Chapter 3

Carl Wilson

I spend the rest of the day itching. It's a side effect of the transformation. Unfortunately, even a partial transformation comes with a full dose of that side effect. There's a part of me that wishes I would have gone full wolf on Ben, to make sure he knew full well what he was messing with, that Ivy is part of my personal pack and off limits to the likes of him. If I'm going to itch all day, might as well earn it, right? But I know that's the wolf blood talking – the part of my nature that drives on pure impulse and aggression. It will always choose the path that leads to the most bloodshed, if I let it.

But there are so many reasons to not let the wolf out. The most obvious, of course, being that we never, ever show our true selves to the pinkies. We've gone for centuries without them realizing how many of us walk among them. Me transforming right in the middle of a school would have single handedly destroyed all of that work by countless of my ancestors, and have only ended in me being hunted down and torn to shreds by morning.

Then there's the Truce between us and the zombies. No matter how many of my problems with Ben, and his sniffing around Ivy, are personal, for me to tangle with him would be a violation of the Truce. It could be one pebble in an avalanche of violations that could restart the Great War. I lost way too much to the war to risk that. Way, way too much.

I had to content myself with showing him just enough to hope he'd back off instead of starting a fight with me. I can only hope that he also values the Truce and is terrified of breaking it. Maybe that will get him to back off from Ivy, go find some other pinkie somewhere else to mope around with his fashionable immortal ennui.

Showering up after gym class only makes the itch worse, but there's no way I can skip it after working out. Another side effect of the wolf blood is that my scent can be quite strong for a while after any degree of transformation. Not bad, like a dirty, wet dog, but still very obvious. I suffer through my last class of the day, a physics class where we sit at our desks and learn equations instead of getting to move around doing some lab work. I try my hardest to not fidget around while I stare at the clock, willing the minute hand to move on and the bell to ring.

When it finally does, I'm so restless that I nearly leap up out of my seat. It feels so good to just be able to move as I walk down the hallway toward my locker. I grab the couple of books I'll need for tonight's homework and head out of the building. My bloodline descends from the great alpine wolves of old, so I am extraordinarily tolerant of cold. Where everybody else in the school had brought out their lightweight jackets that morning for school, I'd stepped out with just a lumberjack shirt and a cap.

As soon as I step out of the building into the sunlight, the first thing I notice is Ben, the only one bundled up hiding from the sun, and not throwing open his coat and looking up to face the sky. And he's walking with Ivy. I wonder what could possibly have happened that they're just about shoulder-to-shoulder, speaking quietly together. After she had been so angry at him this morning, how she backed me up when I stepped at him, how could that zombie have possibly redeemed himself?

I come up behind them, wedging myself right between, and I hook Ivy's arm in mine. They're both taken enough by surprise that he doesn't protest and she just comes along with me.

"What is going on?" I ask Ivy.

"Nothing that is any of your business!" she says.

I look back over my shoulder at Ben. He's got his leather jacket zipped all the way up, his oversized sunglasses on, cap pulled down over his ears, and his facemask bunched up around his neck. He looks positively ridiculous, hiding his precious zombie skin from the mean old sun. Where Ivy wears her paleness with grace, Ben just looks like somebody has sucked all of his blood out, instead of the other way around.

"That guy was a complete ass to you this morning. To anybody that got too close to him and that overblown bike of his, in fact. He doesn't actually think about anybody, you know. He's just here for himself and nobody else." I wanted to add, 'Like all zombies,' but that would just get her asking too many of the wrong questions. But I knew Ben's type of zombie. Oh so weary of the world, and oh so 'Woe is me!'

"He apologized," Ivy says.

"I saw it. It wasn't very sincere."

"Carl!" Ivy says, jerking her arm away from me. "I know you don't like him, but he meant it."

"You didn't seem to believe it, either," I say.

"I was still freshly angry this morning. And he was in the middle of another apology when you just plowed in between us. He really does feel bad for what he did this morning."

I am about to say something else, when she interrupts me. "Besides, he really doesn't know about my parents and what happened, so he doesn't know just how people driving crazy around me on these mountain roads really affects me. Now he knows, and he's going to do better. So like I said, Carl, none of your business."

"You don't see how cold he is? How little he cares about people, how he keeps himself separate from everybody? That kid is bad, bad news, Ivy."

We get to her car. By force of habit, I walk around to the passenger side. "If I really needed a new dad, Carl, it wouldn't be you," Ivy says. "I get that we're a lot alike, and you've been the best brother I always wish I'd had, but lay off on Ben. I don't need you to protect me from him, because he's not going to hurt me. He's just a lonely guy that's a little bit odd, and he just needs a friend."

"There is an entire school full of friends he could make if he'd just stop being such a creep and a loner. And half of those potential friends are guys, if he'd just make an effort."

I realize I've just pushed it too far. I just started pushing the conversation to one we've had many times before. She thinks I'm jealous of Ben because I want to be her boyfriend, and he's a threat to that. That's not entirely false, but with that zombie, it's more than him taking an affection that she'll never feel for me anyway. I have good reason to not trust zombies, but there's something about Ben that really smells off. There's more to him and his attraction to her than just a beautiful woman having caught his eye. He wants way more than that from her.

Ivy opens her door, but doesn't hit the switch to unlock the rest. "Check with Grandma to see if she wants you to come to dinner tonight," she says, getting in and slamming the door behind her.

I always join her and Grandma for dinner when she gets home from a trip out east, typically catch a ride with Ivy after school. Obviously, tonight I'm walking home and driving myself over. It's probably for the better, considering how upset she is at me, and how she thinks this is all because I have a crush on her. Spending thirty minutes in a small car together isn't going to improve things. She backs out of her parking space and leaves the lot driving as angry as the world's most cautious and considerate motorist possibly can.

There's a shortcut to my house from the school that cuts two miles of highway switchbacks off of the trip, in exchange for climbing a steep, wooded slope. Even though I have a car, I like the trail enough that I usually only drive to school if the weather is truly terrible, or I have to go to town afterwards. I step inside the treeline, and duck under the vine and moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree. I'm really upset right now, and itching anyways. There's always been one easy cure for that. I strip naked, stuff my clothes and boots into my backpack. I loosen the shoulder straps on the backpack all the way and put it on, clasping the waist belt and the replacement chest strap I'd made out of much heavier material than the original.

I let a little growl escape my human throat, feeling the sound of it get deeper and more lupine, coming from a place deeper in my throat and resonating through my chest. I drop to all fours and growl again, releasing my hold on the wolf, letting it into my bloodstream, and from there, feeling it spread into every part of my being.

The color washes out of my vision, things become softer, more blurred, but I can also see more clearly into the dark areas of the woods around me. Whiskers sprout out of my face, and I feel every movement of the air in them. My nostrils fill with a riot of smells – the damp earth below me, still mostly dormant after winter. The slowly rotting wood of the tree I'm sheltered under. The reek of burning gasoline and diesel fuel waft in from the road just a few dozen yards away. I smell deer and birds and possum around me, small rodents too insignificant to rouse my appetite, the fake stink of scented soap clinging to a passer-by from their shower. I sniff again, and catch the nice musk of deer again. My mouth starts to water.

As the transformation continues to take hold, I roll my shoulders and twist my torso, to make sure the backpack is in the right position. By the time the wolf has taken over completely, my hands have been replaced by heavy paws with thick, strong claws. My first instinct is to try and shake that human thing, filled with the clothes that my weak, pinkie form must wear, off me. I try to claw at it, but can't quite twist my legs into the right positions to get a solid grasp on it. The annoyance and distraction of it actually keep the wolf from completely taking me over, giving my human self a presence in my mind that allows me to constrain my wildest nature. Only if I suffer physical harm or experience some intense emotion do I risk ceding complete control to the wolf.

I'm tempted to go for the deer I smell, but it's still daytime, and once on the hunt, I struggle to control the wolf. The chances of flushing the deer out into the open or across the highway during daylight hours is too great. I try to appease the wolf by letting it run free and hard up the wooded slope, making great leaps as I zig-zag across the bedrock that juts out through the thin soil and leaf litter. Every time we come to a highway, I skulk down in a thicket and wait for all traffic to be clear before I sprint across the road and into the woods on the other side.

The backyard of my house is surrounded by a solid wooden fence, but there's one place, right at the back of it, where there's a gap beneath the boards. I creep under that, careful to not snag the backpack, and crawl to the cellar door. I keep a stout rope tied to it that I'm able to grab it in my teeth and pull it to open it up. Once I'm at the bottom of the stairs, I curl up and spend a minute coaxing the wolf back from me. I close my eyes and feel my shape shift, feel the hairs recede back under my skin. As always, I find myself disoriented as my senses of smell and hearing fade back to their human limitations. That's why I keep my eyes closed during the transformation back if I can – the sudden riot of sharp colors is too much to take at the same time the other two senses are so sharply curtailed.

I pull the heavy cellar door above me shut, and fish the basement door key out of my backpack. Right inside is a shower for those times I come back home muddy or bloody.

Two hours later, I arrive at Grandma's house. Fortunately, Ivy's good nature has returned by the time I arrive. We give each other a huge hug. "Everything good?" I ask.

"Everything's good," she says.

For all the time we've known each other, if we've ever parted mad at each other, 'Everything's good,' has been our greeting the next time we see each other.

It pains me to sully that little ritual by lying to her. Everything is not good, won't be good as long as Ben is in the scene, but I decide to let it rest for now. I hope that he'll show his true nature again, maybe a few more times, but enough to let her know how bad he is for her and get her to push him away herself. Our conversation today told me pretty clearly that I can't protect her from Ben by putting myself between them. But patience isn't really a strong suit for werewolves. We're creatures of action.

I wait until after dinner, when Ivy goes to the den to practice piano. Grandma knows that something happened between Ivy and me, so she takes two beers from the fridge. We sit at the kitchen table together, listening to Ivy's gentle music. Grandma waits me out, sipping at her beer, until I can't hold it in anymore and I tell her about what happened with Ben.

"You shouldn't have let the wolf growl at Ben," is the first thing Grandma says. "Now that he knows, it's going to change everything. He's going to treat you differently, both when Ivy is present and when she isn't."

"I know," I say. I consider making some excuses, but I know that Grandma won't have any of it. She's always pushed me to keep the wolf on a shorter leash than I do, always pushed me to think farther ahead that I usually do.

"The Great War is over, Carl," Grandma says. "But the need to think two steps ahead is just as vital for your survival now as it was then. There is a Truce now, but it was a long war, and it will only take a few small errors to break the peace and bring you right back to where you were."

"I know," I say. "I just can't stand the thought of that zombie getting his teeth into her."

"Don't call them that. You need to respect them to respect the truce."

"I respect 'them'," I say. "I don't respect him."

"Disrespect him with better language, then," Grandma says. "You've already figured out that the more you push them apart, the more Ivy is going to push at you. Swallow it when you're around him. You really want Ivy to be alright tomorrow, mind your behavior today."

I take a drink of beer to try and collect my thoughts. Grandma has said her piece, and she's waiting me out again. I know this silence. She wants me to figure something out. I replay that moment with Ben this morning, everything about it. I recall my own actions, and Ben's responses. I suddenly recall a certain look on his face when I made the final step in at him, looking down on him from my enhanced height. It was a very brief, smug flash of victory. In that moment, Ben realized that he'd actually won the confrontation. I listen to Ivy's playing from the other room. She's in the middle of a song, which means it's at least a couple of minutes before she'll be getting up from the piano.

"So, he knows. About me," I tell Grandma. "He knows a secret about me that I can never tell Ivy. Which means he can start planting it in her ear that I hide something from her."

Grandma lifts her bottle of beer and holds it out toward me, offering a toast. I clink my bottle against hers. "Now you understand why you need to think ahead, don't you?"

I throw my head back and groan and run my fingers through my hair. Grandma is right. The little victory I thought I'd won today turned out to be a loss in many ways. Ben had bested me at a game I didn't know I was even playing yet. The wolf whispers that ripping his throat out would end the game, on my terms, tonight.

"I know what you're thinking," Grandma says. "You touch Ben, they'll take it out on Ivy."

Grandma just leaves it unspoken that if any harm comes to Ivy because of my action, that her vengeance on me will be harsh and swift.

"What do I do?" I ask her.

"The hardest route, but also the safest, is to be the better man. Which means you don't try to compete with Ben. You compete against yourself to show Ivy that you are the best one for her. Better than Ben isn't going to cut it. Best possible choice is all that will work."

I sigh again. Ivy's song is just about at an end. "What do you think I've been trying to do since the day I met her?"

"Finish that," Grandma says, gesturing at my beer.

I quickly drain it and put the empty into the recycling bin as quiet as I can, just before Ivy comes into the room. "Lovely," I tell her.

"That's what I miss most about being on the road," Grandma says.

Ivy curtsies for us before she sits back down at the table. She looks at the half-full beer in Grandma's hand and at the little condensation ring on the coaster in front of me. She winks at me to let me know that I've been busted.

We chat for a little while longer, about Grandma's trip and about the first real day of spring in Stokers Mill, until Ivy pushes her chair back to let us know that she's heading upstairs for the night.

"I should get going," I say, pushing my own chair back.

"Unless Ivy would like you to spend the night, perhaps?" She cocks an eyebrow at her.

She gives her a slightly sour look. She's almost as tired of her trying to nudge us into a relationship as she is of my wishing she'd see me as something different than her big puppy.

Before she can open her mouth, I say, "No, that's alright. I should get home to my own bed. Good night, Ivy," I say, opening my arms to invite a hug.

She accepts, and we share a short embrace. "I'll see you tomorrow," she says, heading toward the stairs.

I bid Grandma a good night as well. There's a look on her face that tells me deflecting her invite to spend the night so Ivy didn't have to is exactly what I should have done.

If only I had figured that out a couple of years ago.