Mongrels

Halfway to the house the vampire hears her crying in the car behind him, but he doesn’t turn around.

“Oh no, cover your neck,” the unsteady woman who answers the door says in a too-high voice.

The vampire holds his paper sack out and waits for whatever the next part is.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_93db5b0c-3db4-5988-a3dd-a01449912ab0)

American Ninja (#ulink_93db5b0c-3db4-5988-a3dd-a01449912ab0)

We were in Portales, New Mexico, just long enough for me to wear a dog path between the back door of our trailer and the burn barrels. That’s what Darren called it when he came through, and then he’d punch me in the shoulder and get down in a fighting stance, his shoulders curled around his chest like he was a boxer, not a biter. Sometimes it would turn into a wrestling match in the living room, at least until a lamp got broke or Libby’s coffee got spilled—I was twelve and tall by then, needed a yard to wrestle in, not a living room—and other times I’d just hike another half-full trash bag over my shoulder, slope out the back door again.

Because night was falling. Because night’s always falling, when you’re a werewolf.

There were eighty-nine steps to the burn barrels.

And it wasn’t a dog path.

That was just Darren funning me about not having shifted yet. It was probably supposed to be him reminding me not to worry, that I was like him, I was like Libby, I was like Grandpa.

It didn’t feel that way.

I didn’t mind the trash runs, though.

You can always tell who might be a werewolf by if they’re careful like we are, to take the trash out each night, even if it’s just a little bit full. Even if it’s just wasting a trash bag. But I wouldn’t waste them. I’d upend the day’s leavings into the flaky black drums, tuck the white bag into my pocket, use it again the next day.

What I was doing was making deals. With the world.

I’ll take care of you, you take care of me, cool?

Darren had told me that the first time he shifted it was three years early, and that had triggered Libby to shift, and my mom, she hadn’t even flinched, had just stood and pulled the kitchen door shut so they couldn’t get out, and then cornered Darren and Libby with the business end of a small broom until Grandpa got home.

Three years early would put Darren and Libby at about ten.

I was coming in late, it looked like.

If ever.

Libby never said it out loud, but I could tell she was pulling for “never.” She didn’t want her and Darren’s life for me—moving every few months, driving cars until they threw a rod then walking away from them to the next car. She wanted me to be the one who sneaked through without getting that taste for raw meat. She wanted me to be the one who got to have a normal life, in town.

We’re werewolves, though.

Each night at dusk one of us leans out the door to burn the trash, just because we all know what can happen if that trash is left in the kitchen: Somebody’ll go wolf in the night, and because shifting burns up every last bit of fat reserves you have and even leaves you in the hole for more, the first thing you think once you’re wolf—the only thing you can think, if you’re just starting out—is food.

It’s not a choice, it’s just survival. You eat whatever’s there, and fast, be it the people sleeping around you at the rest stop or, if you’ve got a trailer rented for four months, the kitchen trash.

It sounds stupid, but it’s true.

When we first open our eyes as werewolves, the trash is so fragrant, so perfect, so right there.

Except.

There’s things in there you can’t digest, I don’t care how bad you are.

Ever wake up with the ragged lid of a tin can in your gut? Darren says it’s like a circle-saw blade, in first gear. But it’s only because you’re so delicate in the morning, so human. Even a twist tie can stab through the lining of your stomach.

The wolf doesn’t know any better, just knows to eat it all, and fast, and now.

Come daylight, though—so many werewolves die this way, Libby had told me once. So many die with a broke-tined fork stabbing them open from the inside. With a discarded but whole beef rib pushing through their spleen, their pancreas. She said she’d even heard of somebody dying from a house dog that had had its pelvis put together with a metal rod. That metal rod, it went down the wolf’s throat fine, along with the crunchy domestic bones, but in the morning, for the man, it was a spear.

Libby had stopped meaningfully on spear, settled me in her stare to make sure I was paying the right kind of attention.

I had been. Sort of.

Because I was sure I was going to shift just any night now, was going to pad on all fours down the long hall from my bedroom at any moment, sniff at the coffee table then turn my attention to the much richer scent of the kitchen—because that was definitely going to happen, I always lugged the trash out. Never mind that Libby’d always been careful to not leave steel wool or bleach containers in there. Never mind that we kept a jug of black pepper right there on the counter, to sprinkle onto the trash as it built through the day.

I’d be able to smell through that, I knew.

I was going to be that kind of werewolf. In spite of Libby’s prayers.

The life she wanted for me, it was the life my mom should have had, the life that, her not being a werewolf, should have been mine by birthright. But something had gone haywire. Just once, or just waiting, though? That was the part her and Darren couldn’t figure. I had the blood, but was that blood ever going to rise again, or had it been a onetime thing? With Grandpa five years gone, there weren’t even any old-timers to ask. Had this happened before? Had there ever been somebody like me?

There had to have been.

Werewolves have always been here. Every variation of us, it has to have happened at some point.

Just, it’s the remembering that’s tricky.

Until we knew for sure one way or the other, Libby was packing my head with facts, like trying to scare me back across the line.

Driving here from East Texas, the big Delta 88 eating up the miles, the trunk empty because all our stuff had burned a move or two ago, she’d evened her voice out to sound like a safety pamphlet and recounted all the ways we usually die. It was the werewolf version of The Talk. Just, with more dead bodies.

It took nearly the whole ten hours, no radio, no books, nothing. I stared a hole into the dashboard, not wanting to let her see how perfect all this was. How much I was loving every single wonderful fact.

She’d already told me about the trash.

The rest, though—being a werewolf, it’s a game of Russian roulette, Darren would say. It’s waking up every morning with that gun to your temple. And then he’d snap his teeth over the end of that sentence and give a yip or two, and I’d have to look away so Libby wouldn’t see me smiling, I wanted to be him so bad.

What he was doing those four months we were in New Mexico—the farthest west we’d ever been since splitting east out of Arkansas once and forever—was dragging trailer homes between Portales and Raton, up in Colorado. And if the p-traps of those kitchens and bathrooms were packed with baggies of anything, then he didn’t know about it, anyway.

His logbooks were meticulous, his plates screwed on top and bottom, and his license wasn’t even expired, for once. It wasn’t his name on that license, but, other than that, he was completely legal, right down to the depth of the tread on his tires.

His bosses insisted.

Libby didn’t approve, but you do what you can.

And, up in his truck, the only werewolf death he really had to worry about was that old one of going wolf up in the cab, behind the wheel.

According to Libby, that’s the main way most werewolves cash out. Not always in cab-over rigs on a six-percent grade, the jake brake screaming, but on the road at highway speed, anyway. Usually it’s just making a run to the gas station for ketchup packets. Somebody cuts you off and you wrap your fingers extra tight around the steering wheel, until the tendons in the backs of your fingers start popping into their canine shape. At which point you reach up for the rearview to check yourself, to see if this is really and truly happening. Only, the rearview, it comes off in what’s now your long-fingered paw. And, if the glue’s good, then maybe a piece of the windshield craters out with the mirror, and you know how goddamn much that’s going to cost, and thinking cusswords in your head, that’s no way to hold back the transformation.