17

OPEN THE DOOR AND LET ME IN

The sun had set, and we were sitting, kneeling, getting up, pacing, cursing, sweating, grunting while Chai droned on about letting energy move through us in a monotone that was supposed to be soothing or hypnotic. To be fair, maybe his voice was both of those things. Maybe Chai’s voice was exactly what we needed, just not enough of whatever that was, a drop of water for people who were on fire.

Cory had been the first one to take off his clothes, doing so without any embarrassment or fuss. Sig had teased me about how frequently I seemed to wind up being naked, but under a full moon, the compulsion is real. Perhaps it is the way our flesh burns as our molecular rate speeds up, or perhaps it is our bodies anticipating change and not wanting to be confined. Jelly slid out of his overlarge britches grublike, pale and pissing himself. I forced myself to stand and remove my garments methodically, and if my movements were abrupt and jerky, I still managed to fold my clothes.

Mayte positioned herself behind Chai. She was fumbling with her own clothes, her hands trembling violently. Cory was staring at Mayte hungrily.

Jelly was huddled in a fetal position whimpering, his head clutched between his forearms while his fingers scrabbled mindlessly at his back like the legs of large hairless spiders. Those same fingers had grown thick gnarled nails, and his skin was parting beneath them, bleeding and reknitting in a frantic cycle.

Butterflies, I thought.

I could barely make sense of Chai’s droning. Normally, I would be running right now. Running and running and running through endless stretches of forest. I had to do something. Anything. I tilted my head up at the sky and howled. Answering howls sounded from the woods around us.

Okay, maybe not anything. How many paws and claws were out there in the forest reserve, anyhow?

The howls seemed to tilt some kind of balance. Chai shifted into a wolf almost seamlessly. He fell forward as a man, his face contorted in something that might have been pain or ecstasy, but it was a wolf whose paws hit the ground. Cory changed more violently, his back arching upward, his fingers flexing and unflexing while his jaw contorted, his body hair elongating and thickening. The two of them were diametrically faced off against each other.

Cory was screaming. Jelly and Mayte weren’t making any sounds at all, but I couldn’t make myself look at them. I was on my hands and knees, staring at my fists as they clenched tighter and tighter, driving my fingers into my palms and my knuckles into dirt and leaves and twigs and small chips of rock.

I wasn’t changing.

I expected to change. I needed to change. But the geas doesn’t allow any outside magic to get behind the steering wheel of my psyche unless it’s the only way for me to survive, and the geas wasn’t letting me go.

I was relieved and horrified at the same time.

Relieved because I didn’t really want to change into anything against my will.

Horrified because I was a naked and kneeling man surrounded by wolves.

Talk about socially awkward.

Other wolves began to slink silently into the periphery of my vision from all sides. I don’t know if they were responding to my howl or if our paw had been their destination all along. They crept through dark and moonlight in seamless ripples of fur and shadow, unhurried, unworried, but not without purpose.

A good twenty feet back, I saw the leader. I don’t know how I knew he was the leader. Body language, scent, position… some wolf knowledge buried in my brain before I was even self-aware. The wolf was large and dark and still, though not motionless. It was not sitting on its haunches, but there was something relaxed in the set of its shoulders, in the way it was putting weight on its forelegs. Looking at that unnatural poise and pose, I knew though I don’t know how to articulate how I knew, that the mind of a satisfied man was in that wolf’s body. On a full moon.

It was an impressive display of control. I saw it and wanted it.

The wolves behind me moved closest first. I knew this game. I pretended to whirl on them, then spun around to kick aside a wolf that had jumped at me from the opposite direction. Another tried to bait and switch, darted in from an alternate side to draw my attention, but I feinted it into a retreat as well, then spun on my real attacker. A third wolf warily joined the circle around me. Eventually, one of them would get in close enough to tear my back or get jaws on my throat or sever an Achilles tendon.

They would wear me down. I would be pulled down beneath a wave of teeth and claws, torn into so many wet shreds of flesh and sprays of bodily fluid that there would be no possibility of ever healing again.

They weren’t giving me a choice. The man had to die for the wolf to survive.

I opened my mouth to scream. The wolf snarled out through it.