run with the pack of her ancestors. But now whenever she picked up the brush, she couldn’t go on. She couldn’t see herself there. She had a dream about the painting that kept coming back. She was surrounded by darkness and she couldn’t see the muzzles around her. She was running, running, trying to reach the open night, but all around the huge forms crowded close and abraded her skin with their harsh thick fur as they thudded into and jostled her. And she couldn’t grow her pelt. It was always their fur against her skin, and she’d wake up crying.
As if to counteract the dream, she had become obsessed for a while and had created dozens of smaller paintings and sketches of the pack she knew while growing up. They lined her closet and were stacked in the space between her dresser and the wall. They helped her hold on to the past. They kept her from going crazy.
The art teacher thought she was one of those punk artsy types and raved about the power of expressionism.
Great Moon, he’d shit a brick if he knew my subjects were real, Vivian thought gleefully. He’d talked her into submitting a few prints to the school literary magazine. She’d laughed at first-but why not? And now, to her surprise, there was one of her prints near the center of
The Trumpet. Vivian smiled. And no doubt those humans thought her work was the too-cool vision of the terminally hip and dangerous.
Thought of this small acceptance pushed back the gloom, and she bounded up to fetch her backpack and have another look. She should leave the magazine open on the kitchen table for Mom to see tomorrow before she went to work. Would she recognize her daughter’s art? Would she be proud?
The magazine smelled glossy and was cool in her hands. She found her print and devoured the sheen of it, crisp and stark.
And will those girls at school notice me now? she thought.
She hadn’t even bothered to see who she shared space with.
Is my work better than the others’? she wondered now. A poem was on the page opposite hers. She looked at it suspiciously. A crappy poem would lessen what she’d done, make it cheap.
The title startled her-“Wolf Change.” She read on.
Corsair of the wood discard your skin your pallid, wormlike vulnerability.
Corsair of the wood exchange your skin for pelt of dun and brindle luxury.
A pentagram is burning in your eyes and soft, pale twists of wolfbane squeeze your heart.
A grinding pain is writhing in your thighs the crunch of bones proclaims the change’s start.
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