Running with the Pack

WERELOVE LAURA ANNE GILMAN

Katya sat on her porch, and watched the street. The neighborhood had been built in the 50s, when sprawl was something you did on the sofa, and everyone had two cars and a lawn. Her house was the third in the pretty little cul-de-sac, five houses set in landscaped lots, with backyards perfect for games of touch football or Frisbee or general roughhousing—safe places for wild-tempered kids with too much energy, or teenagers counting down the days of the month, or adults who just liked to laze about in hammocks, and watch the night sky, a glass of sangria in their hands and the remains of dinner on the patio table.

Katya had raised children herself. Two boys, who had gone off and done things in the world. Max was an immigration lawyer. Leon taught grade school math and coached the local track team. Neither of them had children of their own, at least not that they told her, and she never asked why. She had no interest in being grandmotherly.

So it had been a true surprise to her when, somewhere in her sixties, the neighborhood children started coming to her with their problems.

Not the human ones, no. Only the werewolves.

Katya had come to this neighborhood when her sons were grown, had lived in the small green-painted house in the cul-de-sac for ten years. She had drawn no attention to herself, nor sought out others. But they came to her, appearing on her porch and sitting quietly, waiting for her attention. She would come out with a pitcher of lemonade, sometimes, or a thermos of coffee. They would sit on the porch, in all weather, and she would listen. And, because they were teenagers, they almost always asked variations on the same thing.

Katya gave them the truth. “Sex is for release and offspring. There is no morality to it and no immorality. Those are rules for someone else’s game.”

Some of them looked relieved. Some protested, swallowing the veneer of their surroundings instead of listening to their own nature.

“Sleep with them and get it over with,” she told the girls. “Don’t expect anything more than the moment,” she told the boys. Not unkindly, not cruelly, but with age’s knowledge: sex meant more to the males. It was how they marked their place, laid their scent. They were basic: hunt, kill, eat, protect. Girls looked forward, long-view. It did not matter what the pairing: the gender traits bred true. Katya was an old woman, and knew enough about nurture to give Nature her due.

Contrary to modern folklore, weres did not run in packs, did not have territories, and did not keep to their own kind. It would, she thought often, have been simpler if they did: a way to remember who they were, not losing themselves in what they pretended. Of course, that would also mean a serious bit of inbreeding, which brought its own problems. Instead they lived with humans, lived as humans, sheathing claw and tooth in handshakes and smiles, squeezing their inner selves into the brief window the Moon demanded.

But they should never forget. The danger lay in forgetting.

Not everyone felt as she did. “You should not tell them these things.” A parent cornered her once in the supermarket, their carts side by side in the produce department. “You confuse them, lead them into trouble.” His face had been stern, his eyes worried. Katya only shrugged; she did not invite these children onto her porch, she did not ask them to confide in her. She did not tell them anything that was not true.

“Their blood runs hot, the change confuses them, they are learning how different they are when they need to be the same, to fit in. If we are not truthful, how can we teach them?”

“Teenaged politics,” the parent said with a shrug, not callous but with the casual disdain that time endows. “The change comes to us all. We all survive.”

He believed that, but she knew that some did not. And there were not so many of them in this world that she could stand aside, and simply watch.

Katya had not asked for this, the sharing of confidences, the laying out of fears, but she would not shy away, either. Most of their questions were foolish ones, puppy whingings or worries. They asked, and some-times they listened, but more often they drank her iced tea or her coffee and made their noises, and went away, not learning a thing.

She made no promises, and told them no lies. The rest was up to them.

Most of those children who came to her moved away as they became adults, looking for something new, something more. Empty-den parents moved away, and new families came, because the suburbs were kind to their folk. Katya stayed, because she had nowhere else to be, and the new children followed what had become tradition, to ask the old bitch for advice.

Once alpha, always alpha. She had not announced herself, but you could not change what you were.

The girl was no teenager, no raw and anxious child climbing her stairs. She was long and lean, the way weres were, her shoulders erect and her eyes bright and clear. Brown curls clung to the side of her head in a fashion that had been daring when Katya was her age, accentuating her nose and eyes, and her skin was dusky-smooth and unwrinkled. Her car was parked by the curb, a sedate little coupe, dark blue and brand-new.

Katya did not make her wait in the hot sun, but brought out the pitcher of iced tea, placed it on the table between their chairs, and waited.

“They say . . . you know what to do. You understand the old ways.”

“They say many things.” Katya poured two glasses, left one on the table and drank from hers.

“It’s over. My marriage.”

“I’m sorry.” Katya was. She might never have chosen that path herself, but love was never to be disparaged. But she said no more. This girl was none of hers, had not grown up here; Katya had no obligation to her.

Save the girl had climbed her stairs, had lifted her throat in submission, and asked for help.

“Is he..”

“One of us? Yes.”

Katya knew, then, where this would end, and felt a deep, bone-deep sorrow.

“I don’t want it to be over but. . . . ” The girl—woman, really—waved her hands helplessly, unable to find the words. “But it is. And I don’t know how to do this.”

“File for divorce?”

That got a sad, bitter laugh. “I know that. I have a lawyer. It . . . the moment I realized it wasn’t going to work, I moved out, got a lawyer, told him to stay away. He didn’t understand. He thought we could work it out, that I’d change back, come back to him.”

She shuddered, although Katya couldn’t tell if it was at the thought of going back to her ex, or the fact that she couldn’t. The girl’s hand shook as she lifted the iced tea to her lips. “I mean, this, the messy stuff. The inside stuff.”

Katya did not nod, or make an encouraging noise. She sat in her chair, back straight, shoulders relaxed. The cane she never used lay at her feet, the wooden grain satin-smooth. Katya was old now, but she had not always been so, and she knew what would follow. The girl was seeking a reminder of what she already knew, had forgotten in her years out in the world, where people wore civilization as though it was more than a veneer.

“I want to howl my pain. I want to bite his hand when he dares touch me. I want to cuddle and tell him it’s okay, I forgive him, I understand, and hear the same words from him, so we can let it go, move on. I need to move on, and I can’t, because he can’t and I don’t know what to do.”

The words fell from her mouth like well-chewed meat, soft and broken-down. Katya felt exhaustion in her bones, exhaustion and sadness growing as the words filled the air between them. Nobody had ever told this child anything, and Katya felt a growl grow in her throat. Who were her people, to have been so careless?

You cannot choose whom you love. Not human, not were. But it was safer to be human. Kinder to be human, and not so fierce.

The girl went on, her voice crackling. “I feel like I’m chasing my tail, only I have three tails and only one jaw. And I try to talk to my friends and they look at me like I’m insane, and give advice that doesn’t fit, and all I can do is change and run, and it feels all right for a moment and then I’m back and everything’s the same.”

She looked at the older woman, despair in her eyes. “Does that make any sense?”

“None at all,” Katya said, in the voice that said Yes, it makes perfect sense, I understand.

She had not always been an old woman. Once her skin had been dusky-smooth as well. Her eyes had been bright, her heart fierce, and she had loved a man who could not match her, and would not let her go.

You could not choose where your heart went. You could only suffer the consequences.

The girl finished speaking, draining the dregs of her tea and placing it with exaggerated care, as though she were drunk, on the small round table beside her, the glass top perfectly polished, the cast iron legs weather-washed and nicked. Like her, like this girl: a survivor.

“I don’t know what to do.”

Katya did not give advice. She did not make promises, and she did not lie.

The girl had a faraway look in her eyes, the kind that looked at something distant, invisible. “I don’t want to hurt him. But I will. I’ll gut him, if I have to, to get away. He doesn’t get that.”

Katya closed her eyes, the powder-dry skin softening in repose.

They never do. Not until it is too late.

They both heard the howl rising, and both turned to look; a motorcycle, turning down the street, cutting the engine in front of Katya’s house, the rumbling echo fading into the sky above the houses. He swung his leg over the beast, removing his helmet and placing it on the handlebar. A handsome creature, as strong and lithe as the girl. Each motion was precise, steady, the moves of a surgeon, or a painter.

“Oh, fuck.”

The girl’s words were soft, barely whispered, but Katya felt her jaw drop open slightly in sympathetic laughter, a wolf’s humor trumping any human shell.

The boy strode up the walk, standing at the base of the stairs, glaring up at them. He was angry, so angry; Katya could feel the heat of his rage simmering above his skin. The girl was angry too, but she controlled it, holding it within. Females have more understanding, they know how to embrace their emotions, offering them up to the Moon, racing them down until they’re manageable, shifting them into calories burned, not words said.

An alpha female thinks long-term, survival of the species. Males know only kill, or die.

“Get down here!” His voice was hoarse, his gaze not angry but despairing. He does not understand; he will not leave without her, not willingly.

He is were; he should know better. But they have no choice, none of them.

“Humans are fortunate,” Katya says, speaking as much to her own memories as the flesh and blood girl in front of her. Too late, the lesson comes. “They can let go of love. It fades, dims, becomes a pleasant memory. They can choose to part as friends.

They didn’t, all too often, but they had that choice.

“We are made from stronger passions, and domestication has neither stripped nor blunted us. We have only two options: turn love to hate, or love until we die.”

The words were no comfort. A were who loved was a mighty thing. A were who hated . . .

Freedom, like love, has a price.

“I can’t do this.”

But the girl stands, her body slim but muscled, her head high and her eyes clear, staring down her fate, and Katya knows that she can.