Page 4 of Feral Werewolves
I hugged him back. I felt like crying.
I’d done a lot of crying since I got the letter, even though I’d known it was happening for a while now. Last full moon, I’d been particularly antsy. I probably could have been outthere, actually, then, but I hadn’t had the certification yet, so I’d been safe.
My father pulled away and looked down at me. “I set something up. I have the money ready, and if I pull the trigger, there’s a fake passport and you go overseas.” Different countries had different rules regarding the werewolves. He wanted me to go to a country where they didn’t have fences. There, they were all intermingled and tithes weren’t required to be registered or anything, but… the way I understood it, it didn’t matter. It happened anyway, only it happened in your house when the wolves broke into your bedroom and they destroyed all your furniture fucking you senseless. So, there was a lot of self-organization there, into the exact same behavior as here. Just that tithes went voluntarily to places where wolves gathered.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Because if I do that, I can’t come back.” I’d be unable to re-enter the country. If I came back, I’d go to jail for skipping out on my duty to society or whatever.
“They have safe houses there,” he said. “There are places, sanctuaries, where girls can check in and be kept during the moon, where no one touches them.”
I’d heard about this, too, but I heard they were usually pretty empty, that tithes did not voluntarily go there, not when the moon got close. “Dad…” I backed away from him, hugging myself, unable to talk to him about this. It was too disgustingly embarrassing. This was not something I wanted to discuss with my father.
It was very quiet.
“You want it,” he muttered.
“No!” I said, turning to him, angry.
“How could you, Clem? After what happened to your mom? After everything you’ve seen Angela go through? After all of that, how could you want this?’
“I don’t want it!” I protested. “I don’t have a choice, Dad.”
“You do. I amgivingyou a choice.” Now, he was angry,too.
“It’s not a real choice. Leave everything, give up on my future, on my degree, never see you again, live out my life in a foreign country… And how much money is it that you’re trying to spend on this? You can’t dump all your savings into—”
“Yes, I can. That’s what my savings arefor. To protect you.”
“Dad, it’s too much. I’m sure Angela thinks it’s too much.”
He sighed heavily, and I knew she’d probably thrown a fit at the thought of his spending that kind of money. “Whatever she said, I know it’s just her trauma speaking. And when I think of you, that traumatized, for the rest of your life, it kills me.”
“People say it’s not that bad,” I said with a shrug.
“Of course they do. We all say that,” he said, gesturing around. “You were six when it happened, sweetheart. You don’t remember the world before. You don’t know what it used to be like. We all pretend we don’t live in a dystopian nightmare with a borderline dictatorship and that we haven’t slipped intoThe Handmaid’s Tale,but—” He broke off. “I’m only saying, when things are bad, you have two choices. You can sit around longing for something better or you can accept things the way they are and make the best of it. Of course we’re making the best of it. But you know that I think that it’s insane that we don’t just kill all those freaking monsters.”
There were countries where they did do that, of course. Places where they hunted the werewolves down and shot them all. Where they loaded them into gas chambers. Where they did flyovers and dropped bombs on them. Shit like that.
There weren’t werewolves in those places anymore, because if you shifted there, you left. You had to fucking escape in an underground system of safe houses. And to saythosegovernments hadn’t turned into fascist dictatorships, well…
“Yeah, whatever,” he muttered. “Maybe they’re still people, sure, but that doesn’t mean anything. People are responsible for all of the awful atrocities that have ever been visited on this world.”
“No,” I said. “Not necessarily. Sometimes, nature is. Like, whatever happened to the dinosaurs.”
He gave me a look, because we’d had this argument before. “This is why I thought it was dangerous that you were such a bleeding heart for the werewolves. This is why I argued with you. Because now, here you are, faced with the reality of being victimized, and you’re excusing their monstrosity because you think they have humanity. Can’t you remember when they came into our house that night? Can’t you remember what they were like then? Can’t you remember how vicious they were? That’s not something we feel sorry for, Clementine. That’s something we fear.”
Maybe he was right.
Maybe that was why we didn’t shoot them or hunt them down or attempt to eradicate them.
Maybe we were afraid of what the wolves would do if we attacked them. There were a lot of them, after all. And they were objectively terrifying.
My lower lip trembled. “You think I’m not afraid, Daddy?”
His face crumpled.
I ran at him, ran into his arms. He caught me and we both cried, and my dad never cried, like never cried. The First Full Moon, that night, yes, when we left Mom, at her funeral, yes, and sometimes, when we talked about her, yes, but…
But then it didn’t matter.
