Bitch

“Werewolf is not a dirty word.”

Three weeks ago, Amber’s cousin Chad stopped his pickup truck by the side of the road to coax a stray dog out of the bushes. Big, silky, floppy, scared; at the stage where it had got enormous but was very clearly still a puppy. And in the course of persuading it that he was less scary than being lost and alone and right next to rushing traffic, it nipped him, and just — just barely — broke the skin on his hand. A graze.

A phone call to the number on the collar, a series of decreasingly casual questions, a rush trip to the doctor with the extremely embarrassed family, and a positive blood test later, Chad was left with a fistful of leaflets with titles like “Lycanthropy and You”. Amber doesn’t think he’s read them. Amber doesn’t think he’s done much of anything, except half-remember every wolfsploitation-flick stereotype and bigoted stigma, and panic for three weeks solid.

So she’s been the brains of the family. As usual.

Amber has spent the time reading everything. Everything. Civil rights history, medical information, “So You’re A Werewolf Now” guides, social justice discussions on preferred terminology and the social model of lycanthropy…everything. And she keeps helping. Trying to help.

No, okay: she keeps talking to him, but she thinks nothing’s going in. And the full moon’s tonight.

She made him come to the local support group. (There’s a local support group. Town hall, after old people bingo, for a couple of days before and after the moon each month.) And they were lovely people, warm and welcoming and supportive, and she is starting to uncharitably think that he just doesn’t want to feel welcomed and supported. He really, really wants to feel cursed.

So they’re walking out afterwards, and she’s about to say something snippy because he hasn’t listened to anything and he won’t engage with any of it and when he does open his mouth it’s to regurgitate some POSSESSED BY THE SAVAGE BEAST!!! schlock, when someone says, accented — Russian? — “Hey. Chad, no?”

There’s an absolute junker of a car, rust held together with twists of wire and duct tape, and probably gum and prayers. Two people sitting on the hood — scruffy, fraying shirts for metal bands nobody’s heard of; long, straggly hair on the guy, and a short, sharp tousle, bleached and dyed, on the girl. He’s half again as tall as she is; she glitters with piercings, all the jewellery plain metal studs.

All, Amber thinks a beat later, plain silver.

She doesn’t know them, but they could have stumbled out from central casting somewhere: someone’s weed dealer, and his dirtbag chick. Only, Amber thinks, their faces are too alike: siblings. And she reads the tells, with her reams of shiny new knowledge: hereditary werewolves. Caucasus Bluebacks, the closest anyone gets these days to pure-strain wild werewolf.

(The terminology’s loaded; “domesticated” is a bad word — as is “breed”, although most government paperwork still uses the term “domestic breed” to mean a socially integrated werewolf.)

Chad mumbles something, in his own head.

“You got the look, man,” the guy says, grinning, and unfolds to a standing position. “First time? You got maybe an hour, two hours of daylight left? You prepared?”

Chad kinda-sorta glances back at the emptying town hall, which is about the most he’s acknowledged the support group so far.

“Nah,” the dirtbag guy says, still grinning, then gets serious, real serious. “Nah, man. You got it inside you. You got the look. You ready for what’s gonna come out?”

This is pure fucking bullshit. This is —

This is — she can see it happening in real time, enraging: this is speaking to Chad on his level, his lazy bigot myth “the werewolf is the ATAVISTIC MONSTER INSIDE!” level.

And so that’s how Chad ends up, eyes lit up at the prospect of a fellow bro who Gets It, climbing into the terrifying piece of shit car, and she can’t just leave him to whatever bullshit he’s let himself get roped into; so that’s how she ends up with the dirtbag chick looping a surprisingly strong arm through hers and towing her into the back seat, too.

Stefan has a pitch, which he unreels as they drive out to their place, the sun dipping low. Amber knows she’s hearing a pitch, something rehearsed, and her stomach gets heavier and heavier as they go.

There’s a lot in there about Real Men, and Alphas, and The Beast Inside, and The Wolf. Chad has The Wolf inside him (apparently.) It’s primal. It’s uncontrollable. All that wishy-washy self-acceptance talk isn’t for him. He needs the real thing to keep his Rampaging Animal Side controlled.

(When she tries to interrupt, Nadia grips her arm firmly, rolls her eyes in total agreement, mouths Dudes — and mimes a warning slash across her throat. And Amber is stuck in a car with them, miles away from Chad’s car, which was her ride for this. She clams up.)

She’s half expecting a disintegrating trailer to match the car, but the house they eventually bump up to is a big antique farmhouse; the grounds are overgrown, but the building’s been kept neat enough. And there’s a patio with a rusting barbecue grill, and a freestanding picnic bench made from rough-hewn oak, nearly thigh-thick, and Stefan is pacing round, waving his arms and holding forth like a Reddit Svengali, about the Alpha Beast inside Chad.

Amber wants to remind Chad, sharply, that literally everything from the “So You’re A Werewolf” guides to the medical literature to the nice folks at the support group agree that his first moon, it’s vanishingly unlikely Chad will physically change at all. Might need to shave a full beard off in the morning, but the actual shift will be all psychological the first time round: the werewolf is not a true wolf, but it is a non-human animal, with non-human cognition and psychology. It’s like a drug trip: better if you ride it out in good company and familiar, comforting surroundings while your brain goes alien on you.

And then Stefan opens up a big plastic storage tub that she’d assumed was barbecue tools or something, and starts hauling out leg irons, and Nadia takes hold of her arm and bodily relocates her, striding away from her fucking idiot cousin and whatever terrible fucking hazing ritual the other werewolf is about to put him through.

“That’s not — ” Amber says desperately, as Nadia hustles her round the corner of the farmhouse.

“Shhhh.” Nadia stops and shoves her up against the wall, and grins, identically to her dirtbag brother, full of sharp points. “Sun’s nearly down — you want your fool boyfriend to wander off on his own, full of stupid ideas about the beast inside him made him do it?”

“He’s not — he’s my cousin,” Amber says weakly, because no, it’s a good point, she doesn’t.

“So. Come.” Nadia hauls her along at redoubled pace. “Stefan is…you are not wrong, he is not a nice guy. And he is right on edge of change, now, so maybe you stay very quiet and don’t draw attention, yes?”

And before Amber can form a reply, they complete the circuit of the house and emerge at the opposite side of the patio, behind a shoulder-high stone wall. Nadia ducks down to walk unseen behind it, tugs Amber to likewise stoop, and then drags her down to a crouch at a crumbling hole, large enough to crawl through.

She grins again, wickedly, and gestures for Amber to look.

Chad is chained, heavily and extensively, to the massive oak bench. He looks…both incredibly alert, head twitching in the direction of every cricket chirp, every breeze-stirred leaf; and simultaneously as though that sharpness is totally undirected, in service of no process at all behind his eyes, keenly intent and utterly vacant.

He looks totally unbothered. He’s also naked.

“So the Beast doesn’t rip out of his clothes,” Nadia breathes against her ear. “So he can be taken by the rage, calmed and guided only by the superior pack presence of elder alpha male.”

“But that’s all bullcrap — “

“Shhh!” Nadia’s hand clamps over her mouth. “Listen, you know what happens here, yes?”

Stefan is, indeed, an elder werewolf presence. The change is coming on like the slow, inevitable tide; his shoulder are broadened, his posture melting over minutes as his pelvis, spine and shoulders no longer support a truly upright stance. Human, he is a scruffy weed, tall but with little substance; now, mass is supernaturally wicking onto him, slabs of muscle, the creep of spreading fur.

He also has a fucking enormous erection.

Amber nods behind the iron clamp of Nadia’s cool palm.

“He is all worked up, and someone is gonna get the knot. He doesn’t like being disturbed with a new fish; if we distract him....”

Nadia grimaces in a way that speaks of experience.

“You’re his sister!” Amber protests behind her hand.

“Human sister, yes. The wolf....”

The wolf doesn’t think like a human.

“Besides, is like joke where lion tamer is running from tent, yeah? Today, I don’t have to outrun shithead. Today,” and Nadia is no longer entirely human-shaped either, but her grin remains perfect and truly evil, “just have to outrun you.”

Amber shudders.

“So you be quiet.”

Amber nods, making a tiny, pathetic, involuntary whimpering noise along with it.

Nadia uses her grip on Amber’s face to direct her attention back to Stefan, who is still monologuing about the need for the Senior Alpha to subsume the uncontrollable animal wildness of the new werewolf with his masculine energy, and some idiot process is still functioning in Chad’s head, eliciting an occasional nod, while at the end of the bench, Stefan strokes lube along himself, along a truly terrifying cock that his fist can’t fit around —

“Shhhh,” Nadia croons. “No outward change on his first moon, but your cousin’s body is already alive with the wolf. It knows how to take it, how to fix it. He is fine.”

That doesn’t change the noise Chad makes when Stefan plants his hind paws, shoulder width apart, aims his murderous-looking erection with one clawed fist, and nudges the head unsubtly in-between Chad’s cheeks.

Nadia peels her hand off Amber’s mouth. “Quiet,” she reminds her. “Better him than you.” And before Amber can process it, she is pinned in the hole in the wall by Nadia’s other hand on the scruff of her neck. Fingers touch the back of her calf, drag up under her skirt, skimming a curve from the hollow at the back of her knee, around and in to her inner thigh, and roughly push aside the fabric at her crotch.

She makes a sound. She doesn’t mean to, and it’s small, but enough for a frozen, dangerous moment when all three werewolves are perfectly still and focused. Prey drive, her brain says helpfully, while she’s trying not to breathe.

And then Chad makes a brainless sobbing noise of pure surprise, as Stefan begins to push; and horribly, gratefully, she is safe. Safer. Again.

“Amber,” Nadia’s breathes, very softly, in a tightly controlled way. “If he fucks you, the only way you survive it is if we bite you, yes? I am trying to help you.”

And Amber gets it. She thinks.

Werewolves all get it in the neck when one of their own gets shitty. And so they are, by and large, all Very Nice Folk. They live tight-knit, neighbourly as heck.

Outsiders, idiots like Chad who get themselves bit, are a terrible, terrible problem. Come in with their heads full of the idea that going wolf-shaped is an excuse for acting like frat bros eight beers deep…so if they don’t get with the program, there are other ways to keep them in line.

Bluebacks. Old blood, from the Old Country. The old ways, traditional ways.

If knocking the Chads of the world over the head with their own broken idea of how it works — the Alpha, making them his bitch — keeps the torches and pitchforks from the community’s gates....

But Amber hasn’t been bitten. And what if she takes her modern ideas about “consent” and “cultist shit” and “big gay werewolf rape” and brings the sheriff out here regardless? Can’t kill her. And there are ethics, Big Serious Community Ethical Standards, about biting her on purpose just to keep her quiet.

A cool, spit-slicked finger swabs her own, panic-tight asshole.

But that’s the entire mechanism right there, isn’t it? You make the idiot outsiders safe by bringing them into the community. And you do that by —

Somebody —

(“Shhhh,” Nadia croons, smug and hot and in a different octave to her human vocal chords)

…somebody just has to make ‘em their bitch.