Running With the Pack (16 page)

An hour later, the wolf appears.

Velia tenses, once, just to make sure she hasn’t frozen. But her muscles are warm and ready (she’s never really been cold), and she’s not frightened.

The wolf has never frightened her. It’s how she can live as a human without losing her mind; she accepts the shape of the beast.

(In her bones, she knows that sooner or later, she’ll give in to the wolf and disappear.)

It pads to the edge of the clearing opposite her and stands in the shadows, waiting. Once, it shifts, and the sun catches its head for a moment—one amber eye, sharp tight muzzle-fur the color of dust.

“I’m here,” Velia says. “What do you want?”

When there’s no answer, she tries again, in her true language. Silence.

“Why did you kill one of your own?”

It’s one of their own—the jaw of one of their own is sitting in the dinky office lab ten miles away—but those who live as wolves don’t like hearing solidarity from those on two legs.

The wolf-change claws at Velia’s throat; she bites her lips against it until she tastes blood.

“What do you want?” she calls again, finally, but the wolf startles and runs, leaves nothing behind but a maze of prints and a cloud of breath that hangs in the air for a few moments after the wolf has disappeared.

She shivers; pretends it’s from the cold.

Velia takes her time putting her clothes back on.

They make her feel more human, a little less afraid.

The wolf, in all things, protects itself.

It’s why Velia studied animals. It’s why she examines bones and tags them wolf or coyote or some breed long dead. It helps keep them all from being found out.

She fears for her kind. They are fragmented (the human-living and the beasts, taking turns hating one another more), and she knows that even under threat they would not unify. Some humans would submit to the knife rather than give in to the beast, and the true wolf would kill all comers until it died of exhaustion.

So she keeps her human shape, walks through the world, tags her jaws “Canis lupus arctos”; because what else could humans do but wipe them out, if they knew?

Velia and Mark were at the end of the Alaska winter when the thaw came.

They got called away from wrap-up in Alaska to work a dig in Iceland. Spring had come early, and they were summoned to take advantage of the softer ground and dig down another layer.

(“What are you really looking for?” he asked, like he already knew why she agreed to come.

She didn’t ask why he had come with her. She knew what pursuit looked like.

“I can’t explain,” she said, as if it answered him.)

For two weeks she scooped mud out of her taped-off square and carved bone after bone in bas relief, and all the while she knew she wasn’t alone. The mossy tundra had eyes for her, and whenever she was near Mark, under his wolfish eyes, she felt a beast in the forest hating her.

(A wolf knows a wolf.)

They were done for the night, back at the rickety two-bedroom house near the dig site, when the wolf came.

There was the single howl as it called her to battle (they both stood up so fast the work table skidded), and then nothing but the wind; the dire wolf is silent when it hunts.

“Stay behind me,” Mark said.

Then came the thunder of the charging beast.

It was too fast for her to get away, too fast to hide Mark, too fast to explain.

There was only time to throw open the door and leap (Mark shouting at her to stop), force the change between one breath and the next, so that she furled inside-out and the air crackled with the sound of snapping tendons and the grind of bone.

(She won. She doesn’t remember how. All the way home she coughed up bits of the other wolf; spat up bone and teeth and fur.)

The fight carried her a quarter-mile from the cabin, and she padded back as the wolf.

There was a chance he hadn’t seen her. There was a chance he didn’t know.

(No chance.)

When she saw him standing in the doorway, the blanket in his hands, she made a high, keening noise that started as a howl, and became—between one breath and another—a human cry.

(Grief.)

Her bones seemed painfully soft and frail in her human form; she could hardly feel her blood pumping through such long, twisted veins. She set her weakling jaw against the shaking, but her skeleton rattled inside the meat.

It was worse than the new moon, ten times worse. It was the tree roots erupting through the pavement, shattering the stone.

Mark got both arms under her and carried her inside, out of the ice and the dark. He smelled like snow and detergent and fear, and she didn’t know why a smell like that would be comforting to a wolf.

(She didn’t know much about love, back then.)

He carried her up the stairs and ran a hot shower until the blood and dirt were gone, and his hands were shaking.

(Fear, she thought then. She knows now—desire.)

When she came downstairs again, he was standing outside. There was a wolf’s footprint in the snow outside the cabin. It was the same length as Mark’s foot, and as wide; her claws had pierced right through the snow and dug up four thin sprays of black dirt across the white as she ran.

He passed his foot over it, smoothing the snow free of the evidence. She waited, wondering what she would do if he threatened to expose her.

(It was a lie. She knew what she would do. On four legs, she could hunt without thinking.)

After a long time, he took a step backwards, closer to her, without turning.

“Does it frighten you?” he asked.

She said, “Always.”

When he came at her, the kiss drove her against the door with a thud, and he tore away the blanket as if he wanted some part, any part, of her fight.

She dragged her nails over his back, five thin trails of red against his skin.

The dire wolf that lives in human form spends the day of the new moon curled in a corner, trembling, aching, grinding her teeth as the bones scream for change. The moment of transformation is unbearable (there is always the wrenching cry), but it passes, and the bones and the fur and the teeth of the wolf are her relief.

A dire wolf can turn at will, but it’s the last line of defense; between pain and death, some choose death.

Changing at every new moon from human to wolf and back can drive you mad. Most dire wolves eventually give in to their true form, and make their homes in forests, or tundra if arctic wolves are nearby, or desert caves. They can go anywhere once the moon has lost its power over them. What animal would stand up to a beast twice as large as a wolf, twice as fast, twice as cunning?

Legend, which looks for monsters within its own neighbors, claim that werewolves are people who achieve the body of the wolf.

This is untrue.

The dire wolf took on a human form; down at the bone, between every breath, each of them is really the animal. The human shape is a useful trick, that’s all.

(Adapt or die.)

Christopher’s waiting at the lab when she comes back.

“Mark says it looks like an Arctic wolf that got on the wrong side of a bear attack,” he says. “What are you thinking it is?”

“I think that wolf had a pretty sad end,” she said. “Did you find anything else of the skeleton?”

Christopher shakes his head. “We don’t have the manpower we used to, but as far as we looked, there was nothing to find. Maybe the head got carried over to where our guy found it.”

“Was there any skull? Any other bones?” She thinks about the deep, low temporal fossa—a jaw is easy to disguise, but the skull would be hard to explain.

He shakes his head.

“Where’s Mark?”

“Went out looking for you,” Christopher says. “I’ll call him back in on the radio.”

When she’s alone, she looks at the jaw under the magnifying glass, marks on her report the hundred tiny dents where the birds pecked the flesh away, the smooth expanses where the insects got there at last, carrying away whatever was hanging on.

The bone is cool, and smooth as human skin.

Mark opens the door too fast, gets too close.

“I saw the tracks,” he says, quietly, so Christopher won’t hear. “It’s big.”

He means, it’s bigger than you. His breath is warm on her scalp.

“I’ll win,” she says.

After a little silence, he says, “I’d forgotten what it feels like to be close to you.”

She doesn’t know what he means; doesn’t dare ask.

The dire wolf was too slow to evolve, everyone knew.

“Poor guys,” Alice said (she pitied all the bones). She waggled the saber-toothed tiger skull she was working on, like it was nodding. “The saber-tooth says nature cuts us all down sooner or later. He should know. Poor kitty.”

Alice always got punchy near the end of an excavation.

“Nature might surprise you,” Velia said, ran her tongue over her teeth.

“Promise me you won’t fight,” he says.

They’re in his room. He’s pacing; she’s watching the moonlight play over his face. When he passes back and forth, his shoulder brushes her shoulder.

“It doesn’t want to fight,” she says.

He stops and looks at her. “What can I do? How can I help you?”

She doesn’t know how to explain how he’s only ever been a danger. She doesn’t know how to tell him how different he is from most of his kind, in loving her.

(Most wolves find a mate in each other, because humans are frail; because when faced with a monster, a normal human senses danger and retreats.)

She says, “Live where there are no wolves.”

He frowns like she’s cut him. She knows that pain.

She wants to leave here with him and go somewhere where there are no wolves, carve some narrow sliver of love from each of them, see what it can build.

Doesn’t dare.

They don’t embrace; his hands are shaking, her hands are fists. He kisses her temple, presses his lips to the temporal fossa; she holds her breath, closes her eyes.

At night, the wolf’s tracks are easier to follow. There’s a better quality of shadow when the moon is out, and in her waxy coat and bare feet, Velia is an extension of the snow; only her dark eyes and black hair give her away.

(They used to be the color of dust, and her face was broad and sharp-mouthed. There’s too much human in her face, now.)

The den is in a shallow cave, close to the surface. It’s shallow enough that by the time Velia smells decay, she is looking past the narrow entry through the darkness to the wolf and the human body of its dead mate.

Of course there were no wolf bones to find; the human shape is the dire wolf’s last defense.

But Velia’s eyes have always been sharp, and she can see from where she’s standing that there’s an empty shadow beneath the torn throat, the wrinkled skin. (She was old, old enough for even the true wolf to die.)

The break in the jaw was a clean one. It must have snapped as he dragged his mate’s body to the shadow of the den, before the change, where he could make sure no stranger would find her.

He watches her with gleaming eyes, and she braces herself against his sorrow.

She says, “We found the bone. You’re safe. You can find another place.”

The head droops, and a huff of breath mists over the black for a moment.

Then the wolf lies down beside its mate and stretches its neck along the ground, waiting for the strike.

Velia hadn’t known enough true wolves to know what can happen when a wolf is parted from its mate. She had hoped her parents were the exception, and not the rule. But the dire wolf does what she dreaded; it mates for life.

No, she thinks, I can’t, I can’t, but the wolf is willing. (The human form is just a trick; at the roots, the wolf is always waiting.)

When the change comes over her, the other wolf whimpers a welcome. She chokes through the pain before the wolf form takes, bites down on her cries.

Old habit. The wolf is silent when it hunts.

According to the fossil record, dire wolves hunted in packs to the exclusion of good sense, leaping into the tar pits by the dozens until every last one of them was drowned.

“Live together, die together, I guess,” sighed Alice, cleaning dirt off her chisel. “I mean, what could possibly drive an animal into the tar pits, once you saw what happened to the others? They couldn’t
all
be stupid.”

Velia blew a layer of dust off the skull at her feet and wondered about that first wolf, the first one who had retreated from the edge of the tar. She wondered how it got desperate enough to turn to humans just to find some pack to live among.

That was the dire wolf that had fathered them all. The true wolf had always been separate; had been always alone.

When Velia can stand on her two feet, she washes the blood off in the river, then pulls on her waxy coat and walks back the way she came.

She scuffs gently over her footsteps on her way, so that no one might find the tracks and disturb the dead.

She leaves that night. She doesn’t ask where Mark was going. Doesn’t dare.

(When the dire wolf bites down, it holds on. That’s what it’s made to do.)

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT

LAWRENCE SCHIMEL

Some have said I’m crazy. Well, lots have said that about me, actually.

I run an all-night bookstore. An all-night feminist bookstore.

Take back the night, we’d demanded in all those demonstrations and marches. This is my way of doing just that, claiming the night as my own. I’m making a safe place for women to go to at night, a reason besides the bars for going out—and someplace to stop on the way home from them.

Not that I don’t allow men in the store. Their money’s just as good as anyone else’s, so long as they’re respectful, and I certainly need that money to stay open.

And, sure, I get a lot of riffraff coming through, but I’m not the kind of woman to let that stop me. And anyway, the cops know to keep an eye on the place. The new guy especially, Albert, likes to come in every now and then, and I let him take a used mystery novel for free. His taste is for police procedurals, and I never can figure out, if he’s dealing with the stuff all day long, why he wants to read about it on his time off, but maybe he’s looking for tips and pointers. I just hope he realizes reading is no excuse for experience, especially in his line of work.

One night in mid-summer it was hot as hell and I had the doors open. Around 2:30
am
—late at night or early in the morning depending on your perspective. I was standing on the porch having a cigarette, since I don’t allow smoking inside the store. Too much of a fire hazard, what with all those old dry books.

The moon was full and fat and sort of orange as it perched above the sports bar across the street, looking as if it were a basketball teetering on the rim of the hoop. I felt a powerful urge within me to jump up and slam dunk the moon right over into tomorrow, and right as I’m thinking about that metaphor a large dog climbed up the steps and walked into the store, just as casual as can be.

I looked around the street for the owner, but no one was in sight. I stubbed out my cig, and followed the dog inside. She was sitting in front of the cash register, as if waiting for me. I walked around the counter, wondering what to do. Call the cops? Or was it the fire department who handles pets, or only the ones stuck in trees and stuff?

The pooch turned to face me, just siting there, waiting. She wanted something from me, I was certain, but I had no idea what. A doggie treat? She seemed to expect me to recognize her.

I didn’t know whose dog she was, and had never seen her around town. She wasn’t wearing a collar. But something made me trust the beast.

“Come here, girl,” I said, bending down. She eagerly came towards me, and licked my face and sniffed my crotch as I ruffled the scruff of her neck and stroked her back. “Didn’t you read the sign on the door?
No Dogs Allowed.
”

I didn’t really mind. I like dogs, a lot in fact. I just don’t want them in my store. I was losing some customers by not allowing dogs—people out walking their dogs used to stop in and browse when I welcomed pets. But one night a man came in with a doberman and the damned creature lifted his leg on two shelves full of hardcovers. Couple hundred dollars worth of damage, and I didn’t even find out until after they’d left the store. Not even an apology. After that, the sign went up on the door. I figure I’m saving money in the long run, and who knows, maybe before I was losing customers who were afraid of dogs, who now felt welcome.

She barked twice, as if to get my attention, and then began to howl. I clapped my hands over my ears and stood up.

“Quiet there, you’ll wake the dead with that racket!” I stared down at the beast. “I should change the sign to read:
No Dogs Aloud
, but you couldn’t read it anyway.”

She shook her head, as if to disagree.

“If you could read it, then why’d you come in?”

She disappeared into the back of the store. Had she come here to get a book to read? I wondered if I should follow her, wondering what damage she might be doing to the stock back there, but just as I was about to set off after her she reappeared. She had a book in her jaws, which she placed at my feet. I picked it up and wiped the slobber off on my jeans.
Women who run with the wolves.

I looked down at her, and her lips pulled back, revealing her large sharp teeth. She was grinning.

I felt like I was in an
X-Files
episode or some horror movie. She’d run with the wolves, and now was one. I wondered if she were one of my customers. Instinctively I wanted to reach out and pat the top of her head, comfort her by saying “It’s all right,” but I didn’t think it was appropriate.

Instead, I put the book down on the counter and looked out the still-open door at the dark night. “Kansas,” I said, “I’ve a feeling this isn’t Toto anymore.”

The wolf and I sat on the front steps as I smoked another cig and tried to think of what to do. Or at least, what to do next.

At first I kept trying to think of ways to cure her, since I’d fallen into the kinds of thinking that assumed that was why she had come to me. But as I looked at her, sitting next to me, I got to wondering more. Was there anything wrong with her being a werewolf? Maybe she’d come to me because I knew her, or because she knew I’d understand. I had no idea how it had happened, whether she’d wanted it or not. She didn’t seem in any distress or anything, so why fix something that wasn’t broken.

Although with canines, one did have them fixed as a preventative measure . . .

I watched the smoke drift upwards. There was just a tiny sliver of moon peeking over the edge of the building, like the slivers of moon on my fingernails. I looked over at Wolf. Would she turn back into a woman as soon as that sliver disappeared? But no—just because we no longer saw the moon didn’t mean it had set. Not yet.

I wondered about clothes. Would she have any when she changed?

I couldn’t help wondering how long it had been since I’d seen a live naked woman. Not that I don’t practice what I preach. It had just been a long time is all. I tried to remember exactly how long and gave up before I became depressed.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if it was me instead of her who’d wound up as a werewolf. And as I tried to figure out how I’d feel, I realized how much I’d changed.

I’d grown older.

I’d become such a goody two shoes. I no longer went to rallies, ACT UP meetings, no longer did any civil disobedience of any sort. I didn’t have the time, struggling to keep the bookstore open and alive.

I’d turned into a solid, conservative businesswoman—a model citizen. I was a member of the chamber of commerce. I paid my taxes like a good little girl and didn’t even complain all that much about how they were being spent. About the most radical thing I did anymore (besides run an all-night feminist bookstore) was sign petitions.

I felt sick.

I was disgusted with myself.

I’d betrayed all my earlier dreams.

Suddenly, I shoved my hand in her mouth. “Bite me,” I said. What was I thinking? Was I even thinking? As the words flew from my mouth I realized I should’ve had her bite me someplace else, that I’d be crippled with only one hand to use. Still, sometimes sacrifices must be made for the greater good and I didn’t pull my hand back.

She waited for me to reconsider, then bit down.

I flinched, but it was only a pinch, and then a prick, like having your blood type tested at the doctor’s office, the kind of prick you had to give yourself in biology lab.

And then the world dropped away in a flash of pain as her teeth broke skin.

I howled.

I have no idea what my body did. I think I thrashed about and convulsed. But my mind was numb to anything but pain. That pain was liberating, setting me free from my body. I looked down at myself, sitting on the porch of my bookstore with a wolf biting my hand, and I thought: Well, why don’t I do something?

That was when I snapped back into my body. She released my hand and I stared down at the neat puncture points her teeth had made. I was calm and detached about the blood that leaked from them; my mind kept repeating one phrase: Why don’t I do something? I’d been feeling this way for a while, I only now realized. Maybe this is why the werewolf was here, to wake me up from this stupor, reclaim me as a lesbian avenger. Not a loup garou but a lesbian garou. My mind began to race through imagined scenes, the power we would have.

I was already beginning to act like a werewolf: the bleeding was slowing as my new super-fast metabolism began to kick in. I figured I could get to liking this. I’d even get a humane fur coat out of it.

Of course, I had still to see how painful the Change would be.

“Watch the store,” I told her, then went upstairs to get gauze and neosporin.

When I got downstairs again, the wolf was gone.

In its place was a naked woman. “How do you feel?” she asked.

I looked her over: mid-thirties, dark brown hair that hung to her shoulders, slightly overweight but seemingly unselfconscious about her body. Here she was, buck naked in a used bookstore, and she was able to hold a conversation. I liked that.

My hand throbbed. It felt swollen big as my thigh. “I’ll live,” was all I said.

And a part of my mind whispered that I would, that I would heal from any ordinary wound, heal from anything but silver.

She smiled and before I could help myself—I generally had more presence of mind, but perhaps I was too flustered at seeing a naked woman again, after so long, or maybe I was just rusty from lack of practice flirting—I blurted out, “Why me?”

She closed the coffee table book she’d been leafing through and put it down on the counter. “It was the wolf. Instinct. My feet just knew where to take me. I guess they knew you’d be able to handle this.” She looked away from me, as if suddenly shy, and then added, “The wolf is not a solitary creature.”

What was she asking of me? Or had I already decided, when I’d asked her to bite me? Was I now part of her pack?

She looked to me like I was the alpha female. So I took charge.

“Human’s aren’t either,” I said, and reached for her.

I didn’t bother to open the store the next day. For one thing, it had been so long since I’d had someone in bed with me, I didn’t want to get out of it. And I’d just have to close up at sundown, anyway, which would confuse people. What if I couldn’t get rid of all my customers in time, I wondered, if I turned into a snarling bitch right in front of them. Every store needs a gimmick these days, but that just didn’t seem right for mine.

The Change began like a severe case of cramps, only it was all over my body at once, not localized to my belly. I wondered briefly if taking Midol or aspirin before the Change would help dull the sensations. I resolved to try it next time, just as my body convulsed and I lost all conscious thought to the pain.

When I uncurled my body from the floor and stretched my limbs, I knew something was different but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was. Perhaps it was because I no longer had fingers per se. I yawned, my jaws gaping wide, and I knew suddenly how sharp my teeth had become. I’d felt them, the night before, when Laura bit down on my hand.

And Laura. She, too, would have changed. I could feel her near me, the heat of her body picked up somehow through my new wolf’s senses.

I didn’t bother to look for her, but nosed open the apartment door we’d left ajar and ran down the steps. I was oddly comfortable in this new body, as if I’d lived in it once before. Perhaps being a werewolf was like riding a bicycle, a skill you didn’t forget. I jumped up and pushed open the outer door, which we’d blocked open with a rock, and ran out into the night.

This was nothing like riding a bicycle. This was like riding the wind.

I ran through the city’s streets, hearing the click of my nails on pavement, and the echo of Laura’s behind me, as we raced.

I remembered how one night a friend and I had gotten dressed in male drag and gone out. We were packing dildos in our jeans, and it gave us a glorious feeling of power. It made us feel cocky, in all sense of the word. We didn’t know where else to go, so we went to a gay bar, and we watched the men cruising each other, and were ourselves sometimes cruised, sometimes cruising, wondering what we’d do if one of these big men took us up on our offers, how they would react when they got us home and found out our dicks weren’t real. Would they want us to fuck them anyway? We never found out.

I remembered that heady sensation of power I’d felt that night, but compared to this packing was just playing a wolf in cheap clothing.

This was power. I could feel the energy coiled in my limbs as my silvery pelt stretched and moved across my wolf muscles and sinew.

This was taking back the night.

I felt the familiar anger begin to burn in my belly, a hungering for justice and retribution. I wanted a fight, to test my newfound strength, to redress the balance. The night wasn’t a safe place, only now it wasn’t as safe for the people who made it unsafe.

I could be shot, I realized. I could be knifed.

Only silver can harm a werewolf, a voice inside my head reminded me. Although I didn’t doubt that an ordinary bullet or knife would hurt like hell.