In and of Blood - Kat Lewis
Wolves surrounded me in the form of floating eyes. With pressing glares, they glinted in the dark, sporadically blinking like dying Christmas lights. My throat tightened as I took a step forward. Pine needles crunched under my boot and the sound gave life to a chorus of growls and clicking jaws snapping shut. I held my hands out in surrender and said, “I just need to talk to your leader.” The words quaked out of my mouth in a hazy breath, but the growls only grew in volume until a lone howl hung above the feral noise.
As a sharp silence settled among the wolves, a new pair of eyes loomed forward. Their owner’s nails ticked against the surface of her stone throne. The other eyes moved to make room as their alpha emerged from the blackness. She leapt down from her throne, and sauntered into a pale shaft of moonlight that illuminated a gloss of charcoal fur. Her copper eyes sized me up from my tawny skin and bundled hair to my hiking gear and backpack. I cringed away from the judgement clouding her eyes and said, “Chloë, we need to talk.”
The wolf shook her head before nodding to the rest of the canines. I frowned. “Don’t make me do that.” Chloë’s glare persisted, and I spoke again, voice more resolute than before. “I won’t.”
Baring teeth, she tackled me. As she knocked me over, bulging skin shredded my clothes, and a tempest of fabric fluttered around us. I hit the ground, and my body shifted. Layers of a cinnamon coat spurted from dark skin. My head shrugged and rippled, cranium stretching into something of a snout. As fur covered my face and my hands exploded into paws, a snarl brewed in the back of my mouth. Chloë gnashed her yellow fangs at me. Lying on the ground more wolf than human, I kicked the alpha off of me and stumbled back to my feet. The two of us skulked in a circle, our eyes tracing the other’s movements.
We lunged at the same time, Chloë with smart precision and me as nimble as a pup with feet too big. Our chests clashed and our paws clawed at one another. Chloë reached forward and bit down on my shoulder. A yelp shot from my lungs. She tore her teeth away, and the black wolf stood over me, watching my fur recede and limbs stretch back into a cowering human form. Hot drool dribbled from her purple-splotched gums and splatted against my cheeks. Her rancid breath enveloped my face as she licked her lips, freeing my fur from the crevices between her rotted teeth. With a wince, I clutched at the puncture wounds on my shoulder and grimaced at the warm blood sticking to my palm.
Chloë’s snout shrunk back into her visage. Her fur peeled back, revealing the grime-splattered face of a young adult. Her black nose smoothed out, dying itself the same dirt-washed taupe as the rest of her skin. “How dare you?” she spat. Chloë pressed a firm paw against my neck. “How dare you come into my territory in that ugly form and make me deign to you in this one?” Choking on a gasp, I watched the anger constrict across her round face into tight folds. It was eerie enough to see full-grown wolf speak, but to see it speak while wearing the face of my sister made the hairs on my arms stand tall. “I haven’t turned into this foul monster in five years, but I will, Nadia, just to tell you this. Leave and don’t come back.” Chloë’s putrid breath continued to seep out between her chipped teeth and burn its way up my nose.
My throat writhed under the pressure of her foot as words tried to push themselves free. They leaked from my lips strained but audible. “Dad’s dead.”
I can’t be sure when Chloë began to hate me, but I remember the day it became mutual. We were raised as people, fed at the breast of our human mother. During the week, we lived ordinary lives from preschool and ABC’s to seventh grade and American history. Despite our efforts to repress and humanize ourselves, the spirit boiled in our bellies. By the end of the week, it was ready to ride a wave of insurrection up our throats and realize itself against our wills. Every weekend Dad took us into the woods, and taught us the ways of the animal world. On all fours, the three of us ran through the wilderness, weaving between pine trees and up rock faces.
When we were fourteen, Dad took us to watch the sunrise from Eagle Mountain’s peak. As always, I was paces behind. Although I felt miles away from Dad and Chloë, I was close enough to see her sauntering ahead, tail high and waving in a taunting sway. I watched the two of them crest the peak together with the rising sun haloing their silhouettes. They stopped to take in the view, but all I could see was Chloë’s clean asshole crowned by the amber glow, and the proud smile on Dad’s face as he shared the moment with her.
I caught up, and Dad’s penny-colored gaze shifted between us. “One day,” he said, turning his eyes to the dead landscape and the frosted pockets of Whale Lake below. “After you finish high school, you’ll have to make a choice. You can either go on living as humans, or join my old pack. Your mother and I will support your decision, whichever it may be. We just want you prepared for both.” Chloë stared out into the Minnesota mist as if she owned it and all it shrouded. I stood next to her with a paw in Mom’s world and a hand in Dad’s but a grip on neither.
While I spent my days on two feet dreading Friday’s arrival, Chloë longed for the weekends we lived as wolves. Whenever she got the least bit wet, be it a spritz of rain or a post-P.E. shower, people always scrunched their noses, and whispered about how it smelled like wet dog. I discovered that just the right blend of Motions and Garnier could keep the stench at bay. But Chloë refused to mask the smell of who was and carried herself with pride. She bore her faint, fetid scent the way Christians wore crosses. Even when I mocked her stench to impress our cruel classmates, she walked away with her head held high – a talent I always envied.
The night before graduation, I lay on the bottom bunk in our room, the weight of our choice sitting heavy on my chest. I felt like I lived in a world of extremes comprised of this-or-that decisions. My comfort zone – the middle ground – wasn’t an option, and I was stranded alone with a choice to make. To live as my human half, suffering through the toil of days lost behind the blue glow of computer screens, or to lose hours hunting and tracking, occasionally falling asleep with only the hollow pit of hunger for company.
Chloë rested on the top bunk, leafing through The 48 Laws of Power, The Prince, or some other pretentious book about domination. Fingers laced on my stomach, I stared at the underbelly of her bed, feeling like I was gawking at the ceiling of a coffin. “Are you sure you want to leave?” I asked, my words a quiet breath rising above the tick of our wall clock.
“Absolutely,” she said. “The way I see it, you can either be a wolf gifted with a human life span, or a human that always smell a little like wet dog,”
“There’s a lot more to this life than that.”
Her pages rustled. “Regardless,” she said, the bed shifting under her weight as she shrugged. “I’m not cut out for four years of college, forty years of working, and a retirement spent in Pensacola waiting for a call from grandchildren that don’t give two shits about me.”
I frowned. “So hunting and going hungry is the way to go?”
“You only go hungry if you don’t know what you’re doing, like you.”
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“You living out in the world would be natural selection working at its finest. Stay in your bubble. Work your nine-to-five. Find someone to share this monotonous existence with, and be unhappy and unfulfilled together.”
So often when Chloë spoke, I just wanted to projectile vomit. “You talk a lot of shit for someone raised by two humans.”
“Dad’s not human,” she spat out the word as if it were a slur. “He’s a wolf.”
“Is he though? He only goes out once a week with us. I bet if we weren’t in the picture, he wouldn’t turn at all.”
There was a long pause. I could feel her anger burrowing through her mattress and radiating above me. Several clock ticks rang out in the empty silence before she whispered, “He may live as a human, but he’ll die as a wolf.”
Chloë flinched as if the news had slapped her. She eased her foot off my throat and stumbled back. Smearing blood across my neck, I rubbed away the impression of her paw. “The funeral’s Monday.” My words didn’t seem to reach her. She only gaped ahead at the darkness. “Today’s Thursday,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t know which day of the week is was. Her legs trembled, and I reached out to her with a bloody hand. “Chloë, it’s o–”
She snarled at me, face warping back into that of a wolf. “Get out!” I tried to grab the remains of my backpack, but she lunged at me again. “Now!” Leaving the pack and my spare clothes behind, I carried my naked self out of her sight before phasing. She made me travel all the way back to my apartment in St. Paul in the form I was ashamed of. She did so because she was liberated without human materials, and the liberty of wolves meant the death of lambs. I followed the clouds of my breath home, hiding behind the Charlie Brown statues in Landmark Plaza as I waited for people to pass and a chance to cross the streets in peace.
On Saturday, my doorbell rang at three in the morning. Tying the sash of my robe, I squinted at the peephole, only to see the balcony railing outside my door. When I opened the door, I found Chloë standing on the other side with mud-steeped paws dirtying the welcome mat.
She stained my tub’s porcelain with a film of brown gunk, and splayed footprints, both wolf and human, across the floor. I leaned against the bathroom’s doorway, watching Chloë lose a fight with her black, matted mane. When my comb’s teeth snapped in her hair, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Let me do that,” I said. She glared at me, but didn’t protest. A new comb in hand, I hopped on the counter, breathing in Chloë’s damp, stale scent – the smell of our childhood. “Been awhile since you put a comb to that head, huh?”
Chloë scoffed as I squirted a dollop of leave-in conditioner into my palm. “Not long enough,” she said.
“If you want, Monday morning I can put in a relaxer. Make it look nice before,” I hesitated, rubbing the cream into her hair and feeling the knots relax between my fingers. “You know.”
“It’s not like Dad’s gonna see it.” The cadence in her voice chimed with so much sadness that I didn’t have the spirit to chastise her glib attitude.
“It’s a closed casket ceremony. So he really wouldn’t.”
A lull graced the conversation. After a minute, Chloë let out a sentimental chuckle. “I haven’t gotten a relaxer since Mom took me to that nasty hair dresser right before graduation. What was her name?”
“Miss Ashley. God, was she awful,” I replied, teasing through the tangles. “Didn’t she say something about you dying alone because of your hair?”
Chloë laughed and nodded. “Yeah. She said something like if you don’t get these edges to grow back, no man’ll ever take you. As if male attention is our only purpose in life. Mom basically paid her for misogynistic insults. The haircut was just thrown in for free.” I snickered, and she added, “Sad thing is she’s about as nice as your kind gets.”
“Why do you hate humans so much?”
“I don’t,” she said, her words sounding surprisingly honest. “I leave the hating to you guys. People despise anyone who’s the least bit different. Be it the way you talk or dress or smell. If you fucking breathe weird someone’ll hate your guts for that. You’re always trying to assimilate to fit in. You do it with your relaxers and weaves. Others do it with contacts or teeth whitening strips. All you people have to wea– Ouch, Nad.” The comb snagged in her hair and I apologized, albeit half-heartedly. “You all have to wear masks to fit in and not before long, when you go to take it off, you realize it’s stuck to face. Molded to your skin, your soul. I refuse to let that happen to me.”
We sat in silence a moment – nothing to hear but the scrap of a comb in hair and the flush of the toilet in the apartment above me traveling through the walls. Chloë eventually broke the silence with a quiet question. “How often do you change?”
“About once a month.”
“How cliché of you. You throw out all your silver jewelry too?”
I snorted. “Don’t be stupid.”
The next morning, I walked into the kitchen to find Chloë already muddy again. She sat perched at the counter with one foot propped up in her seat and an elbow resting on her knee. She picked at her red-tinted teeth with the stem of a feather. “You know,” I said, opening the fridge. “I could’ve cooked you something.”
She shrugged, smoothing away the tartar her teeth left on the stem. “I didn’t become alpha by letting others do shit for me.” She twisted the feather between her fingers, watching the brown and cream stripes twirl.
I remembered when Dad brought home the news. I had just finished my first year of college, and I was home for the summer. Dad burst into the house, still getting dressed after turning. “She did it! She did it!” he shouted as he caught his breath and buttoned up his shirt. Mom and I wandered into the foyer. Dad met our confused faces with a wide smile. “Chloë’s the alpha.”
I blinked in surprise. “Already?”
Dad walked past me and pulled Mom into a tight hug. “Less than a year and she’s already the leader,” he said, lifting Mom off of her feet.
Envy must have stole its way onto my face because Mom pushed him away and said, “Nadia was just telling me that she made dean’s list this semester.”
Dad turned to me with a distracted smile. “Oh, that’s great, champ,” he said like an afterthought.
I filled up a glass with orange juice and leaned against the counter, watching Chloë dig in the space between her teeth. “I’ve always wanted to ask,” I said. Chloë replied with an uninterested hmm? “How did you become alpha so fast?”
Chloë audibly swished something around in her mouth before leaning over the upper counter and spitting into the sink below. “About eight months after I joined the pack, Boris’ mate got really sick. Tate was the sweetest wolf I’ve ever met. She accepted me faster than anyone else. Even though she was kind, she knew how to be scary as shit. The pack loved her, but more than we loved her, we feared her. Anyway, she took a turn for the worst and Boris, knowing I was a Halfie, pulled me aside and asked if there was anything I could do. I left the pack to get antibiotics, but by the time I got back it was too late. Boris didn’t take her death well. He slept all the time and eventually stopped eating. But I helped him pull himself together, and then we became mates.” Chloë ended her story with a casual shrug.
“That seems too–”
“Easy?” She let out a humorless laugh. “It wasn’t. Getting power is easy, sure, but keeping it? Not so much. The day I joined the pack, this one wolf, Waya, was all up in arms about it. Going on and on about how Halfies didn’t belong.”
I stared at Chloë, puzzled. Last night she implied that wolves were unprejudiced saints, but Waya seemed worse than even Miss Ashley. “But that’s Dad’s old pack,” I said.
Chloë nodded. “Apparently after Dad left, the new alpha ran out all of the Halfies. Until me, there hadn’t been one of us in the pack in years.”
“So what happened when you became alpha?”
“Shit hit the fan. Waya and couple others were planning a coup. I kept telling Boris that we needed to be proactive about stopping them. But he swore left and right that Waya would come to her senses. A few weeks later, I got pregnant and I was worried the pup would come out human. And it did. They came running when they heard the crying. Boris was out hunting and they overwhelmed me.” I could feel the horror scribbling its way onto my face as Chloë spoke. With a flat gaze, she stared at her smudged reflection in the granite countertop. “It was a boy. We never tried again.”
“Chloë, I–”
“I got them back through,” she said with a grim smile. “Burnt them alive. All of them.” Before I could think to ask how, she explained almost gleefully. “After Tate died, I buried some human supplies nearby just in case. Gauze, antibiotics, a fire starting kit.” She smirked. “I rounded up the pack and made an example of them. Then I collected their head and lined their charred skulls up outside of the den to remind everyone. No one said anything about my human side again.”
Uncomfortable silence cluttered the air. In the quiet, Chloë didn’t look at me. I walked around the counter and pulled her into a hug. She didn’t fight it, only leaned against me limp and unfeeling. After a few minutes, she sniffled and whispered, “I need a drink.” I returned to the fridge and pulled out the orange juice, but when I turned around, Chloë gave me an unimpressed look before glancing at the liquor cabinet.
We got drunk at noon. I told her about the worst days of my life and she told me more of hers. We giggled about the times Dad made us smile and cry. For a while, we sat in abstemious silence, thinking about how it was something in and of blood – our bond, our condition, our dissatisfaction with life.
Monday came quickly, and Chloë and I didn’t speak much after that afternoon. We were the first to arrive at the funeral home because Chloë insisted that we get there before everyone else. I assumed it was to give her time to prepare lies for the onslaught of questions from Mom’s side of the family. Mom told all of our human relatives that Chloë had joined the Peace Corps and was busy toiling in some fly-ridden country. I couldn’t say that was far from the truth.
Chloë stood with me in the lobby, tugging at the back of the old dress she had borrowed from me. “Where’s the bathroom? Your underwear is a fucking wedgie machine.”
“I’m sorry I’m not gonna let you have panty lines at our father’s funeral.” Chloë rolled her eyes. “Down the hall to the right,” I said. She started down the hallway, but blatantly turned left instead of right. Curious, I gave her a head start before following. She turned into a room with a window slit in the door, and closed the door behind her. From the small window, I watched her walk up to a chestnut casket resting on a cart labeled with our father’s name. I stared at her, confused by the way she slipped her hands under the ledge of the top until I remembered what she said to me before graduation. Eyes bright with expectation, she lifted the lid and looked inside. A human corpse lay in our father’s coffin. Chloë hovered over the body, throat shrugging with a hard swallow. As tears burned her eyes red, her nose started to straighten out into a muzzle, but she fought the urge to turn. She wiped the tears off her cheeks with paws that eased back into hands, and her snout dwindled, returning to the flat, crooked nose that was too big for her face. Chloë put on a human mask to bury our father, and I hoped, for her sake, it would peel off like a scab.
Wolves surrounded me in the form of floating eyes. With pressing glares, they glinted in the dark, sporadically blinking like dying Christmas lights. My throat tightened as I took a step forward. Pine needles crunched under my boot and the sound gave life to a chorus of growls and clicking jaws snapping shut. I held my hands out in surrender and said, “I just need to talk to your leader.” The words quaked out of my mouth in a hazy breath, but the growls only grew in volume until a lone howl hung above the feral noise.
As a sharp silence settled among the wolves, a new pair of eyes loomed forward. Their owner’s nails ticked against the surface of her stone throne. The other eyes moved to make room as their alpha emerged from the blackness. She leapt down from her throne, and sauntered into a pale shaft of moonlight that illuminated a gloss of charcoal fur. Her copper eyes sized me up from my tawny skin and bundled hair to my hiking gear and backpack. I cringed away from the judgement clouding her eyes and said, “Chloë, we need to talk.”
The wolf shook her head before nodding to the rest of the canines. I frowned. “Don’t make me do that.” Chloë’s glare persisted, and I spoke again, voice more resolute than before. “I won’t.”
Baring teeth, she tackled me. As she knocked me over, bulging skin shredded my clothes, and a tempest of fabric fluttered around us. I hit the ground, and my body shifted. Layers of a cinnamon coat spurted from dark skin. My head shrugged and rippled, cranium stretching into something of a snout. As fur covered my face and my hands exploded into paws, a snarl brewed in the back of my mouth. Chloë gnashed her yellow fangs at me. Lying on the ground more wolf than human, I kicked the alpha off of me and stumbled back to my feet. The two of us skulked in a circle, our eyes tracing the other’s movements.
We lunged at the same time, Chloë with smart precision and me as nimble as a pup with feet too big. Our chests clashed and our paws clawed at one another. Chloë reached forward and bit down on my shoulder. A yelp shot from my lungs. She tore her teeth away, and the black wolf stood over me, watching my fur recede and limbs stretch back into a cowering human form. Hot drool dribbled from her purple-splotched gums and splatted against my cheeks. Her rancid breath enveloped my face as she licked her lips, freeing my fur from the crevices between her rotted teeth. With a wince, I clutched at the puncture wounds on my shoulder and grimaced at the warm blood sticking to my palm.
Chloë’s snout shrunk back into her visage. Her fur peeled back, revealing the grime-splattered face of a young adult. Her black nose smoothed out, dying itself the same dirt-washed taupe as the rest of her skin. “How dare you?” she spat. Chloë pressed a firm paw against my neck. “How dare you come into my territory in that ugly form and make me deign to you in this one?” Choking on a gasp, I watched the anger constrict across her round face into tight folds. It was eerie enough to see full-grown wolf speak, but to see it speak while wearing the face of my sister made the hairs on my arms stand tall. “I haven’t turned into this foul monster in five years, but I will, Nadia, just to tell you this. Leave and don’t come back.” Chloë’s putrid breath continued to seep out between her chipped teeth and burn its way up my nose.
My throat writhed under the pressure of her foot as words tried to push themselves free. They leaked from my lips strained but audible. “Dad’s dead.”
I can’t be sure when Chloë began to hate me, but I remember the day it became mutual. We were raised as people, fed at the breast of our human mother. During the week, we lived ordinary lives from preschool and ABC’s to seventh grade and American history. Despite our efforts to repress and humanize ourselves, the spirit boiled in our bellies. By the end of the week, it was ready to ride a wave of insurrection up our throats and realize itself against our wills. Every weekend Dad took us into the woods, and taught us the ways of the animal world. On all fours, the three of us ran through the wilderness, weaving between pine trees and up rock faces.
When we were fourteen, Dad took us to watch the sunrise from Eagle Mountain’s peak. As always, I was paces behind. Although I felt miles away from Dad and Chloë, I was close enough to see her sauntering ahead, tail high and waving in a taunting sway. I watched the two of them crest the peak together with the rising sun haloing their silhouettes. They stopped to take in the view, but all I could see was Chloë’s clean asshole crowned by the amber glow, and the proud smile on Dad’s face as he shared the moment with her.
I caught up, and Dad’s penny-colored gaze shifted between us. “One day,” he said, turning his eyes to the dead landscape and the frosted pockets of Whale Lake below. “After you finish high school, you’ll have to make a choice. You can either go on living as humans, or join my old pack. Your mother and I will support your decision, whichever it may be. We just want you prepared for both.” Chloë stared out into the Minnesota mist as if she owned it and all it shrouded. I stood next to her with a paw in Mom’s world and a hand in Dad’s but a grip on neither.
While I spent my days on two feet dreading Friday’s arrival, Chloë longed for the weekends we lived as wolves. Whenever she got the least bit wet, be it a spritz of rain or a post-P.E. shower, people always scrunched their noses, and whispered about how it smelled like wet dog. I discovered that just the right blend of Motions and Garnier could keep the stench at bay. But Chloë refused to mask the smell of who was and carried herself with pride. She bore her faint, fetid scent the way Christians wore crosses. Even when I mocked her stench to impress our cruel classmates, she walked away with her head held high – a talent I always envied.
The night before graduation, I lay on the bottom bunk in our room, the weight of our choice sitting heavy on my chest. I felt like I lived in a world of extremes comprised of this-or-that decisions. My comfort zone – the middle ground – wasn’t an option, and I was stranded alone with a choice to make. To live as my human half, suffering through the toil of days lost behind the blue glow of computer screens, or to lose hours hunting and tracking, occasionally falling asleep with only the hollow pit of hunger for company.
Chloë rested on the top bunk, leafing through The 48 Laws of Power, The Prince, or some other pretentious book about domination. Fingers laced on my stomach, I stared at the underbelly of her bed, feeling like I was gawking at the ceiling of a coffin. “Are you sure you want to leave?” I asked, my words a quiet breath rising above the tick of our wall clock.
“Absolutely,” she said. “The way I see it, you can either be a wolf gifted with a human life span, or a human that always smell a little like wet dog,”
“There’s a lot more to this life than that.”
Her pages rustled. “Regardless,” she said, the bed shifting under her weight as she shrugged. “I’m not cut out for four years of college, forty years of working, and a retirement spent in Pensacola waiting for a call from grandchildren that don’t give two shits about me.”
I frowned. “So hunting and going hungry is the way to go?”
“You only go hungry if you don’t know what you’re doing, like you.”
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“You living out in the world would be natural selection working at its finest. Stay in your bubble. Work your nine-to-five. Find someone to share this monotonous existence with, and be unhappy and unfulfilled together.”
So often when Chloë spoke, I just wanted to projectile vomit. “You talk a lot of shit for someone raised by two humans.”
“Dad’s not human,” she spat out the word as if it were a slur. “He’s a wolf.”
“Is he though? He only goes out once a week with us. I bet if we weren’t in the picture, he wouldn’t turn at all.”
There was a long pause. I could feel her anger burrowing through her mattress and radiating above me. Several clock ticks rang out in the empty silence before she whispered, “He may live as a human, but he’ll die as a wolf.”
Chloë flinched as if the news had slapped her. She eased her foot off my throat and stumbled back. Smearing blood across my neck, I rubbed away the impression of her paw. “The funeral’s Monday.” My words didn’t seem to reach her. She only gaped ahead at the darkness. “Today’s Thursday,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t know which day of the week is was. Her legs trembled, and I reached out to her with a bloody hand. “Chloë, it’s o–”
She snarled at me, face warping back into that of a wolf. “Get out!” I tried to grab the remains of my backpack, but she lunged at me again. “Now!” Leaving the pack and my spare clothes behind, I carried my naked self out of her sight before phasing. She made me travel all the way back to my apartment in St. Paul in the form I was ashamed of. She did so because she was liberated without human materials, and the liberty of wolves meant the death of lambs. I followed the clouds of my breath home, hiding behind the Charlie Brown statues in Landmark Plaza as I waited for people to pass and a chance to cross the streets in peace.
On Saturday, my doorbell rang at three in the morning. Tying the sash of my robe, I squinted at the peephole, only to see the balcony railing outside my door. When I opened the door, I found Chloë standing on the other side with mud-steeped paws dirtying the welcome mat.
She stained my tub’s porcelain with a film of brown gunk, and splayed footprints, both wolf and human, across the floor. I leaned against the bathroom’s doorway, watching Chloë lose a fight with her black, matted mane. When my comb’s teeth snapped in her hair, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Let me do that,” I said. She glared at me, but didn’t protest. A new comb in hand, I hopped on the counter, breathing in Chloë’s damp, stale scent – the smell of our childhood. “Been awhile since you put a comb to that head, huh?”
Chloë scoffed as I squirted a dollop of leave-in conditioner into my palm. “Not long enough,” she said.
“If you want, Monday morning I can put in a relaxer. Make it look nice before,” I hesitated, rubbing the cream into her hair and feeling the knots relax between my fingers. “You know.”
“It’s not like Dad’s gonna see it.” The cadence in her voice chimed with so much sadness that I didn’t have the spirit to chastise her glib attitude.
“It’s a closed casket ceremony. So he really wouldn’t.”
A lull graced the conversation. After a minute, Chloë let out a sentimental chuckle. “I haven’t gotten a relaxer since Mom took me to that nasty hair dresser right before graduation. What was her name?”
“Miss Ashley. God, was she awful,” I replied, teasing through the tangles. “Didn’t she say something about you dying alone because of your hair?”
Chloë laughed and nodded. “Yeah. She said something like if you don’t get these edges to grow back, no man’ll ever take you. As if male attention is our only purpose in life. Mom basically paid her for misogynistic insults. The haircut was just thrown in for free.” I snickered, and she added, “Sad thing is she’s about as nice as your kind gets.”
“Why do you hate humans so much?”
“I don’t,” she said, her words sounding surprisingly honest. “I leave the hating to you guys. People despise anyone who’s the least bit different. Be it the way you talk or dress or smell. If you fucking breathe weird someone’ll hate your guts for that. You’re always trying to assimilate to fit in. You do it with your relaxers and weaves. Others do it with contacts or teeth whitening strips. All you people have to wea– Ouch, Nad.” The comb snagged in her hair and I apologized, albeit half-heartedly. “You all have to wear masks to fit in and not before long, when you go to take it off, you realize it’s stuck to face. Molded to your skin, your soul. I refuse to let that happen to me.”
We sat in silence a moment – nothing to hear but the scrap of a comb in hair and the flush of the toilet in the apartment above me traveling through the walls. Chloë eventually broke the silence with a quiet question. “How often do you change?”
“About once a month.”
“How cliché of you. You throw out all your silver jewelry too?”
I snorted. “Don’t be stupid.”
The next morning, I walked into the kitchen to find Chloë already muddy again. She sat perched at the counter with one foot propped up in her seat and an elbow resting on her knee. She picked at her red-tinted teeth with the stem of a feather. “You know,” I said, opening the fridge. “I could’ve cooked you something.”
She shrugged, smoothing away the tartar her teeth left on the stem. “I didn’t become alpha by letting others do shit for me.” She twisted the feather between her fingers, watching the brown and cream stripes twirl.
I remembered when Dad brought home the news. I had just finished my first year of college, and I was home for the summer. Dad burst into the house, still getting dressed after turning. “She did it! She did it!” he shouted as he caught his breath and buttoned up his shirt. Mom and I wandered into the foyer. Dad met our confused faces with a wide smile. “Chloë’s the alpha.”
I blinked in surprise. “Already?”
Dad walked past me and pulled Mom into a tight hug. “Less than a year and she’s already the leader,” he said, lifting Mom off of her feet.
Envy must have stole its way onto my face because Mom pushed him away and said, “Nadia was just telling me that she made dean’s list this semester.”
Dad turned to me with a distracted smile. “Oh, that’s great, champ,” he said like an afterthought.
I filled up a glass with orange juice and leaned against the counter, watching Chloë dig in the space between her teeth. “I’ve always wanted to ask,” I said. Chloë replied with an uninterested hmm? “How did you become alpha so fast?”
Chloë audibly swished something around in her mouth before leaning over the upper counter and spitting into the sink below. “About eight months after I joined the pack, Boris’ mate got really sick. Tate was the sweetest wolf I’ve ever met. She accepted me faster than anyone else. Even though she was kind, she knew how to be scary as shit. The pack loved her, but more than we loved her, we feared her. Anyway, she took a turn for the worst and Boris, knowing I was a Halfie, pulled me aside and asked if there was anything I could do. I left the pack to get antibiotics, but by the time I got back it was too late. Boris didn’t take her death well. He slept all the time and eventually stopped eating. But I helped him pull himself together, and then we became mates.” Chloë ended her story with a casual shrug.
“That seems too–”
“Easy?” She let out a humorless laugh. “It wasn’t. Getting power is easy, sure, but keeping it? Not so much. The day I joined the pack, this one wolf, Waya, was all up in arms about it. Going on and on about how Halfies didn’t belong.”
I stared at Chloë, puzzled. Last night she implied that wolves were unprejudiced saints, but Waya seemed worse than even Miss Ashley. “But that’s Dad’s old pack,” I said.
Chloë nodded. “Apparently after Dad left, the new alpha ran out all of the Halfies. Until me, there hadn’t been one of us in the pack in years.”
“So what happened when you became alpha?”
“Shit hit the fan. Waya and couple others were planning a coup. I kept telling Boris that we needed to be proactive about stopping them. But he swore left and right that Waya would come to her senses. A few weeks later, I got pregnant and I was worried the pup would come out human. And it did. They came running when they heard the crying. Boris was out hunting and they overwhelmed me.” I could feel the horror scribbling its way onto my face as Chloë spoke. With a flat gaze, she stared at her smudged reflection in the granite countertop. “It was a boy. We never tried again.”
“Chloë, I–”
“I got them back through,” she said with a grim smile. “Burnt them alive. All of them.” Before I could think to ask how, she explained almost gleefully. “After Tate died, I buried some human supplies nearby just in case. Gauze, antibiotics, a fire starting kit.” She smirked. “I rounded up the pack and made an example of them. Then I collected their head and lined their charred skulls up outside of the den to remind everyone. No one said anything about my human side again.”
Uncomfortable silence cluttered the air. In the quiet, Chloë didn’t look at me. I walked around the counter and pulled her into a hug. She didn’t fight it, only leaned against me limp and unfeeling. After a few minutes, she sniffled and whispered, “I need a drink.” I returned to the fridge and pulled out the orange juice, but when I turned around, Chloë gave me an unimpressed look before glancing at the liquor cabinet.
We got drunk at noon. I told her about the worst days of my life and she told me more of hers. We giggled about the times Dad made us smile and cry. For a while, we sat in abstemious silence, thinking about how it was something in and of blood – our bond, our condition, our dissatisfaction with life.
Monday came quickly, and Chloë and I didn’t speak much after that afternoon. We were the first to arrive at the funeral home because Chloë insisted that we get there before everyone else. I assumed it was to give her time to prepare lies for the onslaught of questions from Mom’s side of the family. Mom told all of our human relatives that Chloë had joined the Peace Corps and was busy toiling in some fly-ridden country. I couldn’t say that was far from the truth.
Chloë stood with me in the lobby, tugging at the back of the old dress she had borrowed from me. “Where’s the bathroom? Your underwear is a fucking wedgie machine.”
“I’m sorry I’m not gonna let you have panty lines at our father’s funeral.” Chloë rolled her eyes. “Down the hall to the right,” I said. She started down the hallway, but blatantly turned left instead of right. Curious, I gave her a head start before following. She turned into a room with a window slit in the door, and closed the door behind her. From the small window, I watched her walk up to a chestnut casket resting on a cart labeled with our father’s name. I stared at her, confused by the way she slipped her hands under the ledge of the top until I remembered what she said to me before graduation. Eyes bright with expectation, she lifted the lid and looked inside. A human corpse lay in our father’s coffin. Chloë hovered over the body, throat shrugging with a hard swallow. As tears burned her eyes red, her nose started to straighten out into a muzzle, but she fought the urge to turn. She wiped the tears off her cheeks with paws that eased back into hands, and her snout dwindled, returning to the flat, crooked nose that was too big for her face. Chloë put on a human mask to bury our father, and I hoped, for her sake, it would peel off like a scab.