Tammy was five years old when she met the werewolf. Five exactly. Having just walked out of your birthday party before something happens really helps to put a time and a date to it.
There had been a lot of talking, and then some yelling, and then some cake (which spilled EVERYWHERE) and then mom wiping her off (ugh) and then everyone milled around and she said she wanted to play tag but Josh yelled YOU’RE IT and shoved her and ran into the bathroom and wouldn’t open the door so she went to play catch in the backyard but Ben threw like his hands were his feet and WHOOSH went the ball way off to one side and slip-slide-swish through the crack in the backyard gate.
And Tammy knew she shouldn’t wander out of the backyard, but it was okay because she wasn’t. Just her arm.
So she slipped the gate open just a little inch – ker-chack, ker-chuck – which was much easier than she’d always thought it’d be, and she reached down for the ball, and as she did that something large and furry bolted upright from the shade of the fence, where it had been napping.
She knew it wasn’t a dog. If it were a dog it would be a puppy, with those big feet and big eyes. And if it were a puppy it wouldn’t have quite as many teeth to show at her when it growled.
“Waa-AAH!” said Tammy, and she jumped back and the thing jumped forwards and it was lucky her other hand was still holding the gate because that shut it without even trying, ker-chack, and then it locked solid when something heavy and furry hit it from the other side, ker-chuck. It growled at her one last time – high-pitched and squealy – and then its ears pricked up and it ran away. It didn’t run like a dog; its legs were too long; its ankles weren’t in the right places. It ran like Ben when he was pretending to be a lion.
Tammy thought about it, then remembered she was upset and burst into tears, and that distracted her again until that evening when she was supposed to be going to bed.
“Mom?” she asked. “Can people have wolf faces?”
“Baboons are called dog-faced monkeys, bug,” said Mom. “But they aren’t people.”
“Oh,” said Tammy. And she asked to look up pictures of baboons, wolves, and dogs, which was how she decided based on the available evidence that it had been a werewolf. Or a very ugly baboon, but Mom said the zoos would say something if an animal escaped. Then she told her it could be a school project so Tammy remembered it was time for bed again.
She forgot about all of it until the next morning, when she got out up and looked out the window and saw a shadow lurking by the mailbox. It ducked when she jumped.
It was there the next day too.
***
Tammy was twelve years old when it tried to get into the house for the first time. Twelve-and-a-half, maybe? It had been winter, she was sure. A bad time of year for her werewolf; the sun went down earlier and the shadows grew so much longer and there was so much more room for a growing monster to hide in. Tammy never walked home from school without a friend; she never stayed out late; and she never snuck out. The only complaint her mother ever had was that she insisted on leaving all the lights on, especially when she was alone in the house.
Which she was sure she was, because she had definitely imagined the sounds of someone walking up the front step.
And the sounds of someone scuffling at the key.
And the deep, irritated wuff of someone without opposable thumbs.
Yes, she had imagined all of it. And she was going to make sure of that right now. So she took a deep breath and marched to the front door with her eyes shut and looked onto the deck and couldn’t see it because it was blocked by a big, hairy set of shoulders and some shockingly bright yellow eyes.
“Nine-one-one isn’t a toy, bug,” said her mother much, much later that night.
“I could call animal control instead,” said Tammy. “What’s animal control? Can I have their number?”
Her mother ruffled her hair with condescending love. “See, what am I meant to do about you, bug? I can’t even ground you; you do that to yourself. So how about this: as punishment, you’re doing my half of the snow shovelling too.”
“Not after dark.”
“The snow doesn’t wait for our convenience, my tiny horror.”
“Can I have a big shovel?”
“Sure.”
“And an axe?”
Tammy had to settle for a VERY big shovel and very fast shovelling, which was what got her into weights.
***
Tammy was twenty when it finally happened. She was in the car and she was done for the day and she had both hands on the wheel at precisely nine and three o’clock and was focusing her full attention on driving, exactly as she was meant to. It was therefore completely unfair for the werewolf to leap from a streetlight directly onto her hood and crash through the windshield, spinning the car into the ditch and flipping it what was probably once and felt like sixteen times.
Her eyes were full of fur. Her mouth was full of fur. Her nose, much to its regret, was full of fur. Also blood, judging by the fluid sliding down her throat.
“Fuck,” she said into the fur. And like magic, it moved away, turned, rolled – with a slight whimper – upright, and, with one long, gangled, mangy arm, began to feel around for her like her mother looking for her glasses at three AM.
It was much less endearing from the perspective of the glasses. The palm was thick and hairy and gigantic; it fit over her face like she was a baseball, and in accordance with ancient instincts honed by several playground fights, she licked it. Then she nearly choked on fur and reverted to older instincts and bit hard.
It shrieked. There were no other words for that; it wasn’t a howl; it wasn’t a yelp; it wasn’t even a bark. This was a noise made by a human being in distress filtered through a throat incapable of enunciating anything less threatening than a snarl, and it was at full volume. It was also – partway through – fading rapidly into the distance.
Lights probed the inside of the car.
“That makes sense,” Tammy told the friendly man telling her something about ambulances. “It only comes after me when nobody else is around.”
Hair was still stuck on her tongue. She passed out hoping she wouldn’t choke on it; that’d be embarrassing.
***
Tammy was thirty-seven when she made it happen. It had taken no small amount of effort.
Spending a decade looking over her shoulder? Hard. Mastering half a dozen forms of self-defence and buying an arsenal of technically-legal cutting-edge animal control weaponry? Also hard. Admitting it wasn’t following her anymore? Harder. Figuring out what she wanted to do about that? Harder still. Spending nearly ANOTHER decade looking for clues as to where the thing had gone? Hardest.
After all that had been said and done, setting up the kill zone had been easy. Except for her glasses. Even under her scarf her breath was steaming them off her face; how the hell had mom survived with these things for so long?
“Anything to say?” she asked the werewolf.
It gurgled at her, two-meter legs and arms thrashing. The electricity pumping through the net turned the escape attempts into the skittering limbs of a spider-trapped fly. Its claws groped at nothing, gripped their own palms. Foam was leaking from its mouth – maybe an aftereffect of the six darts clustered in its chest. Something else was leaking out too; squeaks, whines, whimpers, something guttural. Nothing decipherable.
“Good enough,” she said, and kicked it overboard.
Great Bear Lake was nice and clear this time of year, the tail-end of the little window where the ice didn’t coat it. Tammy got to watch it sink all the way down.
It never quite stopped squirming.
Then she returned the boat, paid everyone she’d contacted in the last six months a two-hundred-percent bonus to shut up, went home, and slept the whole night through for the first time since she turned five.
***
Tammy was sixty-eight and in the hospital. Again.
It didn’t seem quite fair. She’d managed to deal with such a larger monster for so much longer. But at least this one didn’t hide outside her door, or try to grab her when she took the long way home too late on a Friday, or climb the tree outside her new room’s window until she convinced her mother it was too close to the power lines to stay standing, or make her break up with her first girlfriend because she refused to go anywhere after sundown, or shine its reflective eyes from behind every bush she swore had been empty a minute ago, or stick its nose under her bedroom door the single time her mother forgot to lock the front hall, or anything else.
The door opened for her evening medication, which she was pretty sure she remembered already taking.
Slow, slow, slow reflexes. She looked up and it should’ve already been too late.
It filled the doorway, but not as grandly as it once might have. Its back was hunched; its fur was grey – where it still existed: something had burned thin bald lines into its skin in a criss-crosshatch that covered it from gnarled head to long-nailed toe. Its eyes were a cloud yellow that didn’t shine in the gloom.
Its nose twitched, and its legs unfurled and it took three quivering, unsteady steps, half-dragging at its own distorted heels. The left arm held it upright against Tammy’s bed; the right extended, fingers quivering, and with a gradual and horribly familiar effort, grabbed her by the head as it leaned down close, muzzle dripping something warm and nauseating as its teeth parted.
“agg. yurrit.”
Then it let go, lurched to the window, and slid through it.
Tammy didn’t move. She didn’t move when the ruckus came visiting over the sound of the glass. She didn’t move when they checked her pulse, called the police, asked her if she saw anything.
She was busy thinking.
***
The gravestone was a last-minute addition to the will, on behalf of a woman whose funeral arrangements had been ‘just recycle me and don’t bother with a plot’ since she was forty. But the money was there for it, and the lawyers and family vouched for it, and so it was bequeathed.
‘YOU WIN’ wasn’t the oddest thing to have put on a tombstone anyways. That was the bimonthly graveside bouquet of venison – which was also quite clearly specified, although the graveyard management objected strenuously.
They never had a leg to stand on, anyways. It always vanished overnight, without leaving so much as a drop of fat.