Chapter 22
Rocky took a bag from the trunk of her car and followed Jason to the house when they arrived. He opened the door to let her in and saw it.
"What's in there?"
"Underwear, clothes, toothbrush. The usual."
He blushed. She didn't.
"You moving in?"
"For a few days. It's time, Jason. You heard the crazy lady, you've seen the dreams. We have to stick together before the A-sgi-na comes back."
He nodded his head in agreement and then touched her shoulder.
"One thing," he said.
Rocky turned to him.
"What's that?"
He climbed one stair so they were at equal height and kissed her on the mouth. She relaxed and returned the favor. When they released each other, he said, "Just in case."
"In case of what?"
"In case this ends badly. I didn't want to regret never kissing you."
She smiled, blushing this time. "I'm so glad you did."
Both were silent for a long time after that. They walked straight to the couch in his living room and sat down. Rocky leaned back into his arms and they closed their eyes. In minutes they were lost in a deep, dreamless sleep.
The next couple days went by in a haze of ibuprofen and sleep. Their bodies changed and they adjusted to each other's presence. The situation was embarrassing. What had, to that point, been a very private metamorphosis for each of them became something shared. Then the embarrassment ceased and instinct overcame reason.
Rocky woke and rolled toward Jason. Her eyes were still green, but the human quality was gone. They glowed in the low light. She shook him gently and brought him back from sleep.
"You ok?" he said.
"I wanted to talk to you about me."
Jason roused and shifted to one elbow, giving her his full attention which he prefaced with, "You don't have to."
"I know. But I want to. You never know how things turn out until they turn out."
He blinked, feeling the burning of the last white hot strains in his joints. The next round would blacken his mind, turning him fully wolf. He rotated his neck, popping the vertebra so that Rocky could hear. She grimaced and grinned with understanding.
"I was ten, like I said. My mother had just died and my dad doubled his drinking. Before that, he was a happy guy. He visited on occasion, and they fought about whatever had caused their divorce. He still loved her, I guess. She wouldn't have anything to do with him. Then she died. I don't remember details. Just that I woke up to the police at my door. They came in and wrapped me in a blanket. A female cop sat with me while they contacted my dad. I went home with him that night."
"I'm so sorry,"
"It's ok. Anyway, I went home with him. He cried and told me about mom, that she had been found shot and laid on the side of the road a mile away from our house."
"Shot? Rocky."
He couldn't say anything else.
"He spoiled me until that first change. I thought it was my period. It happens sometimes to young girls. When I told him about the pains I was having, that I wanted to go to the doctor, he became angry."
"It did come from your mother, didn't it?"
"He said I was like her. I was going to be like her. He just kept saying it and I didn't know what he meant. Then he started to drink from sunup to sundown. He tied me to my bed. When I tore through the ropes, he chained me to my bed."
A single tear escaped Jason's eye.
"He called me inhuman, a beast. He threatened to kill me and send me 'back to hell with my beast mother'. He beat me."
"Jesus, Rocky."
"I learned to control myself quickly. Chained to a bed for the first nine months of my new life and trained like a dog. I gained that one advantage. I was able to control myself around him. Mainly from hatred, and a little fear. As I got used to the monthly occurrence, I was less fearful and more calculated. I watched him and waited for a break. Finally he did one thing he had never done. He didn't disappoint me."
"He let you go?"
"No, he drank himself stupid and passed out. He bounced his head off the footboard of my bed. It took me less than five minutes to tear my arms free, breaking the headboard and finding the key to undo the shackles."
"God, did you kill him? I would've."
"No."
Her eyes welled with tears and she looked away for a minute. Pain doubled her over for a moment and Jason reached to comfort her.
"I'm fine," Rocky said, breathing through the wave. "No, I waited there until he woke. I was fully changed by then. Staring at him and crouched, ready to pounce as he stumbled back into the wall. He begged for my mercy. He pleaded and cried with empty apology after empty apology, but he still called me a monster. He still hated me. I knew then that my mother was like me. They divorced because she wouldn't live with his taunts, or his abuse. I don't know how they hid it from me or if I might have repressed those memories, but I knew he was the one that shot her."
Jason hung on her every word. His eyes didn't blink, and he hardly took a breath waiting for her to finish the story.
"I jumped at him and scratched his face with both paws. Left him a good set of scars. Then I ran. I hid in the woods and waited. I stayed in churches, begging the ministers or priests not to take me back to him, and not to send me away."
Jason nodded.
"They put me in foster care. Then the hospital. Then foster care. I bounced around because I ran away before each change. Once I was thirteen, I started bussing tables at the restaurant, living in the owner's basement until I could get a place of my own."
"He didn't question?"
"I never ask anything of him. He never asks anything of me. My rules. I get to leave for one week each month and he pays my bills. Simple."
Jason's jaw hung open a minute as he took it all in. Then he realized there was more he needed to know.
"What happened to your dad?"
"He's a mental patient. Paranoid schizophrenia they call it. He has an uncontrollable fear of werewolves, dogs?anything with four legs. He takes shock therapy and buckets of medicine or else he has nightmares. They have labeled him a danger to himself and others."
"But he never changed?"
"No. That's how I knew it's wasn't contagious."
"It's hereditary. You got it from your mother."
"Yes. But I can't have children, unless James was right."
Jason crawled behind her and settled in, draping an arm around her. Rocky leaned into him and closed her eyes as if at peace.
"I don't understand how you remember the attack, how you remember anything. I never remember after the change. Not until I wake up and I'm me again," he said.
"I never fully changed until I was about seventeen. When my body decided that I was ready. Fully developed and all that. Up until then, it was mostly internal. I just seemed like a girl with a really bad attitude on occasion."
"I don't know what to say."
"I don't expect you to say anything. Just hold me."
He did and they drifted off soon after. Their bodies healing before the final stretch, the last unnatural heave that sent their human form on vacation and let the wolves out to play. Muscles rippled beneath furred skin as the pair slept, one last dream before they awoke to a different world with different needs and desires. The slow brewing agony of metamorphosis was gone and left was the freedom of instinct.
There were no more Rocky and Jason that cycle, only Gray and White.
Words were replaced with grunts and barks. Verbal conversation turned to play, pawing and mouthy exchanges that existed only in the pack. The bond was still there, but was somehow different. A partnership built from respect, compatibility, instinct and need. The attraction was something they could never explain with mere words. It was ancient and unshakeable.
They left the house and went to the woods together, running as a pair. They were free of their human bonds until the moon's cycle ended, if they made it that far. They explored
the hills and drank from the stream. The scents and the flow of the landscape had changed significantly over the years, but the area was still familiar. Some of the trees they had known as saplings when they were natural wolves had become monuments to nature's ability to endure. The grassy pastures had been mostly replaced by woodlands. And by luck, or by memory, they found a crack in a limestone outcropping that opened into a small cave. It had changed as well, crumbling in places, eroded in others, but the den was still serviceable. Their pack had moved on due to human population or hunters, perhaps due to lack of food source.
They settled in, lying side by side, and slept for half the day. That night was the last night before the full moon.
The next morning, as the sun rose, Rocky's White found Jason's Gray sitting outside the opening to the cave. He stared off in the distance and panted, sitting sentry for his mate. She nudged him when she reached him. He licked the side of her snout and she snorted, pawing at him. They bounced and swatted at each other like pups, happy to find friends they didn't know would still be there after a nap.
Gray straightened up after a moment as if something had caught his attention. Human memory had escaped the pair for the time being, but something urged them toward that place in the woods. He trotted off as he had in the dreams. As if he was going to spy on his family without the rest of the pack knowing. She followed, that time out of duty instead of curiosity.
They stopped at the stream for a drink, then followed it to the South. The stream wound around trees, and under logs to the familiar place they had last seen as a man and a woman. They found the clearing in the woods where the ring of mushrooms grew. Fingers of sunlight poked through the canopy and stroked the ground beneath.
The wolves stood their vigil for hours, knowing something needed them to be there. Something they needed to bear witness to, or perhaps participate in. It wasn't until nightfall that they realized what that something was.