striped panties under her stockings. “I’m just saying…”
Carmen pats my free hand. “Well, I think it’s very thoughtful. And practical. You know there are still outbreaks from time to time, back home in New Carolina. Now at least we’ll have some defenses.”
“Yeah,” Tracy snorts. Carmen used to be her babysitter and is only about ten years older than her. “As if the barbed wire fence, steel doors, shotguns in every room and bars over every window weren’t enough.”
Carmen shoots her a hard look. “You know the government made us do that, Tracy. And after what happened with your mother, who can blame them?”
“You shut up about Mom!” Tracy spits, nearly lunging out of her chair. Dad lurches forward to stop her, a hand on both knees. I can’t tell who he’s being more protective of: Tracy or her stepmother. “You’re not fit to talk about my mother.”
“Our mother,” I remind her, pointedly, with a low growl. She glares back at me, but says no more on the matter. “So I am fit to talk about her, and Carmen’s right. What happened to Mom, and what she did to me, could happen to anyone. Anytime, anywhere. That’s why I’m in here, Tracy, so I won’t do to you… or dad or Carmen… what Mom did to me. So, yeah, bars on the window suck but they’re a lot better than turning into a monster once a month and devouring the neighbors. Take it from me.”
Tracy sniffs dramatically, rolling her eyes. “Boo hoo,” she sneers, looking out a nearby window, also covered with bars. It’s hard to find one that isn’t, nowadays. “Poor teen wolf. At least you get to stay here, and not back home with these two jack apes.”
“Tracy!” Dad shouts, but Carmen just slides further into her chair. I’d like to reach out and squeeze her arm, just to let her know she’s not alone. But that would just rile Tracy up some more.
The fact is, I wasn’t the only one affected by Mom’s rampage. Carmen was babysitting Tracy the night it happened. I was old enough to do it myself, but had begged off to go to the movies with Heather Foster. (Ironically, I’d talked her into seeing Werewolf Bikers 4!)
When I got home that night, Mom had already made short work of Carmen’s parents. I caught her in the back alley, sniffing around the garage window, scratching at the sill to get inside with seven-inch claws, standing on her hind legs.
I didn’t know it was Mom at the time, of course. She looked like any other giant, 8-foot, 300-pound werewolf, yellow eyes flashing, leathery snout drooling.
The neighborhood had been on high alert for weeks with the recent rash of werewolf sightings and actual attacks in nearby Foster County. But things had quieted down in the last few days, so we were all a little too lax.
Dad later told me he and Mom were coming home from dinner when a werewolf dragged her out of the car at the stoplight up the street. It happened so fast, Dad said, there wasn’t time for him to save her. One minute they were sitting at the stoplight, listening to their favorite 80s music on the radio, fighting about the big tip she’d left the cute waiter and the next, the beast had torn off the door, taken a bite out of Mom’s thigh and dragged her out of the car and down the street.
I believed him. Tracy didn’t. Not then, and she still doesn’t.
Either way, he called out after her, got out of the car to find her, then got back in and drove around looking for her. She found our street first, and must have mistaken Carmen’s house for ours.
Which makes sense, if you think about it, because all the houses on our street look alike. When she found Carmen’s parents inside, watching TV in the living room, that was all she wrote. Mom devoured them both in seconds, then went next door and was sniffing around the garage when I walked up.
There was no hesitation, no flicker of recognition, nothing more than animal hunger – and instinct. She bit me, square, on the shoulder before I jabbed a shovel in between her ribs and kept on jabbing until the blade popped out the middle of her back. The minute her werewolf heart stopped beating, there she was. Mom, lying on her back, blood all over her, eyes open and already cooling. Staring up at me. I always wondered if she knew, in that instant, what she’d done to her son.
After all that’s happened, even now, I sure hope not.
Dad pulled up just as Tracy and Carmen came running out of the house, and then Carmen looked over at her house, next door. Saw the blood on the door jam, the torn screen door, and started screaming.
I took one look at the bite on my shoulder and fainted. I woke up here. That was three years ago, and I’ve been here ever since. Carmen grieved her family. Alone, in her house. Dad grieved Mom. Alone except for Tracy, in his house. After enough grieving, I suppose, Dad and Carmen got… close. Close enough to marry, I suppose. Happened last year around this time, as a matter of fact.
I look at Carmen, then at Dad, blinking away the old memories and shaking my way back into the present. “Isn’t your anniversary around now?” I croak around the lump in my throat. It hurts, to think of all that. Mom gone. Tracy pissed. Dad and Carmen oblivious. Me… here. I try not to think about what could have been, but it’s hard when you see the kid you used to be reflected in other people’s eyes.
Dad smirks. “Try two weeks ago, Bud.” Then he rustles my hair, like he used to when I was twelve.
“But thank you for the thought, honey,” Carmen says.
Tracy rolls her eyes. “Gross,” she snorts. “I hate when you do that, Carm. You’re like, four years older than him. It’s… it’s… obscene.”
“Seven years now, Trace,” Carmen corrects her.
Tracy looks me up and down and rolls her eyes. “Only on a technicality. He’s gonna be 17 forever. He should be 21. He should be back home, buying me beer on the weekend, looking out for me, not sitting in here… rotting.”
Dad shakes his head. “Jesus, I wish I’d stayed 17 forever.”
We all chuckle, even Carmen. Just then Reggie appears with a small stack of presents. They all look like they were elegantly wrapped, once upon a time. But Reggie and Claudell had to open them, check for any contraband, and clearly enjoyed doing so.
“We had to confiscate a few things,” he says, nodding toward Claudell who is already tucking into a box of my favorite pre-packaged Christmas snack cakes, Sno-Hos.
“You took his Sno-Hos?” Carmen asks, face wrinkling, accent in full “oh no you didn’t” mode, complete with a lip smack for a question mark.
“Sugar is a trigger for shifters, ma’am,” says Reggie, sliding the three packages left in my lap. “You should know that by now.”
“And he’s not a shifter,” blurts Tracy with a growl of her own. “You should know that by now.”
Reggie ignores her and returns to his post on the other side of the door. I watch as they make quick work of an entire box of Sno-Hos. They’re lucky I can’t shift at will, or so help me they’d both be in pieces on the floor by now, me eating bloody Sno-Hos over their cold, dead limbs.
“Oh well,” says Carmen, brightening, tugging on the hem of her sweater. “They were just stocking stuffers anyway.”
I open a green package first. It contains a paperback called It’s Not Over Yet: Life After Lycan. I chuckle. “Thanks, Dad.”
“How’d you know it was from him?” asks Carmen with a tone that says, of course it was.
“Dad? He’s the self-help king. I didn’t know they had a section for werewolves, Dad.”
He blushes a little, loosening his cheap Santa tie. “Forget section, kid. They’ve got a whole shelf on werewolf self-help these days.”
“Well, it’s mostly for families of werewolves,” Carmen corrects, “but we thought you’d like this.”
“I will, thanks.” I open the next one: it’s a nature CD called Christmas Music to Soothe the Savage Beast. I chuckle. “Thanks for this, too.”
Carmen explains, “Even though you’re not a shifter, it could still help. Especially tonight.” As if on cue, we all look toward the window where the afternoon sky is already growing cold and gray. Not that long until sunset, now. I can see it on every
body’s faces.
“Thanks, really,” I say, remembering Christmas past, but only fleetingly. It doesn’t do to think about the past these days, only the now. I open the last present, expecting it to be from Tracy. But it’s not. It’s a calendar, a wolf calendar, with the last Sunday of every month circled in big, fat loops of bright red marker.
“We wanted to give you something to look forward to,” Dad says, looking to Carmen for help.
“We circled the days we’d be coming to see you,” she explains. “Not that that’s the most exciting thing in the world, but… since you’re here, and stuck here, family visits re better than nothing, right Jace?”
I smile. “That’s really thoughtful, guys.” I look at them both, then feel like I should add something more. So I do: “Really.”
I carefully fold the wrapping paper on top of each present, then stack them in a small bundle at my feet. “What about you, brat?” I say, kicking Tracy’s shin absently.
“I’ve been grounded so long, I never got a chance to leave the house,” she says, avoiding my eyes and scoping out the small picnic table in the corner topped by a cheesy
The Werewolf On Christmas: A YA Paranormal Story Page 2
