Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

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      Libby’s always careful to wear denim, and Darren wouldn’t be caught dead in anything but jeans.

      Me either.

      The good thing about jeans, it’s that they rip away. Not at the seams like you’d think—that yellow thread there is tough like fishing line—but in the center of the denim, where it’s worn the thinnest. It sucks always having to buy new jeans, or finding ones at the salvage store with long enough legs, but that’s just part of being a werewolf.

      A pair of tights, though, man.

      Panty hose are murder.

      Libby’d only heard about this, never seen it, but supposedly what can happen is you’ve wriggled into a pair of hose or tights—except for color, I really don’t understand the difference between the two—and then, over the course of the day, they’re such a constant annoyance that you kind of forget them altogether.

      Enter night, then.

      Begin the transformation.

      Where pants will tear away, split over the thigh and calf, burst at the waist no matter how double-riveted they are, your fancy panty hose, your stretch pants, they wolf out with you. I’d imagine you look kind of stupid, with your legs all sheer and shiny, but anybody who laughs, you just rip their throat out, feast on their heart. Problem solved.

      At least until morning, when you shift back.

      Just like that tick that impacted itself into Grandpa’s skin, a pair of panty hose, they’ll retract with your legs. Except, instead of one tick embedding itself in your skin, flaring into some infection, this time every hair is pulling something back in with it.

      What happens is your skin, your human skin, it’s part panty hose now. Like the hose have melted onto you, but deeper than deep. And, because you just used all your calories shifting back—it’s not easy like on television—and because you’re hurt, now, you probably can’t go back to wolf yet, can’t get tough enough to sustain this kind of all-over injury.

      Worse, this isn’t an immediate death.

      You linger through the day.

      If your family—your werewolf family—if they really love you, they’ll end it for you. If you’re alone, then it’s hours of trying to pull those panty hose up from your bloody skin. It’s fine, slippery threads of that hose ducking into your veins and getting pumped higher, into your body.

      If you’re lucky, one of those clumps makes its way to your brain.

      If you’re not lucky, then you end up trying to use your human teeth to peel up all the skin from the top of your thigh, the back of your calf. Wherever you can reach.

      It doesn’t help.

      I don’t know what the coroner calls these kind of deaths. Probably drug psychosis. Obvious enough to him that a blood test isn’t even necessary. Look at this trailer, this living room, how they were living. Look at how she was picking at her skin. Bag her up, team. And drop a match on your way out.

      But there’s another way to die too.

      The oldest way, maybe.

      Darren had been gone five weeks without checking in, long enough that Libby’d started calling the DPS, asking about wrecks, when his rig rumbled up, shaking every window in the trailer.

      She ran out in her apron and hugged him hard around the neck almost before he’d even stepped down from the truck, hugged him hard enough that her feet weren’t even on the ground. Hard enough that I remembered that they’d been pups together. That they’re all that’s left of their litter. Of their family.

      Except for me.

      It’s why Libby was trying so hard to save me, I think. Like, if I never went wolf, she’d be keeping some promise to my mom. Like she’d have saved one of us.

      I’m not sure I wanted to be saved.

      I stood there in the doorway, too grown-up for hugs, too young not to have been drawn to the sound of a big rig, and Darren lifted his chin to me, pulled me out into the driveway with him. He had a box of frozen steaks in the sleeper. We were going to eat like kings, he said, messing my hair up and pushing me away at the same time.

      All those movies, where the werewolves eat their meat raw? Libby at least seared our steaks on the outside. I didn’t have a taste for it yet, but I could pretend. Darren cued into how long I was having to chew and planted a bottle of ketchup right by my plate, and nobody said anything.

      Each veiny, raw bite swelled and swelled in my mouth, but I swallowed them down hard. Because I’m a werewolf. Because I’m part of this family.

      After dinner, after Libby’d gone in to work the counter at the truck stop, Darren pulled out the next way to die but, before showing it to me, made me promise I wasn’t a cop, a narc, or a reporter.

      “I tell you if I was?” I said to him.

      “You report back to Lib about this, it’s both our asses,” he said, then added, “But mostly yours.”

      I flipped him off at close range.

      He guided my arm to the side, opened the fingers of his other hand one by one and dramatic.

      On his palm was a throwing star, like I’d seen at ten thousand flea markets.

      Only this one, Darren said, it was silver.

      That’s a word werewolves kind of hiss out, like the worst secret.

      Every time he spun it up in the air, reaching in to pinch it on both sides and stop its spinning, it was in slow motion for me.

      Not just the points were sharp either. Somebody’d ground the edges down, then used a small, patient whetstone on them. Just the weight of this star, it was enough to pull those razor edges down the middle of Libby’s magazine pages. We’d taken turns doing it, just to prove that something so small could be so dangerous, so deadly, so wrong.

      When we were done Darren passed it to me reverently, holding it sideways. With a knife, you usually hold the blade yourself, offer the handle like’s polite. There was no safe part of this throwing star, though.

      Even the slightest nick and our blood would be boiling.

      Darren being careful with it when he handed it across, watching my eyes to make sure I understood what we were playing with here—my heart swelled, my throat lumped up, and I wondered if this is what it feels like, changing.

      He was only telling me to be careful because this was dangerous to me as well.

      I was part of this family. I was in this blood.

      So he wouldn’t see the change happening to my eyes, I tilted my head back, gathered up the trash, and walked the eighty-nine steps to the burn barrels.

      The trash was all bloody cardboard from the steaks and fluttering pages from Libby’s magazines we’d cut all to hell.

      When I heard the thunk СКАЧАТЬ