Bobby gave her back her old clothes—he’d gathered them up from the campsite at the tiny lake. She’d almost forgotten how cold she was until she pulled her parka back on and felt warmth, real human warmth caress her. It made a big difference, though even getting warm didn’t seem to shake the hollow feeling she had, the strange high-pitched emptiness in her stomach and her limbs.

She tried not to think about it. She helped Lester build a fire out front of the cabin. She couldn’t help but look up among the trees. She tried to focus on the wood in front of her, concentrate on building a little pyramid of medium- sized branches, but then Lester cleared his throat and she realized she was scanning the dark rank of trees again. Looking for Powell.

He wanted to kill her. He had killed other people before. She had plenty of reason to be frightened of him. Right?

Skin—human skin—hanging in his sweat lodge. What had Powell been up to? She didn’t like to imagine it. She’d come north to kill him. She had wanted to confront him, thinking she knew what kind of monster he was. She’d started to think things were more complicated than that. That there was something to him ...something human. The straps told a different story, though.

She watched the trees. Waiting. It was only a matter of time before he came back. To finish things with her. Maybe to finish her off.

The little kindnesses he’d shown her—taking her into his home, teaching her the ropes of lycanthropy. Had those been the gestures of a human being reaching out to the only other person in the world who might understand him? Or had it been an initiation? Had he just been recruiting her into his own world of blood and horror? Breaking things to her slowly, so she wouldn’t get scared off. What dark secrets had he hidden from her? And then she had betrayed him—a creature capable of such violence.

Maybe she’d made a very bad mistake when she didn’t shoot him. Maybe it was destiny catching up with her. Making up for the day twelve years earlier when she should have died.

Sunset Boulevard was a filigree of neon, offering up its incandescent scribble like a hasty autograph written to a sky that didn’t really care. Women teetered by on clear plastic heels that looked as cheap and crushable as bottles of spring water, giving their gait a trussed-up, clumsy sexiness that can only be achieved with impractical shoes. Vanity billboards for movies loomed high above half-sleeping homeless people like kites on invisible strings—worlds apart, yet each somehow implicating the other.

Amy was mostly watching the tourists, who were more used to being the watchers, and therefore oblivious. They usually wore one of two uniforms. There were the pointers and photograph-takers, who unfolded maps in front of themselves like giant napkins to catch their awestruck slobber. Then there were the hip, tourist-hating breed of neo-tourist, their eyes set on a deliberate dimmer switch, feigning cool, casual indifference, pretending to live here. Amy found herself relating to these types; she knew what pretending looked like.

“There’s something you need to see,” Bobby told her. Fenech, she thought. She should start thinking of him by that name, since it was clear that whatever had once been between them was over. It was hard, though. She watched him as he turned and walked away from her and she thought about how she knew exactly what it would feel like to run up behind him and run her fingers over the top of his spiky hair.

“Lester, get this thing ready, okay?” he snapped. It looked like he might have had a bad morning.

The pilot ducked his head and ran to his helicopter. He was ready to go by the time the other two got there. “Might be there’s room for three in here, as long as we’re all friends,” he assured her. He held open the Plexiglas door on the side of the bubble cockpit and moved around some of the baggage for her. Chey clambered into the space behind the two seats and sat with her knees up around her chin. She had to hold down the front of her sweater to keep from flashing the two men.

Then Bobby and Lester got inside and pulled the door shut. The air in the cockpit changed, subtly, and Chey found her breathing came a little faster. She didn’t know what to make of that. Once Lester had them off the ground and she could look out at the blue sky and the trees below them she was pretty much fine, she decided.

Lester and Bobby had headphone sets so they could talk to each other over the roar of the engine. She had to make do with her hands over her ears just to keep from being deafened. Still, when she saw where they were headed she tried to shout over the noise and warn them away.

Ignoring her pleas, Lester descended toward the clearing by Powell’s cabin. The rotorwash stirred up a ton of pine needles and curled brown leaves as they set down gently on the almost- level ground. As the engine wound down she grabbed Bobby’s shoulder and said, “This is a lousy idea. He’s probably lurking nearby, waiting for you to mess with his stuff.”

“Good. If he is I can shoot him,” Bobby told her. He shrugged violently.

They piled out of the helicopter and moved across the front of the house, Chey craning her head back and forth to try to pick up any stray noise.

“Relax,” Bobby finally told her. “I’ve already been through this place once and he didn’t pop out of the woodwork to get me.” He pointed and she saw that the front door of the cabin stood open. She could only see shadows inside, but she understood what he was trying to tell her. Powell had moved on—as he always had before. Had he run off to the north? There wasn’t much farther he could go.

But still I wanted to go back and give big bear hugs to Eos and tell her I was really really sorry and that I didn’t mean she was putting all her emotion to the search for nothing. Even though I still thought she mostly was, I guess I just wanted to see her wild hair and the veins in her smooth, toned arms. I wanted to go back to before the fall on the monkey’s bar, and before the 7-Eleven, before the guy with the phocomelia, and before the Subway BMT on honey oat.

But instead, I took my father’s advices one more time because he was always right about everything, almost, and we got back on the road to Irvine where he had to go back to painting the next morning.

For hundreds and hundreds of decades, there weren’t many advances from the Egyptians on breast tumor treatments, according to the books I read. Of course, by the time my mother was going in for her surgeries, the surviving statistics were starting to be pretty good, and so I guess this was part of the reason why she’d insisted I go with the kids that day to Tel Aviv, rather than being by her side in the hospital. She was just hoping to be one of the good statistics on the graph and that life would go back to normal some few weeks after her recoveries.

She came to, naked and stiff, on the floor of the fire tower. It was nearly pitch dark inside but she recognized the texture of the floorboards under her cheek and her stomach.

It was somewhat reassuring to find herself in the same place she’d been before. She was a little surprised, though, to find herself still there—surely her wolf would have wanted to get down to the forest floor, to get out among the trees and run and hunt. Then she noticed the trapdoor that led to the stairwell. It opened easily; in fact it was on a spring, so you barely had to tug with one finger on a ring to make it pop open. Of course, what’s easy for a human finger might not even be possible for a wolf’s paw.

Rising to her feet, she pushed open one of the shutters to let in some morning light. Then she turned around and jumped in surprise.

The wolf had been busy while she was out.

It must have gone wild when it realized it couldn’t escape through the trapdoor. The walls of the small room were gouged, scarred with claw marks, scratches whole meters long, some deep enough to put her finger inside. The graffiti left behind by the tower’s human occupants were obliterated by the scratches. The table and the chairs had been broken into pieces, while the footlocker had been smashed up against one wall, its contents strewn across the room, battered and trampled. Nothing remained of the Edward Abbey book except tiny scraps of paper that littered the floor like big moldy snowflakes.

She understood, of course. They had been human things. Maybe they even smelled, to the wolf, like their previous owners still. Trapped and alone, the wolf had resorted to the one thing it really understood, which was destruction.

The smell of the wolf was thick in the tiny room. A little like wet dog, a little sharper than that. Chey pushed all the shutters open and let in a frozen wind to try to disperse the funk. Then she sat down on the floor—the chairs were useless, broken—and put her head in her hands.

There’s a very old city in the high mountains of the Galilee called Tzfat, which I enjoyed from very much when I was there visiting years ago. You might have heard of this place because of some few trips that Madonna made there to see the city that the Zohar says has the purest air in all the land of Israel. Basically, if you don’t know, the Zohar is the mystical books on Kabbalah, which many American celebrities like Madonna, Demi Moore and the baseball player A-Rod are following.

Chey discovered the limits of her new domain pretty quickly. The fire tower comprised a single square room twenty feet on a side. It had a pitched wooden roof through which she could see sunlight peeking in. The walls were painted a peeling green, and were cut away at waist height so they could be opened upward like shutters. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in block- letter graffiti carved into the wood with a pocketknife. Very little of it was legible or made any sense—mostly it was just names and dates, presumably memorials left by the people who had stood lonely watch high above the trees, making sure they didn’t all burn down. Chey propped open one of the shutters even though it let in a gust of frigid air and made her feel even chillier. She took a long look at what her predecessors in the tower would have seen. The drunken forest all around rolled and pitched like an ocean frozen in mid- heave. In the distance she could see sparkling light bouncing off some water, but she couldn’t be sure if it was the lake where Bobby had set up his camp. Powell’s cabin was nowhere in sight. Beyond that she had no points of reference—beyond those two locations the forest was a unicellular seething mass, an entity without boundaries or form. She let the shutter fall back with a bang that made her wince.

A big footlocker along one wall proved to be locked up tight. Chey tugged at the latches a little as if they would come loose in her hands, but the metal locks were solid, perhaps rusted in place. Chey inhaled deeply—she wasn’t going to let even such a tiny mystery go unsolved if she could help it. Then she used all of her wolf- given strength and tore the locker open, sending pieces of the lock flying around the small room.

Inside the locker were kerosene lamps (but no kerosene), boxes of firestarters, tin plates and cups, and other camping supplies. Underneath the supplies she found an old sweater with a bad tear down one sleeve and struggled into it. It was far too big for her and came down to mid-thigh. She pawed wildly through the other contents of the locker, looking for more clothes, but didn’t turn anything up. There were some old books, but they smelled musty and when Chey picked one up the cover was damp and spotted with mold. The pages stuck together in one thick, gloppy block.

At least his eyes aren’t open while he says these things, she thought. If Greg were awake, he’d be making the kind of eye contact that made her squirm; it was so unbearably naked and bold. He’d be staring unflinchingly at whoever he was confronting with all of his conviction and all of his vulnerability, because he was brave enough to show both. She knew—she’d been the recipient of that stare before. It was an unrelenting, hard-working stare, insistent on nothing but honesty. She’d rarely been able to outlast it.

But mercifully, his body was busily locked in a battle with his 103-degree fever. It was with some simulacrum of himself, some dream version of his clear, reckoning blue eyes, that he was staring down his listener, and no doubt forcing them to look away.

“You know, I’m always trying to get the answers right, but I’m never asking any of the questions, am I?” His voice was plaintive but steady as he directed the question into the general proximity of the abandoned dent in her side of the bed. “Maybe I’m too much of a coward to ask the questions.”

The pile of junk mail sat loudly on the kitchen counter, looking brighter and much more alluring than the legitimate mail. Pouring her first cup of coffee, Amy’s eyes were drawn to the colorful plumage of solicitation—garishly bright car dealership balloons, tawny before-and-after Botox faces, fat, anthropomorphic dollar bills, apparently eager to be wasted.

She sifted through the pile as the animating force of caffeine slowly reached her dulled nervous system and took the opportunity to appreciate the flamboyance of each piece of junk before tipping it into the recycle bin.

Chey woke face down in a snowdrift, her hands gripping the earth like claws. Her body ached and pulsed—a maddening tingle in her left leg made her cry out.

She rolled over and stared up at the sky. The sun was high above but its light couldn’t seem to warm her. Her breath turned to mist inside of her mouth.

She sat up—her body complaining, her neck popping noisily—and grabbed at her leg, kneading the muscles there, trying to get her circulation going. She felt a real shock when her hands met the skin of her calf and found it blistered and raw. She looked down and saw what looked like a burn scar there. That was where the silver chain had bound her. She knew silver could kill her, kill the wolf. Maybe even just being in contact with the metal was enough to hurt her.

Wait, she thought. Something was wrong. Bobby had chained her up so she wouldn’t hurt him or Lester. The chain had held her even when she transformed—she could remember that much. But now it was gone. Had Bobby released her while she slept?

Except then why was she not in the clearing by the little lake? She looked around, nearly forgetting she was naked, and called Bobby’s name. There was no sign of the helicopter. She must have traveled some distance while she was in her wolf form.

She brushed snow off her arms and her chest with shaking hands and rose creakily to her feet. She wasn’t going to freeze to death, she knew that much now, but her body still rebelled at the cold air around her, the cold earth beneath her feet. It wanted clothing and shelter.

She took a step and got another shock. A bad one, a really bad one. The snowdrift around her was splattered with red blood. What looked like gallons of it.

Her hands pressed against her mouth. Her chest tightened—what— where—had that blood come from?

Oh, God, she thought. Oh, no.

The two men made camp and built a cheery little fire. The white smoke that lifted off the blaze mixed with the mist off the water and the yellowish twilight. That butterscotch quality of the evening had lingered for hours and it still wasn’t dark—it was near midsummer in the Arctic and that meant some very short nights—but the air had turned frosty and damp and the dancing fire chased away some of the gloom.

It was half past nine, already. The moon was going to rise at 9:45.

She caught Lester checking his watch more than once. Bobby, though, kept his eyes on her the whole time. Even as he got up to throw another sap- heavy log on the fire he watched.

“You hungry?” he asked, and she almost jumped. She’d gotten used to the silence. “We’ve got some powdered eggs and coffee. Instant, you know, but it’s still Timmy Ho’s best, and it’ll probably smell like civilization. I can’t remember, do you take sugar?”

The breath leaked out of her with a whimpering sound.

“I guess not,” he said, and sat down by the fire. To watch.

Her body grew light, almost insubstantial. Her clothes hung on her like formless sacks, then dripped to the floor of the clearing. She watched her broken wrist. The hand there lifted of its own accord—it looked like a balloon filling up with air. She could feel the bones inside twanging and grating on each other. It didn’t hurt much—nothing hurt, or felt like anything much. She felt like she were made of some softer substance than flesh and bones. She felt like she might have floated away if not for the incredibly heavy chain around her ankle that held her down. That didn’t fall off, even when she stood naked and ghostly and tearing at it, pulling at it—

Silver light. The world filled up with silver light. It was 9:47 p.m. Moonrise.

Her body shook with joy, her fur fluffing out and her bones popping happily. She dug at the ground with her claws and then lifted her muzzle to the wind to howl in pure pleasure.

Her nostrils twitched. Her throat tasted smoke—fire—wood burning nearby. Her eyes tried to focus and though her vision was not her best sense, she could still see the yellow splash of flame in the middle of the clearing. She could still see—them.

Men. Men. Men, hated men. Men, she panted. Men. She could taste their blood already. Though not as much as she would have liked. Visions of tearing them up and feasting on their entrails struck sparks in her heart and her head. Desires she had not felt before blossomed inside of her, filled her up, made her body race.

Men—two of them. They stood around their little fire as if it could protect them, their bodies crouched as if they might run. They were afraid of her.

We took the bus over to this part of Sunset Boulevard that she wanted to go to and we set up in the parking area of a 7-Eleven. After having no luck with several of the customers going into or out from the 7-Eleven, we were suddenly approached by a big man with a big moustache growing over his lips and down toward his chin. He was dressed like he worked at the 7-Eleven.

“Do you have permit?” he asked to us with a rude voice.

“Actually we don’t need one,” said Eos.

“Get out of here or I’ll call the cops!” he shouted. “Go on!”

“Chill out dude,” said Eos.

“Go! Stop harassing the customers!”

“Okay, just chill man. We’re going—“

“I call the cops on you niggers!”

At this point, I told Eos we should just be going. That it wasn’t worth fighting over, but there must have been something about this man she didn’t like because she suddenly didn’t want to move.

“What did you call me?” she asked him in a tone I had never heard from her mouth before.

“You fucking niggers are always harassing people. ‘Gimme change, gimme food, gimme, gimme, gimme.’ Get your nigger ass out of my parking lot or I’ll call the cops right now!”

And then there was another stranger who stepped in-between the man with the big moustache and us. He was one of these people who has the one arm shorter and skinnier than the other with some fingers missing from the deformed hand.

“It’s okay, they’re with me,” he said, showing the big man a small white card that he held in his normal left hand without the missing fingers.

The 7-Eleven man took the card and read it. “Yorkshire Productions?” he asked. “You guys filming a movie?”

“Just go back inside and let us do what we do, okay?” said the guy with the deformed hand.

“I don’t want my customers harassed.”

“Just go back inside and we’ll find some other place to shoot, okay?”

And without saying any more words, the big man turned and went back in his store. I looked to Eos, who had sweat on her face and was looking like she was going to kill someone.

“That was sooo unnecessary,” she said to the guy. “I mean—”

“I know him,” said the small arm guy. “I’m here like every other day and he’s not someone you want to piss off. Believe me. I’ve seen him pull a knife on more than one occasion.”

“He’s a bigot,” said Eos.

“He’s a senseless asshole, too. What can I tell you? They usually go hand-in-hand. No point in fighting him. You want to send a letter to 7-Eleven’s corporate office, to the ADL? I’ll help you petition to get him fired. Just don’t exchange words with the guy. He’s looking to pick a fight on a daily basis. And on top of that, I don’t think he’s had a bath in several months. Trust me. You don’t want to get too close.”

Pain ate at her. It was like a small animal lodged in her abdomen, chewing on her stomach. Nausea made her eyes bulge, made her sweat even in the cold air.

Slowly Chey raised her arm to look at her wrist. The skin of her forearm was red and purple, while the hand itself looked limp, like a doll’s hand. It dangled at the end of her arm. She tried to close her fingers and they twitched but refused to do as she asked. She tried to lift the hand but it wouldn’t move at all.

The pain grumbled inside of her and told her to lie down. It told her to go to sleep. If she hadn’t been half wolf, she probably wouldn’t have had a choice. Whatever she thought of the curse Powell had given her, it did have some compensations.

It wasn’t permanent, she told herself. As soon as she changed again her body would heal the injury. As soon as she changed again...

She had some thinking to do. She had to make a plan. The pain was going to have to wait.

She stumbled up onto her feet and walked toward where Bobby lay curled up on the ground. He was conscious, but his face was twisted in a grimace of hurt. “Lester,” she shouted. “Lester, come over here.”

“Is he gone?” the pilot asked, coming around the side of his helicopter. “Do you think he might come back?”

She shook her head. “He’s too smart for that. Come on, help me with Bobby.”

Together they pulled Fenech up into a sitting position. The operative clutched at his chest, but Chey found he was weak as a kitten when she took his hands away. She pulled at the neck of his polo shirt and looked inside. A wide blue bruise had already formed around his sternum. Powell had tackled him pretty hard. “Can you talk?” Chey asked. “Can you say something?”

“Frigging squatch,” he moaned. “That frigging squatch!”

“I guess you’re going to live,” she said, and squatted down next to him.

She stared out at the water, unsure of what to say next. The sun was still high over the trees, but she figured it had to be getting on to nine o’clock. She could have checked the clock on her cell phone, but that would have involved reaching into her pocket with her broken hand.

“Listen,” she said finally, “I’m sorry, but—”

“Hold on.” Bobby patted the needles around him with his hands, then turned up his sunglasses. They must have fallen off when Powell hit him. The right lens was badly scratched, but he polished them on his shirt anyway and then pulled them over his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Chey, you know how I feel about you. You know that I trust you. So when I ask you my next question, I want you to please not take it the wrong way.”

One of the first categories I was very close to sweeping from Lily and Jake with the braces and the hairy buzzer-arm mole, was Ancient Egypt. I’d gotten the $200, the $400 and the $600, all from one to the next in a row, and then the $800 turned up to be the Daily Double.

Most people who are watching Jeopardy! at home don’t have any way to know this, but there are lights on the game board when you’re there at the studio that can’t be seen on television. When Alex Trebek finishes speaking, the contestant can buzz to give the answer in the form of a question, but only when these special lights are lighting up. If you buzz in before the lights, you’re prevented from buzzing again for about one quarter of a second. This may not seem like a crucial amount of time, but on Jeopardy!, being locked out from buzzing, even for a nanosecond, can mean all the difference from getting the chance to answer the Daily Double, which just happened to be in the Ancient Egypt category, which I knew like no one else, and being locked out.

The breeze off the tiny lake shook the pine needles, made the limbs of the trees bounce and sway. Sunlight danced on the water.

Chey adjusted her stance. Then she lifted her weapon and pointed it right at Powell’s forehead. He looked surprised but not very frightened. Her hand started to shake but she fought the tremor down. One shot was all it would take. He would be dead. She would finally be stronger than the wolf.

She wished she’d had time to talk with him more. She had so many questions she wanted him to answer.

“Chey,” he said, slowly. He was going to try to talk her down.

Her father hadn’t been given a chance to talk. “You never gave my father a chance!” she screamed. She was losing control; she could feel it. She needed to act quickly or she was going to fuck this up.

“Your father?” Powell asked.

“His name was Royal Clark. He was a good man. You wouldn’t know that, of course. You didn’t seem particularly interested in his character at the time. You seemed more interested in how his guts tasted. You attacked our car twelve years ago and you ate him.”

“Oh, boy,” he said.

“Tell me you remember him,” she said. “Tell me you know who I’m talking about. I know you were never introduced, but surely you remember his red jacket. That’s pretty much all I remember now. Tell me!”

If he confessed, if he said he remembered, and that he was sorry, then it would all be over. Then she could just kill him and she could sleep again.

“I’m sorry, Chey,” he said.

Her body sagged a little. She thought she might swoon. He was confessing, he was apologizing for what he’d done, just like she’d wanted—

Except he wasn’t finished.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember him at all.”

Quite suddenly she became aware of the solidity, the square rigid reality of the gun in her hand. Now, she thought. Now now now! She tried to squeeze the trigger. It didn’t move. Nothing happened.

She closed her eyes in shame and horror. The weapon’s safety was still on.