Amy woke up on the living room floor, her cheek itchy and crosshatched with rug burn, her left foot partially asleep, her perspective mercifully limited. She took in the room gradually from her low vantage point: the muscular bulge of the cherry-wood chair legs, the loose baseboards in the corner, the long stagnant plug-in air freshener, greedily sucking up voltage for no apparent reason.

A few feet away, her laptop winked with its logon screensaver, and she idly watched its predictable disappearing act as the icon rotated its position on the screen. She must have fallen asleep working on her newest account, sitting on the floor. This was something she used to do fairly regularly; she believed the odd location helped her think more creatively. She hadn’t done it in a long time, though, and it didn’t feel the same.

She rubbed her eyelids over her irritated contact lenses, which caused her vision to slip into blurriness and then, with the next blink, to pop back into clarity. Across the room, near the DVD player, she thought she saw a glint of something shiny, metallic, almost painfully sharp and bright. At the moment, though, she had trouble trusting her own eyes.

Just then, the phone trilled loudly; apparently, she was going to be jolted into full wakefulness, whether by migraine-inducing optical illusions or by the shockingly aggressive bleat of the phone. Her decision to let the answering machine get the call felt more like a deferral than any kind of true escape; it was like hitting snooze on the alarm one last time.

“Amy, Greg, hi, this is Diane Lucas from the agency,” the smooth, musical lilt of the voice, with its relaxed-sounding Southern accent, hardly needed to be identified. “Um, I’m calling you with a bit of a difficult situation here. It seems as though the—“

“Hi.” Amy almost didn’t realize she’d picked up the phone until she heard her own voice, terse and nasal and ugly, interrupting Diane’s melodic flow. “Hi, I’m here.” And she took the phone and lay back down on the floor, looking up at the ceiling as she listened to the news Diane had called to give her.

The last time she had lingered in this spot on the floor, Greg had been beside her, laughing. And they’d both stayed there for a while, staring up at the tacky popcorn-textured ceiling as though a fascinating, hypnotically entertaining TV show were being projected on its surface.

They’d been crawling around on all fours on the floor, an absurd exercise recommended in a baby-proofing book Amy had read. The goal had been to see the house and its potential hazards from the perspective of a crawling infant, or as the baby-proofing expert phrased it, to “think like a baby.” Greg had found this endlessly amusing from the start, and he’d teased her mercilessly about it. She’d reluctantly admitted that it was kind of ridiculous. But she also felt it was important, and she didn’t mind making a fool of herself for things that mattered.

She’d been worried. From the moment they’d learned that the agency had matched them with a young expectant mother who’d agreed to give them her baby, Amy’s excitement had quickly transmuted into anxiety, and she’d set about taking steps to prove them worthy of this good fortune. She wanted to be sure that nothing went wrong; she read every book on baby-proofing that existed, and purchased virtually every safety product on the market. She’d made sure the slats on the crib were less than 2 and 3/8 inches apart, so that the baby’s head wouldn’t get stuck, jail-bird style, between them. She’d purchased a toilet lock and baby gates and edge cushions for sharp corners and edges. She’d bought a “small object tester,” essentially a small shot glass, which was used to gauge which household items were small enough to be a choking hazard (if they fit into the glass, they could fit into a child’s mouth). She’d actually acquired several of these, which she gave out to her mother, Greg’s mother, and a few of their close friends to keep in their homes.

“Now, this is pure genius,” Greg had said, holding the small object tester up to the light with a chuckle. “I guess some shot glass manufacturer with extra inventory decided to make some cash on the side off anxious moms. I wish I’d thought of that; what a racket.”

He had a point; the whole business of baby-proofing, unheard of in their parents’ generations, had built into its premise an almost endless tunnel of anxiety, one which seemed to reveal new depths, twists, and turns the further she progressed along it. The relief of one fear, ritualized with a wise purchase, seemed only to lead into to another, even more terrifying possibility.

Almost—almost done. The ten- kilometer run ended in the obstacle course. Hand over hand, swinging on an overgrown jungle gym. Crawling under wire. Chey came through the tires puffing, but she had enough strength left to grab the top of the wall. She got one leg over and jumped down the other side just like she’d been trained. Sergeant Horrocks, her drill instructor, started screaming at her as soon as she was through the mud. “If you can’t get those legs up higher you’re going to do the whole fucking thing over again,” he said. He was a tough little man with curly white hair and during her six weeks of training she had never heard him say one word in a conversational tone. With the sergeant it was either screaming or contemptuous silence.

She ran up to a table and tied a blindfold around her face. She had fifty- five seconds left. With sweaty hands she picked up the pieces of her weapon off the table. Receiver, barrel, clip. She slapped the handgun together, stripped it down, put it together again. Then she pulled off the blindfold and stood at attention until Sergeant Horrocks screamed at her to stop.

Her heart was racing. Her body burned with pain. She was done.

“Pretty shabby, but it’s a passing score,” the sergeant announced. “Alright, you’re done.”

And that was it. She walked over to where Bobby and Uncle Bannerman were sitting in camp chairs and dropped to the grass in front of them. She didn’t have the strength to say anything and they didn’t offer any congratulations. They were deep in conversation and barely seemed to notice she was there. The same conversation they’d been having, over and over, since the two of them had met.

“This is your brilliant plan. To send one woman against a monster.”

“How about a Cuban cigar, Captain?” Bobby asked, waving one at Uncle Bannerman. Chey’s heart sank. She jumped up onto a wooden fence and sat down on the top rail. She didn’t have high hopes for this introduction to start with—she had known all along that the two men weren’t going to click—but it seemed almost like Bobby wanted this to fail. “You can’t get these down here in the States, right? There’s nothing like them.” He rubbed the cigar under his own nose and breathed out joyfully.

“Thank you, no. I don’t smoke.” Her uncle was dressed in his ranch clothes. Flannel shirt, jeans, perfectly clean work boots. He didn’t wear his uniform anymore—he was retired now, retired with honor and a nice pension after he cleaned up some bad prison riot or something with no casualties. He had transitioned to private life pretty smoothly and had bought a ranch where he raised Appaloosas. He had a bag of carrots with him and he was methodically feeding them, one after another, to his favorite animal, Vulcan, who kept flicking his tail back and forth.

It was 2006, the year the Canadian government went to the Conservatives, and it seemed like maybe, finally, they had a chance. If they were discreet about it. They needed Uncle Bannerman’s help, though, so the two of them had flown down to Colorado to ask him in person. It was January and there were patches of snow on the ground and Chey wished they could just go inside and get warm.

Bobby bit off the end of his cigar and spit it into the grass. Banner-man followed the projectile with his eyes and stared at where it hit the ground, probably memorizing the location where it fell so he could pick it up later. Bobby put the cigar in his mouth unlit and started sucking on it.

“Do you need a match?” Bannerman asked.

“Fuck no. You think I want lung cancer? I just like the taste.”

Bannerman looked away. “You can get mouth cancer just as easily.” He shook his head, clearly ready to give up. “Cheyenne told me that you wanted to ask me for a favor. I suppose I should let you ask, at least.”

“Yeah. I need your help with killing a werewolf.”

Bannerman didn’t react to that at all. He fed the last carrot to his horse and then wadded up the bag and put it in his pocket.

“It’s a matter of public safety,” Bobby tried to explain. “Canadian citizens are at risk and you can help me put an end to that. Surely you can appreciate that. This asshole ate your own brother.”

At the playground, Eos and I were kicking the ball to each other for some few minutes and then we were playing at the monkey’s bar, seeing who could pull the other person off the bar with our legs, as we were suspending from our hands. Because we were both dressed with short pants on, every time my skin was meeting hers, my penis was getting more and more stiff, to the point where I was very glad it was dark outside because she would have noticed this rising hill in my groin for sure. She was succeeding at pulling me off the monkey’s bar more times than I was, but I was basically letting her because it felt better when her smooth legs were around my hairy ones than the opposite.

And then, just when I thought I felt some sperms coming, everything went black, like in a movie when they want you to think for some few seconds that the hero is dead.

Silence.

Nothing for a long time.

Until now, I have no memory of these moments, except what I guess I reconstructed from what Eos told me later. Apparently, the last time she pulled me from the monkey’s bar, I bumped my head on one of the four iron posts that hold the thing up, and fell unconscious.

Three days later she woke up and rolled out of a motel room bed in Ottawa. Bobby lay asleep under half of a sheet, one arm slumped off the side of the bed, his knuckles buried in shag carpeting.

Chey showered as quietly as she could and then got dressed. Bobby didn’t stir. She went to the drapes across the window of their room and pulled them open a little. Across the street she saw a convenience store, a chemist’s, the parking lot for the local Canadian Tire. Everything had the same muted, grayish colors that blended together. Bilingual signs crowded the sidewalks. She was back in Ontario, alright.

It had been so many years. Her mother still lived in Kitchener. A couple hundred kilometers away, but in the same province at least. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in six months and she wondered if she ought to call her—but it was still too early.

Chey and Bobby had flown in the night before and taken the little room because they were too tired to find anything better. Then Bobby had wanted to fool around, and she’d been too tired to put him off.

No, that wasn’t quite true. As much as she wanted to pretend that she wasn’t attracted to Bobby, she couldn’t convince herself. He was a little daft looking and a little obnoxious, sure. But he got her. When she’d told him about sleep- driving to Chesterton he’d just nodded and held her hand. When she told him about how ashamed she’d been when Uncle Bannerman saw her tattoo he had showed her his own tattoo, a sloppy black Molson logo on his bicep that a high school friend had done with a hot sewing needle. And when she told him she was still afraid of dogs he hadn’t laughed.

Then there was the fact that he knew more about lycanthropes than she did. He could teach her things. That was his ultimate turn- on.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, his head still buried in a pillow. He brought up his dangling hand and ran it through the spikes of his hair. They were crusty with old mousse and he scratched at the scalp underneath.

“I’m too excited,” she confessed.

He turned his head enough to smile at her. “You’re doing a good thing,” he said. He pushed his butt up in the air, getting his knees up un¬derneath him, then sprang out of bed and whooped as he jumped into the shower. “Today’s going to be a good day.”

A car came for them promptly at nine, a white sedan with a government seal on the driver’s side door. They drove along the St. Lawrence River to spy headquarters, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building. The building was a three- sided monolith with big mirrored windows surrounded by a miniature park. It looked pretty impressive from the highway.

The next two weeks were much like that first one in many ways. Otis was waking me up every night walking on my hair. But despite these nightly interruptions, I still enjoyed from Otis very much, especially the video version of him that Eos had started editing with her voice dubbed in where he was meant to be speaking. It was exciting knowing that we had made something unique and entertaining and funny and that the world didn’t know about it yet but soon they would. It felt like knowing a top secret, sort of.

The editing happened mostly at nights and so during the mornings, Eos and I made films in different parts of the city. We went to the beach some few times, which is similar to the beaches in Tel Aviv—lots of trash laying around by people who can’t be bothered to clean up after they’ve been there. And lots of people subjecting themselves to the harmful rays of the sun—on purpose! Perhaps they never lost anyone to cancer before. Or perhaps it was some version of suicide. Whatever the reason, I can never understand the joy that comes by being on a beach for the purpose of sun. For playing volleyball or swimming or picnicking or especially matkot, of course, but not for the sun. If you’ve never played matkot, which is basically something like paddleball, or even tennis without the net, I can’t recommend it enough. The word comes from the Arabic madka, which means to knock, because the rubber ball makes a knocking sound on the wooden racquet when it’s hit. In my family, I was the matkot champion who easily beat my brothers and even my father, who used to be the champion until my arrival to the sport. I’ll tell you the secret to becoming a great matkot player: learn how to put the spin on the ball. It’s like in Ping-Pong where you have to use your wrist side-to-side or up-and-down at the very moment the paddle strikes the ball. This gives the ball some movement in the air and makes it harder for your opponent to knock it back to you.

Eos—the one from the pool at Park La Brea. And for the first time in as far back as she could remember, Amy smiled, glad for the unexpected company.

“What are you doing here?” the two women cawed, almost in unison.

Eos went first, explaining how she was attending the wedding of her friend Rhoda, down in the Palm Room. “I’m totally happy for her,” she said, “but I just had to escape for a while, you know what I’m saying?”

Amy nodded. Though she hadn’t been totally happy for anyone lately, she understood how those things sometimes played out.

“And anyway, this wedding cost me the guy of my dreams,” Eos continued. “If anyone gets pissed off that I’ve disappeared for 30 minutes, well fuck them.”

Amy admired the way Eos talked—her youthful confidence and bravado. She wanted to know more about how the wedding had ruined Eos’ relationship, but didn’t feel like scrounging for more than the girl was willing to part with. Though the circumstances that had brought the two women together might have appeared like one, Amy knew this wasn’t a daytime soap; there were boundaries that needed to be respected in real life, at least for the one doing the listening.

Life changed again on July 25, 2003. Chey was twenty-one years old. Though she’d done nothing in remembrance, nor did she even want to think about it, she was conscious of the fact that it was the ninth anniversary of her father’s death.

One reason people go to the same bar every night is because every night is exactly the same. That night started like any other. She was pulling Labatt Blues for the workingmen and Alley Kat microbrews for the more discriminating customers. She was laughing and generally having a good time, making jokes with the regulars, eating some fried fish one of them had brought her from the chip shop next door. She had just taken an order for a table full of mixed drinks when Bobby Fenech pushed through the door and the smoke in the air rolled under the lights. Well, it did that when anyone walked in, when the warm air in the bar surged out into the cool night. For whatever reason, she happened to be looking up at that exact moment and she saw him. The swirling smoke seemed to wrap around him like a cape.

He looked like the kind of person who would work on that effect. The kind of man who liked to make a dramatic entrance, whether or not he could back it up.

He wasn’t a big guy, really, but he sort of puffed himself out, the way a cat’s fur will stand on end to make it look bigger. He had on a heavy-duty leather jacket and boots with steel- reinforced laces, as if he’d just hiked down out of the hills. If he was all business on his feet, though, he was ready to party upstairs. His hair glowed with mousse and ended in sharp triangular points that stuck straight up. He was maybe thirty- five years old, though there was a weird boyish air around him. Maybe it was the shit- eating grin on his face. He came up to the bar and leaned up against it, his hands grasping the brass rail around the edge.

Chey smiled at him—he looked like he might be a big spender— and finished the order she’d been working on. Then she turned and gave him the nod.

He raised his voice over the general din of conversation and the Aerosmith song on the jukebox. “What do you have that’s Mexican and bottled?” he asked. “I can’t stand domestic beer. I prefer my piss- water imported.”

Her eyebrows drew together in consternation but his grin didn’t falter. The bouncer by the door, three hundred pounds of Eastern European muscle named Arkady, gave her a glance. But it was a questioning glance, not a warning glance. She shook her head and Arkady relaxed a fractional amount. She was pretty sure this newcomer was just trying to be funny.

“Corona good enough?” she asked, reaching for the bottle. He nodded and she tapped it down on the bar, flipped off the cap and shoved a lime wedge down the neck in one quick motion. “Three dollars,” she said, holding up three fingers in case he couldn’t hear her over the crowd noise.

He took out a hundred and draped it across the top of his bottle. “You see me running low, just give’r and don’t ask questions,” he smiled. “Whatever’s left when I leave you keep for yourself.”

Chey had been tending bar long enough at that point to know how to react. “That’s very generous, thank you,” she said. “I’ll be sure to take care of you tonight.” She grabbed the bill off the top of his bottle. “At least until you leave.”

At nineteen she found herself in Edmonton, Alberta, nearly a thousand kilometers from where her mother lived. She told herself she wanted to get as far away from the crazy old bat as possible. There had been some pretty epic fights between them just before she left—screaming fights. Worse, even. She had punched her mother in the nose, not all that hard. There hadn’t been any blood. But it was going to be a long time before she could go back there.

Edmonton was okay. It was huge, but it always felt half empty. There were big parks to roam around in and plenty of cheap places to live. She tried at first to live with a couple of girls her age in a nice place near Old Strathcona, which was safe and clean. After six months, though, she found she couldn’t live with other people. They wanted to sleep at night, while she got by with only a few hours during the day. After the forty or fifty thousandth time they knocked on her door at three a.m. and told her to turn her stereo off, she moved out.

She got a room of her own, then, above a car body repair shop. She had to listen to metal screaming and tearing all day long, but that wasn’t too bad. It only sounded a little like the way the car sounded when the wolf clawed it. Anyway, the rent was next to nothing.

She got a job as a bartender, which fit her sleep schedule better than being a secretary or working in a retail shop. She had worried at first that being around so much alcohol would be a problem, even though she didn’t drink much at all anymore. She’d stopped drinking herself to sleep back in high school, after she started waking up places she didn’t recognize, but toward the end of that part of her life she’d really started worrying she was an alcoholic. It turned out the alcohol wasn’t as big a temptation as she’d thought it was going to be, and the work was pretty easy and it paid well. She didn’t mind pouring shots for the Ukrainians in cowboy hats and the real cowboys in baseball caps who surged in and out of the place every night, as reliable and reassuring as the tide. She didn’t mind their filthy jokes, or the rude comments. She’d never really worried about things people said. It was what they did you had to watch out for.

The bar had a reputation as being a real tough joint, but for the three female bartenders there was no safer place in the world. They kept bouncers at the table next to the door all night, big guys who drank for free but never very much. If anything went wrong the bartenders would slip out back and share a smoke while the on- duty bouncer took care of it. When she started Chey hadn’t believed that one guy—no matter how big he might be—could keep a lid on so many rowdies. She quickly learned there was an art to it. Good bouncers didn’t wait for a fight to break out. They watched the crowd and they could see right away who was going to be trouble: the ones who laughed too loud or who didn’t laugh at all, the real nasty shit- kickers who started fights for entertainment, the skinny little ones who looked like they wanted to prove something. Just as trouble was about to begin the bouncer would jump in, grab the idiot’s arm, and haul him outside before he even knew what was happening. It was truly rare that a punch ever got thrown—things usually ended well before that point.

That was how you kept yourself from being victimized, Chey realized. It was how you kept from being prey. You found out where the would- be predators were and you dragged them out of their dens when they didn’t expect it. She made a mental note.

Not all of the men who came to the bar were after violence, of course. Occasionally somebody would grab her ass or make a stupid pass at her. Occasionally, if she was bored, or horny, or she wasn’t ready to go to sleep at closing time, she would go home with one of them. The bouncers wouldn’t let her leave with anybody who might hurt her, so she knew she would be safe. She had a couple of rules to make sure none of the men ever got a second date. Nobody ever came back to her place, and she always drove her own car—no matter what they said. Some of them told her they wanted to be her boyfriend. Some said they wanted to marry her. She never stuck around long enough for them to sober up and decide if they’d meant it or not.

It was a dry wedding, because it had to be. The bride and groom, who combined had a total of 817 days of sobriety, had insisted on it. Shelly and Mark probably didn’t mean to be obnoxious, but they both emitted a mildly irritating 12-step smugness as involuntarily as static electricity conveyed through a handshake.

Dry wedding.

It seemed to Amy like a grossly unromantic description for the start of a marriage. It was as if the marriage were a desiccated wheel of tumbleweed trundling across the desert, or a puckered old lady who could no longer produce skin emollients. Used up. These were two broken, damaged people who couldn’t trust themselves around a bottle of tequila. To Amy, it felt more like the end of things than the beginning.

Yet there she and Greg were, at this dry wedding in the midst of their own dry marriage. They were being forced to feign happiness even as unrelieved sobriety grated against them like friction from uncomfortable shoes.

When she was sixteen years old Chey went down to Colorado for the summer. Uncle Bannerman met her at the airport in Denver in his uniform. As far as she knew, he always wore it. He was in the American army somehow, but she didn’t really understand when he tried to explain his exact job. He took her up into the mountains, where he’d already set up a camp with two small tents and a fire ring.

“We’re going to live up here for two months,” he said. “No telephones, no Internet, no friends from school.” He took off his uniform jacket and tie and put them in a plastic bag in the back of his car. Chey was confused and kind of frightened—she’d had no idea this was coming. “Your mother tells me she found pot in your school bag,” he said. “That won’t happen again. Correct?”

“I guess,” she said. She hadn’t liked pot anyway. It made her feel weird and fuzzy and that made her paranoid—she kept looking at all the shadows in the room and they kept changing like they were moving. Circling her. “Yeah, whatever.”

“When you speak to me you will call me sir,” he told her. He wasn’t joking around. “She tells me you’re running with a bad crowd. Older girls who already have bad habits.”

She squirmed and kicked at the dirt before answering. “Maybe. But they know how to fight,” she said, figuring that if anybody would understand it would be him. “I thought they could teach me how, too. I mean, sir.”

“Fighting is a bad habit,” he told her, which didn’t make a lot of sense since he was in the army. His eyes softened a little, though. “Cheyenne,” he said to her, “there is a difference between getting in fights and learning how to defend yourself.”

She could only look at him. He got it—he understood what she’d wanted to learn. What she’d been trying to figure out by spending so much time with the tough girls. She was amazed. She hadn’t really thought it through that carefully herself.

For a couple of weeks Chey’s mom walked around the house like a ghost. She would walk into a room and look around as if she didn’t recognize it. She didn’t talk much and when she did it was just to say she was alright, she was fine, she was just tired. She worked pretty hard at boxing up all of Chey’s father’s stuff. Most of it went to the local church, even though the Clark family had never been particularly religious. Other things were just thrown away. Everything he’d ever owned had to be seen to.The car that the wolf had attacked was still out there, still out west sitting in a police station parking lot. Chey’s mom asked them to donate it to a good charity, but there were insurance problems with that, so every day for a week she had to make phone calls and send letters and emails until eventually somebody agreed to take responsibility for the car. Her dad’s will was pretty simple; everything went to her mom, but it turned out that even a really simple will took a lot of work to execute. A lawyer came to the house a couple of times. He brought Chey a box of chocolates, which was weird, but she thanked him po¬litely and even ate a few while he watched and smiled.

Eventually Chey’s mom went back to work. She was a paralegal at a firm of business lawyers. She said she desperately didn’t want to go back, that she wanted to stay home with Chey and help her, but Chey said she would be okay on her own. It was another lie, and her mom even said she knew it was a lie, but when Chey didn’t say anything more, her mom said it was alright, that she would go to work, that they would find a way to make things okay together. The first day back she called Chey at least a dozen times just to see how she was doing. That night she came home and fell asleep on the couch and Chey could smell alcohol on her. But that didn’t turn out to be a long- term thing. After a couple days back on her job Chey’s mom wasn’t wandering around the house anymore. She looked more like her old self.

It took Chey a while longer to figure things out.

The neighbor’s dog was a little schnauzer with whiskers hanging down from its face. It didn’t look anything like a wolf, but still, every time it barked, she would jump. Her heart would race and she would hug herself, pull herself into a ball. When they walked around town, when her mom would take her to do the shopping and she saw a dog, she would cross the street.

She didn’t sleep much. Maybe a few hours every night. Her grades started dropping at school because she kept falling asleep during algebra. She tried all kinds of tricks to stay awake. She jammed pencil points into her thighs, bit her tongue, anything, but it never seemed to work.

The therapist gave her tranquilizers so she could sleep and Prozac so she wouldn’t just sleep all day. The combination made Chey feel like live eels were swimming around and around inside her skull, so after a while she only pretended to take the pills and hid them in the back of her desk drawer.

The therapist was supposed to be somebody she could talk to, but she had nothing to say. She would go and sit in his office and not say anything, thinking she could just wait him out. For a couple of sessions that was exactly what happened—he just waited until her time was up, then sent her home. After a while, though, he started asking her questions. Weird questions that made her feel angry or upset and she didn’t know why.

She drove until she found people. Good, kind people who took her in and let her tell the story as best she could, and who tried to understand what had happened to her and help her in any way they could. But not the people she’d imagined, the people who could make everything okay. Over time she began to realize those people did not, and could not, exist.

After the police were through with her, they put her on the phone with her mom, who told her not to worry. That everything was going to be okay. On the phone it sounded like her mom was a long, long way away.

Chey got to fly home in first class. She slept through the flight and the stewardesses had been advised ahead of time not to wake her until they had to, and then someone came and led her through security to her mom, who just stood there watching her for a while, studying her. Maybe looking for signs of injury. Maybe just watching to see if her husband would come off the plane as well, even though everyone knew he wouldn’t. There wasn’t even a coffin to ship back, because the body still hadn’t been recovered. Eventually her mom hugged her, and rubbed her back, but she didn’t say anything. She just led Chey to the car, and drove in very uncomfortable silence back to their house.

Chey went home, except home wasn’t there anymore. Not home like she remembered it.

“I was wondering if you were wondering what the deal was about that,” she said. “Well,” she said, “the truth is, the whole Ask Otis idea only hit me when I was musing on how to locate this guy I met.”

“Saul?”

“No. I don’t know his name.”

“What?” I said. “So you’re not working for mentalfloss?” I was suddenly filled with confusion and maybe even a small feeling like I was being tricked.

“No, no, I’m totally working for them. And I’m totally psyched about Ask Otis. I think it’s gonna be a huge viral hit and help me land a real job after. But basically the idea for the feature grew out of my desire to locate this guy, who I only met briefly once, a few weeks ago.”

Her dad—her dad was dead. Dead. He was—he was dead.

It was like the moment when the airplane lands, and the pressure in your ears is intense and you can’t hear anything. And then your ears pop and it all comes rushing back. Time started moving again, and everything was real.

Chey screamed and screamed. She thrust her hands into her eyes so she wouldn’t see, pressed her face against her shoulder.

Screamed some more.

It didn’t change anything. It didn’t help. Breath whistled in and out of her lungs, but she was just sitting there. She was just sitting there doing nothing.

She was still about to die. The wolf was still going to tear her apart and—and—

She was still screaming as she unfastened her seat belt, but at least she was moving. Achieving something. She was going to open her door, very slowly, and get out. And then she was going to run as fast as she could.

She would run until she found someone else, somebody who could help her. Somebody who could make it all okay. Somehow. She didn’t have to worry about the details, about how anything could ever be okay again, because when she found this person, this hypothetical Good Samaritan, they would have the answers. All she had to do was get out and run.

Except that wasn’t going to happen, was it? She could run as fast as her body was capable of and it wouldn’t be enough. She knew it wouldn’t. The wolf wouldn’t just let her get away. The wolf would outrun her. It would catch her, and finish her off.

That was what the wolf wanted. And the wolf had all the power. It had those teeth, and it had claws, and it had millions upon millions of years of evolution on its side. It would be very, very good at chasing down little girls in the dark and tearing them to pieces. That was one reason why people had invented fire, and guns, and cities—as a way of protecting themselves from—from monsters that ran in the darkness.

She had none of those things at her command. If she played this game the way the wolf played it, she was going to die.