by Kelli Kimble
“Can silver bullets kill us?”
“What about holy water?”
“Do you only change on the full moon?”
“What if we bite someone? Can we make more werewolves?”
Mr. Anu held up his hands to stop the barrage of questions. “I see you’ve been watching a lot of movies. But to answer your questions: any bullet can kill you, holy water has no effect, the full moon has nothing to do with your ability to change; it’s only that werewolves are most often sighted by the light of the full moon, and if you bite someone, it’s just a bite. It might kill them, but it won’t make them a werewolf.”
The room grew quiet. Siggie raised her hand.
Mr. Anu pointed at her. “Yes, Sigourney?”
“What are your plans for the future?”
His eyes glittered in the dim basement lighting. “My plan is to rise again. Humans will again worship me and make sacrifices in my name. They’ll build monuments to me and when I direct their actions, they will listen.”
“It sounds like you want to make humans into slaves,” Patty said.
“Servitude can come in many forms. That doesn’t make it slavery. Here in America, many people worship in churches. They listen to preachers and pastors and the like, holy men. I actually am a holy man. And I want what’s due to me.”
A pall cast over the room, cheering my spirits. He was playing it all wrong; it didn’t matter if they believed him or not if they thought he was up to no good. There was a long pause.
“Any other questions?” Mr. Anu asked.
The room was silent. In the back, someone coughed.
“Then I suppose it is time for you to witness proof. It seems faith is in short supply here.”
He shrugged off his sport coat and handed it to Patty. He started rolling up his shirtsleeves, revealing the gold bracelets that he always wore.
“Unlike Iris, I have the ability to only reveal part of myself if I so desire. I also don’t take quite the same form. You are human, and as such, you won’t be able to assume a jackal’s form as I can. I am going to start with one hand, because I think it is likely you will be frightened. Do not be alarmed. I will not hurt you.” He held up his right hand. His forearm gradually changed to black, and his fingers morphed a paw with huge claws.
Shirley’s hand shot up, and Mr. Anu acknowledged her.
“May I . . . that is, would you mind if I . . . I’d like to touch it.”
Mr. Anu nodded, and she came up and touched his forearm first, stroking the fur and then tugging at it gently. Then she pressed a finger to the tip of one claw.
“Ow,” she said, sticking her finger into her mouth.
“My apologies, miss. I might have told you that the claw is razor sharp. Why don’t you tell the ladies what you’ve observed?”
“His claw is razor sharp. It drew blood.” She held up her finger, and as we watched, a single pinprick of blood enlarged to a full drop before it started sliding down her finger. “The fur is firmly attached. Doesn’t seem to be a costume or a trick.” She turned towards the room. “It looks like what I’d expect the paw of a wolf or large dog would look like, except the toe joints seem a little long.”
Mr. Anu assumed the rest of his form. He grew several feet taller in spite of the way his legs bent to accommodate the dog leg. “I don’t wish to alarm you, miss, but perhaps you shouldn’t turn around just now.”
There was a collective gasp.
Mr. Anu returned to his human appearance. “Now. I mark it as progress that nobody ran screaming from the room.”
“Sir? Just one more question,” Patty said. She raised her hand again. She was really starting to annoy me.
“If it’s your job to guide souls to the afterlife . . . how do you know when it’s time?”
“Another astute question from Patty,” he said. “It’s simple, really. Life is all around us, at all times. Death is the balancing force to life. I can sense when the life force is weakening. Right now, in London. I can feel a young man who was struck by a car dying. In Tucson, I feel an old woman dying of old age. In Buenos Aires, a child is dying from a wasting disease. Death is happening all of the time, non-stop.”
“But you’re here,” she said.
“I am.”
“What about guiding their souls?”
“This is part of what is wrong with humanity. Because they’ve forgotten how to appease me, they don’t receive the benefits I provide. And that contributes to the negativity that continues to spiral humans downward. Humanity is well on its way to utter self-destruction.”
“Wait a minute,” Francis said. “Isn’t their self-destruction bad? Won’t you be useless without them?”
He shrugged and began unrolling his shirtsleeves.
“I don’t believe that you can feel people dying,” Patty said, apparently unconcerned with the destruction of man. She was like a dog with a bone. “Prove it. Someone nearby must be dying today. Someone we can verify. And we want to see how you guide their soul.”
“Are you sure you want to know such a thing?” he asked. “It can be a terrible burden.”
Unbelievably, murmurs of ascent swirled around the room. Mr. Anu nodded.
“Very well. There is someone in this room, who shall remain unnamed, that is on the verge of death. And she’ll die within the hour.”
The murmurs rose in both pitch and volume. He’d managed to scare them. But I didn’t like what he was doing. I stood. Voices that I couldn’t match to faces rose up around us. “Is someone here sick?”, “But we’re all so young.”, “How would anyone here die? We’re perfectly safe.”
But are we perfectly safe? A trail of disgust and fear rose up my spine. Was he going to kill someone in this room just to make a point? “Mr. Anu, can I see you for a moment upstairs?”
“Of course,” he said. He was calm and placid, oblivious to all of the agitated Alpha Nu members. I went to the steps and he followed me. Upstairs in the kitchen, I whirled on him.
“You can’t seriously think you’re going to get away with this,” I hissed. “There are almost sixty women in that basement! There are enough witnesses to put you away forever.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Iris. I’ve told them the truth.”
“I obviously mean that you can’t kill someone just to get them to believe.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I barely want to guide a human over without their devotion. Why would I purposely take someone against their time? That doesn’t make sense.”
Frustration seized at me, and I had to stop and force myself to take in a breath. You can’t let him do this. You won’t let him do this.
The tromping of feet on the stairs kept me from saying anything more. Patty appeared, and others had followed her up the steps. In a moment, the kitchen was full of Alpha Nu members, and more were still coming up from the basement.
“Mr. Anu, we’ve decided to wait and see what happens,” Patty said. “Perhaps you’d like to retire to the parlor for tea while we wait?” She snared his arm and guided him towards the parlor. Francis filled the tea kettle while the rest of the members filed past us in Patty’s wake. When Siggie reached me, I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her aside.
“Wait here a minute,” I said.
She frowned but didn’t object. When everyone had packed into the parlor except for Francis, I pulled her to the foyer and up the stairs to our room. I closed the door and sagged against it. The voices in the parlor faded to a murmur.
“Siggie, this is so bad,” I said.
“Come on,” she said, crossing her arms. “You can’t really believe someone here is going to die.”
“I don’t just believe it. I think he’s going to kill someone, just to make it happen.”
“Iris.”
“I’m serious, Siggie. If he claimed someone was going to die, and nobody did, who would believe him, then? Nobody. That’s who. He would’ve staged this whole dog and pony show for nothing.”
“Look, Iris,” sh
e turned to face the window. “I know you’ve been going through some . . . stuff. But I think maybe I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t tell you that you need to take a good long look at yourself. Not everything has to be some crazy conspiracy theory.”
“It’s not a theory,” I said.
“He didn’t say someone would be killed. He said someone would die.”
I pushed off from the door and moved around in front of her. “One of the women in this house will be dead soon. He’s going to make sure of that. Do you want that on your conscience?”
She chuffed out a breath. “If he kills someone in this house, who will follow him, then? Huh?”
I took a step back and blinked. That made sense. Who would follow him? But he wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true. “Maybe someone is going to, I don’t know, choke on a cookie or something.”
“Unbelievable,” she muttered. She pivoted on her heel and went to the door. “I’m going downstairs to see what else he has to say. I’m going to do what I can to be the best I can be. And I believe that he can help me do that. Are you coming?” She had just the edges of a hopeful expression.
My feet were rooted to the spot. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
“Yeah,” she said, her face falling. “That’s what I thought. I’ll see you later.”
She closed the door behind her, and I listened to her soft footfalls on the carpet disappearing over the balcony and down the steps. I wanted to run after her and tell her to stay away from him. I wanted to scream and rail at how unfair it was that they were falling so naively into his carefully laid trap. I wanted them to know how manipulative he’d been, and how he’d taken my humanity from me.
I wanted them to know that he intended to take it from them.
But I didn’t do anything. I stood in the center of the room and stared at the door. Siggie had hung a full length mirror on the back of it, and it reflected something back to me that I didn’t recognize. Siggie was right, I was being crazy.
Without thinking about it, I took off my shoe and threw it at the mirror. It shattered, and glass tinkled to the floor. The voices downstairs stopped. A distinctly male voice rumbled. Mr. Anu. He was coming.
I have to kill him. That’s the only way to save one of the Alpha Nu.
I grabbed a towel and used it to pick up a long shard of glass. I wrapped the towel around it and let the sharpest point protrude, then I slipped my shoe back on, opened the door. A heavy foot — definitely Mr. Anu — stepped at the bottom of the stairs. I eased out into the hallway and moved along the wall until I came to the balcony. Mr. Anu’s head was bouncing up into view. I ducked into a shadow against the wall. I’d stab him and push him over the railing.
I kept my eyes on him. Everything else fell away. My heart was beating in my ears, drowning out the sound of his shoes on the steps. A vibration in my chest registered as his voice somewhere deep in my mind, but I pushed it away. The world telescoped towards me, with Mr. Anu filling the entire lens. He was nearly at the top. I shifted my hold on the glass, and it bit through the towel into my skin. The fresh feel of blood reaching air was only recognizable from a distance.
He reached the top of the stairs. His hand was on the banister. He took a step onto the balcony. The chandelier backlit him so that I couldn’t see his face, but he was in profile, turned to look back down the steps. He took another step, and another. Remarkably, he didn’t seem to sense me standing there.
Some god you turned out to be.
I raised the shard and screamed, running at him. He was there, in my sights. I only had to bring down the glass and pierce his heart. It was going to cut my hand, maybe badly. But it would save someone here. Time stretched out, and the sound coming out of me lengthened into a howl. Was I changing into my alternate form? I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t be able to hold the glass. My eyes broke contact with Mr. Anu and drew to my hand.
It’s just your hand. You aren’t changing. Finish it!
With a final burst of an exhale, I rammed the glass downwards into the body in front of me.
Only, it wasn’t Mr. Anu. Frantic, my eyes flew about. He was standing just to my right, and the glass was buried in Siggie’s chest, not his. Her mouth was open, but she didn’t say anything. She blinked, once, twice, then looked down at the glass sticking out of her chest, and at my hand, still clutching it. I snatched my hand away.
“Siggie?” my voice was small and ragged. How had this happened?
She blinked again and stepped slightly away from me, as if she were afraid.
Afraid of me.
She bumped up against the railing and swayed. Before I could make sense of what was happening, she sagged away from me, tipping over the balcony rail and falling with a horrible thump to the hardwood floor of the foyer below.
“Siggie!”
“Excuse me, Iris.” Mr. Anu brushed past me and descended the stairs. As he went, he dropped his human form, growing taller and darker. The women clustered at the bottom of the steps and over Siggie’s broken form shrank away.
“No,” I pushed past Patty, who I just realized was at the top of the steps. She must have followed Siggie to investigate the breaking glass. She grabbed me by the arm, but I shook her off. “Siggie. Siggie!” I reached the bottom of the steps and took another step towards her. Mr. Anu was now kneeling beside her in full Anubian form. He turned his gaze towards me. His eyes were dark and hard. They glittered in the light of the chandelier.
“She’s ready,” he said.
“No. She can’t be. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
“It’s more than the blood.” He set a hand on her arm.
“Wait, no. I need to do it.” I kicked off my shoes and closed my eyes. I was too rattled for my alternate form to come forward without concentrating.
“That’s not a good idea,” Patty said from above. “Don’t you touch her. You killed her.”
“It was an accident,” I wailed. “I was trying to . . .” but I couldn’t finish. If I admitted that I’d been trying to kill Mr. Anu, it wouldn’t be an accident anymore. My werewolf form came forward, and my fur chafed under my clothes. Angry and frustrated, I tore it away with my claws.
The Alpha Nu members already huddled in the corners of the foyer and at the door of the parlor tried to shrink further away from me but there was nowhere else to go.
“Mr. Anu,” I said. I hated the way my voice sounded, so weak and pathetic. Tears were wetting my fur, causing my nose to run as well. “Do I have to beg? She’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”
He moved his hands from her and met my eyes. “She’s the closest friend you’ll ever have.”
Patty snorted. “Some best friend you are. You killed her.”
I whirled on her. “I didn’t mean to! I was trying to protect us. From him!” I pointed a claw at Mr. Anu. “He said someone was going to die. He meant he was going to kill someone.”
“That isn’t what I meant at all,” he said. “I can sense the pending death of someone. In this case I couldn’t tell what would cause the death, because she’s healthy. Or she was.” He looked down at Siggie. “I have to do this now. She’s suffering.”
“Wait,” I lunged forward and pushed him away before he could touch her again. “I have to say good-bye.” I gathered her up and pulled her to me. I brushed back her hair and whispered into her ear. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I know you’re hurting so I’ll let you go. But I wanted you to know that I love you, and I'm sorry.”
“What’s she doing?” Patty demanded from somewhere in the foyer behind me. “You aren’t letting her guide Siggie over, are you?”
I didn’t care what anyone else in the room thought or wanted. Not even Mr. Anu. Here was the one person besides Jacob who made me feel like I belonged. I touched her cheek. “Siggie. It’s time to go.”
Siggie’s body tensed for just a moment. Then she let out a long breath. I closed my eyes and walked with her towards the light
. I looked at our hands. They were intertwined, and mine was human. She looked at me and smiled. “I’m sorry,” I said. All around us, pastel colors swirled in curling patterns, all pointing us towards the light. We kept moving forward.
“Don’t be. You were trying to protect them. Us. Me.” Her skin was radiant, and her hair lifted as if it were caught in a spring breeze. She giggled and it sounded far away. “Buster will be here soon?”
I stumbled and almost lost hold of her hand. They’d bonded, and if the bond was strong enough — and according to Mr. Anu it was plenty strong — he would die, too. I nodded. “Yeah.”
She smiled. “Will I see other people I know, too? People who’ve passed?”
I nodded again, not sure I could trust my voice to work.
“My great-grandmother was full of piss and vinegar. I can’t wait to talk to her again.”
We laughed together. She squeezed my hand. We were getting close to the point where I would have to let her go.
“Is this what it was like when you brought that boy who hurt you?”
I shook my head. “No. It was stark and cold.”
“So, there is a heaven and hell is real.”
“Not in the sense you mean. Death is what you make of it. Just like life.”
She stopped and turned to me. “You can stop him, Iris. I know you can.”
I pressed my lips together. “Siggie.”
“Shh,” she said. “I know you think this is your fault. It’s not. I felt it when he touched me just now. All of this was in his plan. He wanted you to come to school here. He wanted you to make friends. And he wanted to tear them away from you. He made it happen so that you would be dependent on him. You’ll be alone again. But you’ve been alone before. And you still have Jacob.”
She drew me into an embrace. She squeezed me once, hard. Then pulled back.
“Promise me that you’ll stop him.”
I bit my lip. Could I promise that? She tugged at my hand and I met her eyes. “I’ll try.”
“Good. I’m ready now. Okay? I’m not in pain. And I’m not afraid. Because of you.”
