Furr

by Axel Howerton

  The two boys stand proud and smiling in front of me. They look smaller in this form, and cold.

  “Your turn, Uncle Finn.”

  “I’m your cousin, not your uncle,” I say to whichever one has addressed me.

  “Yeah, but you’re old,” says the other one. “Like an uncle.”

  They both laugh, the tittering giggles of twelve-year-olds.

  “Very funny,” I groan. “Show me how to do that.”

  “We wouldn’t want you to have a heart attack or something.”

  “Yeah, you are pretty old to be starting now.”

  They walk around me like a couple of drill sergeants out of a movie, circling me in opposite directions, hands clasped behind their backs, eyeing me up and down, appraising my suitability as a cadet.

  “You haven’t changed at all? Like, ever?”

  “No,” I stammer. “I don’t know. Maybe?” They give me a pair of sideways glances. “I messed up some dudes in the park, and I maybe ate somebody’s fingers?”

  They chuckle in concert.

  “You’re supposed to do it when you’re a teenager. When you’re like eighteen. Like drinking.”

  “Or voting.”

  I swing my head from side to side, trying to catch both of them in my field of vision at once. They’re making me dizzy. I decide to focus on the one moving clockwise.

  “You guys can do it, and you’re not eighteen yet,” I shrewdly point out.

  They switch places in my eye line, and I find myself moving counter-clockwise, despite my best efforts.

  “We’re very smart.”

  “Auntie Raigan says we’re prodigies.”

  “Because we’re twins,” they say together. “Take off your clothes, dummy.”

  I stare at the ground in front of me and reach for my boots, feeling the world continue to swirl around me as if I was circling the drain. I barely feel the backward momentum compared to the side-to-side, and the ground hits my ass hard, without me even realizing that I’m falling.

  “Fuck.”

  The boys laugh and crouch on either side of me.

  “You’re never going to handle the change.”

  “Poor, dumb old Uncle Finn.”

  My boot is in my hand, and I let it fly toward whichever one is spinning closest to me.

  “Get up.” They laugh.

  I waver and wobble, but I manage to take one knee, and then the other, slowly hauling myself up to standing.

  I drop my pants, shrug off my jacket, and pull my shirt over my head. I hesitate with my hands on the waistband of my boxers.

  “If you leave them on, you’ll get tangled up.”

  “Or you’ll be a wolf in underpants. That sounds scary.”

  I drop the shorts and pull my socks off. No sense in being a wolf in socks either. We’re trying for fierce hero-animal, not Dr. Seuss.

  “Good. Now, close your eyes . . .”

  “And think of England.”

  They laugh hysterically, in that way that only smartass kids, pleased with their own daring and insight, can cackle and twitter.

  “Very funny, guys. Come on, show me.”

  Goosebumps are rising on every part of me in this cold. I shiver and feel my balls pull up close, hoping for some warmth. My thighs are stinging, and I can see my breath.

  “Come on, man. It’s fucking freezing out here!”

  They stand in front of me, red-faced and shivering, yet still smirking despite the cold.

  “You just need to know who you are, Finn,” the first one says. I still can’t tell which is which.

  “You need to let go of everything else, and know that your true self is the one underneath the skin. All the way under the fur.”

  “Does it hurt?” I ask, shaking.

  “It . . . tingles.”

  “How do I turn back? Obviously it’s not the moon, right? It’s not like in the movies?”

  They snicker and shake their heads at me. “You just have to want to be this Finn again.”

  “If you really want to. You might just want to stay changed. This you is sad.”

  “And old.”

  “Very old.”

  The little bastards laugh again, but the laughter changes into something else, something wild and free, as the smoke overtakes them again, and both of them twist and swirl and are torn apart and remade. Ten times faster than they changed before, the smoke roils and clears and the two wolves are standing before me. They dance and hop, impatient for me to join them, or maybe just still mocking me in their wolf language.

  I brace myself against the cold, close my eyes, and wish to be free. I take a deep breath and try to release myself, everything that I’ve ever felt was wrong, and terrible, and human. I focus on the cool, fresh air in my snout, the wind in my fur, the smell of the pines, the rush of the river in the distance.

  The tingling starts at my feet, as if all ten of my toes had suddenly gone to sleep and then lit up with pins and needles. The sensation moves quickly from there, rushing over the bottom half of my body like an electric pulse. Am I imagining it? Is it happening? I don’t dare open my eyes. I’m terrified to look down and see my body twisting into ribbons of smoke and bone. What if I look and it stops, and I’m caught halfway? Some terrible half-life beast made of parts with no whole? A mud puddle of wasted humanity and partially chewed dog. Despite my paranoia and my terror, the tingling takes me over. It runs through my veins, winding through the air like streamers now, warm and soothing.

  My body buckles, and the smell of the wet grass and scrub comes into my snout. Is it a snout now? I still can’t will my eyes to open, even though it seems like an eternity has passed. Something changes, and the night opens to me. Even without my eyes, the world becomes brighter, thicker, more alive than ever before. Sounds, smells, I can feel the wind prickling against my skin like soft fingers, rubbing against me in a thousand different places. I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m overloading, like I’m lost in an endless miasma of colour and noise inside my head.

  Just as my panic reaches fever pitch, there’s a thought, soft, warm, quiet. Not a word, not an image, exactly. A thought, pure and simple and uncluttered. Like putting your hand near a flame and knowing hot by instinct.

  Look, it says.

  I open new eyes onto the night. A night brighter and louder than anything I’ve ever seen. My thoughts are simpler, quieter, more assured. My senses are alive, my body is electric. I feel everything. I sense everything.

  Run, it says. Follow.

  And I do.

  I BOUND AND hop behind the little wolves, my head low to the ground, shoulders up and new legs propelling me faster, stronger than I have ever moved before. It’s as if my feet know where to land, my body knows where to fit, and twist, and maneuver, before I even get there. I’m strong and free and ready. More than anything, I feel right. Like this is the real me. The me I’ve never met. I overtake the two smaller wolves and run through the forest, King of my new lands.

  We come to another small clearing in the trees, and I sense it. I catch myself on the edge of the treeline and come to a silent stop, down-shifting without a thought, my heart dropping to a rumble from a scream. There, twenty feet away, are three deer—skittering, dumb, and innocent. Their ears perk up, their heads bobbing up from the grass, eyes darting left and right at the sound of our approach. We’re so quiet, so strong. They sense us too late, and I know it. I leap from my place, secret in the trees, as the deer spring forward, and I catch one on the back legs, my claws sinking deep into the meat of its hindquarters. It pulls away, tries to kick free, but I’m on top of it already, over its back, turning it, teeth to throat, ripping, snapping. It kicks, and twists, and spasms, pumping more of its life into my mouth, the red gushing forth, filling me. It quivers, one last convulsion of Life, and falls quiet. My teeth are tearing the meat away from the bone even as I feel the spirit leaving it.

  The small wolves join me, ripping away chunks of fur, yanking the carcass back and forth between us,
rending the thing limb from limb. We savage its innards, warm, bloody, and delicious. We lap the blood from the ground. The black birds are in between us, underneath us, dropping in and flying away.

  I understand it now, all of it. Stretched out in the long grass, a sky full of stars above, the smell of fresh blood and the squalling of those black birds, picking the remains of my kill, my feast.

  Nature. You are what you’re born to be.

  Me?

  I’m a Strong Wolf. There’s another word, but it won’t come to my wolf brain the same way it does to human lips. I picture the little jade statue. I feel a wide, sure strength swelling in my chest.

  THE BOYS LEAD me through the woods, past Raigan’s little cottage, down the winding mountain path—much easier in my new form—and back into Bensonhall, where we creep to the furthest edge of the little stream and drink deep one last time. We skirt the cabins in the edges of the wood, slowing and moving deeper in as we pass McQueen’s place, until we come out more or less where we started, where Bob had left me in the twilight.

  There, I watch with hesitant curiosity as the smoke swirls and the boys take their shape again, seeming taller and paler than I remember. They stand, naked and shivering, expectant eyes waiting for me to follow their example. I don’t want to give this up. I feel like I could stay like this forever, strong and free. I know I can’t, but I cling to it anyways. I nuzzle my snout into my own white fur, thick and soft and full. The scents of blood and meat still thick on me. I rest on my haunches, tongue wagging like a happy Pomeranian. The thought of my human self, the one I’ve lived inside for more than thirty years, is a half-forgotten dream. The change won’t come.

  One of them goes to the door of the house, turning the handle and opening the door ever-so-carefully, and ushers us inside. In the dark of the cabin, surrounded by people smells, plastic and metal, pent in with dust and dead skin floating in the air, I find myself, and I feel the room swirl as my body changes.

  I come back to myself, lying on the floor, freezing and nude as the day I was born.

  One of the boys—Jamie, I think—throws a blanket over me, and Kevin emerges from another room, still naked, with a pile of clothes in his arms.

  Their father’s clothes, an uncle I’ll never meet.

  Jamie brings me tea, and they tell me to practice changing in secret, for a few days longer.

  “That was good, though,” Kevin says.

  “Yeah. We’ve never heard of somebody making a kill first time out.”

  “Usually takes a few months to get used to it.”

  “The first time, I just curled up on the ground for an hour.”

  “I threw up.”

  “Yeah. All over me,” Jamie says.

  The clothes fit me perfectly, but I wave off the offer of their father’s boots. There’s something about another man’s shoes. A dead man’s shoes. They still haven’t dressed as I’m ready to leave.

  “Don’t you wish you could stay that way?” I ask. “Stay wolves?”

  “It’s better,” they say in chorus.

  “But it’s not us,” Jamie says.

  “In the middle of all things. Always,” Kevin adds. “That’s what Auntie says.”

  I think about myself at their age, angry, terrified, and mostly alone.

  I look back on a thousand drunken nights, a hundred drugs I used to try to curb the pain. I can see what she sees in them. These boys—parents murdered, sister insane, living alone on the edge of the forest, wolf-boys in a world of hunters, three hundred yards from a man who could kill and skin them in his sleep, the same man who killed their parents—yet these boys are the sanest, most together people I’ve ever met.

  “She’s absolutely right. You guys just be you.”

  They smile at me, unified, as they always are. They’re going to be just fine, so long as I can protect them from whatever is about to come our way.

  “Thank you,” I say, turning back at the door.

  “We’re glad you came back,” Jamie says.

  “You’re going to be a good uncle,” Kev adds.

  They leap out and wrap their arms around me. It feels good to have someone that wants me here, to have someone connect.

  They release their bear hug and both look down at my bare feet.

  “I’ll be fine. You boys go get some sleep.”

  And I leave them there, to make my way through the pre-morning dew, cold and wet on my feet.

  28

  I SNEAK IN the front door. There are no locks here. Not anywhere I’ve been yet, anyways.

  I creep up the stairs past the bedrooms, the parlour, the giant bear looming claws-out in the hallway.

  I stop, step up into his terrible, tooth-filled maw and his dead glass eyes.

  I bare my teeth, and I dare him to move.

  “Boo.”

  THE ROOM IS dark, save the moonlight streaming through the open window. Instead of turning on the light, I duck into the bathroom, strip the borrowed clothes off of me, and start the shower in the dark.

  I come out and stare at the long table full of exotic bottles, tasting the memory of those thousand whiskey burns on my tongue. I’m almost surprised, and certainly pleased, that it offers me no further urge. They’re just bottles. Just things piled up on a table. No saviour, no friend, nothing more than bottles.

  “Are you going to have one, or just stare at them all night?”

  There’s a clink in the corner. Ice on crystal. My distraction at the events of the night has betrayed me.

  She leans out of the shadows in the corner and shakes her glass at me.

  “What are you doing, Emma?”

  She’s out of the chair and slinking toward me through the moonlight that casts down in sparkling slivers through the half-drawn blinds. She turns to set down her glass and I see the amulet catch the light, the moon bouncing like a mirror, dangling from her neck, but there’s something strange about the light. It seems diffused, muted, as if there were a fine mist of grey fog surrounding it.

  Emma moves closer, barely dressed in a short piece of lingerie, what I think they call a teddy. Black silk against her milk-white skin, hard nipples poking against the fabric.

  “Finn,” she purrs. I feel the accumulated energy of a lifetime climb up into my throat. My whole body feels electric and jittery, like too much coffee on top of too much speed.

  “What are you doing here?” I repeat. “Did Simon send you here?”

  “Simon?” she says softly, close enough for me to feel her breath. “Forget Simon.”

  Her hands are on me, light touches, running up my naked thighs, over my side, and up to my chest as she moves in front of me, pressing her soft, silken body against me. The vanilla and chocolate smell is gone, replaced with something lighter, softer. It smells fresh, like rain. She reaches fingers around the medallion at my neck.

  “What’s this?” she asks in a whisper. “You’ve been up to see the witch. I suppose you’ve made the change?”

  Her voice is all wrong, it carries an echo of somewhere, as if she’s throwing her voice, or there’s a speaker in her throat. It’s her voice, but not her words.

  Her fingers curl around my neck, up into my hair, pulling me close. Her lips, pink and full and so perfect, brushing against mine. As they separate, the tiny tip of her tongue drags across my upper lip, teasing, welcoming. Her other hand slides down the front of me, over ribs and past my hip, down to my balls before sliding up and around the shaft of my hard and ready manhood. I tremble and draw a stuttering sigh.

  “Emma,” I groan, wrapping an arm around the small of her back and pulling her into me. Her back arches, and her neck falls open to me. I wrap my lips around the skin there, kissing, licking, tasting her up to her little ears, burying my face in her hair and breathing deep of the smell of her. I pull her hair back, hard, to look down into her face, those delicate cheekbones, those luscious lips, those dark eyes, olive green and deep as the ocean.

  Except they’re not.

  Ther
e’s a smoky haze over her eyes. The same haze I’d caught in the moonlight, seeping from that thing around her neck. I shove her onto the bed, the spell broken. The energy falters, fades, but it’s replaced by the fury of knowing that I’m being played for a fool, and that Emma is being used like a marionette.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  She crawls forward, lust dripping from every movement. She twists and poses and opens herself up to me.

  I grab her shoulders with rough hands, shaking, part of me wanting to throw myself on top of her and devour her whole. The other part of me wants answers, wants the real Emma. Not this puppet in silk.

  She smiles, wan and confused. Something slipping in the fog that’s covering her. I grip the moon medallion in my hand and a tremor of filthy energy crawls up my arm. I yank, I pull, I tear at the frail-looking chain, but it won’t give. Emma slumps, as if she’s drunk and exhausted, falling limp as I pull at the foul thing around her neck.

  I step away, frustration and anger boiling up under the skin. Slapping my hand against the silver at my own neck, I take a breath, close my eyes, and feel the world spin again. I beg for more power, and I feel it course through me.

  The smoke whirls around me, and I crumple and change, reborn into the beast inside.

  The chain is hot and evil between my teeth. I can taste the darkness of it, death and unnatural power.

  I twist, and growl, and grind my teeth against it, until I feel it disintegrate and give, and the momentum leaves me scrambling backwards.

  Emma lurches and sucks in a huge breath, falling back against the bed as the mist flows out of her and dissolves into the air. She sits bolt upright on the edge of the bed, panicked and confused until her gaze falls on me, crouching in the shadows.

  I sniff at the amulet lying in front of me, draw back, bare my teeth at it. I snatch it up by the chain and whip it with my head, growling as it spins through the air and lands near the door.