“What’s going on?” I said.
“Okay, so I’m a werewolf. And I met this girl—she’s a were-tiger. How cool is that?”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“We decided to move in with this other couple—they’re were-leopards.”
“What was that line about dogs and cats, living together? Sounds a little wild, literally. You all get along?”
“Yeah, we seem to. We all go out on full-moon nights together. And I bring along my friends—a couple of werewolves. We’re not a pack or anything, it just works out.”
“Well, that’s just great,” I said, wondering what the real story was, because I didn’t get happy stories like this too often. “So what’s your question?”
“Is there a name for something like this? You know—werewolves have packs. Were-lions have prides. But what are we? My girlfriend wants to call us a collective, but that doesn’t sound cool enough.”
“Collective or a zoo?” I said.
“Come on, there’s got to be some kind of technical term.”
“How about ‘roommates.’ Why make it any more complicated? Let’s take another call.”
I clicked the line on as I greeted the next caller. Instead of the usual enthusiastic answer, I got a deep sigh, and I braced for the heavy-duty confession that would inevitably follow. People only sighed like that when they had real problems and no one else to talk to. It was difficult, but it was also the reason I’d started the show in the first place—so people like this would have someone to talk to.
“Hi, Kitty,” he said. “I’m not even sure why I called. I just . . . I just have to tell someone what happened.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Just take your time.” I tried to sound comforting and authoritative. It was all an act, but it seemed to fool people—they kept asking me for advice. One of these days, everyone was going to see right through it.
“I want to talk about my brother,” he said, speaking quickly, as though he wanted to get it out before he changed his mind. “He was a park ranger and was attacked by a werewolf while working in the back country. He killed himself a few months later. He couldn’t live with it, he couldn’t stand it, so he found a silver bullet and shot himself.”
I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead against a sudden headache. I hated this. I wanted to reach out and hug him, but I also wanted to scream. At least radio—the microphone—gave me a shield. A mask to hide behind.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “That’s very difficult.” I sounded so trite.
“I keep wondering—could he have gotten help? Is there anything I could have done to help him? Did he have an alternative?”
I tried to sound professional, as if I had the ability—or even the right—to serve as someone’s therapist. “I’m guessing that since he was attacked in the wild, he was never brought into a pack. He didn’t have anyone to tell him what had happened to him or help him adjust. In my experience, it’s difficult for someone like that to recover and achieve any kind of stability. Sometimes they do, or sometimes they run away. I don’t know if anyone could have helped your brother. There isn’t a standard procedure for this. He must have felt very alone.” That was what happened—you felt alone, lost, paranoid, helpless. The rage and violence followed.
My caller said, “I’m the only person he ever told about what had happened. And I’m glad he told me, because at least I know why. At least it makes a little bit of sense. I try to tell myself it’s better this way. He was so afraid of hurting someone. Isn’t this better than him hurting someone?”
It must have seemed like the responsible thing to do. He must have thought he was saving more than he was losing. I imagined all that despair. It made me think of Tyler and Walters, lurking in their hospital room.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I like to think there’s always a choice. I can’t put myself in your brother’s shoes. But you’re right, he probably didn’t see any other way out.”
“I wish . . . I just want anyone who’s listening to your show, anyone who’s thinking they don’t have another way out, who thinks that’s a solution—try to get help. Try to find someone, anyone, to help. Don’t give up. Because me—my family—we’ll never be the same. I don’t know that he thought about that.” I didn’t know how he could say all this without sobbing.
“Thank you very much for calling. And again, I’m so sorry. Good luck to you and your family.”
He clicked off without saying good-bye. I wasn’t surprised. I hoped he’d gotten some comfort out of sharing the story and his grief.
“All right, let’s take a break for station ID, and I’ll take more calls when we get back to The Midnight Hour.” I looked at Matt through the booth window. He nodded—he’d already cued up the announcements. He must have known what was going through my mind. I pulled off my headphones and scratched my scalp. I still had half the show to get through, and I had to get back to being positive.
Somehow, I managed.
Chapter 14
TWO DAYS before the next full moon, I met with Dr. Shumacher to discuss her patients. She sat behind her desk, looking harried, her hair slipping from its bun, gray shadows under her eyes. She kept glancing at the pages on her clipboard as if they would start speaking, telling her what to do.
“Tuesday’s full-moon night,” I said. I sat across from her, staring her down, playing a dominance game and putting her on edge. “I’d like to give them the chance to get out, with my pack.”
She blinked at me. “Do you really think they’re ready for that?”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure. The safest thing would be to keep them locked up, but that wasn’t the goal, ultimately. “If they’re going to move on, either to go back to civilian life or to active duty, they’ll have to do this eventually. My pack can keep an eye on them. We ought to be able to keep them safe.” As well as surrounding civilization . . .
“I suppose they deserve to have that opportunity.” She was reluctant. I wondered what she wasn’t telling me.
“I’d like to ask them. See if they feel up to it.”
“Yes, of course,” she said. I got the feeling Shumacher wasn’t used to giving her lab rats a choice. “But Kitty—do you really think they’ll ever be able to lead normal lives? Don’t you think they’d be safer—better off—staying under supervision?”
“What? For the rest of their lives?” I almost laughed. But Shumacher just looked at me, matter-of-factly, as though the suggestion wasn’t outlandish.
Then I realized that maybe she wanted to keep them locked up for the rest of their lives. Not for their own good, but for hers.
“Do you even see them as people? As patients? Or just as an experiment?” I said.
“That’s not fair—I’m trying to do good work here.”
“You can’t keep them locked up forever. They’re not guilty of murder.”
She spoke with passion—desperation, almost. “We’ve never had a chance to study the long-term effects of lycanthropy like this. I’ve never had subjects I could study this closely. It’s too good an opportunity—”
“At the cost of their sanity?” I said calmly. “They’re people, Doctor.”
She looked away.
She’d seemed so different than her predecessor at the NIH, but maybe there wasn’t any difference at all. The only results she wanted were raw data.
“Doctor, you have Vanderman. I’m not going to argue with you about letting him loose. But you have to let the others go. Please.”
She leaned forward, resting on her elbows. “I’ve been to see Vanderman. He hasn’t spoken in days. He paces, sleeps. If we try to confront him, he shape-shifts. He throws himself against the walls of his cell. I don’t know how to bring him back. My only option is to keep him sedated. That’s not a good baseline, even for a werewolf.”
Tyler and Walters I could help. Vanderman . . . I didn’t even want to see him. “I’ve heard stories of werewolves going so far that they don’t come back. I wondered s
ometimes if it was just stories. The way shifting feels, the way it gnaws at you—it’s easy to believe it could take over.”
“Nobody knows how to deal with him,” she said, shaking her head.
“This is where the bounty hunters usually come in,” I said.
“That’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
She sighed, seeming resigned. “I don’t suppose it’s that much worse than any other violent, mentally ill patient who has to remain confined.”
I said, “Most violent mental illnesses aren’t contagious.” By her frown I could tell that I wasn’t helping. “Can I go ahead and talk to Tyler and Walters? We can help them, I’m sure of it.”
She took me down the corridor to their room, opening doors with her pass key. I straightened, readjusting my mood to leave the grimness of the conversation outside. I didn’t want them to see me frustrated or upset.
The men actually seemed to perk up when they saw me. Walters was sitting on his bed and looked up, interested. Tyler had been at the table, reading a dogeared paperback. He set the book aside and stood, almost at attention, when I came through the door.
“Kitty. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, smiling. “And you?”
He shrugged, Walters glowered, and I had to smile. Those were perfectly reasonable, human reactions to being locked up in a cell. Another step toward normality achieved. Shumacher left us, but I knew she was watching on her closed-circuit camera. My skin prickled at the scrutiny.
The normal thing to do would have been to pull up a chair to talk. But I remained standing to keep myself taller. And I wanted to let these guys out on the full moon?
“So,” I said. “Did you guys get a chance to listen to the show Friday?”
Tyler donned a crooked grin. “Shumacher let us have a radio. You do that every week?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of fun.”
He shook his head and seemed amused. “It’s kind of crazy.”
“I didn’t know there were so many of us out there,” Walters said, from the bed. “So many people called in saying they’re werewolves. Are there really that many?”
“They call in from all over,” I said. “I don’t really know how many of us there are. But they’re out there. Most of them lead pretty quiet, normal lives. They keep themselves secret and no one knows they’re there.” And you can do the same, was the conclusion I left unspoken. Walters nodded thoughtfully, which heartened me. Maybe he really had been inspired. “Full moon’s in a couple of days. You two feel up to maybe spending it outside?”
They looked at me, eyes wide, like kids who just found out they might get to go to Disneyland.
“Really?” Tyler said, hesitating, obviously not believing it.
“It’s a step,” I said. “You want to get out of here, you want to go home, you’re going to have to deal with the full moon. You can come spend it with my pack. See how real werewolves handle it.”
“I’d go for that,” Tyler said, glancing briefly at the camera in the upper corner of the room, where Shumacher was watching, before looking back at me. I wouldn’t blame him for thinking this was some kind of psychological experiment. Subject them to stress and disappointment, and so on.
“It’s not a done deal yet,” I said. “You need to be honest about whether you think you can handle it. Because if you screw this up, you may not get another chance. And if you hurt any of my people, I’ll finish you off myself.”
“You could try,” Walters grumbled.
I looked at him. “Yeah. And what would you say if I told you I’ve done it before?”
“What, stopped a werewolf?” he snickered.
“Killed,” I said. “Killed a werewolf.”
He frowned and looked away, suddenly uncertain.
Tyler smiled wryly. “I believe you. I don’t want to fuck with you.”
“Good man,” I said. “Walters?”
“I want to get out of here,” he said softly.
“Then we have to toe the line,” Tyler said to him, leaning in, a private conference. “Follow the rules and we get out. Got it?”
Walters nodded, closing his eyes, gritting his teeth, as if it was an effort.
“I still need to talk it over with Dr. Shumacher and my people. But if you’re up for it, we’ll come get you on Tuesday.”
“Kitty. Thanks,” Tyler said.
“I WAS under the impression that werewolf packs were not meant to be run by committee,” Ben said as we pulled into the parking lot behind New Moon Monday evening, just before closing time.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t want to be like all those other werewolves, you know?”
“Says the werewolf named Kitty.”
“It’s too late to change my name now,” I grumbled.
A half an hour later, we stood before our pack of werewolves and explained the situation. Everyone had an opinion.
“I do not like the idea of baby-sitting those guys,” Becky said, glaring at me from her seat at the end of the table. “We can’t control them. They can’t control themselves.”
Twelve of the pack’s seventeen members were here. Word had gone out through Shaun. I’d told him over the phone what I wanted to talk about, he saw others of our pack as they came in and out of the bar, and the grapevine would have continued from there. They came to find out if what they’d heard was true: was I about to let a couple of new wolves join the pack? We clustered around a few tables in the back of the restaurant. Head of the pack, Ben and I sat at our own small table for two, presiding over the gathering.
Becky wasn’t wrong. She had every right to be worried, since she’d dealt with them up close. Our outing at the restaurant last week hadn’t immediately made everything all sunshine and show tunes.
“I know,” I said. “We need a plan. Several of us need to look after each of them. Help keep them in line, keep them grounded.”
“You’re asking us to keep tabs on a couple of Green Berets here? Are we even up for that?” Jared was in his late thirties, unassuming. Older and more experienced than I, but with no desire to be a leader, so he deferred. Like a lot of us, he just wanted to be left alone to live his life. And like it did for a lot of us, the pack helped keep his wolf side sane.
I couldn’t bullshit these guys. They’d only go along with me as long as I kept the pack stable.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “But they’re motivated. They want to go home. They need our help.”
“I understand that,” Shaun said. He was leaning on the bar, on the other side of the gathering. “But I don’t want us to turn into Kitty’s home for wayward werewolves.” A few of the others nodded in agreement. I couldn’t blame them. We’d been stable for over a year now—no invasions from the outside, no dissention from within—and most of the pack wanted us to stay that way.
“You want me to just turn my back on them?” I said.
“Your own people have to come first,” Shaun said.
“I want us to be a little altruistic here. These guys are war vets, they’ve been through a lot. They need to see what well-adjusted werewolves look like, and I think we can do that.”
I looked around at my bunch. My pack. It had taken a long time for me to think of them that way. When I’d first met most of them, I’d been a newly minted werewolf, freaked out and constantly on the edge of panic, rolling over to show my belly to keep out of trouble. Now look at me—giving orders. And they were actually listening. I liked to think it was because I made sense, usually. All three of the pack’s women, apart from me, were here—Becky, Kris, and Rachel. Rachel was older, quiet and submissive. She didn’t want any trouble, and Ben, Shaun, and I tried to keep trouble away from her. She was looking particularly jumpy, her shoulders bunched, her gaze darting. Becky, sitting nearby, put her hand on her shoulder to calm her. The men of the pack weren’t the most aggressive werewolves I’d ever met—the previous alpha had rather ruthlessly gotten rid of anyone who posed a threat to his authority—but they weren’t p
ushovers, either. If Ben and I vanished, Shaun, Becky, or Dan could serve as the pack’s alphas just as well. But they weren’t going to challenge us for the hell of it. We were a stable group, which was why I thought we could handle Tyler and Walters.
“What do you think about this, Ben?” Jared asked. I tried not to bristle, even though this felt as if he was going over my head. I glared at Jared, and he ducked his gaze.
Attitude counted for so much around here.
“I’ve met ‘em,” Ben said. “I’m with Kitty. They need a break and I think we can help. Call it our patriotic duty.”
A couple of the guys snorted—patriotism didn’t count for much when you sometimes felt like a stranger in your own country. Werewolves were their own country.
Kris—a thirty-something woman with thick brown hair, and a little bit of wolf always lingering in her brown eyes—sat back, her arms crossed. She was looking at the floor when she spoke. “My little brother’s in Iraq right now. If it were him, I’d want someone to help him.”
I’d known about her brother. She’d come to me about it, because knowing her brother was in danger and out of her ability to help him set her on edge, and she’d needed help—a friendly ear, a leader to help her keep herself together. But she must not have told everyone, because the others seemed surprised, then looked away, not knowing what to say.
We didn’t get any more arguments after that. So, the pack wasn’t comfortable helping other werewolves, but they’d help the soldiers. I’d take what I could get.
Chapter 15
TUESDAY MORNING, it started snowing. The weather had gone from clear and windy the night before to overcast and settled. Times like these, when the sky was gray and full of weight, you hardly noticed when the flakes started falling—just a few at first, then more, until the air was a wall of snow. If I’d been paying attention to the forecast there had probably been great pronouncements of a front moving in. But I’d been a little preoccupied. The weather matched my mood.