at night. Kevin stayed. He didn’t think they were scary; he thought they were beautiful and full of life and
energy. He didn’t want to go back yet. A few drops of Josh’s blood had fallen to the damp earth from the
place where Kevin had kissed him. He could smell it. When Josh was out of sight, Kevin carefully licked
the earth where they had fallen.
He shivered all over as the wolf took him over, quickly and efficiently. He’d seen enough werewolf
movies to know what was happening, but this wasn’t anything like those horror movies that he and Hannah
had seen late at night. It didn’t hurt. It was like a rush of adrenaline. He felt fear, triumph, and sudden,
overwhelming…freedom. In seconds he shimmered from a young man to a four-legged animal, his russet
fur glinting in the moonlight.
He was hungry, ravenous. Soon he was racing with wild abandon through the woods, his heart pumping,
his human thoughts a low, steady murmur in the back of his brain. He knew who he was and he knew he
had no wish to hurt anyone, but also knew he was a wolf, and the wolf needed to hunt. He bounded easily
over rocks and deadfalls. He splashed through streams, the icy water soothing his fever and soaking his
plush, reddish pelt. His feet barely seemed to touch the earth. He felt less like he was running and more
like he was flying. His energy was boundless; he felt he could run all night long.
And he did, gobbling up whatever prey fell into his path—squirrels and chipmunks, snakes and frogs. He
drank from a nearby riverbed, then ran again. His hunger to be free seemed insatiable.
Come morning, he woke on the outskirts of camp, muddy and naked, lying behind a rotted log. Thankfully,
he was up before anyone else and was able to sneak back to his cabin without being seen. He thought
about what he was, but it didn’t seem awful, just another part of him that needed to be accepted, like being
gay. And it wasn’t the last time the wolf visited him, though he never told anyone about the wolf—not his
parents, not Hannah, though he told her everything else.
He came to accept what he thought of as the wolf’s visits. The wolf was not something to be feared,
exactly, though certainly respected. He supposed it was similar to how Hannah felt about her disability. It
was as much a part of her as anything else. After his first shift at age fourteen, Kevin became rapidly
obsessed with lycanthropy. He read all the books, saw all the movies. He studied every “real life”
account he could find.
He didn’t find much that helped him, though. The wolf didn’t walk only during the full moon like in the
movies—it could appear almost anytime. Silver and wolfsbane seemed to have no effect on him. He
didn’t know what, if anything, could kill him, but he wasn’t big on finding out. The only thing he knew for
certain was that the wolf wasn’t his enemy, though it did require time off the leash.
Over the years that followed, he and the wolf learned to compromise and coexist. It let him live his human
life, but if he didn’t let it run at least a couple times during the month, it became wilder, more demanding,
more difficult to control. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, least of all Hannah—after their parents died when
he was eighteen and Hannah twelve, she was all the family he had left—so he took pains to give it space
and let it run.
The job at the Barracuda became a godsend. Jolene was a great boss, the best he’d ever had. He was a
good barkeep, watched after her dancers, did her favors all over the place, and in return, she lent him the
cabin and time off when he requested it, though she had no idea what he did with that time. No one did.
Hannah thought he had his porn stashed up here; Jolene figured he had a married boyfriend he was hiding.
Both of them were wrong.
How do you explain to your boss, your friends, and your kid sister that you change into a wolf a couple of
times a month? How do you tell your lovers?
The wolf made him stronger, faster, more intuit. But in return, he had to respect its boundaries. He had to
run his life around it. A career was out of the question. He knew there was no job he could take where he
could make his own hours. He couldn’t be a doctor or lawyer. He would never do better than the
Barracuda, and sometime during his second semester of college, he got practical and dropped out. It hurt
to give up, to give in, but he managed. He knew he wanted more out of life than to be a barkeep forever,
but he didn’t know what that was or how to get it.
It hurt more to know he would be alone for the rest of his life. He never told Josh, or any other lover he
ever had, about the wolf. They wouldn’t understand. They’d figure he was a freak. But not telling them left
him feeling like a liar, like he was deceiving them. He had this huge secret, this massive, private part of
his life, and he couldn’t share it with the one he loved. There were boys in high school, of course, and
during his college stint, he’d been with a few guys, though he never let things get too serious. He made it
just about sex. The emotionally-distant relationships he developed never lasted for very long.
No, he thought even as he cut soundlessly through the trees and leapt effortlessly over ravines, the forest
skirting by him in a dark green blur, he couldn’t trust his heart to anyone. His heart, like the rest of him,
belonged to the wolf. The wolf was all. The wolf was all he would ever be.
His lungs, brain and body filled with the lush wildness of the evening forest. He loved the woods and he
loved to run. In a way, it was his lover. He let it fill his senses to overwhelming, until the aching, haunting
loneliness inside him subsided once more to a low and almost imperceptible murmur. In the twenty-eight
years of his life he had never met another werewolf. He was likely the only one of his kind, maybe the last
werewolf on planet earth. He could never allow himself to fall in love. It just wasn’t in the cards for him.
Then he met the black wolf, and everything changed.
***
Chapter Four
He was digging out a family of chipmunks from under a large, flat rock when he picked up the intruder’s
scent. Forgoing the prey, he breathed in the new, musky, male scent and bolted into the trees. The
intruder’s trail was warm, recent, and unfamiliar. There were coyote in this forest, but this didn’t quite fit
that scent. It was interesting enough to draw him on until he reached what looked like a small clearing
with a creek running through it.
The sun was almost completely down, the light soft and purple. The canopy of the forest made the
shadows long. But despite these things, he recognized the figure standing on the opposite side of the creek.
The wolf was huge, shaggy, bigger than he was, almost the size of a Shetland pony, and all black except
for its glaring yellow eyes. It watched him steadily from atop a deadfall, head down, tail carried low.
Obviously, it was wary, wondering the same things as he: Was he a threat? What would come of this
encounter?
Kevin felt his heart thudding thick and heavy against his furry chest. He sniffed the air. The wolf smelled