In the bedroom, Letha lay with him and draped an arm and a leg over his body. Still superstitiously keeping herself between this body and the world.
He prodded at the fissure in his mouth again.
Letha winced. “Stop that. I can see you doing that.”
Peter looked at her. This funny little person who had put all the love inside her between him and a kicking that might have had who knew what end. One of Nicolae’s main criteria in determining a woman’s quality was whether or not she would help with moving the furniture. Not some womanly business like picking up the odd lamp or box of dishware, but really get in there with the men and put some teeth in it. What do you say to that, Nic?
But the fact remained that Peter still had to tell her what he’d been avoiding in the first place. He had to tell her what was going to happen tomorrow night and she was not going to like it. Especially now. She was not going to like hearing it any more than he was going to like saying it. But it did not change the fact that he had to tell her, and waiting would only make it worse. He shut his eyes and smelled her hair. In a minute.
There was a knock on the door. Lynda entered with Olivia. They had agreed it might not be safe for Peter to stay here. The full moon does bring it out in people, observed Olivia. Peter nodded, in no mood to challenge this unlikely turn of events. He rose and packed an overnight bag for Godfrey House.
* * *
Olivia set Peter up in a spare bedroom. In the corner there was an old mirror mounted on wooden trunnions and angled slightly up, and from where Peter stood it caught the reflection of the wall portrait of an old man with a hawk face and previously commented-on green eyes and the ghost of a smile like he’d just stuck the knife in without your even noticing.
Olivia put her hand on Letha’s shoulder. “I took the liberty of calling your father.”
She turned to Peter, looking at his mangled face. He could not read her expression behind the sunglasses. She put her fingers to his face but he didn’t flinch. The soft knowing of her touch did not hurt him.
She left to give them a few minutes.
“Boys…” she said under her breath. “Boys…”
Peter looked into the mirror. His Swadisthana may have given him a heightened sensitivity to the frequency, but he had always been just as happy that this had never migrated up into the Third Eye. The Third Eye had struck him as depressingly literal. But tomorrow night would come the turn, the turn where he would have to do what had become inescapable since Roman got himself arrested. What the fact was, was inescapable since the night they found Brooke Bluebell. He would have to scent the
vargulf
and hunt him down and tear his throat out. It made him weak and he wanted just to lie down, but he was supported by the ongoing pain of the beating. Pain providing nothing if not a sense of priority. He did wish now for just enough of the Third Eye to provide him a view in the glass of how the world would look the morning after next, but all it contained was his own ugly beaten face. In the mirror, hands came around his midsection and clasped.
“Let’s go see him,” said Letha.
They went up to the attic. Shelley was downstairs; when not sleeping she held her brother’s privacy as inviolate. He lay under the window. Pairs of owl eyes glimmering in the trees creating a flickering vigil. There was more natural black on Roman’s scalp, and his cheeks were patchy with stubble. Letha knelt.
“I didn’t even know he could grow facial hair,” she said. She looked at his face. In the moonlight she could see the delicate veins in his eyes.
“If you were going to run away, would you tell me?” she said.
“I’m not going to run away,” said Peter.
“I’ll go with you if you run,” she said.
He looked out at the round moon.
“I’m not fast enough to outrun this,” he said.
She looked at the curl of Roman’s ear, like a?, and knew there was more to come and she would hate it just as much as she hated that her best friend was in a coma and seeing the beating of the first boy she had loved with all her body. She knew that whatever he was about to say was going to be like that, so she focused on the faintly luminous down of hair in Roman’s ear and she waited for it.
“I need you to promise me something,” said Peter. “Tomorrow night I need you to promise me you’ll be home at sundown and no matter what that someone else is with you until the sun comes up. The whole night.”
“What are you going to do?” she said pointlessly. She knew exactly what he was going to say and it wasn’t going to improve anything hearing him say it, which made it no less necessary to hear.
“I’m going to kill it,” he said.
She could just barely hear Roman’s breath issuing from his nose.
“You know you’re just a person, right?” she said. “That’s what we all are. We’re all just people.”
“An hour before sundown,” said Peter. “Under no circumstances leave the house. Under no circumstances let anyone in.”
“And then what? The next time I see you you’re in jail? At your funeral? Do I even see you again after that?”
Peter didn’t have an answer and had taken too many hits to the head to make one up fast enough.
“I think you’re full of shit,” she said. “I think you’re both fucking full of shit. You think I’m the one who needs protecting? Well, look at you. Look at both of you. What do you need to happen to understand that this isn’t some kind of game? This is life.”
Peter still did not answer; it was not because he didn’t have one but because he was too tired to hear it himself. That what had happened the last two turns was going to happen again tomorrow night, and the whole town knew it. Unless he killed it. That this thing knew who he was and there was nothing he could do now to make himself not part of this. Unless he killed it. That he had a fear now even deeper than the cage and it was for what had happened to those other girls to happen to her, for her to be alive and watching while teeth and claws ripped open sacks of meat and jelly and shit and the life inside her. Unless he killed it. That life
is
a game, with the clearest stakes possible, and that losing it blows beyond all comprehension. He was not a killer, he did not want to kill anything, fuck all this killing.
He looked for something breakable but not valuable, punctuation, not passion. He selected a desk lamp and hurled it to the floor. Letha startled at the violence, which had been its intended effect, and he hated its efficacy.
“Either do exactly what I say or you will never see me again, you stupid little bitch,” he said.
There was a wash of headlights outside; her father was here. Letha lifted Roman’s hand and brushed the tears from her cheeks. She rose and smoothed out her shirt and looked at Peter. Her crying Godfrey eyes were red and green, like the worst Christmas in the world.
After she was gone, Peter sat on Roman’s bed. He put a hand on Roman’s shin and gave it a shake.
“Nobody here but us chickens,” he said.
There was a creak and he looked up to find Shelley hovering in the doorway, reluctant to intrude. She looked at the broken lamp but would not have needed the evidence to know the air of people hurting. Peter said nothing. He bent forward and removed one of his sneakers, and then its mate. He tossed one sneaker and then the other into the air and she watched as he, with an elegiac grace, began to juggle in the dark room.
* * *
The following morning, Peter was prodded awake by his mother. His cheek was a welt of purple and there was a black crust on his lip that had leaked in the night and fixed to the pillow. He wanted to feel better now that he had gotten a night’s sleep and his mother was here, but what he felt hadn’t changed. Yesterday had still happened and so would tonight, and nothing in between changed that giant black hole of suck.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“How do I look?” he said.
She spit on her shirtsleeve and dabbed at the side of his lip.
“Breakfast,” she said.
Olivia had given Lynda the run of the kitchen and this was reflected in the volume of the offering. But it was times like these that require our greatest strength and it had just killed Lynda the night before that she couldn’t feed her baby. Shelley attempted to eat with an exaggerated delicacy to compensate for the increased toll on her nerves, but every so often her salad tong clattered into the punch bowl of Cream of Wheat before her. When their eyes met Peter pulled one earlobe down and cocked the opposite eyebrow and this elicited a faint smile, but when he attempted to return it he only grimaced at the affront to his bruise. Olivia, meanwhile, hid behind smiling eyes and blithe gossip about the recent celebrity scandal as though just as pleased for this amusing disruption of routine. Peter did not know what to make of the
upir
woman’s sudden hospitality, and didn’t care. His mind was busy with the way Letha had flinched when he threw the lamp, and the lost look in Roman’s eyes when Peter turned his back on him, and the moon that was now on the other side of the earth but couldn’t have exerted greater pull over his thoughts.
After breakfast Olivia rose to take Shelley to school. Lynda took the other woman by the hand. “Your kitchen is really a dream,” she said.
Olivia was demure. “One does one’s best.”
When Peter and Lynda were alone, Lynda rummaged for the liquor cabinet. She removed a bottle of whiskey and doctored their coffee.
“It’s less than a day’s drive to Toma and Crystal’s farm,” she said. “We can be there before you turn.”
There was a hairline crack in his mug and he traced it with his fingernail.
“What if she’s next?” he said.
They looked at each other and there was nothing more to say.
Peter sipped from the mug. When he swallowed, his throat was the eye of a needle. Lynda got up and came over to him and he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into the folds of her belly and he wept and wept.
“Fuck all this killing,” he said.
Someone came into the dining room and Lynda looked over. It was Roman. He did not display surprise at walking in on the Rumanceks in his dining room as much as the faint befuddlement of the overslept.
“What time is it?” he said.
PART III
THE FOREVER HOWL
The Fence
Peter and Roman sat on the hood of Roman’s car and the sun was pink through the trees and the shadow of the electrical substation came at them like a slow attack of elbows.
“Will I be able to keep up?” said Roman.
“No,” said Peter.
Roman threw his cigarette butt to their growing pile and lit another.
“I’m sorry I was a pain in your balls,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Peter.
Roman looked at the crisscrossing tracks at the rail yard and straightened his arm, considering the intersection of veins at his elbow. Means of transporting iron.
“Do you love her?” said Roman.
Peter hunched forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Yeah,” he said. “Or whatever.”
“Shee-it,” said Roman.
“Shee-it,” said Peter.
They were quiet. Peter reached into his pocket and pulled out the fragment of
Goblin Market
and handed it to Roman.
“What is this?” said Roman.
“I found it here last time,” said Peter.
“What do you think it means?” said Roman.
Peter didn’t answer. He was through trying to solve a wolf problem with people skills.
“Why are you giving me this?” said Roman.
Peter didn’t say it. But if tonight went all to shit it would be on Roman to stay on the trail. God help us. He changed the subject.
“Do you remember anything from when you were out?” said Peter.
“No,” said Roman. “Well, a feeling. I have a feeling. It’s sort of like déjà vu but not. Like … something that’s gonna happen but I forget what it is. I guess I’ll know it when I see it.”
He looked at the Dragon and knew now what if only he had known sooner. That it stood for something that was more powerful and more important than anything with the name Godfrey on it, and making fun of it had been a boner move.
They were quiet.
“Shee-it,” said Peter.
“Shee-it,” said Roman.
And then Peter felt it. Heard, that is. It starts when you hear it, in the rocks and trees and sky. Calling out your secret name. He slid off the roof of the car and undressed. He pulled his ponytail free and got on all fours. When the wise wolf stopped shaking and the red mist settled, it looked at Roman. It had the appearance of being stouter than at the previous moon; its winter coat was coming in.
“Peter?” said Roman.
The wolf looked at him but not in recognition, and then it looked away. It walked to the entrance of the mill with its head lowered and scratched at the door for entry. Roman went and pushed it open and stood back as the wolf trotted inside, nose to the ground. Roman waited outside; he accepted finally that the better part of valor was knowing when you were getting in the way. After a minute or two the wolf returned and nosed its way out and turned toward the rail yard.
“Is there a scent?” said Roman.
The wolf lifted its nose into the air.
“Do you have him?” said Roman.
The wolf shot through the rail yard for the trees. It was immediately apparent nothing on two legs could keep pace. Roman watched the wolf race over the muddy outskirts of the yard and leap over the fence. The hairs on Roman’s arms prickled as he watched the wolf leap: clearing the razor wire with a brute and unsurpassable grace, its coat rippled like a breeze over a wheat field and if its paws never touched ground again Roman would have been just as happy, he would have been just as happy to watch his friend fly forever.
Then, faster than Roman could keep track, things went all to shit. A pained yelp issued from the wolf and it went all cockeyed in the air, body tumbling over legs and skidding into the brush. With whimpering pants it rose, stumbling, and attempted to push forward into the woods, but its shaking legs sent it into a drunken carom, walking into the trunk of a birch.