The Frenzy (16 page)

I shuddered as I stared at the hand and then willed myself to look away from it. “Please, don’t.”

“Okay, baby,” said Corey, stroking my head. “We’ll get you out of here first and we will figure out what to do.”

When my mother came to the hospital I didn’t want her to comfort me the way I had imagined I would. She looked as if she had lost weight, her eyes were unfocused, as if she hadn’t been sleeping and her hair—this was the part that freaked me out the most, because I’d never seen it like this before, at least not out of the house—was a mess. She asked how I was but we
hardly talked about what had happened. We hardly talked about anything at all. She mentioned the full moon murders once, how great it was that my dad had solved the case, how he was the big hero now. She also started to talk about things she was going to order from catalogs but I stopped her, saying I was feeling sick, and eventually she left.

After one of these visits I called Corey and he came right over. He brought some wildflowers he had picked along the way and put them in an old apple juice bottle by my bed.

“I need a plan now,” I said, after I had thanked him for the flowers. “I can’t go home with her.”

He nodded. “I know. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“But you’re about to leave for school.”

“I told you, Liv, I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“We can’t stay in this town,” I said. “It’s not even safe for us. I don’t know what Victor’s brothers will do now that he’s in prison.”

“And your dad put him there. Believe me, I’ve been
thinking about it.” Corey stroked my hair. “I’m going to take you with me. As soon as they release you I’m going to come get you and we’ll go.”

“Where?”

“East,” Corey told me. “Where the sun rises. Like we always planned.”

I reached out for him and he leaned over and kissed my mouth. A warmth tingled through my body. I reached up with my left hand to touch Corey’s unshaven face, forgetting that there was nothing at the end of my arm. No hand, no miracle of fingers with their dexterity and sensitivity to sensations of hot and cold, smooth and rough. Tears again. It seemed like I was always crying now. Damn. I thought about the silver hand, so delicately crafted that it looked like something that could have been in a museum. Maybe I would let Corey strap it to my ruined stump. Maybe Corey and I still had a chance to be free.

As if he could read my mind, Corey said, “The first night you’re home, at midnight, I’ll come for you.

I’ll bring it with me.” He didn’t say “the silver hand” but I knew that was what he meant.

My mother and father (the man I had always believed was my father, the one who looked nothing like me) finally brought me home. When we got home, that cool afternoon in September, as the students were arriving for school and the air smelled of wood smoke and dried leaves, all the TVs were on and my gramp was dozing in front of the big one in the living room. I looked around at the house full of television sets. Liquor bottles gleamed in the cabinets. The refrigerator was full of meat. Gossip magazines and catalogs were piled on all the tables. And everything was clean.

It all seemed perfectly normal. Happy America. Except that I was a werewolf, my mother had shot off my hand and one of my father’s men had been brutally murdered. But no one would talk about it.

“I’ve ordered you some cute new jeans and things for when school starts,” my mother said, holding up a
catalog. I glared at her.

“Cindy,” my dad said. “Not now.”

She looked at him, surprised. “What, Jeff? She needs clothes.”

My dad turned off the TV in front of Gramp. He stirred in his chair and made a wheezing sound.

“Just not now.” My dad went to pour himself a scotch. Then stopped and turned to me. “Do you need anything, Olivia?”

I shook my head. Gramp opened his eyes. “Olivia!” he said. “You’re home.” He lifted himself from his chair with effort.

I went to meet him, trying to hide my stump as best I could. He had tears in his eyes. I put my arms around him. He’d wanted to visit me in the hospital but they hadn’t let him.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. None of it was your fault. Remember that. Live responsibly but without guilt for what is past.” He let go of my shoulders and gripped
my right hand in both of his. “You must try, Olivia.”

“Liv, why don’t you go upstairs and lie down,” said my mom. “I’ll bring you some food and a magazine.”

“I hate your magazines,” I said. “I hate your food.”

She brushed invisible lint off her shirt and went to the refrigerator. “I know you’ve been through a lot but that’s no reason to speak to me like that.”

“Mom,” I said. “‘Been through a lot’? My hand got shot off. Do you see this?” I held up the stump, still wrapped in a bandage.

“Jeff …,” my mom said.

“You shot me.” I was shouting now. “You shot off my hand!”

“Jeff,” my mom said again. Her eyes were huge and she took a step away from me as if I were a crazed monster. I realized she didn’t know. Either she really didn’t know or she had blocked it from her mind, the way I had blocked the clues to what I was for so many years. But I remembered how she had called my name before she shot me, how she had glanced back at my
window as if she was wondering if I was in there or if, maybe, this creature before her, so like the two wolves she had shot before, was me. She didn’t know for sure if she had shot me but there was doubt in her mind. I didn’t hate her for the doubt; I hated her for not acknowledging it, for blocking out everything except what she wanted to believe.

My dad walked over to me. He hadn’t touched me in years except to hit me. I backed away. I could feel my blood heating up. The moon would rise tonight.

“Liv,” he said. “Olivia.”

“You’re not much different,” I told him. My voice was soft and I hung my head. “When you get mad and you get drunk and you hit me in the face.”

My dad cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

My mom came over and touched his arm. He brushed her away. “Olivia, I don’t understand what is happening but I see you are hurt. And it’s not okay. And I’m going to find out who did this to you.”

He didn’t know anything, that was for sure, but
maybe part of him sensed something because he had never sounded this sympathetic. I looked at him. His face was red. He had folds under his eyes. He had raised me as his own but it was clear I never was. I looked at
my mom with her pleading face.
Part of her knows
, I thought again.
Part of her knows what she did
. But I wasn’t going to tell him, confirm his suspicions and bring more pain on them. It was enough; we’d all had enough.

“No one did this to me,” I said. “I did this to myself.”

Scoot began to bark hysterically.

“What’s that in the yard?” Gramp pointed. “Out in the yard! Lookit!”

We turned and saw a shadow slip behind a tree.

“A wolf!” Gramp said. “I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one.”

My mom ran toward the window but she crashed into the glass coffee table and slumped to the ground. Her shin was bleeding. A bright red trickle. I inadvertently touched my top lip with my tongue.

My mom looked from me to my dad and back, then to Gramp, then to Dad again. “Isn’t anyone going to ask if I’m okay?” She paused. “I guess not. Because I always say everything is okay. But you know what? I have some news for all of you. I am not okay.” She looked at me. “I loved you. I did everything for you. I’m a good mother. But you’re right. Nothing is okay and it won’t ever be.”

Then she started to cry. Maybe, someday, she would be strong enough to acknowledge what she had done. But I wouldn’t be there to see it.

The shadow in the garden was gone. I backed away from my mother. Then I turned. I ran upstairs and packed a backpack and sat by the window. My right hand was shaking so much it seemed like it belonged to someone else. My other hand was still because it wasn’t there.

May love’s fire burn away my pain.

Corey came at midnight as we had planned. I was lying on the floor breathing as deeply as I could—even though the breath kept catching in my chest—trying
to keep the change from coming on. He knelt beside me and I noticed the hair on his cheeks and chin; he’d never had so much before. He looked a lot older to me then.

“My mom said the bandages can come off now.”

I flinched.

“May I?

Corey was used to handling fragile, sick animals. Once he’d cared for a sick lamb. He kept it in a box in his room and fed it with a dropper. When it died he buried it in his garden.

I let Corey unwrap the bandages. My head was turned away but when I felt his touch on my wrist—so gentle—I looked back. My arm seemed smaller and paler as if it had shrunk. As if it wasn’t my arm at all but the arm of a small child. But not a normal child. It ended in a roughly tapered stump.

Corey slipped the silver hand over my wrist. It attached with a delicate strap above my elbow.

I waited for something to happen. For me to die,
maybe. For more pain. But there was nothing, only a feeling of calm. And Corey was holding my hand again, the way he used to hold my hand of bone and flesh.

He helped me up and took my backpack.

We climbed down into the garden.

“How are we getting there?” I asked him. I hadn’t even thought of it.

“I have something to show you,” Corey said, heading for the road.

Then, out of the shadows came the six figures. Their eyes were golden mirrors. They were brothers. Wolves.

I heard them though they did not speak in words.

Victor has been sacrificed.

All those killings—he was trying to protect you!

He thought you were his chosen bride, because he had never met a female like us before.

But you are nothing compared to him.

Bitch.

This is the third generation of our family that your family has taken.

Soon we will have our revenge.

Part of me had dreamed of a life with these men and their mother, deep in the forest where no one could find us. I would be the bride of the most handsome and most brutal of them all. I could live true to my animal nature, let the beast inside me come out whenever she wished, without having to wear a piece of metal to control her. But just as I was not my mother with her fear, I was not Sasha with her brutality. I would have to find who I was, and whoever that was lived somewhere between them. Nor was I a bride for Victor, who had taken my breath away in the shadows of my room and who had also killed all those men, men whose children (or, in the last case, whose friend) had hurt me in some way.

I lifted my silver hand in the moonlight and the six brothers lowered their heads to the ground, whining. So it affected them differently, my silver hand.

We were different. I would have been relieved at this proof that I was perhaps more human than monster. But their eyes were fixed on Corey.

He’s ours, they said. If you won’t be, sister. Our brother showed you compassion. He is gone. We are here now.

Corey squeezed my right hand so hard that it hurt. Victor was in prison and my father had put him there. I wore a silver hand but Corey had nothing to protect him, not even me anymore now that Victor was gone.

But Corey wasn’t asking me to protect him.

He was different now.

Corey’s eyes flashed. The hair on his face made him look a lot tougher. A sound stirred from his throat like the voice of the night.

A month ago, when Victor cornered us in the woods Corey had hidden behind me. But he had changed. Now he frightened me but he was also beautiful in his strength. He was everything I wanted and maybe he was different partly because of me. And it was going to be my fault when he attacked the six wolves that
surrounded us and they tore him to shreds of flesh and blood.

“Corey!” I shouted. I moved toward him but he didn’t seem to hear or see me. He stepped closer to the wolves. “Corey, no!”

And then Joe Ranger was there.

He stood at the edge of the garden, wearing a plaid flannel shirt, his gun cocked on his shoulder and his eyes narrow slits. “Silver bullets, boys,” Joe said. “And it is time to leave.” Then, out of the corner of his mouth, he added, “You, too, kids.” And with his free hand he shooed us off.

Corey reached out and took the silver hand my real father had made for me in his own warm hand.

I looked back at Joe. He was standing his ground and the wolves slunk away. His eyes met mine.

“Be safe, my girl.”

Then he left, too. I watched my father become part of the trees along the gulley. My chest tightened as I realized I might never see him again. But I had ways
to remember him; I had Joe Ranger’s red hair, his green eyes and his silver hand.

“Come on,” Corey said, bringing me back to him.

“Where are we going? How?”

“You’ll see.”

We were running along the road out of town but in another way I was running back through my life. Here was me lying in the hospital with Corey and Joe Ranger at my side. I looked into Joe’s eyes and saw where I had come from, the pain and also the beauty. I looked into Corey’s eyes and saw where I was going, the trepidation and the excitement. Here was me bleeding in the woods, bleeding from my ruined hand, the victim of my mother’s gunshot. Here was my mother fallen, weeping on the yellow linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor. She had not meant to hurt her daughter and destroy her family. She had been hurt, too, as she ran from her own pain, her own wild nature. Here was my father, so upright and respected by day, drinking by night, swallowing his betrayal and
his rage in angry mouthfuls, sleeping in his twin bed. Here was my gentle grandfather who had not seen the destruction he caused in my mother’s life, calling her mother an angel and taking his daughter up in a helicopter to shoot wolves that showed up better against the white landscape. Here was Pace hanging from a rope in his closet, just like Michael Fairborn did long ago. Here was Pace dancing with me. Here was Victor, kneeling on my carpet, spreading roses on the bed. Here was Victor ripping the carcasses to shreds with his teeth. Here was Corey making love to me in the woods while our eyes sparkled with the light of a thousand fireflies. Here was Sasha with blood on her paws from the meat she had killed for me. Here was her husband and her father killed by my mother’s hand. Here was Corey and Pace and me exploring the ruins of buildings where ghosts mourned their unfinished lives. Here was me changing into something I had not understood, something with hair and teeth and hunger and ferocity and power. Here was me as
a baby, sleeping peacefully in my mother’s arms while she dreamed of her wild lover who would never come back to her bed. Here was my mother in a helicopter, taking aim.