Mongrels Read online

  “Oh,” she said. “The new—Daryl.”

  “Darren,” I corrected.

  Soon enough the exterminator came in from the back to tell me the story again. He didn’t smell like pesticide this time, but his goggles were still cocked up on his forehead. Maybe it was how he kept his hair out of his eyes.

  After making sure I was with that other lady who’d come by, the exterminator shrugged, looked through their plate glass at the road, and said the same thing: Darren had started drinking at lunch, at that taco place, and then he must have had a bottle or a flask in his pocket, because by three he could hardly stand.

  “He just walked out?” I said.

  “He said he knew the way.”

  It sounded like Darren, all right. Of the two things he wouldn’t take from anybody, one was directions. The other was advice.

  “Could he have got, like, sprayed with the spray?” I asked, doing my finger on the trigger of an imaginary spray-rig, one aimed up into my face.

  “Got to be licensed to handle that,” the exterminator said. “He was strictly a gofer.”

  No, I said in my head. He was a wolf.

  “Thanks,” I said, not sure what else I could even ask.

  The exterminator clapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand at the same time, pulling us close enough I should have been able to smell the pesticide on him.

  Maybe Libby just could, though.

  Maybe it was because I hadn’t shifted, didn’t have the right nose.

  Maybe it was because, in every way that mattered, I wasn’t wolf.

  I had my hand to the push bar on the door when I stopped, looked over to the woman at the desk. She was trying to get a pen to work. How she was even able to hold on to it with her nails, I had no idea.

  “Hey,” I said, back to the exterminator, who was halfway out of the room as well. “What was he drinking, do you remember? I can tell how long until he shows up again, you know?”

  The exterminator nodded, understood.

  “Coronas,” he said like he was sorry to have to be the one to tell me.

  Beer.

  And either more beer in his overalls, clinking with every step, or a flask.

  For a guy who lived on strawberry wine coolers. For a werewolf whose only and main religion was strawberry wine coolers.

  “Anything else?” the exterminator asked.

  The woman behind the desk was watching me too.

  The exterminator’s name was Rayford, sewed right there on his chest in cursive.

  The woman was Grace-Ellen, by her nameplate.

  I shook my head no, nothing.

  Because I didn’t trust my voice.

  That night when Grace-Ellen came in from wherever she’d gone after getting home from work—I’d ground hamburger and Libby’s blood into the tread of one of her tires—I was waiting in the living room. Just standing there in the dark.

  Werewolves don’t care about breaking and entering.

  Werewolves care about their uncles.

  We were trying her first because Rayford had his lies all ready. Grace-Ellen might have to make it up as she went. She might leave cracks we could see through. She might leave cracks we could see Darren through.

  When the light from the porch hit me she startled, dropped her keys into the deadspace behind her console television.

  “Guess you could say I’m still looking for my uncle,” I said.

  Grace-Ellen turned to run, to shriek out into the night, but there was a gigantic wolf-thing standing in the doorway behind her.

  Or, that’s probably what she would have called Libby.

  It would have been close enough.

  Libby growled deep in her chest, her lips snarled back, a single line of clear drool drawing a line to the floor. When we want to, when we’re really trying, we can look eviler than sin. We can kick-start thirty centuries of legends.

  Even when we’re not trying, I guess.

  Libby took her weight off her forepaws, was going to stand, I knew, really put the fear into Grace-Ellen, but I didn’t want pee on the ground.

  I stepped around, eased the door shut on Libby.

  “Now that we know what’s out there . . .” I said, and turned back just as Grace-Ellen slashed at me with her claw.

  No, I saw in slow motion: not her claw, not one of her curvy fingernails.

  This was—I almost had to laugh.

  It was a cockfighting spur. Because this was Florida. The spur was just two or three inches long, perfect for a purse, and it had a little loop for her finger, even, where the rooster’s leg would have gone.

  My blood sprayed up in front of me in a slow-motion fan of deep red before I could even get my hand to the slash she’d made down from my shoulder to the ribs on the other side. It didn’t feel like a cut so much as like she’d found the pull tab for a wire buried in my chest, and was pulling it out all at once, fast to keep it from hurting.

  But it did.

  Without having to think about it, I knew this was going to be a stitches-and-staples fix. You see enough bodies torn up, you get to know. Not because Grace-Ellen’s spur had cut deep, but because it had cut ragged. And it would likely heal that way, if it got the chance.

  I was getting my own stories.

  I think I might have smiled, the two of us caught there in that flashbulb of an instant.

  But then the silver hit me.

  It was like nothing I’d ever felt. I’d had spider venom in me before, sending out red tendrils each way from the bite, and that was the closest thing. Except, for this, the spider would have to be the size of a motorcycle, and have electricity in its jaws.

  I locked eyes with Grace-Ellen, could see that she knew, she knew about us, she knew what to do, and then there were splinters blooming in the air all around the two of us.

  Libby had heard my intake of breath, had smelled my blood.

  Grace-Ellen came around with her silver spur, but, like Darren says, it’s going to take more than that. It would take a thousand roosters with a thousand spurs, and even then they’d all have to get past Libby’s snapping teeth.

  After a flurry of motion between Libby and Grace-Ellen, it was me on the kitchen floor, Libby naked and so human, so my mom at last, holding her face close to mine and screaming at me to look at her, to look right fucking directly at her, that she wasn’t losing both of us, not tonight.

  It was the third time I’d ever heard her cuss.

  I closed my eyes.

  2.

  We never should have come back to Florida. But we had to.

  Libby was right: We were running out of places. Coming back to Florida—none of us would have said it, but it was like if we hit it just right, we could back up time, start all over again. Do it right. Do it better. Do it where we didn’t end up where we’d started again.

  I didn’t shift to save myself from dying, like werewolves are supposed to.

  Maybe I never would, I figured.

  Maybe some never do. Maybe I was doomed to just be a werewolf in my head. Or maybe I was trading in being a werewolf for getting Darren back.

  It was a deal I would have made, I think.

  Damn the future, right? It’s right now that matters. When you don’t have a future, it’s always right now that means everything.

  Especially when right now hurts like that spur did.

  After the silver hit my blood I was in and out, thrashing against arms I thought were Libby’s, arms I was pretending were my mom’s, until I opened my eyes.

  Grace-Ellen was standing over me, Libby right beside her gripping a kitchen knife in her hand, the blade to Grace-Ellen’s throat, hard.

  Libby never told me, but what I figure is that I never even hit the ground. Grace-Ellen catching me on the way down, holding me like you hold a child, it was the only reason Libby hadn’t ripped her throat out in that first second.

  But she was right there ready to, teeth or no.

  As it was turning out, though, Grace-Ellen, she knew how t
o kill us, but she knew how to bring us back too.

  The secret was boiling a broth with werewolf blood as the water, dog bones as the stock. Libby supplied both. Really, she’d supplied every dog from the street, it looked like, in case breed or volume of blood made the difference. The kitchen floor was slick with dead dogs, like she could stack them up, weigh them against my life.

  It worked.

  The broth wasn’t for me to drink. It was to pour directly into the cut, with Libby pulling the skin apart so that the cut could be an open mouth, one breathing out a steam that smelled like gravy.

  I thought she was screaming, or that some dog owner outside was screaming, or that the villagers had finally mobbed up, found us, but I’m pretty sure it was my own voice I was hearing.

  Grace-Ellen cooled my forehead with a damp washcloth.

  Libby paced back and forth by the front window. Because of whatever had happened to all the dogs, there was a police car trolling up and down the street, angling its dummy light into all the cracks and crevices of the night.

  We couldn’t stay here long, I knew, not with the front door just balanced in its frame. Not with Libby’s voice on the radio, her bloody paw prints on the sidewalk. Not with that look in her eyes, like her back was against the wall and she was about to have to come out slashing and snapping, take down as many as she could when she went out.

  When the dummy light glowed the front window hot white, Libby bared her teeth.

  Like the light knew, it kept moving. For now.

  “She’ll fight them all, don’t you worry,” Grace-Ellen said, refolding the washcloth so the coolness it had left could be on the outside.

  “She shouldn’t have to,” I said, closing my eyes. The tears came anyway. And my stupid chin was doing its stupid thing, bunching up like a stupid-ass prune. “I should be able to—to . . .”

  “Shh, shh,” Grace-Ellen said, and did me maybe the best kindness I’d ever had done for me in fifteen years: She pushed the washcloth down over my eyes, to hide my crying. “Do you think that silver would have hurt you if you weren’t like her?” she whispered.

  “But—”

  “Being a werewolf isn’t just teeth and claws,” she said, her lips brushing my ear she was so close, so quiet, “it’s inside. It’s how you look at the world. It’s how the world looks back at you.”

  My hand found her wrist to keep that washcloth there.

  By sunrise I could stand. Grace-Ellen squeezed superglue onto the end of a Popsicle stick and smeared it up and down my cut then held the ragged, boiled edges of the skin together, blew on the glue, her breath cold in comparison to the searing heat of the glue’s drying.

  It held me together. It held me together enough.

  Libby was wearing Grace-Ellen’s clothes—jeans that fit, a shirt that didn’t, flip-flops that left her heels still touching the carpet. She didn’t care about any of that. She was opening and closing her left hand by her leg. Her mouth was pinched tight.

  “Thank you,” she said, guiding me over from Grace-Ellen. No: taking me back from Grace-Ellen. “I’ll pay for your door.”

  “It’s just a door,” Grace-Ellen said.

  “And your car,” Libby said, her eyes darting away.

  “My car?” Grace-Ellen said.

  I didn’t need to look to know the state of Grace-Ellen’s tires. Libby had been out there alone with them for probably twenty seconds. Any longer and her little Honda probably wouldn’t have a windshield, or a hood, or a roof.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Grace-Ellen said, the challenge rising in her voice.

  “You just happen to know about us,” Libby said, rising to that challenge. “And he happens to be one of us. Working at the place you work.”

  Grace-Ellen breathed in, breathed out, and flicked her eyes away from Libby’s hand by her thigh—flicked her eyes in a way I could tell she knew what Libby spreading her fingers like that meant: It’s what you do when you’re about to shift. If your hand’s a fist, the claws will embed into your palm when they push out.

  No, not “embed.” Impact.

  I nodded, was ready for whatever this was going to be, wherever this next part of the day was going to take us, but then Grace-Ellen was wading in: “I know because of my husband,” she said, hijacking Libby’s tone. “You’re the first other ones I’ve met since . . . it’s been two years.”

  “Then I need to talk to your husband,” Libby said, closing her hand into a fist that was hardly less threatening.

  “Me too,” Grace-Ellen said, then settled back on me. “Y’all’ve really just been living out there on the road, not knowing any of the old ways?”

  “We’re from Arkansas,” I said.

  Grace-Ellen smiled a polite smile. “My husband, Trigo, he was from Texas.”

  “We don’t all know each other,” Libby said.

  I asked the obvious question: “Was?”

  “He’s smart for a wolf,” Grace-Ellen said to Libby, about me.

  “He’s smart in any room,” Libby said, her voice gearing down for a climb.

  Grace-Ellen grinned a thin grin, liked that.

  “He wouldn’t just leave us,” I said before I could stop myself.

  “Your uncle,” Grace-Ellen said.

  “My brother,” Libby said.

  “I’m sorry,” Grace-Ellen said.

  “And he’s not dead,” I added.

  Grace-Ellen didn’t look at me about this. Maybe because it was better to let me believe.

  “He’s not!” I said, baring my teeth, wolf in everything but body.

  Libby took me by the upper arm, held me in place.

  “Your boss was lying about the beer,” Libby said. “Why would he lie if he wasn’t hiding something?”

  “Rayford,” Grace-Ellen said. “He probably just forgot what everybody was drinking.”

  “And if it wasn’t just forgetting?” Libby said.

  Grace-Ellen did finally look up about this. Something passed between her and Libby. Grace-Ellen nodded, pushed up from the back of the couch she’d been leaning against.

  “Here,” she said, lobbing something across.

  Because I was closer, I snagged it out of the air, my chest screaming from the effort. It was the silver cockspur.

  “Truce,” Grace-Ellen said.

  Without asking for permission from the two werewolves in the room—the one werewolf—Grace-Ellen pulled the phone up to her ear. The plastic rattled against all her earrings.

  “Rayford,” she explained to us once it was ringing.

  Libby stepped in, her eyes hot, but Grace-Ellen held her hand up, like that could ever be enough.

  Rayford’s wife was Marcie.

  Twenty seconds of polite nothings later, Grace-Ellen hung up, held the phone on its cradle, looked over to us.

  “What?” Libby said.

  “Rayford’s not there,” Grace-Ellen said, speaking like from a trance. As if she was just waking up.

  “Where is he?” I said, because somebody had to.

  “Hunting,” Grace-Ellen said, defeat in her voice.

  “Where?” Libby said.

  “He’s back tonight,” Grace-Ellen said.

  “Not good enough,” Libby told her.

  “It’s Sunday,” Grace-Ellen said then, like the answer to a question we hadn’t thought to ask. “The office is closed on Sundays.”

  “We’ve already been to the office,” Libby said.

  “You’ve been to the waiting room. I can go—I can check their schedule against business expenses, receipts, see where they were that day, show you that they’re not involved. How long ago can you still track someone from a place?”

  “He’s my brother,” Libby said.

  “It’s not Rayford,” Grace-Ellen said then, standing from the phone, taking a key ring from a peg on the wall.

  “He is an exterminator,” Libby said. “How did you get that job? Think it was random?”

  “I being interrogated now?” Grace-Ellen s
aid, setting her feet and her eyes both.

  “You do work there.”

  “They gave me the front desk when they were trying to get Trigo to come work for them. Then when he disappeared—I already knew how to run the place.”

  “Trigo?” I said, when it was suddenly too quiet.

  “My husband,” Grace-Ellen said, for the second time.

  After a glare-off—more of a dare, really, for me or Libby to ask any more questions—Grace-Ellen hooked her head for us to follow her down the hall she was already walking down.

  “Where are we going?” Libby asked, being sure she was ahead of me. For all we knew there was a pistol-grip shotgun behind every door, on top of every shelf.

  “We can’t take my car, right?” Grace-Ellen said, hauling open the scratched-up door to the garage.

  “You’ve got two cars?” I said.

  “Trigo had the county Ford,” Grace-Ellen said, slapping the wall for the electric door to hitch and grind up. “But this was where he kept his heart.”

  It was a project car, under a splotchy canvas tarp.

  “Your brother,” she said to Libby. “He older or younger?”

  “The same,” Libby said, stepping in, casing the whole garage at once, to be sure it was safe for me. “We’re twins.”

  “And both wolf?” Grace-Ellen said, impressed. “You know that’s not how it works, right? There’s usually a feeder.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “How have you stayed alive this long?” Grace-Ellen said to me and Libby both, and in one grand gesture then, she swept the tarp off her dead husband’s project car, dust and dead moths fluttering behind, settling down onto faded black paint. Onto the chipped-white racing stripes. Into the unlikely bed, the uncracked rear window, onto the base of the whip-antenna that had been mounted on the roof one bad-idea afternoon.

  My heart hammered once in my throat, and my hand pulled into a fist, my head turning half away, like to avoid a blow coming in fast.

  “No,” I said.

  But yes.

  It was the El Camino. It was our El Camino. Because it was parked backward I could zero in on the cigarette burn on the dashboard above the radio. The whole drive out from Arkansas that first time, I’d stared at that burn, pretending that it had got hot enough one day to melt the glass from the rearview, drip it down onto the dash, sizzle that crater into the vinyl.