Estimated reading time — 33 minutes

By the time Jean-Luc finally arrives, the only things awake are the moon and me. It sits in the sky a perfect, silver half-slice, dewy in the way all things get around dawn. It’s cold out. My breath fogs around my cigarette, and I hear the bus before I see it: the crack-crunch of wheels on soft, overnight ice. I shift on the hood of my cruiser, watching it pull even to the base of the road, and all of a sudden I feel old. I feel even older when Jean-Luc stumbles free of the bus’s gullet, his feet slipping over the loose gravel.

“Jesus,” he says, his voice too loud for a morning like this. “Goddamn.”

I snort, smoke and air billowing out from between my lips, and watch him struggle his way up to me. Jean-Luc presses into me for either survival or affection, maybe both, when he manages. He’s too tall now to fit into the curve of my shoulder.

There’s an injustice there. Kid brothers shouldn’t grow higher than us older ones can reach. I pound against his back when the moment stretches on for too long. We aren’t like that, him and I — or we weren’t. I squint up at his face when he lets me go. He shuffles around.

“You look surprised,” Jean-Luc says. “Did you think I wasn’t really coming, Laurie?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

Jean-Luc’s face softens. He looks tired — pale cheeks and slow eyes — but he smiles like he did when he was still in Pampers, shy and bright and winsome. I turn away from him, and there’s the moon again, watching.

“Come on,” I say. The bus is already lumbering back to Québec for the winter. Outside of the ski crowd, this is our low season. Jean-Luc will probably be the last one up the mountain until the new year proper. “We’ve still got a drive, and there’s snow coming.”

Jean-Luc glances up at the sky. I grab the handle of his duffel and carry it to the trunk, and he jolts at the sound of me closing it. We settle into the cruiser. It’s still a little warm inside, thank Christ, but not enough. Jean-Luc holds his fingers right up to the vents. My cigarette smolders.

“How do you know it’ll snow?”

“I can smell it.”

“That’s bullshit,” he says. “That’s some game warden bullshit. You can smell rain. You can’t smell snow.”

I tap some ash out.

“Petrichor.”

“What?”

“We smell petrichor when it rains. Water activates the geosmin in the soil, and that’s what we smell, not the rain.” Jean-Luc stares at me, and that look is familiar, too. I’ve simultaneously become the smartest and most boring person he knows. I wait until he figures out which one is more impressive.

“You still can’t smell snow.”

“Alright,” I say.

“Can you?”

I put the car in drive, swinging the wheel around with one hand. The other rolls the window down just far enough to let the smell of smoke out — and the snow scent comes rushing in, soft and downy like fresh river banks and evergreen — before stubbing my cigarette out. Jean-Luc fiddles with the radio. The moon fills my rearview, and Jean-Luc twists in his seat to avoid it. I guide the cruiser up toward Saguenay before it can catch either of us.

Jean-Luc stays blissfully quiet through most of the drive, and so does the rest of the world. We ride into the thick-ferned Réserve faunique des Laurentides, the spruces and big birches rising over the road, a gable of dark green nettles shielding the nakedness of the other. It’s pretty, if not desolate, and it becomes even prettier when the sun finally wakes up and turns everything the same gold-pink of peach skin. The roads grow narrower and higher, climbing up the feet of the Jacques-Cartier Massif, and I take it slower than I usually would. Jean-Luc has that funny little furrow between his eyes that means he’s thinking.

“Père took me here,” Jean-Luc eventually says, sounding confused.

“Pépé lived here before I did,” I answer. “Père brought you up for the funeral. You were six, maybe. I was still in school.”

Jean-Luc frowns. I doubt he remembers any of it except a sudden rush of things: the silence, the casket, the shape of the trees and the scent of Père’s tobacco and the half-familiar stranger everybody kept telling him to call Frère. I had been freshly twenty-one and drunk through most of it, still young enough to come running when Père called but old enough to be sullen about it. I didn’t even know Pépé. Nobody did, not even in the town, but I still peered into the casket and saw him anyway, the whole time wishing I didn’t look so much like the dead man.

“Père grew up here?”

I nod. It never fails to surprise me how little Jean-Luc knows about us, about our family. I would blame his mother if I didn’t know Père so well — like most things, that was his fault. All of this is.

“But you didn’t. Why’d you come back?”

“I got the house,” I say. The town’s coming up. It appears like it always does, too fast and too sudden for most people to make the turn in time. Jean-Luc presses into his door when I turn, bracing, but the cruiser keeps moving, its wheels catching on the recently plowed and iced streets. These ones are paved, at least. “Pépé gave it to me — don’t ask why because I don’t know either — and the park was hiring. A house and a job? It didn’t seem like much of a choice back then.”

I slow the car down just long enough to see if the diner’s open, and then I swing into the tiny off-shoot of its parking lot. Whoever’s singing on the radio — Corey Hart — dies an inglorious death when I kill the engine, but Jean-Luc still has that look on his face. I get it, kind of. He’s twenty-one, probably more sober than I used to be, and there’s a reason he’s here anyway.

“Do you ever regret it?”

I don’t answer that question either, even if I should. I only fish out another cigarette, pressing my boot against the door to swing it open, and point at the diner. Jean-Luc follows my hand like a well-trained dog, his face reverting to unthinking again at the idea of food. He’s so hungry that I can nearly taste it — the optimistic rush of saliva, the rasp of tongue against teeth, the throbbing of his stomach. He’s only twenty-one. He’s still growing.

“Let’s go,” I say, and he’s climbing out of the car, too. “My treat, Jeanie.”

————————————————————————————————————————

The diner’s warm and smells of coffee. I scrape my boots clean from the outside and make sure Jean-Luc does so too, rounding past the abandoned alcove of the hostess’ stand and heading toward a booth. It’s all old-school charm inside, with wooden floors and dark tables, the chairs and booths green vinyl. One of the walls in the back is decorated with the town’s history, some of it new but most of it not. Jean-Luc’s busy staring at it when the waitress — Colleen — stops by. She gives me a once-over, tapping the tip of her pen against her pad, her blonde hair pulled up high enough to show where her dye job ends, her perm beginning to lose some of its bounce.

“Well, now,” she says, not unkindly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you out of uniform before. Should I still call you Officer Laurent?”

“Just Laurie.”

“And him?”

I nudge Jean-Luc’s leg under the table.

“Jean-Luc,” he answers, flashing his smile again. Colleen seems unimpressed. I wonder how many Jean-Lucs she’s seen coming and going — and then I think that no one is really like Jean-Luc. No one is except for that half-slice the two of us somehow share.

“He’s my brother,” I say, and Colleen’s pen pauses.

“I didn’t know you had any siblings,” she says, looking between us. I know what she sees. For everything I am — broad, tan, mercifully still dark-haired despite being over the hump of thirty-five — Jean-Luc is the opposite. It’s funny, almost, how different two brothers can be, but blood doesn’t lie where it matters, not really.

“Half-siblings,” Jean-Luc admits, flicking his eyes over to me in apology even though I forgave him before he was even born. Père was Père. His decision to remarry after Maman passed, and then have another kid at his old age, was his own. I had been half-grown already, and Jean-Luc’s mother feared me enough to understand that I wouldn’t consider her anything more than Père’s second wife. She was probably just grateful that I thought of Jean-Luc as my brother at all — now moreso than ever, I think, remembering her phone call a few days ago.

Jean-Luc keeps talking.

“I’m up for the break. I thought I’d keep him company over the holidays.”

“That’s sweet,” Colleen says, but she’s busy staring at me. Everyone in town will know about Jean-Luc by the time we finish breakfast, but he’s less interesting as a person and more as an addition to who I am, the game warden who’s somehow both theirs’ and not. “The usual?”

“Sure,” I say, crushing my cigarette into the table’s ashtray. “He’ll have the same, just no coffee.”

Colleen leaves — heading toward the phone on the wall first, not the kitchen — and Jean-Luc kicks me in revenge. I trap his foot with my legs. He scowls.

“I can drink coffee, you know.”

“The thought of you caffeinated makes me want to hurl.” His foot twitches. I hold it tighter. “Besides, I don’t think sick people do well with coffee.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Yeah?”

Some of the fight leaves Jean-Luc’s body. He looks weaker without it — maybe one of the few things we have in common — and paler, too. Underneath his eyes are the faintest, ugliest lilac bruises. He looks sharper in the way all sick people do, all straight edges and hollow curves. Something like pity comes alive in my chest.

“Your mom didn’t tell me much,” I say. “Just that she was worried and thought it might help if you were here, with me, instead of stuck with her.”

“The doctors didn’t find anything, and they tried everything. X-rays, EKGs, blood tests — everything.” Jean-Luc rolls up one of the sleeves of his sweatshirt, showing off the mottled crook of his arm like one might a particularly intricate tattoo, and I hum sympathetically. I had been there, and I had done that, too.
“They didn’t find anything wrong with me, either,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with you, or with me. It still hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

“All the time,” I say, remembering being twenty-one and whiskey-mellow save for the pounding in each of my joints and the tender ache radiating out from my spine. I thought it had been early-onset arthritis or some form of neuropathy, but there was no significant sign of either. I spent every week leading up to Pépé’s funeral waiting around for test results that never meant anything.

Jean-Luc fidgets. He leans in across the table, his blue eyes so fine they look translucent in the growing sunlight coming from the diner’s windows — like the last slate of spring ice across a lake, bouncing my reflection back at me. I hardly recognize myself. I look so much like Père that it’s disgusting.

“It’s not — I mean — it isn’t cancer, is it?”

“Non.”

“So what is it?”

I shake my head. Jean-Luc retreats back to his side of the table, his eyes still on my face.

“You don’t know what it is?”

“Non, I don’t. Nobody does,” I say, watching myself lie. It’s an eerie sensation — I almost feel guilty, and I would’ve, maybe, if I wasn’t right there in the booth with him. I survived. Jean-Luc would, too.
He opens his mouth to say something else — probably does it ever go away or is there any way to make it hurt less because those were the questions I once asked — but then his eyes finally move off of me, over my shoulder, and I turn just in time to be trapped.

“Laurie?”

I sigh through my nose.

“Harriet,” I say, trying to remember what being kind sounds like. I’ve never been good at being gentle before, and neither this — Jean-Luc’s spontaneous vacation — nor my job has softened me much. I twist in my seat to get a better look at the woman who just entered the diner, and the sensitive hair on the back of my neck and all down my arms rises when she stands over me, something old in my blood recognizing the danger in hers.

“I saw your cruiser out,” she says. She pats the bulge in the front pocket of her stained white shirt, pulling out a cigarette. It jerks, up-down, in the grip of two of her fingers. I offer up my lighter and she takes it, leaning her weathered face toward me. She smells clean enough, but her eyes have the same blind, frothing look of a startled horse. “You workin’?”

“Not today. My brother’s come into town.”

Harriet turns to Jean-Luc. My brother doesn’t smile. He doesn’t even hold out his hand — but Harriet doesn’t, either. Her cigarette, smoking, keeps jumping in her shaking hand, her hands curled in the cold, ancient way hands always curl: thick and nearly useless, ridged up to the knuckles like a microscopic mountain range.

“So?” She says. “So? Brother comes into town and you quit?”

“Nobody’s quit anything, Harry.”

“You ain’t workin’.”

“Harry,” I say, “I’m sorry, but Eric —”

Harriet slaps the table. Jean-Luc flinches, running his still-trapped foot right into the side of my shin. I breathe the pain out. I try again.

“Harry, Eric —”

“It weren’t no bear that killed him,” Harriet says. “Weren’t no wolves either, or moose, or beavers, or any other damn animal people keep tellin’ me. There’s a pattern, Laurie. People goin’ missin’, people showin’ up dead. Animals don’t kill like that. No sane one does.”

“Harry, you saw the body,” I say. It’s a cruel thing to remind her of, especially when she slinks away, blinking rapidly, but it’s true. “A person didn’t do that. A person couldn’t. Same with the others. It’s why we closed the park so early this year. Those woods aren’t safe for anybody, and Eric —”

“Are you blamin’ him?”

“S’il te plaît, Harriet. Don’t you know me?”

“I know you ain’t workin’.”

I slide the ashtray down, catching the disappearing end of her cigarette before it hits one of Colleen’s tables.

“You’re right,” I say. “I’m not.”

“Sonofabitch coward,” Harriet spits. “Never met a game warden scared of his own forests ‘fore. A big man like you —”

“Hey, don’t talk to him like that,” Jean-Luc says, his face flushing for me. “Christ, if it means that much to you, why don’t you go?”

I sigh. “Jeanie.”

“She can’t just talk to you like that. You’re an officer.”

“My taxes pay for his goddamn salary. I can talk to him any way I please, not that he’ll listen,” Harriet says, her voice raising into a pitiful, croaking fervor. “Not that he’s any help anyhow. All these people dying — Eric dying — and nothing. Not a damn thing. Should be ashamed to drive that cruiser and carry that badge. Ashamed. Your grand-père’s rollin’ in his grave somewhere. He would’ve gone out. He would’ve done it when that first body showed up, and Eric would still be — he would —”

“Je suis désolé.”

It’s the only thing I can say, and Harriet stares down at me like she doesn’t recognize my face. Maybe she doesn’t. Grief does funny, fucked up things to people, and everyone else around them is forced to weather it the best they can. She gives me one last look, a mixture of pleading and furious, before leaving. Jean-Luc watches her go with a look reserved for a rabid animal.

“Laurie?”

“Later.”

“But Laurie —”

“Shut up.”

Jean-Luc shuts up. It’s just in time for Colleen to swing by, laden with our order. I ask for the check, holding my cup of coffee despite its heat biting into my hand, and while Jean-Luc cautiously pokes around his plate, I think about sickness and death and the forest — always the forest. I sigh again. Outside of the diner, it starts to snow.

————————————————————————————————————————

The town hibernates over the next weeks, settling itself down for a long winter’s nap, and the dormancy catches. We fight the age-old Canadian cold by hiding from it, holing up in our houses, and running our heaters hot enough to burn. It’s the thick of the slow season. With the forest closed, most of my work dissolves into a series of propositions, some from neighboring wildlife parks, some from the government, and others still from Québec universities: Laurie, let’s circle back to additional wolf reintroduction (no); Officer Laurent, do you believe that the lynx population is truly endangered (yes); We’d love to have you come down for a lecture series on the possibility of climate change (no, no one would listen anyway).

The respite is good for me, maybe better for Jean-Luc. He worsens in the cold, growing paler, eating less, and sleeping at odd hours, more awake at night than during the day. I make a joke out of checking his teeth, but Jean-Luc’s always too nervous to laugh.

“Alright, vampire?”

Jean-Luc’s already sitting in the living room in his new, sick-drowsy way. He’s stretched out in the easy chair, his throat a pale, tender line bobbing in the murky morning light. He turns his head toward me, the rest of his body following — fils lune, I want to say. It had been Père’s nickname for Jean-Luc, but it had been mine once, too.

“Something was howling outside.”

“Did it sound like a wolf?”

“What else would it sound like?”

I go to the kitchen instead of answering. Town legend says Pépé built it himself, and if someone squints just right, you can see it. Some of the baseboards are crooked, the wallpaper bubbled, and the kitchen tiles were a strange mosaic — too little grout in some places, and then too much in others. I’d spent most of the first few months here fixing it up, cutting my teeth and hands on the basics of good construction. I suppose that should’ve made the house feel more like my own, but in the end, it felt like all I’d done was conjure the dead. Still, the things inside the kitchen are mine, including the secrets of the highest kitchen cabinets.

I break them open now, wrinkling my nose against the sudden onslaught of floral scent. I turn away, bracing my face on my shoulder to force away the urge to sneeze, and then I turn back, moving aside the repurposed coffee containers. I reach for the Folgers. Inside is a carefully tied bundle of flowers, their stems withered yellow-brown husks but their petals still a vibrant, unimaginable violet. I scrape half the petals away, discarding them into my old tea kettle. I’ve got the Folgers back in the cabinet and the kettle seeping by the time Jean-Luc gathers up enough energy to meet me in the kitchen. It’s a great sacrifice on his part, and I try to feel humbled. In another hour or so, he’ll be sleeping again, dead to everything except the constant, hungry ache of his body.

Jean-Luc settles across from me, wrapping his feet around the rungs of the bar stool. He drops something on the counter — it’s one of the books from the guest room’s library. He tilts it up until the title shows along the spine: Gabriel-Ernest.

“Reading fairy tales now, Jeanie?”

“Is that what it is?” Jean-Luc flushes, the color only blooming in the tips of his ears and the high points of his cheeks. “It’s in French. You know me and French.”

My stomach twists. I do know Jean-Luc and French, more so the fact that Jean-Luc’s relationship with it is little more than a fleeting bilingual fling. It makes me feel guilty. The non-teaching is another casualty of Père’s second life. Jean-Luc can pick up whatever I hand him, but it still needs to be handed — a thing given, a thing taught.

The kettle starts keening, starting low and then swinging up high. I wince, jumpy. The noise rattles around in my head, hurting my ears. I’ve left the thing on for too long, but when I pour it, straining out the steeped leaves, the tea is the right color, a winning blue, the color of bluebird eggs.

“Laurie?” Jean-Luc speaks over the kettle. “Did you hate Père?”

Some of the tea dribbles on my wrist.

“Christ,” I say, dropping the kettle back onto the stove. I watch my skin rise in a weal, turning red. I bring it to my mouth and suck, my face tightening at the bitter taste of the petals and then slackening, going half-numb right down to the bone of my jaw. A shiver runs up my spine. It’d been years since I tasted the God-awful stuff, and my body shrinks away from it, settling. My body goes loose with memory alone — it’s the only reason I make it for Jean-Luc. If he can make it through the taste, he can make it through anything; the pain’ll let him go for a few hours if he’s lucky, just enough to trick him into thinking he’s human again.

“Well?”

“Well, what,” I say, releasing my wrist. I watch the burn weal sink back into my skin. Jean-Luc thumps his fist into the book. Jesus, I should’ve gotten rid of them, French or not. Did I hate Père? Could you hate a person you hadn’t spoken to in decades? I hadn’t gone to the funeral, but I never thought of that as hate. I try to tell Jean-Luc the truth. “I don’t know. Maybe. I know I loved him at one point — you know, like all kids do, except I started growing up. And one day I guess I grew so much I figured all the bad things about me were from him.”

“Did he give us this? The — the illness?”

“Must’ve,” I say, knowing the truth. “Unless we’re both unlucky bastards.”

“Do you think I’m going to hate him, too?”

Jean-Luc looks at me then — really looks. I wonder what he sees, and then I wonder what he’s trying to see. I doubt I have it, whatever it may be. All I have is the house, the books, and the tea, and Jean-Luc doesn’t understand any of them.

I put the tea in front of him.

“Go on, drink it,” I say, and then I move away from his eyes, out of the kitchen. He turns on the stool to watch me.

“Where are you going?”

“Wolf hunting.”

There’s a pause. “Can I come?”

I think it over, hands on my hips, head down. My tongue presses into my teeth, seeking the sensation. The numbness has faded already — it hadn’t been that big of a dose — and I miss it in the same way I miss alcohol; it isn’t worth getting drunk nowadays. The buzz never catches.

“Okay,” I say, surprising the two of us. “But I’m not carrying you back if you get too tired.” Jean-Luc rises, his face sweetly excited underneath his pallor. I go searching for my boots, calling over my shoulder, “Finish the tea. All of it. I’ll know if you don’t, alright. I’ll know.”

————————————————————————————————————————

We bundle up like astronauts. Thick socks, thick pants, thick jackets — we walk like sheep, stiff and warm, and Jean-Luc fidgets with the beanie I gave him. It’s so cold when we go outside it punches the air right out of us for a few seconds too long, the kind of time that makes someone think they’re drowning. Jean-Luc claps his hands together. He looks better in the open air.

“C’mon,” I say. The snow is fresh, but the sun’s out. It’s too cold to melt away any prints entirely, but no slush is better than some. Besides, although the house is perched right between the national forest and the town, the wolves didn’t often trek out this far, not so early in the season and not so close to the house — they only came when they were desperate, down on their bellies with their ears laid just as low.
We trudge into the snow. Jean-Luc points in the direction he’d heard the howls coming from and I follow. The world smells new around the two of us.

“Laurie, can I ask a question?”

“You’ve been asking those all morning,” I say. “If I say no, will you stop?”

Jean-Luc pushes on as if I hadn’t spoken. “That woman at the diner a few weeks ago — what was wrong with her?”

“Harriet? Nothing.”

“It sure didn’t seem like nothing.”

I shrug. Jean-Luc isn’t wrong, but he isn’t right, either. “She’s in a bad sort of way right now. Her grandson was found a little less than a month ago in the forest. We’d closed it already on account of the other bodies found, but Eric must’ve…well, what we found hadn’t been pretty, and Harriet took it like people take those sorts of things.”

Jean-Luc slows next to me, falling a little behind my shoulder.

“How many “other” bodies are we talking about, Laurie?”

“Enough.” A series of bodies rise in my mind: women, men, children, their mangled limbs bluish from the cold, their blood still warm in the leaf litter, sending my boots skidding down to their sides, forcing my head to look at the frayed remains of their neck or their stomachs, their ribs sticking out like spurs, their hyoid fish-bone slim in the mess, both the color of curdled cream. “It isn’t the first time we’ve had a string of animal attacks, and it probably won’t be the last. Animals can get mean when they want to, especially when they feel threatened.”

Jean-Luc’s staring at me. I stare back.

“You could’ve gone into veterinary science, you know. Like normal people.”

“Well, maybe I like the wild things.”

My eyes catch something in the snow — tracks. I step parallel to them, and Jean-Luc follows, leaning over to pretend to read them with me.

“Oh, sonofabitch.”

“What? Laurie, what?”

A common misconception about wolves is their size. So many people imagine them to be oversized dogs, but they are bigger, leaner, smarter — their prints don’t lie. What I see in the snow never belonged to a wolf. It’s half a relief. The other half is a dull flare of anger that spreads out through my body, beating in time with my heart. The prints are small, narrow, and round, the hindlegs swaying from side to side, running over one another.

“Laurie,” Jean-Luc says, his voice rising, and my head jerks up, my body stretching back toward him instinctively. In the distance, a low baying starts to pick up, and the hair on the back of my head stiffens at the noise. Jean-Luc’s fingers skim my back. “Laurie, something’s in the forest.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Dogs.”

I make my way to the treeline, toward the baying. The sound hits a crescendo when I step through the trees, the snow shaking. The tracks multiply. I start to follow them again, but the owner appears in front of me like a good boy, the bloodhound’s body dark and wiggly in the cold — prey playing predator.
It notices me before long, it’s nose flaring. The baying dies out. The dog stills.

“C’mere,” I say, snapping my fingers, and the dog comes slinking up, the fur rising along its spine. When it gets to my boot it rolls right over, showing off the soft skin of its belly for the sake of peace. I feel around its ruff, trying to find a collar. The snow behind me crunches, and my hand digs too deep into the dog in surprise. Jean-Luc tugs at my sleeve like a little kid.

“Laurie, oh, Jesus, Laurie,” he murmurs. “Crazy woman with a gun, Laurie.”

My body snaps up straight, sharpening. The dog tucks underneath my hand, growling, its body pressing into my legs. I keep it down. Through the woods, out of the forest, comes Harriet. She yells at us, stumbling through the steep snow banks.

“What’re you doin’ to my dog?”

“What are you doing in the forest?” I counter. Jean-Luc’s right; Harriet is armed. It’s an old hunting rifle, and the old woman’s cradling it like it’s a child — like it’s Eric, I think, and something cracks inside of me like the side of a glacier, the sheet crashing into my stomach. The world smells like evergreen, tinged sallow by Harriet’s unwashed tobacco scent. The rifle tilts around in her hands. She jerks the barrel toward Jean-Luc, and I brace one arm behind me, tucking my brother into my back.

“Took that one’s advice. Ain’t he say it? If I cared so much, I should do it myself. Well, I’m doin’ it. Gévaudan knows Eric’s scent, and we’re followin’ it.” Gévaudan? Right, the dog. Harriet moves closer. “I know the stories, Laurent. I know ‘em. And I’m goin’ to kill the bastard when I find it.”

“Still think this is nothing?” Jean-Luc mutters. I’m too busy dealing with Harriet to smack him for it. I try to keep my focus on Harriet’s face, and I notice for the first time that they’re riddled with cataracts — the eyes of the dead.

“Stories? Harry —”

“Don’t you lie to me. You know ‘em. You know ‘em like everyone else. Somethin’s in these woods, somethin’ ugly evil, and it took Eric. It takes all the folks.”

“Harriet, nothing’s in these woods except what’s meant to be in the woods. Wolves, bears, badgers — you think I don’t know what’s in there? You think I would let something run around like that?”
Harriet grows quiet. She stares at me with her dead, glazed eyes, and I sense the hate building behind them. Gévaudan whines, his tongue lolling. I stand my ground.

“Dunno, Laurent. Gévaudan keeps pointin’ me this way, up to your house.”

I settle back.

“I carried him — carried Eric. If you don’t believe me, the flics will tell you the same thing. They found Eric, and they called me down because of what it looked like, and when I saw the body I walked back up here and got a blanket to wrap him up in. The flics wouldn’t touch him, so I carried him up to their cruisers because they wouldn’t,” I say, and Harriet’s face twists, hurting and hating and half-crazy all at once. In my arms comes a phantom weight — Eric. He’d been so small and feather-light. One of his feet had still been trapped in his shoe, and his arms kept trying to escape from the blanket, his wrists awkwardly spilling out, waving to the circle of us grim-faced men.

Harriet doesn’t say anything. Behind me, Jean-Luc shudders, his hands so hot with fear they seep through all my layers, branding my skin. I squeeze him back: I’m here, Jeanie. I’m here. I finally let myself look back at the rifle.

“Is that legal?” I ask.

“Bullshit.”

“Non bullshit,” I say. I step up to Harriet and she slides down, back toward the forest’s outer boundary bank. She clutches the rifle close to her chest, and Gévaudan moves with me, pressing into the vulnerable muscles of my legs, his broad head swinging between me and Harriet. “This is my forest, Harriet — and pretty or not, I’ve got to protect it. I can’t have you shooting anything unlucky enough to look dangerous. So oui. Is that gun legal?”

“I’ve got my license,” Harriet says petulantly, like a child. I nod. My hackles lower. Harriet might be toeing the edge, but she isn’t so far gone to step right over the line of the law. It’s a way to reel her back, and I take it. I make my voice as gentle as I can — and it shocks me, suddenly, how much I sound like Père had, his big hands on my shoulders, his jacket around my shoulders, my naked ass on the leather seat of his old truck, shaking: What are you going to do, Laurie? What’s happened, happened. What are you going to do with it?

“I’ve got to take a look.”

Harriet turns away, muttering something about her car, and I pat Jean-Luc on the shoulder, brusque and grounding, trying to catch my breath. “Stay here,” I say, but it’s Gévaudan who listens, sliding back down on his stomach to wait, his round, sweet eyes staring up at me with pathetic devotion.

————————————————————————————————————————

Harriet’s gun is legal, and for that — for that and the fact that Harriet hasn’t shot anything yet — I can’t seize the damn thing. Instead, I only help pile Gévaudan into her truck and warn the old woman away from the forest again. She grunts at me and shifts gears, leaving before I can issue her a ticket for trespassing into a closed reservation area.

Something settles over me as I watch her leave. Guilt, maybe. Or premonition. The days are growing longer and colder, the wilderness wilder, and my eyes flick up to the sky reflexively, searching for any sort of answer, any sign. I find it in the moon, the half-crescent gone, having instead grown fat and wobbling and fresh, and I open my mouth, dying for a cigarette, hating my père — oui, I decide, staring up at that moon, I hated him, hated him as animals do, bloody and all-consuming. I want to scream the moon out of the sky, but the words get all twisted in my mouth, and I end up yelling for my brother instead.
It’s a good instinct. Jean-Luc worsens that night, descending into someplace dark and earth-damp. His whole body trembles, the muscles jumping underneath his skin, and he lies, sleepless, on the guest room bed most nights, his eyes half-slits in the dark, the shell of his face turned toward the window — toward the forest, always the forest.

“Talk to me, Jeanie,” I say, touching his shoulder. His jaw works. The outside ring of it is bruised a soft pink, edging into purple, and it’s so tender he slurs when he speaks, his tongue obsessively tapping at the corners of his lips. He stares at me like I’m a stranger. He pants between his words, great lungfuls from his narrow chest.

“Am…I…dying?”

I pet his hair.

“I’m…scared,” he says, growing still. His eyes roll underneath their lids, searching, and when they open again, they look hungry. He mumbles something about dreams — ugly, bloody dreams of Pépé, Père, and me — and Jean-Luc’s hand comes up to feel his teeth. I put my hand out just in time for him to spit, and we both stare, dumb, at the shrapnel of bone in my palm, its white husk slick with saliva and blood.

“Laurie?”

The tooth rolls. It’s a canine, broad and arrow-edged. When I swallow, my throat clicks.

“I’ll get you a dollar,” I say. His mom had done stuff like that — had insisted upon it — when he was still young enough to believe in it. I wonder what he believes in now, but then I catch sight of his face and already know too much.

That night, I bolt and cover all the windows. It sinks the house in a stifling darkness punctuated only by the sound of Jean-Luc’s breathing, and my skin crawls. I burn through cigarettes in the kitchen, the Player’s magnified into flares between the loose clutch of my fingers. The smoke washes out the scent of sickness. The ashes rain into the sink. I brace my arms against the edges. If I were religious, this is where I would link my fingers together and bow my head, singing out to all the saints and angels — but they don’t listen to things like me. No, like calls to like, and that’s why my whole body tenses when I hear the baying bark of a bloodhound.

For a small moment, I trick myself into thinking the noise never existed — but it comes again, louder, headier, the arrival of the damned. I suck the rest of my cigarette down with a sudden, serpentine viciousness, and let the rest of it smolder in the sink. I murmur to myself, a litany of Jesus, and the bloodhound keeps baying outside, the noise burrowing into the back of my head like a parasite. From the guest room, Jean-Luc’s breath hitches.

“It’s fine,” I call out. He can’t answer but he can hear — or at least I hope he can. Deep in my head comes the smudged memories of my own illness. I remember the pain. Nobody could ever forget that, I’m sure, but it’s also the only thing that seeps free from that dizzying hole in my mind, and I think of Jean-Luc’s tooth again, as luminescent as the moon. I sigh and go to repeat myself. “It’s —”

I never finish my sentence. Outside of my house comes an electric noise, disgusting and powerful, the thunderous culmination of firing pin to primer, primer to powder, powder to gas, gas to force — I duck before I realize it, my cheek pressing into my kitchen cabinet, silence spilling into the world like an ocean tide, too loud and too fragile. There’s a caterwauling from outside, the sound of voices, the dog again, and I skid to the door, putting my shoulder to the wood. Something rattles in the guest room.

“Stay here, Jeanie,” I say. My hands are sweating. There’s an awful drumbeat in my chest. I should stay inside, I know. Harriet — because who else could it be? — isn’t shooting at the house, and Jean-Luc is so fragile, so ill — but he’ll live because we always live, and he’ll wish that he hadn’t but he will, and maybe he’ll still hate me regardless of everything, hating me the same way I hate Père because everything becomes so much easier if you blame it on someone else. I put my head against the door.
I shouldn’t go out. I shouldn’t. I should not, but Harriet is out there half-mad and armed, actively shooting, and, crawling out of the blurry, pain-riddled hole of my mind is the urge to go out, the same urge, no doubt, that has Jean-Luc pawing at the sheets of his bed, trying to reach the window. I wrestle with it like I always do — I lose to it the way I always do.

I have enough sense to move back into the kitchen, ransacking the cabinets for that familiar Folgers jug. The flower stems crumble under my touch, but I pluck as many petals as I can and shake them into my mouth. They blister like fire on my tongue, shredding, and my mind fogs, turning numb and loose. I retch. I swallow. I burn and then I hollow and then I fall back into myself. I’m on my knees. A trail of blue-tinged saliva unspools from my mouth. My body convulses once, twice — I retch again, the petals turning me inside-out.

It takes another gunshot to move me. This one sounds louder and meaner and I start to crawl to the back door, my nails digging into the tile to shuffle me along. I spit. I taste copper, bright and metallic, and something shuts down inside of me when I dig my hands into the frame of the door and pull up, leveraging my body back up from all fours. I fumble with the latch, yelling, and then the night rushes in to greet me: snow-thick, ink-black, beautiful. The fresh air clears away some of my pain, exacerbates others — Christ, my joints jerk around in their muscle-bone sheaths, expectant — and I gulp down as much of it as I can. The world doubles, sharpens, and my head swims with the suddenness of it. I slide through the snow, tracking.

“Harriet!”

My breath erupts in front of my face. Winter closes in around me, as heavy and dark as lake water, and the forest glows in the moonlight like a beacon, the trees swaying with my motion. My legs finally connect back with my body, and I start to run — faster and faster and faster. I slide down the low ravine that separates the house from my forest, and my head snaps to the side, the hair along my body stiffening, as something blood-hot and wasp-mad rockets past my face. I trip, skittering on my knees, as the tree next to me shudders, bits of its bark cracking and spinning through the air. My ears ring. I face forward, staring into the dark — seeing into the dark, the world crystallizing. I see Gévaudan first, the bloodhound weaving back and forth, wailing like only dogs can do, and then there’s Harriet.

“Harriet!” I hear the rifle cock again — the bullet rotating in the chamber, the firing pin pressing into it — and I rise onto my feet, holding out my hand. “Don’t!”

“Go ‘way,” Harriet screams. “Get out, Laurent!”

“You’re breaking the law —”

“I’m gettin’ justice. Justice!” The rifle wobbles. I force myself to stay upright and still, and the sky — there’s a tender, driving ache in the middle of my chest, a pining so intense that I fear it more than I fear the gun’s barrel, and my body convulses again. I feel the petals rise in my throat. They want out. I want out.
Harriet’s still talking. I watch her mouth move, but all my senses have retreated inward. I taste the half-bile in my mouth, I see the fog of my breath, I smell my fear scent, I hear my blood rushing through my ears, evacuating, mobilizing, readying itself, and in its agonizing flight I feel Pépé, I feel Père, I feel each generation of my blood as it stretches back to the ancestral wilds of France, those ancient, great plains we were forced out of with bloody mouths and bloody hands.

“You know what’s here —” Harriet, again, her voice a dull echo “— you know what’s here!”

I do. I do. Oh, Jesus, I do.

“Get out,” I yell. My voice fractures, winding high. “Harriet, for fuck’s sake, you need to leave.”

“I ain’t afraid! I —”

The rifle moves, bobbing away from me. I turn to follow it, my chest clenching when I see a figure stumble out of the house.

“Jeanie!” I scramble toward him, too slow — his feet sink into the snow, coming closer, but his face turns up to the sky, and I watch his body stiffen. His eyes grow wide and in them I see the moon. It’s a beautiful moon, dove-white, full, and scheming, and it drives Jean-Luc to his knees.

He screams. His back arches, too far and too fast, hobbled, and there comes a series of shattering glass — his spine, his ribs, the gentle hinges of his elbows — and his body goes loose, unraveling, the snow steaming from the rush of blood that drains from the sockets of his shoulders, and I drop to my knees, belly-down.

“Jeanie. Jeanie!”

He screams at me — non, he snarls, his head rising, the moon hanging in the center of his roiling eyes, his skin stretching until it bruises and splits, the bone shining underneath, and it’s awful, it’s awful, it’s the other side of a looking glass, and when Jean-Luc cries out, the noise bubbling up from his throat, wet and guttural, and his hands claw into patches of starlight, the knuckles shifting, lengthening, his nails darkening. I touch them, and it’s like touching a live wire — Jean-Luc burns and writhes against his own body, changing. His lips curl, red and slick and monstrous.

“You’re fine, you’re okay, it’s going to be okay —”

He snaps at my face, frothing, his breath smelling like death and woodlands and moonlight, and then his neck arches, the tendons straining before giving away like frayed rope, his head lulling.

“What’s wrong with him?”

I turn away. Harriet’s in the treeline now, watching, her back braced against one of the trees. Gévaudan’s disappeared from her side, smart enough to know, like all animals do, what’s tearing its way out of Jean-Luc’s skin — what’s hiding in mine.

“What’s —?”

A howl crawls into the air behind me, and Harriet juggles the rifle around, her face curdling with fear as the howl spirals deeper and longer, Jean-Luc shifting behind me, and I stand up, hearing the firing pin vibrate like thunder, the bullet hissing, screaming, knowing that Jeanie needs only a little bit more time until he can handle it, and I trace the shot through the air, the blind white-hot fury of it, baring my teeth as I step even with it, the breath punched out of me when it hits, a sudden, drilling sensation in my forehead. A warmth floods through my body — death.

There’s a faint suggestion of pain. It fades at the same time my vision does, a shadowy haze descending over me, and the last thing I know is a sudden silence, the shape of Jean-Luc rising on its two, crooked-back legs to the call of the moon.

————————————————————————————————————————

Coming back to life is a surprisingly gentle process. It’s like waking up from a long, deep sleep, and the heaviness lingers even as your eyes open and your limbs start working again, uncurling from the spider-like clutch of rigor mortis. When I wake up, the night is gone. A tender pain blooms in the center of my head and down my neck. My lashes are clumped together with blood and gristle. I feel around. There, behind me in the snow, lies the bullet meant for my brother.

“Goddamn,” I say. Head injuries are always the worst. It takes a long time for the brain to knit itself back together, but I’m young considering, and I force myself up before too long. The sky is a quilt of grey, damp clouds. I can feel the rain coming, and I think of Jean-Luc — oh, Jeanie.

My clothes are still intact. It’s a small miracle; between the bullet wound and the petals I downed, I must have missed the height of the moonrise. I’d survived a full moon, then. But had my brother?

I start tramping through the snow. My jacket clings to my body, tacky with long-frozen blood, and in the quiet stillness of the forest my mind turns back to Père’s truck. He’d found me after my first transformation, sprawled out in some landfill of an abandoned park, my body surrounded by a myriad of stolen limbs — did I eat them, I asked, already knowing the answer in the pit of my mind, and Père only smiled. I’m proud of you, he said. Proud. I had hunched over afterward, gagging between my legs, drawing up a torrent of bloody matter that had me crying.

I pause slightly when I see the wolf carcass, long enough to find the pin-prick small hole of the bullet. Harriet’s first kill, then. I move on.

I follow the smell of blood. The trail of it, too. There are long smears of it in the snow, and I sniff, trying to place it. The footprints next to it are as good of an omen anyway: an oversized man-print, the heel lifted higher than the ball, the toes long and tear-drop wicked. I take care not to step on any, and they lead me into a natural clearing where some of the trees have splintered away.

I see Harriet first. She’s lying among the pieces of her rifle, the barrel through her shoulder, pinning her, her back shredded badly enough that I can make out the curved hunch of her shoulder blades. The snow around her is half-melted pink slush, and when I move closer to her, her body twitches. She says something.

“You bitch,” I mutter, squatting. There, amid her back, something shines like a fallen star. I pluck it out, already knowing what it is before I rub it clean on my thigh. It’s another tooth, one of Jean-Luc’s, except it’s all wrong, the bone crooked and misaligned — caught growing, I guess, and I grip it in my hand. It’s then that I see Jean-Luc.

He’s half-hidden by the clearing’s tree line, his back to me. It’s bare and pale blue around the edges, frostbite creeping in like ivy even though it can’t kill, his freckles spanning like a constellation over his skin. When I touch him, he jerks.

“It’s just me, Jeanie.”

His head turns. His blond hair flares around his face, glossy with damp snow and thicker than it used to be; there’s a new beauty to him in the dawn, something ethereal. Something immortal. His nose flares and his mouth opens, his lips peeling away to show the tips of his new teeth — I watch his tongue swipe over the straight, pale edge of them, and the muscle beads, bleeding, after a pause, like a particularly surprising knife wound. It drools over the corner of Jean-Luc’s lips, and I rub it away. His eyes blink at me. His throat works.

“Shh, easy. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay,” I say. I get my hands underneath his elbows, his skin slick with sweat, and I pull up. He moves like a ragdoll, and I chafe at his back for a short while, trying to bring the blood back into it. His fingers twitch, numb, around my neck.

“The moon,” he says, his voice so hoarse I have to lean my head into his to hear. His brows furrow. “I saw…”

I stand him up. His feet, normal again, drag against the ground. Jean-Luc’s body breaks out in goosebumps, his muscles — cut hard and fast now, the body of an athlete, the weapon of a killer — coming to life, his new body breaking itself in. I sling my arm under his shoulders and the other over his stomach, and then I get him walking.

“Come on, Jeanie. One foot in front of the other — good. Good. There we go. That’s not so hard, is it? You’re doing good, kid. I’m proud of you.”

We trip into the house together, his knees knocking into the doorframe. A pile of snow has invaded the kitchen in our absence. I prop him against the counter for a short while and find where I left the Folgers. I tear away the last of the petals, handing them to him.

“Here. I don’t have time to make it into the tea, but you can eat it straight now. Go on. It’s Wolfsbane. It’ll help. But watch the new teeth, alright?”

“New…?”

Jean-Luc eats the petals. I cover his mouth before he can spit them back out again, his body writhing like mine had the night prior, trying to get the poison out. I pet his throat, saying stupid, sweet things, and I only let go when he stills. Jean-Luc’s face gives a complicated series of twitches, and then — and then he starts crying. I rub his eyes.

“Stop. Stop, Jeanie. You’re fine.”

“Laurie,” he gasps, not listening. “Laurie.”

He dissolves into odd, hiccuping wails. The vocal cords are always the last to be fixed after transformations, probably because they’re so small and insignificant among the grander hierarchy of things. I take him by the elbow and guide him into the bathroom. I draw the shower curtain back and turn the water as hot as it’ll go. Getting the blood off of him will help; it makes it easier to pretend nothing’s happened.

When I turn back to him, he’s pressing himself into the mirror, clumsily wiping the condensation off the glass. I watch his mouth open, unveiling a fresh set of pristine teeth, and he presses his thumb against the fat of one of his new canines. His eyes flick to mine in the mirror, and I tentatively smile — I bare my teeth, my fangs, and for the first time in our lives, Jean-Luc and I look like brothers. We both look like Père and Pépé and all the generations of Leloups men before us.

“Laurie, what are we?”

“The French call us loup-garou.”

“Laurie.”

“The English —,” I pause, stopping. I start again. “Werewolves, Jeanie. We’re werewolves.”

Jean-Luc folds his arms on the counter, and I watch his whole body shake apart with the noise of his broken, plaintive wails.

————————————————————————————————————————

It doesn’t take long to settle Jean-Luc down. The transformation works in my favor here — shedding and then reclaiming one’s body is exhaustive work, and it takes only a few minutes out of the shower before Jean-Luc’s snoring on my couch. His feet dangle over one of its arms. He’s going to need new clothes, I know. He’s even taller than me now but leaner. The transformation is unique in that way: you never know how it’s going to change someone.

I cover him with a blanket and head inside my bedroom. I go into my closet, straining on the tips of my feet to reach the top shelf, and I grab the box I never thought I’d have to use — just in case, Père told me. For emergencies, Laurie. Then I find my service gun. I carefully unload its bullets, and then I wrap my hand around a tissue to slide open the box. Inside is a pile of bullets the color of a rhino’s skin, their edges sleek and sterile. I breathe out, breathe in. I reach my hand into the box of silver bullets.

It’s difficult to fish one out. The closer my hand comes to one, the more it seems to withdraw, growing colder and damper. My fingers shake. The tissue slips — Goddamn, a bullet rolls right over the unprotected skin of my wrist and brands it, the pain clearing out the rest of my body. I fumble the bullet into my gun’s chamber, and then I lay across my bed, biting into the mattress to muffle my scream so it won’t wake Jean-Luc, my wrist throbbing. It takes a while before I can pull myself back together. Right below the heel of my hand the skin blisters, a strip of moonlight across the vulnerable hollow of the joint.

It stings when I walk outside. The world feels heavier. The wind moans through the trees, their nettles rattling together, and I can nearly taste the rain now. I head back to the clearing.

The funny thing about being attacked by a werewolf is that you can get lucky. Like any animal, there’s a reason for attacks: to satiate hunger, to protect themselves, to be, on occasion, an asshole. Werewolves don’t always kill, and, better yet, they don’t always use their teeth — but Jean-Luc hadn’t and had, and that means when I go back to Harriet, she’s only wishing for death. She watches me walk up with a desperate sort of vindication. I grip my gun.

“You crazy bitch. How many times did I tell you to go away? How many? If you’d just listen to me, Harry. If you — if you listened and kept away from my damn forest.”

“I shot you.”

“I thought you said you knew what was in these woods. Those bullets don’t kill, Harry.”

Her chin trembles. I thumb the hammer of my pistol.

“You killed ‘im. You killed my Eric.”

“He should’ve listened, too.”

“You —”

The revolver’s retort sears my ears. The side of Harriet’s head caves in, pushing to one side, and her mouth swings open, showing off her yellowed, age-riddled teeth. I stand above her for a while, watching. The silver burrows into her skull and burns, the heat sinking her body into the snow. An awful smell starts coming off of her. I shove my nose into the crook of my elbow, waiting it out. It’s the snap of a twig that has me looking away.

It’s Gévaudan. The bloodhound tiptoes into the clearing, his face trained on mine. Behind him comes a congregation of the reserve’s wolves. Theirs is the only pack I’ve ever allowed on the land and the only one I ever will, their great, grey heads lowering away from mine. My body strangely recognizes them, the faintest whisper of pack coming out of the pit — out of the den, the second half, the wolf in my mind. I can taste their hunger. It tastes like Jean-Luc’s.

My head turns back to the house, back to Jean-Luc, considering. A bullet hole is so much harder to explain than an animal attack. I whistle low, and the wolves and Gévaudan perk up, obedient. I gesture at Harriet.

“Come on, then. Come get her. My treat, boys.”

I start walking before the animals converge, before the wet, snapping noises start, and on the way back the rain starts up. I raise my face to it, scrubbing the new skin of my forehead and dragging my hands through the tender, still-soft space on the back of my skull. I’ll have to burn my jacket, and I’ll have to find the rags of Jean-Luc’s clothes and burn those, too. I sigh. The next cycle will be easier, I tell myself. It has to be.

Credit: Haley Kilcoyne