The wolf backed away on its belly, and Berthe sat down among the pine needles.
“Sometimes they still turn back,” Stephen said. “I thought perhaps—I wanted there to be something here for you.”
“A look into the future?”
“No,” said Stephen. “They make a choice—they turn toward the wild—”
“And what other choice is there to make?” Berthe demanded. “The one your friend did?”
Berthe had to look up from the pine needle floor because she could not hear Stephen. He did not breathe and his heart did not beat; when he was still he was a creature of perfect silence and she could not tell if he was there. She was suddenly afraid that he had left, suddenly aware that things could get worse.
Stephen had not left. He was looking down at her, eyes moonlight-eerie in his thin, serious face, and then he knelt down so they were on a level.
“She was very lonely,” he said. “She didn’t know what was happening to her at first. She hurt people. She hurt her family. You haven’t done that. You’re not alone.”
“No,” said Berthe, and thought painfully of her parents, and of Leela and Natalie. They all seemed so far away in a world she did not know how to scramble back to. “But I could hurt them,” she said. “And I can’t tell them. And I’m alone with this.”
“You’re not,” said Stephen.
“You’re not like me,” Berthe told him, her voice low.
She did not just mean what they were, or the feeling of being on different sides in a dark wood. He was in control as she was not: he was not tearing rooms into shreds.
“I only wanted . . . ,” Berthe tried to clarify, “I wanted someone who could explain this to me, from the inside out.”
Stephen looked off into the trees, after the fleeing wolf, and then knelt down on the ground among the needles with her.
“I’m not telling you this to trump what you’re feeling,” he said, “or to try and win the argument. I was made by a man who had a whole bevy of us—teenage minions, old enough to be useful, but not old enough to survive on our own with ease. He told us what was happening to us, and what to do, how to feed, how to serve him and recruit for him. We were dependent on him, because of what we were.”
Feed, Berthe thought, and whispered, “Did you kill someone?”
“I killed three people,” Stephen answered, without hesitating. “The last one was the worst, though I doubt the first two would agree with me. I had a family, once. I waited for my chance to get back to them. When it came, I didn’t get away clean—someone was watching me. A window broke, and I was cut, and one of the others had her teeth in my wrist to the bone. I had to tear free. They were hunting me through the streets, and I did not know what to do. I knocked on doors and a woman let me in, a teenage boy covered in blood. In return for her kindness, I knocked her to the floor, ripped her throat out, and gulped down her heart’s blood. I stayed in her house all that night and the next day with her body. Without her, I don’t think I would have escaped.
“I wanted to get away from the man who made me and taught me. I wish I had not asked for that woman’s help. Being able to depend on nobody but yourself isn’t so bad.”
“If you can depend on yourself,” Berthe said shakily.
“You can,” Stephen said, and sounded sure, calm again, the alien creature, the murderer who had saved her from hurting anyone. “And you’re not alone.”
The night was crystal clear and terrifying, the wolf running through the woods, and when she closed her eyes she could not hear anyone’s breathing or heartbeat but her own.
But when she looked up, she wasn’t alone, after all, and when she got home from the dark woods, her mother made her hot chocolate, popping in a marshmallow. Berthe looked at the tiny treat in the cup and thought about all the little sweetnesses love slipped into your daily life, almost unnoticed except that when they were added up, they meant you could bear anything.
At her next lacrosse game she was running, running across the field with her stick in hand, her parents and friends cheering as they watched. Another girl ran at her full tilt, body-checking her.
Berthe barely paused, but she bumped the girl’s shoulder—carefully, careful, she had to be so careful, you don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?—and the girl fell back, and Berthe ran ahead with the ball and her victory.
It was a bright sunlit moment, but the girl had a bruise on her shoulder afterward. She said in the locker room, with a little admiration but mostly spite, “You’re an animal, Lindstrom.”
The other girl was the one who had not been playing fair. If Berthe was playing fair by playing at all, considering what she was.
Berthe went and took a hot shower, scrubbing hard at her unmarked body. She came out of it and looked in the fogged mirror set over the sink, misted glass reflecting back pieces of her grotesquely: blond hair dark-stringy with water, pale blur of flesh and eyes cut with lightning, like the eyes of the wolf in the woods. She pressed her face against the wet glass and took deep shuddering breaths, and outside the building she heard Natalie and Leela whispering secrets Berthe was not supposed to know.
When she was done taking breaths, she leaned back from the mirror, wiped it with her shaking hand, and looked at herself whole and clear.
“How do you,” Berthe said, on the third morning after a full moon, sitting with her cookie half-eaten in her hand. “How do you feed now?”
Stephen sat in the corner away from the sunlight. He did not, as she had feared, look offended by the question.
“Not well,” he answered. “There is no way to do it that’s right. People who are sleeping on the street. People who are passed out drunk at parties in a garden. Stealing from a blood donation clinic, or a blood bank. I feed in small, dark ways, but I don’t kill.”
It was a horrible picture, the monster preying on unsuspecting people. The savagery that ripped through Stephen’s bedroom every full moon, that would rip through people, was horrible as well.
And there was something else besides horror in it: the thought of kind Stephen spending half his life desperately scavenging for sustenance.
“You must be hungry a lot,” she said quietly.
He was silent.
“If you want,” she began. She had brought her own clothes this time, and she fiddled with the sleeve of her warm, comforting sweater, pulling it up to expose the veins on her wrist.
It could not be anything like as bad as the liquefying pain she had suffered last night and would suffer, again and again, as long as she lived. And she would get to do something for Stephen: something that might make him happy.
“I wouldn’t mind,” she told him.
“My kind can’t feed on your kind,” Stephen said, and after a pause, very politely: “But thank you very much. I mean it. Nobody’s ever offered me that before.”
It hurt for a moment that her body was disqualified to do something for him. She felt monstrous for not being prey for him, and how stupid was that?
“When I’m—like I am, upstairs, can you hear me?” she asked. “Is it awful?”
“No,” said Stephen.
“How can it not be?”
“How can you stand to look at me,” Stephen said, “when you know what I am? Once you change things from the general to the personal, what does ‘monstrous’ even mean? It’s not awful. I hear you and it’s Berthe, upstairs.”
It didn’t seem like her, and she was scared of thinking of it as her, but she gave some thought to trying to remember next time.
Berthe tucked her feet up under her. “How’d you get so smart?”
“Well, I’ve been around awhile,” Stephen said. “Gives you time to think things through, even if our minds don’t mature like yours will.”