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“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.
The vampire holds his paper sack out and waits for whatever the next part is.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_93db5b0c-3db4-5988-a3dd-a01449912ab0)
American Ninja (#ulink_93db5b0c-3db4-5988-a3dd-a01449912ab0)
We were in Portales, New Mexico, just long enough for me to wear a dog path between the back door of our trailer and the burn barrels. That’s what Darren called it when he came through, and then he’d punch me in the shoulder and get down in a fighting stance, his shoulders curled around his chest like he was a boxer, not a biter. Sometimes it would turn into a wrestling match in the living room, at least until a lamp got broke or Libby’s coffee got spilled—I was twelve and tall by then, needed a yard to wrestle in, not a living room—and other times I’d just hike another half-full trash bag over my shoulder, slope out the back door again.
Because night was falling. Because night’s always falling, when you’re a werewolf.
There were eighty-nine steps to the burn barrels.
And it wasn’t a dog path.
That was just Darren funning me about not having shifted yet. It was probably supposed to be him reminding me not to worry, that I was like him, I was like Libby, I was like Grandpa.
It didn’t feel that way.
I didn’t mind the trash runs, though.
You can always tell who might be a werewolf by if they’re careful like we are, to take the trash out each night, even if it’s just a little bit full. Even if it’s just wasting a trash bag. But I wouldn’t waste them. I’d upend the day’s leavings into the flaky black drums, tuck the white bag into my pocket, use it again the next day.
What I was doing was making deals. With the world.
I’ll take care of you, you take care of me, cool?
Darren had told me that the first time he shifted it was three years early, and that had triggered Libby to shift, and my mom, she hadn’t even flinched, had just stood and pulled the kitchen door shut so they couldn’t get out, and then cornered Darren and Libby with the business end of a small broom until Grandpa got home.
Three years early would put Darren and Libby at about ten.
I was coming in late, it looked like.
If ever.
Libby never said it out loud, but I could tell she was pulling for “never.” She didn’t want her and Darren’s life for me—moving every few months, driving cars until they threw a rod then walking away from them to the next car. She wanted me to be the one who sneaked through without getting that taste for raw meat. She wanted me to be the one who got to have a normal life, in town.
We’re werewolves, though.
Each night at dusk one of us leans out the door to burn the trash, just because we all know what can happen if that trash is left in the kitchen: Somebody’ll go wolf in the night, and because shifting burns up every last bit of fat reserves you have and even leaves you in the hole for more, the first thing you think once you’re wolf—the only thing you can think, if you’re just starting out—is food.
It’s not a choice, it’s just survival. You eat whatever’s there, and fast, be it the people sleeping around you at the rest stop or, if you’ve got a trailer rented for four months, the kitchen trash.
It sounds stupid, but it’s true.
When we first open our eyes as werewolves, the trash is so fragrant, so perfect, so right there.
Except.
There’s things in there you can’t digest, I don’t care how bad you are.
Ever wake up with the ragged lid of a tin can in your gut? Darren says it’s like a circle-saw blade, in first gear. But it’s only because you’re so delicate in the morning, so human. Even a twist tie can stab through the lining of your stomach.
The wolf doesn’t know any better, just knows to eat it all, and fast, and now.
Come daylight, though—so many werewolves die this way, Libby had told me once. So many die with a broke-tined fork stabbing them open from the inside. With a discarded but whole beef rib pushing through their spleen, their pancreas. She said she’d even heard of somebody dying from a house dog that had had its pelvis put together with a metal rod. That metal rod, it went down the wolf’s throat fine, along with the crunchy domestic bones, but in the morning, for the man, it was a spear.
Libby had stopped meaningfully on spear, settled me in her stare to make sure I was paying the right kind of attention.
I had been. Sort of.
Because I was sure I was going to shift just any night now, was going to pad on all fours down the long hall from my bedroom at any moment, sniff at the coffee table then turn my attention to the much richer scent of the kitchen—because that was definitely going to happen, I always lugged the trash out. Never mind that Libby’d always been careful to not leave steel wool or bleach containers in there. Never mind that we kept a jug of black pepper right there on the counter, to sprinkle onto the trash as it built through the day.
I’d be able to smell through that, I knew.
I was going to be that kind of werewolf. In spite of Libby’s prayers.
The life she wanted for me, it was the life my mom should have had, the life that, her not being a werewolf, should have been mine by birthright. But something had gone haywire. Just once, or just waiting, though? That was the part her and Darren couldn’t figure. I had the blood, but was that blood ever going to rise again, or had it been a onetime thing? With Grandpa five years gone, there weren’t even any old-timers to ask. Had this happened before? Had there ever been somebody like me?
There had to have been.
Werewolves have always been here. Every variation of us, it has to have happened at some point.
Just, it’s the remembering that’s tricky.
Until we knew for sure one way or the other, Libby was packing my head with facts, like trying to scare me back across the line.
Driving here from East Texas, the big Delta 88 eating up the miles, the trunk empty because all our stuff had burned a move or two ago, she’d evened her voice out to sound like a safety pamphlet and recounted all the ways we usually die. It was the werewolf version of The Talk. Just, with more dead bodies.
It took nearly the whole ten hours, no radio, no books, nothing. I stared a hole into the dashboard, not wanting to let her see how perfect all this was. How much I was loving every single wonderful fact.
She’d already told me about the trash.
The rest, though—being a werewolf, it’s a game of Russian roulette, Darren would say. It’s waking up every morning with that gun to your temple. And then he’d snap his teeth over the end of that sentence and give a yip or two, and I’d have to look away so Libby wouldn’t see me smiling, I wanted to be him so bad.
What he was doing those four months we were in New Mexico—the farthest west we’d ever been since splitting east out of Arkansas once and forever—was dragging trailer homes between Portales and Raton, up in Colorado. And if the p-traps of those kitchens and bathrooms were packed with baggies of anything, then he didn’t know about it, anyway.
His logbooks were meticulous, his plates screwed on top and bottom, and his license wasn’t even expired, for once. It wasn’t his name on that license, but, other than that, he was completely legal, right down to the depth of the tread on his tires.
His bosses insisted.
Libby didn’t approve, but you do what you can.
And, up in his truck, the only werewolf death he really had to worry about was that old one of going wolf up in the cab, behind the wheel.
According to Libby, that’s the main way most werewolves cash out. Not always in cab-over rigs on a six-percent grade, the jake brake screaming, but on the road at highway speed, anyway. Usually it’s just making a run to the gas station for ketchup packets. Somebody cuts you off and you wrap your fingers extra tight around the steering wheel, until the tendons in the backs of your fingers start popping into their canine shape. At which point you reach up for the rearview to check yourself, to see if this is really and truly happening. Only, the rearview, it comes off in what’s now your long-fingered paw. And, if the glue’s good, then maybe a piece of the windshield craters out with the mirror, and you know how goddamn much that’s going to cost, and thinking cusswords in your head, that’s no way to hold back the transformation.
