the night.”
My heart beat imperceptibly faster, and I waited until I’d closed his office door to breathe again, for fear I would betray myself. Ten days? At the full moon. But that had to be a coincidence.
I spent most of the next week fixing computers, which meant anything from formatting and installing a fresh OS to opening up a case to show Caroline, “Someone spilled hot chocolate with marshmallows in this; there are little white blobs burnt into the circuit board. It’s dead.” I also helped her with some coding for a blog that she was trying to set up to keep local donors and “friends of the shelter” up to date. Then one morning I came into her office and she said, “That’s it, you’ve fixed all our computers. You’re now useless to me.”
For several days after I became useless, I shadowed Hector, and assisted with manual repairs. I hadn’t done that kind of work since I’d helped my father tear out our kitchen- and I had still been too young for him to trust me with anything more complicated than pulling out the old boards and mortar.
I saw my cousin once, at lunch, but when I tried to walk over to her, a man whose head and face was covered in gray whiskers stepped between us. I think his name was Bill. “No cutting in line,” he said, poking a crooked finger into my chest.
I tried to push past him. “I don’t care about the line,” was all I got out before he shoved me. I stumbled over a chair and smacked my face into a folding table. One man helped me up, and by then Bill was being held back by several others who were trying to calm him down. Amy was already gone.
It was the day of the full moon when Bill sat down beside me at breakfast. “Sorry,” he said quietly, “about the other day. I’m not always in my own head. Sometimes I just have to watch myself be crazy.” He slid his chair closer to mine, and his voice got quieter.
“I know you have to leave tonight- everyone knows.” As if on cue, I noticed several sets of watchful eyes flick over me, then away as they realized they’d been noticed. “Do yourself a favor- never come back. Bad things happen to those who stay.” I might have entertained it as a threat, but Bill looked up from his tray and his eyes were earnest and a pale blue, and I knew, at the least, he believed what he was telling me.
“What if I’ve no place else to go?”
“There’s other shelters,” he whispered, “but you know that.” With a speed that frightened me, he grabbed my hands and rubbed them with the pads of his fingers. “Your hands are still soft. Whatever work you done, you’ve done it long and well enough you ain’t worked as hard as you have the last week. You don’t belong here. I ain’t the only one to think so. There’s nothing but danger here for you. You oughta get while you can- is the last advice you’ll get out of me.” The old man abruptly released my hands, and picked up his tray and walked away.
I didn’t know what to make of it. But I didn’t get much of a chance to, either. That night I packed up the things I brought, namely an old fraying backpack filled with clothes, and left the shelter. I returned less than a half hour later, skulking through the shadows. I didn’t even make it through the front door before Hector, far stronger than he looked, seized me by the collar and led me in. “Hector? It’s me,” I stammered as he led me through the empty lobby. He didn’t speak, just kept pushing me, holding my collar at such a height and angle I couldn’t resist, down the hall, up the stairs. I wriggled to break free, but all I managed to do was dig my shirt deeper into my neck.
He pushed the door at the end of the upstairs hall open with my face, and with enough force that I thought he would throw me inside, but he didn’t let go. Howard was looking out of his window, down towards the warehouse. “Ah, there you are. I was beginning to think you’d lost your nerve. Hector, if you’d be so kind as to bring him to the window.”
Hector walked me like an awkward marionette, kicking my ankles whenever I didn’t move my feet fast enough. “Now, normally, we don’t leave the doors open like that, but it’s for your benefit.” The yard below was lit by an unseen moon, hidden behind clouds. Inside the warehouse I could see a man, one I thought I recognized- I think he was the one who helped me up in the cafeteria. He was lashed to a big wooden “X” in the middle of a circle of the homeless.
“I can’t expect you to understand, frankly; ours is an old culture, very foreign from yours. Lionel, who’s tied to the cross- and I’m not certain you’ve met-is an object lesson.” Bill, the old man covered in graying whiskers, looked up in our direction. Howard nodded, and Bill produced a long, thin knife. He held it beside Lionel’s neck, then shoved the blade into the center just behind the trachea and pulled forward, tearing out his throat in a torrent of blood.
Lionel’s face twisted, beyond the contortions of pain. The skin of his face stretched taut, then broke at the edges of the mouth, and his blood ran down his cheeks and chin, tributaries into the rivers pouring out of his neck. His nose pressed forward out of his skull, causing his face to take on a bestial silhouette; it was very much the image of a wolf trying to force itself through a drum of flesh, until suddenly the last vestige of life poured out of his cut throat, and the beast subsided, leaving his human appearance intact as his head fell forward.
“What do you know of wolves who look like men?” Howard asked, then looked at me, and realized I was too stunned to reply (though I suspect his question was largely rhetorical, anyway). “Then I suppose you’ve never heard of a Vargulf. Wolves need blood for the monthly ceremony of Lykaia; without it, they turn, and lose all reason, and sanity. Wolves kill for this blood. A Vargulf is a wolf who did not join in the Lykaia. They are driven mad by the moon. They do not simply kill without discriminating- they essentially kill for the joy of murder; you might use the term rabid as a touchstone, but it’s far more insidious than that.”
“I don’t know that I’d put much faith in Ovid’s interpretation of our genesis, but we are cursed. We change with the seasons and the moon. We take no joy in death or the destruction we wreak, But we try to minimize our impact. You may have noticed certain… eccentricities already amongst us. We prey upon those who are unfortunate; they are often not among man’s pristine specimens. But those who survive the ceremony become one of us- they become family. But when someone who is unstable is transformed into a beast, what else could you think the outcome would be but unstable beasts? We are cautious, and attempt to keep the urges of the pack in check- but there are always exceptions. Broken people who break things.”
“Lionel below was one such person. He was the source of the murders recently. Certain others were profiting off the deaths beside him- but they will be dealt with less harshly.” He stopped, and ran his tongue across his teeth; I realized they seemed sharper, and I was compelled to look up at the moon. It was hidden behind a thinning sheaf of fog, but every moment its features became more prominent as the condensation before it faded. Howard’s clean-shaven face was already peppered with long whiskers that I’d have sworn I could see growing.
“But I believe the real reason you were ever here to begin with was Amy. You smell like her- just a little.”
Amy came into the room. She made quick, intermittent movements, like a chicken. “Hey cous,” she said, and the way she emphasized it made the word sound like a swearword- but she’d always talked like that, and moved like that, too. Really, the only thing that had changed at all was she’d put on a little weight, so the quick movements seemed a little more forceful and intimidating.
Standing beside her was Danny, her husband. He was trying to be coldly impartial- though we’d met a few times before, and he seemed pleasant, apologetic, even, as if he had to explain the forceful turn in Amy. But now he was watching her, and Howard, subordinate to them.
Howard mused: “Perhaps we could let you go. Having seen a functioning social element here, perhaps we could rely on your discretion. But we’d never know. How many cycles would it be before you counted the waning moons and decided we’d taken too many victims, that your conscience could no longer handle the strain? Four? Seven???
?
“Ultimately, the question is one of survival. Lionel, by breaking our laws, was a threat to our pack- and now, so are you. You are an unfortunate case, too, because you’re an intruder; we can’t simply turn you and hope for interdependence. You still have friends, and resources beyond these walls. But beyond any other considerations, however, tonight is the Lykaia, and we need the blood sacrifice.”
My eyes widened. “But Lionel-”
“Lionel was one of us- and a Vargulf besides; his blood would merely infect others, and those untainted would become Vargulf for want of the proper ceremony.” He turned to Amy. “You should say your goodbyes.”
There was the hint of tears in her eyes, though her plump face was becoming more elfin, the fine blond hairs on her face thickening and darkening. “I’m sorry- but you made me choose between the family I want, and the family I didn’t.” She turned away from me, and said to her husband, “Make it quick.”
He was only barely recognizable as a man beneath the elongated bones in his face, and the thick hair sprouting over his skin, but his eyes failed to keep his stoic vigil.
“Sorry,” he said, and put his hand on my shoulder, and his teeth around my