I bang on the door. “Daddy, let me out!”
And I wait, but he won’t come. He never comes when I cry.
I sit on the top step in the basement and wipe tears from my cheeks.
I didn’t mean to growl at him, but I have a wolf inside of me, and she sometimes growls when he glares at me. He blames me for Momma dying.
It wasn’t my fault that she got sick. But he says that if Rachel hadn’t taken me, God wouldn’t have punished her.
When I ask him what he means, he yells at me to shut up, and he drinks more of the stuff that smells bad.
The men came again today.
“You sure she’s a werewolf?” One man stares, and his eyes are hungry.He’s wearing a smart blue suit and a black tie. “That would be worth a lot of money. Maybe in a circus.”
“She growled, and I think she has claws sometimes.”
They all stare harder, and I huddle in the corner of the basement, wanting them to go away.
“We’ll have to see her do something,” another man says. “We need to know she’s worth something.”
“We’ll need to provoke a response,” Daddy says.
His eyes are hard now. Always hard and cold. He doesn’t look at me unless it’s when he brings strange men down to stare at me and poke my arm with their bony fingers.
I yelp when a man jabs me in my belly with his walking stick.
They stare at me, disappointed.
He jabs again.
I cry out, pushing his stick away. “Stop it.”
Thwack!
The stick bounces off my shoulder, and he moves to do it again, but my wolf doesn’t like it.
She growls.
The men look pleased.
The man in the blue suit nods. “I’ll take her. Have her ready to go. I’ll be back in the morning with a cage.”
They walk up the basement stairs, and Daddy closes the door.
I hear him lock it with the padlock.
Cage.
My wolf growls in my head at the word. She doesn’t like it.
I don’t know what it means, but if it’s like the basement, I don’t like it either.
Daddy drops the tray in front of me. “Eat.”
The macaroni and cheese is burned on the bottom, and the fish sticks are dry.
“I don’t want to go in a cage, Daddy,” I whisper.
