Dying Bites

by DD Barant

  “Where I come from, that’s not only a suburb but the name of a famous mental hospital.”

  “From what I understand of the term,” he says as he pulls into traffic, “that’s a pretty fair description of what you’re about to experience.”

  He fills me in as we drive. I can’t really keep track of all the aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, but I try to remember the major players. The sheer size of his family answers the age-old question of what you get when you cross a Catholic with a werewolf: a small country.

  He also gives me the rundown on the difference between a thrope’s family and his pack, which is not always the same thing. You’re born into your family, which is also your pack until you come of age. Then you can choose to join another pack—based on profession or lifestyle, usually—or can marry into one. If you don’t want to choose right away, you can be an independent until you make up your mind.

  “Not too many lone wolves, though,” Dr. Pete says. “Most thropes choose a pack, sooner or later.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then they don’t. There’s no penalty—not an official one, anyway.”

  He doesn’t have to elaborate. Certain doors simply wouldn’t open to a loner; certain invitations wouldn’t be offered.

  That’s how it is on any world.

  Dr. Pete, it turns out, isn’t married—the only one of his seven brothers and six sisters who isn’t. He is, however, the favorite uncle of many of his nieces and nephews. “Which is a mixed blessing,” he admits. “I love all of them dearly—well, most of them—but sometimes when I visit it’s a little overwhelming.”

  “I see. You’re just bringing me along as cannon fodder?”

  He gives me a puzzled look.

  “An expendable hostage. Human shield. Sacrificial decoy.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  I laugh. “Well, this should be interesting. . . .”

  His parents live in a big house in the south end of the city. There’s what appears to be a thrope riot going on in the front yard; when we pull up, it transforms into a furry tidal wave that surges against the minivan with a crash.

  “Watch the paint!” Dr. Pete hollers. “No claws! No claws!”

  The thropes surrounding us are in permutations from wolf cub to humanoid, sporting many different colors of fur: blond, brunette, redhead, pure white or glossy black and every shade between. Some are cute, some are terrifying—in other words, children. I understand the terrifying ones are sometimes called “teenagers.”

  We get out of the van. All the thropes that currently have hands are signing furiously, which makes me feel like I’m in some kind of surrealistic performance art piece or maybe a live-action version of a Muppet movie on bad drugs. I can only catch about one word in three, but I get the general gist—who is she, is she your girlfriend, did you bring me anything, and a request to either drive his van or lambaste his camel.

  “Peter!” a voice booms out. “Ah, the prodigal cub returns!”

  The fur flood recedes to let through a big, burly man with a considerable paunch and two wiry gray tufts of hair protruding from his head like an aging Bozo the Clown. He’s got a wide, smiling face, canines so prominent they look artificial, and eyes as black as chips of coal. He’s wearing a bright yellow polo shirt and baggy black shorts with sandals, and carrying a struggling child under one arm.

  “Hey, Pop,” Dr. Pete says. “This is Jace Valchek, the one I told you about. Jace, Leo.”

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hello!” he says, and gives me a hearty, one-armed hug. “Welcome! It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Dr. Pete leans down to address the child under Leo’s arm, who’s mostly stopped kicking and is regarding me suspiciously. He’s got jet-black hair, gray eyes, and he’s wearing a T-shirt with a smiling moon on it. “Hey, Nicky. In trouble again?”

  “Nah. I’m wrestling Grampa.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “I’m winning!”

  “Excellent. Come see me later, I’ll tell you where all his weak points are.” He straightens up and says, “Okay, okay, I’ll come out and see all of you in a minute. Now back off and give her some breathing room.”

  Pop Leo turns around and leads us toward the house while the kids disperse with no apparent decrease in enthusiasm. “How you holding up so far?” Dr. Pete stage-whispers.

  “Better than Nicky,” I whisper back.

  “I heard that!”

  The house is a monster, three stories high and sprawling, painted a bright green. It doesn’t look like a mansion, though, just big and lived-in. Extended family, extended living quarters.

  The noise diminishes slightly once we’re indoors. It’s still definitely in the “din” category, but there’s less screaming and more banging, with a backdrop of flamenco guitar. Three swarthy men are doing intricate and stirring things with guitars in the front room, while a toddler standing on a piano bench pounds solemnly on the keyboard. They’re good enough to not only keep up with her but make it sound like she’s the performer and they’re just the backing band.

  The house also smells wonderful. I may be a vegetarian, but I still get a guilty jolt of pleasure from certain aromas; roasting lamb is one of them. I try to pretend it’s just the spices, and hope they serve something I can actually eat.

  I needn’t have worried. The table is slightly smaller than a soccer field and holds enough food to feed a dozen teams: eggs, bacon, muffins, salad, fish, bread, sausages, lamb, potatoes, fruit, pancakes, juice, coffee, milk, pastries. A rough head count of the clan puts it somewhere around thirty, though so many people keep coming and going it’s hard to keep track.

  It’s chaotic, confusing, and oddly soothing. I find myself grinning, passing various dishes, and eating a lot. The fact that I don’t eat meat is the subject of much discussion, but it’s more along the lines of genuine curiosity than anything else. Several of the women come to my defense, citing recent diets they’ve read about that are good for your figure, and point out that their men could stand to lose a few pounds. Everybody eats in human form, even the children, which makes eating and talking at the same time a lot easier.

  Afterward, everybody helps clean up and the whole party moves into the kitchen. When that’s done, people break up into smaller groups all over the house and the backyard, which has a pool. I decline the offer of a swimsuit, but join Dr. Pete in a lawn chair at poolside.

  “So, what do you think?” he asks with a grin. “The clan try to buy your soul yet?”

  “They don’t seem so bad.”

  “They’ll wear you down with relentless hospitality. I’m surprised they didn’t offer you pack membership before dessert.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He chuckles. “Only partly. Joining a pack is serious business, but I can tell my folks like you. They were a little thrown off when I told them about the artificial pheromone, but I explained it was a security precaution for your work.”

  “Wait. So they know I’m not one of them?”

  “Well, the adults do. The kids think you’re an alpha female, which means they’ll give you some respect. With the others you’re on your own—but you seem to be doing pretty good so far.”

  Something was tugging at my memory, but it wouldn’t quite surface. “How does that work, in a legal sense? When a human gets turned into a pire or a thrope?”

  “Depends on if it’s voluntary or not. If it is, witnesses are usually required and documents have to be signed. If not, the transformed party can sue the other party for damages and have them criminally charged.”

  “So with consent it’s like a marriage. Without, it’s rape.”

  “More or less. Why?”

  “Just wondering what my options are if things go wrong.”

  His face turns serious. “I suppose that’s a possibility. But it’s not something you have to worry about from most of the population; neither pires nor thropes have any reas
on to transform a human against their will. It’s a truly rare occurrence.”

  Besides, it’s not so bad, is what he doesn’t say. Just look around you. Kids running around and splashing in the pool, adults laughing and joking, everybody out enjoying the sun . . . it all suddenly feels a little forced.

  I shake my head, and the feeling passes. When you start wondering if the whole world is a play put on to manipulate you, that’s the time to look up “paranoid” in the dictionary and check for your picture.

  “You all right?” Dr. Pete asks.

  “Fine. Just not used to this much—glee, I guess.”

  “Oh, they’re just getting started. You don’t want to see what they’re like when they’re actually celebrating something.”

  There’s a long table, shaded by patio umbrellas, at the other end of the pool. A half-dozen or so females, ranging from ten-year-olds to grandmothers, are gathered around it and busily working on . . . something.

  “What are they doing?” I ask.

  “Making decorations for Moondays.”

  “Moondays?”

  He shakes his head. “Sorry. Some things are so ordinary you just take them for granted. Moondays is the festival that takes place every month during the three nights of the full moon. You think this is a lot of food, wait until then.”

  “Shouldn’t it be called Moonnights?”

  “Well, it’s pretty much a seventy-two-hour-long event, day and night. Daytime events are spent in human form, and are more family-oriented. At night, everyone changes into were-form—it’s the one time we don’t have a choice. Then the party really starts.”

  Despite the sunshine, despite the laughing children and Dr. Pete’s relaxed smile, I still feel a chill go down my spine. “Yeah? And exactly how do thropes like to party?”

  “Lots of drinking, lots of dancing, lots of team sports. Lots of, uh, amorous entertainment. Lots of food.”

  I put the next question as delicately as I can. “Is it . . . safe?”

  “You mean for non-thropes? Sure. Mostly.”

  He sees the look on my face and hastily adds, “I mean, any large event has its troublemakers, but the Moondays of today aren’t anything like they used to be. The whole idea behind them is to control our animal nature, by finding socially acceptable outlets for our instincts.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like something regurgitated from a first-year university textbook.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s still true. Look, lycanthropes used to be a very different race. We’d hide our true nature from everyone around us, then go on a wild carnivorous spree once a month. Everybody knows how unhealthy that is now.”

  “Oh, absolutely. I don’t care what anyone says, you have to get a few carbs in now and then.”

  “These days, people split their times as lycanthrope or human about fifty-fifty. When Moondays roll around, there’s much less pent-up aggression to be released. We’ve turned it into a celebration as opposed to an explosion of primal urges.”

  “Sounds like it’s still pretty primal to me.”

  “Not in Seattle. New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Anchorage—those are places that can get out of hand. But—” He stops himself.

  “But what?”

  “Nothing. Hey, you should see this.” He gets up and motions me to follow him.

  I do, making a mental note to pursue the topic later. He walks up to the table where the women are working and says, “Ah, making mirositors, I see.” The women are taking chunks of beef jerky and dried apricots, sprinkling them with herbs, and wrapping them in small, brightly colored squares of cloth.

  “It’s for the young ones,” a woman who must be in her eighties says. “We sprinkle some herbs on the treats, you see? With a strong smell. Then we hide them and they must search them out with their nose.”

  “Like Easter eggs,” I say. The woman smiles at me and nods, but I can tell she has no idea what I’m talking about.

  “You help?” she asks, motioning to a chair.

  “Uh—sure.” I sit down and pitch in.

  “I’m going to go catch up with some of the kids,” Dr. Pete says. He leaves before I can protest.

  Not that there’s anything to protest, really. Putting the little packets together—the cloths have to be folded just so, and then tied with a little piece of colored string—is relaxing in that monotonous, mindless way that certain tasks are. The women ask questions about me and Dr. Pete, some sly, some blunt. I inform them that he’s just my doctor, then have to defend that position when they begin to detail the many, many fine qualities he possesses and why he would make a perfect husband.

  It’s all right, though. I’ve had to use the same arguments before, with my own mother. In its own way, it’s as rhythmic and repetitious as the folding of the cloths, and almost as soothing.

  Almost.

  It makes me think about Roger, which is not a subject I tend to embrace. Still, he’s the closest I ever came to walking down the aisle—well, thinking about walking down the aisle—and the fact that my professional ability to recognize sociopathic tendencies completely failed me when it came to the person I was sharing a bed with screwed me up for a long time. The first casualty of that particular psychic battle was any thoughts of matrimony, ever. When you have your trust violated on the level that he violated mine, it’s hard to imagine ever having that level of emotional intimacy again.

  So why is Roger the one who’s trying to warn me?

  I refuse to consider that he might in any way be real. I’m suffering from a condition that causes hallucinations; therefore, he has to be a hallucination. Never mind that the aforementioned condition was brought on by supernatural weirdness—I can’t just toss out the rules of deductive logic because the occasional natural law gets bent. Roger being more than a hallucination opens up a whole can of worms labeled: PARANOID SUSPICIONS—CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE. Is Roger really an evil wizard? Is an evil wizard posing as him? Did an evil wizard send a demon to pose as him and get inside my head? Does Roger have an evil twin who is, in fact, an evil wizard? And why am I so obsessed with evil wizards when I’ve got vampire ninjas, Mafia werewolves, and Irish shape-changers to choose from? Maybe it’s an evil witch that’s getting into my head—Maureen Selkie in ex-boyfriend drag?

  No. If she were trying to contact me, she wouldn’t pick an image from my brain that I associate with treachery. Unless maybe my own mind applied that as some kind of filter, trying to let me know the sender wasn’t trustworthy. . . .

  Argh. It’s like trying to build a house out of wet spaghetti. I make a mental note to talk to Eisfanger about astral projection and telepathy later and whether they even exist in this world. I still don’t know everything that’s possible or impossible here. . . .

  And then the zombie sits down next to me.

  Half her face is rotted away. She looks like she was around seventeen when she died, and the undertaker who did her makeup used too much. The exposed, lengthened canines tell me she was a thrope, and the hole in her skull tells me how she was probably killed. I can see her brain.

  “Hi,” she says. I’m surprised how good her enunciation is with only half her lips.

  “Hi,” I say cheerfully. Some stubborn inner resolve has kicked in, a grim refusal to be freaked out by anything else. Mummies, giant spiders, flaming skeletons, whatever you got; bring ’em on.

  “I’m Alexandra,” she says. “I’m, um, Uncle Peter’s niece? And I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?”

  “I’ll answer yours if you answer mine.”

  “Okay, I guess so.” The other women at the table don’t seem fazed at all by Alexandra’s appearance—though a few of the older ones don’t seem to approve, either—so why should I?

  “Are you dead?” I ask. It seems like a reasonable question, but it produces giggles from most of the kids at the table.

  She smiles at me, which is a truly horrifying sight. “No. My turn. Are you really from another world?”

  “Yes. If you�
��re not dead, why does your face look like that?”

  “It’s called corpsing. It’s just a fashion thing, lots of people are into it. Is it true there aren’t any thropes or vampires where you come from?”

  “Not real ones. But there are people who imitate them, fashion-wise.”

  She frowns. “They dress like us? But we dress normal.”

  I can practically hear the cultural gap yawn between us. “No, they dress like they think vampires would—lots of black, makeup to make their skin pale, artificial fangs. Like you imitating a corpse, I guess.”

  “Oh. We have those, kind of. Except their fangs aren’t fake and they like to speak weird.” Unlike the very mundane conversation we’re having at the moment, of course.

  “Is corpsing painful?” I ask.

  “No. It uses a charm, see?” She holds up her wrist, which has a small purple pouch tied to it with string. “And it’s just temporary. I take the charm off, everything grows back really fast.”

  “Cool.” And it actually is, in a creepy kind of way. It’s actually less of a commitment than a tattoo.

  “So, what’s it like where you’re from? I can’t imagine.”

  “A lot like here, actually. We drive cars, we shop in supermarkets, we live in cities. Sometimes being here feels like I’ve just gone to another country instead of another universe.”

  “So you don’t have Moondays?”

  “Not as such.”

  “God, you are so lucky,” she moans in that self-indulgent way only a teenager can really do justice to. “I hate having to change every month. I can’t wear any of my clothes, it makes my joints hurt, and I totally eat like a pig.”

  “Bah!” the oldest-looking woman at the table says. “You should be proud of who you are! Not complain all the time!”

  She glares ferociously at Alexandra, who sighs theatrically and says, “Whatever.” She gets up and slouches away, probably to go find her socially unacceptable boyfriend and make out with him. Those lips will make it difficult, but I’m sure they’ll find a way. Teenagers are inventive.

  I notice that the Urthbone effect is much more subdued than it was previously. I can feel the emotions around me, but they don’t seem to be affecting my own mood nearly as much. Perversely, at the moment I kind of regret that; the women around me are happy, surrounded by people they love and preparing for something they’re looking forward to.