Karen drove back home, her eyes clouded by tears. She entered her parents’ house and headed straight for the refrigerator. A therapeutic gallon of chocolate swirl ice cream awaited her for precisely such dire occasions. Grabbing a soupspoon, she dug into it with a vengeance. She was consumed with anger and, even more so, with disgust. Yet, somehow, the icy tingles at the back of her throat, combined with the sugary taste melting in her mouth, momentarily took her mind off her emotional distress. She was simultaneously punishing and rewarding herself. She hated herself but blamed him more. What is a binge on chocolate vanilla swirl if not the perfect blend of opposites? Immediately afterwards, Karen knew what she had to do to expiate this moment of guilty pleasure. She went into the bathroom, leaned over the toilet, stuck her index finger deep into her throat and made repeated efforts to gag. Nothing came out at first, but she was eventually rewarded for her persistence by a little cascade of sour-sweet liquid that she quickly flushed away.

She then lay down on the sofa and stared blankly at the ceiling. How I loved him, she said to herself. And now it’s all over. I’m stuck in an impossible situation. I can’t forgive him but I can’t forget him either. He’s probably in her arms right now. Although she had never met Lisa, Karen had a graphic mental picture of Michael having sex with a big-breasted woman. Even if we tried to get back together, it would be impossible to trust him again, she tried to convince herself that she made the right decision. At the same time, however, the thought of a permanent separation was unbearably painful to her. In spite of what her fiancé had done, Karen loved Michael even more now that she had lost him for good. She needed to talk to someone about this. In the absence of any close friends, she decided to call her older sister, Maggie, who was indifferently married to a plumber with whom she had two kids plus one on the way. Generally speaking, Karen preferred to avoid discussing personal matters with family members. But this time she felt desperate.

Chey lifted the pistol in her hand and studied it as if there were some hidden message engraved on it. Some explanation of why it had been placed in the bag with the sandwiches and magazines.

When she actually thought about it, though, there really was only one conclusion to be made. A pistol with a single bullet in it is useful for a small variety of things, and only one of them made sense given where she was. And how alone she was.

The pistol was Bobby’s final gift. The last residue of whatever he might have once felt for her. He was being merciful. The thought made her grin crazily. She had never meant anything to him, not really. She couldn’t have. She was just convenient, a way to bring Powell out into the open.

His apparent affection for her—the words he’d spoken when they were quiet, when, after sex, she would reach for him—those words weren’t sincere. They were calculated, intended to achieve a certain effect, and in that regard they’d been very successful. He had a problem— Powell—and she had presented a solution. That was the closest thing to affection he’d felt for her, that she was useful.

He hadn’t expected her to get scratched. To join the club. Now that she had, she had become a new problem. And the pistol was what he’d come up with. The silver bullet was the solution. He was going to let her solve herself.

She lifted the pistol to shoulder height. She wondered if it mattered if she shot herself in the heart or the head. Blowing her brains out might hurt fractionally less—before she even knew what was happening she would just be gone, a puff of smoke blown away on a stiff breeze. If she shot herself in the heart it might take a couple of seconds for her to die. Excruciating, burning seconds.

In the days following the blowup with Karen, Michael took a short break from his hyperactive sex life. He made a genuine effort to miss his fiancée. He remembered Karen’s patience. The way she was so loyal to him. The way she stood by him even after she caught him cheating the first time. The way she clung to him. As he was going over his fiancée’s qualities, the perfect metaphor occurred to him. Karen was a boa constrictor. Whenever she felt him detach from her, she’d press tighter, refusing to let go. In spite of its negative connotations, this image amused him. As an adolescent, Michael had often imagined making love to one of those busty women, curvaceous and seductive, stretched out butt naked on a shag rug with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck. But he had never envisioned dating the actual boa!

Granted, he had given his fiancée plenty of reasons to be vigilant. Why beat around the bush? He was a lying, cheating bastard. That much was undeniable. The problem was, Michael absolved himself, that Karen didn’t appeal to him anymore. So cheating on her wasn’t really his fault. He had a glimpse of this realization a few weeks earlier. During one of the rare weekends when her parents were away visiting relatives, Karen spent Saturday night with him. Around 3:30 a.m., she woke up in a sweat. She tapped him on the shoulder to make sure that he was also awake. Then she asked him, as she did during holidays and other special occasions, to make a bullet point list of the top ten qualities he liked about her. “Number one. You let me sleep,” Michael mumbled. But since that night Karen was particularly persistent, he quickly spewed off a list, hoping that she’d let him go back to sleep: “You have soft skin. You give to charity. You’re a good listener. You communicate well. You love me. You’re considerate to others. You’re solid as a rock.”

Eventually Chey woke in silver light.

Her mouth was smeared across the floor. Her hands were under¬neath her, crushed under her own weight. It felt like there was no blood in them—they tingled painfully. Unbearably.

Her eyes felt like raisins. Dried up, cracked and broken. She rolled over and the effort made her squint. She was so hungry, it felt like insects had colonized her abdomen, that they had hollowed her out and left a gaping void where her stomach had been. So hungry.

“Hungry,” she moaned. She had a voice at least. A voice meant she was human again. It was getting hard to tell, sometimes. “Hungry,” she said again, and her throat cracked. No one could have heard her— she didn’t expect them to. But she was hungry.

She had no idea what time it was, or how many days had passed. Her thoughts were loose and small and she couldn’t get the mental energy together to make the simplest of logical jumps.

“Hungry.” She hadn’t even thought it that time. It just came out of her like a fetid belch.

Without water, without food—shouldn’t she have died already? But no. The curse wouldn’t let her die.

She closed her eyes. Maybe she changed, maybe she didn’t. All she saw was darkness.

Michael returned home from the bachelor party around 4 a.m. As soon as he stepped into the living room, he noticed that the red light of the answering machine was blinking. He figured it was nothing important. Whatever it was could wait until the following morning. He proceeded to crash on the living room couch without changing his clothes.

At 9:23 a.m.—Michael checked his watch twice since he felt it was way too early to get up—he heard Karen fiddle with her spare key in the front lock, which had a slight imperfection. “Hold on a sec!” he called out groggily and got up to open the door for her.

It’s only when Karen’s eyes moved over him disapprovingly that he realized he was still wearing the previous day’s outfit. “I was wasted last night,” he said by way of explanation.

“You mean this morning? Did you enjoy the stripper?” Karen inquired matter-of-factly, but her lips pursed into a tense smile.

“She was alright,” Michael shrugged, knowing better than to elaborate.

“Was she pretty?” In spite of her best efforts to be cool about it, Karen felt a knot of jealousy constricting her throat.

Michael’s policy had always been to mix a grain of truth with the lies, so that she couldn’t tell the difference. But this time he saw no harm in answering Karen’s question quite honestly: “Actually, as far as strippers go, she wasn’t too shabby,” he replied as he stepped into the bathroom, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Karen heard a light tinkle, followed by a vigorous flush. He can’t even close the door like a civilized human being! she muttered to herself. Although she realized that bachelor parties were a culturally accepted institution, she had little patience with this sleazy ritual right before a man enters into a so-called monogamous marriage. What kind of training for monogamy was that anyway? To distract herself from her mounting indignation, Karen began cleaning Michael’s apartment. She collected the socks and shirts scattered on the floor and lined up his shoes neat and parallel by the front door. “We’re still on the same wavelength about the justice of the peace thing, right?” she double-checked. She certainly didn’t want Michael having another bachelor party with his buddies, all of whom she considered big-time losers and hard-core womanizers. If not having her fiancé fool around with strippers before their wedding day implied foregoing the fairytale wedding she had dreamed about ever since she began collecting Bride Magazine at the age of twelve, then so be it.

“Sure thing!” Michael called out from the bathroom. “Why? Are you having second thoughts about it?” Karen didn’t reply, so he began to wonder if she had gotten it into her head to have the big wedding she originally wanted. He had worked hard to persuade his fiancée that an elaborate reception would be expensive. Worse yet, it would require spending time with each other’s families, something both of them preferred to avoid. “We wouldn’t have much time to plan the wedding anyway,” he said, washing his hands.

When Michael stepped out of the bathroom, Karen had a strange look upon her face. She looks like a deer trapped in front of the headlights, he thought, noticing her frozen expression. “What the hell happened? Did you decide you want a huge wedding after all?” he asked with a chuckle, prepared to fight her tooth and nail.

Karen shook her head.

“Did your mother try to convince you that you’re missing out? You want to have a Catholic ceremony or something?” Michael pursued. What was it with women and big weddings anyways?

“There’s not going to be any wedding,” Karen announced quietly, barely moving her lips.

The wolf howled.

The wolf felt as if she had always howled.

The wolf had gone a little bit crazy.

Not crazy like a human being goes crazy. Like an animal. There were two parts of her, of her self, of her mind. The thinking part of her brain, the part that could solve problems and that kept her out of trouble, grew less active with each passing hour. The instinctual part of her, the older half of her brain, rose up, its hackles high, and demanded more and more of her mental energy. Anger and fear and desperation had built up in the crenellations of her brain like wax building up in her ears, horror and hate and pain added to every day she was locked in the human place, magnified by the moonlight that leaked in through tiny cracks in the ceiling and the shutters. Multiplied—her hatred and her rage and her torment were multiplied, jacked up by a power of ten, because she knew a human female had been inside her square little cell the last time she’d slept. She could smell it on the floor, on the walls. She licked the wood and tasted the human, the oily sourness of the female’s skin, the unbearable thickness of her artificial scent. She hated, hated, hated the human, wanted to snap her neck, wanted to grind her bones between her teeth. Where was she? Was she nearby? Was she—was she?

Was she still here? Hiding somewhere? The wolf felt the female human like she was under the wolf ’s very skin.

She paced the corners of her cell, ran from wall to wall. There wasn’t enough room, wasn’t enough, wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t. She panted with the fear, the fear, the fear. Her legs cramped and her head bowed—her body filled all the available space. Her rage filled every square centimeter. It made the walls stretch and buckle as if she could escape just by needing it badly enough.

Finally she sank down to lie on her belly, her tongue out, her breathing slowing. And still she howled.

The human, the other human, the male, was he near? The one who had chained her leg, the one she’d nearly devoured. He had done this to her—he had imprisoned her in this terrible place. She could smell him! Was he nearby? She would tear him apart! She would, she would, she would. She would.

No, the human was nowhere near. She knew as much. Still, his stink, his cologne, was smeared on the walls, and the floor. Still he stung her nose, her eyes.

Still she howled.

“So did I choose well or did I choose well?” asked Alain Boulanger, a Frenchman whose last name sounded very seductive to American women: until, that is, they learned it meant “baker”.

Though not one to be an ingrate, Jose, the future groom, who happened to be a sculptor specializing in female nudes, upheld his high standards: “Yeah, we loved the slot machines. They were almost as much fun as those at Chucky Cheese’s!” he said with a good-natured laugh, opening the front door to usher his friends into his modest studio apartment.

Although the slot machines at the local casino may not have been the most exciting venue for a bachelor party, it would be unfair to hold it against Alain. After all, he had done his best. He was one of those men who was mostly talk and no bite. Alain bragged about his success with the ladies whenever he wasn’t chaperoned by Sara, his second wife. From what Jose and the others could tell, he tried to pick up anything that moved and wore panties, with only limited success. Around his wife, however, the Frenchman assumed a lap dog demeanor. He never leered at other women when in her company, knowing full well that the more he displayed his predilection for the fair sex, the shorter his leash become. “What do you mean Chuck E. Cheese’s?” he objected to the unflattering comparison. “That was a world class casino.”

“Call me crazy, but I think I speak for everyone here,” Jose gestured towards his distinguished companions, “when I say that we’d have preferred to see some of the racier shows.”

Alain frowned at his friend’s ingratitude. “Although I do quite well for myself and my family, excuse moi, but I’m not a millionaire, you know!” he attempted to justify why the only part of the bachelor party he had sponsored was the one where destitute retirees dispensed with their monthly Social Security checks.

“Yeah, well, I prefer the slut machines myself,” Michael intervened jovially. “Speaking of which, when is she coming?”

The six hours between moonset and moonrise went by in a flash. Especially because she knew the next day would be even shorter. And then—well, maybe by then it would all be over.

Bobby came with her back to the fire tower. He had a padlock in his hand so he could lock her inside. She tried not to think about what her wolf was going to do when it found itself locked up, again.

Lucie, the French lycanthrope who had given her curse to Powell, had gone mad from being confined when the moon was up. Of course, she’d been doing it for centuries. Chey wasn’t sure she could live any kind of life that long without going crazy.

Then again, she’d had so little practice at life. What did she know?

Bobby knew exactly when the moon would come up. He offered to sit with her until nearly the last minute. She wanted to tell him not to bother, that he didn’t have to coddle her like that. Instead she tried to hug him, to hold him close, to force him to be nearer to her. Physically near her.

“I understand you need some human contact,” he told her, gently pushing her away. “But it’s not so safe anymore. I don’t know if you can pass on your infection to me when you’re in human form. But I won’t take that chance, Chey.”

Michael walked briskly towards the Department of French and Italian. Since he was running late, he rushed into his office without stopping to banter, as usual, with fellow graduate students. As soon as he opened the door, Mireille, the officemate who had provided him with pleasant companionship for the past two years, greeted him. She lunged into his arms and plastered her lips upon his.

“I’m late to class!” Michael announced as soon as he managed to regain his breath. “Which, incidentally, starts in about 30 seconds,” he added, glancing at his watch.

At the moment, however, Mireille had a more pressing concern than his class. “Double D dropped by earlier this morning looking for you,” she said with an ambiguous look in her eyes, half-taunting, half-reproachful. “Double D” was their code name for Lisa, his well-endowed student from French 101. Michael preferred to avoid, as much as possible, crossing wires among his women. But Double D came by his office so frequently during the past few weeks that Mireille would have to be blind not to get the picture. Not that he felt that bad about it. After all, Mireille was no saint either. She was engaged to Jack, an all-American blond, tall law school student, through whom she hoped to obtain U.S. citizenship.

Bruce Pickersgill took Chey down to the tiny lake on the back of an ATV. It was one of two vehicles the exterminators had brought with them. When she arrived she found Bobby and Lester unloading a small seaplane with the Western Prairie Canid Management logo on its side. The logo showed a stylized wolf head howling at a crescent moon.

“That’s a strange logo for what you do,” she said, as Bruce helped her off the ATV.

“Oh? Why’s that?” he asked.

She squinted at him. “You guys hate wolves,” she tried to explain.

“Heck, no,” he told her, leading her over to the landing site. “I wouldn’t say that at all. I’d say we have a healthy respect for them. The wolf is a beautiful animal; all of the canids are.” He looked up as if he were trying to remember something. “I think Tony’s pop’s even got a pet coydog, back at home. We just provide an important service for livestock ranchers.”

Chey decided she had better things to do than psychoanalyze the three brothers. She dashed ahead to where Bobby was drinking Pepsi out of a three- liter bottle. He had a number of white paper bags on top of a crate before him and as she got closer he took a golden brown pastry out of one of them.

The stranger’s hand on her arm felt like a pair of pliers were being closed on her wrist. She had no choice but to pull her hand back. Chey was astounded—she’d had no idea the man was near her, hadn’t heard him coming up behind her.

She shook the pain out of her hand. Then held it out again, to shake. She glanced down at the PVC pipe at her feet. Its smell still tantalized her. “What is that, wolf musk?” she asked. She had it now. It smelled exactly like Powell’s hair. Like a lycanthrope.

The sneaky guy stared at her for a long time before taking her hand. Then he bent down slowly from the waist and kissed it. “Bruce,” he said, “Bruce Pickersgill. I think you’ve already been introduced to my brother.”

He was smaller than the near- giant Frank Pickersgill, considerably smaller, and his shoulders were thin and narrow, but there was a smoky kind of intelligence in his eyes she hadn’t seen in his brother’s. He had a pencil-thin mustache and he wore a parka with a beaver fur collar that smelled like old smoke. He had a pair of pistols low on his hips, like a gunfighter, though the guns themselves were matte black and square in shape, just like the one Bobby had given her. She didn’t doubt they were full of silver bullets.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“We came in this morning,” he told her, “while you were up there howling away. We didn’t have a chance to be properly introduced then.” He held her with his eyes while he reached into his pocket. She half expected him to pull a knife on her. Instead his fingers flicked out with a business card between them.

western prairie canid management llc, she read. 67 years com¬bined expertise!

“Canids are what—dogs?” she asked.

“Doglike mammals,” he told her. “Predatory beasts. Mostly we get called in by shepherds who don’t like coyotes worrying their flocks. Lots of outfits do that. My brothers and I, though, we specialize in larger pest animals. Coydogs, bears, and the occasional wolf pack.”

She nodded. She understood how these men “managed” such animals, she guessed. They killed them in the fastest, cheapest way possible. “I take it Bobby explained to you what I have become, Mr. Pickersgill.”

The name Kittens couldn't be taken seriously. It had a Pavlovian tendency to dredge up memories from childhood, of the kitten that got caught up in the tree and had to be carried down by the volunteer fireman or the kitten that pawed the spokes of the Concord stagecoaches that brattled down main street. At twenty-one, he lopped off the surname that had plagued so many generations of his family and let himself be known as Charles Katz, a name, in his opinion, more befitting of a public official.

Katz was the governor of a little known state, a lesser known national figure, obscure even to those who had winched him up into office, for the reason that the preceding governor had embezzled ones of thousands from the state and was said to have fled with his mistress to somewhere in Latin America. Katz was an orator with a droll voice and affinity for archaic and rarely spoken words like gramercy and wellaway. He was as erudite and sagacious as he was dull and frequently ignored by his subordinates. One reporter commented he displayed the charisma of "a paper bag". Another journalist mused he made "Calvin Coolidge look like Will Rogers". He campaigned on the strength of his record, which in an extract from a short blurb published in the Boston Globe was "modest and without any great shakes". Polls had him pinched between Oklahoma Governor William "Alfalfa Bill" Murray and Maryland Governor Albert C. Richie. He was described by his colleagues as a blunt man. A bluntness, they said, that was often mistaken for haughtiness or curmudgeonry. An old friend said of Katz, "Despite oratory difficulties that have troubled him since grade school, he is a man of deep convictions, who says what he believes and believes what he says."

Silver light came and passed behind her eyes and then Chey was down on the floor, naked and grunting, her fingers raw, the nails broken as she scratched and scrabbled and gnawed with her teeth at the wooden floorboards. Her cheek burned as she pushed her face harder and harder against the floor, and her hair got in her eyes. She whined and whimpered as her fingers dug and dug but got nowhere against the old dry wood.

Then she sat up fast enough to give herself a head rush. What— what had she been doing? It was dark in the fire tower, but she didn’t want to get up to open the shutters, not when she didn’t know what she would find. She’d had a shock the last time she’d woken up in that position and found the place torn to pieces by her wolf.

Her hands were stiff and sore. Carefully she unbent her fingers, smoothed out her palms. Then she reached down and touched the floor. There had been scratches there before, but now there were distinct gouges. Four narrow trenches, some of them deep enough to fit her fin¬gertip inside.

In the dark she pulled on her clothes, then stood up and hesitantly opened one of the shutters. Outside afternoon sunlight stretched in long rays through a haze of pollen. The golden spores filled the air between the trees like mist. She could hear people down there, maybe more people than just Bobby and Lester. She heard the repeated dull sound of a hammer at work. In a second, she thought, she would go down and join the other human beings. Yes. That would be nice. First, though, she had to make sure her wolf hadn’t destroyed her one place of refuge.

Slowly Chey turned around. It wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The gouges were there, yes, but only in a few places. Her wolf hadn’t dug its way through the floor. She’d been worried it might have found a way out—though she remembered almost nothing of the last eighteen hours, she knew the wolf had desperately, almost pitifully, wanted to escape the tower. The floorboards were too thick for that, it seemed.

Chey smoothed out her wild hair and rubbed dried drool off the corner of her mouth. Maybe she could have a bath in Powell’s big galvanized tin tub. Maybe she could convince Bobby and Lester to heat up enough water so that the bath would actually be warm. She reached down and pulled the ring of the trapdoor, ready, she thought, to rejoin polite company.

It was difficult for her to answer. After all, what did he mean by love? Did he mean sexual desire, romantic notions of soul-mates and passion? Did he mean an enduring affection, an attachment born of nostalgia? Or was he talking about the desire to move forward together, to remain committed to walking through life together even after all they’d endured? By any definition, she wasn’t so sure and
was quiet for long enough that when she finally did answer, it didn’t matter anymore.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Ever since she died...” he started, and she saw that tears were coming down his cheeks.

“Greg. We’ve both been through hell,” she said.

“No, Amy. You can say that, but it’s not what you really think.” Now his face was red, and a gnarled vein at his temple bulged ominously. She was worried he could either explode or implode, easily; he seemed capable of either an aneurysm or a murderous attack. “Let me explain something to you about yourself, since you don’t seem to know it,” he began again, his voice humid with sarcasm about to break into fury. “You didn’t just have an affair with that woman for no reason. You did it because you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You do, you do. You should admit this to yourself, at least,” he said. “You took up with her because you blame me for P.J. That’s who you are, Amy.”

She could see her reflection in the back of a DVD case on the coffee table, and idly wondered what movie it was, then felt guilty for it. Her face was suffused with pink shock and the oily shine of new tears. But her eyes didn’t look like those of a person who’d had a sincere cry. Her eyes looked dead.