TWENTY-NINE

I was sitting in the examining room when Red burst in. I watched his eyes as he took in the scene: the sterile, pale hospital green walls and strong overhead lights which make everything, even childbirth, look so much more dire; me looking wild and disheveled in my crushed velvet Witch of Camelot dress, ruined hands held out as if in supplication. For a moment, he looked as if he were going to cry. Then he came forward and knelt at the floor by my feet.

 

“Jesus, Doc, you okay?”

 

I held Red's gaze as the startled young intern turned back to my hands. Hazel eyes, so much easier to read than Hunter's dark brown. “Not really,” I said. “I burned my hands.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I'm supposed to be taking care of my mother's animals.”

 

“You need taking care of yourself, Doc.”

 

The intern, who had been examining my hands, paused. “How old are these burns?”

 

“I don't know. Half an hour. An hour.” I sniffed loudly, like a six-year-old. “When do I go into the OR?” Red put his hand on my shoulder.

 

“Lady, these burns are at least a week old. Who treated you initially?”

 

I stared into the intern's round face. He had large, dark pores and one thick unibrow which stretched across both eyes, making him look permanently irritated and puzzled. “The EMTs treated me about half an hour ago. What are you talking about, a week old? There was exposed adipose, charred tissue …”

 

“Are you a doctor?” The doughy face with its villainous brow looked even more irritated and puzzled than before.

 

“No, a vet.”

 

“Well.” He held out my hands as if they were exhibit A. The flesh on my palms was bright pink, horrible to look at, but still, not anywhere near as damaged as it had been forty minutes earlier. “These wounds show substantial healing, wouldn't you say? More than an hour's worth, clearly.”

 

I stared at my palms, raw with new skin. “I don't understand it. I swear to you, this happened only a short time ago.”

 

“Look, I'm not going to argue with you. I'll just put on a dry sterile dressing and give you some supplies to take home. You'll still need some help with the rebandaging.”

 

“I don't have any help.” My voice came out thin and small, embarrassing me. I felt that the intern disapproved of me, and this bothered me, too.

 

“Abra, where's Hunter?” I turned to the owner of that soft Texas drawl and felt calmer. Red, unable to take my hand, had decided to hold both my shoulders. I couldn't see his face, but I could feel his chest behind my head.

 

“He's home.” The intern wrapped and snipped.

 

“And you are …”

 

It was lovely not to have to look at him. “Staying at my mother's. At Beast Castle.”

 

Red didn't react right away to the news that my mother was the vampire screen queen Piper LeFever. Instead, he just took a deep breath and said, “I see.” Then his grip on my shoulders tightened, and I realized I was crying.

 

“All right,” said the intern, “that's done. So you'll be taking her home? I need to give you some instructions.”

 

I stared at the intern's ear. He was not looking at me anymore. “Wait a minute. That's it? Don't I need IV antibiotics?”

 

“Ma'am, you may have needed that a week ago, but not today.”

 

I looked at Red for support. “But there was charring, tissue damage, loss of sensation …”

 

“Listen, ma'am, you can wait to speak with the admitting doctor who saw you first, or you can look at your chart—second-degree burns.” The intern pulled his latex gloves off with a flourish. “Now, do you want the instructions, or not?”

 

Red placed one hand on my shoulder, and said, “We'll take the instructions—boy.”

 

I didn't pay attention as the surly intern told Red how to care for my injured paws. As we were about to leave, a tall woman in a tomato red jacket came up to me. Her blond hair had been sculpted into a shape faintly reminiscent of a turkey, and I wondered if this was intentional, as a nod to the holiday.

 

“Are you Ms. Barrow? I'm sorry, but we weren't able to find a number for the contact you gave us.” She checked her file. “Red Mallin. Is there anyone else I can try to call for you?”

 

I turned to Red, confused. “But someone must have called him.”

 

“No,” the woman said, rechecking her information. “We tried, but there's no number available from Information.”

 

“It's okay,” Red said, giving the woman an easy smile. “I got here, and that's the important thing. Now, I guess I'd better take this lady home.” As the lady in the red jacket frowned in puzzlement, I let Red put his arm around my shoulders and guide me out of the hospital without comment, aware of his head, not so far above mine, and of his lean strength. He half-lifted me into the passenger side of his pickup truck and then walked around to the driver's seat.

 

“You're not in shock, are you, Doc?”

 

“I should be. They were third-degree burns.”

 

It is not so easy to lean across the interior of a pickup truck, particularly one with a stick shift. Red managed it, his hand under my chin, forcing me to look at him.

 

“I know they were, Doc. But by the time that little shitheel looked at you, they were healed up some.”

 

“That's impossible.”

 

“I would have smelled the deep tissue if it had been exposed. You won't be havin' the use of your hands for a while yet, and the rest of the healing's gonna take a mite longer, but you don't have third-degree burns, I can assure you of that.”

 

“Red, burns just don't heal up that way. Especially deep tissue damage. It doesn't just go away.”

 

Red stroked the underside of my jaw with his thumb. “It does when your husband gives you a dose of what your husband did.”

 

A jazzy little jingle from an old public ser vice announcement flashed through my mind: VD Gets Around! No wonder Red hadn't wanted to make love with me that night. And then I realized what he was really saying. “You've known all along, haven't you? About the virus?” Red nodded. “But he said I couldn't catch it. There has to be a genetic predisposition.”

 

His hand came up to the back of my head, and he leaned his forehead to rest against mine. “I guess you're predisposed.”

 

“You know, in all the movies I've ever seen, you can only catch this from a werewolf in wolf form.”

 

Red started the car. “That part's pretty accurate.”

 

“But Hunter never—I've never seen him turn into a wolf, and he sure didn't bite me.”

 

Red looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, turning on his headlights, “it doesn't have to be blood-to-blood transmission. And if, you know, you were tired or a little tipsy one night …” His voice trailed off.

 

That night, after I'd drunk wine and smoked pot with Red. When Hunter's back had seemed to ripple underneath my touch. I curled up in the seat as far as the belt would allow, my head turned toward the window. “Just take me home.”

 

It was very dark and the headlights cast a weak beam over the winding roads, but Red seemed to know his way. For a moment, I remembered that I hadn't asked Red how he'd known to come to the hospital if no one had contacted him. And then I wondered why an animal removal operator would have an unlisted number. But before I could form any questions, I nodded off, and when I woke up I thought, for a moment, that I was a child again, and my father was carrying me to my bed.

 

He's really very strong, I thought, as Red settled me down and pulled back the covers.

 

“I have insomnia, you know. I'm not going to just fall asleep.”

 

Red turned the light off. “You always have trouble?”

 

I yawned. “For the past few years.”

 

The bed dipped with Red's weight. “Anything help? Hypnosis, exercise, massage, sex?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Maybe you're one of those people meant to stay up most of the night and sleep all day.”

 

I leaned back and found my head on Red's arm. How warm he was. “But I want to go to sleep now. I just know I won't be able to.”

 

“Just lie here and let me rub your back.”

 

“That doesn't work.”

 

Red moved his hand up until it was on my stomach. “Roll over,” he said.

 

I turned, and he pulled my dress up at the same time as he covered me with the sheet. With his hand against my naked skin, he began tracing some sort of letters on my back. “This is silly, Red.”

 

“Shh. Don't try to look. Just breathe. Relax.”

 

I closed my eyes and he traced some foreign alphabet down my spine, to the very edge of my underwear, and then back up again. “I tried to call you. After that night with the storm.”

 

“I know. I'm sorry, Red.” I took a breath, then forced myself to say it. “I found out I'm pregnant with Hunter's child.”

 

Red didn't say anything, but his hand stilled for a moment before resuming its slow rhythmic stroking of my back. His touch was soothing in its certainty, and I found myself half-wishing his hand would move lower. Pregnancy hormones, I thought. Not my fault. After a while we left the room and were standing in the forest, and Red was a wolf that kept running ahead.

 

“Hold on,” I said, “I can't keep up with you.” But he'd scented a rabbit or something and kept lunging forward, and by the time I caught up with him he'd been sprayed by a skunk and sat with his tail tucked between his legs.

 

“You really are an idiot, Red.”

 

“You'll never make love to me now,” he said, and I put an arm around him, thinking, Oh, what the hell, at least he isn't screwing around.

 

 

THIRTY

The three little words “I fell asleep” may sound simple to some, but to me they are a rare and elusive delight. Whether it was emotional or physical exhaustion, or the unexpected security of Red's embrace, I slept in his arms better than I had slept in all my years in my husband's bed.

 

I awoke to find myself curled into a fetal position, my bandaged hands crossed in front of me, my dress balled up around my waist. Red was nestled against my back. I'd read once that the happiest couples slept this way. “Tell If Your Relationship Is Happy From Your Sleep Styles,” or some such article. Hunter and I slept on opposite sides of the bed, or else I spooned around him, because he claimed his once-broken nose did not permit him to lie on his left side, facing me.

 

Red held me with loose possessiveness, one hand across my lower abdomen.

 

“Red?”

 

“Mmm.” He sleepily pressed his erection against my bottom, and for a moment, without thinking, I pressed back. Then he groaned and woke up, although I could feel him pretending not to.

 

“Red? I need to go to the bathroom.”

 

“What? Oh. Right.” He sat up, tousled and almost boyish with his hair tufted in different directions. He wore boxer shorts, dark red ones. I realized he'd gained weight since I'd first met him, that late summer day in the subway. He was carrying a good fifteen more pounds, all of it muscle now padding his shoulders and ribs.

 

I walked self-consciously to my mother's bathroom and then confronted the predicament of being without opposable thumbs in a floor-length gown. I don't know how long I might have continued standing there had Red not knocked on the door.

 

“Need help?”

 

“No!”

 

“Sure about that?”

 

“Oh, Christ, Red, I have no idea how to do this.”

 

Red opened the door, and I was slightly amused to note that his face was scarlet. “I could, ah, lift the skirt.”

 

Now my face was scarlet. “I can't even wipe myself. Oh, God, Red, I can't do this with you here, I need a nurse, I should still be in the hospital.”

 

“I'm a former EMT.”

 

“You are?”

 

“Couldn't take all the dead children. Seems each July a good ten children would wind up in the bottom of pools and lakes. But anyway, I'm still a professional. Your privates are safe with me.”

 

We both burst out laughing the kind of relieved, embarrassed laughter that lasts too long and sounds too loud. But when you have to go to the bathroom badly enough, in the end, that's all you can think about. “Just help me out of the dress.”

 

He did, looking away from my naked breasts. The dress hadn't left room for a bra. I had a moment to remember that I was wearing ratty cotton pan ties, and then Red caught my eye. “Anything else?”

 

My cheeks burned. “Don't look.”

 

Red knelt and helped me out of my pan ties, carefully looking down all the time. At my pan ties.

 

“Leave now!”

 

Red raised one eyebrow. “What, ah, can I do with these?” He held out my underwear, which looked very small in his large palm.

 

“Leave them!”

 

He closed the door, and, after a moment, my bladder relaxed enough to function. I shook myself, flushed the toilet with my right foot, and managed to use my clumsily bandaged paws to get a plush purple towel wrapped around my body. I positioned myself in as ladylike a fashion as I could manage on the toilet seat before calling out.

 

“Red? Could you—do you think you could run a little bath for me?”

 

“Sure.” He came in, still bare except for the boxers, but wearing a nurse's expression, very kindly and matter-of-fact. He crouched down to reach the bath taps and I admired the width of his shoulders and the lean shape of his back. When he turned to me I found myself looking at the ridges of muscle that ran down his abdomen. I looked up and found that Red was smiling; he'd left his shirt off on purpose.

 

“Want me to put your hair up?”

 

I was surprised he'd thought of it. “Yes, please. It takes forever to dry.”

 

Red got my brush out of my suitcase and worked it through my hair in long, sure strokes, holding my hair in his left hand so he didn't pull at my scalp when he hit a knot.

 

“You're good at this.”

 

“I've worked with horses,” he said, and I laughed. “Is there a hairband somewhere—ah, here on the brush handle.” He caught my hair in a high ponytail, then wrapped it into a loose bun. In a sort of trance, I found myself wishing he could just go on brushing it.

 

“Thank you,” I said, thinking, Hunter may have loved my hair, but he never offered to do this. It would never have occurred to him.

 

“If I had my choice, I'd brush your hair every night of my life,” Red said quietly. Then, before I could respond, he added, “Let me help you into the bath, Doc.”

 

I snorted. “I don't think so.”

 

“C'mon, you can trust me, I'll keep my eyes to myself.” He held out his hand and grasped me around the wrist, and a little shock of awareness shot through me. As I climbed in I saw that yes, he was looking away, and yes, he was definitely affected. His boxer shorts were standing up in front as if they'd been starched.

 

I sat down in the bath with a slosh of water and Red moved so that his back was facing me.

 

“You in okay?” His voice sounded throaty.

 

“I'm in.”

 

“Need soaping?”

 

“Now, just how far do your medical ser vices extend?”

 

Red turned around and I sank lower in the tub. “At the moment, Doc, they're pretty extensive.”

 

“Well, I do have a toothbrush in my bag …” And then I remembered something that drained all the humor out of me. “Red, this is probably not an appropriate time for me to be flirting, let alone anything more.” I took a deep breath. “I'm pregnant.”

 

Red cocked his head to one side, considering. “Listen, Doc, I don't like to be the one to break this to you, but I'm pretty sure you're not.”

 

“What do you mean you're pretty sure I'm not? I've gone to the doctor. It's confirmed.” And then I remembered her concern about some of my hormone levels.

 

Red crouched down on his heels, so that his face was more or less level with mine. “It's the virus,” he explained. “It'll play all hell with your hormones at first, and then …” He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “You don't smell pregnant,” he finished, although I had the sense that he'd started to say something else and then changed his mind. “Not to make you feel self-conscious, Doc, but you smell like you're close to the change.” He cleared his throat. “Which means, uh, that you're also getting your period.”

 

I cried out in dismay. It was too much, too fast. I'd just been told that everything I'd been building my life around was false, and even though I understood on one level that there was no baby, I felt as though I'd just lost one.

 

Red moved toward me as if to draw me into an embrace, and I began to flail my arms at him, striking out blindly. Water splashed, wetting his chest, his shorts.

 

“It's not fair,” I kept saying. “Not fair.”

 

“I know, darlin', I know.” He knelt beside me, our bodies separated only by the porcelain rim of the tub, his hands stroking the back of my head, animal-tamer hands, calming and wise. But my heartbeat was tripping over itself, unable to slow down. “I'm here. I'm going to take care of you.”

 

“I'm not pregnant,” I said, trying to get used to the idea. I recalled the doctor telling me that my hormone levels were unusual. “I never was pregnant.”

 

I felt his hands grow still and pulled back to see his expression. He must have known, or else he controlled his reactions better than anyone I'd ever met.

 

“Did you really want to be?”

 

“Yes.” But I was looking into his eyes, and know he saw that the truth was more complicated than that.

 

Red slipped his hands around to cup my face. “Abra,” he said, then stopped to take a breath before starting again. “I'm sorry about the pregnancy, because I want for you what ever you want for yourself. But in a way, I guess I'm not sorry, because it might have made you stay with Hunter. And even though you probably know it, I'll say it anyway. I'm in love with you.” Red looked at me with a look of such intensity that I found it hard to keep meeting his eyes. “I've never said this to another woman, Doc—I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

 

And then, because I didn't know how to respond, I said, “Do you know that my father had a television series back in the eighties?”

 

Red shook his head, clearly befuddled.

 

“Well, he did. It was called I Married a Werewolf. Pretty ironic, huh?” And then I found myself laughing until tears ran out of my eyes. I guess Red must have thought I was laughing a little too hard, because he started stroking my hair and murmuring to me as though I were crying.

 

“I went too fast,” he said. “I'm sorry, Doc, I rushed you.”

 

“No, no, I'm sorry.” I looked at him, realizing how vulnerable he must be feeling. “I remember Halloween. How you—what I did to you, how you changed …” I stopped because I was naked in the bath, and I had just reminded Red of how I'd been desperate to have him in my mouth. Recalling it, I felt a rush of heat between my thighs. “How was it for you when you first found out you had the virus?”

 

Red cleared his throat again. “It's a little different for me, Doc.” His amber eyes flared gold, their pupils dilating.

 

“Your eyes—did they just—glow?”

 

“You have no idea how much I want your mouth on me again. How much I want to put my mouth on you. Ah, God.” Red went up on his knees and wrapped his arms around me, and I could feel the waves of desire rolling through him, making him shake as my wet body soaked through his clothes. “Let me put my mouth on you.” He kissed my damp hair, my forehead, and then he was kissing me on the mouth, a deep, ravenous kiss that he broke off, gasping for breath. “Abra, oh, God.” He leaned over and took one of my nipples in his mouth, suckling so strongly that I felt my response between my legs. As if he knew, he switched his attention to the other breast and reached down to touch me, his callused fingers surprisingly deft and gentle—more so than Hunter's had ever been.

 

“You're so slick down there—ah, Jesus, woman,” Red said, and just as his light, skimming touch made me want a deeper contact, his finger began to slide inside me. But thinking of Hunter had broken the spell.

 

“Hey, hang on—slow down there,” I said. “You're moving too fast.” Despite myself, though, my internal muscles gave a little clench as he withdrew his finger.

 

“I'm sorry, Doc.” But he didn't look sorry; he inhaled my scent from his hand, and then, as if he couldn't help himself, tasted me on his skin. His eyes were bright with mischief and desire.

 

“It's just happening a little fast for me, Red.”

 

He pressed a kiss to the top of my collarbone. “I got you. You want me to help you out of there?”

 

“Thanks.”

 

Red lifted me out of the bathtub, and I realized that he was astonishingly strong, much more so than his wiry build suggested. He wrapped me in a towel, and said, “Do you want to see me do it?”

 

“Excuse me?” I wasn't sure what he was asking, but assumed it had something to do with sex.

 

Red grinned. “What I meant was, do you want to see me shift?”

 

“Oh.” I felt myself flush. “Yes. I would.”

 

“Okay. I can't quite concentrate like this. Do you have any clothes here?”

 

“In the other room.” I held the towel shut with my hands and walked into the bedroom, followed by Red. “That's my bag, over there,” I said.

 

“How about this?” Red held up a thick red flannel robe.

 

“That's fine.” I backed into it and let the towel drop. When I looked over my shoulder, I realized Red hadn't looked away this time.

 

“Jesus,” he said, his eyes wide. I instantly recognized the expression in his eyes. It was what Lilliana had always called the “My God you're naked and a goddess” look, and I had nodded and pretended I knew what she was talking about. It was such a wonderful reaction that I didn't have the heart to chide him. I belted the robe.

 

“Can you concentrate now?”

 

Red turned around. “You're still very naked under that, but—yeah, I can handle it.”

 

I sat on the bed, wrapping my arms around my knees. “So what happens now? We wait for the moon to rise?”

 

Red sat down beside me. “It's easier when the moon's full, like now, but I'm not a werewolf, so I can change at other times.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Lycanthropy's a virus. What I've got is more, ah, gene tic in nature. I'm Limmikin—a shapeshifter.”

 

“I've just accepted the idea that lycanthropy can actually turn people into werewolves—Unwolves—whatever. And now you're telling me there's more supernatural weirdness around?”

 

Red threw back his head and laughed, revealing canine teeth sharper than I remembered. “Doc, around these parts, I'm what passes for normal.”

 

I felt my eyebrows rising up. “So prove it.”

 

“Right here?”

 

“Right here. Turn into Red the coyote.”

 

Red flushed his splotchy, hectic redhead's blush. “A wolf. A red wolf, not a coyote.”

 

“I didn't mean to offend you.”

 

“I know I may not be quite as big as some of the timber wolves …”

 

“Sorry, I just remembered that in Texas, some red wolves had interbred with the local coyote populations …”

 

Now Red narrowed his eyes. “Coyotes are tricksters, Abra. I am not a coyote.”

 

“Okay, I believe you.”

 

Red stood up so that he was looking down on me and the bed. The look on his face made my breasts tingle and my nipples harden. “A Limmikin doesn't require the moon,” he said, his gaze dropping down to my mouth. “All that's required is that I be naked and in an ecstatic state.”

 

 

THIRTY-ONE

In a sense, all women are shapeshifters. But even though I'd thought I was pregnant until a short time ago, I had found it hard to imagine myself undergoing the dramatic transformation into moon-bellied hugeness. Picturing myself with an actual baby had been even harder. My mind had accepted it; my gut had not.

 

So even though I didn't think Red was lying, I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the image of him turning into a wolf, and imagining myself transforming felt even more outlandish.

 

Except that I still had the guilt-blurred memory of Halloween night, the sudden storm of intimacy between us, and the unexpected climax of that intimacy. My mother had always insisted that as a child, I'd had some sort of strongly empathic ability that I'd blocked out when I became a teenager. I would argue that I'd had a very good reason for embracing rationality as my religion, and in any case, doesn't every mother want to believe that her child is special, gifted, magic? Even when she knows she is only the absolutely plain and ordinary daughter of an extraordinarily vivid woman?

 

My defense had been to grow up and resolutely not believe in it, any of it—no to my mother's bags of aromatherapy herbs, no to her crystals and runes and astrology charts, no to her psychic dreams and votive candles and hand-painted leather voodoo charms.

 

Ye t here was Red, telling me if he just shucked his clothes and, presumably, his inhibitions, he could turn himself into a wolf. And if he could, then presumably, I could, too.

 

The one thing I'd wanted more than magic, as a child, had been to be a dog.

 

With all these things running through my mind, I couldn't quite sort out what to say when I opened my mouth. But Red seemed to understand. Because he knelt down between my thighs, as if he were about to propose, and waited.

 

“What do you need to do?”

 

Getting up to sit beside me on the bed, Red reached over to cradle my head between his hands, then raked his fingers through my hair, tugging gently at the hair-band until it came loose and my hair tumbled down my back. That almost familiar sensation his hands induced in me, a kind of mindless sensual relaxation, kicked in and I felt my eyes go heavy-lidded. “I need to take off my shorts. Anyone likely to come in here? Disturb us?”

 

I shook my head no. My mouth was kind of dry.

 

Red drew in a sharp breath. “Jesus, Abra, you smell … you smell like you want me.”

 

I swallowed, with difficulty. “I do, Red. But I'm not going to make love to you.” I couldn't. Not five minutes after believing myself pregnant with another man's child.

 

He nodded. “I just need to get a little—you know, reptile-brained. Instinctive. I can do it with the right ritual, or music, but that would take a while. Don't suppose you happen to have any pot?”

 

“My mother probably does but I have no idea where.”

 

“So it might be quickest if you—if you let me kiss you.”

 

“Just a kiss?”

 

Red's eyes crinkled with amusement. “Doc, a kiss done right is a pretty powerful thing.”

 

“All right then. Just a kiss.” As if I hadn't had my mouth on his penis a month ago.

 

Red pulled down his shorts. “One thing, though.”

 

“Yes?” I tried to look away, but it was hard. I mean—well, yes, I guess I meant that, too. I hadn't been with many men, and I hadn't really thought much about size before. It wasn't that Red was that much longer than Hunter—it was just that he was, well, thicker. And I couldn't help but wonder how that would feel. I put my thumb and finger around him, trying to measure.

 

Red gave a sharp gasp and his eyes closed. “Just … just wanted to mention that …” I moved my fingers slightly, and he moaned. “Wanted to … Jesus, wait, I can't think when you do that …”

 

“Yes?” I took my hand away.

 

Red swallowed hard and opened his eyes. “In my other state, I might not be as, ah, restrained.”

 

I nodded in mock-seriousness. “You think your dog-self is going to try to mount me?”

 

I guess the tone of my voice fell somewhat short of diplomatic. Red looked at me with something that was mostly amusement but ever so faintly tinged with annoyance. “Oh, just shut up,” he said, and kissed me.

 

At first it wasn't much, just a press of his thin lips to mine, just an angling of his jaw to set his mouth more firmly over my mouth, just his big hands cradling my cheek, my jaw. And then I became aware of his bare chest against my breasts, the red robe must have slipped down off my shoulders, and as I reached for it he took my wrists in his and held them captive, and that one small gesture did me in. I moaned, and the next thing I knew Red was biting his way down the side of my neck, sharp little nips like nothing Hunter had ever done. Red lifted one of my breasts, the skin underneath so sensitive it nearly hurt, and took one of my nipples between his teeth, sending a shock of painful plea sure straight down to my womb.

 

I grabbed ineffectually at his hair with my bandaged hands and he pulled his head away. “I thought you said just a kiss.”

 

Red grinned, and his eyes were an intent, wolfish yellow. “I lied,” he drawled, and buried his face between my breasts.

 

“Stop,” I said, and he opened his mouth wide, engulfing most of one small breast. My thighs fell open, and Red made a strange groaning sound. “Really stop,” I said, and tried bringing my knees together.

 

“Little pig, little pig, let me in.” His hands parted my legs.

 

“Red. Red!” I was crying now, and he looked up, all humor gone.

 

“Doc?”

 

He came up until my head was level with his strong chest and pulled me into his embrace. “Ah, Jesus, Doc, I'm sorry. Please, don't cry. I stopped, all right? I stopped.”

 

“Red.” I cried his name into his mouth and felt his startle, and then his comprehension. He started kissing me again, and again I could feel that barely restrained wildness in him, sharp teeth leaving faint marks of possession, my heart thudding with fear and excitement. But when his eyes met mine, I could feel the strength of his love for me, holding his hunger in check. This time, as he slipped down my thighs and I started to cry, he understood and held my wrists all the tighter, and I finally let myself go and wailed as he found me with his tongue.

 

He did not ask me if I was all right, thank God, and when he closed his teeth on the tender bud of my flesh I lost that tenuous sense of self separate and apart. In the moment when I seized his coarse hair with my damaged hands, in the moment when need became savage and primal and fierce, I threw my head back and howled and howled.

 

 

THIRTY-TWO

“Okay, so here's the problem—you're not a dog. Or wolf, or coyote, or any other canid form.”

 

We were lying in bed, my head on Red's chest, one of my legs thrown over his hip. We were not lovers by Bill Clinton's definition of the word. But we were definitely more than just friends.

 

“Well, no.” Red's fingers traced lazy patterns on my back.

 

“But you did say that all that was needed …”

 

“Was my being naked and in an ecstatic state. But here's the thing, darlin'—that was your ecstatic state.”

 

I leaned up on an elbow and planted that elbow in the middle of Red's chest. “But you said—”

 

Red had begun kissing the inside of my elbow where it dug into him. “I'm in love with you. I'm part wolf. I want to eat you up.”

 

I drew my knees in and sat up. “So why aren't I a wolf then, if I have lycanthropy?”

 

Red propped himself up on one elbow. “ ‘Cause the virus kicks in when it reaches a certain level in your bloodstream. If it kicks in—some are predisposed, some aren't. Also, it depends on the moon. And we're not within Northside's borders now—the town tends to have an amplifying effect on certain conditions.”

 

“You watch my mother's movies, don't you?”

 

“We need to change your bandages now.”

 

“Don't change the subject.” But I held out my hands as he gathered the gauze and antibiotic ointment.

 

“Well, would you look at that.” We stared at my hands as Red unwrapped the gauze. The skin was a paler shade of pink, the color I'd have expected to see in a burn two weeks old.

 

“Can you feel this, Doc?” He ran a finger over my palm.

 

I looked at his finger touching my palm. “No.”

 

“You're healing this fast because of the virus.”

 

I wiggled my fingers, then touched my knuckles. “I still can't feel anything.”

 

“Maybe if there was a complete change … Do you want me to try to bring it on?”

 

The rush of fear left me feeling almost sick. It wasn't a rational thing. I knew that even as I heard the breath hiss out of my teeth. “I don't know. I don't think I'm ready.”

 

Red gave me the kind of look I am used to in dogs: a look of perseverance. “I think you're readier than you know.”

 

The fear was gone, leaving something darker and more difficult in its wake. “Oh, Red.” I wondered if I was going to be able to love him back the way he deserved.

 

“How about this. Let me change. Then we'll work on changing you.”

 

“Fine, do it.”

 

Red raised one eyebrow. “This how you talk to all your gentlemen friends?”

 

I touched the side of his face. “Sorry. What should I say?”

 

He came closer, so close the tip of his nose touched mine. “Say, Hey, I never noticed how incredibly handso—” The phone rang.

 

We froze, looked at it. “Don't pick it up, Doc.”

 

“What if it's an emergency?”

 

I could feel his sigh in my hair. The answering machine clicked on as I sat up. “You have reached Beast Castle, a refuge for abandoned, abused, and unwanted cats and dogs,” said my mother's voice, incongruously sultry and dramatic. “We are currently tending to some of our animal patients. Please leave a message and one of our dedicated volunteers will get back to you shortly.”

 

“I am an extremely patient animal,” Red growled, getting up from the bed.

 

“Be quiet,” I said.

 

“Pagan? I'm calling from the airport to tell you that I'm catching an early flight back.” It was my mother, sounding more than a little stressed.

 

Red, moving more quickly than I would have expected, was there to lift the phone to my ear.

 

“Mom? It's me. Why are you coming back so soon?”

 

“Abra? Where's Pagan?”

 

“With her boyfriend. Mom, listen, I don't want you to get alarmed, but I have to tell you—”

 

“Wait a moment, they're announcing something—no. Abra, my flight should be in this evening, but they're experiencing some delays. I may be in late.”

 

I was looking into Red's eyes as I spoke to my mother. There was a band of dark green, another band of gold. His lashes were tipped with gold, and I traced my finger along the fan of crow's-feet which deepened with his smile.

 

“Mom, before you get here, I wanted to tell you what happened. Hunter and I had a—we had an argument.”

 

“It's the pregnancy. Hunter can't stand the thought of being tied down to anything. I've always told you that about him—he's an emotional sixteen-year-old. He wants you to be the home that he keeps leaving.”

 

As I watched, Red's eyes began to fill with tears of mirth. I realized he could hear every word my mother was saying.

 

“Mom, I'm not pregnant. It was a false positive. And I've left Hunter. But there's something else you need to know.”

 

“Wait a moment … Christ, another flight's been delayed. Abra, I need to get myself a drink before any more serious talking takes place. I just wanted to inform Pagan that I was coming back, not get into a whole emotional unburdening.” There was a pause while my mother snapped at someone standing too close to her that she was having a private conversation.

 

“Abra? Are you there? Listen, I realize that you are the daughter and therefore filled with your own concerns right now, but it would be nice to actually hear you ask me why I'm coming home a week ahead of schedule.”

 

I put my hand over Red's mouth to stop his snort of laughter, and he kissed my palm. “I don't need to ask, Mom. You're coming home because Grania broke up with you. She's emotionally immature and you caught her flirting with some other guest. Or spa worker. Male,” I guessed.

 

There was a momentary silence. “You think yours is the only drama that counts, don't you, Abra?”

 

“No, Mom, that would be you. What I've been trying to tell you for the past ten minutes is that I just burned my hands and—” The phone went dead with a click. Red and I stared at each other.

 

“Well,” he said.

 

“Meet my mother, the undead queen of psychodrama.”

 

“I guess I'd better go fix some coffee. Something tells me that you need it. We can always pick up where we left off a bit later.”

 

I didn't know what to say. I'd told him the truth when I'd said I couldn't just sleep with him—well, have sex with him, as I had slept with him. But then, lying on my back a few moments ago, I had rather lost my sense of boundaries. Had he pressed his advantage sooner, I would have said yes. Now that I was no longer aroused, however, I couldn't see myself taking the next step with this strange new man. But I couldn't exactly leave him stranded, either.

 

“Forget the coffee. Lie down on your back,” I said.

 

“No.”

 

“No?”

 

Red reached out and touched me on the side of my face. “This time I won't be able to keep control. If you do that for me—I can't promise not to take you. In any form.”

 

I stared at him. No man had ever seen me as the kind of woman who would make restraint impossible. “What do you suggest, then?”

 

Red scratched the back of his neck, his arm and shoulder muscles bunching. “Well, I do need to prove to you that there's more to me than meets the eye. If it can't be sex …”

 

“It can't.”

 

“Then it has to be beer and rock and roll.”

 

Since beer and rock don't really sit well before eight A.M., we spent the day pilling a few cats, taking a shivering greyhound's temperature, and putting ointment on the fungal Burmese. I noticed that the animals had a strange reaction to Red: At first, a few of the cats hissed and arched, but after a moment all of them became downright affectionate, rubbing against him and purring loudly. Most of the dogs were relaxed after they'd had a chance to sniff him. To my relief, they sniffed his breath, not his rear end. The Akita, never a stable character to begin with, did a little mad barking dance, but Red crouched down and smiled a particularly unfriendly smile, and then the Akita rolled over and writhed.

 

“So dogs don't mind the fact that you're an Unwol … Limmikin?”

 

“Most don't. I've got a good way with animals, in any case.” As if he were reading my mind, Red added, “You'll still be able to work as a vet, you know. During the time of month when you're transitioning, you'll smell like a cross between a menstruating female and one in estrus. But the animals aren't going to go white-eyed with terror—they'll just try to sniff your crotch a bit more than usual.”

 

Something to be grateful for, I supposed. At four o'clock I rested and discovered that in the forty-five minutes I'd been asleep, Red had cleaned out one of the spare guest rooms so it no longer smelled as badly of cat piss and mold. I moved my things in and looked out the window. It was not my childhood bedroom—that was the room Pagan was using. It was the room my father had liked best, overlooking the garden in back.

 

Red composed one note for my mother and another for Pagan, explaining about the animals, my hands, and the sleeping arrangements. Red seemed to be assuming that after the upcoming evening of boozy rock and possible shapeshifting, I would want him to leave me back here with my mother. I suppose that was the best way to handle things. My mother could help take care of me until I figured out what to do with the rest of my life. Or maybe I'd turn into an Unwolf and my hands would heal completely. I couldn't really say which outcome seemed more likely. My mother hadn't been much good at taking care of me when I was little, but then, I'd never turned into a hairy monster before, either.

 

At seven Red brushed out my hair and braided it, his hands firm and deft as he formed the plait. Then he helped me into a button-down shirt and jeans. “I guess no makeup,” I said, mostly to myself, as I looked in the mirror. I looked, in Hunter's words, nunlike.

 

“What do you need makeup for?” Red was buttoning the silver snaps on a jeans shirt.

 

“I just thought a little blusher, some lipstick …”

 

“Wait.” Red came up behind me and put his hands on my hips so I could see both of our reflections in the full-length mirror. Then he leaned in and kissed me on the pulse in my neck.

 

“What's that for?”

 

“Wait.”

 

He leaned in and turned my head till our lips met, and now the pulse between my legs throbbed. It seemed to take less and less for him to arouse me, as if I were becoming tuned to his frequency. When he released me, I looked at my reflection and saw flushed cheeks, red lips.

 

“You don't need artifice to look like sex, Abra. You look like sex.”

 

Since Red didn't know anyplace local, he drove us a full hour till we were back in Northside.

 

“So where are we going?”

 

“Somewhere they serve beer and rock and roll and I feel at home.”

 

“Oh, no. Red, you aren't taking me to Moondoggie's?”

 

“Yup. From what you said, your husband's going to be pretty busy stalking his mistress …”

 

“Very funny.” Despite Red's assurances, I really didn't want to go there. What if we did meet Hunter?

 

But when we arrived at Moondoggie's, Red went and stood at the door and inhaled, a deep breath as if gathering his nerve, though I knew better. He was checking out the joint.

 

“He's not here.”

 

How could he tell? All I could smell was beer and cigarettes.

 

The restaurant had a few elderly diners lingering over their turkey and yams, but the dark side of Moondoggie's was almost empty. The bartender to night, I noted with plea sure, was a burly, middle-aged brunette, not Kayla.

 

Red turned to me, and I realized he smelled faintly spicy, like cologne. “What do you want, Doc? Beer? Wine?”

 

“Just a soda. No caffeine.”

 

Red put his hand on the small of my back as he ordered. “Listen, Jelaine, mind if I put on some tunes?”

 

“You go right ahead, Red.”

 

“I want to open up the back patio. That suit you okay?”

 

The brunette lady laughed as she handed Red our drinks. “Hell, freeze your ass off if you want to, Red. It's your ass. You want glasses?”

 

They both looked at me. “Not if we're dancing,” I said, and they both laughed as if I'd been witty.

 

Red led me over to the jukebox, his hand on mine reminding me of high school dates. There was a lot of country western and eighties power rock, but Red seemed to know what he was looking for. He flipped rapidly from one selection to another, not asking my opinion.

 

“Come on, Abra, let's go.”

 

The back patio, which must have served as a dance floor in the warmer months, was lit with two red and two pink floodlights. Red opened the doors and I wished I'd put on a sweater underneath my wool jacket. Red put his beer and my ginger ale on the table and the first song came on, an old tune about dancing in the moonlight, a fine and natural sight. Red caught me around the waist and started moving, and to my surprise I found myself following with ease. I'd never been partnered by someone who knew how to lead so well that my feet just sort of fell into place. My bandaged hand crept from Red's palm to his shoulder and my hips began to roll more fluidly. Red half-closed his eyes and we turned neatly, almost in a country two-step.

 

“This is fantastic, Red!”

 

“Your husband doesn't dance?”

 

“No, I'm the one who doesn't dance.”

 

Red finished his beer and ordered another. The next song was faster and we moved apart, then together, and I threw back my head and laughed with the sheer delight of this kinetic flirting. Sweat was rolling down my forehead and between my breasts, but Red seemed impervious as the music shifted to something acoustic.

 

“May I?”

 

I walked into Red's arms as some band from the seventies crooned that they would believe in miracles if I would. We moved together, with only the hand on the small of my back guiding me. His breath smelled like yeast and hops. We were both sweating now.

 

“You ever listen carefully to the words of this song, Doc?”

 

I paid attention. There was a clear suggestion that the miracle in question could be achieved tantrically.

 

“We tried that, remember?”

 

Red playfully bit my ear. “We almost tried it.”

 

“Are you going to change soon? Are you close?”

 

“Abra.” He rocked me away from him, back into him. “Didn't you ever have some guy asking, Was that it? Did you come yet?”

 

“Oh, whoops.”

 

After that I just forgot about why we were there and enjoyed the evening. Two more couples came in and joined us on the patio, younger than us, teenagers. I became so relaxed that I didn't pay attention to the small kisses Red pressed to the tip of my collarbone, to the pulse behind my ear. I let him pick me up in an exuberant show of strength before sliding me down the length of his body, and if I danced away from him I moved right back in, so close that I knew that this was foreplay, and not just for shapeshifting.

 

And then we just stopped moving and looked at each other, and Red was sweating and unsmiling and his eyes were burning a deep gold color, and I could feel how badly he needed to get out of there.

 

“Let's go.”

 

He was following me so closely that he stumbled, and one of Red's friends called something out, but Red seemed sick, pale, and clumsy, and intent on me in a way even lust could not explain. He was following me as if I were the only beacon in a dark world.

 

“It's okay, Red, we're almost there.” I was leading him out into the bar area, toward the front door, the parking lot, our car. There were a few locals drinking post-Thanksgiving beers, big, bearded, deer-hunting types. If I'd been thinking more clearly, I would have taken Red out of the patio straight into the woods. But I meant well. I wanted to lead him home.

 

“Hello, Abs.”

 

I looked up at the bearded man with the fierce eyes, uncomprehending. And then I recognized him, despite the full black growth of facial hair.

 

It was my husband.

 

 

THIRTY-THREE

I had last seen Hunter clean-shaven on Thanksgiving morning. Less than twenty-four hours later, he was standing in front of me looking like a mean Grizzly Adams. And suddenly this whole lycanthropy thing didn't seem quite so far-fetched.

 

“Hunter!” He was wearing a black sweater, dark jeans. He looked like some sort of bearded assassin.

 

“Hello, Abra.” His nostrils flared, and I wondered what he was smelling on me. We became aware of Red at the same moment. I glanced behind me, hoping to see normal, watchful Red, laid-back and easygoing, hazel-eyed and cautious. And it was close. If you didn't notice the pallor, the yellow eyes, the patina of sweat. It was a good approximation of normal.

 

“Hello, Hunter.”

 

“Hello, Red. Fucking my wife yet?” Hunter leaned close, inhaled. “Ah. Not yet, I see. But you'll keep dogging her until there's a weak moment, is that it?”

 

Red smiled, and it wasn't friendly. His canines looked particularly sharp. “Seems like you've been a bit of a dog yourself, now.”

 

“She's got my baby in her belly.”

 

“Hunter!” Other people were listening. Kayla's colleagues and friends were listening.

 

“No, friend, I'm afraid she doesn't. It's the virus kicking in. She has it, too.”

 

“And what do you know about it, vermin catcher?” Hunter stood up, and I felt a cold wash of adrenaline sweep through me. I wasn't the only one sensing real violence in the air; the small crowd murmured and gathered itself for the coming fight.

 

“Take it outside, boys,” said Red's friend from behind the bar, who seemed to be speaking for the bar.

 

“Red, don't do this.” I held on to his arm. It didn't occur to me to hold on to my husband's.

 

Red glanced down at me and then lowered his mouth to mine. He brought his hand up to cup the back of my head and held me there while his tongue explored my mouth, and I tried to push him away. I could feel Hunter watching, feel the growing sense of excitement in the room. Lust and violence, now. “Delicious,” Red said, and then looked up at Hunter.

 

A direct challenge.

 

“Outside, Red. Let's discuss boundaries.”

 

Red grinned, and I could see a side of him I hadn't suspected. He was enjoying this. For him, there was a dark humor to the situation, while for my husband, there was nothing but fury and dented pride. “What, right outside, in front of all these folk?”

 

“You chicken?”

 

Red's eyes narrowed in what almost seemed like delight. “Well now, sticks and stones, Hunter, may break my bones, but name-calling, that's serious business. Your place or mine, sweetheart?”

 

“Mine.” Hunter gestured at me with a sideways turn of his thumb. “But Abra comes with me.”

 

“The hell you say.”

 

I put my injured hand on Red's shoulder. “No, it's okay.”

 

Red shook his head. “Don't do it, Doc.”

 

Hunter laughed. “You don't know her very well if you think that's going to work. Come on, Abs, let's take a drive.”

 

Thinking that I would have time to talk him out of this fight, I followed him out of Moondoggie's, shivering from cold and nerves. Red, just behind us, cursed under his breath. Overhead, the rising moon shone a spotlight on our little drama. “If you hurt her,” Red warned Hunter, “I'll hunt you down.”

 

Hunter looked over his shoulder. “I'm not going to hurt her, you moron.” He unlocked his car and I opened the passenger-side door. As Hunter started the engine, I saw Red watch us for a moment, his hands balled by his sides and his body coiled with tension, before he sprang for his car so that he could follow right behind us.

 

Like me, Hunter was observing Red in the rearview mirror, and for a moment, our glances met. “What the hell do you see in that asshole?”

 

“He's the opposite of you,” I retorted. Then, remembering why I was in the car with him, I said, “Tell me what the point is in you two fighting each other. It's not like he took me from you. It's not even that you want me back.”

 

“He trespassed,” Hunter said simply, turning onto a side road. “And besides, he wants the fight as much as I do.” Then he smiled, revealing sharp canines. “At least, he does now. In about twenty minutes, my guess is your new boy toy will have changed his mind.”

 

Hunter was right; he was bigger and stronger than Red, and this was not going to be an even contest. I wanted to plead, Don't fight him, but I wasn't sure that was even an option anymore. Somehow, I had gotten myself into a place where pangs of jealousy and possessiveness could become punches and bites that left visible wounds.

 

The moon seemed to follow us as we drove, sometimes dipping behind trees for a moment, then reappearing in a different position. I could see its light reflected in Hunter's dark eyes, and noticed that dark hairs had begun to sprout on the backs of his hands as they clutched the steering wheel.

 

I no longer tried to speak, and the silence between us felt so deep and weighted it seemed impossible that this was my husband, my old college friend, the charming rogue who'd singled me out and reinvented me as a desirable girlfriend after a lifetime of being the plain daughter.

 

If you are not Hunter anymore, I wanted to ask, then who am I?

 

The bearded stranger beside me parked the car at an angle and hopped down just as Red pulled up in his jeep.

 

“Doc, you'd better climb on up to the porch.”

 

As I walked toward the steps, I felt the crunch of dried leaves and fallen twigs underfoot. Pulling my coat more tightly around me, I wished with all my heart that I could find a way to stop this before it began.

 

“You first, Texas. Let's see it.”

 

Red took off his clothes and Hunter followed him, garment for garment, a kind of terse strip poker. Naked, my husband was taller, handsomer, broader. Red was more leanly muscled, hairier, balanced on the balls of his feet like an experienced fighter. He changed first, a ripple of movement through his muscles, then waves of transformation, spine curving, legs bowing, face elongating. Hunter was not so quick or so graceful about it, and I realized that his struggle was tied to the lunar phase. On this clear November night, the moon was so bright that you could see the details of her surface.

 

According to the calendar, we were one day shy of the full moon, but you could have fooled me.

 

When I looked back, Red was a wolf, a small one, short-coated, with a coyote's narrower muzzle and larger ears. He was not the great timber wolf of legend, but I hadn't been expecting that. I'd seen him this way before; I accepted it now.

 

But my husband writhed and screamed and panted, the change a painful one for him. And when it was done, he was a wolf man, like the creatures of B-movie lore. He hunched close to the ground, hairy and grotesque, clawed and splay-footed, and to the naked eye it looked as if there could be no contest. Red was a wolf. Hunter, my husband, was a monster.

 

Hunter stood there, yellow-eyed, breath fogging out over his fangs in the cooling night air. Red stalked toward him stiff-legged, his ruddy, gray-tipped fur bristling. From where I stood, safe on the porch, it looked like my husband would be having Red for lunch.

 

Then Hunter launched at Red, more like a man than a wolf, and the fight was over almost before it began. Red lunged up and snapped his jaws over Hunter's throat, and Hunter swung wildly left and right before dislodging his foe.

 

Like a good street fighter, Red took advantage of Hunter's momentary disorientation by darting in. He got a few good bites in to Hunter's flank and clawed hands, and I was clenching and unclenching my fists, worried now for my husband, when suddenly Hunter grabbed Red by the throat. Red twisted and writhed, and Hunter sank his fangs into the smaller wolf's side, missing his belly by only inches.

 

“Stop!” Galvanized, I tried to draw their attention back to me. “You're killing him!” But the creature that had been Hunter was beyond human recall. He would have disemboweled his rival then and there, except that the brief distraction had allowed Red to break free.

 

This time, as the opponents clashed, I could hear Red's whimpers along with his snarls. Though weakened and seriously injured, he seemed no less aggressive than before. Knowing dogs, I could see all the signs of a fight to the death.

 

“Submit, Red,” I whispered, but then he hurled himself at Hunter, biting hard at Hunter's calf. Hunter lashed out, catching Red right below one eye with his claw.

 

“That's enough! Stop!” Hunter was slashing at Red's belly again, and Red was refusing to back down. I had to end this now.

 

I ran down the steps knowing what might happen. You can't be a vet and not know the chance you take when you put yourself in the middle of a dogfight.

 

“Stop!” I planted myself between them just as Red lunged up. It was his weight that knocked me down, and though he was light for a wolf, he had used all his remaining, desperate strength to attack. As he tried to swerve, his teeth grazed my thigh. Hunter snarled and seemed ready to continue the battle.

 

Then both combatants smelled the blood trickling down my leg. In the long pause that followed, I think I saw Red ripple and begin to change, but I will never be sure, because it was at that moment that I heard the woman's voice.

 

“That is quite enough,” she said. I had to admit, I agreed with her. I wasn't feeling at all up to any more.

 

And then she came out of the shadows of the porch and I saw her face, and realized at once who she was.

 

 

THIRTY-FOUR

I knew one thing for certain: Magdalena Ionescu was not my husband's usual type. In the past, his girlfriends had always been pretty. Magda was not pretty. Magda ate pretty for breakfast and then looked in the mirror and admired how sleek and shiny she was from a diet rich in iron.

 

“You are bleeding?”

 

I looked up into her dark, almond eyes and wondered if I should lie.

 

“Never mind. Sit down, woman. I will examine you. I am medically trained.”

 

“So is Red, and I prefer not to have you touching me.” She'd just stepped out of the house, and it didn't take a master's degree to tell who'd been sleeping in my bed.

 

“He is indisposed,” she pointed out, and I saw that he was still in his wolf form, injured and panting.

 

I looked at Magda and knew that if I pushed her away, the curtain would fall, and I would see the reality behind this little play of normalcy. So I sat down on an old wooden bench and let my husband's mistress look at the gash on my thigh. The fabric of my jeans was ripped and stained with blood, and her nostrils flared.

 

“If you get queasy at the sight of blood, you're not going to be much help to me,” I pointed out.

 

“Blood does not disturb me. Did you know you are about to get your period? No, wait.” Her nostrils flared again as I scrambled up off the couch. “It is not menstrual. You are about to shift.” She didn't sound too happy about it. “Hunter. You did not inform me that your wife was also pricolici.”

 

The wolf man—or Unwolf—that was Hunter made a grunting sound, not unlike the noncommittal grunting sounds he made in human form. Some things, I supposed, didn't change with the full moon. I noticed there was blood on his calf, and his bicep. I didn't particularly care.

 

I stared up at Magda. She was taller than I, larger boned, with full breasts beneath her turtleneck sweater and a tiny waist set off by a thick leather belt with a heavy, almost medieval buckle. A gold cuff of a ring adorned one hand, more like a weapon than a wedding ring. Her chic, boyishly short dark hair had a jagged streak of white shot through it. She had the kind of mouth that made men rearrange their underwear. Right now, though, it was frowning. “I thought you were not intimate with each other,” she said, turning to Hunter. “That was why I came, because you said …”

 

“Guess he was cheating on both of us, huh?”

 

Magda's eyes were flat and dark, unreadable as she gazed down at me. “You will bleed now for a few hours. There is no stopping it, until you change. Perhaps you will die, though—not everyone survives the change.”

 

“I suppose you missed the medical school course on bedside manner.” I was talking tough, but I felt a wave of dizziness and had to put out a hand to steady myself on the bench.

 

“Better if you wait to stand.” She reached out to steady me, and the touch of her hand sent a wave of discomfort down my back. “Perhaps you would like to clean up in the house?” She gave a meaningful look at my bloodstained jeans.

 

What a lovely hostess. “Actually, I'd just like to be on my way.”

 

“You cannot drive like that. Your hands are shaking. And it is not my intention to kill you.” She smiled. “We are all civilized people, no?”

 

“Fine.” I wasn't going to thank her, but I walked into the house and headed for my bathroom. Getting my jeans off was the hard part, but the wound underneath wasn't too bad. Ideally, I would have stitched it up, but instead I washed it off, applied some antibiotic cream, and closed it with a couple of butterfly bandages. I found a pair of fresh pan ties and a sanitary pad and changed into a pair of loose sweatpants. On the bright side, my injured hands seemed to be in fine working order.

 

On the downside, Magdalena's toothbrush and makeup were all over my sink.

 

And her skanky wolf-bitch smell was all over my bed.

 

 

I limped down the stairs and saw Red, pale and human, sitting in the living room. There was a cut under his right eye, and bruising on his neck. He was wearing his jeans, but naked from the chest up. He was holding a wad of reddened pillowcase against his ribs.

 

“Oh, God, Red, are you all right?” I hadn't realized how badly he was injured.

 

Red smiled grimly. “I'll be fine, darlin'. You just tell this husband of yours that this is not a fight over who gets you.”

 

I turned to my husband, who did not look quite right and seemed incapable of standing still. His eyes still burned yellow. His hairline seemed lower, almost meeting his eyebrows. But he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and, as I now realized, the clothes inhibited the change. “You can't go with him, you know,” he said. “Not when you carry my child.”

 

“Hunter,” I said, “weren't you listening before? I am not pregnant.”

 

Magda looked at him sharply. “She is not, my love. Use your nose if you do not believe me.”

 

“And what was your plan if I was pregnant? Set me up in the guest room while you slept with Magda? Or were the two of us going to take turns?”

 

“I would never—” Magda began, but Hunter lurched over to me, his misshapen legs making him clumsy.

 

“I'm not completely insensitive. Magda came to make sure I could handle what was happening. She was here to help you.”

 

I put my hands on my hips. “Funny she never came by before. Where did you stash her, at the local bed-and-breakfast? In the attic? And how did you have the energy for both her and Kayla? No wonder you didn't want to have anything to do with me!”

 

“Don't be such a child. If Magda hadn't been around, I would have damaged you. And I thought you were pregnant,” Hunter went on, his voice roughened to a near growl. “Didn't you notice anything different, Abs? How blind can you be? I could have torn you in two. Magda was here to help me leash what I could no longer control.”

 

Magdalena walked over to Hunter and placed a hand on his shoulder. Instantly, he quieted down. “The initial change is a very sexual time, Abra.” Her voice was the voice of a seductive schoolmistress, something British mixed in with the Eastern European accent. “It cannot be gentle, controlled. It is a time of instinct and passion.”

 

“Oh, and I'm supposed to thank you for relieving me of the duty? Well, no thanks, lady. You infected my husband, you've ruined my life—”

 

“Your friend here understands.”

 

We both turned to look at Red, who flushed, though not as deeply as I would have expected. “Red?”

 

Magda smiled. “Your friend allowed me to stay at his house. It was nearby, and convenient for visitation.”

 

“Red?” I felt a rush of blood between my legs. I wanted to sit down.

 

He started to get up, then winced as if his ribs were hurting him, and sat back down. “Listen, Doc, you have to understand. I knew what was going on. I knew there was a damn good chance that Hunter could kill you, playing slave and master or what ever the hell you were doing.”

 

I didn't understand. How could he know this? I turned to Hunter. “What's going on here?”

 

Hunter smiled, and suddenly I saw his father in his face, arch and sarcastic. “Oh, come on, Abs. You knew. Do we really need to sit around explaining things like this is some kind of soap opera? Darling, Red here is therian and so am I. I had questions.”

 

I looked back and forth between Red and Hunter. “Okay, I've heard about Unwolves, werewolves, shapeshifters, Limmikin, pricolwhatsit—now what the hell is a therian?”

 

“ ‘Pricolici' is a Romanian word—in English you would say Unwolf, or werewolf, although the ‘were' is Old English for man, so I would not call myself a werewolf. I have never heard of Limmikin. In my country we would call him a vrcolac, because he uses magic to control the change. And a therian is any being that can change into a beastly form,” said Magda. “I see you haven't had a classical education.”

 

“This isn't part of a classical education!”

 

Magda raised her eyebrows. “Well, it does help to know Latin and Greek roots.”

 

I dragged my hands over my hair. “Okay, wait a minute. Forget the vocabulary lesson. Let me get the facts straight. Hunter, you told Red about me and our sex life—to ask him advice?”

 

“And to make him suffer, of course. It made him so unhappy when I described how much you liked me holding you down and treating you roughly,” Hunter rasped. “And then, when I said I wasn't sure I could stop myself from getting really rough, he suggested I contact Magda.”

 

There was a buzzing in my ears. “Red, how can you not have told me any of this?”

 

Red stood up and walked toward me. “I didn't think you'd believe me, Doc.” He tried to draw me into his arms and I pushed him away. “Oh, no you don't. I'm sorry, but I am not happy with all these secrets you've been keeping from me.”

 

Magda laughed. “Wait a moment—I think I do remember hearing something about the Limmikin. I believe my father once said that—”

 

“It's a Mohawk word,” Red interrupted. “It means a shapeshifter.”

 

“A therian,” she corrected him. “Does it really? I thought the American Indians believed in skinwalkers.”

 

“There are different traditions.”

 

“And you have a wolfskin in your cabin, do you not?”

 

Red seemed irritated, and I understood that he did not keep it out in plain sight. “It ain't magic,” he said. “I don't need it to change. But it is personal.”

 

“Yet you keep it hidden and heavily warded.”

 

Red looked at her, and I realized he didn't like her any more than I did. “I control the change,” he said. “Not the skin. And not the moon,” he added pointedly.

 

“Do you really?” Magda sounded truly interested. Then she slowly pulled her sweater over her head. Her generous breasts were not completely firm, I noted. She slid her long skirt down her thighs and stood there naked, a forty-five-year-old woman, muscular and confident. And then she smiled at Red, and stepped closer in to him. I wanted to say something—Stop, I suppose. Don't. But instead I just watched as she knelt beside him and began licking his wound. And as she licked, her nipples puckered and grew erect, and her fair skin flushed and darkened. Red's head went back. I could hear the moan gathering in his throat as she pulled his pants down. I retreated a step, toward Hunter, and heard the growl in Hunter's chest as he, too, stepped out of his jeans.

 

I turned back and Red was a wolf again, whimpering, smaller and ruddier than the dark, sleek female with the surprising arctic blue eyes. She continued licking at him, now at his belly, now lower still. She presented her back to him, lifting her tail. And then Hunter growled and shifted into wolf form. He paced back and forth, putting himself between Magda and Red until she raised her hackles at him: Keep to your place.

 

As the wolf Magda looked at me, I understood what she was saying: I am alpha, and I rule here. I will have both males as my mates and you will stand and watch, losing your husband, losing the man who would have been your lover.

 

Red had said the virus was in me. He'd said I could change. But would I? There had to be some predisposition. Did I have the right genes, the right mixture of magic and intuition? I watched as Red whimpered and turned back and forth, torn between instinct and something else, something strong enough to make him stop, trembling with the effort, with the scent of estrus in his nostrils.

 

Hunter had no such qualms. He lunged forward, gripped the ruff of the female's neck, and mounted her. Then he looked up, and there was still something human in his eyes. Something that found it amusing that I was watching.

 

I took off my clothes, feeling supremely self-conscious. Absurdly, I wondered if my stomach was pooching out. As I inhaled to flatten my belly, the dull ache of a cramp rippled through my abdomen. Ignore it. I closed my eyes and tried to awaken something. Rage. Grief. Jealousy. Some tidal wave of emotion strong enough to wash through logic and civilization and the whole of my upright primate's sense of self.

 

But there were too many emotions, and the main thing I felt, standing there naked in Hunter's family's living room with all the ancestral Barrow furniture around me, was stupid. I was going to leave a stain on the carpet.

 

But then Red, loyal Red, came over and started to lick the back of my hand before taking my wrist in his mouth and gently tugging me toward the door.

 

“No, Red, I don't want to leave,” I said. I was tired of being the good girl. I wanted my turn to be the bitch. But then he bit down harder, and I was forced to follow him. Growling and snarling, nipping at my bare fingers, he herded me outside.

 

For a moment, I felt relief to be standing inhaling fresh air instead of stale hostility. And then I realized that I was standing on what had been my front porch, stark naked in the moonlight. I had just lost everything to Magda, including the shirt off my back. Shit. Red sat back on his haunches, wagging his tail as if he'd just done something marvelous.

 

I rounded on him, frustration and inarticulate rage boiling up in me. “No! No! You stupid, mangy—bad dog!” I chased after him, too furious to care what kind of a spectacle I was creating, and Red bounded away. I had never wanted to swat a dog so much in my life. “Get back here! Come here this instant, you …” Red used the tried-and-true dog ploy of pretending this was a game, putting his front legs down and raising his hindquarters up in a puppy-play bow, his tail wagging optimistically.

 

“No, I'm not playing with you—this isn't funny, Red …” Now he was running from me, looking coyly over his shoulder. I lunged forward and grabbed his tail, but he slipped away, giving little mock growls and shaking his head from side to side, as if playing tug-of-war with an imaginary toy. “I'm. Not. Joking!” I bellowed, shaking with fury, and then I realized that I couldn't stop the tremors quaking through me, or the strange, icy sensation racing through my limbs, like the aftereffect of a powerful anesthesia. The first contraction took me by surprise, and I stopped in my tracks. Even with the odd, tingling numbness in my arms and legs, the pain was incredible. It felt like the worst menstrual cramp I'd ever had, magnified and attenuated, and I looked at Red, who was next to me now, his wolf eyes wide with concern. I tried to say, This really hurts, but no words came out.

 

The second contraction made the first seem like the edited-for-television version, and I dropped to my knees and screamed.

 

The third contraction felt like it was turning me inside out, and didn't so much end as bleed into the fourth, and then the fifth. All coherent thought ceased, and I stopped making any sounds, and then something ripped and I thought, I'm not going to survive this.

 

But after a while, the pain began to recede, and I opened my eyes, exhausted. Something was wrong with my vision, I thought, because everything looked grayed-out and blurry. I tried to stand up and realized that my body wasn't responding the way I expected. And then I realized why.

 

I was a wolf. I was a wolf!

 

And Magda, walking out to meet me, was a bigger wolf.

 

 

THIRTY-FIVE

It wasn't a fair contest. I was smaller, weaker, new to this idea of running around on four legs. Magda was top dog. As Magda began to circle me, flanked by my faithless husband, I really missed the ability to form words. There had to be some way to communicate our feelings that didn't draw blood. Couldn't she just take Hunter, I'd take Red, and we could all go home and call it a day?

 

And that's what I told Magda. Or at least, that's what I thought at her. Out loud, what I said was, whimper, whimper.

 

Red looked at me, and his ears went back. Ears back—that's a signal. But what did it mean?

 

Magda lunged at me and inflicted a painful blow near my left shoulder that made me yip and dart away. Ears back meant protect yourself, I realized. Damn it, I knew that.

 

Magda stalked toward me, and as I moved toward the protection of a wall I felt someone behind me and skittered sideways a moment before my husband tried to take a bite out of my hindquarters. He had finally managed to get himself into full wolf form, although there was still something a little wonky about his hind legs.

 

I snarled at him, so incensed by his sneaking up on me that I missed Red's streaking out from my right side and grabbing Hunter right under the throat—a benefit of being smaller in stature. But Hunter swung his muzzle and knocked Red loose, and then Magda was on me, the ruff on the back of her neck sticking straight up, her head held low as she growled.

 

I didn't know exactly how I wound up on my belly on the floor. But then I rolled onto my back and began posturing faster than you can say “submissive.” Magda looked like she wasn't going to be having any of it. She and Hunter kept nosing at me, trying to get me to stand up and take it like a wolf. But I did not want those Alpha Female fangs ripping my beta throat out, and my current posture of abasement seemed to be inhibiting her from doing just that.

 

Red was walking back and forth, head held low, trying to figure out what to do now that his teammate had chosen to throw the game. And that's what I was doing, I realized. Letting that bitch win. No sooner had my thoughts turned aggressive than I found myself in motion, rolling off the floor and launching my attack on the male—I mean on Hunter—while Red came in to distract Magda, the more experienced fighter.

 

We did all right for a few moments, Red and I, holding the other two at bay. And then I heard a particularly painful yelp from Red. When I turned to look at him, I saw that Magda had torn a chunk from his ear. I think what happened next surprised even me. I leaped past Hunter onto Magda, my teeth going for her ear. I wasn't thinking biblically, I swear. It was a purely bloodthirsty moment, a moment in which I just saw a vulnerable spot and went for it. I had her ear in my jaws and her pain was music to my ears.

 

“Enough.” There was a woman underneath me. A wolf-woman. I couldn't understand it. And then I felt a man's hand on me, lifting my muzzle to face him.

 

“Abra.” It was the kind-eyed, smaller male. He looked at me as if he were trying to think of the right command to give me. There was no challenge in his gaze, but still, I looked away. There was blood dripping from the side of his head, and I wanted to taste it. “She's in trouble,” I heard the smaller human male say to the wolf-woman. “This was no way to come at a first change.”

 

“Take her out of my sight and out of my territory,” said the woman. “And stay out.” She also had a cut on the side of her head and looked very, very angry. There was another male with her, also human, but with a very canine scent. He was familiar, but when he looked at me, I caught a whiff of anger tinged with lust. The female scented it, too, and yelled again at my male. Something about getting me out. He said something back, about needing our clothes.

 

I felt the human male's hand on the scruff of my neck, and it was a comfort to me. He led me into the night, and then into a little metal room. A car: I remembered. He looked down at himself. He was bleeding from cuts on his side, ear, and forearm. I whimpered at him and he crouched down so I could reach him better. I licked the blood until it stopped flowing and then I licked the salt from the male's face. Red's face. I remembered that, too.

 

“Oh, Doc, if only you meant it.” The human hands rubbed and stroked the muscles of my shoulders and then caressed behind my ears. In my strange state of gray-toned vision and Technicolor smells, I could sense how Red was bonded to me, almost as a mate. I thought this one was a good one. We could form a new pack. I tried to tell him this, but he kept trying to pull some strange soft cloth over my head. At first, I tugged at it, thinking this was a game, but then I could see from Red's intent posture that this was an important submission for him. So I allowed the cloth and then when the cloth was on I felt different.

 

“Doc? Abra?”

 

I was human again, human enough to be embarrassed that I was naked from the waist down. The wound on my thigh had almost healed, however, and the little cuts and scrapes on my arms were closing up as I watched. Wo w. No wonder Malachy wanted to tinker with this virus.

 

“You with me, Abra?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Red drove the car onto the road, and then, to my surprise, he stopped the engine halfway up the hill. Without the dashboard lit up, I couldn't make out his features. Turning to me in the dark, Red paused, took a breath. “I have to get my things from my cabin now. By morning, she won't let me back. My place is too close to Hunter's property. She feels threatened by us now.”

 

“But it's your house. She can't just chase you off.”

 

Red looked at me strangely. “Of course she can,” he said.

 

It took me a moment. “Oh.”

 

“Won't take me long, Doc. You can wait in the car.”

 

“I can come with you. To get your stuff.” My voice sounded quite matter-of-fact, I was proud to note. We stepped outside and I stumbled. Red took my hand and I walked in his footsteps through the woods, and when we reached the cabin he released me and I went to sit on his bed on the floor. I tucked my legs underneath me and tried to pretend I wasn't cold and bare-ass naked.

 

Red moved efficiently from place to place, throwing some small bottles and the tarot cards into a backpack. There was also some sort of pelt, wrapped with cords and scrawled with purple symbols. “Won't be a minute.”

 

“Sure. Do you have a bathroom?” Because I hadn't seen one on my last, unofficial visit to his cabin.

 

The look on Red's face said it all. “The thing is, it's out back … I'm kind of off the grid here.”

 

“With a CD player?”

 

“Batteries. Listen, Abra, I didn't mean to give you the wrong impression. I mean, it is an out house, but it's clean.”

 

“To be honest … what I really need is running water. To wash.”

 

Red cleared his throat. “I have a sink here. I could pump some water …”

 

“We have to rush, don't we?”

 

“I think … as long as we leave to night …” Red's eyes dropped to my naked lap, then returned steadfastly to my face. “May I bathe you?”

 

Now I was blushing. “All right,” I said. I watched him as he threw some logs in a small black woodstove and then turned to the sink, where he primed the pump before working the level over the sink. The room began to warm as Red set some water to boil in a kettle on top of the cast-iron stove. He fetched what looked like a huge roasting pan from a closet and set it on the floor.

 

“Is that a bathtub?”

 

“Well, it's what I use for one.”

 

“I'm going to sit in that?”

 

“That's the idea.”

 

It was all very Little House on the Prairie. Except for the look in Red's eyes.

 

“You okay for a moment? I'll chop a little more wood.”

 

“I'm fine.”

 

And I was fine. I loved watching him. I loved the easy, economical grace of his movements, the loyal caring tilt of his eyes. I loved watching his lean hips inside his jeans as he walked outside, the play of muscles in his arms and back as he turned a small log into kindling.

 

“You making sure I don't chop off a hand?”

 

“I'm just watching.” How had I ever doubted his intelligence? He didn't need a PhD to prove himself to me. Red was wolf-smart, coyote-clever. He might read westerns and he might never impress my father discussing Hitchcockian suspense techniques, but if Armageddon arrived, Red would lead you to safety.

 

“Abra?” He was crouching by the bath, pouring in the water from the kettle. There wasn't more than a few inches.

 

“Yes.”

 

“The water's ready.”

 

“That's not a bath.”

 

“I'm in charge here, remember?”

 

I climbed in, still wearing the torn remnant of my shirt. Red removed it, and for a moment I just looked at him looking at my tightly beaded nipples.

 

“You sore?”

 

“No. I should be, but I'm not.”

 

“Unless we're really wounded mortally, the change tends to speed up the healing pro cess.” Red picked up a flannel washcloth. “May I?” I nodded and he began to wash my arms. I leaned my head back and then Red lifted my leg, using the flannel on my calf and thigh … and then higher. I gasped with the shock of sensation. No way we could pretend this was part of a sponge bath. Red glanced up at me.

 

“I'm sorry. I know the rules—you're not going to make love with me. Guess I'd better stop this.”

 

“Red, to night I changed,” I said.

 

“I know. I saw.”

 

“The other thing, too. The part about falling in love with you. I changed that way, too.”

 

Ah, the lovely light entering his eyes. “Abra.”

 

“Please. Show me what comes next.”

 

Red knelt beside the tin tub, his hands withdrawing from my flesh. “God, you have no idea how much I'd like to—but it's the first time you've changed and it's like you're drunk with it.”

 

I silenced his mouth with my hand. “I'm going to kiss you now.”

 

“And then there's the fighting …”

 

“We can do that, too.”

 

Red's hand gripped my wrist. “Abra, no. It's not you speaking, it's the hormones. And it's kind of like I'm your teacher here.”

 

I surged up and kissed him, ignoring the pain in my wrist. No, worse. Liking it. Liking the hint of something not so gentle in this gentle man. Maybe if I were not so gentle back, I thought. I could feel the heat between my naked breasts against his bare skin, my erect nipples brushing the furry mat of his chest hair.

 

“Abra.” He lifted me out of the tub and onto the bed and was on top of me before I could draw breath. His hands were in my hair, his thumb moving down to graze the corner of my mouth as he rained kisses on my lips, my jaw, the corners of my eyes. But what I was feeling had plunged straight past tender, and I pulled his hair until his head went back and bit him on the firm wedge of muscle between shoulder and neck. I felt the ripple of desire go through him.

 

“I don't know what this is. Help me.”

 

I watched his face change. “The moon's riding you. You need to change again.”

 

“Oh, hell no,” I said, recalling the agonizing pain.

 

“The second time's not so bad. And if it's the moon's pull, there are ways to make the pain …” He paused. “Pleasurable.”

 

I stood up on my knees, grabbed the back of his jeans, and pressed him against me so hard I made myself gasp. “Do it,” I said.

 

And then his eyes met mine and we kissed, a long, hungry, devouring kiss, a little too fierce, a little too desperate, conscious of the danger outside the door and the need to be quick.

 

Red seized my head in his hands, his teeth closing on my lower lip, then moving to claim the pulse beside my ear, and then down lower, to trace the pulse in my neck. I sank my fingers into his hair as he bent to taste the hollow of my collarbone, then the space between my breasts, his mouth closing over one nipple so gently I wanted to scream.

 

I wanted to say, No, not like that, not human and considerate, just take me, take me hard and lift me out of myself. But suddenly Red looked up and his eyes flared golden, and then his teeth closed down on a breast and he was suckling me, hard, and still this was not enough, there was a wolf inside me raging to be set free. I yanked at his hair and he looked up, face flushed and dazed with lust.

 

“What?”

 

“Help me!” And Red, my tender Red, tore open the buttons to his fly, and grabbed my wrists hard, and I spread my thighs wide so he could shove himself inside me.

 

We froze for a moment, staring at each other, a little stunned to be here at last. I couldn't believe how good he felt, just stretching me. And then, holding my gaze, Red thrust into me. Once, twice, deeper, so hard I knew it had to hurt him a little, too. He thrust again, the corner of his jeans getting in the way, his face intent, unguarded, and I closed my eyes, bracing my heels on the bed by his hips. The plea sure was awful. I wanted it to hurt more. I needed the pain to ride the awful plea sure. And then Red lifted my hips and slammed into me and I realized what Hunter had meant when he'd said, I could have hurt you. This was not just a strong man making love full tilt. This was someone who could shift down to his bones, and there was preternatural energy trembling up and down his arms.

 

“Wait, I have to get my jeans off. It hurts.” I watched him tug his pants down over his narrow thighs. Naked, he gave a shudder and closed his eyes as if he was fighting something back. “I can't—I can't keep going and not—you'd better turn over.”

 

I didn't want to. I wanted to watch him. At some point during this endless night, he had become so beautiful to me that I couldn't bear the thought of not watching him as he came.

 

“Abra, this first time, I can't control it. You have to turn over.”

 

“You don't have to control anything. Let go with me, Red.”

 

His pupils narrowed in the luminous circles of his irises, wolf eyes in a human face. I watched him set his jaw so tight that a muscle jumped high in his cheek. “Abra, I'm too close. I won't be able to hold back much longer, and if one of us changes before the other, what we'll be doing will be illegal in this state.”

 

“Oh.” I let him turn me over, the wool of his Indian bedspread rough against my belly. Red positioned himself behind me, lifting my hips, and then he entered me very slowly, his arms trembling on either side of me with the effort. It was then, not looking into his eyes, that I felt what was happening—the surge of heat, the loosening of bones. Except this time the pain was all caught up with the plea sure.

 

“Are you okay?” His voice was hoarse.

 

I opened my mouth and found I could not speak, so I tried to tell him with my body, arching my back.

 

“I don't want to scare you, Doc.”

 

I looked over my shoulder and met his eyes, and I could tell from his gasp that I looked the way I felt—already mindless, already somewhere where animal instinct ruled, except that down here where my muscles were reweaving themselves there was still the awareness that this was Red. Red, who loved me enough to fight for me.

 

Red cupped my chin in his hand and kissed me, a hard kiss, triumphant. “It's got to be now, Abra.” I was amazed he could still talk, and I wanted him to stop. No words. Words reminded me of Hunter. Red and I didn't require the crutch of words in bed.

 

I felt Red brace himself more firmly, thrust in, thrust out. I lost my bearings. Forgot about the bed, the cabin, the dangers outside. Red began to pound into me, a steady rhythm that stopped all thought, and then he shifted his hips and now his thrusts were reaching that spot high up inside me that brought the feeling everywhere at once, into my breasts and nipples and belly and heart, and it was too much to bear, I had to reach the top of this or fall apart. And then Red leaned down to bite me on the back of my neck and as his teeth turned to fangs we both arched with the savage joy of release.

 

 

 

 

THIRTY-SIX

“This is a definite drawback.”

 

Red kissed the back of my shoulder. He was half-lying on my back, keeping some of his weight off me, and I was on my stomach, propping my face in my hands. It wasn't exactly a traditional postcoital position, but we weren't exactly in a traditional situation. Well, okay, it was traditional for canines.

 

“You mean being stuck together? It only lasts a few more minutes. I kind of like it.”

 

“No wonder dogs look so embarrassed afterwards.”

 

“We could always take advantage of the position,” Red murmured, nibbling at my ear. He was lying curved around me, the bed a rumpled mess around us, and I could feel his radiant happiness at having me there, joined to him at last. I had never felt anything like it before, this drunken puppy sense of loving abandon. It was almost better than the sex, although the musky salt-sea odor of our coupling kept making me think I should get a second opinion.

 

Red must have been thinking much the same, because he began to swell inside me. I felt the prickle of change begin sooner this time, a gooseflesh sensation of the small hairs lifting all over my body.

 

I looked over my shoulder and Red's eyes met mine. He stroked the hair back from my face and we smiled at each other, wordless with the gift of love and sex. All this fun, all this remarkable, physical, mind-slowing, soul-searing fun, and it was ours for the having, free and clear. I'd always thought this kind of sex—the kind that sells cruises and canned soups and silk sheets and health club memberships—was some Hollywood invention. But it was real and it was mine.

 

“I sure hate to wipe that look off your face, Doc, but if we can, we'd better get moving. If we linger here too long, Magda's liable to take it the wrong way.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I mean, she said to take ourselves out of her territory. And I figure the sun better not catch us still here in easy walking distance.”

 

“Or else?”

 

“Doc, if we discuss this any further in this position we'll be here till noon, if you catch my drift.”

 

We tried to pull apart and, to my regret, succeeded.

 

“Well, that didn't hurt.”

 

Red flashed me a slightly rueful smile. “Speak for yourself.” I wondered whether or not he was joking. At least dogs didn't have to worry about what to say to each other afterward. Red pulled on his jeans and picked up one very small suitcase.

 

“You didn't take much.”

 

“Just the important stuff.”

 

We drove back, trying to be serious. Serious things were happening. But Red and I couldn't quite wipe the sloppy, happy grins off our faces. I was a wolf girl and he was a wolf boy and we were in love. Somewhere behind all of this giddy plea sure there was grief at losing my old life, but having Red to touch kept that pain at bay. We kissed at all the red lights, and some of the roads were so empty that we made out through two lights in a row. We necked our way up to Beast Castle's front door, his fingers hot against my skin despite the chill predawn air.

 

“I hope my mother's gone to bed already. I don't think I can wait till we get to my room.”

 

“Ah, first change. There's nothing like it.”

 

“You mean it doesn't stay like this?”

 

“Well, whenever the moon rides you, you'll find you're in the mood for a little bloodsport or sex. Sometimes both. But the initial metamorphosis is particularly—intense.”

 

“So you probably can't keep up with me, huh?”

 

Red raised one eyebrow. “Careful, little girl. I've been doing this a mite longer than you.”

 

I twined my hands around his neck. “So you think you can manage?”

 

My lover replied with a grin that revealed all his white and pointy teeth.

 

“I didn't know you could do that! You can change just a part of you?”

 

Red's eyes gleamed wolfishly. “It takes practice.”

 

“Wow, I want to try.”

 

“You'll probably be a quick study—it's unusual to change fully your first time, like you did—so, hang on.” Red was still looking at me, but he wasn't paying attention.

 

“What is it?”

 

“I don't know yet. Shh.” And then we both listened, testing the feel of the quiet darkness that was just beginning to lift in the east. Somewhere in the distance, a car's engine downshifted. Near us, a breeze blew leaves and a small rodent froze in reaction. Something was wrong.

 

“Red?”

 

He looked past me, out at the yard. “Aren't there dogs kenneled out here?”

 

“Of course there are. You helped me feed them—”

 

“They're awfully quiet.”

 

“I don't usually hear them when I'm outside the kennel building.”

 

Red's jaw tightened. “I do.”

 

We walked over to the small outbuilding used for the Castle's larger and more obstreperous canine visitors. The door was still closed, but the lock had been broken.

 

“What is it, Red? Vandals?”

 

“Maybe.” Once we stepped inside, I stopped thinking clearly. There was a tangle of limp, furred bodies on the hard cement floor—necks at odd angles, jaws frozen wide—and there was a lot of blood, the thick, ropy kind. The Akita had been killed near the front door, her throat ripped out. The rottweiler was in a far corner, his blood running in a thick stream toward the drain in the center of the room.

 

“What was it?” The smell of copper and flesh was so intense that I felt as if I were tasting it. I was still thinking vandals, some kind of animal, some hideous dogfight.

 

“Abra, maybe you'd better wait here while I check out the house.”

 

And that was when I realized that, of course, it was Magda. Which meant that this was my fault, my responsibility, for seducing Red instead of leaving his cottage as quickly as we could. “Oh, God. Is this—is Magda punishing us?”

 

Red reached out and touched the back of my head. “Let's just take this one step at a time. Give me the key. You see if anyone here needs your attention. I'll be back in a few.”

 

I had begun to crouch next to one of the mongrels, a sweet doe-faced female we'd called Happy, when I realized what had just happened. I didn't need to go to each victim's body. My wolf-enhanced hearing could detect that the only heart beating there was mine. Which Red would have known as well.

 

So the only reason for him to have gone in solo was to keep me safe. I stood up, my knees trembling a little in reaction.

 

The scream was sudden and high and unmistakably female.

 

Mother.

 

I ran to the main house and found the front door open. And then I stopped, waiting in the familiar Spanish foyer with its grand winding staircase, not knowing where to go. I had started heading for the stairs when I heard a metallic crashing sound, and turned back toward the kitchen. Remembering all the old cop shows I'd ever seen, I tried to ease myself along the wall so that I could see what I was getting into before it hit me.

 

“No good sneaking like that, Abs. I can hear you rustling around out there.”

 

It was Hunter's voice. Surprised, I stood still for a moment, my hand to my mouth.

 

“Come on, come on out. Come on, dear, I can smell you. And what an interesting odor it is, too.”

 

I stepped out into the light of the kitchen, and what I saw was so unexpected that I wound up just standing there in the doorway with my mouth hanging open.

 

Hunter, on the other hand, did not seem in the least surprised.

 

“Hello, Abs,” he said, never looking up from what he was doing. “Still on the veggie kick, or in the mood for a little meat?”

 

 

THIRTY-SEVEN

For one long improbable moment, I thought Hunter was cooking dinner or a really hearty breakfast, and the unexpected domesticity of it stopped me in my tracks. There he stood, bearded but dressed in a long-sleeved burgundy shirt and black jeans, chopping meat at the wooden side table while a pot of something bubbled on the gas range behind him.

 

“Hunter.” I squeaked the end of his name, and he smiled.

 

“You took your time.” His hands were surprisingly deft with the blade, considering how seldom he cooked. At first I thought he was carving up a chicken, then I looked again and thought, Maybe rabbit.

 

Or cat.

 

“What are you doing here, Hunter?”

 

The scream made me jump and turn, but Hunter simply raised the heavy French knife and sliced through a joint. “What was that?”

 

Hunter's eyes, when he looked up, were the ugliest shade of yellow I had ever seen. “That was a scream. As for what I'm doing here—well, I should have thought that was obvious. I'm making myself at home. This should have been my home, you know. And now it is.”

 

By now I'd had enough time to notice the furry striped pelt which had been stripped from the carcass. Time to take in the amount of blood staining the old wood. “You bastard,” I hissed. “Why are you doing this?”

 

The knife whacked off another joint. “Because you owe me.”

 

“I owe you?”

 

Hunter's smile was pure malice. “Yes, Abra, you owe me. For all the years my father subsidized your fucking education, while your mother pissed all her money away on sick cats. You owe me. For dragging me down year after fucking year into domestic fucking oblivion while you refused to make any of the changes that would have helped my life, my career.”

 

I was absolutely confused. What changes? What had Hunter ever wanted me to do that I had refused him? “Hunter,” I said, “I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you mean my not asking my mother for money?”

 

Hunter moved around the side table, and now there was nothing between him and me and the big knife in his hand as he approached. “Oh, baby, don't forget your father. Did you ever once consider asking your father if any of his connections could have helped with my career? Did you ever do a single thing to help me get to the top?”

 

“He didn't like you. My mother didn't like you. What was I supposed to—” The knife flew past my face and shuddered as it embedded itself in the plaster by my head. Hunter braced his arms against the wall, imprisoning me between them. Then he leaned in close, his spittle flying into my face as he spoke.

 

“Maybe you didn't defend me very well. Maybe it served you to have mummy and daddy on one side and me on the other. Or maybe you just never thought about anyone but yourself.”

 

This time the scream was cut off. I raised my knee up hard, jamming it between Hunter's legs, and then ducked under his arm as he crumpled. I took the stairs three at a time, stumbled, took them two at a time, and opened my mother's bedroom door so hard the knob slammed against the wall.

 

“Mom!” But it wasn't my mother. It was Magda, half dressed in a purple sequined Bob Mackie gown my mother had worn back in the early eighties. Her short dark hair, with its streak of white, looked oddly appropriate with the showy dress. She looked like a Disney villainess now, ready for her close-up.

 

“Oh, hello, Abra. Good—I needed someone to do up the back.” Magda turned to me and smiled, and I saw that there was lipstick smeared at the corner of her lovely mouth. No, not lipstick. Blood. She had prepared this for me, part of my brain registered. This was a theatrical setup, and she was the star.

 

“Where's my mother?”

 

“Oh, that heavyset dyed blonde was your mother? I'm afraid your boyfriend's eating her.” Magda gestured at the bed, where I could see what appeared to be a pile of discarded costumes. I looked harder and saw a mound of Piper LeFever's old movie star dresses lying in an ever-widening pool of blood.

 

“Where is she?”

 

“Some men just lose control when they change, haven't you noticed? Or are you so innocent that you thought it was just all fun and fucking?” Magda leaned in so close that I could smell the raw meat on her breath. I crouched there by the bed, hyperventilating, crying. “Hunter's gotten quite angry at you, hasn't he? The wolf in him has been waking up, bit by bit. And, guess what? Deep down, where instinct and passion rule, your husband has despised you for a very long time.” I was breathing too hard, almost whimpering, but behind my panic and shock, there was that sober little nun voice inside my head, detached and still functional. She's doing this on purpose, the voice said. This is a production, and it's for my benefit. I looked up at Magda through a veil of tears and hatred. “I'm asking you again, Magda. Where is my mother?”

 

“I don't know where your coyote dragged her off. Follow the blood trail, I suppose. Or doesn't your nose work that well yet?” Magda turned in front of the mirror, admiring the way the fabric hugged her breasts. “Do you think I could keep this? In Romania, we didn't have much need for dressing up, but I can see that your husband and I might enjoy going out while we're here.”

 

I looked at her and felt so much anger that my other senses kicked in. Suddenly I could smell the musk of her excitement. She wanted me to attack; she wanted to take me down. But I had caught the blood trail, and my sharpened vision caught the traces of blood on the dark wood and tile floor. My world had narrowed to the scent of my mother's injury, to the traces of dark blood splattered unevenly along the walls and floor.

 

I found my mother—lying naked on my bed, her skin far too pale—in my childhood room. Someone had tied a rough bandage around her right wrist, and my mother was cradling that hand to her chest. Red was huddled in the corner, as far from my mother as he could possibly get, incongruously draped in my mother's huge paisley caftan, a fringed bandanna wrapped around his head. Underneath her clothes he was clearly naked.

 

“Mom! Red! Oh, my God, what are you—”

 

“Abra.” My mother's voice was faded, weak, almost unrecognizable. “He tried. To help me.”

 

I turned to Red. “She's going into shock. Help me cover her and get her out of here.”

 

Red shook his head as if he were pushing something away. “Doc, she took my clothes. This place is thick with blood and I've already changed twice to night.”

 

“Red, you told me that you're a shapeshifter. You can control this. I need you to control this.”

 

“No. He can't.”

 

I went over to my mother, and for the first time in our lives, I knew she wasn't dramatizing what she was feeling. I put my finger over the thready pulse in her neck. “What do you mean, Mom?”

 

“He's not my lover and he's not my family. Right now, all I am to him is fresh meat, and if he stands up, you'll be fighting to keep him from finishing me off.”

 

I looked at Red, pale and trembling like a junkie. “Is this true?”

 

He smiled, and it was almost his old rueful grin. “Turns out your mother liked to research her roles. Knows a thing or two about wolves and men.”

 

“But you said you were a shapeshifter. You said the moon didn't control you.”

 

My mother lifted her good hand, and I could see the effort it cost her. “My daughter,” she said, “does not believe in half-truths.”

 

Red laughed, a hoarse little bark that turned into a cough. Or maybe it was the other way around. “They took my clothes and gave me a taste of your mother's blood, Doc. And locked us in here alone together. My control's good, but it's not perfect. Jesus,” he said, shaking a little harder. “It's goddamn hot in here.”

 

I watched in horror as he began shifting the dress farther down his shoulders. “You keep those clothes on!”

 

“I'm burning up.”

 

“Red, don't take that off. You'll start to shift.” Opening the door to my closet, I rummaged through a bag of old toys, throwing aside an old poster of Duran Duran and a pair of never-worn high-heeled boots.

 

“Abra,” my mother said tightly, “this is not the time to clean out your closet.”

 

“Oh, for God's sake, Mom.” I finally located the safe and worked the combination. “I'm looking for the Telazol. I keep it hidden and locked away.” With trembling fingers, I began mixing the powerful sedative.

 

“Typical. If you weren't so paranoid about drugs, you wouldn't have to waste all this time now—Abra, your friend here is taking off his clothes again.”

 

“Red, please.” I turned around, shaking the mixture in one hand while I tried to remove the cap from a hypodermic with my teeth.

 

“Don't worry, I'm fine now.” Half naked, hairier than I remembered him, Red sat with his chest heaving in and out, panting for air. “I just couldn't breathe for a minute. You know what? I'll just open the window a crack.”

 

“No! Abra,” my mother called, “you have to stop him!”

 

Too late. I'd barely had time to take a breath of cold morning air before I saw the waxing moon hanging low in the twilight sky. Moonlight. Shit. I turned to my mother, and what ever I was about to say lodged in my throat because in the next moment Red was on top of her. And he wasn't human anymore.

 

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

Panicked, I rushed forward, dropping the hypodermic. Cursing my own stupidity, I jammed my hand sideways into Red's mouth and for a moment there we all were, frozen in tableau: my mother silent and frighteningly cold underneath me, Red a hundred and seventy pounds of wolf above me. Then he twisted his neck to try to get free and I punched him so hard in the nose with my good hand that he rocked away from her and rolled off the bed and back onto all four feet in one smooth motion. For a second, I thought he was going to go for me, but there was something in his eyes, not so much recognition as lack of malice. He was like a dog on the scent of quarry, quivering with excitement and focused on one thing and one thing only.

 

Killing my mother.

 

I looked directly into Red's eyes, trying to challenge him, draw his attention back to me, when I heard them.

 

“Oh, look,” Hunter said, and of course I turned to see him. His mouth and beard were stained with blood. “It's little Red and the mother-in-law.”

 

Magda, still dressed in my mother's Bob Mackie, laughed that awful fake laugh women used to use with men, the kind you hear on old television shows. She turned and I saw that she had something in her arms, half hidden beneath the generous cleavage spilling out of the gown.

 

I had Red by the scruff of his neck, but his attention had caught on some new prey. Following the line of his vision, I saw what he was looking at: Pimpernell the Chihuahua, cradled like a baby in Magda's arms. Glad for the distraction, I managed to throw my mother's caftan over Red's back, and he shivered and changed. Trembling with reaction and paler than before, he remained crouched by my feet, a beaten man in a big dress.

 

“Red? Are you all right?” When I looked into his unfocused eyes, I could see they still gleamed a wolfish gold. “No, he's not all right, Abs.” Hunter smiled at me, enjoying himself. “He looks like a frowsy red-haired fortune teller, for one thing. And he's hungry. Blood-hungry.”

 

“Hunter, why are you doing this? If you wanted to leave me, then why didn't you just go? What does it gain you to be cruel?”

 

Hunter looked at me coldly. “Abs, you've spent the past ten years perfecting your little martyr act, but it's just not going to work anymore. My time with Magda helped me see your game. You pretended to be in de pen -dent and fine with my work, and I never understood this undercurrent of guilt I kept feeling. You were reeling me in, trying to tie me down to the kind of life I loathe. Even when I tried to explain that I couldn't live your way anymore, you kept clinging to me, making it impossible for me to make a clean break without being a shit.”

 

I could hear the echo of Magda's voice in this, and yet there was a strange, clunky ring of half-truth there, too. For the first time I understood that Hunter was filled with a kind of corrosive rage that had been eating away at what ever other feelings he might have once had for me. “So now you're okay with being a shit. Fine, Hunter. Great. But are you okay with being a murderer?”

 

“Don't be so melodramatic.” Magda shook her head, and for a moment seemed again a respectable European scientist. “As far as I can see, the only person in danger is your mother. And the one looking to murder her seems to be your boyfriend.” And that's when I looked up to see that Red had gotten right up close to my mother, and was sniffing her wrist.

 

“You've made your point by killing all the dogs, all right? So get him away from her.”

 

“We set the dogs free, and they attacked us. It was self-defense. As for the cats …” She shrugged. “I am not a cat person.”

 

“Are you willing to be an accessory to murder?” I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “You can't actually mean to let this happen, Magda.” Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the hypodermic that I had dropped earlier, lying half under the bed. I looked away, trying not to change my expression. “Back at the house, you said we were all civilized.”

 

Magda narrowed her eyes. “That was before you challenged me. But fine. You want to save your mother? Go ahead. We won't stop you.”

 

Red was kneeling by my mother and examining her wrist now. My mother made a low moaning sound.

 

“Hunter! Hunter, you can't let her do this!”

 

“Don't worry, Doc,” Red said from across the room, “I'm not losing control. I'm just checking the extent of your mother's injuries.”

 

My mother tried to raise her head. “What are you—Hey! Stop licking me. Stop …” Her voice trailed off as Red's eyes held hers, and she seemed to grow calmer. It reminded me of how wolves hypnotize their prey, giving some kind of predatory look that the wounded victim instinctively understands and accepts.

 

“It'll feel quite nice, actually,” he said as he bent over her.

 

“Don't interfere,” said Hunter, coming up behind me to grab my wrists. “I'm getting turned on.”

 

I struggled, but Hunter's grip was like steel. “Red! Red, stop this! Please, don't hurt her, don't—try to remember who you are. Try to remember that I'm her daughter. Please, Red, stop.”

 

Magda turned to Hunter. “Americans really love to talk everything to death, don't they? What a bore. Did she analyze your sex life, too?”

 

Hunter laughed. “She was too repressed.”

 

“Well, I'm not.” Magda lifted her chin and Hunter switched both my wrists to one hand and began kissing his lover openmouthed. The little dog whimpered as it found itself pressed between their two bodies.

 

And then everything seemed to happen at once.

 

Magda cried out, “Ouch, that little shit just bit me!” and dropped Pimpernell, who whimpered and then raced over to my mother. Bracing his little matchstick legs on her shoulder, he barked imperiously at Red.

 

I don't know what the little dog said, but it must have been convincing. The next thing I knew, there was a blur of reddish-brown fur as Red left my mother and his human form all in one lightning movement, launching himself onto Hunter with snarling jaws. For one wonderful moment, Hunter remained in human form and fell down. In that endless sixty seconds, I had time to dart forward and grab the hypodermic. And then Hunter changed and stood, a much bigger animal than Red, and far more aggressive. His hackles raised, and although Red did not back off, I could tell which was the more dominant animal.

 

“Don't forget me, Abra.” Magda smiled, and it was like a baboon's threat of teeth.

 

“How could I forget you—the biggest bitch in the room?”

 

“Careful, little girl—I might just have to discipline you.” I could hear the snarls and growls as the boys circled and lunged at each other. How long did I have before Hunter took Red out?

 

I stood up and could feel my mother watching me from the bed. Make a scene, I thought. Make one worthy of Piper LeFever and maybe you can act your way out of this. “Oh, you mean I shouldn't mention that you're a little long in the tooth to be playing dress-up? Not to mention a little too old for whelping lots of puppies.”

 

“I am fertile.”

 

And that was why we were all here, I realized. I remembered Red telling me that not everyone who got bitten by a lycanthrope became infected. You needed to have some kind of predisposition. Maybe Magda had been looking for a mate for a long time—her own personal breeding program to save her own endangered species. “Are you? For how long, Mags? You're forty-five, forty-six? Fine for a woman wanting one or two kids, but you're aiming a little higher, aren't you?”

 

“I do not think the world needs more nearsighted, bucktoothed, asthmatic children who are allergic to peanut butter and require pencil grips for their clumsy little hands.”

 

I moved closer to Magda. “Gee, I don't know. I was a little nearsighted, bucktoothed child myself.”

 

“Precisely.”

 

“Don't you believe in penicillin, or should we just let the sick work it out for themselves?”

 

Her snort of laughter was the first unpremeditated sound I'd heard her make. “Penicillin has bred a generation of weaklings. I suppose in your work you would like to save little mutant runts like that bowl-headed excuse for a dog. Dogs must be fast enough and smart enough to hunt and kill, or they should be allowed to die. And, yes, people, too. We need to bring out the best in our children, not settle for defects of the heart, the eyes, the brain.”

 

“So you want to breed the strong, and I want to save the weak.”

 

“Yes. That is why I—”

 

My bitch slap caught her completely off guard. I hit her on the right cheek, then harder on the left, and while she was falling back, I jammed the hypodermic I'd been concealing into her neck.

 

“What have you done!”

 

“I had to put a dog to sleep to night,” I lied. “It's sodium hydrochloride.”

 

“How much?”

 

“Enough to put you down.”

 

“Hunter!” She fell to her knees. “Help me!”

 

But Hunter was a wolf, and he didn't quite understand that bad chemical smell, although it scared him. He growled, and Red lunged at him.

 

“No, Red, down!” Magda tried to take advantage of my momentary distraction, but wound up causing me to jerk my arm, depressing the plunger.

 

“Oh, my God,” she said. Her eyes were wide and terrified.

 

“Magda …” The syringe had actually contained only butorphinol, a sedative, and I wasn't sure how quickly it would take effect, or what kind of effect it would take.

 

“You are going to absolutely ruin the Unwolf species with your inferior genes,” she said, and her eyes rolled back in her head. She had passed out from fear, I thought, unable to believe my good luck.

 

“I happen to like your inferior genes, Doc,” said Red, who had changed form while I wasn't looking. “I'd be honored to mix them with my own.”

 

I looked pointedly at my mother's caftan, which Red had wrapped around himself. “Not if you keep wearing women's clothes, I won't.”

 

“Well, I did manage to subdue the wildlife.” Red gestured to Hunter, whom he had muzzled and hog-tied with the fringed headscarf. “Now, let's see to your mother. You doing okay there, ma'am?”

 

My mother may have been half dead from shock and loss of blood, but you do not call Piper LeFever “ma'am.” Her brows came together and she looked past him. “Abra,” she said firmly, “get this redneck asshole out of the room. Get me my black gown. And for Christ's sake, call 911 before I lose consciousness.”

 

“I love you, Mom.”

 

“Then try to act like it sometimes.”

 

I didn't want to kill her by trying to have the last word. I called the ambulance. But Red stopped me from calling the police.

 

 

THIRTY-NINE

In the aftermath of violent change, you think you yourself are changed. And maybe you are. But after a while, things get back to normal. You start thinking about the fact that you need a new winter hat. You stop thinking about how you almost lost your mother and how she still has a thin scar on the inside of her wrist. You have that first argument when she criticizes your lack of a hairstyle. And then you remember that your husband and his new girlfriend killed her animals and are now on supernatural probation, which means they can't get furry unsupervised for a year. The sheriff, Emmet, turned out to be a gruff, taciturn, seven-foot man with hands the size of dinner plates and a sharp beak of a nose. When he shook my hand, I saw that there was dirt embedded deep in the wrinkles of his dry, hard skin, and when he tipped his long-brimmed Stetson hat to me, I saw that someone had carved crude symbols or letters on his forehead. I asked Red whether anyone thought the sheriff of Northside looked a little unusual, and he smiled and said that anyone who actually met him was already well-acquainted with weird.

 

At first, I'd thought that the sheriff had let Magda and Hunter off too lightly, but something about Emmet made it hard to argue. He did say that they'd have to perform community ser vice, which in their case meant maintaining the cairns and wards all along the North-side town limits. I hardly thought this seemed sufficient, but at least they would have to wear bright orange jumpsuits when they did it.

 

And then I woke up feeling tired and cranky on the last day of the old year, with a cramp low in my abdomen. I could feel that it was that time of the month, but because I was in Pleasantvale and not in Northside, the pull of it was weaker than before.

 

My father had left just a few days ago after coming up from Florida, tanned and too thin, to celebrate our survival. He had wanted to bring his new girlfriend, but had finally agreed to leave her at home out of respect for my mother, who was still mourning the loss of her animals.

 

“She'll get better, Doc,” Red reassured me. And at midnight, I saw him rescue her from my father, walking her underneath the mistletoe to kiss her gently on the cheek and whisper something that seemed to take her by surprise. She turned in my direction, and even from across the room I could see her eyes brighten. It was close enough to the full moon for me to tune my hearing in.

 

“So your bite wasn't infectious, but Abra's might be?”

 

Red whispered something else, and for the first time in over a month, I saw my mother's old flirtatious look reappear. She hooked her arm through my boyfriend's and walked him over to the buffet table, which was groaning with meat and pies and three different kinds of potatoes. I heard a noise and saw a bounding blur of large, curly dog. It was Morgan, a standard poodle who had broken out of the kitchen and was making a beeline for the roast beef. Red fixed her with a stern look and Morgan had the good sense to back off. He might not have been the biggest wolf around, but he was the biggest wolf around our house.

 

Except for me.

 

I felt him come up behind me, a full plate in his hand. “How're you doing, Doc?”

 

I leaned back into him and let him put a piece of chicken in my mouth. It's hard to be a complete vegetarian around the holidays. Especially given my lunar cycle of meat-hungry hormones.

 

I chewed while Red smiled at me. “You want to step on over here where it's quiet?”

 

I followed Red into my favorite spot in the house, a lovely little central hall area with a fountain in the middle of the room and a skylight overhead. The real El Greco house in Spain is open to the sky here, but this is as close as you can come in New York State. The others were still audible from the living room, but they seemed far away. From where we stood we could see out of two large windows, and I took a deep breath and felt better.

 

“I'm okay, Red. It's just—this is too claustrophobic for me.” I hadn't been able to bear the thought of living in Red's cabin, so close to Magda and Hunter, who were still living in the Barrows' ancestral home. And, I suppose, I hadn't wanted to live in a place that had so much wild magic floating around. I didn't like believing in magic. I didn't want to embrace a lifestyle that meant losing control once a month—especially now that I'd seen where that could lead.

 

“Now, that's just what I was wanting to talk to you about. I know staying here at your mom's has been kind of rough on you, but I think I might have a solution in mind.”

 

“I think I have one, too. I think I need to go back to Manhattan.”

 

Red looked a little startled for a moment, but then he collected himself. “I guess I understand that. You thinking about the Medical Institute?”

 

“I'd like to finish my internship. If they'll take me back.”

 

Red jammed his hands into his back pockets and whistled softly. “The city, huh? Well, as the good book says, Whither thou goest, honey, I go along for the ride.”

 

I put my hand on his shoulder. “I'll be working almost all the time.”

 

“Since you don't sleep much nights, I reckon I'll still get to spend a few hours with you after dark.” Red grinned. With his hands still in his back pockets, he scraped the toe of one of his scuffed cowboy boots like a cowboy straight out of central casting. “Hell, after dark's the best time, anyways.”

 

“You'd hate being in the city.”

 

Red met my eyes, serious, all trace of the redneck act gone. “You might hate it too, Doc. You haven't been back since the change.”

 

“Then I need to find that out for myself.”

 

Red put his arms around my waist and we looked out the window together, at the dark night and the bare, brown earth and the skeletal trees. A glitter of white caught my eye.

 

“It's started to snow, Doc.”

 

I nodded. I was crying.

 

“Ah, don't do that, Abra. I'm not going to let you get away. I've been looking for the right mate for way too long to let a little thing like an internship get in the way. I can wait a couple of years for kids—so long as you make an honest man of me now.”

 

On the other side of the window, the snow looked powder-soft, and I watched it filling the air like a cloud. Behind me, I could hear the steady rhythm of Red's heartbeat. “So I'll commute for a while. A couple of years we won't see each other so much. That's not too bad, is it?”

 

I shook my head. I wanted to believe in what he was saying, but I'd lost the faith that had kept me with Hunter. Maybe Red would stay with me, driving back and forth whenever I had a day off. But I still remembered him huddled beneath my mother's caftan, fighting his own instincts. He'd said he controlled the change, that his initial attack on my mother and the subsequent wrist-licking had all been part of an elaborate trick, and I half-believed him. But that wasn't exactly comforting, because it meant he'd lied about what kind of animal he was. If Red really had been faking, then he was more coyote the trickster than he was admitting. In the Native American myths I'd heard, coyote was the card that always played wild.

 

So how could I trust him, knowing that duplicity was part of the package?

 

Which brought me back to thoughts of Hunter. I suppose I'd always known, deep down, that Hunter was capable of cheating on me. I may even have thought there was a chance our marriage might not last. But I never thought he would leave me so completely that he didn't care if I lived or died. I never thought he would tear me apart and then blame me for everything. My mother had warned me that I wasn't reading Hunter correctly. But who'd have guessed my lack of insight would nearly cost her life?

 

“Abra.”

 

I turned to Red and discovered that he had dropped to one knee. Despite the submissive position, his smile held perfect confidence. Well, why wouldn't he feel secure? We'd spent the past month in a kind of extended recuperative honeymoon. “You haven't answered me, Doc. Suppose I ought to say it right.”

 

I couldn't smile back. “Oh, please don't.”

 

“Don't be embarrassed—I'm not. Abra Barrow, you are the cleverest, least pretentious, gentlest, and most passionate woman it has ever been my good fortune to know. I may not be quite up to the job, but I sure as heck would work at it. Take me on as your husband, woman, and I promise you won't live to regret it.” He took the ring box out of his back pocket and flipped the top open. It was a lovely ring, a deep coppery gold set with a golden Topaz, the color of my wolfish lover's eyes. I thought about how much Red must have invested in this—time, money, the risk of my disliking the ring—or refusing him.

 

My face started to go, first the mouth contorting, then the eyes filling with tears. It wasn't pretty crying, and I knew it. “I'm so sorry,” I said, and Red jumped to his feet in one graceful motion. His arms came around me and I rested my cheek against the soft flannel of his shirt. “I want to believe it could work. I want to say yes.”

 

“Sh, Abra. I can wait.”

 

“I don't know what's wrong, if I've lost faith or if it's just too soon after Hunter. But I'm scared of how people change. Even people who don't change.” I sniffled, and Red stroked the back of my shirt. “I mean, if Hunter hadn't turned into a werewolf, would I ever have noticed he was no longer the man I'd fallen in love with?”

 

“I'm done with that kind of change, Abra. I'm not a man who needs to go finding himself anymore. Hunter still is.”

 

“I know, you're probably right. But I still can't do it. I know in my bones that what I need now is to get my life together. You can't wait for that, Red. And I can't risk hoping that you will. I have to let you go now.”

 

“Not now. Not to night. Dump me tomorrow. Dump me the day after tomorrow.”

 

At the edges of my consciousness, I could scent the tinge of Red's despair, and behind that, the desire in him, the desire that was so intermingled with love it never felt like a thing apart. The way it had with Hunter.

 

I leaned into Red and started to kiss him and the taste of him made me feel drunk with the change again, the pull of the other like the pull of the moon. I broke away.

 

“I can't do this, Red.”

 

His hazel eyes searched my face. “Hold on to the ring for me?”

 

“I can't do that.”

 

“Well, do it anyway.” He pressed the ring into my hand, and I let him.

 

“This feels wrong.”

 

“I won't let you go, Doc. But I'll give you the space you need to figure things out.”

 

“I'm sorry.”

 

Red walked to the front door, already unbuttoning his gray flannel shirt. “Don't be too sad. I'm coming back.”

 

“Okay,” I said, my voice breaking on the word. He walked out the front door and the cold night air raced in to take his place. I stared through the dark window for a long time, watching Red shake off his boots, unbutton his jeans, and then turn to look at me over his left shoulder, naked and unabashed. I thought I saw him wink, then change form between one eyeblink and the next. Four-legged, he bounded with astonishing speed toward the tree line. When I turned around to try to face the brightly lit room again, my mother was there.

 

“That was stupid,” she said. She was cradling Pimpernell in her arms, and when he saw me, he wriggled with happiness.

 

“I know.” I reached out my arms for the dog.

 

Placing Pimpernell in my hands, my mother put her arm around me, and for a moment, we just leaned into each other. “Well,” she said at last, “I've done stupid things, too. Like your father. And look what came out of it.”

 

I laughed, my forehead against hers. “The most stupid thing of all,” I said, and my mother stopped smiling. Pimpernell barked, a shrill little reprimand.

 

“No,” she said. “The smartest.” And then, after a moment, she added: “Now, could I talk to you about the lycanthropy? Because Red had a very interesting suggestion …”

 

But as much as I sometimes wanted to, and as much as my mother longed to run with the wolves, I couldn't quite bring myself to bite her.

 

 

FORTY

It was too cold for walking, but I needed the exercise. April is the cruelest month, the poet said, but my vote goes to March, which has the gall to call itself the beginning of spring, when it's really just winter in disguise.

 

I put on two layers of leggings, a turtleneck, and the faded flannel shirt Red had left behind. At first I'd tried to put it away, as I had done with his ring. But then there were all those long wakeful nights when I found myself searching for his things—his jeans, his Timex watch and worn cowboy boots—everything he'd left on my mother's front lawn the night he'd walked away. I didn't feel entitled to wear Red's ring, but it felt all right to try on his shirt. The ghost of his scent still clung to it, though fainter each time I wore it.

 

I was on the waitlist for a new internship at the Institute. Meanwhile, I was renting a room in Lilliana's East Side apartment, and had found a job spaying and neutering cats and dogs for the Humane Society. In my spare time, I was also working with Malachy, who had turned his Queens town house into a makeshift laboratory. I had contacted Malachy when I'd come back to the city, hoping he could prescribe something that would temporarily suppress the change.

 

Malachy seemed intrigued at the challenge, and had come up with some foul concoction that I drank every morning. So far, three months had passed, and I hadn't changed. I also hadn't had a period, and my hair seemed to be falling out. But I couldn't see myself going back to Northside and letting my wolf run free without Red around to guide me. And thanks to my brilliant decision-making, Red was gone.

 

As for Malachy, his health seemed marginally improved, and he made it clear that what he really wanted was to continue his research—ideally, with me as a subject. Barring that, he intended to set up a practice in Northside as soon as he'd saved enough money. The idea that something about the town amplified certain conditions did not strike him as insane, which surprised me. But then, I had never been known for my ability to judge human character.

 

But I was back in Manhattan, and Lilliana and I were having a ball, cooking dinners together and watching the complete Fawlty Towers on DVD in the evenings. On the weekends, we went to museums and saw foreign films. So, really, I had nothing to complain about.

 

Except for the pain of losing Red. It wasn't going away, even though I'd started accepting that I really had lost him. I'd stopped calling Jackie and asking if she'd seen any sign of him. I'd stopped trying the cell phone number on his card. My mother had said, Listen, when a man is really ready to settle down, he settles down with the woman who's available. That's the reality. Red wanted a wife and family, and you said no. So give up on that and go start dating again.

 

But how do you tell a potential lover about this little medical condition you have which makes you hairy and homicidally horny once a month? And how do you content yourself with boring, safe vanilla sex when you've had the experience of complete surrender? I suppose I could have tried looking for bikers, but the kind of danger I wanted was wrapped in a package with love and respect and specific desire. I wanted a beast who believed in riding into the sunset. And every day that passed I seemed to want him more.

 

I walked west to Central Park, smelling the change in the season. Everyone seemed to be out today, and the Great Lawn was full of dogs and their walkers, which was nice—in general, I'd been exercising in a local gym, and I'd missed seeing other people in the street. I switched on my iPod and Helen Reddy sang that she'd been down on the floor but was much too wise to ever go down again. The air was cool enough for me to feel it in my lungs, and the uncivilized part of me whispered, Run. The part of me that needed the smell of the park like a taste on the back of my throat didn't want to just walk, it wanted to leap and race, bad knees be damned. So I let myself pick up speed. It wasn't until I moved past a slow jog that it happened. First the golden retriever to my left, tugging, breaking loose from the thin female walker, taking chase. Then the terriers, all three of them. Then the dachshund, pathetically moving its runt legs along.

 

“Hey!” She ran after them, reaching for their dangling leashes, but now there were other dogs joining in—a beagle descending from another path, a basset hound interrupted mid-sniff, suddenly bounding off—easily outdistancing their elderly owners. A black shepherd mix, puppy-eager, jumped a bench and barked his plea sure as he reached me ahead of the rest.

 

I looked down at his happy, floppy face, still jogging, trying not to lose momentum. It's not cardio exercise if you keep stopping. “What is it, boy? What's going on?” I patted his head as I moved on down the hill, and the others galloped along, the basset hound skidding to keep up.

 

“Come back here! Hey! Get back! Bad girl!”

 

For a moment, I thought the shouting was meant for me. Then I looked back up over my shoulder and saw, silhouetted against the pale, cold sky, a Pied Piper's assortment of breeds and mutts at the crest of the hill, all bounding along, freeing themselves from their leashes and owners, canines aroused by the irresistible, infuriating scent of wolf. I wasn't just another jogger: I was the friggin' call of the wild. Turning around, I tried to count. Ten now, including a Samoyed; a giant, dark, square-headed Bouvier; two collies; and a Great Dane.

 

And suddenly I understood why so many people choose giant hunting and herding breeds to roam their tiny Manhattan apartments. In a city this vast, you sometimes need a dog the size of a person to form a pack with. Except that it isn't always easy to convince these giants that you are top dog, even if you do bring home the Alpo.

 

I, on the other hand, obviously smelled like a leader. That, or they wanted to eat me.

 

I ran faster, nervous laughter bubbling up in my throat. I ran all the way through the park, up to Third Avenue, and back to Lilliana's apartment, where I had trouble getting my key in the lock.

 

The dogs went wild, barking, yipping, the shepherd managing a low approximation of a howl as I finally got the door open and slammed it in their eager faces. I ran up the stairs, still energized; well, I ran up the first two flights. At the door to the apartment, I stopped, trying to catch my breath. I braced my hand against the door, which I had locked not forty-five minutes earlier, and it opened.

 

The fear lasted only a moment, because I didn't have to look to know who had invaded my apartment. I could smell him. But I still couldn't believe it when my eyes located him, straddling a chair, regarding me with that familiar lazy smile.

 

“Did I wait long enough, Doc? I figured, April—she'll feel it by then. But I missed you too damn much.”

 

I stared at him, conscious of being sweaty and unmade-up, my hair falling in a lank ponytail down my back. “How did you get up here?”

 

“Fire escape.”

 

“But the windows were locked!”

 

“Jackie never told you? Right before I apprenticed with that shaman, I spent some time with a master thief.”

 

I walked closer to him. He'd lost weight again, and there was grayish-red stubble on his chin. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap and a perfectly hideous green sweatshirt with a picture of a stag on it, and if I'd never met him before I'd have figured him as the type to hunt from the back of a pickup truck. But my stomach was coiled tight with excitement and fear, and I had to concentrate on my breathing. In and out, that's how it's done, I reminded myself.

 

“I've been calling and calling you, Red. But you never called back, and all Jackie would say was that you were out of town.”

 

He unhooked his leg from the stool and stood up. “I know. Jackie told me that you'd talked to her a couple of times when I got back from Canada.”

 

“How long since you got back?”

 

“Three days. It was easier to stay far away, you know what I mean? Since you sounded so damn sure of yourself on New Year's, I figured I'd better wait till it was really spring to come after you. Not that this feels like spring, but hey, it's coming. You can almost smell it on the wind.”

 

I touched his face, tanned from a winter sun, and the shock of the contact raced all the way down my arm. “So what happens in spring?”

 

Red wrapped his arms around me and kissed me so hard my teeth hurt. Then he pulled back, laughed at my expression, and kissed me again, harder, his hands cupping the back of my head.

 

“How about this for a proposal: Come live with me and be my love and if you've got insomnia, hell, we can go chase sheep till dawn. No more lonely nights. That's my proposal.”

 

“I've been pretty stupid about men up till now.”

 

“I've been pretty stupid about women. Kept chasing after the ones who wanted to run away.”

 

“I don't want to run away.”

 

“Sure you do. But you also want to be caught.”

 

And he grabbed my wrists and held them behind my back and we kissed again, till I could feel the rapid beat of his heart against my chest.

 

“Are you ready for a little adventure, Doc?”

 

“What kind?”

 

“Let me see. How about something that calls for you to hang on to the back of a motorcycle. We spend some time exploring out west. I'll show you where I grew up in Texas. Then, when it really warms up, we head for northern Canada, where my grandfather lived.”

 

“And then what?”

 

Red traced my mouth with his thumb. “And then we go home.” He kissed me again, and this time, his tongue found mine.

 

Maybe somewhere between complete surrender and total independence I could find a middle path. Maybe there was a way for me to forge a veterinary career that could bring me closer to Red, not distance me from him.

 

Maybe I was thinking below the waist and had completely lost my ability to reason.

 

But really, when you think about it, Manhattan is no place for anything on four legs. And certainly not for something the size of a wolf.

 

I pulled apart from Red, wanting to find the words to reassure him that my answer to all his questions was a most definite yes. But then Red growled and began circling me, and I let out a nervous laugh.

 

“What am I supposed to do now? Say, My, what big teeth you have?”

 

Red just smiled and didn't answer. And suddenly I really was a little frightened. For the first time, I was seeing Red with his guard down. Not careful because I was new to the change. Not cautious because he didn't want to frighten me off with his intensity. This was a man secure in himself, and as he moved deliberately around me, I could feel the balance of power between us shift and reconfigure.

 

I didn't know the name of this game, or the rules. In all the years that Hunter and I had made love, we had remained bound by certain unspoken guidelines. I like this kind of touch, not that; touch me here, not there. We were like those people who go on vacation the same time each year to the same room in the same hotel in the same place. When Hunter had first come back from Romania, he had crossed our unstated boundaries a little, but only a little. Maybe, deep down, Hunter had known that if he'd pushed too far, he'd have discovered the surprisingly deep reservoir of cruelty in himself.

 

But this was different. Red was different. I stood my ground as he closed in, forcing myself to hold eye contact, that primitive, dangerous intimacy which provokes all manner of animal desires. A shiver of anxiety raced through me and I recognized it for what it was: that age-old fearful longing to surrender and let passion consume you.

 

Red's teeth closed over my shoulder. I had finally met my fate, and it was delicious.

 

 

 

The Better to Hold You is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

 

 

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

 

 

 

Copyright © 2009 by Alisa Sheckley

 

All rights reserved.

 

 

 

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

 

 

 

eISBN: 978-0-345-51273-4

 

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