by Allison Moon
“We turn one into a man,” Sharmalee finally said, though it sounded more like a question.
No one responded, though Hazel stifled a grin and Corwin shook her head.
“I thought full-bloods didn’t shift,” Mitch said.
“They don’t, as far as we know,” Renee said. “But what the hell do we know. We beat half-bloods to turn them from men to wolves. So maybe we have to do the opposite to turn a full-blood into a man.”
“What’s the opposite of beating?” Lexie asked.
“Petting?” Mitch offered.
“Positive affirmations?” said Jenna.
“Folk songs?” said Sharmalee.
“All right,” Renee said. “Let’s get one. We can figure the rest out from there.”
The girls looked to each other, waiting for someone to speak.
“So … ” Lexie said. “Where do we get one?”
20
Lexie pulled on Blythe’s old black leather jacket. Hazel sat on the stairs, and Renee leaned on the banister.
“My dad keeps a tranq gun in the house,” Lexie said.
“Seems a bit excessive,” Renee said.
“Until you need one.”
Hazel buried her mouth in her hands and wiggled her feet. Lexie and Renee exchanged a look.
“How do you get it?” Renee asked.
“No idea. I don’t think he’s left the house in three months. Since Hal died, he hasn’t even left to go to watch sports.”
“Is that weird?” Hazel asked.
“It’s my dad. He’s always been a little … sullen.”
“Even when your mom was alive?”
“Kinda. Quiet at least.”
“When my mom left my dad,” Hazel said, “he got drunk all the time and wandered around in his underwear. Then he got really into Rilke. It was weird.”
“It sounds like your dad’s depressed.” Sharmalee said, coming down the stairs in her pjs.
“I don’t know if my dad has feelings like that. He’s from the John Wayne school of masculinity: Don’t say shit. The more it matters, the less you say.”
“So, how you gonna get the gun?” Renee asked.
Lexie waved a hand at her all-black attire. “I don’t really want to have to explain anything. I’m just gonna have to sneak in and take it.”
Lexie wished for the first time that shifting was an option. Paw pads would help ease her path over her house’s creaky stairs. But she’d never navigated her house with her wolf body before. Best to go with the knowns. She clicked her cell to silent and saw the time, 1:35am. Her father would be deep asleep by now, his pain killers just kicking into full gear.
The guns lived on a rack in the hall closet outside Ray’s bedroom. He slept with his door open.
Lexie had only snuck in once before, during her junior year at Rogue River High after the homecoming dance. Now, walking up the stairs at the edges, she wondered why she hadn’t done it more often. The answer, of course, was that she never had any reason to.
At the top of the stairs, Lexie turned away from her closed bedroom door and toward her father’s open one at the other end of the short hall. The closet door stuck; she knew that. She turned the handle completely before pulling, eliciting a short moan from the door jamb. She froze and waited to hear her father rustling. He didn’t. She peered inside. Next to the fresh sheets and towels was the gun rack, and at the end was the dart gun. It had a narrow, black barrel and fake wood stock. The brass sight glinted in the meager light. She reached for it. Somewhere nearby would be the box of darts and CO2 cartridges. Cursing the lack of moonlight for rendering her blind, she eased her hand into the darkness, feeling towels, sheets, and nothing more. She leaned in farther, hoping to catch the corner of the box somewhere in the mess. The back of her neck tingled, and she heard a click.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
Lexie whipped to see the barrel of a rifle aimed at her head.
Her father stood in the doorway to his room, pupils wide from trying to see in darkness.
“Dad!” She thought the word would come out easier, but it croaked from her mouth. The panic from being in the crosshairs froze her muscles. “No!” she croaked again.
He stepped forward, the barrel just out of her reach.
A choked wail echoed in the hallway and died amidst the linens: Lexie’s terrified, and failed, final attempt at communication.
Or not failed. Her father lowered the gun and squinted into the darkness. “Lexie?” he asked.
Lexie whined and nodded her head vigorously. She was flush with adrenaline, struggling to regain equilibrium.
“Christ, Lex! What the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s my house!” she shouted, finally finding her voice. As if that really answered his question.
Ray flicked on the light switch, and they both flinched against the yellow burn.
Her father wore shorts, thank god, and the rifle was still in his hands. Lexie held the tranq gun, and there was no way to hide it now.
Her mind scrambled for a plausible excuse. Hunting club. Zoology paper. Evil professor. Tenacious stalker. Her vision blurred. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she choked on nothing, gasping for breath and trying not to drown.
She dropped the gun and fell to the carpet, her diaphragm heaving in an odd rhythm. Amid her anger at her father and his lies was her own shame for excising him from her life. The burst of adrenaline at being in the crosshairs swept along all the resentment and shame in a flood of hot tears.
Ray stood flabbergasted for a long moment before he figured out what to do. He lay the gun on the floor and stooped with a labored grunt. He crawled forward to her, close but not touching her while she sobbed.
“Lex. Baby. What’s the matter?”
He watched her from the distance of a wary pet, waiting for her to calm.
She hated that she couldn’t have just asked him for the gun, that their once close relationship had deteriorated so far. She pulled it together after a few shameful moments and bit her lip, hard.
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Twenty minutes later, Lexie and her father were sitting at the kitchen table, hot chocolates in hand, and she was trying to tell him something. Anything. The house smelled strongly of mold and dust, and she hoped it was her keener sense of smell instead of a sign that things for her father had taken a bad turn.
After a grueling five minutes of silence, Ray finally asked, “How’s the quarter going?”
“Semester. Milton’s on the semester system.” Lexie got up from the table and started digging through the refrigerator, finding only moldy take-out and sour milk.
“Oh, right. Of course. That’s half a year, right?”
“Yeah, Dad.” Lexie shrugged. “S’alright.”
“You like living with those girls?”
Lexie poked around the kitchen cupboards. They were equally bare. “Sheesh, Dad, when’s the last time you bought groceries? There’s nothing to eat.”
“There’s some tuna and pasta in the bottom cabinet,” he said, rolling the muscles of his lower back with his fist.
“Classes?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“Any boys?”
“Boys?” Lexie asked. “Oh, you mean … . No.” She buried her face in the pantry, finding an ancient can of peanuts and cloudy jar of olives.
“I’m thinking boys might not be a thing.”
“What?” he said, loudly.
Lexie exhaled hard enough to stir up a bit of dust on the shelf.
“What?” he said again. “I can’t hear you when you mutter into the oatmeal like that.”
If, before she changed, Lexie had been soft-spoken like her father, she’d become even more reticent now that her ears worked ten times better.
“Never mind!” she shouted, withdrawing from the pantry. She tried to recall all the words Blythe had said that night. About her mother, about her lineage.
I know you lied about mom. The words
came so easily in her head, but they refused to find a place on her tongue. Calling her father a liar bit her with too much irony. She had to come clean at least a little bit.
“There is—was—a woman.”
Ray waited for the rest of the sentence, and when it didn’t come, his brow furrowed in the same configuration of puzzlement as when he did crosswords.
Then the solution dawned. His eyebrows rose once, then all expression disappeared, replaced by his normal stoic face.
“Huh,” he said at last.
“What?” Lexie said.
“Nah. I mean, sure.” He looked away, thinking, weighing the possibilities, then returned to her. “Yep. That sounds fine.”
“Fine? What?”
“Yep.”
And that was that.
Ray’s answer to her unspoken question was an eyebrow twitch that became a deep furrow. He took a long swig of his hot chocolate.
He swallowed and said, “That school of yours finally delivered your stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“From your old caved-in room. I forgot to tell you about it when they came a couple weeks ago. I had them put it all in the basement.”
Lexie swung open the door, scattering paint flakes at her feet. A wrong, sour kind of smell wafted up the stairs. She grimaced.
Two cardboard boxes sat at the bottom of the stairs, casting long shadows. At her first step, she heard squeaks and the scattering of mice.
The stench of mold, dust, and mouse shit caught her by the throat. She grabbed for the basement light string and gagged as it clicked, warming the dingy place with its sulfur-colored light.
Lexie knelt at the nearest box and pulled out some moldy notebooks and her first semester syllabi, the pink highlighter bleeding over all the pages like watercolors. Beneath that was only clothing, crumpled and musty.
She reached for the other box. More books, two woefully overdue from the library, and beneath them, softness. Her quilt.
She pulled it from the box in a flourish of odor. The batting had been chewed through, and the whole of it had become a mouse nest. Bits of fabric and turds fell as she shook it.
“Dammit dad,” she muttered. She shook the quilt again, hard, whipping as much filth and regret from it as she could.
“This place is disgusting!” was all she could think to shout.
No response from her father upstairs. The man never fought back, even when he was being insulted. “My quilt’s full of mouse shit,” she said. She climbed the stairs with the quilt in her arms, tugging off the light behind her. “You let my stuff get trashed down there.”
“You left all that stuff behind, kiddo. Dean Fern had to get your RA to pack everything up and send it to student affairs. It sat there for five months and you never once asked about any of it. You never treated that quilt with respect.”
“It was my blanket for my whole fucking life! It was one of the only things I had from Mom.”
“Well you seemed happy to be rid of it.”
“Well you seemed happy to be rid of mom.”
Ray glared in the shape of a question.
Any more would be a confession, any less a cruelty. Lexie chewed her lip and spilled.
“I know what happened to Mom.” Lexie stared at him, quilt cradled in crossed arms. “I know she’s dead.”
Ray stared into the brown depths of his mug and rocked his head in a facsimile of a nod. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to lie again or come clean. His thoughts lived locked behind his stoic face.
His non-reaction was terrifying. She told him she knew he was a liar and she hated him for it. He took it all without so much as a raised eyebrow. She gripped her knife, hoping it would keep her from shifting and eating him right then.
“I’m sorry,” he said to his mug. “I didn’t want you growing up afraid.”
“Of what?” Lexie asked. “Rares?”
He pressed his lips together and nodded. “Them. And your genes. Your ma wasn’t in her right mind the night she died. She was having …what I guess you could call an ‘episode’. I didn’t know how to talk to you about it. Especially since Nana had died so soon before. It was just too much to explain to you, kiddo.”
“I deserve to know the truth.”
“I know you do,” Ray muttered.
They sat in silence again, Lexie stroking her thumb against the tiny bubbles in the ceramic of her mug, Ray chewing the inside of his cheek. Neither looked the other in the eye.
“I want to kill the Morloc,” Lexie said.
Ray gave her a confused look.
“The Rares that live up in the Barrens.” Lexie picked up their mugs and put them in the microwave for a reheat. “That’s what the gun was for.”
“The tranq?”
Lexie wasn’t ready to come clean either, it seemed. “No one’s bagged a live one. I thought maybe I could catch one. For … science.”
Ray stroked the white stubble on his chin. “You’re talking about an animal that’s as tall as a horse with the bulk of a tiger. I think you’re gonna need at least two solid shots with those darts to take one out. Three would be better. And I think you’re out of your goddamned mind.”
Lexie watched the mugs whirl in the flickering microwave light.
“So?”
“So?” Ray asked. “You’re not fucking doing it ‘so’.”
“Dad.”
“Oh hell no. No no no. You can be a smart-ass, you can be a college student, and you can be a queer. But there’s no way in hell I’m letting my only daughter hunt Rares.”
“Dad, I have to.”
“Like shit you do.”
“They’re after everyone,” Lexie pleaded.
“So, you do what everyone does. Keep your head down, stay alert, and stay the hell out of the north woods.”
“Mom was a Rare hunter!”
“She was not!” Ray’s face burned purple and his eyes bulged. “Your mama had mental problems, just like your Nana. And probably her mother before her.”
“She wasn’t crazy. She was trying to broker peace between the people of Milton and the Morloc. They’re more than just animals.”
Ray rubbed his temples. “Honey, I don’t know where you got this stuff, but it’s all bullcrap. Your ma was delusional, end of story. She hated it when white folks attributed all this magical mumbo-jumbo to Indians, even before she went ‘round the bend. I wish I could say the stuff she came up with was insightful or symbolic, or magic or something, but it wasn’t. It was just a string of nonsense followed by more of the same. Every shrink and brain doctor we could afford said the same. She had nightmares and took to drinking just before she died. These Rares, they aren’t skinwalkers, or an organized society. They’re barely even intelligent. They’re just big, mean, dumb animals. Nothing more. Your ma died like that Curtis girl did—in the woods alone at night, for no good reason, all but asking for it. That’s not sinister or supernatural. It’s just a bad fucking idea.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“You’ve seen what? A wolf become a man?”
Lexie bit her lip. In a word? No, she hadn’t. But she had seen six women become wolves, and she’d seen a wolf become a woman, her lover.
“That’s just an urban legend, Lex. It’s been around since I was a kid and it never got true. You don’t think if that were real it’d be all over the internet by now?” Ray sighed and rubbed his forehead with a thick and heavy hand. “I’m real sorry I lied about your mama running off. That was a bad dad move, and it wasn’t fair to you. But you can’t hide from the truth by believing in fairy tales. It’s not going to serve you. It’ll just get you dead. I don’t doubt that Curtis girl was chasing after some sort of rumor either. Don’t do the same.”
“Dad, these Rares killed Bree Curtis. They killed Mom. They’ve killed dozens since I’ve been alive, and they’ve controlled us with curfews and gun racks and decades of fear of the woods—our woods! And they’ll keep killing. Why can’t you let me do this?”
&
nbsp; “Your ma had twenty-five years of experience on you. And she faced a Rare. One hit and she was dead. No way, kiddo. No goddamned way.”
“I’ve seen them. I can handle them.”
“You are just a girl, Lexie.”
I’m not, though, she tried to say.
The microwave beeped, and Lexie brought the steaming mugs back to the table.
She placed Ray’s mug in front of him, grabbed hers, and poured it on her hand.
“Lex!” Ray shouted.
Lexie grimaced with the pain as the chocolate buried tiny splinters of heat into her skin.
Ray stood like he was going for the sink, but Lexie grabbed his shoulder with her free hand and forced him back into his chair.
“No, Dad. Watch.”
The rich brown liquid dripped away, exposing a bright pink, raw and throbbing hand. Her skin began to blister. Ray stared, nostrils flaring.
The burning sensation lingered, then died. Her hand paled and tightened, the blistered skin deflating, the ripples of damaged flesh regaining tautness and flexibility. Even the tiny, singed hairs regrew. In less than a minute, second-degree burns appeared, then healed.
Ray didn’t say anything; he just stared agog at her healthy hand. He looked to Lexie’s face, then to the hand she still had clamped on his shoulder. The puzzled expression returned. She eased back into her seat. He kept his eyes trained on his shoulder, and when Lexie finally sat, he rubbed and stretched it.
“The wolf that Hank Speer shot at, the one that killed him defending me, was my girlfriend.” Lexie took a big breath before the plunge. “Daddy, I’m a werewolf.”
Ray choked, and a vein like a swollen river pulsed along his temple and across his stubbled head. His eyes rested on the table top, and from across the table she could hear his pulse quicken. His face turned white and his ears red. He looked like she did when she was fighting off the wolf. But all he seemed to be fighting were tears.
Lexie’s own throat tensed watching her father’s pained face. He leaned on the back of the chair, eased himself to standing, and shuffled toward the stairs.
“Dad?” Lexie called after him.
