fic, original fiction: moonstruck (part 3)
There isn’t much to tell, anyway: Jeremy goes to a firing range between school and work, finds classmates who hunt and attaches himself to then long enough to learn something. He tells Rae that much. He tells her nothing when he begins spending the night away from home every full moon, returning tired and grumpy, but she can guess. (He does bring home a lot of meat, once, saying a friend’s family had too much to fit in their freezer from a recent hunting trip. Mom is too glad of the extra food to question it; Dad returns home after the strongest of his heightened senses have subsided, and if he still notices a strange taste or smell, he doesn’t mention it-probably because he turns faintly gray at the suggestion of any meat the first several days after this full moon, and this is something else Rae doesn’t want to think about. Rae, who still isn’t thinking about Jeremy’s hunting trips either, can’t help a flash of horrified revulsion that apparently shows on her face, because he pauses in unloading the meat into the freezer to roll his eyes at her. “It’s just wolf,” he says, “ordinary gray wolf or something. Might even be legal.”) Mom, usually working late anyway, doesn’t think to wonder whether Jeremy’s at home, and Dad is usually gone much longer, returning too ill or injured to think about much else.
September’s full moon rises, and Jeremy doesn’t come back.
Rae waits through the day after, unable to concentrate on school, constantly checking her cell phone after every class to see if he’s returned any of her messages-he might have been late, he might already be at work or school by now, nursing a Red Bull to stay awake. His bike’s still gone when she returns home, and her everpresent nausea gets a little stronger.
Near midnight, finally, a text: “Im ok. Back in a few days.” She looks at it until the cell phone’s glow shuts off, plunging her room back into darkness, and doesn’t know what to do.
Then she sees the newspaper’s cover story the next morning, and she understands, and she thinks for a minute that she really will be sick. Police found a young man’s naked body in the woods last night, the story says, with multiple bullet wounds. No murder weapon, bullet casings, or clothes could be found anywhere nearby, but a short blood trail indicated the victim hadn’t died somewhere else and been deposited there. One of the bullets removed from the body was silver.
Rae sits very still for a long moment, her spoon dripping milk into a steadily growing puddle on the table, her cereal soggy and forgotten. Then she very deliberately sets down the spoon, folds up the newspaper, and drags her chair across the kitchen to reach the box of matches on a top shelf.
The newspaper makes an untidy pile of ashes and blackened shreds of paper as she burns it on the driveway, instead of all going up in smoke like it’s supposed to. Finally she sweeps away the ashes, letting the breeze do most of the work, and quietly throws up in the backyard before going inside to finish getting ready for school. There’s no time now to have breakfast again, but she isn’t hungry anyway.
She still doesn’t tell anyone.
The next day she copies Mom’s handwriting for a note saying Jeremy’s sick, realizing as she writes that she’s probably an accomplice to murder now. She takes the note in anyway, picks up Jeremy’s chores, calls his boss at the store, and feels grateful for once for the overlapping schedules that mean Mom and Dad still don’t notice Jeremy’s gone.
He comes back after almost a week, stumbling into the house after school when only Rae is there, reeking of unwashed clothes and alcohol. Rae jumps up, watching him, but for a long moment he just stands in the entryway, staring around as if he doesn’t recognize his own house. Then he staggers upstairs, one hand on the railing for balance; he’s lying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling when Rae works up the courage to follow him several minutes later.
He doesn’t look at her, and she has no idea what to say. Finally he mumbles, “Had to do something. I just…had to…” He rubs at his face with both hands. “And I did and it was…wrong, it was really wrong, and I can’t…just wanted to fix it and now it’s worse and I can’t fix this.”
Rae picks at the doorjamb and hopes she won’t be sick again. “Was it…you know, the right one?”
He huffs out something that might be a laugh, under other circumstances. “It was a damn wolf when I shot at it, I don’t even know, he only turned back into a human when he was dying. Poor bastard probably didn’t even know what happened.” He’s silent for a second. “Lucky him.”
“So,” she says, because suddenly it seems important, “the silver-”
“God, I don’t know. Had to shoot him like six times before he went down. The silver was just in case. Only had a few anyway. So it was the final shot, but…it was a head shot close up, so…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Ditched the gun way out of town, didn’t know what else to do with it…”
“You were gone a long time.”
He shrugs, a funny-looking gesture when he’s lying down. “Cheap skeezy hotel. Pretty sure you can rent by the hour. Didn’t want, you know, police finding me at home, and…couldn’t come back. Not after…you know…after.”
“But you did come back.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” he says, and it’s the old sardonic tone, barely blurred by whatever he was drinking, but the undercurrent of despair is new. “You think this is ever going to change?”
Her voice comes out very small. “I don’t know…maybe, if we try hard enough…”
“Yeah? Rae, that’s what I-I tried, okay, and this is what happened and we can’t-there’s just…nothing. Get used to it.” He rubs at his eyes again, then grins suddenly with no humor at all and too many teeth showing. “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” he mumbles, and then he laughs and laughs and laughs.
***
Rae doesn’t sleep much that night, or for several nights after that. She feels like she should be crying, but it doesn’t happen; instead she just lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, exhaustion doing nothing to make her thoughts settle.
She has to do something.
She doesn’t know what to do.
For a few days, she’s too tired to notice much of anything, so it’s a couple weeks later that she realizes another new normal has begun. Nothing’s changed with Mom and Dad; instead, Jeremy begins skipping school more and more, partly for longer shifts at work, before she finds a notice from the principal’s office in the mail and realizes he’s dropped out altogether. The lingering smell of stale alcohol hasn’t left his room since he came back, which she doesn’t understand until she watches him walking back from work one night and sees the slight unsteadiness to his steps, like he’s just on the verge of tripping over something. Then she remembers the way his eyes never quite focused on her the last several times he had anything to say to her, and she realizes he hasn’t been entirely sober since the last full moon.
That evening, she draws up a plan of action. It isn’t much, but it’s all she can think to do, and the next day after school she takes the city bus to the university library. Her municipal library card lets her check out as many books as she wants, except she doesn’t want to take them home, and a nice librarian gives her access to the university’s database of academic journals.
“Normally this system’s just for the students here,” the librarian tells her, writing a login code down on a card, “but since it’s for school-what’s your topic, exactly?”
“Werewolves,” Rae says without thinking, and quickly adds, “You know, folklore, and-and that sort of thing. It’s for a project.”
“Interesting subject. Did you pick that yourself?” The librarian hands Rae the card. “Let me know if you need more help.”
“Thanks,” Rae says, and doesn’t answer the question, because the librarian’s already turned to a much older student who wants her attention, and how would she explain a negative answer anyway?
***
She begins her research.
The library’s cataloging system is thorough and confusing, but she still ends up with a stack of books two feet high on her first day, which she spreads out on the most isolated table she can find.
She is meticulous, scientific: she takes notes on everything she reads, even the details that seem insignificant, and begins cataloging, cross-referencing, trying to find the common patterns. Every legend starts somewhere, and every story has a true core. She saves pages at the end of her notebook and there she begins lists: every possible cure, no matter how far-fetched. Some cures are filed together for similarity, but most are split into two sections: ones that will be easy to cross off, and ones that won’t. Some of the latter are merely impossible (the werewolf must kneel in one spot for a hundred years); others might kill someone even if they work. Absurdly complicated rituals, especially those that involve dozens of other people (where could she even find 25 virgins of marriageable age anymore?) still go on her list, but she can’t imagine actually being able to try them.
She doesn’t write that virtually every myth turns the werewolf back into a human when he dies. She doesn’t write that virtually every werewolf movie-and she hunts down as many as she can, watching in the media room nobody uses-is a tragedy, ending with the death of the werewolf in his monster state, usually after he’s already killed someone he loves.
She doesn’t let herself wonder why the movies end like this, because she refuses to accept that it might be the only fitting end to a werewolf’s life.
***
The library becomes the center of her new routine. Every weekend she makes enough food for the whole week and tells everyone else to microwave it, since they haven’t eaten together in ages anyway, and every day after school she goes to the university library. She stays as late as she dares, often until closing if she knows no one will be home to wonder why she isn’t back yet.
After the first visit, she pulls only a few books each time, stakes out her table, and reads and cross-references and writes notes. She repeats the same process online. When she’s stared at the pages of books so long that all the words are blurring together, trying the computer is at least a change, if not actually a welcome relief, and then she switches back again when too long on the computer makes her head and neck ache. The internet is faster, of course, and so is her note-taking, but search-engine results number in the hundreds of thousands, and most aren’t remotely helpful. The books aren’t much better: they are sensationalist stories, paranormal romance with far more sex than she has any desire to read, academic discussions of the medical condition, folklore accounts too vague or too specific to be worthwhile. Descriptions of lycanthropy as a mental illness, she lays aside; fiction that reinvents werewolves for its own purposes goes the same way. Montague Summers is a special brand of despair: between untranslated quotations that take up probably half of every page and demand knowledge she doesn’t have of at least five different languages, his intensely scholarly discussion of folklore does little to cover his belief in the reality of werewolves and equally firm ideas of their invariably demonic origins. Dad didn’t sell his soul for this, and he definitely doesn’t use strange potions and occult incantations to carry out his transformations, but the tiny quiver of nausea that seems to wait for her in these books gets a little stronger.
She keeps reading anyway, and her notes are no less thorough.
Sometimes she drifts off to sleep on top of her books, slipping into hazy dreams about hairy wolf-men and moonlit spellcrafting, and a librarian closing down the building has to shake her awake. There’s an instant of momentary confusion and then relief-it’s all been a dream, of course werewolves aren’t real-and then memory reasserts itself. She wonders once, as she gathers up her notebooks, whether the books on medical lycanthropy are right after all, and Dad only thinks he’s turning into a wolf, only somehow everyone else in the family shares the delusion and sees it happen too. Maybe they’re just all crazy. Maybe she is crazy alone, and all of this has happened only inside her own head-but then she zips up her backpack and decides that she’s not much into really abstract stuff anyway, and if they’re all crazy or none of it’s real, it’s still the world she knows, and it’s still the world she has to deal with.
She gets home late almost every night, walking from the bus stop in the dark, keeping her pace steady and deliberate because she doesn’t have the energy to run from everything her imagination wants her to think is out there. Most of the time Mom is still at work when Rae gets back, and Dad is still asleep. Once in a while Jeremy is already in bed or slumped in from of the TV. More often he isn’t home either, and then Rae takes her homework into the living room where she can see the driveway and waits for him. He almost never gets back before midnight, and usually when he does come home, Rae has to help him up the stairs and into bed. She has no idea what to do about hangovers, so it’s just as well she leaves for school before he wakes up.
She’s glad she has the research to focus on, because otherwise she’d have to think about how much her family’s falling apart and how little she can really do to hold it together.
***
Rae doesn’t tell anyone else about her research; she’s not sure why, except that it can’t possibly help for Dad to think there might be a cure if there’s nothing that anyone can do. He hasn’t been looking-no one has-but she thinks maybe that’s because he doesn’t want to know that there isn’t, because maybe there’s still a shred of hope he hasn’t lost. She definitely doesn’t tell anyone when she starts experimenting; she does manage to persuade Dad to have his transformations at home again, which isn’t as hard as it might be after one moon that’s cold even at home when he has to drive himself off the mountain with feet numb from frostbite.
Easy cures come first: calling the werewolf three times by his Christian name takes all of five minutes one full moon, even after she runs through every possible name combination that might work. Throwing an iron object over his head is almost as simple; the most difficult part is finding something made of pure iron, and even that she accomplishes by getting a fireplace poker from a thrift store. Striking him three times on the head with a silver knife is harder, since any silver they might have owned was sold long ago and getting to the wolf’s head involves coming close enough to get hurt, but she manages. Getting the wolf to jump into water might be easier if she were willing to tell Dad what she wanted him to try, except he can’t control the wolf either. She finally settles on borrowing a kiddie pool to fill up because there are more variables than she can account for anyway: does it need to be moving water? Holy water? Does the timing matter? Does this supposed cure only apply if some kind of cursed stream or pool turned the werewolf in the first place?
One month she tries wolfsbane, the tiniest amount, making sure it’s well below a lethal dose. His senses are always heightened before and after the full moon, but his hunger before means he’ll eat almost anything, so if the powdered wolfsbane in his milk tastes a little weird, he doesn’t seem to notice.
It sends the wolf into seizures. Rae watches from the window, her stomach clenched so tight she’s afraid she’ll throw up (as reactions go, it leaves a lot to be desired), heart lodged throbbing somewhere around her throat. She’s glad that Jeremy’s already asleep and Mom’s still working, because she doesn’t want anyone else seeing this, worrying, wondering what’s going on. If this goes bad-really bad-she doesn’t know what she’ll do, but whatever it is she’ll be the one doing it, because this is her idea and her fault-
The seizures subside after what seems like hours but is really just a few minutes, and Rae can breathe again. The wolf stands in the yard for a moment, head and tail drooping, tongue hanging out as he pants, and then he settles to the ground, stretched out on his side.
It takes Rae a few minutes to realize that he’s sleeping.
She stares, disbelieving, and then eases the door open, takes a few tentative steps into the yard. The wolf doesn’t stir, not even when she gets close enough to touch him-not even when she does touch him, telling herself all the while that she’s insane.
But he doesn’t move. She flattens her hand against his ribs, feels the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, thinks that it’s no cure but they can live with this, he won’t be as exhausted or as injured or as dangerous if he just sleeps through every full moon; and she tries hard to remind herself that this is one time, she has no idea if it could work long-term, no idea whether it’ll affect him in the morning-but she can’t do much to stop the relief that wells up inside, leaving her so limp with the draining-away of tension that she nearly gives in to a sudden temptation to fall asleep right here, curled against the wolf’s side.
Instead she returns to the house and dozes near the door, where she knows she’ll wake up when the transformation back begins. And she does.
It’s one of the worst she’s seen yet, dragging his body through agonizing spasm after spasm for a good ten minutes after moonset, bloody foam coming from his mouth, and when he’s almost all the way back, only claws and a little extra hair to go, he hunches over and vomits blood.
He ends up in the ER again even though they can’t afford it. Rae crosses pure wolfsbane off her list and doesn’t cry until she’s in bed the next night and no one’s around to hear.
***
It’s just as well that Rae has to wait a month before she can experiment again, because it takes about that long for her to work up the courage to do so. There aren’t that many cures left to try, but they’re getting more dangerous. She has to cut him or stab him-there are different accounts-between the eyes with a silver knife, which could go badly wrong in a hundred different ways; she has to draw exactly three drops of blood from some part of his body. Against her better judgment she gives him wolfsbane again for its tranquilizing affect, way less this time, and although the transformation isn’t quite so bad, he doesn’t actually sleep, either, watching her narrow-eyed as she approaches. Some meat they can’t afford to waste helps distract him, but it’s still a near thing, especially since she has to cut him twice, and only staying close to the house gets her back inside fast enough. The cures don’t work, just like before, and any thought she might have had that a tinier dose of wolfsbane could still help are dispelled when the change back is almost as bad as last time.
At the library, she starts digging deeper, trying to see if studies on real wolves or anything in medical literature about multiple personality disorder could possibly be useful (after all, if a werewolf is half wolf, half man, then two beings exist in one body-but then it’s not the same, is it?). It’s not, since Dad doesn’t behave that much like an ordinary wolf; they’ve even tried putting meat out for him, at least earlier when they could afford to waste that much, but it made no difference: the wolf ate it, sure, but filling his stomach had no effect on his attempts to get into to the house and take down some humans.
She does find some more local and more recent stories, not so much about werewolves specifically but about human-animal transformation in general-bears mostly, and for the first time she’s glad that Dad turns into a wolf and not something else, because a bear would be even more impossible to deal with. These ones mostly involve animal skins or spirit transfers, and they’re almost all voluntary, so that’s no help either. She reads about a man possessed by wolf spirits after he killed several of the animals, the author theorizing that he’d been punished for mistreating the wolves, but Dad’s never had any interest in hunting and always used to like animals. If he’s being punished for something-and she doesn’t even want to go down that line of questioning, because it can’t lead anywhere good-she has no idea what.
Still, at least it sounds like some people still believe this sort of thing is possible. She’s no closer to a cure, but feeling less crazy, or maybe still crazy but with more company, helps a little.
(It doesn’t help to read about a dying man who turns into a caribou to take the burden of his last days off his relatives. Everything is so wrapped up in death and she can’t get away from it, maybe not ever.)
Finally she goes back to the librarian for help, and he looks stumped. “I’m not exactly an expert on werewolves,” he says. “Well, or folklore in general, or the supernatural, or…” He shrugs. “You looked through the catalog and journal listings?”
“I’ve read everything on the shelves,” Rae says, and she can hear some of the desperation coming through in her voice. “It’s all the same, it’s not good enough-I need something new.”
He frowns. “If you’re looking for novels, there aren’t many at this branch, but they’re all in the same system, so the catalog-”
“No, not novels, I don’t mean new like that, I mean…something else. Not just all the same legends and folklore. Something that’s not as common.”
“This must be some assignment,” the librarian says. “Well, you could try the archives-it’s mostly local, but you might find what you’re looking for. Otherwise I could help you with an interlibrary loan-”
“Archives,” Rae says, thinking of the stories she read, the recent ones-the ones that weren’t any help, but it was worth a shot, wasn’t it? “I’ll try that.”
The silent archives room upstairs becomes part of her new routine for a while; it’s only open normal business hours, so afterward she usually pursues more fruitless research online, but then what she’s finding in the archives isn’t helping much so far either. There is a catalog, sort of, and papers are organized enough that when she asks to look at anything about wolves, she gets a stack of just about everything that mentions hunting, but mostly it’s a matter of skimming every single document to see if it’s remotely useful.
When the papers on wolves run out without giving her anything, she thinks to ask about unusual diseases, and mostly that’s tragic accounts of devastating epidemics-still not helpful, and far from comforting. Then she stumbles across the personal journal of a missionary to one of the more isolated areas, at least a hundred years old, and begins paging through it carefully so the pages won’t crack apart.
The entries are mostly terse and impersonal, accounts of the day’s happenings with scattered mentions of conversations with natives who expressed interest in the Gospel and a lot more mentions of the weather (the missionary obviously came from a much warmer climate). It’s interesting, especially since she hasn’t studied that much local history, but it still isn’t helpful-and then she finally sees why the journal has anything to do with “unusual diseases.”
She barely notices the first relevant entry, it’s such an offhand reference-the missionary’s wife had some training as a nurse and provided medical services on a regular basis, so a new patient isn’t unusual. What’s odd is his speculation an entry or two later that he’s not being told everything about this illness and that the young man seems reasonably healthy, if fearful, and then he adds, “Wondering if it’s the wrong moon.”
Rae sits back and stares at this statement, some overpowering emotion-she’s not sure if it’s hope or fear-rising in her chest. She tells herself that this could mean nothing, could easily mean nothing at all, just a term that the missionary picked up from the natives, maybe (did they even mark time in moons here?), and then tells herself that she’s being an idiot and won’t find out anything unless she reads on.
She does. The he missionary never names or describes the mystery illness, not exactly-in fact he skips several days and when he does write his entries are even briefer than usual, mentioning a “project” that is taking most of his time-“but at least he told the truth when he understood I’d not condemn him for it.” He mentions writing home for an old family story, says he wasn’t sure until now whether he could believe it; at another point he speculates that “the wolf moon or sanguine moon may be needed. Convergence?” Rae takes a research detour, learns that each full moon has had its own name since ____, all drawn from Native American legends. ___ is the Wolf Moon; ___ is the Hunter’s Moon, the Blood Moon, the Sanguine Moon.
(She dreams of a blood-red moon that night.)
The journal’s long and she can’t take it home with her, can’t even take it from the archives room or make copies, so for three days in a row she spends all her after-school time with it, reading and taking notes on almost everything, because she doesn’t trust herself to know what’s really weighted with hidden meaning and what’s just her own hope or excitement or paranoia. Food isn’t allowed in the archival room, but then it’s pretty generally frowned upon in the library anyway, so she’s already used to ignoring a growling stomach.
“Tried a few additional methods,” the journal says, “no result. To be expected but still disappointing. Waiting to hear more from home.” Rae pages forward, hoping the letter itself will be preserved here too, but it’s only the same small, precise handwriting, and no loose pages flutter free.
He does mention a letter, eventually, and the dates skip another week before he reports the patient’s unwillingness to try-whatever was in the letter and the legend, apparently, and he doesn’t say. Then there are half a dozen entries about the school he’s started, conversion efforts, his struggle to confine a flu outbreak. Rae finds herself skimming these pages and then jumping back to them in something like panic, afraid she’s skipped over something important.
Then, at the end of a new entry: “Spoke to the daughter yesterday; she wants to try, insists on secrecy. Troubled at heart to go against his wishes or to endanger her, but she claims to understand risks, says she cannot lose more family.” Rae pages back again. Yes-the flu epidemic could have killed them; she knows a little something from school about local history and the diseases that came with white settlers, diseases that sometimes wiped out whole villages. The missionary still hasn’t mentioned the name of his maybe-werewolf, but he does list the dead, and several have the same family name. She turns back: “Likely that we have only the one chance, so no experimenting this time; tomorrow is Sanguine Moon.”
Rae stares at this single line for several seconds and then begins flipping pages again, hunting for another mention of…whatever he did. Surely he’ll say whether it worked.
He doesn’t. Not a word.
She sits back, clenching both fists in her lap so she won’t take out her frustrations on the old journal itself.
She thanks anybody who might be listening for the internet: half a dozen old manuscripts exist electronically in scans, a world away from originals she doesn’t have time or money to visit.
She tells him, sticking to the nutshell version so he won’t interrupt, and doesn’t let the firmness leave her voice for a second. Bad enough that she has her own doubts; there’s no reason to let Jeremy know.
For a long moment he just stares at her, his mouth opening once to speak and then closing again as if his brain hasn’t entirely decided what message to send, and Rae starts wondering if maybe he’s not as sober as she hoped. The he says, “What the hell, Rae.”
“Have you got any better ideas, then? This is it. It’s the only thing I’ve found that might actually work.”
“The only-might work-are you completely insane? You dug up some-random fairy tale and you think it’s going to magically turn Dad back into something other than a raging asshole?”
Rae doesn’t let him see her flinch. He’s already coming too close to what she’s been thinking. “It’s a legend, an old one, but it’s been passed down through one family for a long time and it looks like it actually worked, here, within the last couple centuries, and-and it feels right, okay? It makes sense, none of the other cures ever did, and-” He’s still staring at her and she’s talking too much; she can feel her voice and resolve beginning to fray. “Look, just read it.”
She feels thoroughly sick already, although she doesn’t know if it’s fear or if it’s the wolfsbane taking effect already. She doesn’t mention this to Jeremy; he’s reluctant enough to let her do this, and they really don’t have money for Poison Control or something anyway.
“I don’t need to be in there long,” she says, gripping his arm, more to keep herself moving forward than anything, “just long enough-I mean, you’ve seen him, he’ll probably-go for me right away-”
“I don’t think me letting you stay in there too long is going to be the issue,” Jeremy mutters.
The wolf howls, and his body slams against the side of the shed. Rae swallows hard, trying not to throw up, and then pulls off her jacket and drops it to the ground. Jeremy unlocks the shed door, bracing against it to hold it shut until they’re ready. “You know I think this whole thing is insane, but if he’s really got to bite you, can’t you just stick your arm in or something?”
“I’m pretty sure I have to be…you know, in a position where he could actually kill me. That’s what it sounds like.”
Jeremy spits out an oath and yanks the door open, just far enough for Rae to squeeze inside, and then she’s alone in a small dark space with an animal who really, really wants to kill her, no light except the light of the full moon filtering through cracks near the roof, and Jeremy’s right, she must be out of her mind, and she backs into the corner just before the wolf lunges. She gets a millisecond’s warning, the gleam of eyes in the dark, and then she’s crushed against the wall and teeth fasten around her arm.
The wolf yanks her down, skin and muscle tearing-and then it’s over that fast, the teeth let go, and Jeremy’s pulled the door open again and is hauling her out, and there’s blood again but this time it’s hers, hot and wet and slippery, and her arm hurts, but she only half-notices any of that, because she’s still staring at the wolf: he’s backed up, every muscle tense, and something is happening to his eyes.
“Wait,” she says, grabbing at Jeremy’s hand as he starts to slam the door closed again, “wait-”
The wolf is frozen, his eyes fixed on both of them, and then he shudders, staggers out of the shed, and the change takes him.
It’s longer than usual, maybe just a little more violent. Rae feels Jeremy backing away, pulling her with him, but she can’t look at anything except the wolf, and she maybe isn’t breathing but she barely notice that either.
Dad collapses in the grass, moonlight falling on his human body, and Rae can’t think anything except: it’s enough. It was enough. Wolfsbane, the daughter’s blood, the Blood Moon, the willing sacrifice. She doesn’t know if she might have just given herself lycanthropy instead, although she doesn’t think so-that was half the point of the wolfsbane in her blood anyway-but when Dad’s eyes open, she really doesn’t care about anything else.
Jeremy’s hand tightens on Rae’s shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Dad…?”
Dad half sits up and blinks at them, and then his eyes widen in horrified recognition. “What are you-you can’t-” He focuses on Rae’s arm, at the blood still dripping into the grass. “Oh, God-”
Rae shakes her head and points up at the moon. “It’s okay. Look. It’s still full.” He stares at her, not comprehending, and she feels herself starting to smile for the first time in-a long while, probably. “I did it. It’s gone. I think…you’re cured.”
Dad looks upward, then at his hands, grass-stained and very human, and whispers again, “Oh, God,” but now his tone matches what Rae’s feeling.
Jeremy helps him up, and the yard is still full of shadows as they make their way back to the house-but for the first time in years, the light of the full moon that outlines every grass-blade in silver feels like a benediction.
September’s full moon rises, and Jeremy doesn’t come back.
Rae waits through the day after, unable to concentrate on school, constantly checking her cell phone after every class to see if he’s returned any of her messages-he might have been late, he might already be at work or school by now, nursing a Red Bull to stay awake. His bike’s still gone when she returns home, and her everpresent nausea gets a little stronger.
Near midnight, finally, a text: “Im ok. Back in a few days.” She looks at it until the cell phone’s glow shuts off, plunging her room back into darkness, and doesn’t know what to do.
Then she sees the newspaper’s cover story the next morning, and she understands, and she thinks for a minute that she really will be sick. Police found a young man’s naked body in the woods last night, the story says, with multiple bullet wounds. No murder weapon, bullet casings, or clothes could be found anywhere nearby, but a short blood trail indicated the victim hadn’t died somewhere else and been deposited there. One of the bullets removed from the body was silver.
Rae sits very still for a long moment, her spoon dripping milk into a steadily growing puddle on the table, her cereal soggy and forgotten. Then she very deliberately sets down the spoon, folds up the newspaper, and drags her chair across the kitchen to reach the box of matches on a top shelf.
The newspaper makes an untidy pile of ashes and blackened shreds of paper as she burns it on the driveway, instead of all going up in smoke like it’s supposed to. Finally she sweeps away the ashes, letting the breeze do most of the work, and quietly throws up in the backyard before going inside to finish getting ready for school. There’s no time now to have breakfast again, but she isn’t hungry anyway.
She still doesn’t tell anyone.
The next day she copies Mom’s handwriting for a note saying Jeremy’s sick, realizing as she writes that she’s probably an accomplice to murder now. She takes the note in anyway, picks up Jeremy’s chores, calls his boss at the store, and feels grateful for once for the overlapping schedules that mean Mom and Dad still don’t notice Jeremy’s gone.
He comes back after almost a week, stumbling into the house after school when only Rae is there, reeking of unwashed clothes and alcohol. Rae jumps up, watching him, but for a long moment he just stands in the entryway, staring around as if he doesn’t recognize his own house. Then he staggers upstairs, one hand on the railing for balance; he’s lying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling when Rae works up the courage to follow him several minutes later.
He doesn’t look at her, and she has no idea what to say. Finally he mumbles, “Had to do something. I just…had to…” He rubs at his face with both hands. “And I did and it was…wrong, it was really wrong, and I can’t…just wanted to fix it and now it’s worse and I can’t fix this.”
Rae picks at the doorjamb and hopes she won’t be sick again. “Was it…you know, the right one?”
He huffs out something that might be a laugh, under other circumstances. “It was a damn wolf when I shot at it, I don’t even know, he only turned back into a human when he was dying. Poor bastard probably didn’t even know what happened.” He’s silent for a second. “Lucky him.”
“So,” she says, because suddenly it seems important, “the silver-”
“God, I don’t know. Had to shoot him like six times before he went down. The silver was just in case. Only had a few anyway. So it was the final shot, but…it was a head shot close up, so…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Ditched the gun way out of town, didn’t know what else to do with it…”
“You were gone a long time.”
He shrugs, a funny-looking gesture when he’s lying down. “Cheap skeezy hotel. Pretty sure you can rent by the hour. Didn’t want, you know, police finding me at home, and…couldn’t come back. Not after…you know…after.”
“But you did come back.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” he says, and it’s the old sardonic tone, barely blurred by whatever he was drinking, but the undercurrent of despair is new. “You think this is ever going to change?”
Her voice comes out very small. “I don’t know…maybe, if we try hard enough…”
“Yeah? Rae, that’s what I-I tried, okay, and this is what happened and we can’t-there’s just…nothing. Get used to it.” He rubs at his eyes again, then grins suddenly with no humor at all and too many teeth showing. “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” he mumbles, and then he laughs and laughs and laughs.
***
Rae doesn’t sleep much that night, or for several nights after that. She feels like she should be crying, but it doesn’t happen; instead she just lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, exhaustion doing nothing to make her thoughts settle.
She has to do something.
She doesn’t know what to do.
For a few days, she’s too tired to notice much of anything, so it’s a couple weeks later that she realizes another new normal has begun. Nothing’s changed with Mom and Dad; instead, Jeremy begins skipping school more and more, partly for longer shifts at work, before she finds a notice from the principal’s office in the mail and realizes he’s dropped out altogether. The lingering smell of stale alcohol hasn’t left his room since he came back, which she doesn’t understand until she watches him walking back from work one night and sees the slight unsteadiness to his steps, like he’s just on the verge of tripping over something. Then she remembers the way his eyes never quite focused on her the last several times he had anything to say to her, and she realizes he hasn’t been entirely sober since the last full moon.
That evening, she draws up a plan of action. It isn’t much, but it’s all she can think to do, and the next day after school she takes the city bus to the university library. Her municipal library card lets her check out as many books as she wants, except she doesn’t want to take them home, and a nice librarian gives her access to the university’s database of academic journals.
“Normally this system’s just for the students here,” the librarian tells her, writing a login code down on a card, “but since it’s for school-what’s your topic, exactly?”
“Werewolves,” Rae says without thinking, and quickly adds, “You know, folklore, and-and that sort of thing. It’s for a project.”
“Interesting subject. Did you pick that yourself?” The librarian hands Rae the card. “Let me know if you need more help.”
“Thanks,” Rae says, and doesn’t answer the question, because the librarian’s already turned to a much older student who wants her attention, and how would she explain a negative answer anyway?
***
She begins her research.
The library’s cataloging system is thorough and confusing, but she still ends up with a stack of books two feet high on her first day, which she spreads out on the most isolated table she can find.
She is meticulous, scientific: she takes notes on everything she reads, even the details that seem insignificant, and begins cataloging, cross-referencing, trying to find the common patterns. Every legend starts somewhere, and every story has a true core. She saves pages at the end of her notebook and there she begins lists: every possible cure, no matter how far-fetched. Some cures are filed together for similarity, but most are split into two sections: ones that will be easy to cross off, and ones that won’t. Some of the latter are merely impossible (the werewolf must kneel in one spot for a hundred years); others might kill someone even if they work. Absurdly complicated rituals, especially those that involve dozens of other people (where could she even find 25 virgins of marriageable age anymore?) still go on her list, but she can’t imagine actually being able to try them.
She doesn’t write that virtually every myth turns the werewolf back into a human when he dies. She doesn’t write that virtually every werewolf movie-and she hunts down as many as she can, watching in the media room nobody uses-is a tragedy, ending with the death of the werewolf in his monster state, usually after he’s already killed someone he loves.
She doesn’t let herself wonder why the movies end like this, because she refuses to accept that it might be the only fitting end to a werewolf’s life.
***
The library becomes the center of her new routine. Every weekend she makes enough food for the whole week and tells everyone else to microwave it, since they haven’t eaten together in ages anyway, and every day after school she goes to the university library. She stays as late as she dares, often until closing if she knows no one will be home to wonder why she isn’t back yet.
After the first visit, she pulls only a few books each time, stakes out her table, and reads and cross-references and writes notes. She repeats the same process online. When she’s stared at the pages of books so long that all the words are blurring together, trying the computer is at least a change, if not actually a welcome relief, and then she switches back again when too long on the computer makes her head and neck ache. The internet is faster, of course, and so is her note-taking, but search-engine results number in the hundreds of thousands, and most aren’t remotely helpful. The books aren’t much better: they are sensationalist stories, paranormal romance with far more sex than she has any desire to read, academic discussions of the medical condition, folklore accounts too vague or too specific to be worthwhile. Descriptions of lycanthropy as a mental illness, she lays aside; fiction that reinvents werewolves for its own purposes goes the same way. Montague Summers is a special brand of despair: between untranslated quotations that take up probably half of every page and demand knowledge she doesn’t have of at least five different languages, his intensely scholarly discussion of folklore does little to cover his belief in the reality of werewolves and equally firm ideas of their invariably demonic origins. Dad didn’t sell his soul for this, and he definitely doesn’t use strange potions and occult incantations to carry out his transformations, but the tiny quiver of nausea that seems to wait for her in these books gets a little stronger.
She keeps reading anyway, and her notes are no less thorough.
Sometimes she drifts off to sleep on top of her books, slipping into hazy dreams about hairy wolf-men and moonlit spellcrafting, and a librarian closing down the building has to shake her awake. There’s an instant of momentary confusion and then relief-it’s all been a dream, of course werewolves aren’t real-and then memory reasserts itself. She wonders once, as she gathers up her notebooks, whether the books on medical lycanthropy are right after all, and Dad only thinks he’s turning into a wolf, only somehow everyone else in the family shares the delusion and sees it happen too. Maybe they’re just all crazy. Maybe she is crazy alone, and all of this has happened only inside her own head-but then she zips up her backpack and decides that she’s not much into really abstract stuff anyway, and if they’re all crazy or none of it’s real, it’s still the world she knows, and it’s still the world she has to deal with.
She gets home late almost every night, walking from the bus stop in the dark, keeping her pace steady and deliberate because she doesn’t have the energy to run from everything her imagination wants her to think is out there. Most of the time Mom is still at work when Rae gets back, and Dad is still asleep. Once in a while Jeremy is already in bed or slumped in from of the TV. More often he isn’t home either, and then Rae takes her homework into the living room where she can see the driveway and waits for him. He almost never gets back before midnight, and usually when he does come home, Rae has to help him up the stairs and into bed. She has no idea what to do about hangovers, so it’s just as well she leaves for school before he wakes up.
She’s glad she has the research to focus on, because otherwise she’d have to think about how much her family’s falling apart and how little she can really do to hold it together.
***
Rae doesn’t tell anyone else about her research; she’s not sure why, except that it can’t possibly help for Dad to think there might be a cure if there’s nothing that anyone can do. He hasn’t been looking-no one has-but she thinks maybe that’s because he doesn’t want to know that there isn’t, because maybe there’s still a shred of hope he hasn’t lost. She definitely doesn’t tell anyone when she starts experimenting; she does manage to persuade Dad to have his transformations at home again, which isn’t as hard as it might be after one moon that’s cold even at home when he has to drive himself off the mountain with feet numb from frostbite.
Easy cures come first: calling the werewolf three times by his Christian name takes all of five minutes one full moon, even after she runs through every possible name combination that might work. Throwing an iron object over his head is almost as simple; the most difficult part is finding something made of pure iron, and even that she accomplishes by getting a fireplace poker from a thrift store. Striking him three times on the head with a silver knife is harder, since any silver they might have owned was sold long ago and getting to the wolf’s head involves coming close enough to get hurt, but she manages. Getting the wolf to jump into water might be easier if she were willing to tell Dad what she wanted him to try, except he can’t control the wolf either. She finally settles on borrowing a kiddie pool to fill up because there are more variables than she can account for anyway: does it need to be moving water? Holy water? Does the timing matter? Does this supposed cure only apply if some kind of cursed stream or pool turned the werewolf in the first place?
One month she tries wolfsbane, the tiniest amount, making sure it’s well below a lethal dose. His senses are always heightened before and after the full moon, but his hunger before means he’ll eat almost anything, so if the powdered wolfsbane in his milk tastes a little weird, he doesn’t seem to notice.
It sends the wolf into seizures. Rae watches from the window, her stomach clenched so tight she’s afraid she’ll throw up (as reactions go, it leaves a lot to be desired), heart lodged throbbing somewhere around her throat. She’s glad that Jeremy’s already asleep and Mom’s still working, because she doesn’t want anyone else seeing this, worrying, wondering what’s going on. If this goes bad-really bad-she doesn’t know what she’ll do, but whatever it is she’ll be the one doing it, because this is her idea and her fault-
The seizures subside after what seems like hours but is really just a few minutes, and Rae can breathe again. The wolf stands in the yard for a moment, head and tail drooping, tongue hanging out as he pants, and then he settles to the ground, stretched out on his side.
It takes Rae a few minutes to realize that he’s sleeping.
She stares, disbelieving, and then eases the door open, takes a few tentative steps into the yard. The wolf doesn’t stir, not even when she gets close enough to touch him-not even when she does touch him, telling herself all the while that she’s insane.
But he doesn’t move. She flattens her hand against his ribs, feels the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, thinks that it’s no cure but they can live with this, he won’t be as exhausted or as injured or as dangerous if he just sleeps through every full moon; and she tries hard to remind herself that this is one time, she has no idea if it could work long-term, no idea whether it’ll affect him in the morning-but she can’t do much to stop the relief that wells up inside, leaving her so limp with the draining-away of tension that she nearly gives in to a sudden temptation to fall asleep right here, curled against the wolf’s side.
Instead she returns to the house and dozes near the door, where she knows she’ll wake up when the transformation back begins. And she does.
It’s one of the worst she’s seen yet, dragging his body through agonizing spasm after spasm for a good ten minutes after moonset, bloody foam coming from his mouth, and when he’s almost all the way back, only claws and a little extra hair to go, he hunches over and vomits blood.
He ends up in the ER again even though they can’t afford it. Rae crosses pure wolfsbane off her list and doesn’t cry until she’s in bed the next night and no one’s around to hear.
***
It’s just as well that Rae has to wait a month before she can experiment again, because it takes about that long for her to work up the courage to do so. There aren’t that many cures left to try, but they’re getting more dangerous. She has to cut him or stab him-there are different accounts-between the eyes with a silver knife, which could go badly wrong in a hundred different ways; she has to draw exactly three drops of blood from some part of his body. Against her better judgment she gives him wolfsbane again for its tranquilizing affect, way less this time, and although the transformation isn’t quite so bad, he doesn’t actually sleep, either, watching her narrow-eyed as she approaches. Some meat they can’t afford to waste helps distract him, but it’s still a near thing, especially since she has to cut him twice, and only staying close to the house gets her back inside fast enough. The cures don’t work, just like before, and any thought she might have had that a tinier dose of wolfsbane could still help are dispelled when the change back is almost as bad as last time.
At the library, she starts digging deeper, trying to see if studies on real wolves or anything in medical literature about multiple personality disorder could possibly be useful (after all, if a werewolf is half wolf, half man, then two beings exist in one body-but then it’s not the same, is it?). It’s not, since Dad doesn’t behave that much like an ordinary wolf; they’ve even tried putting meat out for him, at least earlier when they could afford to waste that much, but it made no difference: the wolf ate it, sure, but filling his stomach had no effect on his attempts to get into to the house and take down some humans.
She does find some more local and more recent stories, not so much about werewolves specifically but about human-animal transformation in general-bears mostly, and for the first time she’s glad that Dad turns into a wolf and not something else, because a bear would be even more impossible to deal with. These ones mostly involve animal skins or spirit transfers, and they’re almost all voluntary, so that’s no help either. She reads about a man possessed by wolf spirits after he killed several of the animals, the author theorizing that he’d been punished for mistreating the wolves, but Dad’s never had any interest in hunting and always used to like animals. If he’s being punished for something-and she doesn’t even want to go down that line of questioning, because it can’t lead anywhere good-she has no idea what.
Still, at least it sounds like some people still believe this sort of thing is possible. She’s no closer to a cure, but feeling less crazy, or maybe still crazy but with more company, helps a little.
(It doesn’t help to read about a dying man who turns into a caribou to take the burden of his last days off his relatives. Everything is so wrapped up in death and she can’t get away from it, maybe not ever.)
Finally she goes back to the librarian for help, and he looks stumped. “I’m not exactly an expert on werewolves,” he says. “Well, or folklore in general, or the supernatural, or…” He shrugs. “You looked through the catalog and journal listings?”
“I’ve read everything on the shelves,” Rae says, and she can hear some of the desperation coming through in her voice. “It’s all the same, it’s not good enough-I need something new.”
He frowns. “If you’re looking for novels, there aren’t many at this branch, but they’re all in the same system, so the catalog-”
“No, not novels, I don’t mean new like that, I mean…something else. Not just all the same legends and folklore. Something that’s not as common.”
“This must be some assignment,” the librarian says. “Well, you could try the archives-it’s mostly local, but you might find what you’re looking for. Otherwise I could help you with an interlibrary loan-”
“Archives,” Rae says, thinking of the stories she read, the recent ones-the ones that weren’t any help, but it was worth a shot, wasn’t it? “I’ll try that.”
The silent archives room upstairs becomes part of her new routine for a while; it’s only open normal business hours, so afterward she usually pursues more fruitless research online, but then what she’s finding in the archives isn’t helping much so far either. There is a catalog, sort of, and papers are organized enough that when she asks to look at anything about wolves, she gets a stack of just about everything that mentions hunting, but mostly it’s a matter of skimming every single document to see if it’s remotely useful.
When the papers on wolves run out without giving her anything, she thinks to ask about unusual diseases, and mostly that’s tragic accounts of devastating epidemics-still not helpful, and far from comforting. Then she stumbles across the personal journal of a missionary to one of the more isolated areas, at least a hundred years old, and begins paging through it carefully so the pages won’t crack apart.
The entries are mostly terse and impersonal, accounts of the day’s happenings with scattered mentions of conversations with natives who expressed interest in the Gospel and a lot more mentions of the weather (the missionary obviously came from a much warmer climate). It’s interesting, especially since she hasn’t studied that much local history, but it still isn’t helpful-and then she finally sees why the journal has anything to do with “unusual diseases.”
She barely notices the first relevant entry, it’s such an offhand reference-the missionary’s wife had some training as a nurse and provided medical services on a regular basis, so a new patient isn’t unusual. What’s odd is his speculation an entry or two later that he’s not being told everything about this illness and that the young man seems reasonably healthy, if fearful, and then he adds, “Wondering if it’s the wrong moon.”
Rae sits back and stares at this statement, some overpowering emotion-she’s not sure if it’s hope or fear-rising in her chest. She tells herself that this could mean nothing, could easily mean nothing at all, just a term that the missionary picked up from the natives, maybe (did they even mark time in moons here?), and then tells herself that she’s being an idiot and won’t find out anything unless she reads on.
She does. The he missionary never names or describes the mystery illness, not exactly-in fact he skips several days and when he does write his entries are even briefer than usual, mentioning a “project” that is taking most of his time-“but at least he told the truth when he understood I’d not condemn him for it.” He mentions writing home for an old family story, says he wasn’t sure until now whether he could believe it; at another point he speculates that “the wolf moon or sanguine moon may be needed. Convergence?” Rae takes a research detour, learns that each full moon has had its own name since ____, all drawn from Native American legends. ___ is the Wolf Moon; ___ is the Hunter’s Moon, the Blood Moon, the Sanguine Moon.
(She dreams of a blood-red moon that night.)
The journal’s long and she can’t take it home with her, can’t even take it from the archives room or make copies, so for three days in a row she spends all her after-school time with it, reading and taking notes on almost everything, because she doesn’t trust herself to know what’s really weighted with hidden meaning and what’s just her own hope or excitement or paranoia. Food isn’t allowed in the archival room, but then it’s pretty generally frowned upon in the library anyway, so she’s already used to ignoring a growling stomach.
“Tried a few additional methods,” the journal says, “no result. To be expected but still disappointing. Waiting to hear more from home.” Rae pages forward, hoping the letter itself will be preserved here too, but it’s only the same small, precise handwriting, and no loose pages flutter free.
He does mention a letter, eventually, and the dates skip another week before he reports the patient’s unwillingness to try-whatever was in the letter and the legend, apparently, and he doesn’t say. Then there are half a dozen entries about the school he’s started, conversion efforts, his struggle to confine a flu outbreak. Rae finds herself skimming these pages and then jumping back to them in something like panic, afraid she’s skipped over something important.
Then, at the end of a new entry: “Spoke to the daughter yesterday; she wants to try, insists on secrecy. Troubled at heart to go against his wishes or to endanger her, but she claims to understand risks, says she cannot lose more family.” Rae pages back again. Yes-the flu epidemic could have killed them; she knows a little something from school about local history and the diseases that came with white settlers, diseases that sometimes wiped out whole villages. The missionary still hasn’t mentioned the name of his maybe-werewolf, but he does list the dead, and several have the same family name. She turns back: “Likely that we have only the one chance, so no experimenting this time; tomorrow is Sanguine Moon.”
Rae stares at this single line for several seconds and then begins flipping pages again, hunting for another mention of…whatever he did. Surely he’ll say whether it worked.
He doesn’t. Not a word.
She sits back, clenching both fists in her lap so she won’t take out her frustrations on the old journal itself.
She thanks anybody who might be listening for the internet: half a dozen old manuscripts exist electronically in scans, a world away from originals she doesn’t have time or money to visit.
She tells him, sticking to the nutshell version so he won’t interrupt, and doesn’t let the firmness leave her voice for a second. Bad enough that she has her own doubts; there’s no reason to let Jeremy know.
For a long moment he just stares at her, his mouth opening once to speak and then closing again as if his brain hasn’t entirely decided what message to send, and Rae starts wondering if maybe he’s not as sober as she hoped. The he says, “What the hell, Rae.”
“Have you got any better ideas, then? This is it. It’s the only thing I’ve found that might actually work.”
“The only-might work-are you completely insane? You dug up some-random fairy tale and you think it’s going to magically turn Dad back into something other than a raging asshole?”
Rae doesn’t let him see her flinch. He’s already coming too close to what she’s been thinking. “It’s a legend, an old one, but it’s been passed down through one family for a long time and it looks like it actually worked, here, within the last couple centuries, and-and it feels right, okay? It makes sense, none of the other cures ever did, and-” He’s still staring at her and she’s talking too much; she can feel her voice and resolve beginning to fray. “Look, just read it.”
She feels thoroughly sick already, although she doesn’t know if it’s fear or if it’s the wolfsbane taking effect already. She doesn’t mention this to Jeremy; he’s reluctant enough to let her do this, and they really don’t have money for Poison Control or something anyway.
“I don’t need to be in there long,” she says, gripping his arm, more to keep herself moving forward than anything, “just long enough-I mean, you’ve seen him, he’ll probably-go for me right away-”
“I don’t think me letting you stay in there too long is going to be the issue,” Jeremy mutters.
The wolf howls, and his body slams against the side of the shed. Rae swallows hard, trying not to throw up, and then pulls off her jacket and drops it to the ground. Jeremy unlocks the shed door, bracing against it to hold it shut until they’re ready. “You know I think this whole thing is insane, but if he’s really got to bite you, can’t you just stick your arm in or something?”
“I’m pretty sure I have to be…you know, in a position where he could actually kill me. That’s what it sounds like.”
Jeremy spits out an oath and yanks the door open, just far enough for Rae to squeeze inside, and then she’s alone in a small dark space with an animal who really, really wants to kill her, no light except the light of the full moon filtering through cracks near the roof, and Jeremy’s right, she must be out of her mind, and she backs into the corner just before the wolf lunges. She gets a millisecond’s warning, the gleam of eyes in the dark, and then she’s crushed against the wall and teeth fasten around her arm.
The wolf yanks her down, skin and muscle tearing-and then it’s over that fast, the teeth let go, and Jeremy’s pulled the door open again and is hauling her out, and there’s blood again but this time it’s hers, hot and wet and slippery, and her arm hurts, but she only half-notices any of that, because she’s still staring at the wolf: he’s backed up, every muscle tense, and something is happening to his eyes.
“Wait,” she says, grabbing at Jeremy’s hand as he starts to slam the door closed again, “wait-”
The wolf is frozen, his eyes fixed on both of them, and then he shudders, staggers out of the shed, and the change takes him.
It’s longer than usual, maybe just a little more violent. Rae feels Jeremy backing away, pulling her with him, but she can’t look at anything except the wolf, and she maybe isn’t breathing but she barely notice that either.
Dad collapses in the grass, moonlight falling on his human body, and Rae can’t think anything except: it’s enough. It was enough. Wolfsbane, the daughter’s blood, the Blood Moon, the willing sacrifice. She doesn’t know if she might have just given herself lycanthropy instead, although she doesn’t think so-that was half the point of the wolfsbane in her blood anyway-but when Dad’s eyes open, she really doesn’t care about anything else.
Jeremy’s hand tightens on Rae’s shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Dad…?”
Dad half sits up and blinks at them, and then his eyes widen in horrified recognition. “What are you-you can’t-” He focuses on Rae’s arm, at the blood still dripping into the grass. “Oh, God-”
Rae shakes her head and points up at the moon. “It’s okay. Look. It’s still full.” He stares at her, not comprehending, and she feels herself starting to smile for the first time in-a long while, probably. “I did it. It’s gone. I think…you’re cured.”
Dad looks upward, then at his hands, grass-stained and very human, and whispers again, “Oh, God,” but now his tone matches what Rae’s feeling.
Jeremy helps him up, and the yard is still full of shadows as they make their way back to the house-but for the first time in years, the light of the full moon that outlines every grass-blade in silver feels like a benediction.