by Selah March
The night manager—John Chasseur, she surmised—had chosen a seat to her right, about three rows over. She waved at him, desperate to catch his eye. He had to recognize her, didn't he? It'd been less than an hour since he'd asked to see her ID. But he ignored her in favor of using some weird screwdriver-thingy to carve into the surface of his desk. She opened her mouth to hiss at him under the squeak of DuBois' chalk.
"And here come the Teddy Bears with the sweet sounds of their nineteen-fifty-eight hit, 'To Know Him Is To Love Him'..."
The voice of the announcer and the girl-group harmony that followed struck her like a blow on the back of the neck, killing the whisper on her lips. She knew, without turning to look toward the back of the classroom, who'd brought the radio to class.
"Monsieur Homme? If you would be so kind?" DuBois didn't bother to turn either. His chalked list of phrases numbered in the twenties now.
The music faded just a bit, as if Homme had adjusted the volume ever so slightly in deference to the teacher's request. Zoey swallowed and gripped the edge of her seat with numb fingers. Should she turn around and confront him? Accuse him of drugging her? What if he denied it? What if nobody believed her?
"Voila!" DuBois rapped his pointer against the blackboard. "Mademoiselle Ryder, you will rise and take the first turn, mais oui?"
The front of the classroom looked as far away as the payphone had seemed when she'd left Homme's rig. There was no way...just no way...her legs wouldn't carry her that far, not with Homme's eyes on her back, watching her, waiting for her to fall—
And then she was there, standing next to DuBois. He smiled at her in that prissy, smug way he'd always had, and offered her the piece of chalk. She had no memory of making the twenty-foot trek from her desk to the blackboard. Bizarre, like in a dream...
Of course. She almost slapped herself for being so stupid—again. Well all right, then. She could handle a simple, drug-induced nightmare. Who said she had to confront Homme, anyway? She could ignore him. Pretend he didn't exist. It was her dream, after all, even if he and his spiked can of cola were the cause of it. She took the chalk, turned toward the blackboard, and was reaching up in preparation to define the first phrase in DuBois' list when something caught her eye.
A...blob? Yes, a yellow blob of butter. On the blackboard, about two feet above Monsieur DuBois' head. What the hell...?
"Next up, The Capris with 'There's A Moon Out Tonight,' from early nineteen-sixty-one..."
"Mademoiselle Ryder?" DuBois' voice held a note of impatience. "The first five phrases, s'il vous plait?"
"Huh? Oh. Right." She looked away from the butter blob and back to the task at hand.
The first phrase waiting to be defined was joli garçon. Beneath it, in careful letters, she printed 'pretty boy.' Next on the list was liaison dangereuse. Too easy. Who didn't know that one? She translated it as 'dangerous liaison' and moved onward to pris au piège comme un rat. Hmm...a little harder to figure out, but she got it. She printed 'trapped like a rat,' wincing as the chalk screeched against the slate.
Next up was homme de loup. It looked familiar, as if she'd seen it written somewhere recently. Weird...but no weirder than the blob of butter still stuck to the middle of the blackboard. She printed 'wolf-man' beneath DuBois' scrawl and moved on.
But the fifth phrase stumped her. She stood staring at it for long seconds, willing it to make sense, but the words and letters appeared as an indecipherable jumble to her eyes. She raised the hand that held the chalk to the board and let it drop again in defeat.
"Mademoiselle Ryder? You are having trouble?"
She stepped back from the board and shrugged. DuBois dismissed her ignorance with a snap of his sausage-like fingers. "Can anyone assist Mademoiselle Ryder in defining the phrase? Monsieur Chasseur?"
Chasseur raised his hooded eyes and looked at the blackboard. "La petite mort? Is that the one?" His voice sent a prickle of awareness over Zoey's skin. The fantasy she'd entertained about his fucking her against the wall of his cubicle came rushing back. She shifted her weight from one saddle-shoed foot to the other and back again.
"Oui, that is the one." Now DuBois sounded bored with them. He pulled a gold watch on a chain from his vest pocket and examined its face.
"It means 'the little death'," said Chasseur. His gaze lit on her face, and one corner of his mouth tugged upward in something between a grin and a smirk, almost as if he knew what she was thinking. "You know...like, an orgasm? To climax. To come." He hit the last word so hard it echoed in the almost-empty classroom.
She felt her face go red—the second time he'd managed to make her blush, the bastard. The silence stretched out, long and tense. For some reason, it made her picture her own nude body pulled taut between two unyielding posts. Kinky. A side-effect of the drugs, no doubt. Then DuBois cleared his throat and began shuffling the pile of papers on his desk, and she thought the bad moment had passed.
"Let's go all the way back to nineteen-fifty-six and give a listen to The Platters hit, 'The Great Pretender'..."
Shit. No, she would not look at the back of the room, where the other bastard sat with his stupid radio. If she didn't acknowledge him, he couldn't hurt her, remember? Although more and more, all she wanted to do was kick the motherfucker square in the balls. She kept her head down on her way back to her desk, so she didn't see Homme step into the aisle and move to meet her.
"You shouldn't let him talk to you like that." The trucker's voice, soft and textured like raw silk, forced her to lift her eyes to his face. His perfect, golden beauty gave her a jolt, just like the first time, though he'd changed even more than Chasseur.
Gone were the painter's cap, thermal pullover, and faded jeans, replaced by a white button-down shirt tucked into pressed and belted khaki chinos and...were those penny loafers? His stubble and long curls had likewise been traded for a clean-shaven jaw and a crew cut. But did something seem...off...in the slant of his eyes and the flare of his nostrils? And in the way his lips twitched over his teeth? No. Again, it was the drugs. The drugs he had given her. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands and fought the urge to spit in his face.
"Did you hear me?" he asked, his tone tender. "I said you shouldn't let him talk to you like that. Say those things...those dirty things. You're my girl."
"I...uh..." She could feel herself freezing in the hard blue light of his gaze, could feel her anger dissipating, replaced by a paralyzing terror. She blinked, and the image of a small, furry, long-eared mammal flashed in her brain. Not a rat, but a rabbit, caught in a trap.
Homme's hand settled on her shoulder. With just the right amount of pressure, he pivoted her body so that she faced the front of the room and marched her forward several steps. Then he leaned down to whisper in her ear. "Tell them, Zoey. Tell them how you belong to me."
DuBois stood behind his desk, busily stuffing his briefcase with papers. Sweat sat in beads on his bald pate. Somewhere a bell rang, signaling the end of the class period.
"Monsieur DuBois?" Her voice emerged as a croak. "Monsieur DuBois, please, will you help me?"
Homme's fingers tightened on her shoulder, making a sharp twinge shoot up her neck. She yelped before she could stop herself. Pain? In a dream? What the fuck? This was wrong. Way, way wrong.
DuBois snapped shut his briefcase and hugged it to his chest. "I have tried to assist you, Mademoiselle Ryder—several times, in fact—but you are..." His eyes rolled skyward, as if searching for the right words. "You are trop stupide pour vívre."
"What?" Now her voice was a pure, desperate whine, irritating even to her own ears. "What does that mean?"
But DuBois ignored her, turning away and making for the door. He threw it open with far more force than was necessary. Beyond it, she saw a black whirlpool, swirling and endless. A hot wind, smelling of dust and empty time blew across the room, ruffling the few papers DuBois had left on his desk. The teacher looked at her one last time, then redirected his gaze to the far right corner of
the blackboard. Then he was gone. The door slammed behind him with a bang that shook the floor.
"It means you're too stupid to live." Chasseur was on his feet as well, tucking the tool he'd used to vandalize his desk into his jacket.
"You're going too?" She was positively squeaking now, and Homme's fingers seemed to be sprouting blades as they pressed into that spot at which her shoulder met her neck.
Chasseur shrugged. "Why not? You're with him. That's what you said, right?" His tone was flat and hard, like it had been when he'd told her what a bad idea it would be to catch a ride with Homme. She hadn't listened. Too stupid to live.
"That's right. She's with me, so get lost, Johnny. Take a powder." Homme's voice had deepened further, and taken on a funny texture, like he was forcing the words through a clogged drain. "Make like a tree and—"
"Leave. Yeah, I get it." But Chasseur didn't appear in much of a hurry to vacate the classroom. "You gonna make me? All by your lonesome?"
She listened to them banter back and forth, afraid to move, barely able to breathe for the fear that gripped her throat. But why? She was caught in a bad dream, an illusion gone sour, a nasty figment of her unconscious—nothing more. She blinked her eyes to clear her head and found herself staring at the upper right-hand corner of the blackboard, where DuBois had looked just before he'd left. Where he'd written the attendance list.
Zoey Ryder.
John Chasseur.
Lou P. Homme.
Lou P. Homme...loup homme...homme de loup…
"Walk away, Chasseur. Take a nice, long stroll, and maybe I won't hunt you down and rip out your throat when I'm done..." Homme's other hand crept around her waist. She felt it snag on the weave of her sweater and glanced down. The backs of his fingers...Christ...mustard-yellow fur, coarse and wiry, and long, curved nails, like scythes... He pulled her against him, and she felt something prod her lower back. Something hard...a hard-on. Just for her.
The floor pitched and rolled under her feet. The men's voices faded, drowned by the buzzing in her ears. The edges of her vision grew fuzzy, and she felt herself slipping away.
Sharp, sudden pain brought her back. Homme had her by the hair, her head pulled as far back as it would go, and her throat exposed.
"Sorry, Red." His tone was tender again beneath the lisping, clotted snarl. "You don't get to sleep through it. It's no fun for me if you don't scream."
Where was Chasseur? Had he abandoned her? No, there was movement off to her right. She tried to turn her head, but Homme tightened his grip on her hair. Then Chasseur moved into her line of vision, using a desk to pull himself off the floor. Four long scratches marked the front of his tee shirt, though she saw no blood beneath them.
"Let her go, Homme," Chasseur said. "Just for a minute. You can't need more than that to take me down, right?"
Homme snuffled in response. But did his hold on her hair loosen just a fraction?
"Come on, Lou. Think how much fun it'll be, fucking her in a pool of my blood."
She'd thought she could smell the testosterone before, on the sidewalk near the payphone. Now she could taste it, like an electric zing in the air, underscored by the hot, animal rage coming off Homme. She held her breath.
"And now a word from our sponsors. When we return from the break, we'll hear The Shirelles nineteen-sixty-one hit 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow'..."
"What the hell." Homme's words were barely intelligible now. He pushed her away from him, and she fell to her knees. Instinctively, she began to crawl forward. Homme's penny-loafered foot landed on the small of her back, and he growled a warning.
She steeled herself to turn and look at him. Because, after all, how bad could it be? A werewolf...furry, right? She could handle furry. She'd always gotten on well her grandmother's Collie mix, Dusty. She twisted her head around as far as she could to peer at him, and whatever illusions she might have cherished about something reasonably cute and Lassie-like shattered into a trillion ugly fragments.
Homme's body inside his white shirt and chinos looked grossly misshapen—all weird angles and bony lumps that didn't make sense to her eyes, including the out-sized bulge at the crotch of his chinos. His ears had twisted sideways out of his head, sprouting more of the same mustard-yellow, wiry hair. His eye sockets looked as if they had melted somehow, and grown far too big for the pale eyes still burning hot inside them. But the worst was his mouth, and the teeth that filled it. His face had stretched—not just lengthwise, into a canine's muzzle, but across the cheekbones, too, pulling his lips into an obscene leer filled with long, needle-pointed fangs...so many of them...
Horror wrenched the air out of her lungs and squeezed them shut. The floor flew up and smacked her cheek. The last thing she heard was Homme's barking laugh and the crash of something heavy overturning a desk...
...and then a hand fell on her shoulder, firm, but not brutal.
"Zoey? Get up off the floor."
"No." She kept her eyes shut tight behind her fists and her body curled in a defensive position. In the background, The Shirelles were winding up their homage to lovelorn one-night stands.
"Come on. It's okay." The hand was joined by another, sliding beneath her arms and lifting her till she sat upright. "Open your eyes, Zoey." Chasseur's voice, like his hands, was firm but kind.
"I don't want to."
He tugged at her arms till she maneuvered her feet beneath her, then hoisted her up to a standing position. "It's okay. You're safe now."
He ran his fingers beneath her jaw, and she jumped, stumbling backward, knocking her hip into something.
"Dammit, I said open your eyes." He grabbed her wrists and yanked her hands from her face.
"...and here's the original girl next door, Shelley Fabares, with her big hit, 'Johnny Angel'..."
But she clung to the darkness, turning her head, sinking her chin into her shoulder and letting her hair fall over her still-closed eyes.
"Are you always this stubborn?" He released her wrists, and her hands dropped to her sides. Every nerve in her body jumped and twitched at his nearness.
"Too stupid to live, remember?" Her voice was muffled by her shoulder.
He sighed. "You need to look, Zoey… See that you're safe."
Safe? He was kidding, right? There was no 'safe'—not in this nightmare world in which she could pass out and regain consciousness, but never actually wake up. She'd never feel safe again.
He took a step, forcing her backward till her ass came up against something low and hard—DuBois' desk, most likely. Except...hadn't the teacher's desk been made of wood? When she reached behind her, the surface her fingertips met was smooth and cold. Made of metal. Weird.
Chasseur ran his fingers along the line of her jaw again, then down her throat. "What do I have to do to make you trust me, huh?"
Good question. After all, they were both still standing, which could only mean he'd vanquished the beastie. Johnny Angel...
His fingertips moved over the cashmere that clung to her breasts. Funny how even in this blast-from-the-past dream-world, she wasn't wearing a bra. Her nipples knifed to points offering him a focus for his attentions. She shivered and chewed at her lip, fighting to keep the little noises that bubbled up in her throat from escaping.
"Zoey," he whispered. "Open your eyes. It's okay—I promise."
She could hear the smile in his voice and wanted to comply, if only to please him. But when she tried, she recalled peering over her shoulder and seeing her handsome blond trucker in his true form. The memory brought back the sickening twist of terror in her gut. Her mistake had been looking, acknowledging Homme's presence in the room, and in her dream. She wouldn't do it again—she couldn't do it again.
"I can't."
"You can."
"No." She leaned away from Johnny, away from his caressing fingers. "You can't make me."
He stilled. "You're wrong. I can make you, but I won't."
She felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her, just as Homme had
turned her. Every muscle in her body tensed, and she readied herself to do some damage. She wouldn't go down without a fight—not this time.
Johnny pivoted his body just in time to deflect her rising knee. She felt it make solid contact with his thigh. Her breath came faster as his hands tightened her shoulders, just to the point of pain.
"Don't do that again," he said, finally. Then, after a few more seconds: "Last chance. You ready to be brave and look?"
She wrapped her hands around his wrists and turned her head to face him. Her stomach rolled, and tears leaked from beneath her clenched eyelids. She willed herself to open her eyes.
No deal.
What if she was never able to open them again? What if when she finally did, she was blind?
"Shhhh...it's okay. Come on." Johnny's grip loosened, and he rubbed her shoulders. He pulled her forward, guiding her, turning her so that she faced the front of the room. His voice muffled, and she thought she heard him say, "Five more steps, and you'll be at DuBois' stool."
Except...it wasn't five steps, it was barely even two. And the piece of furniture upon which he helped her climb was far too unstable to be the teacher's stool. Whatever it was felt like it was on wheels, for one thing, and the surface seemed to be cushioned.
"That's right. Good girl." He kept his hands on her hips till she found her balance. "Now, arms straight out, palms flat."
"Why?" she asked, even as she complied with his request, placing her hands flat against the blackboard. "What are you doing to me? Why can't we just—"
"Leave?"
"Yeah, why can't we just leave?"
"You tell me."
He was laughing at her, the bastard. "I hate you."
"I don't think that's true." He slid his hand from her hip, moving it over the curve of her ass, squeezing here and there, gentle—but not too gentle. "I can't go because my shift isn't over till seven, and you can't go..." He pinched her softly, "...till you grow up and quit acting like such a baby."
