Page 2 of Feral Werewolves
My friend Ninnia’s younger sister was actually a werewolf child, though, and she seemed totally normal. Everyone knew that women didn’t shift, even if they carried the werewolf gene, such as it was. Only boy babies born from the gatherings would grow up to be werewolves, and we didn’t know yet if those babies would turn. The oldest children were only thirteen now. There were reports of some of them turning that young, but most were making it unscathed through the full moon. Whether they would turn when they were older, we simply didn’t know.
Furthermore, whenever the werewolves all shifted forthat first time, when I was six years old, none of those men’d had any recognizable werewolf gene. And there were still men, even now, shifting for the first time for no reason anyone could determine. It was a theory that there was a werewolf gene, but whatever it was, kind of like the autism gene, no one had isolated it.
Ninnia and I were probably friends because of that—her mother was a former tithe and my stepmother was one.
Tithes, well, no question. Tithes were all fucked up.
So, when I started showing signs, I didn’t really want to notice them, which was pretty common.
Women were always freaking out that they were showing tithe signs. There were about seven thousand forums on the internet, and a huge part of Reddit, all devoted to people trying to analyze their tithe signs, and if it meant they were a tithe and what they were going to do if it was true and all of that.
In the end, it usually ended up being no more than six months of your life. Less if you got knocked up.
And women who had been tithes were sometimes very sought out by non-werewolf men afterwards. Maybe it was some kind of fetish.
Not in my father’s case, though. While I was psychoanalyzing my stepmother, I couldn’t help but try to figure him out, too. It probably had something to do with my mom. My mom died that night, the first night, the First Full Moon, as people called it. She was raped to death by werewolves and my father tried to save her, but she made him saveme. Which. Turned out, as we later discovered, they wouldn’t have done anything to me. They never went after children, just women. Of course, the wolves seemed to think that meant people with uteruses who had gone through puberty, so therewerechildren of twelve or fourteen who were attacked at the beginning. But I was only six. I would have been fine.
I didn’t think my father had ever forgiven himself for not saving my mother.
And I thought he probably married my stepmotherbecause of some twisted way to do his penance for not saving my mom. His whole life would be devoted to taking care of some woman who’d been ravaged by wild, clawed, hairy beastmen.
Never mind that the titheslikedit.
The werewolves would go after any woman at all, but a tithe’s body had changed and morphed to be able to handle it. Sometimes, tithes even stayed with them. They called it “bonding.” The internet said it was some kind of out-of-control Stockholm syndrome. But whatever the case, sometimes the tithes went out beyond the fences and the walls and they lived out there, with the wolves.
When I knew I was a tithe, I began to wonder if that was going to happen to me.
It horrified me, but I felt it in another way too, a undercurrent, a strange pull, like the call of the void, where you feel like something in the universe wants you to fall from a tall height, like you’resupposedto throw yourself to your death?
2
clementine
MY ROAMING PHASEhit me the summer after my sophomore year of college. It was the week of my twentieth birthday, and I felt the whole thing pretty hard, this knowledge that I was old enough to be a tithe, to be thrown to the wolves to keep them satiated so that they wouldn’t attack the cities and rape the normal women, that I was old enough to do that, but not deemed old enough to drink.
I spent all my time sneaking into bars or scrubbing the Xs off my hands with a special soap I’d bought. Once inside and not marked as too young to drink, I’d order lemon drops, green tea shots, buttery nipples, chocolate cake shots, cherry bombs, and fireballs.
I’d get wasted drunk and flirt with random men.
I’d note strange things about the kinds of men who excited me the most. I liked it when they seemed so big that they could break me. I liked it when they were covered in hair, faces bearded, fingers and arms coated with it, chest hair peering out of the top of their t-shirts.
I liked it when they acted like it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to talk to them, when they pressed into me on the dance floor even without my permission. I liked it when they touched me or kissed me like they knew I was theirs.
And then I didn’t go home with any of them.
I don’t know what I was doing. Seeing if I could resist? Seeing how far I could go and stay in control?
Maybe I was just saving myself for the werewolves, as fucked up as that sounds.
I would sometimes call Ninnia to talk about it. She was going to a different college, one in an entirely different city. She had to fly there because there were no safe roads there, not roads that weren’t in werewolf country.
“You don’t want to wait for your first full moon to have sex for the first time,” she would say.
“No, I know that,” I would say.
“You want to havesomekind of experience before that happens!” Ninnia was out there having a normal college experience, with a boyfriend and stuff, attending sex toy parties, making TikToks about body positivity and stuff like that.
“Yeah, I do,” I would say. “I definitely do. Next time I’m out, I’m just going to go for it. I’m going to take someone home and get it over with.”
