THOMAS HAD a younger brother.
His name was Mark.
He was older than me by three years.
He was nine and I was six when he spoke to me for the first time.
He said, “You smell weird.”
I scowled at him. “I do not.”
He grimaced and looked down at the ground. “A little. It’s like… the earth. Like dirt and leaves and rain—”
I hated him more than anything in the world.
“HE’S FOLLOWING us again,” Rico said, sounding amused. We were walking to the video store. Rico said he knew the guy working behind the counter and that he’d rent us an R-rated movie and not tell anyone. If we found the right movie, Rico told us that we could see some tits. I didn’t know how I felt about that.
I sighed as I glanced over my shoulder. I was eleven, and I was supposed to be a witch, but I didn’t have time for wolves right then. I needed to see if tits were something I liked.
Mark was there on the other side of the street, standing near Marty’s auto shop. He was pretending he wasn’t looking at us, but he wasn’t doing a very good job.
“Why does he do that?” Chris asked. “Doesn’t he know it’s weird?”
“Gordo’s weird,” Tanner reminded him. “His whole family is weird.”
“Screw you,” I muttered. “Just—just wait here. I’ll deal with this.”
I heard them laughing at me as I stalked away, Rico making kissing noises. I hated all of them, but they weren’t wrong. My family was weird to everyone who didn’t know about us. We weren’t Bennetts, but we might as well have been. We were lumped in with them when people whispered about us. The Bennetts were rich, though no one knew how. They lived in a pair of houses in the middle of the woods that many outsiders came to from all around. Some people said they were a cult. Others said they were the mafia. No one knew about the wolves that crawled just underneath their skin.
Mark’s eyes widened as he saw me approaching. He looked around like he was plotting his escape. “You stay right there,” I growled at him.
And he did. He was bigger than me, and the impossible age of fourteen. He didn’t look like his brother or father. They were muscled and larger than life, with short black hair and dark eyes. Mark had light brown hair and big eyebrows. He was tall and thin and seemed nervous whenever I was around. His eyes were ice, and I thought about them sometimes when I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t know why.
“I can stand here if I want to,” he said with a scowl. His eyes shifted to the left, then back to me. The corners of his mouth went down even farther. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“You’re following me,” I told him. “Again. My friends think you’re weird.”
“I am weird. I’m a werewolf.”
I frowned. “Well. Yeah. But—that’s not—ugh. Look, what do you want?”
“Where are you going?”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“To the video store. We’re going to see some tits.”
He blushed furiously. I felt a strange satisfaction at that.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I’m not going to. But why do you want to—never mind. I’m not following you.”
I waited, because my father said wolves weren’t as smart as us and sometimes needed a little time to work things out.
He sighed. “Okay. Maybe I was, but only a little bit.”
“How can you follow someone only a little—”
“I’m making sure you’re safe.”
I took a step back. “From what?”
He shrugged, looking more awkward than I’d ever seen him. “From… like. You know. Bad guys. And stuff.”
“Bad guys,” I repeated.
“And stuff.”
“Oh my god, you are so weird.”
“Yeah, I know. I just said that.”
“There are no bad guys here.”
“You don’t know that. There could be murderers. Or whatever. Burglars.”
I would never understand werewolves. “You don’t need to protect me.”
“Yes, I do,” he said quietly, looking down at his feet as he shuffled his sneakers.
But before I could ask him what the hell that meant, I heard the most creative curse ever uttered burst from the auto shop’s open garage door.
“Goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch whore. Bastard cunt, aren’t you? That’s all you are, you bastard cunt.”
MY GRANDPAP would let me hand him tools as he worked on his 1942 Pontiac Streamliner. He’d have oil under his fingernails and a handkerchief hanging out of the back pocket of his overalls. He muttered a lot while he worked, saying things I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. The Pontiac was a dumb broad who sometimes wouldn’t put out, no matter how much he lubed her up. Or so he said.
I didn’t know what any of that meant.
I thought he was wonderful.
“Torque wrench,” he would say.
“Torque wrench,” I would reply, handing it over. I was moving stiffly, the latest session under my father’s needles only a few days past.
Grandpap knew. He wasn’t magic, but he knew. Father had gotten it from his mother, a woman I’d never met. She’d died before I was born.
There’d be more cursing. And then, “Dead blow mallet.”
“Dead blow mallet,” I said, slapping the hammer into his hand.
More often than not, the Pontiac would be purring again before the day was over. Grandpap would be standing next to me, a blackened hand on my shoulder. “Listen to her,” he would say. “You hear that? That, my boy, is the sound of a happy woman. You gotta listen to ’em, okay? That’s how you know what’s wrong. You just listen, and they’ll tell you.” He snorted and shook his head. “Probably something you should know, too, about the fairer sex. Listen, and they’ll tell you.”
I adored him.
He died before he could see me become the witch of what remained of the Bennett pack.
She killed him, in the end. His lady.
He swerved to miss something on a darkened road. Went into a tree. Father said it was an accident. Probably a deer.
He didn’t know I’d heard Grandpap and Mother whispering about taking me away just days before.
ABEL BENNETT said, “The moon gave birth to wolves. Did you know that?”
We walked through the trees. Thomas was at my side, my father next to Abel. “No,” I said. People were scared of Abel. They would stand in front of him and sputter nervously. He’d flash his eyes and they’d calm almost immediately, like the red brought them peace.
I’d never been scared of him. Not even when he held me down for my father.
Thomas’s hand brushed against my shoulder. Father said wolves were territorial, that they needed their scent on their pack, which was why they always touched us. He hadn’t been happy when he’d said it. I didn’t know why.
“It’s an old story,” Abel said. “The moon was lonely. The one she loved, the sun, was always at the other end of the sky, and they could never meet, no matter how hard she tried. She would sink, and he would rise. She was dark and he was day. The world slept while she shone. She waxed and waned and sometimes disappeared entirely.”