Chapter Text
The gate and walls of the garden in Attolia's house were wired with about ten kilograms of silver.
The idea that werewolves lost their minds when they transformed was untrue. Attolia had never attempted to break out of the garden. Neither, to her knowledge, had her father. The reason for its existence was not for the safety of the others in the house or town, but for their own comfort. The silver didn’t hurt you unless you went very near, but its presence was powerfully tangible and demarcated a strict dimensional barrier: the private, and the public. The wolf was strictly in the realm of the private. The silver reminded you of that, when your mind went animal-numb and the world became a flat rich gold-and-blue landscape defined more by its scent than by its look. On the rare occasion someone walked by the premises, it kept you from perking up and trotting near the gate, keening with curiosity and a desire for companionship. It kept you from forgetting that you needed to be discreet, from trying to get out when you got too bored.
Irene Attolia spent around twenty four days’ worth of hours a year in that garden, and some of those days she considered the integrity of its walls to be equivalent to that of her sanity. Sometimes near the end of the transformation, you — an animal that for the other days of the month was not accustomed to captivity — sometimes got tired and stressed enough to forget why you couldn’t just unlock the gate and leave.
:::::
Attolia knew there were others like her. She wasn’t interested in them. The only other one she’d ever known was her father, who hadn’t known any werewolves outside the family, either. Her grandmother had. She’d left her home country pregnant and gotten on a boat across the Atlantic, and Attolia had never inquired into her story at all. The vastness of her father Attolis's wealth had always stood between them, a barrier that made Imelda’s home country and family an impolite topic of conversation. It did not have to be that way, Attolia knew, but Imelda had never acted like her childhood was anything other than an embarrassing footnote in the prologue of their family’s success.
After her first transformation at thirteen, she got her first glimpse of why her grandmother had thought this way. After graduating college and business school with the condition, she understood her grandmother completely. Being a werewolf was at best an inconvenience, at worst a misery. She had no desire to build a community out of it.
:::::
Transformation stripped you bare both psychologically and physically — you would lie there for a few hours, aching until the pain of your muscles being ripped apart to form new ones dissipated. And then you had to get up and deal with being a self that was not your old self, one that couldn’t understand the complexities of your decisions and your life and spent hours baying that it wasn’t fair, that it wanted to run, that it didn’t understand why you were living the life you were, that it wanted something quite different — except this wasn’t a dialogue, this was you, questioning the validity of your own life. And when you woke up, reborn your bipedal homonid self, you had to shakily get yourself into a shower and endure the incredible psychological numbness that lingered for another few days.
It hadn’t been so bad when she was a child. She remembered the thing she’d changed into — she’d looked at herself in a mirror, several times. Her new body was a small gangly dirty-gray thing with a lolling tongue and curious eyes — yellow, unlike her own. It looked like a dog, almost. She thought she could grow to like it.
But then she’d hit adolescence, and a widening understanding of herself — and so had the wolf. And their understandings had not matched up, at all. The trouble had begun there.
:::::
Attolia inherited her father’s company when she was twenty nine. He died in his mid-fifties, only two years younger than his mother when she’d passed. The autopsy turned up nothing suspicious, but his death was a little eerie nonetheless — he’d been in decent physical condition and had not been ill. He’d had a weak heart, but not weak enough that it would simply fail on him one night. Attolia put it down to being a werewolf. She’d die roughly the same age, she assumed, and went on with her life.
That year was a trial. Attolia was perfectly aware the board had elected her only because they thought her pliant. She spent the month following her father's death showing them, diplomatically but unbendingly, that she was not pliant for them.
She could have dealt with the board if the most troublesome member hadn't also been her CFO. Attolia tried not to hold any personal feelings towards any of her work colleagues, but Erondites was testing that principle harshly. His father been a major shareholder since hers had founded the company, and if she got rid of him directly, he would still be on the board. There, he could dislodge her tenuous control entirely. The only way to get rid of him, she knew, was to expose his negligence without tarnishing herself or the company. That would take a few years. Sometimes the thought of it made it hard to get out of bed. Erondites had also planted his son as an assistant in her father's office, and she had to smile and greet him every day. Privately, she thought him a dolt. He tended to drop things a lot and had a rather gooey smile. Getting him reassigned somewhere was on her to-do list as well.
A few months into her job, when things were finally getting a little easier, Attolia took another blow. The accounting firm in the building next to hers went underwater, and when they all moved out, so did the coffeeshop on their first floor. The barista there had been making Attolia’s quadruple espresso on ice perfectly for three years, and she hated the second-nearest coffeeshop. This was an inconvenience as bad as having Dite in her office all the time. At first she thought this as a joke to herself, but the first time she tried office coffee, she changed her mind.
She’d been making do for about two months with the gas stop Starbucks on her way to work when a little hipster cafe opened up in the building down the street. They had a good spot in the corner, and had done a surprisingly adequate job with the decoration. It was obnoxiously filled with twenty-somethings in scarves, attractive college students in glasses, people with dyed hair. That sort of thing. When Attolia walked past it, she didn’t recognize any of the music. She decided, on her forty-sixth cup of gas stop Starbucks that was definitely not on par with the dead accounting firm’s, that she’d give The Seperchia a shot.
It was seven in the morning and there were only three people inside — two young people slouched over a table, practically inhaling their beverages, and the barista. When he walked past the baked goods display to reach for something on the top shelf (he was not tall, and stood on his tiptoes) Attolia saw that she was the only person in the establishment not wearing jeans. She nearly walked out there and then, but she certainly wasn’t going to the other coffeeshop, so she forced herself to approach the counter.
“Be with you in just a second,” the barista reassured her, his back still turned. Almost the same time he spoke his scent reached her, and she was glad he couldn’t see her eyes widen. He smelled good. Some people did, more than others. It was normal. She’d surrounded herself with people who did, perhaps subconsciously. The man smelled like coffee grounds, fertile soil, pine trees — not of them, like them. He smelled like one thing that was reminiscent of all of these at once. Plus actual coffee, steamed milk, cinnamon —
Wow.
She shook her head once. The barista was turning around. “Hey, can I take your order?” he said. “Anything on the menu, custom drinks if you’re charming enough.”
“Could I have a quadruple espresso on ice, please,” she said.
“Careful, that’s pushing the healthy intake limit for an adult,” he replied, grinning. Attolia was having none of it (first of all, that wasn't true), and gave him an unamused look. He took her card, swiped it. The price was unusually cheap. Two dollars? In this neighborhood? She felt her eyebrows rise, but didn’t comment. She declined getting a receipt, and he and went to prepare her drink. Attolia took a seat, deciding she was too decaffeinated to care about the price.
It was ready in an impressively short time. The barista poked a wine-red straw through the cup and passed it to her.
She took it, and frowned. “This isn’t what I ordered.”
He craned her head, giving it an owlish look. “I could’ve sworn it was.”
“I ordered a quad shot of espresso.”
“Ma’am, I apologize,” he said gravely. Attolia would almost have bought it — what kind of employee for a newly established business would deliberately give a customer a wrong order? — but there was an impish smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I can give you a refund — I must have gotten confused, it’s unconscionable.”
Attolia felt her mouth tighten. She was being mocked. “That will be unnecessary,” she said curtly. “This’ll do.”
She walked away before the barista could start apologizing again. The stuff in the cup she was holding was dark brown, too milky to be espresso. She noted that the straw color had been well chosen — it was the same color as their logo, a stylized S that was also a river, and went with any shade of brown a coffee could be. The observation made her angrier. She would have thrown it away, but she’d either have to drive somewhere to get another cup or push through five hours of work without any coffee at all, which was frankly too horrible a thought to contemplate it. She walked into work and grimly took a sip in the elevator. For two dollars and bad service, it was going to be too sweet, or weird, or watery, or just bad —
Wait. Huh.
It was strong, which got rid of her foremost objection. But it wasn’t overwhelming, like her usual drink was, because it was tempered by — milk, yes, and it had to be watered down just a little. It wasn’t bitter at all. The Seperchia must be using good beans, and the taste was also tempered by some kind of sweetener, by itself very faint, but neutralizing — like honey, but also almost… was that oranges?
She was so absorbed in figuring out what the barista had put in her drink that the sound of her elevator door opening at her floor came as a surprise.
Attolia gave her cup another appraising look as she got off, calculating the caffeine per volume ratio she’d tasted and multiplying it by the amount of liquid left in the cup. It came down to roughly four shots, so she was good for the day.
:::::
“I’ll have what you gave me last time, please,” she said, trying not to sound grouchy. She didn’t want to admit it had been good, or that the man had done right by giving her an order she hadn’t asked for.
He beamed at her.
It was the wrong drink. It was almost completely black; too dark to be the drink she’d asked for, too voluminous to be espresso shots.
Attolia felt her expression go thunderous, but she smoothed it over — not out of politeness, but because she could see the barista grinning at her obvious displeasure, and she didn’t want to egg him on to being even more infuriating. She nodded brusquely at him, taking note of the name on his tag (E. Dysmas) in case she decided to complain to the manager afterwards, and left.
She waited until she was in the elevator to try the drink again. It had some kind of syrup in it, but only a little — it tasted inherently different enough from the last that it had to be a different blend of beans, smokier and darker. The syrup (some kind of blackberry?) went extraordinarily well with it. Like two bells ringing the same note, an octave apart.
Attolia gave the coffee a scorching glare, but it didn’t stop being delicious when she took another sip, involuntarily, as she stepped off the elevator.
:::::
Love the sin, hate the sinner — was that how the proverb went? Attolia decided, on the fourth incorrect cup of coffee she was handed, that she definitely loved the sin. Was probably addicted to the sin. Had found that tasting a variation of the sin every morning had become the best part of her day — not that it was hard, what with the rest of her day looking like roadkill. Eugenides, on the other hand, she absolutely loathed.
Attolia hadn’t even wanted to know his first name. The crushing contempt she felt for him demanded that she know as little about him as possible, so he could continue to mean nothing to her. That she was forced to tolerate his disrespect because of the quality of the coffee he handed her every day was one of the greatest indignities of her life. Most definitely ranked within the top ten, if not in the top five. But The Seperchia’s patrons seemed to know the staff fairly well, and it wasn’t long before she overheard one of those young people greet him by name.
Eugenides — Greek, then, like her grandmother. Funny, if she’d thought about it — which she hadn’t — she’d have pegged him as Middle Eastern, maybe Turkish. But then again, she didn’t have much an eye for this sort of thing.
That Friday, the board of directors approved of a set of budget changes that Attolia had quietly fought tooth and nail to keep from happening. As part of the change, AttolCorp pulled out from investing in a housing initiative that had been a personal favorite of hers. She kept her mouth shut as the proposal passed, because at that point it was a done thing and speaking up against it would only hurt her position. It was unexpectedly difficult. She spent the rest of her weekend furiously trying to figure out how to keep the next set of budget cuts from happening. Erondites's sinecures were not going to get more money. She was going to make sure of it.
Attolia was practically dead on Monday morning. She drove very carefully to work, and walked to The Seperchia in a sort of dreamlike haze. Eugenides Dysmas, who was leaning over the counter and chatting with a patron, came back to the counter. "May I take your order?"
She was so tired. Instead of grimly repeating "A quadruple espresso on ice, please", she just gave him an exhausted look. The words just spilled out of her. "Just do what you always do and... give me the drink. Five shots, if you would."
The man's eyes widened a little bit, and the mischievous glee on his face faded. “All right,” he said, unusually complacent. He took a few minutes longer than normal and handed her a drink that outdid all the others — it was a macchiato with strong cherry undertones, the milk was a little sweet and honeyed. It was probably a sixth of her daily caloric requirement.
It got her through the day.
The next day she came in earlier than normal, just a few minutes after The Seperchia opened. She was the only customer. Eugenides turned around and saw it was her. “Oh,” he said. To her astonishment, he looked almost penitent. Almost. It was a stretch, because he didn’t have the face right for penitence. It tried to grab onto the concept, trying out the furrowed brows and the press of a regretful mouth, and succeeded in conveying only the ghost of an apology. “Listen. I’m sorry about the drinks. You came back, so I figured it couldn’t have really annoyed you. But if you really want a quad shot, I can start doing that.”
It pained her to say it, but one of the first things her father had taught her was not to mince words. Also, to give people their due. “No. What you’re doing is fine. Just don’t get sweeter than the last one.”
“Got it,” he said, and then gave her a radiant smile. She was taken aback by it.
He came out to bring her the drink, and sat with her, since the cafe was empty. She sat with him, feeling — incredibly awkward, all of a sudden.
The drink had the same orangey undertaste as the first one he'd given her. "What is it?" she said, breaking the silence.
"Yuzu," he said. "It's a kind of East Asian citron whose rind is used to make marmalade or tea. Do you like it?"
"Yes," she said, without the slightest rancor, and drank.
:::::
The full moon of the month came next week, smack in the middle of the week. Attolia knew she would turn Wednesday evening and be released the dawn of Friday. She hated it — hated how she had to miss a day of work, hated that she would spend Friday dazed and half-competent. She locked herself into the garden and spent the first night stalking around ferociously, despite the terrible ache in her bones. Her wolf mind only half-understood the complexities of her troubles at work, but fully grasped the anxiety of it. Oh no, oh no, Attolia said to herself, distressed and pacing and hating herself for not being able to think.
The sun rose and fell and she napped fitfully. She tried to sleep through as much as this as she could, but inevitably she woke up in the late evening, ready to run and knowing she could not. She trotted around the perimeter of the garden, sniffing at the grass and the ants. She gradually grew hungry and had been lying down for a while, looking forward to the morning, when she heard a yelp.
Attolia raised her head. The noise had come from the gate. When she went towards it, she saw a curious muzzle poking in through the ivy, carefully not touching any of the silver that wove through it as well.
She sat up and stared, astonished.
Attolia could smell the other wolf — and it was a wolf, there was no doubt about that — through the gate. It was waiting for her. She could hear the whupwhup of his tail, beating enthusiastically at the air. It wanted to play.
How the hell did an actual wolf come to be around here? Granted, her residence was vaguely isolated, but only place she could think of where an actual wolf could have come from was a hilly area half a mile away. It was too smalle and sparsely forested to sustain any wolf population, and too close to the suburbs for people to tolerate even a single one. She growled at the gate, unable think of a better way to dissuade him. Go away, she tried to say with the noise, as best as she could. I am not your friend.
The wolf outside made a little yip, surprisingly eloquent: you could be.
She growled again. Leave. Dimly, she realized there was something here to be registered, questioned — there was something weird here. But her animal brain fumbled for the strangeness and lost it. She let it drift away, because the wolf was trying again, pawing at the latch. But it had to be opened from her end. She trotted towards the gate, intending to definitively warn it off.
The wolf on the other side rumbled when she came near, a doglike hum of pleasure that came deep from its thorax. It — or he, she realized, this was definitely a male wolf — thought she was going to come out. Yes! he said, delighted, and somehow with it there was a cascade of sensations hitting her — running through a meadow, launching herself through it like it was endless. This was what he wanted to do. He was inviting her. We run together.
His enthusiasm was like a drug. Attolia felt her tail rise with interest. She liked his scent, too, deep and earthy and real.
When no one was around and there was nothing to do, it was relatively easy to keep your head. You just curled up under the tree or sniffed at the grass and waited for it to be over, because you knew it would be over, and you could go back to wearing clothes and using cutlery and taking baths and having some kind of life.
The animal on the other side of the gate was the most potent distraction from this knowledge Attolia had ever encountered.
She wanted it. She couldn’t remember wanting anything else as bad. Animal want was stronger than human want, in general, uncomplicated by caveats or plans or context. You could only hold one thing strongly in your mind, and although you could lead that one thing along a chain of reasoning until it became a coherent idea, that wasn’t happening to Attolia. The one thing was: I want to follow.
The latch was free of silver, although the metal all around it was surrounded. This was in the case of a fire. She only had a moment of hesitation before nosing it open — this isn’t allowed, is it? — before it swung open and she forgot. Why it wasn’t.
Outside was the smell of grass and wood and stone and water and the flatness of the world on which one could run forever, and the shelter of the trees, and the brightness of the moon above her, suddenly unfiltered by silver. It dazed her.
The wolf in front of her was smaller than her, and darker — his coat looked an almost bluish black, although it was possible he was really a dark red or brown. He looked sleek and well-kempt. Looking at him made her feel suddenly heartbroken, envious, and the emotion temporarily interrupted the huge happiness. He saw it. Trotted forward and nosed at her curiously, wondering why she was sad.
She didn’t know. He suggested, enthusiastically, that they leave now, because the moon was bright and the plains were broad and the trees were waiting for them. She decided that she couldn’t agree more. So they went bounding off, heading for the hills behind her house. It was hardly a forest, but there would be no one there at this time. There was a hiking trail, but it only went around and not through. They ran straight into the center, leaping across obstacles that a human body would have needed to pick through carefully, or gone around. Attolia was slower, but her companion was encouraging, pointing out footholds, paths, or gaps in the shrubbery it would have taken her longer to notice. And soon they were in a clearing that smelled like no human had ever been there at all.
It was like being in a different world. She circled it, smelling everything. Undersides of rocks. Bases of trees. Leaves, grass. Everything here smelled of life — not just the insects and the occasional lizard in her yard. She didn’t know the names of the new things, but she knew what they were now she had smelled them, and that was more important than the names.
The other wolf was sprawled out on the grass, panting from the run. His tongue lolled out and he was clearly content where he was, but he made not a single noise of protest as Attolia, tired herself but too exhilarated to not move, started running again.
This time she led. It felt right, her companion at her shoulder, keeping pace exactly but not moving ahead. The loped around the hills for a while, weaving across the hiking trail several times but encountering no one. They caught the fresh scent of a rabbit once, and veered from their path without a pause to communicate — there was a sense, ghostly and satisfying, of an exchange (yes? yes), but that was all. And they were hunting. They bounded through woods, following the trail, and Attolia felt true hunger for the first time in two days. She found that she was slavering with it, that the need to catch a warm living body in between her teeth was animating her body with effortless energy.
They caught it near the base of the hills on the other side from Attolia’s house. It heard them coming, and they were on an actual chase for a few minutes. But Attolia was running on an energy that felt almost divine. She and her fellow split up and kept in on the path they wanted, away from the denser foliage, and converged on it in a clear area. They moved to leap at the same time —
Attolia’s jaws closed around the rabbit’s throat, snapping shut cleanly. Blood gushed suddenly into her mouth, down her jaw. It was better than anything she’d experienced in her life — better than graduating summa cum laude, better than seeing excellent profit margins, better than orgasm. The other wolf had held back and was now sitting a few feet away from her, clearly asking for permission.
She set the rabbit down on the ground and started delicately savaging at it, tearing open the body to get at the good meat. After a few seconds, her companion joined in, tearing off a leg to gnaw on as she continued to nose at the body. They finished it in half an hour, leaving only a pile of faintly bloody bones behind. Attolia found then that she was very drowsy, so she was about to just fall asleep on the ground when her companion yelped at her, biting lightly at her flank. She snapped at him irritably, but he didn’t relent, driving her onto her feet. She chased at him, intending to retaliate, but he stayed out of reach. She realized he was trying to get her to go somewhere. That was irritating, but she’d oblige him — she felt an uncomplicated warmth towards him that was unfamiliar and good.
It was still pitch dark when he brought her up the steps of a house, maybe several miles from hers. It was also near the hills, and when they broke from the tree line they had to pass only two blocks of human habitation before arriving at their destination. There was a dog door he passed through easily. She was larger and fit only barely.
She liked the place. Not as much as the forest, but better than her garden. The floor was tiled, but the corner of the room was piled with blankets. They smelled good. The other wolf was already curled up on them. Now, his manner implied, we can sleep.
Attolia liked the idea. She arranged herself on them, feeling her tail thump a couple of times against the wall. The temperature here was just right, and there was a row of flowers in small pots arranged on the wall opposite her. She liked that touch.
She closed her eyes, and within minutes fell into some of the best sleep of her life.
:::::
The CEO of AttolCorp woke up in a house she’d never been to before in her life, naked and covered in blood, sprawled on top of a pile of dog blankets. There was a young man next to her, equally naked and slumbering peacefully. She stared at him, heart hammering in her ears. She couldn’t remember having been this panicked, ever. She stared down at her hands — bloody. There was something crusted on her face. Also blood. She stared at the man again. The curly black hair brought no one to mind.
Then he stirred, and she recognized him at the same time she scrambled to cover herself with one of the blankets. It was the smug barista from The Seperchia.
What the fuck? What the fuck? What the —
“Mrr,” he said sleepily.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
“Oh, hey,” he said, catching a glimpse of her face. His mouth too was smeared with blood, although most of it seemed to have rubbed off on the blankets. She stared at him, too freaked out to move. “I’ll bring over a towel. That was a nice hunt, wasn’t it?”
Then he got off and sauntered off in the nude. He had a lithe brown body, visibly but not thickly muscled. She heard a tap start running somewhere around the corner. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think.
Hunt. Yes. She’d caught something warm in her mouth and the pleasure it had given her had not lost its power, even in memory. Attolia shivered with how good it had been, and stared down at her bare feet. How had that started? She’d let herself out… that was the faintest memory of the night, and she had to dig hard to find it, past where it was buried under the better, stronger memories of running and smelling things and nipping playfully at her new friend —
She’d let herself out. Attolia ground the base of her palms into her eyes and almost howled at how stupid she’d been. Why had she done that? She’d never wanted to do it before.
But then, no one had ever asked.
Eugenides was back. The blood on his face was gone and he’d climbed into a pair of jeans. Attolia curled up as he approached to hand her a towel and a bathrobe.
“Huh,” he said. “You’re the first werewolf I’ve known to be shy about being naked.”
“Turn around,” she snapped. He was commendably prompt. She stood up to put on the bathrobe with shaking hands. She scrubbed at her face vigorously with the towel, which became red all over disturbingly quickly. And then she saw something that was even worse — the angle of the sunlight coming in through the window.
Eugenides had turned around by then. “Something wrong?”
Attolia elected to ignore everything else that was wrong in favor of the worst one. “What time is it?” she said, in too high-pitched a voice.
He squinted at the sunlight too. “Around ten, I’d think.”
Attolia yelped and sprang up. “I’m late for work.” She swiveled around and stared at him. “Aren’t you? I thought your shift started at six thirty.”
“I get today off,” Eugenides said, looking perturbed. “I get two days off every month. The day after it passes is always kind of mellow and fuzzy, you wouldn’t want to work. Why, do you?”
“Yes!” she snapped. “Do you — oh gods, I don’t have my phone, I need to call a taxi —“
“You can’t go to work like that,” Eugenides said.
“I was going to go home, and change, and call the ten or so people who need me in right now, and then go in, without coffee, because you’re off today!” Attolia shouted. “I can’t believe —“
“Calm down.” There was in enough command in his voice that she actually stopped. “Dude, listen. Presumably you had some excuse for not going in yesterday. Just call up your boss and say it was longer than you thought, that you’re really sorry. If it was an illness, you’re still sick. If it was travel plans, your flight got delayed. It can’t be that bad, I’m sure they’ll understand —“
“I don’t have a boss,” Attolia said, too startled by being called dude to remember she probably didn’t want to give this man any more information about herself.
Eugenides squinted at her. “Eh?”
“I’m,” she said. “The… boss. I don’t really… have to call anyone.”
“Oh, well then,” he said. “Did you have any meetings?”
“One,” she said faintly.
“Big?”
“Not really.” It was with one of her managers in HR. Attolia didn’t know if the woman was one of Erondites’s yet, and she’d been intending to gauge that through the meeting. She cursed to herself. “But not insignificant.”
“What’s urgent for the rest of today?”
She reeled them off, still too off-kilter to remember she didn’t need to tell this man anything. “Two more meetings in the afternoon. I have a backlog from the past two days — reports to review and respond to, catching up on who’s been… catching up.” Her unread emails would range in the hundreds.
“All right, listen,” Eugenides was saying. “My car’s in the garage. I’ll drive you back to your place — I assume that’s the house where I found you? I’ll call up one of my coworkers, tell them to get you a quad shot, and we can pick it up on the way to work —“
“We?” she said angrily.
“I don’t trust you to not speed,” he said. “Also you’re shaking and look terrified. It’s just courteous. We ran with each other last night — that makes us more than acquaintances.”
That was true. Whatever Eugenides was, he wasn’t a stranger. Not after what had happened. Barefoot, in a stranger’s bathrobe, and with some blood still crusted in her scalp, she got into Eugenides’s beat-up Honda. It was only a ten minute drive to her home. Funny coincidence, since her workplace and his were thirty minutes away. She sat back, feeling her heart slow down. She could recoup. This wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to her. It was only a few hours of work. All of her employees thought she look a day off every month because of her period, anyway — although humiliating, she didn’t need to do anything but stay silent to convince people she’d been in too much pain to come to work at her normal hour…
Attolia took a seven minute shower, furiously rinsing every evidence of the transformation from her body. Dirt, blood, and animal hair poured down the drain. A few of them were longer, and black. She stared at the strands angrily. The anger became nausea when she remembered there was a raw rabbit sitting in her stomach. There was nothing she could do that about that, so she elected to never think about it again.
By the time Attolia came out she was composed enough to drive to work herself, but then there was the coffee Eugenides had promised her. When they arrived it would be lunchtime, and while she’d never visited The Seperchia at noon she suspected it would be crowded. She didn’t want to lose more time. So she went down, got into his car. Said, without looking at him, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said sweetly, and they drove out.
Attolia wasn’t a radio person, and thankfully Eugenides didn’t seem to be, either. There was blessed silence for a full ten minutes before he opened his mouth. “So — why is your gate all blocked up with silver, anyway? You can feel that much a mile away.”
“I didn’t consider it a hazard,” she said. “It’s barely visible outside.”
“I wasn’t going to steal it or anything,” Eugenides, sounding offended. “I’m not a robber. I was just wondering why you have all that strung up everywhere. It hurts when you touch it.”
“It’s a reminder,” she said. “If it weren’t there, I’d forget to stay inside.”
“Why should you?”
“I live in the suburbs,” she said, giving the simplest answer she could. “It’s no place for a wolf.”
“But there are the hills,” he pointed out. “And your house is further away from neighbors than mine. I still find a way.”
“I don’t enjoy taking that sort of risk.”
“You don’t mean to say — you spend all of your time inside that garden?” he said incredulously. “Maybe my sense of its dimensions aren’t right, since I saw it when I was a different size — but it seemed tiny.”
“I don’t move around much,” she said defensively. And because she’d seen his house, and he’d seen hers, she added — “Just because I’m wealthy doesn’t mean I indulge in senseless luxuries.”
“I didn’t mean that.” Eugenides sounded frustrated. “I hope you go somewhere better for vacations, at least, with your pack.”
She blinked. She wanted to stop having this conversation, so she just turned her face away, signaling: I’m done.
“…You don’t have a pack."
“No,” she said coolly.
“When did you leave?”
“I never did,” Attolia said. “The last member died. Recently. Now please stop with the questions.”
“I’m sorry.” Eugenides seemed sincere. “I’m just excited — I moved into the area recently. Didn’t know anyone here. I was so happy when I found you last night.”
“That’s fine,” she said, trying to sound bored. She’d been so happy, too. It made no sense to show it. “I’d prefer to stop talking now, that’s all.”
She looked out of the window and caught her reflection — a neat, composed woman. Who’d guess from her face that she’d gone out running into the hills and had killed a rabbit with her bare teeth the previous night? She looked away, uncomfortable with herself.
Fifteen minutes later Eugenides drew up next to The Seperchia. He parked, leapt out, and was back in less than a minute with her coffee. He fitted it into the cup holder between them before getting into his seat. “Where to?” he said.
“Down this street for two blocks, then right,” she said. “It’s right around the corner. You didn’t really have to drive me.”
“Oh, no, that’s fine, what do you mean you work at AttolCorp,” Eugenides said, in a single breath going from amicable to shocked. “Isn’t that the building?”
“Yes. I work at AttolCorp.”
She caught the look of disbelief he sent her, and tried to ignore it. They weren’t friends. There was nothing being ruined here. “You said you didn’t work for anyone, though — are you the, um. The CEO? Or something?”
“Yes,” she said, pained.
He muttered a curse to himself. “Wow. I’m sorry I’ve been giving you the wrong coffees. I just thought —”
“No,” Attolia snapped. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
She knew she’d flushed a little when Eugenides looked at her, and was glad when he turned the corner and stopped so she could get out. “Thank you for the ride,” she said, taking her coffee. She’d taken a sip and decided it was good, if not up to the standard she’d come to expect in the past few weeks. “I appreciate it a lot.”
“I’ll see you next week,” he said, bending his head a little to maintain eye contact. He was smiling a little, hesitantly. “Take care, Ms. Attolia.”
Attolia kept that smile in her head as she went into work, examining it. It struck her that it was a rather good smile — one she didn’t see all that much. Unforced and kind.
:::::
Despite everything, she was in a terrific mood that day. She caught up with her work much faster than expected, and was focused at both of her meetings that afternoon. She responded with unhesitant sharpness to the few barbs that were thrown at her during meetings with her management team, and had the satisfaction of seeing some eyes widen and some provocations held back. She tore through paperwork and left at nine in the evening having responded to every relevant email she’d received in the past three days.
Reluctantly, she decided that she’d really need to look more into running around and killing things, if it was going to have this effect on her each time.
:::::
She deliberately came in later than normal the next Monday, so Eugenides would be too busy to talk to her. He took her order (‘Go ahead, then’) with a smile and rang her up. The price was now three thirty. She looked at him hard.
“I’ve been undercharging you,” he whispered. “Because you looked so angry all the time. But now I know it’s certainly not because your coffee’s too pricey…”
“Oh, gods,” she said grumpily. Then she added, “I’m fairly sure that’s illegal.”
“Shh,” he said, and a few minutes later handed her a fragrant cup that, even now, was certainly not overpriced.
Wednesday there was a phone number written on her coffee cup. The print was small enough that Attolia didn’t notice until she was in her office. When she did, she snorted at the audacity — and then put it down in her phone. There were literally almost a thousand contacts in there, she thought, some of them even less valuable to her than Eugenides. Why not?
She powered through that month on a combination of excellent coffee, improved health, and most of all a murderous determination to keep the company in her hands, and in the shape her father had envisioned it. He’d passed away right as they were coming out of a recession during which AttolCorp had downsized twice. In the process of slowly swelling their ranks again, several of the higher positions had gone to people who did not quite deserve their jobs. She was negotiating their salaries — and their positions — while also trying to ameliorate their mismanagement, all without seeming too heavy handed. There was also the not inconsiderable matter of getting the COO to resign quietly so she could replace him with one of hers… that would have to happen sometime in the next year or three, as well as expelling Erondites. But then she’d have to find some diplomatic way of removing Erondites as one of her assistants first, because so much of her paperwork came in through him…
Attolia sometimes lay awake and wondered if she wouldn’t be happy tucked away in a small coffeeshop somewhere, making idiosyncratic drinks for a stream of regular customers who called her by name.
A few days before the month's full moon — this time thankfully falling on a Friday-Saturday — there was a question mark on the coffee mug he handed her. By this time she’d relented under the environmental evil eye that Eugenides had started giving her and bought one of The Seperchia’s mugs — they were actually quite beautiful, their logo placed so naturally in an abstract wine-red pattern weaving across the white ceramic that it didn’t even look commercial. She ignored the message, because she didn’t know what she wanted.
Attolia took until the day of to make up her mind. She texted him at work: I apologize for asking so late. Are you free this weekend to run?
Nonspecific enough not to be weird should someone else see it; explicitly nonsexual enough that no one could use it to cause a scandal.
The reply came swiftly. I’m going camping an hour down south. If you want to come with me, you’re going to have to get off work at least two hours before moonrise.
She looked at the time, aghast. It was almost lunchtime. Moonrise was at six. She couldn’t.
…Oh yes, she could.
Where and when should I meet you? I don’t have camping equipment, she texted back, rearranging her schedule for the next six hours and furiously compressing it into four. She would skip lunch. And ask her assistant to get her another cup of coffee.
We don’t need much actual equipment. I’ll pick you up at four in front of the AttolCorp building. does that work?
In front of The Seperchia might be better.
She stumbled into his car at the assigned time, profoundly unsettled by the trip she’d just signed up for. But the lure of an actual mountain to explore was too much. She looked at Eugenides’s face and felt even more unsettled — he was dressed in a loose shirt and dark pants. There was a pair of sunglasses nestled in his dark hair. She was in a pantsuit.
“Ready to go?”
“Yes,” she said shakily. Eugenides started driving. “What’s the plan?”
“I have a tent and a few blankets,” he said. “It’ll be a tight fit for two people, but it’ll be fine for two wolves, if we want to sleep there. I have water, a small cooking set, human food for when we turn back on Sunday. There’s a sizable deer population a few miles into the mountains for when we’re transformed, and two accessible streams. But we need at least an hour to hike in deep enough where we won’t be disturbed by other campers —“
“I’m wearing heels,” Attolia said tentatively.
“So transform early,” he said. “I can carry your stuff for you, it’s not a lot.”
She didn’t say anything. Eugenides peered at her. “What?”
“I didn’t know you could transform early.”
“What,” Eugenides said, his voice flat. She’d heard him surprised before, when he learned that she headed AttolCorp, but this mowed-over tone of his voice was new.
Awkwardly, she said: “I thought it just… happened.”
“Well yeah, you have to when the full moon rises,” said Eugenides. “But you can turn when it’s not full.”
“Well, I never wanted to.”
A silence descended in the car. When she looked over, he was staring at the road, looking vaguely disturbed. “Attolia,” he said, after several minutes. “The pack member who died recently — who was that?”
In for a penny — “My father.”
“Who else was in it?”
“Just him,” she said.
“Was he your alpha?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess. We never acted like wolves, you know. We just waited it out together. It was — better, when he was around.”
“You spent all your time in that yard?”
“Garden,” she corrected. “It’s not a bad place to be. Just a bit boring.”
“Did you ever do what we did last time — just go out and run?”
Attolia swallowed. “We always agreed it was too dangerous. What if we got caught?”
“Who’d catch us?” Eugenides said scornfully. “We’re fast. We’re strong. We don’t get hurt when people shoot at us.”
“We don’t?”
“No.”
“If you laugh at me, I’ll kill you,” she said bluntly. She thought she probably meant it. The humiliation wasn’t that she knew less than he did, but that he took everything about her as horrifying, pitiful. It hadn’t been that bad. “Just explain to me without condescension. Just assume I don’t know anything and tell me about what I am.”
“What we are,” he said quietly. “There is an us, you know. Almost several thousand in the United States alone.”
“Start from there.”
He did. Globally speaking, werewolves were concentrated in the Mediterranean — North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, and some parts of Spain. They’d spread out a lot in the past few centuries, immigrating to the Americas — best as they knew, almost half of the world’s werewolves were now in the Americas, a chunk of those doing quite well in Canada…
“Tell me about packs,” she said.
Lycanthropy was hereditary, so most packs were family packs. Newcomers could come in and children could float away, declaring allegiances to new alphas if they so chose. More rarely they’d be like Eugenides or Attolia, packless and transforming alone. Modernity made that both easier and harder — easier because it was the age of transit, of the Internet, where you could find a new pack to meet with online if you knew where to go. Harder because monthly absences were hard to explain away if you worked for someone who wasn’t family or a friend of. Who wasn’t in the loop.
“So you grew up with a pack.”
Eugenides had. A nice one. He hoped to go back someday, when he’d found a new alpha and the rawness of having left healed over. So that he simply wouldn’t want to melt back into the gap he’d left behind and not leave.
“Why did you leave?”
“Ah, it was rural. Good for a werewolf. Not so good for —“ he made a complicated gesture. “Someone with dreams.”
She glanced down at her watch. They were halfway there. “I think you’d better give me a crash course on how to transform, now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Oh, man. It’s not hard, but if you’ve never done it before... I think you should try, in the backseat, as I explain, it’s not really something you can get with an explanation.”
“Then pull over,” she said. “And keep your eyes on the road while I do it.”
“There’s a big robe in the green pack. It’ll just go all loose around you if you transform. You can put it on.”
Eugenides stopped, Attolia moved seats, and he started driving again as she kicked off her clothes. She got into the robe — dark red, soft, she briefly wondered if and when Eugenides wore it. “So,” he said. “Okay. Man. You know that little — stretching sensation, when you turn?”
“The part where my muscles rip apart and it’s very painful?”
“…No,” Eugenides said, and his reflection in the rearview mirror stared at Attolia like she was crazy. The same mowed-over look. “It’s not supposed to hurt.”
“What do you mean, it’s not supposed to hurt?”
“Did it hurt the first time?”
“When I was a child? No. It got worse and worse throughout my teens. Now it’s —“ she felt her teeth clench. “Excruciating.”
“Gods,” said Eugenides. And then, more emphatically, “God! And you said you kept yourself cooped up every time — you have no recent association with it that’s not pain. All right. You may have to tramp up a mountain in heels. Let’s give it a try anyway. Remember the time we ran and you felt… weightless, thoughtless, not human at all?”
Eugenides kept describing what it was like to be a wolf, trying to teach Attolia how to convince her body that it was lupine. Attolia shut her eyes and tried, but when she was human she only dimly remembered what it was like to be an animal in the dark, running after a rabbit. And while she remembered that with joy, the memory was tagged with meta-emotions of embarrassment and faint disgust. And whenever she thought of an imminent transformation, she couldn’t help flinching at the pain that was going to follow —
“When I transform this time, will it not hurt?”
“I have no idea,” Eugenides said frankly. “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
Attolia still hadn’t managed it by the time they reached the camping grounds. Eugenides came around to the back and looked at her feet. “Hmm,” he said. “My feet aren’t that big, and you’re a tall woman. Maybe —“
She tried on his shoes, and they were only a little big. “Oh, that’s settled, then,” he said. “Do you think you could fit into my jeans?”
“I’ll just get back into my old clothes,” Attolia said stiffly.
“It’ll look very strange,” he said, but cheerfully, as if he liked the thought. She got out with the two packs while he changed in the car. He poked his head out a few seconds, his shirt gone. “Could you carry both of those?”
“For an hour? Certainly.” Attolia was in good physical condition.
“Good,” he said, withdrawing his head. There was was a little thump inside the car. Then a lithe black animal that could almost pass for a dog wiggled out of the window and landed on the ground, holding a leash between his teeth.
“Was I supposed to wear that?”
The tail wagged.
“Oh well.” Attolia looked down at her green sneakers and navy pantsuit. She wasn’t actually sure she’d gotten the better end of that deal. She clumsily fastened the leash around Eugenides’s neck, and rolled up the car windows before locking it. “Where to?”
He led her up the trail after she paid for parking. After almost twenty minutes of quite fast walking, he led her off the road and down into a sparsely wooded valley. It took them fifteen minutes to get where they wanted. It wasn’t that far off the trail — Attolia, not being dog-sized, slowed them down — but it was far off enough that she couldn’t imagine anyone randomly stumbling upon them. It didn’t seem to be that popular a hiking trail. They only saw three other people, and it was a Friday afternoon. They wove through the trees until Eugenides found a decently flat space for them to set up camp.
Attolia turned around as he transformed back. “I’m too lazy to put on clothes,” he informed her. “I can set up the tent and put all the stuff inside, including a big bowl of water. You can help me if you can stand seeing me naked again.”
“It takes five seconds to put on a shirt.”
“Yes,” he said, sounding pained, “but then I have to take it off again in about half an hour, and…”
Attolia made an irritated noise. “Just go ahead. I don’t know how to set up a tent anyway.”
She sat down, back still turned. The sky was going dark, purpling like a bruise. The air down here was chilly. She shivered. There were fabricky noises behind her as Eugenides went on with his business, and it occurred to her that she was being rather ungrateful and useless for someone who was being done a favor. So she cleared her throat and said, “I’m not pulling my weight. I’m sorry about that. I can get up and help you if you really want.”
“If I really wanted, I’d put on a shirt,” he said.
“Oh.”
“While I do this, why don’t you keep on trying to transform?”
That seemed pointless, since it was going to happen soon anyway. But she didn’t have anything better to do, so she closed her eyes and thought again of the ease of running, the wind in her fur. Good things, like Eugenides had suggested. It didn’t work. All she could focus on, now that it was coming on her, was the dread of it. The crackle of her own bones under her skin, elongating, reforming, her skin stretching under and over new concavities and convexities. The screams caught and trapped in the cartilage of a mutating throat.
She was profoundly happy when Eugenides interrupted her thoughts. “I’m done. I’ve covered up with a blanket — you should come in and do the same, it’ll be chilly out here until we have actual fur.”
Attolia did. It was indeed a tight fit for two people. Eugenides was curled up on the ground, and the way he looked was oddly reminiscent of his wolf form — like that, he was just as small and gangly, curly dark hair poking out of the dark blue blanket he had wrapped around himself. There was a second blanket off to the side. She got under it, and after a moment of hesitation, lay down on the ground so she was looking straight at Eugenides.
For a few minutes, they stared unblinkingly at each other — the chief executive officer of one of the larger investment banking firms in the Midwest, and the barista who worked down the street from her building. Attolia was at loss at how they had ended up here. Up this close she could see how dark his eyes were — the same pitch color as his lashes. He had very intense eyes. She knew her brows had furrowed as she looked at him. He was so very young. He couldn’t be older than twenty five. Hell, she could buy that he was in his late teens, but she didn’t get the sense that he was. She was almost thirty. They didn’t have anything in common. Except this.
“What are you thinking about?” Eugenides’s voice was quiet, his words came out as a murmur.
Hers came out on a fast exhale. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I think it’s all right to not know what you’re doing for once,” he said. “I get the sense that you always do, everywhere else in life. It’s okay to let go, you know.”
Attolia didn’t say anything in reply. She watched his mouth.
“Here,” said Eugenides, “up here, far away from anyone you know and anything you have responsibility over, there are no consequences.”
He saw the effect his words had on her. Harder than a sucker punch. His eyes went wide, a little scared, like he’d hurt her and wasn’t sure why, or how he could fix it. But it wasn’t hurt. It was just that he’d said exactly what Attolia needed to hear, and he just hadn’t known how close to home he’d hit. “Okay,” she said, to reassure him. “Okay.”
Outside, the sun was setting.
Eugenides smiled. And she thought, for the second time that month, that it was a beautiful smile. Good. Uncomplicated. “Keep your eyes on me,” he said. “Don’t think about anything.”
Attolia did what he said. And a few minutes later, they turned.
The change took her by surprise, as it had only a handful of times in her life. She felt it in her heart, first, her heart rate adjusting itself before anything else did. And then her body was changing, under the covers and under the robe, the bones of her legs pulling in, her feet stretching out. She saw it reflected in Eugenides’s face — her own vision grayed out momentarily before the blues and yellows trickled back in, but she saw the elongation of his face, the brief but unsettling vision of a face that was neither man nor animal. The form of his body rippled under the bankets, which collapsed where his legs had been. And then he was bounding up, slithering out of the covers, a handsome sleek dark animal, and she — she was one too.
It hadn’t hurt at all.
Let’s go let’s go, said Eugenides, with every bristling inch of his body. I’m hungry.
So was she. They went.