Mongrels

“Some don’t,” Darren said.

“Some are lucky like that,” Libby added.

The rest of the ride was quiet, and the rest of the night too, at least until Darren started sucking air through his teeth at the kitchen table, like he’d been thinking of something the whole time and finally couldn’t keep it in his head even one minute more.

“Don’t,” Libby said to him.

I was sitting with her at the hearth, the fire banked high for as late as it was.

“Don’t wait up,” Darren said, his eyes looking away, and then walked out before Libby could stop him.

I don’t think she would have, though.

The front-end loader fired up, dragged its lights across the kitchen window, and was rumbling back toward town, the bucket lifted high, to look under.

“Pack your things,” Libby said to me.

I used a black trash bag.

When Darren came back in the morning I was standing at the El Camino’s tailgate, looking for my math book.

Werewolves don’t need math, though.

Darren was naked again.

Instead of loose cash and strawberry wine coolers, what he had over his shoulder was a wide black belt.

“Remember when you used to want to be a vampire?” he said down to me, watching the house the whole time.

His hands and chin were black with dried blood, and he smelled like diesel.

I nodded, kind of did remember wanting to be a vampire. It was from a sun-faded old comic book he’d let me read with him when he first got back.

“This is better,” Darren said, his infectious smile ghosting at the corners of his mouth, and then Libby was there, her hands dusted white with flour, her sleeves pushed up past her elbows.

She stopped a few steps out, dabbed a line of white off her face, then looked down the road behind Darren and all the slow way back to him. To his hands. To his chin. To his eyes.

“You didn’t,” she said.

“Wasn’t my fault,” Darren said. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

The creaky black belt hooked over his shoulder was a cop’s. You could tell from all the pouches and pockets. The pearl-handled pistol was even still there in its molded holster, the dull white handle flapping against his side, flashing a silver star with each step.

“Bet we can get seventy-five for it at the truck stop,” he said, hefting it out like to show what it was worth.

“Go inside,” Libby said, pushing me toward the house.

She should have pushed harder.

“This is the end of the liquor stores,” she said to Darren, her voice flat like the back edge of a sharp knife, one she could flip around to the blade in a flash.

“Bears and wolves aren’t meant to get along …” Darren said. The cool way he looked to the left and touched a spot above his eyebrow when he said it, it sounded like a line he’d been saving, his whole long way home.

Libby shoved him hard in the chest.

Darren was ready, but still he had to give a bit.

He tried to sidestep past her, for the house, for clothes, for a wine cooler, but Libby hauled him back, and because I was close enough, I heard one of them growling way down in their chest. A serious growl.

It made me smaller in my own body.

But I couldn’t look away.

Darren’s skin was jumping on his chest now.

It was Grandpa, rising up in his son. What I was seeing was Grandpa as a young man, itching to roam, to fight, to run down his dinner night after night because his knees were going to last forever. Because his teeth would always be strong. Because his skin would never be wax paper. Because fifty-five years old was a lifetime away. Because werewolves, they live forever.

And then the smell came, the smell that’s probably what birth smells like. Like a body turned inside out. A body turning inside out.

“Dad’s dead, Lib,” Darren said, and all his pain, his excuse for whatever had happened in town, it was right there in his voice, it was right there in the way his voice was starting to break over.

“And he’s not,” Libby said, flinging a hand down to me. Darren flashed his eyes over to me, came back to Libby. “We can’t just do whatever we want anymore,” she said, her teeth hardly parting from each other. “Not until—”

I balled my hand into a fist, ready to run, ready to hide. I knew where Grandpa’s creek was.

“Until what?” Darren said.

“Until,” Libby said, saying the rest with her eyes, in some language I couldn’t crack into yet.

Darren stared at her, stared into her, his jaw muscles clenching and flaring now, his pupils either fading to a more yellowy color or catching the morning sun just perfect. Except the sky was still cloudy. Right when he flashed those dangerous new eyes up at Libby, she slapped him hard enough to twist his head around to the side.

Her claws were out too, pushed out not from under her fingernails like I’d been thinking but from the knuckle just above that. I hadn’t even seen it happen.

My eyes took snapshots of every single frame of that arc her hand traced.

A piece of Darren’s lower lip strung off his mouth, clumped down onto his chest. The lower part of his nose sloughed a little lower, cut off from the top half.

His eyes never moved.

By his legs, his fingers stretched out as well, reaching for the wolf.

“No!” Libby yelled, stepping forward, taking him by both shoulders, driving her knee up into his balls hard enough to stand him up on tiptoes.

Darren fell over frontward, curled up there naked and skin-jumpy on the caliche, and Libby stood over him breathing hard, still growling, the canine muscles under her skin writhing in the most beautiful way, her claws glistening black, and what she told him, her tone taking no questions, was that his liquor-store days, they were goddamn over, that he was a truck driver now, did he understand?

“For Jess,” she said at the end of it all—my mother, Jessica, named for her mom—and then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, another dab of claw-shiny black showing on her inner forearm for the briefest instant, for not really long enough to matter.

Except it did. To me.