Mongrels Read online

  “Go inside,” Libby said, pushing me toward the house.

  She should have pushed harder.

  “This is the end of the liquor stores,” she said to Darren, her voice flat like the back edge of a sharp knife, one she could flip around to the blade in a flash.

  “Bears and wolves aren’t meant to get along . . .” Darren said. The cool way he looked to the left and touched a spot above his eyebrow when he said it, it sounded like a line he’d been saving, his whole long way home.

  Libby shoved him hard in the chest.

  Darren was ready, but still he had to give a bit.

  He tried to sidestep past her, for the house, for clothes, for a wine cooler, but Libby hauled him back, and because I was close enough, I heard one of them growling way down in their chest. A serious growl.

  It made me smaller in my own body.

  But I couldn’t look away.

  Darren’s skin was jumping on his chest now.

  It was Grandpa, rising up in his son. What I was seeing was Grandpa as a young man, itching to roam, to fight, to run down his dinner night after night because his knees were going to last forever. Because his teeth would always be strong. Because his skin would never be wax paper. Because fifty-five years old was a lifetime away. Because werewolves, they live forever.

  And then the smell came, the smell that’s probably what birth smells like. Like a body turned inside out. A body turning inside out.

  “Dad’s dead, Lib,” Darren said, and all his pain, his excuse for whatever had happened in town, it was right there in his voice, it was right there in the way his voice was starting to break over.

  “And he’s not,” Libby said, flinging a hand down to me. Darren flashed his eyes over to me, came back to Libby. “We can’t just do whatever we want anymore,” she said, her teeth hardly parting from each other. “Not until—”

  I balled my hand into a fist, ready to run, ready to hide. I knew where Grandpa’s creek was.

  “Until what?” Darren said.

  “Until,” Libby said, saying the rest with her eyes, in some language I couldn’t crack into yet.

  Darren stared at her, stared into her, his jaw muscles clenching and flaring now, his pupils either fading to a more yellowy color or catching the morning sun just perfect. Except the sky was still cloudy. Right when he flashed those dangerous new eyes up at Libby, she slapped him hard enough to twist his head around to the side.

  Her claws were out too, pushed out not from under her fingernails like I’d been thinking but from the knuckle just above that. I hadn’t even seen it happen.

  My eyes took snapshots of every single frame of that arc her hand traced.

  A piece of Darren’s lower lip strung off his mouth, clumped down onto his chest. The lower part of his nose sloughed a little lower, cut off from the top half.

  His eyes never moved.

  By his legs, his fingers stretched out as well, reaching for the wolf.

  “No!” Libby yelled, stepping forward, taking him by both shoulders, driving her knee up into his balls hard enough to stand him up on tiptoes.

  Darren fell over frontward, curled up there naked and skin-jumpy on the caliche, and Libby stood over him breathing hard, still growling, the canine muscles under her skin writhing in the most beautiful way, her claws glistening black, and what she told him, her tone taking no questions, was that his liquor-store days, they were goddamn over, that he was a truck driver now, did he understand?

  “For Jess,” she said at the end of it all—my mother, Jessica, named for her mom—and then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, another dab of claw-shiny black showing on her inner forearm for the briefest instant, for not really long enough to matter.

  Except it did. To me.

  It made the world creak all around us, into a new shape. This moment we were standing in, it was a balloon, inflating.

  Inside of ten minutes, we’d have the bed of the El Camino piled with cardboard boxes and trash bags, Grandpa’s house burning down to the cement slab, the three of us stuffed into the cab of the El Camino, to put as much distance between us and this dead cop as we could in a single night.

  Now, though.

  In this moment where everything went one way, not the other.

  Because of that dab of shiny black on my aunt’s inner forearm, I was listening to my grandpa again.

  This is one of the first stories he ever told me, right before Darren rolled back into town to keep Red off Libby. His left eye then, it was probably already pressuring up to burst back into his brain.

  The story was about dewclaws.

  And none of Grandpa’s stories were ever lies. I know that now. They were just true in a different way.

  He had been telling me secrets ever since I could sit still enough to listen.

  On dogs, he told me, dewclaws, they’re useless, just leftover. From when they were wolves, Grandpa insisted.

  Dewclaws, they’re about birthing, they’re about being born.

  Just like baby birds need a beak to poke through their shells, or like some baby snakes have a sharp nose to push through their eggshells, so do werewolf pups need dewclaws. It’s because of their human half. Because, while a wolf’s head is custom made for slipsliding down a birth canal, a human head—all pups shift back and forth the whole time they’re being born—a human head is big and blocky by comparison. And the mom’s lady parts, they aren’t made for that. You can cut the pups out like they tried to do for Grandma, but you need somebody who knows what they’re doing. When there’s not a knife, or somebody to hold it, and when the mom’s human, not wolf—that’s the reason for the dewclaws. So the pup can reach through with its paw. So that one flick of sharpness high up on the inside of the forearm can snag, tear the opening a bit wider.

  It’s bloody and terrible, but it works. At least for the pup.

  And now I understood, about Grandpa’s tick. That smooth divot of scar tissue he’d shown me on the back of his arm.

  It was so I would look at my own arms, someday.

  On the inside of each of my forearms there are two pale slick scars that Libby’d told me were from the heating element of Grandpa’s stove, when I’d reached in for toast when a piece of bread was still as big as my head.

  Grandpa had been telling me the whole time, though: dogs?

  I’d seen dogs through the window driving to school, but there’d never been a dog at Grandpa’s place.

  Dogs know better. Dogs know when they’re outmatched.

  “No,” Libby said, looking across to me, looking at my inner forearms with new eyes, matching my two scars up with her dewclaws.

  It wasn’t a dog Grandpa had to drag out by the fence.

  I can see it now the way he would have said it, if he could have said it the way it happened.

  A fourteen-year-old girl starts to have a baby, a human girl starts to have a human baby, only, partway through it, that baby starts to shift, little needles of teeth poking through the gums months too early. It’s not supposed to happen, it never happens like this, she was the one of the litter born with fingers, not paws, she’s supposed to be safe, is supposed to throw human babies, but the wolf’s in the blood, and it’s fighting its way to the surface.

  My mom, I didn’t just tear her open, I infected her.

  Werewolves that are born, they’re in control of what they are, or they can come to be, at least. They have a chance.

  If you’re bit, though, then it runs wild through you.

  “We’re going to go far from here, so far from here,” Libby was saying right into my ear, the rest of me pressed up against her, both of us trembling.

  Her breath smelled like meat, like change.

  Darren wasn’t there the night it happened, when I was born. But she was.

  The real story, the one she saw, the one Grandpa was trying to say out loud finally, it’s that a father carries his oldest daughter out past the house, he carries her out and she’s probably already changing for the
first time, into an abomination, but he holds his own wolf back, isn’t going to fight her like that.

  This is a job for a man.

  He raises the ball-peen hammer once—the rounded head is supposed to be kind—but he isn’t decisive enough, can’t commit to this act with his whole heart, but he has her by the scruff, and she’s on all fours now, is snapping at him, her just-born son screaming on the porch, her twin sister biting those baby-sharp dewclaws off for him once and forever, and for the rest of that night, for the rest of his life, this husband and father and monster is swinging that little ball-peen hammer, trying to connect, his face wet with the effort, the two of them silhouettes against the pale grass, going around and around the house.

  We’re werewolves.

  This is what we do, this is how we live.

  If you want to call it that.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Heaven of Werewolves

  I vant . . . to bite . . . your neck,” the vampire says, tippy-toeing to see himself in the mirror again.

  “No, no no no,” the vampire’s uncle says for the third time. “It’s ‘suck your blood.’ That’s what vampires do. They suck your blood.”

  “Then what do werewolves do?”

  “They buy their sister a reasonable costume, for one,” the vampire’s aunt says, trying to get elbow room in the tight bathroom to adjust her habit.

  She’s a nun tonight, all in white.

  The vampire’s uncle is in a rubber werewolf mask, CANDYWOLF traced onto his bare hairless chest in blue marker.

  This is Florida, where it’s so wet that soft green fuzz grows on the guardrail posts. They only stopped driving away from Arkansas because of the ocean, not the El Camino. The El Camino would have kept going, probably. The vampire is eight, now. His uncle says that’s the perfect age for Halloween, except for all the other ages too.

  Halloween is the one night of the year werewolves go to church.

  To get there, they have to drive through the edge of town. There’s mummies and zombies and cowboys and pirates up and down the sidewalks.

  “They going to church too?” the vampire asks from the backseat.

  “Different church,” the vampire’s uncle says.

  The vampire’s uncle is in the passenger seat in his mask, and about every third time a princess or a soldier looks over at this big long four-door’d Caprice creeping past, he lunges half out the window, growling and clawing.

  “You’re going to get us pulled over,” the vampire’s aunt says.

  “Not this night, sister of the ragged bite,” the vampire’s uncle says back.

  In the backseat the vampire wants to smile but he can feel the white makeup on his face like a shell of dried mud, and knows it’ll crack.

  And vampires bite necks, anyway. They don’t go around smiling.

  He falls asleep once town is gone, wakes in his uncle’s hairy arms, doesn’t realize they’re long gloves until he remembers what night this is. They’re not even walking on a trail through the trees, are just following where his aunt says, from the one time she was here years ago. Her white costume almost glows.

  “Who showed you this place?” the vampire’s uncle says.

  The vampire’s aunt doesn’t answer this, just keeps walking.

  Werewolves aren’t afraid of the dark. Even ones dressed like ghost nuns.

  Humans can be, though.

  It’s what the vampire still is, under his makeup. It’s what his aunt says he’ll be until he’s twelve or thirteen—and maybe forever, if he never shifts. You never know.

  The vampire chews on his plastic fangs and tries to look ahead. They’re going uphill now. His face is cracking into pieces, he can tell.

  He doesn’t want to be a vampire anymore. This isn’t like the comic book. He can hardly even remember the comic book anymore.

  Ten or twenty or thirty minutes later the aunt stops, lifts her nose to the air. Right above him, the vampire’s uncle does as well.

  “Tell me that isn’t who I think it is,” the uncle says.

  “You’re just smelling things,” the aunt says back. “He’d never leave Arkansas.”

  “He would for his El Camino,” the uncle says, and wants to spit after saying it, the vampire can tell, but has the mask on.

  The church is an outside church. They’re not the first ones there. There’s no fire, no light, not even a clearing, really. But there are shapes streaking past in the darkness. One of them brushes the vampire’s uncle and the uncle starts to stand the vampire up on the ground like a big chess piece, but the aunt looks back, shakes her nun-head no.

  “But—” the vampire’s uncle starts, a whine rising in his voice.

  The ghost nun stares at him with her faceless face and the uncle gathers the vampire back up.

  “It’s only Halloween . . .” the uncle says.

  “It’s Halloween when I say it’s Halloween,” the aunt says, and reaches back with her hand sideways like the coach at school says you do, to take a baton you’re being handed. It’s for them to follow her around the smelly pond, through the blown-over trees with their roots sideways in the air. To the center of the clearing that’s not a clearing. To the nearly caved-in side of the trailer part of a trailer-tractor rig, like the vampire’s uncle is learning to drive.

  This one’s old and rusted. Grown over with bushes and vines.

  On the panel part of the side, where the picture goes when there’s a picture—it’s why they’re here.

  A wolf head in a circle of yellow.

  This is a holy place.

  The vampire rearranges himself in his uncle’s arms to look around them, at all the motion in the darkness. It feels like whispers. It sounds like smiling. It smells like teeth.

  This is the one night a call to the police about werewolves isn’t going to get answered. The one night werewolves who don’t usually see each other, see each other.

  The vampire feels his uncle’s arms go from normal to steel.

  Nosing up to the vampire’s aunt, on all fours but only about as tall as her ribs, is her ex-husband. The vampire can tell from his hair. And from his eyes.

  “Perfect,” the vampire’s uncle says, standing the vampire up on his own two feet without any permission from the vampire’s aunt.

  The vampire finds his uncle’s belt loop with his fingers.

  “It’s okay,” the vampire’s aunt says back to them.

  Her ex-husband is touching his wet nose to her hand now. His whole body is rippling with tension. And it does look like a man in a suit, bent over onto his too-long arms. Only, this is the best suit ever. With the best mask. The most alive mask. The long snout that twitches. The same eyes.

  “Red,” the vampire’s uncle says, like you say hello. But it’s not that. It’s a warning, the vampire can tell. Because you can’t trust the ones that shift and never come back.

  How long they live is ten or fifteen years if they’re lucky, and have found a big enough place to run, to eat.

  The vampire’s aunt says it’s selfish, it’s stupid, it’s not heaven being a wolf all the time, and some nights she cries from it, from all the ones dead on the interstate. From all of them running away with bullets in them like pearls made from lava. From all of them stopping at a fence line, a calico cat in their mouths, something about that yellow window in the house keeping them there. Some nights the aunt cries from all of those wolfed-out werewolves kicking in their dreams, strange scent-memories rising in their heads: barbecue sauce, pool-table chalk, hair spray.

  Not dreams, nightmares. Of a past they can’t recall. A person they don’t know.

  Her ex-husband can’t say anything to her about it either, the vampire knows. Werewolf throats aren’t made for human words. Human words would never fit. There would be too much to say.

  They can lift their lips, though. They can growl.

  “He knows, he remembers,” the vampire’s aunt says loud enough for the vampire’s uncle to definitely hear.

  “That
car’s long gone,” the uncle says. “It wasn’t that fast anyway.”

  “Shh, shh,” the aunt says, “it’ll be all right this time.” The back of her hand is still to her husband’s velvet muzzle. But when he snaps his teeth together a heartbeat later, her hand’s already back to her chest, her lips drawn back from her own teeth.

  “You idiot,” the vampire’s uncle says, stepping forward, and when the vampire looks up, his uncle is peeling the rubber mask off.

  The wolf snout remains. And the ears.

  The uncle doesn’t even wait to finish shifting. He dives into the ex-husband and it’s a frenzy, a tangle, a fight on this of all holy nights, snapping and snarling and long curls of blood slinging out, other churchgoers coming in to stand up on two legs, to watch, to wait—two of them are human, naked—and what’s going to last forever for this vampire is the image of his aunt in a white nun costume. She’s stepping away from the fight but she’s reaching in, holding her other hand to her mouth.

  “Now it’s Halloween,” the vampire whispers, just for himself.

  After that it’s all running. Faster than before. So much faster.

  The vampire’s aunt, she still has most of her billowy white nun costume on, but she’s on all fours now, her sharp dangerous killer teeth clamped over the high collar behind the vampire’s neck, and even though he’s eight years old, they’re going so fast through the trees that the vampire’s face is cracking into a hundred pieces, into a thousand.

  It doesn’t matter to the aunt once she shifts back, reties her nun-suit back on, turning her face into a shadow, into a face at the end of a long tunnel.

  Coming back through town, she stops all at once in front of the last house with the porch lights on, explains to the vampire what he’s supposed to do here, then fishes a burger sack up from the floorboard, dumps the trash. She shakes the sack open, makes him take it.

  “Just knock,” she tells him, waving him up the sidewalk with the back of her hand.

  Halfway to the house the vampire hears her crying in the car behind him, but he doesn’t turn around.

  “Oh no, cover your neck,” the unsteady woman who answers the door says in a too-high voice.