by Carrie Jones
“Yeah, we shot him,” David says. “I put five rounds in him, myself. Saw two hit the shoulder and two in the chest. I might have missed with the first one.”
“I shot him five times with twelve-gauge slugs,” I tell the cops. “The slugs were ripping out his back. I saw the blood. I put the last one into the side of his throat. Tore off a big piece of skin.…”
More sirens are coming toward us. Far off down the road I can see more red and blue flashing lights.
Mr. Davis appears from the other direction, huffing and puffing up the road, holding my shotgun in one hand while he swings his arms as he sort of runs in an old man way. He stops near the dead man, bends over, and puts his free hand on his knee as he struggles for breath.
“Dear God,” he says, panting. “What happened?”
24
CHRYSTAL
The local police call in the state troopers to help them out, and I guess I look sufficiently traumatized, because the tall blond sergeant doesn’t even yell at me too much for blowing off his directions. Instead he just interviews me in his squad car, gets the facts, and writes them down in a little notebook with a spiral that’s at the top instead of the side. Then he makes me write out my own witness statement.
The sergeant? He swears a lot. I can’t blame him. One of his cop friends is dead and that’s got to be beyond hard. While we talk, we sit in the car with the air conditioning blowing full blast, but the windows are down. The engines are running on every single car like they are all prepared to run away or chase after anything that moves.
The sergeant clears his throat while I stare at my shaking hands. They clutch each other like that will hide the shaking. There are wounds around my wrists. The ambulance people didn’t check them out, though. They are too busy with the dead.
“We normally have one murder a year. One. Thirteen reported rapes. A few dozen assaults, either domestic or bar fights. Most of our calls are dogs at large, noise complaints and thefts from vehicles. This … what’s going on here…” He seems to search for words, stares ahead through the windshield like the sight of the other cops working out there in the dark might somehow magically help the words come out. “It affects all of us … all of the community … You’re not from here, so you may not realize how it is.”
He takes his hand and rubs it across his face. It’s the only time I’ve seen him show any weakness. Then it passes.
“I’m from a pretty small town,” I say. “It’s not the same, but … it’s a lot of death. I … I’ve never seen so much violence. Not ever. I’ve never even seen a gun in real life before.”
I swallow hard and try not to think about it, but images flash into my head. The officer’s head bitten … the dead guy’s eyes … running down the street … hands grabbing me by the waist … howls … duct tape … the ground beneath my body as he drags …
“Your father still hasn’t shown up?” the sergeant asks. His voice snaps me out of the memory suck.
I shake my head because I don’t trust myself enough to speak. It’s like all this fear and sorry and worry are ready to burst out of my lungs, and if I just say that little word, then it will start escaping me and I won’t be able to stop it.
He nods slowly. “This all just sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I make myself say. “Yeah, it does.”
* * *
I run Kierkegaard quotes through my head. I think of what could be keeping my dad from coming back, from answering his phone. I imagine playing the bass, detailing out every sound, every finger position. Nothing calms my mind. Nothing.
I am tired of being at the whims of the bad guys and the good guys. I am tired of hoping things will resolve. Yes, I failed and fell into a trap, but maybe next time I’ll be the one to make the trap.
* * *
When the police are done with us, Logan and I huddle together on the porch, just sort of watching the cleanup and the investigation. There is a tarp over the dead officer. They haven’t removed his body yet. There is yellow crime scene tape pretty much all over the driveway. They’ve blocked off the road, too.
“Are you all right?” Logan asks, stretching out his legs across the wood boards.
“Yeah.” My knees pull themselves up to my chest.
He shakes his head at me. “You’re such a liar.”
“How can you tell?”
“One, nobody can be okay after that, and two, whenever you lie, your mouth twitches in the corner, just at the left.”
My eyes look at him full-on then. He’s got lines by his eyes and they weren’t there before. It’s like all this is aging him. And he still notices that about me. He knows something about me that I don’t even know about myself. I kissed him. I look away again and say, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was doing.”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t see the note, I guess. I should go crumple it up. Police radios crackle in the background. Someone coughs. They’ve put up giant lamps on poles like highway workers do when they do nighttime construction. It’s like daylight in the front yard. I didn’t imagine this.
I say, “I didn’t think it through well enough. I thought the werewolf would come get me, not the human.”
He actually scoffs. “And that would have been better how?”
“I brought wolfsbane.” I show him the plant. “I took it out of your mother’s garden.”
He holds the plant gently in his hand as if he might kill it accidentally. “Wolfsbane?”
“My dad kept muttering things about flowers, right? And he was really interested in the flowers outside your house, so I started thinking about it. And then I looked it up on Google and it’s mentioned in some of my dad’s books. It’s supposed to kill them.”
The ambulance attendants start to take the dead cop out of the car. The body is limp. One of the officers turns away and curses the killer as they move it.
Logan’s hand goes to the side of my head. He turns my face so it is against his chest. “Don’t look.”
“It’s all so wrong.”
“I know … I know…”
We sit there rocking for a second, and then I say, “Wolfsbane is poisonous to them. At least that’s what everything I read says. Maybe you could put it in a shotgun or something.”
“Shoot him with wolfsbane?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t bring a gun, Chrystal. What were you going to do with it?”
“Throw it in his mouth when he tried to bite me.”
“That makes no sense.”
I shrug. “Like any of this does.”
* * *
While we are sitting on the porch, I tell him everything I know about wolfsbane, but I know that’s not what he really wants to hear about. He wants to know about the attack. I tell him to wait until we go inside, until the cops are mostly gone, and he agrees.
Sam, the feedstore guy whose last name I can never remember, says he’s sleeping downstairs tonight with the dogs, who have all come back, even Galahad. He’s bruised up, but his little doggy self is okay.
We say good night to Sam, who has taken the back door. A state trooper is stationed at the front. I wonder how Sam stays awake for so long, but I’m not going to ask. There’s so many other, more important questions.
Logan and I go upstairs. I’m dead tired. It’s like all my body parts weigh eighteen thousand pounds. It kind of feels like when you have the flu. I walk up a couple steps and Logan gasps.
“What?” I say, stopping. All my senses are on super-alert.
“You’re all bruised up,” he says. “The backs of your legs.”
That’s all? I thought he saw the werewolf, or someone else dead or … I don’t know.
“They’re just bruises.” My feet start up the stairs again.
“They are not just bruises.”
We go into his room and sit on his bed. He inspects the damage to my wrists, scowls, and leaves the room, telling me he’ll be right back. I flop onto his bed, stare up at the off-w
hite ceiling. Some of the paint is peeling a little bit. The shape of it looks like Oklahoma. No, it looks like a gun. Something shudders inside me, right near my stomach. Even though I’m afraid, I close my eyes.
Logan comes back in the room and starts working on my wrists. He puts Neosporin on them, then wraps them in gauze.
“You look like you tried to slash your wrists,” he says.
I give him a half-hearted smile. Then I grab his hand in mine. “Thank you. It was nice of you to fix me up.”
“No problem.”
He’s so close. His lips are just about six inches away. When he speaks, I can feel the vibrations of his words, the sound waves against my skin. His eyes meet mine.
“I’m never going to let anything hurt you again.”
“You can’t promise that, Logan.”
He cocks his head, listening. “Do you hear that?”
I listen too. “The cricket? Or something else? Do you hear the wolf thing?”
“Sh … No. The cricket.”
It chirps, steady, just one voice.
“I do,” I tell him. My hands go to his cheeks, hold his head steady. I swear I could stare into his eyes forever. They’re the only things that don’t make me think of what just happened. “I hear it.”
“It’s lonely. There’s just one of them.” His eyes crinkle a little bit. “That’s what I was like—a lonely cricket. Then you came.”
I stare at him.
He blushes and pulls away, plopping next to me on the bed, saying, “That was stupid.”
“No! No! It’s sweet,” I insist, snuggling into his side.
His arm goes around my waist, pulls me in closer. I listen to the cricket. One chirrup-cheep. Another. It’s hopeful. That and our kiss are the only hopeful things going on here.
“Tell me what happened,” he says.
I tell him the basics of it: how I was running and the guy caught me before I got a half mile away. I don’t tell him about the fear, or how the guy’s hands felt so rough. I don’t tell him how scared I was or how much it hurt, how being bound with duct tape was almost more frightening than what had happened in the hotel room because it made me so much more helpless. I don’t tell him how I had to chant Kierkegaard quotes and chord progressions to myself just to keep from passing out. Instead I tell him the basics: He caught me. He hit me across the face so hard, I fell down. He taped my wrists together.
Logan’s body is still and riddled with tension as I talk, but he is obviously pretending he’s not upset. His hand keeps moving in little circles around my shoulder, which is something my mom used to do to me when I was little and she tried to comfort me. I keep talking even as I realize how much I miss my mom and my dad, being a family.
“He told me that the wolf is looking for a mate. Then he said he doesn’t see what’s so special about me.”
“Holy crap,” Logan sputters.
“Yeah.”
For a second his hand is still, but then it starts moving again, pressing me even closer into him, and he says, “Is there more?”
I nod, inhale the smell of his deodorant and farm boy skin and coconut hair. “I asked him why they were helping him and he said that they had pledged allegiance to him, that they were going to start a lupine army. That they were his lieutenants and eventually he would turn all of them, but they had to help him get me first.”
“My God.” He coughs. “Wait. Why? Why not just bite you or scratch you and turn you like he turned my dad? Why kidnap you?”
“They can only do that with men. There are no female werewolves, I guess. If he wants to make pure babies, he has to find a mate.”
I sigh against him. He is so unlike a wolf. So human and warm and fur free. My hands wrap around his arm and the side of his chest. I wish I could crawl inside of him and hide there somehow, and just sleep.
He breathes in so deeply that my head moves about three inches as his chest does. He says, “I found a letter on your dad’s desk downstairs. It was an email from a professor at the university. Your dad said he was worried about bringing you here because of … how’d he say it? I can’t remember, but it was something about your mom’s side of the family.”
“Really?” I say it, but it somehow doesn’t seem important right now.
“The professor said you’d be fine. He said no Oklahoma werewolf would know what your mom’s ancestors had done. Do you know what that means?”
“No.” I snuggle my face against his neck, feel his pulse against my cheek. “That’s really weird.”
“Do you want me to go get it? The email?”
“No. Not now.”
We are silent for a minute, just breathing in each other, and then I tell him the rest.
“The man, the dead man, talked to me at first, when he was carrying me over his shoulder. He said that we won’t ever win. He said the only way to keep your father from changing is to have him drink the wolf’s blood, and to do that we’d have to catch the wolf. That’s when I started screaming your name and he threw me down again and we struggled some more while he tried to tape my mouth.”
He pulls away a little so he can look into my face. “Catch the wolf?”
I sputter out a bitter laugh. “I know. I know. It seems impossible.”
“Nothing … Nothing is impossible.”
25
LOGAN
From the far distance comes a long, angry howl. We both jump off the bed and rush to the window, throwing the curtains aside and pressing our faces against the glass. We can’t see much. I dash over and turn off the bedroom light, then go back to the window.
The last few cops are lined up at the edge of the light in the front yard. They have their guns drawn, not that their little handguns will do anything to that monster. The blond highway patrol sergeant has a rifle now.
On my front porch, our dogs are barking. I still can’t believe Galahad escaped with only bruises and a couple scratches. I thought for sure he’d be dead. He is limping, and that’s keeping him from jumping around the way he usually does.
“I don’t see how that thing can be running around that fast after taking all the bullets me and David put in him,” I say. “Okay, so they didn’t kill him. They weren’t silver, didn’t have wolfsbane, whatever. Still, my last shot ripped out half his throat. Even if the movies are true and they grow everything back, wouldn’t it still take a while?”
“I don’t know,” Chrystal says.
Heavy, slow steps trundle down the hallway, then Mr. Davis appears in my door. “Everything okay up here?” he asks.
“Yes, sir,” I answer.
He rubs a hand over his sleepy face, then seems to realize we’re standing in the dark. “You two ain’t gonna do anything your parents wouldn’t like now, are you?”
“No, sir,” I answer, and I can feel my face reddening as memories of our kiss rush back.
“Okay. Good. I’m gonna go back downstairs. I trust you,” he says, giving me a pointed look. “Turn this light back on when you’re done there at the window.”
As soon as he turns away, Chrystal jabs me in the side with her elbow.
Outside, the dogs have stopped barking. The central air unit is still running in the house because Oklahoma in late July is hot all the time, even during the dead of night. Still, I can occasionally hear the static of a police radio and sometimes a snatch of conversation. I’m very, very tired. We sit on the bed, don’t talk. Chrystal lies back first, then me. She rolls into me and I put my arms around her. The cricket is quiet, and I imagine for a moment that it’s found a lady cricket and isn’t alone anymore.
Chrystal suddenly twitches in my arms, and that makes me jerk.
“What?” I ask. “You okay?”
“I think I kind of fell asleep,” she says.
I kiss her forehead. “You get ready for bed. I’m going downstairs for my shotgun. It didn’t do much good earlier, but I still feel better having it close.”
Mr. Davis is sacked out on the couch, snoring at an unbeliev
able volume. My shotgun is lying across the coffee table with his. I pick it up and start back to the stairs, then detour to the kitchen and look over the stack of books Mr. Lawson Smith left there. Where is he? Has something happened to him? I hate to think about that. I pick up an old, thick volume with pages turning brown around the edges, put the email between the open pages, snap it closed, and take it upstairs with me.
* * *
Can Mr. Lawson Smith really read this? The book is written by a priest who died about a hundred years ago. There are pages and pages of notes for each chapter, and every chapter has paragraph after paragraph in foreign languages without any translation. I skim through several pages, and some passages seem to jump out at me.
The eager lover to the boy aspires,
Just as the wolf the tender lamb desires.
What is that all about? I don’t know, but I’m suddenly extremely aware of Chrystal’s bare leg touching mine under the thin blanket. I flip a few pages.
Lust, then, as well as blood, is associated with the wolf.
Lust?
I flip over a chunk of pages and find a little story about a Norwegian guy named Ulfr Bjalfason, also known as the Evening-Wolf. I read two sentences over and over:
When the werewolf fit came over him and his companions their exploits were bloody with the most ferocious savagery. Whilst the passion endured none could withstand their might, but once it had passed they were weak as water for a while.
Weak as water
After
None could withstand …
* * *
The sun is up and streaming into my room when my eyes snap open. I’m lying on my side and the first thing I see is the butt of my shotgun.
The cows! I’m sooo late for the morning milking.
“Logan? You awake?”
I roll over, and there’s Chrystal, standing on the other side of the bed and holding the little tray with the short folding legs that Mom uses to serve us food when one of us kids is sick. I suddenly smell the scrambled eggs and my mouth waters.
