Chapter Text
Tonight was meant to be peaceful. A run through the woods. Amanda understood, was prepared to lay out interference should anyone come calling. “McFridayz struck again,” was to be my excuse: a harmless story of a gnarly case of food poisoning while giving the greasy fast-food chain another chance at being appetizing. “No-can-do tonight, my fine Sir. It’s a bad scene in there. Pops has been praying to the Porcelain Throne all afternoon and there’s no sign of stopping. Might turn into a cult at this rate. Can I take a message, though? Y’know, when he’s not hurling all over the bathroom floor?”
My dadly pride would have to scrape by after that blow, but embarrassing stories are more believable in a pinch. Besides, food poisoning happens to the best of us.
I cringe at the thought that Joseph might be among the story’s recipients, though. Would violent retching being compared to prayer offend him? Dang, I really hope not. The confidences we shared in Margarita Zone proved he wasn’t the easily-offended type, at least, but a youth pastor is still a pastor. And a friend. A good friend. A really good friend.
Damn—language, John!—that is one complicated web I want nothing to do with unravelling tonight.
Not tonight.
Tonight is meant to be peaceful. A long run through the woods—which, thanks to Craig, runs are getting to be longer and more refreshing. Look at the stars, breathe in the cool spring air, maybe run down a buck. But tonight isn’t a night for hunting. Relax. Breathe.
Run.
That’s the game. Just run. Run and don’t stop.
Don’t stop.
Rushing wind ruffles my fur like grass bending to a hurricane as I hurdle into the moonlit dark; it cools the undercoat, and on muggy nights if I can stomach the humidity it’s so dang nice. The moon is high, now. Pale streaks of light reach for me through the shuddering canopy to caress its fingers through my mane. My tongue lolls from the side my mouth like a streamer but I don’t bother to pull it in. No one is here to see. I can do as I please. Cut loose, I tell myself, but even in this perfect seclusion I hesitate. What if someone’s camping nearby? There’s a road near here, what if someone hears? What if someone sees?
Don’t think about it. Not tonight. When was the last time you go to run like this? I ask myself. Not recently enough, and it’s eating me up inside.
Just run. Don’t think. Don’t stop.
Saliva froths into foam as my lungs pound through hammered breaths, forepaws grasping soft earth and sturdy roots while my hindpaws shove off at a full gallop, and with a soaring in my stomach I vault a low row of brush dividing two game trails, scaring the fluffy tail right off a wild bunny. It’s an adorable flash of brown and white, petrified as it must be, and in the barest instant there’s a bright flare of chase it catch it eat it, but it’s gone the second my claws connect with the packed earth. I could run it down, sniff it back to its burrow, make a morsel of it, but the hunger I feel is not for the meat, only the chase, and a bunny isn’t nearly satisfying prey.
I tear through the woods like evil itself is after me, ears flattened against the roaring wind, the glow of a nearly full moon casting the forest in a striking white that catches my eyes and lights up the world like broad daylight. Any other night, this darkness would terrify me; human eyes cannot see in this. But not tonight. Tonight, wolf eyes gleam like green-gold mirrors illuminating the path as I fly over it, claws barely touching the ground.
Tonight belongs to the wolf.
Tonight belongs to me.
I let loose a bellowing howl that vibrates all the atoms of the world. The stars tremble brightly overhead, the trees sway to my tune, and the moon sings brilliantly back to me in a duet as old as nature itself.
A small herd of deer scatter when I burst into their meadow. Three does and a buck scramble, high-tailed, into three different directions. A sparking flash of instinct takes me after the lone doe. She’s fast. Needle thin hooves bound at break-neck speeds through underbrush too dense for me to navigate, so I skirt the edges. She’s smart thinking she can outmaneuver me in there. This isn’t her first rodeo, but neither is it mine.
She knows these woods. She has agility, but she’s upwind of me, and I have tenacity. I have momentum.
I plow through the undergrowth at the side of the game trail where she leaps in shock, twisting midair as if to alter her path over the ground, but she fails. Leaps, but never exceeds the reach of my claws.
I blast beneath her, haunches grazing her flailing hock. She bolts into the direction her herd ran off to. Whether she knows this, I can’t tell. She’s just an animal, but she’ll find them. They always do.
Ahead, the forest thins out slightly then comes to an abrupt end at the road. I slam to a halt just short of it, claws stealing my momentum by digging furrows into the trunk of an old birch tree. Separated by twenty feet of open air and maybe six inches of underbrush, I vault back around the tree in time to outmaneuver the peripheral shine of headlights as a sedan full of whooping youths screeches by to the thunderous bass of something that can’t possibly be considered music.
Their headlights streak past, and as I stand panting just behind the tree it’s then that I notice a familiar heap of metal, red as much from rust as paint, its lights and engine off. The pickup sits quietly at the city overlook, peacefully at rest with no sign of its driver.
I crouch low, giving my lungs the time they need to control themselves, and scan up and down the tree line as far as the view goes, but there’s no sign of Robert. His scent isn’t on this side of the road, but if he’s near the truck he isn’t sitting up. The heck? Did he fall asleep in the bed or something?
Under normal circumstances—and that’s to say any circumstance, really—I’d make a phone call, shoot a message over Dadbook, or go up and check things out for myself. As it stands, my cellphone is back at the trailhead with my clothes, computer’s at home, and everything about my current state makes waltzing up to peer into the bed of Robert Small’s pickup truck one of the worst ideas I could possibly have. And not just because he’s likely to be whittling his way through a tiny dog sculpture with a knife kept sharp by near constant use. More because I’m liable to send the rugged heartthrob into cardiac arrest. And then get stabbed.
But my dad senses are not relegated by what form I take, and I cannot deny a pang of concern at being unable to locate my friend. He could be hurt. Hit by a car maybe? Jeez, I try not to think about that one. Looking both ways, I lower myself down the steep embankment on all fours, praying the high grass is tall enough to conceal me, and scuttle fleet footed to the other side of the two-lane road and dive for cover below the truck’s ancient side paneling. Good, he’s not under the truck. That would be awkward.
Boot prints have left ruffle marks in the sand beneath the driver’s side door, lead around to the passenger side, and back to the hitch where he must have climb in, and the same tread marks go away from the truck and back a number of times, but their freshness is obscured by various other tracks. Mostly those of a small dog if the scent and shape are right. Robert’s scent is all around his truck; it’s impossible to miss. Sweat, leather, cigarette smoke, and whiskey. A lot of whiskey.
Did he drive out here like that? I deadpan a growl to myself just thinking of it, deciding on the spot that if I locate his keys I’m hiding them in a place he won’t find until morning.
My ears prick and pivot, standing tall to funnel sounds towards them as I sniff my way around the truck, keeping low on all fours. A rustling from inside draws my attention, and I lay my ears flat as, slowly, I raise up on hind feet and peer cautiously into the cab. Heart racing, I duck swiftly after the barest glimpse and breathe a muted sigh to have found it vacant. The rustle comes again, and this time I inch my way back to the rear. There is no mistaking the movement this time.
This is a very bad idea, strikes me with all the blaring intonations of an Olympic gong. I can scarcely fathom how bad of an idea this is. How many ways this could go south for me, for him, for Amanda and the rest of the community, but. . . .
He’s still my friend. I need to be sure he’s okay.
I haven’t seen Robert since he brought me up here the first time, and, well, maybe it’s because I miss him, and I worry. I’m a dad. It’s what I do, and that doesn’t change with my appearance.
Crouched low beside the corner of the open tailgate, I let my hand balance on the back tire, mindful that claws on metal can make a sound, and with the slow, deliberate caution cultivated over decades of careful hunts, peer in from the lowest corner of the tailgate.
Nothing.
What—? Oh!
An adorable boston terrier lies there on a small bed, curled belly-up as if awaiting pats from the heavens themselves in the sleepy, curved posture of a blissfully napping pooch. The bone shaped tag on her spiky collar reads Betsy. Wasn’t the Betsy from Robert’s story a Pitbull? Another embellishment, I decide, or maybe this is just Betsy II: Back in Boston.
What a good girl, I think, tail wagging faster than it has any right to.
Strewn about the bed are a medley of wood shavings and various bottles of different types of booze, mainly whiskey and a couple bourbon, and one uncapped bottle stands mostly full right alongside the sleeping terrier. I frown in a way that pins my ears back and raises the corner of a lip over my teeth; that won’t do. If Betsy were to tip it over and drink some, it would poison her!
I go around the opposite side of the truck for a better reach, stretching up over the top of the railing to grab the bottle next to Betsy without disturbing her, and get two claws around the neck when—
Snap!
My ears shoot up, hackles raised. I whirl my head around, eyes wide.
Robert stands maybe twenty feet back, eyes and mouth agape, ombre skin pale as fresh snow.
Oh, crap. Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap!
My heart leaps into my throat, and I reflexively jerk back. Forgetting the bottle in my hand, it clangs into the side of the bed and falls, clattering cacophonously into a pile of other empty bottles. Betsy leaps awake with a frightened yelp, gets one look at me, and bolts for the back of the pickup with her tail between her legs yapping and squealing with all the terror of a flock of parakeets fleeing a jaguar. It cuts me just to see the little thing so scared, heart breaking in my chest because it’s me that’s frightened her so badly.
“Get away from my dog!”
Oh, CRAP!
I wheel back on Robert. He’s no closer, but now his hands aren’t empty and anger is seeping through the tarrying mask of fear. He’s got his knife, and while I know implicitly it can’t kill me I have no desire to be stabbed on a backcountry road. I back away from the truck on hind feet, inching towards the road and the forest beyond, hands raised in the nearest approximation of a “put-the-knife-down” pantomime as giant, clawed, furry forepaws will allow.
I take on step back. He takes two forward.
Not good. Bluff or no bluff, he’s got to be drunk to be this reckless. Robert may be armed with a knife and a bellyful of courage, but he’s still staring down eight feet of claws and teeth in a cryptic amalgamation of man and wolf in two-tone black and gray fur and the physique of a ripped Shaquille O’Neal—not that I have much to brag about in human form. I look like the absolute last thing you want to challenge in the middle of absolute nowhere with no one else around.
And the way he’s staring me in the eyes, there’s no way he’s thinking clearly. It prickles the fur on my back, and my hackles raise higher to reflexively meet the challenge, my upper lip pulling back over my teeth.
Just back off, Robert, I think desperately. Don’t be this dumb, come on, you know better!
Or, maybe he doesn’t? Not when he’s drunk? Would I react this way in his shoes if it were Amanda? Yeesh, I’d probably be worse.
Oh dear, he’s getting closer.
I go the bluff route, too, and bark a snarl at him before he can take another step, showing off upper and lower teeth this time. It does the trick apparently and snaps him out of whatever protective impulse is egging him on. His resolve falters enough that I take my chance, drop back to all fours, and dart across the road, haul myself up the embankment, and right into the relative safety of the dense undergrowth.
Most of me wants to run home as fast as my feet will carry me and pretend this never happened, but there’s another part, just as strong, that wants to make sure this numbskull doesn’t try to follow me and get lost in the woods or, equally bad, try driving home utterly sloshed and high on adrenaline. Not good options for either of us, and as I circle farther up the tree line and peer low through the cover of night darkened foliage I spot him easy. He’s standing halfway into the road—yeah, he’s hammered—and staring into the spot I went through, at his hands, the knife, the tree line, his hands again, shakes his head, rubs his neck, rubs his eyes, and goes back to staring.
I notice the headlights first.
He’ll see them and move. He’s not that drunk.
Not that drunk? He stared down a werewolf like a WWE wrestler stares down a grade school bully and didn’t so much as bat an eye! Over a dog! A cute dog, granted, but still a dog!
But the engine roars and the high beams are on, surely he sees it?
Robert is still caught between rubbing his eyes and gawking into the night. Surely he knows it’s—
Oh SHIT!
I don’t think.
Over the roar of the engine, blaring horn, and screeching tires, I tear past the blinding glare of headlights and plough the stunned figure of Robert Small out of its path. There is a flash of feeling sorry for how hard I must have hit him and enough sense to tuck my tail in as the hurricane of wind the truck makes roars by me, barely grazing my right haunch, and curl instinctively around him and twist midair. When we hit the hardtop, I take the brunt of the impact on one shoulder and roll with it, pushing through the cramp in my hand to dig my claws in the ground and drag him by the scruff of his leather jacket away from the goddamn street.
Between the scramble and the once-limp now violently struggling man shoving at me, I lose my footing and flop into the dusty ground of the overlook and roll away. I come up in a crouch several feet from him, and only then do I realize something came with the cramp as Robert scrambles away. He’s staring—right at me—but that takes a backseat to the . . . knife sticking out of my hand.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh, wow, blood is so not my thing.
My stomach churns with that horrible sick feeling I still associate with McFridayz, and before I can second guess the move I squint my eyes shut and yank the blade free. The sound I make is undignified at best: a yelp on par with the keen of a dying rabbit. The knife falls where it likes, streaked with and surrounded by small spatters of red, and I clutch my hand to stub the flow and look, wide-eyed, at Robert. The first thing I note is that he seems perfectly fine, a little dirty and what looks like a skinned palm, but apparently no worse than an eight-year-old might look falling off a bike.
He’s gaping at me like I really did try to eat his dog.
The truck finishes shrieking to a halt not far ahead, and my ears flick to the tune of doors slamming and two separate voices shouting obscenities.
I’m up on my hind legs in a sprinter’s dash when I hear it. A gruff, solemn voice turned quiet, timid even, “You—? You . . . saved . . . me . . . ?”
Continuing with my apparent trend of poor decisions, I turn my head to look him right in the eye, and by the way his widen just the smallest bit further I realize the moon must be reflecting in my eyes with that yellow-green predatory shine. I must be a scene. All eight feet of me. All monster. A scene that, in all honesty, will probably replay in his nightmares for years. I already feel bad about that.
The words come from low in my chest, deeper than a growl. I don’t want the sound to frighten him more, but maybe the words will alleviate his fears. “I would never hurt you.”
I’m gone faster than his gaze can follow.