Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 13 (9 page)

Scent of Night

By Gustavo Bondoni

“I really can’t make it on the week of the fourteenth,” Jason stammered.  He thought furiously, trying to think of an excuse, any excuse, to answer the question that she would invariably ask next, which was: ‘why not?’

But Carmen surprised him.  “I’ll be there on the week of the fourteenth.  It’s the only holiday I have, so if you want to see me, you’ll be there.  Otherwise, I’m sure I can find someone else to warm my bed.”

He tried to change tracks, but found nothing to say before she cheerfully, confidently told him that she missed him and hung up.

Damn.
  He was upset that she’d expect him to drop everything and fly to Spain, but the true curse was the fact that she’d chosen a moon-week.  What angered him most, however, was the fact that he was sure that he’d cave, eventually.  Carmen was one of a kind, and he wasn’t going to lose her.

He sighed and Googled “Toledo”, swore when he realized that the first result, on which he’d automatically clicked was for a city in Ohio, and typed the words ‘Toledo Spain’ into the box.

It was a few minutes before he spoke again.

“Crap,” was all he said.

~

Carmen’s head hit him in the chest almost before he had time to get his bearings.  Barajas airport was a big hub and entire Spanish families seemed to have come out to greet the people flying in.  The Latin warmth, a world apart from the reserved, distant Minnesotans he was used to, made him realize just how far he’d come.

“I’m so glad to see you!  I knew you’d come,” she said effusively.  She stood on tiptoes, trying to get him to kiss her. 

He could feel himself turning red, and gave her a chaste peck on the cheek.  He knew it wasn’t what she wanted, that he would pay for it later.

She just laughed at him, a light dancing in her black eyes.  “I see I’ll have to get you into our room before we can say hello properly,” she said.  “So let’s go catch the train.”  Though her English was perfect, there was no mistaking her Hispanic accent which, to his ear, sounded absolutely perfect.  She turned with a wave of long, night-black hair and walked down the concourse while he watched in admiration for a second before pulling himself together.  She wouldn’t wait.

With a groan, Jason pulled his shoulder-strap into position and began to walk, wanting nothing more than to rest on a bed without jamming his knees into the back of the passenger ahead.

That would have to wait until Carmen decided it was time, though.

~

It was only when they went out that evening that Jason realized just how much trouble he was actually in.  The day had gone just about how he’d expected: Carmen had woken him when the cab from the station had pulled up at the door to their hotel, had pulled him, drowsy, up a couple of flights of stairs, and had had her way with him all afternoon.  It was lucky that dinner in Spain was at ten PM, otherwise he wouldn’t even have had time for a short catnap.

Then they walked out into the city, and Jason nearly panicked.  Toledo was a typical medieval city.  Other than the main street the cab had navigated, it was a warren of tiny winding lanes, some so narrow he could touch the buildings on either side without fully extending his arms.  This was actually the case with the lane that held the restaurant, although that one opened up into a square, full of wooden chairs and tables.

As the waiter led them to their candle-lit table, almost in the center of the square, the moon came out from behind the walls, its silver glow talking to every inch of exposed skin.

“You’re not mine yet,”
it told him in its seductress’ voice. 
“But soon, very soon, within two days, you’ll be unable to resist me.  And then we’ll feed on a different menu, won’t we?”

He swallowed hard, his food turning to ashes in his mouth.  A walled city on a hill was no place for a werewolf.  There was no place to run, no place to hide.  He needed space, needed trees, and most of all, he needed to be certain that there was nothing but livestock nearby when the change took him.  None of that would be available in Toledo.

Carmen, sated and glowing, seemed to be enjoying every morsel.  “Could we have asked for a more beautiful night?” she said.

He shuddered.

~

The day and a half of tours, food and sex that followed should have been the best of his life.  Hell, at times he forgot who he was and they were the best days of his life.  This made him smile; even as the Sword of Damocles hung over him by an ever-thinner thread, Carmen was showing the boy from the Midwest what the world was really made of, how people who knew the meaning of the word ‘cosmopolitan’, felt it in their very pores, went about their lives.

He wondered what it would have meant to him without doom in the air.  He supposed he would have proposed to her by now.

But that was impossible.  By the following morning, barring some lucky miracle, he would be a murderer, a wanted fugitive, a freak.  The city of Toledo would be counting its dead and the wails of grieving mothers would lose themselves in the sky.  There was no stopping it.

What he dreaded most was trying to explain his night-long absence to the woman beside him.  He fingered a longsword of Toledan steel in a shop, wondering if the dull point could do enough damage to maim him and keep him abed if he threw himself onto it.  He concluded that it wouldn’t.

The hours flew by.  The sun was soon a distant memory in most of the city, save the widest of the squares.  Why was he still there?  Anyone with a shred of sense would have run to the countryside long before.  But he looked at Carmen, saw the happiness in her eyes and couldn’t bring himself to murder that emotion.  The truth was impossible to believe, and anything else would reduce her to tears and fury.  There was no question of his going.

“Have you ever seen such a beautiful sunset?” she asked, looking over the west wall.  The countryside below, a few hundred meters away, might as well have been on Mars.

The sun ignored his silent prayers and stayed its course. 

~

The upset stomach, the itching skin, all the signs were there.  He wondered whether he could convince Carmen to stay inside that night, hide from the moon under the protection of stone walls and wooden shutters.  Beg off dinner with the flu. 

But it was idle speculation; even if Carmen had believed him, accepted his excuses over the next few days, it was much too late.  Along with the discomfort, he could feel the anger, the seething, burning sense that the moon was a birthright that no one, not even he himself, had the right to deny him.  Long experience had taught him that the longer he held back the flood, the more damage it would do when it burst the dykes.

Carmen looked stunning in her red dress, almost good enough to eat, he thought with a chuckle, but already the colors were fading, and her scent, the mingled hints of rut and perfume gently overlaying the perfect smell of her, filled the air, filled his mind as they walked toward the restaurant.  The human part of him, what little remained of it, took control for a final moment, and led his body in a headlong run along the cobbled lanes, bowling over Korean tourists, dodging frail old women, ignoring Carmen’s screamed demands for an explanation as they faded into the distance.

He could explain later – or fail to do so.  The most important thing, as the world turned to one of scents and shadows, was to be as far away from the woman he loved as possible.  If she was beside him when the change was complete, she would die.

He could feel the moon’s caress as it pushed even that tiny shred of humanity back into an oblivion that would last until the silver orb set.

~

“Where the hell were you?” Carmen screeched as he staggered in.  The rings around her puffy red eyes told him all he needed to know.  She’d been up all night, crying, searching for him, putting herself into near-terminal danger.  He was just happy they hadn’t crossed paths in the night.

But there was no way he could articulate that.  He felt the bruises, suspected he might have a cracked rib.  All he could manage was to limp slowly, silently to the bed and crash onto it.  All he could think of as her anger turned to concern and then terror was that someone was going to be upset about the fact that he was bleeding all over the white sheets.  Then his exhaustion and his injuries overcame his determination to stay awake, and blackness moved in from the edges of his vision.  He fought it with everything he had…

…but was transported to his memories of the night, disjointed, difficult to put into a meaningful order.  At first, as the change took him, there was no urgency; he spent the whole afternoon eating, and hunger wouldn’t begin gnawing for a while.  All he really felt was curiosity.

This night smelled different from anything he’d experienced before.  Gone were the cleansing scents of conifers and oak, replaced by other smells, somehow more immediate.  The smell of human occupation, centuries of it in some cases, of sweat, of unwashed bodies, of perfume and of sewage.  It all smelled wonderful, and gave him a true map of the scenery around him.  He’d padded softly, silently through the deserted streets.

The moon played soft tricks on the cobblestones as he moved into darker places where artificial light was nearly absent and the smells turned deeper and ranker while the walls closed in around the alley he followed.  Even the cobbles seemed softer here, more uneven, less packed together.

Satisfaction welled in his chest.  He was the master here.  There was no creature who could withstand him, and that night he would gorge.

That memory was difficult to reconcile with his reality when he woke.  Carmen was holding a damp towel against his head, eyes filled with concern.  All he remembered was that he should have been uppermost on the pyramid – there was no explanation for the fact that he’d come back to himself feeling like the runner-up in a bullfight.  And yet, there was no denying it.  Someone he’d encountered had put up more resistance than expected.

Who had it been?  A martial arts instructor?  Some kind of special forces soldier?  Finding out would be as easy as turning on the TV, he supposed.  A fight like the one he must have had with whoever it was he’d decided to eat would have made a lot of noise, and would probably have left a messy corpse.  Spain was different from America in some ways, but he was willing to bet that the local media would be all over a nice juicy dismemberment, just like the news channels at home.

“What happened to you, my love?  Why did you run off like that?” Carmen’s voice expressed both her worry and the expectation that she wasn’t going to like the answer.  “Who did this to you?”

I wish I knew
, he didn’t say.  Instead, he replied: “I don’t remember.  I must have hit my head.  The last thing I can picture is being with you on the wall, watching the sunset.  Then, nothing.”  It was a lie, but he could feel the scrapes on his forehead where the compress chafed.  She would probably believe anything related to a blow to the head.

“But you ran off before this happened.  Surely you had a reason for doing that, one that was there before you got hurt.”  Her tone was turning accusatory.

“I don’t remember that either.  I don’t even know how we got back.  We were at the wall, and then I woke up on the bed.  Did I fall off?”  Years of explaining awkward absences had turned Jason into an expert liar.  He doubted she would suspect his sincerity, at least not because of anything in his expression.  The main problem was that she’d seen him run off and, he would need to come up with an explanation for that sooner rather than later.

But what explanation could cover the fact that he’d raced into the night, only to reappear hours later and pretty well banged up?  She would automatically assume that he’d been walking on the wild side in a serious way, and that would be the end of it.  The only bright side was that he’d remembered where he’d hidden his clothing and had put them back on before returning. But that was a victory that would last only until he ran off that night.

Drowsiness came over him again.  He felt panic for a moment: had he hit his head against something?  He’d heard somewhere that concussions made one sleepy.  Maybe he should make an effort to stay awake…

…it was a young girl, no more than eleven or twelve by the smell of her.  Pre-pubescent, for certain.  He could smell her excitement wafting towards him on the breeze.  She certainly wasn’t afraid of anything as she ran down the dark, narrow, deserted passages.  The sharp smell of worked metal reached his nose, and he knew, without caring how he knew, that the facades hid metalworker’s shops.  There was no sign of other human beings in the alley.

The girl was oblivious to his presence.  As she climbed over walls and into patios, he followed in her footsteps.  Finally, she came to a closed yard with the strong smell of etching fluids, and stopped.  She began to root among metal scraps on the floor, and her excitement grew as she sang softly to herself. 

Jason moved closer, not bothering to stay downwind, not even keeping to the shadows.  Unlike the animals he usually hunted, whose sense of smell and hearing would have caught him immediately, humans seemed to exist with remarkably little clue as to what was going on around them. 

This girl was no exception.  He was close enough that he could have reached out with one paw and touched her neck.  No animal would ever have allowed a wolf to get that close, and yet the girl looked through the pile.  Jason could smell the linen of her clothes, a sharp, chemical scent that somehow meant that the clothes were clean, but he couldn’t quite recall why that was so.  He was close enough to discern the fact that her hair was light-colored in the moonlight.