Only the Moon Howls

by Connie Senior

  “Aw, Dog Boy, you don’t need to study–you never did. That’s why they let you into that school after all. Anyway, you gotta come up here this weekend. You can’t stay down in Cambridge, locked in your apartment.”

  “But finals start next week—”

  “And here’s the coolest thing: You gotta come up to help us. ‘Cuz we did it, we got in.”

  “Got in where? Not—”

  “Lilac House, yeah, we did it. Well, sort of…”

  “Toby, are you crazier than I think you are? Nobody has—does—I mean, it’s not—If anyone finds out…”

  “You worry too much. We were fine. Okay, René got lost in this tunnel that we found, scared a bunch of bats, and then fainted, but you know what a wuss he is.”

  “Huh? What—”

  “Yeah, well, we got through the wards at the main gate, but we couldn’t get into the house. The wards on that house were really solid, you know? But the garage was easy to get into and there were tunnels underneath, one leading to the house and others…well, Sophia figures some of those tunnels go down to the cove where they used to smuggle whisky in from Canada during Prohibition. Cool, huh?”

  “Wait a second, Toby. Sophia went with you?”

  “She’s better than me at undoing wards–not as good as you though, and that’s why you have to come up this weekend. She says she won’t go back.”

  “She’s smart, Toby, smarter than you sometimes. I wish you’d listen to her.”

  “But we were really close, and it would be so cool if you could figure out the wards to get into the main house. No one’s ever done that.”

  “You mean no one’s ever lived to tell about it. Toby, you can’t—”

  “Sure I can, Dog Boy, but it’d be easier if you helped me.”

  “Finals, I’ve got finals. I’ll come up after classes are over–I’ll be there all summer, I promise.”

  “Right. Yeah. You used to be fun, you know that?”

  “Toby, I promise I…Toby?”

  Alexandru caught him by the shoulders and shook him. Caleb was momentarily embarrassed, until he realized that the old wizard, too, looked haunted. Caleb resolved to be prepared next time for his personal demons.

  They cornered and killed two other vampires that month, before the warm weather made the monsters more elusive. While they did not stop hunting, it became more difficult. Each time, the old wizard questioned their victims about other vampires. Only once did Caleb ask Arghezi once why he wanted to find certain vampires, and Arghezi had turned away in silence. Caleb intuited that it was best not to ask again.

  They returned to the castle in silence, and then Caleb was put to work. The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to the study of the rhythms of the celestial bodies that controlled the castle wards. He learned how to read star charts, and where and when to look for planets in the sky, both by season and time of night. Alexandru made him read Greek and Roman myths in Latin and Greek, explaining that the ancient pantheons came closer than anyone else to describing the real magic in the celestial bodies.

  After a brief respite when Mihail brought them bread, cheese, and coffee, their real work began. A bright evening star was visible near the thin crescent moon, but Caleb wasn’t even sure whether it was Venus or Jupiter. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t feel anything over the magical surges from the waxing moon. By the time the crescent had set, he was worn out and Alexandru was full of disdain.

  “If you need your celestial body to be the size of your head, I’m not sure how much I can teach you,” he chided. “Now that that pesky orb is out of our sight, let’s try to find Saturn, shall we?”

  It was getting late and Caleb was exhausted, but he made an effort. He spent some time prodding around at something that turned out to be Betelgeuse, but finally located the planet climbing in its rising arc. He was sure he felt something there, something feeble that vanished each time a cloud or even a brisk breeze appeared, but something real.

  “Yes!” Alexandru cried. “You have it!”

  Caleb looked down to see a faint pale blue glow around his fingertips, and then it was all over. He slumped down onto the grass, completely spent, forehead in a cold sweat. “It’s nothing at all. You can use this to protect the castle?”

  “It took me many years, my boy,” Alexandru reminded him. “Many years of patience, study, and practice. We will work on this until Saturn disappears for the season; at least we’ve made a start.”

  He didn’t sound particularly pleased, but Caleb was beyond caring. It was past midnight, and the smell of chicken garlic soup called from the castle. In a single day he had taken part in his first vampire hunt and been introduced to a type of magic he had no idea existed. The mystery of Alexandru’s history with vampires faded to the back of his mind—in time, he told himself. Everything would become clear in time.

  8. Fido

  For a month after they met, Caleb sent food to Grigore from time to time, but he didn’t respond to the invitations to meet Pack Six at the next full moon. He spent that night by himself, running through the fields, exploring the mountains, staying far away from the people and villages below. He had yet to meet another of his kind while transformed.

  But it was summer, and summer was no time to be alone. Even the wolf pack he’d seen his first night out had a pair of little cubs who’d just emerged from their den. In both of his incarnations, he had sat for hours and watched them playing with their parents.

  He couldn’t just tell Grigore he wanted to show up. Grigore had to ask Vlad Alpha, who then relayed his response back through the Beta. An Alpha would never deign to speak directly to Caleb. Caleb was amused that the canine alpha behavior was not unlike that he had experienced in the academic bureaucracy.

  Grigore arranged for Caleb to meet Pack Six at the cottage half an hour before moonrise, the third since his arrival in Romania. Caleb left the castle a couple of hours before that. His confidence had grown in calling forth Wind, which could carry him swiftly across the high alpine valley to Grigore’s cottage, but he still hadn’t perfected ending the spell. He decided to walk so that he didn’t make a fool of himself by falling on his head in front of a pack of strange werewolves.

  Six young people were gathered in Grigore’s cottage: five boys and one very skinny girl with hollow eyes. It was instantly obvious which one was Vlad, first because of the way the others surrounded him with an air of protectiveness and respect.

  Second, because even in human form he looked like a monster.

  When Caleb was a boy, werewolves were never discussed within the Community. But children had a way of figuring out precisely what adults didn’t want them to know. For Caleb and his friends, clandestine reading of books on werewolves “borrowed” from Fintonclyde’s library was a thrill, though some of what they read made Caleb shiver. The worst might have been the laws that werewolves had to be cremated after death, like vampires, because it was widely believed that they were akin to vampires and could turn into them. Some of the old wives’ tales made him furious, especially the idea that a werewolf’s bite was dangerous even when he was in human form. But a lot of what they found mostly made them all giggle, especially the parts about the slight physical differences that were supposed to distinguish werewolves from normal people.

  But even the most ignorant of lobstermen could not have failed to recognize Vlad Alpha. His hands were large and bony, the nails like claws. His six-foot height and broad shoulders made him less imposing than scarecrow-like. Ungroomed curly hair fell past his brow, and an unkempt beard reached almost to his deep-set eyes. A long, quarter-inch-thick scar ran down the right side of his face, just missing his eye—the souvenir, no doubt, of a dogfight. All of the hair on his face couldn’t conceal the contemptuous sneer he had for Caleb.

  “Well, Fido,” he drawled, “decided to join us?”

  “Yes,” said Caleb simply, regarding the other with scholarly detachment. Had Vlad been born that way, which was supposed to make it worse? No, he
decided after a moment, he’s probably just trying to look scary. The thought made him smile—it was what Toby would do.

  “The Betas here were telling me you met some full-timers, Fido,” Vlad continued.

  Caleb wondered what he’d have to do to stop being Fido. “Some who?”

  Vlad glanced at Grigore with a look that plainly said, Where’d you dredge up this moron? “Wolves, Fido. A mommy, and a daddy, and their cute little puppies.” His contempt was accompanied by an evil snarl.

  “Oh, yes.” Caleb remembered the magical feeling he always got when he saw them. “They’re so beautiful, aren’t they?”

  Vlad flexed his long, clawed fingers. “Not any more.” He paused for a terrible leer, showing scraggly teeth. “Now they’re a coat worn by a farmer in the village.”

  “All of them?” Caleb was shocked. He didn’t know what to say. “Even the…the babies?” Wonderful, he thought. Cry, why don’t you—you’ll be Fido forever.

  “Don’t worry, Fido. Mr. Fatulescu doesn’t have long to live.” Vlad looked around at the Betas, who all laughed.

  “Just about half an hour,” Grigore added. “Slightly less.”

  “We’re going to kill him,” Caleb guessed.

  “Very good, Fido, you learn fast.”

  This was what he claimed he had come to Romania to do: wreak revenge on humans who killed with impunity. But talking about it like this made it sound more like premeditated murder than instinct or justice. “Do we have to kill—” Caleb began, but stopped at the malevolent leers proclaiming I knew it that appeared on the faces of Pack Six. He swallowed and thought fast. “It won’t teach him a lesson to kill him. We should bite him and make him one of us.”

  “Fine sentiments, Fido, worthy of your education,” sneered Vlad. “But then what will we eat?”

  “He’s a farmer, right? Maybe he has chickens.”

  Vlad extended his arms towards his pack, all of them skeletal and almost translucent with hunger. “You propose to feed Pack Six on chickens?” he asked dangerously.

  Caleb took a deep breath and thought of the puppies, unsure of how to answer. The power of the moon caused a tug-of-war inside him between the human and the wolf. One wanted cooperation and the other wanted blood.

  Vlad grinned and extended his claws. It was unnecessary for him to demand promises, or to warn, “You do as I say.” They all knew that there would be no scheming or conniving once they transformed, and that as long as Caleb didn’t openly challenge Vlad’s authority, Pack Six could be assured of his loyalty.

  Caleb had a hard time believing that the threats to the farmer were anything but talk. It took a lot of discipline and practice for a werewolf to remember any plans he’d made as a person. He doubted that these Romanian werewolves ever found it necessary to exert that kind of self-control.

  Or maybe murder came more naturally to them.

  A lot of good his Fintonclyde or MIT education had done for him. There was so much he didn’t know.

  “Come,” said Vlad, motioning the others out the door as their bodies simultaneously capitulated to the celestial event.

  The members of Pack Six exited the cabin and sought privacy behind bushes and boulders to await their transformation. Caleb did as the others, saying nothing, reflecting to himself that both humans and animals attached great importance to ritual.

  As they had retreated simultaneously, so they emerged. The full moon now hung several degrees above the horizon, partially obscured by mist. The wolves mingled for another rite: sniffing, bumping noses, wagging tails to show friendly intent.

  Vlad was not the biggest of the pack. Truth be told, he was a rather bedraggled and scrawny animal, with bare patches on his hide. Grigore was actually the tallest, though he too was thin. Caleb’s wolf form, nourished by Mihail’s mutton stew and coq au vin, outweighed the largest of them by at least twenty pounds.

  Size alone, however, wasn’t enough to take on the entire pack. In battles of tooth and claw, Caleb was inexperienced and timid. But he had no doubt of the outcome of a battle of wits, and was even now on the alert for signs of gullibility in Vlad.

  At the moment, though, he knew that it would be worth his life to approach the Alpha without lowering his head and wagging his tail. Vlad did the same, but as they stood up, neither could resist curling his lip to show the other a fang.

  As in his human form, Vlad’s teeth were scraggly and broken, the tip of his largest canine fractured to a jagged point.

  The wolves took off at last, dashing over the wet leaves, between trees, and up and down hills. They did indeed arrive at a farmhouse, which they approached with a brazenness that surprised Caleb. He followed unquestioningly, though his instincts told him to stay hidden. When Vlad motioned for the two of them to continue on while the others hid, Caleb took the challenge and joined him as they loped up to the dwelling shoulder-to-shoulder. They hadn’t discussed whether the farmer might be a wizard, or whether he would take them for ordinary wolves, and at this point Caleb didn’t care. He could smell the farmer, stronger and stronger as they went through the wooden door and up the flight of stairs to a small attic outfitted with a straw bed, a chair, and a triangular-shaped window. The man was sitting in the chair, smoking a pipe…and wearing a wolfskin jacket.

  With a howl of rage, Caleb leapt at his throat, not caring if the farmer was a wizard and could slay him. He wanted, more than he ever had, to kill.

  It was the farmer’s own bloodlust that saved him. Having spotted the wolves approaching, he was holding a gun in his lap, and was able to fire enough buckshot at Caleb to throw him backwards.

  Ordinary shot, not silver, so he had mistaken them for real wolves. It hurt no more than a softball in the chest would hurt a person, but it still made both werewolves hesitate for a split second—just long enough for the farmer to dive through the window.

  Howling and barking, Caleb and Vlad descended the stairs in pursuit. They were somewhat awkward on stairs, though, and the Betas outside had done nothing to stop the farmer, waiting for Vlad’s orders. By the time Caleb and Vlad came tearing out of the farmhouse to sniff in the bushes where the farmer had fallen, he had pulled himself out and taken refuge in the grain silo.

  Caleb was convinced that, with a minimum of cleverness, they could break their way into the silo. Vlad, however, led them all away, and soon they were tearing across the hills again.

  They encountered a small deer, less than a year old, and limping. Vlad and the female wolf brought it down, and they all had something to eat—except Caleb, who sensed that they were all much hungrier than he was. Vlad, too, ate little, perhaps because he wanted to keep his level of bloodlust high.

  It wasn’t clear if it was Vlad or Caleb who led the pack back to the farmhouse. The Alpha wasn’t taking the direct route there, but Caleb’s slightest nudges steered him in that direction. This time they approached more furtively from behind the grain silo, which their ears and noses told them was now empty. Peering up, down, and then straight ahead, they saw the farmer lurking in the bushes with his gun.

  Something made Caleb hesitate, and Vlad led the attack. Too late, the trained wizard that shared the werewolf’s mind realized that the gun appeared to be luminous, as if it carried the magic of the moon that now shone directly overhead.

  Silver, the lunar metal. Caleb threw himself at Vlad and tackled him to the ground before he could reach the farmer.

  The shot went high, but they heard a squeal from one of the Betas. The slugs had indeed been silver.

  Still crushing Vlad to the earth under his 200-pound weight, Caleb watched as the remaining Betas leapt at the farmer before he fired again, and ripped him to shreds.

  Vlad struggled, and Caleb stepped off with an embarrassed shake, as if to say Gee, I must have tripped. He wasn’t sure how the Alpha would interpret the attack. They faced each other for a moment, eyes locked and teeth bared, then turned their attention to their fallen comrade as the Betas devoured the farmer.

  Caleb had
never even learned the name of the wolf who was shot. He lay very still. Vlad and Caleb nuzzled him, but quickly backed off when they realized the Beta was cold and already beginning to stiffen. Their hackles rising, they licked their lips in a gesture of canine disgust. Caleb had never smelled death before; his curious growl turned into a puppy’s whine that lasted until Vlad snapped at the pack. Together they fled, forgetting their dead fellow and the half-eaten farmer as soon as they were free of the scent.

  Sated but subdued by their loss, the werewolves returned to Grigore’s cottage somewhat before moonset. They occupied themselves with small tasks, grooming and napping, until the sky lightened and they hid themselves away once more.

  After the transformation, Caleb was exhausted, but he couldn’t bring himself to return to the castle right away. He didn’t clearly remember the events of the previous night, but he was uneasy. He knew he had challenged the Alpha, though he wasn’t sure to what extent or what it would mean for the future. He also knew that something had happened between the pack and humans, and an odd foreboding told him that he should stay around to see what was going to happen. He had clothes and a vague memory of where the trouble had taken place. The members of Pack Six, equally drained and lazy from their night of gluttony, paid him no heed as he stepped outside to clear his head.

  They came just after dawn. Hunters, dozens of them, with everything from clubs and ropes to silver daggers and lit torches. Caleb did what he could without putting himself in danger. Some of the hunters were easy to dispatch magically: a couple of guns exploding in their hands and they were running down the mountain as fast as they could go.

  A few of the hunters were also wizards, and they were harder to outwit. The hunt lasted for hours. Caleb’s magic did limit the damage: by the end of the day the hunters had killed only one werewolf, along with a teenage boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tired and confused, Caleb limped back to castle Arghezi as the sun set and the nearly full moon was just beginning to rise.

  There had to be a better way to coexist.