Two different events book spaces in the back of the community library, and Evie amuses herself a little by watching scared little newbies wander in from the street and hesitate over asking directions, guessing whether they’re in for the queer munch or the werewolfism support group.
This one’s been hanging about, fiddling with books on shelves, for almost half an hour. If Evie breathes too deep she can smell the fear rolling off her. This one’s a werewolf, Evie’s vampire instincts snarl from the pit of her stomach. Something in the smell of her, probably. If she hangs around any longer, she’ll miss the start of whatever she’s here for.
“Hey,” Evie says, not loud, but loud enough in the dead silence of the front of the library. The werewolf flinches like she’s been screamed at for trespassing. Evie wants to feel bad about that, really. One of her hands is lying idle on the catalogue computer’s keyboard; the other out of sight on her lap. She balls a fist on her leg, nails biting, imagining the smell of welling blood, desperate whimpers. “Are you lost, over there?”
“No,” the werewolf says. If she had pointy wolf-ears on her head right now, they’d be flattened to her skull. Her eyes are wide.
“You look a little lost,” Evie says. She can’t stop her voice from coming out of her rich and slick, like an expensive chilled dessert served in portions the size of a thumb joint. Faintly mocking, unsecretly hungry. “A lost puppy.”
She regrets that line, a little, at the spark of genuine fear it elicits. She clamps down on the urge to corner, to cow, to—
She works her throat a little, hoists what she hopes is a smile onto her face, points. Manages a gentler tone. “It’s back there, sweetheart,” she says. “Straight down, through the door into the corridor. There are signs taped to the doors back there, you’ll find it no problem.”
The lost little wolf hesitates. She really wants the bravery, Evie thinks, to tell Evie to fuck off. She wants to run. But she needs what she came for; needs support. Community. Evie swallows a couple of times; trying to make it unobtrusive. To sink her rapacity back inside her. To be less mean. She’s not here to scare off lost little things from getting help. She doesn’t want that.
She nods, in as friendly a way as she can manage, and takes her eyes off the little wolf. Pretends she’s very busily interested in the library computer, so that the girl has the emotional deniability of not being seen to go where she goes.
She’s shelving returns, when the werewolf group finish. Over time, as usual, but not by so much anyone needs to make a fuss about it. They trail out in dribs and drabs, chattering; on the edge of too loud for the library, if there were anybody else here to care.
“They warned me about you,” the wolf says from the end of the aisle, and Evie turns to her folded arms, stiff back and accusing face. Angry, now, in a way she wasn’t before.
Evie narrows her eyes.
“What do you know about nurses?” she says, and watches the little wolf flicker back to off-balance alarm, wavering on the edge of fear again because Evie is not reacting any way she’d scripted in advance. Not taking the accusation any way someone is supposed to take an accusation. “Nurses. It’s a role so synonymous with care and virtue it’s unthinkable, isn’t it, that there be such a thing as a bad nurse. Oh, weird outliers, if they get caught, but they’re No True Scotsman. Like mothers.”
She licks the scorn of that word off the inside of her teeth.
“Women,” she says, pushing her voice back down from where it had risen, just a little; “don’t join the police so much as men. We know the police are bad; and that men join the police for the ways it allows them to take part in badness. But women are a separate breed, so patriarchy tells us; better than that. Little enwombed cherubs, not built to handle a gun and kill people under the excuse of institutional good.”
“What—” the little wolf says. “What does that have to do with—”
“Bad people become nurses because patients are ontologically identical to suspects,” Evie says. “Authority and civilian. Us and Them. We, who can dispense death or withhold justice; and the less-human, to whom we can dispense as we see fit. And be hailed as heroes, obviously, the seraphim among the cherubs. Nurses are virtuous. Like community organisers who know all the right social justice words to tell you, without telling any lie that I’ve ever done anything, that I’m just plain Bad.”
The wolf hesitates, and Evie thins her lips.
“I know exactly who spoke to you,” she says. “I know why.”
“They said,” the wolf says uncertainly, and trails off uncertainly, mentally reviewing for concrete accusation.
“Predatory,” Evie says, rolling the word around. “Was that it? That was it. What do we call it, sweetheart, when people call you a predator, just because they know you’re a wolf?”
The werewolf inhales noisily through her nose.
“She was with a girl,” Evie concedes, after a pause. “They broke up, oh, sixteen, seventeen times, I think? And then, one of their breakups, I fucked the girl, and they didn’t get back together any more.” She pauses again. “Correlation,” she adds, mildly, “not causation. But now I’m problematic and predatory and she’s just warning you.”
The wolf stares at her, big hurt eyes, picking through the fact that at least one person must be lying to her.
“Sweetheart,” Evie says, and licks around her mouth again, and sighs. “If you scent something on the wind and it makes you growl and some nice little vanilla person next to you startles, they — well, they can’t help being startled, and you probably work on controlling the impulse to growl unless you’re in trusted surroundings. But nobody should tell you to be ashamed of being something that growls. Those types in there, they’ll tell you platitudes about being unashamed, but your shame makes you pliable. They hate things without shame. It’s too convenient for control.” She looks at the books in her hands. “I have none,” she says. “And — that makes it harder, sometimes, not to growl at scents on the wind, because I’m a thing that does that, too. I’m not perfect, I wouldn’t tell you that. I’m sorry for making you uncomfortable on your way in.”
The wolf-girl is silent for a few seconds. Then, low, she says: “She said you — do things. To people. Blood and — and pain.”
It’s Evie’s turn to inhale noisily, with her eyes closed, holding herself very still. “I’m a vampire, sweetheart,” she says. “I could blame an awful lot on that, if I wanted to, but I was — I was always very about inflicting. And now I growl at scents on the wind, and I enjoy pain and blood and I fuck. In ways. That make nice little social justice community organisers get suspiciously fucking judgemental about consenting adults.”
”…I’m going to go,” the wolf mutters.
“Sweetheart,” Evie says. “I am literally a predator, in the sense that I’m a vampire, in the same sense you are because you’re a wolf. But you’d never be between my teeth without asking to be there.”
The wolf shuffles her feet.
“Okay,” she says, very quietly, and Evie keeps her eyes closed until she’s gone.
The wolfgirl comes and goes. Evie sees her about, back and forth from the library, the support group events, slowly branching out to other happenings. She begins to check books in and out, occasionally. She changes her hairstyle once, twice; Evie notices. Evie feels like a butcher’s cleaver, like something under which bones shear, hungering for marrow. She makes herself as polite and distant and unthreatening as she knows how, wet in her mouth and between her thighs, stomach and fingers cramping from ravenous restraint.
The wolf girl goes on a couple of dates with another of the werewolves. They come and go together, heads together, privately giggling. Evie tastes iron and lightning, clamps her teeth tight together, breathes. Then the other wolf comes alone, and Evie’s — and what a truly unfortunate way to think of her, when Evie is painstaking, still, not to risk learning even her name! — Evie’s wolf does not come at all, for a few weeks, and when she does she’s still and quiet, with sleepless bags under her eyes and an unwillingness to raise her head and look right at the world. Evie’s heart snarls in her chest; the wind tastes of salt and the sour sweat of self-neglect.
When the group lets out, Evie arrests her lost little wolf’s trudge past the desk with a stern little librarian throat-clear. She jumps, wide-eyed, reflexively guilty even as she’s clearly baffled what she’s in trouble for.
Evie can’t look directly at her. She keeps her face as still, staring into the catalogue software, and pushes a hot to-go cup across the desk with a finger.
The wolf cycles through several shades of befuddlement. She gingerly takes the cup, rotating it to squint at the illegible Sharpied rubrics on its cardboard sleeve.
“This is my coffee order,” she murmurs.
“Moping looks bad on you,” Evie says severely.
The wolf stares at the coffee in her hand, then very slowly, hesitantly, sips it, as if she might at any second discover that it’s a hoax or an illusion or some kind of prank. She licks her lip a little. “Thanks,” she says slowly, salutes Evie with the cup, and goes; and Evie has to go out the back and clutch her hair about the tiny pink glimpsed sliver of tongue until someone hammers the ring for assistance bell.
A new little wolf comes in, hunched in on themself with nerves, asks for directions in a little squeaky voice, apologising in a constant reflexive stream that they’re not sure they’re even in the right place. Evie points them the right way.
She’s slotting books back into their places when the group lets out. Voices and footsteps leave. On the other side of the shelving, the newcomer says to someone, low, “Gail said—”
Evie’s wolf snorts, loud and self-possessed. An old hand, comfortably occupying her place in the community. “Gail had a toxic on-again off-again thing for ages with someone who finally left for good and made damn sure Gail knew she’d had outrageously freaky sex with the vampire librarian on her way out,” she says dismissively.
“Oh,” the newcomer says, in a humbly enlightened way.
“Pretty sure she bites if you ask nicely,” Evie’s wolf adds lightly, because it’s the kind of thing people say, acceptably jokey, a socially safe way of conveying what kind of matches you could be playing with, so you can avoid striking one by accident.
“Oh,” the newcomer says. Intrigued. “Um. She’s — so she’s—?”
Evie risks glancing up from what she’s silently doing, gaze cutting across the top of the shelved books and their nose-to-nose counterparts on the opposite side, through the shelves. Her eyes lock with the sideways glance of her wolf’s own dark ones.
“I think you’d have to ask any follow-up questions from the source,” Evie’s wolf says, unchastising but dry, so dry, and breaks their secret slantways eye contact.
Evie clears her throat pointedly, and her wolf pauses on her way in to the group. Evie slides a to-go cup across the desk without looking at her, and then when the wolf reaches for it, smiling, Evie drops a heavy, quelling fingertip on top of the cup’s plastic lid.
The wolf halts, hand outstretched, fingers hovering almost-closed around it. She cocks her head.
“Mentoring suits you,” Evie says, eyes on the screen.
“Mentoring?” the wolf says, incredulous, half-horrified at being portrayed as anything so responsible.
“Do not,” Evie says, “throw your puppies at me,” lifts her finger off the cup, and goes back to pretending to work.
“I didn’t throw—” Evie’s wolf breaks off, drums her own fingers on the cup lid, a hollow plastic percussion.
“You made me sound interesting.” Evie rolls the word off her tongue as an innuendo.
“Well, I don’t know how to make you sound anything else,” her wolf says. Evie can hear her smile. “Besides, just shoot them down. I know you can do that.”
Evie snatches her hands off the keyboard and whips her head round to glare, nettled without a reasonably articulable reason.
“Interesting author name,” her wolf says, gives her a sweet lopsided smile, and strolls off with the coffee. Evie swivels her head back to the catalogue search screen, in which she has, indeed, furiously pantomime-typed an awful lot of keysmash into that field. She snarls under her breath, and then, feeling hot and pressurised and riled, props up the Check-Out Desk Closed due to Insufficient Staff (place returns in box) cardboard sign, and goes home to lie in bed, stiff, clenched fists rigid at her sides, glaring at the ceiling.
Like a goth with a wardrobe filled with shades of black, vampires have an internality painted exclusively in hunger. Maturity is measured out in how well they come to grasp the diversity and nuance of it.
Never between my teeth unless you ask, she’d promised; and the space between her teeth, the space her arms could be around, the spaces inside her and next to her, ache with emptiness. She chews down savagely on a safety-grade bite guard, winds herself in blankets like a spindle; stews.
“Hi,” Evie’s wolf says, a little tentatively, and Evie glares into the catalogue software as if it’s wronged her. “You left, last week. Before I got out. Everything okay?”
Evie wants to fill her flesh with teeth. She swallows the flood of saliva in her mouth, unclenches her jaw.
“Fine,” she grates.
Her wolf doesn’t move, standing in front of the desk, looking down a little where Evie’s computer chair makes her short enough to look down at. The wolf doesn’t fidget. She doesn’t soften or quail. Contrition bleeds into her smell; Evie wants to lick it off her skin, beat repentance and bruises into her.
“Evie,” Evie’s wolf says softly, and the feel of it flutters between her lungs. She reminds herself that it’s printed on the card on the lanyard around her neck, and has been every time they’ve ever met. She grips her own thigh hard enough she can feel marks blossoming under her fingertips; raises her eyes slowly to aim them over the top of the monitor, making her gaze as sharp as the feeling inside her.
“What.”
“I thought,” Evie’s sweet little wolf says, “since you keep buying me coffee—”
“I can’t drink hot drinks,” Evie says brutally. “Not since I turned. I throw up.”
The wolf blinks at her, makes an involuntary gesture as if gripping a remembered cup, an abortive dart of her eyes down to it.
“You learned my coffee order somehow,” she says, “when you can’t even—”
“I smelled it on you,” Evie says, channeling every jot of mortification into oppressive crispness.
Her wolf chuffs in puzzled bewilderment. “You learned my coffee order from my smell and started buying me coffee — going to buy coffee especially for me—” and Evie can’t bear it, she can’t bear this conversation or any conclusion the wolf is going to meander to. She lets her eyes film over, red; moves, in between heartbeats, from sitting at the desk, opposite the wolf, to standing behind her.
Her wolf startles, breath catching.
“You were warned about me,” Evie says, snarling it low and furious behind her shoulder, staring at the curve at the root of her neck, aching. Her wolf chuffs again, disbelieving, the start of a laugh, and turns.
“Evie,” she says, and puts her hands on Evie’s hips, unhesitantly pushes her back until she collides with the end of a bookshelf; and Evie snarls at her, grabs the vertical edges to either side of her, wraps her legs around her wolf’s waist. “Fuck,” the werewolf says reverently, and noses against her throat.
“Wait,” Evie whimpers. “Wait—” and prises her a few inches back with shaking hands, foggy and ravenous and weak. “I wouldn’t—” she confesses, “I wouldn’t let myself learn your name, I don’t even know—”
“You memorised my favourite coffee from smelling me but you don’t know my name?” Her wolf shakes with laughter, eyes bright and hands inescapably tight, holding Evie right where she wants her. “Oh, babe—”
Evie hisses and frees up a hand to petulantly yank on her hair, which makes her moan; and so Evie has to kiss her, desperately hungry, even before they’re properly introduced.
