WolfSon
“Gabe? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
The two boys sat on the rickety wooden footbridge, dangling their feet in the cool water that ran underneath and wound its way through the town. Gabriel was the oldest, by a whole two months as he reminded Jack, with serious blue eyes and untidy dark hair that always seemed to end up an inch or two longer then his mother liked it. Jack, on the other hand, had spiky auburn hair, warm grey eyes, and always managed to look neat despite the shenanigans that the two always got themselves into.
Gabriel pondered the question put to him, mulling it over carefully before he answered. “A librarian,” he decided eventually.
Jack gave him a disbelieving look. “Why’d you want to be that?”
“I like books,” Gabriel replied.
“You can’t be a librarian, only girls can be librarians,” Jack said with the kind of surety that only seven-year-olds can manage.
Gabriel didn’t look troubled by his friend’s pronouncement. “We’ll see,” he shrugged. “What about you?”
“Sheriff, like my dad of course,” Jack said, as if that should be obvious.
“Well, if you’re Sheriff, then you can decide the laws. So you can say boys can be librarians, and they can be,” Gabriel reasoned.
Jack thought about that for a minute. “I guess. Okay, when I’m Sheriff, you can be a librarian.”
Gabriel favored his friend with his rare, crooked smile. “You’re my best friend, Jack.”
Jack snorted. “’Course I am. C’mon let’s go catch some tadpoles.”
The day ended, as most had that summer, with both of the boys sitting in the Sheriff’s office, muddy and listing to a severe lecture. It’s not like they had intended for Mr. Temple to knock over the whole shelf of cans when they put the tadpoles in his pocket, it had just sort of happened accidentally. Jack caught Gabriel’s eye, when his father looked away, and they shared a guilty, but conspiratorial, grin that vanished when Gabriel’s mother came to collect him.
Mrs. Bailey was still considered one of the town beauties, with curling dark hair and a friendly smile, though the tired lines around her eyes betrayed her as a widow trying to raise a young boy on her own. She stared down at Gabriel’s muddy form seated next to Jack and shook her head, disappointment clear on her face. Gabriel slumped a little in his seat and avoided her eyes.
She shifted her purse to her other shoulder and gave Sheriff Somerton an apologetic look. “I’m sorry about my boy’s behavior, Andrew.”
The Sheriff shook his head dismissively. “Not to worry about it, Dianna. Avery wasn’t hurt, and boys will be boys.” He turned his stern gaze on the two boys who fidgeted uncomfortably. “You’re not going to do that again are you boys?” He asked firmly.
“No, Dad,” Jack replied shortly.
“No, Sheriff Somerton,” Gabriel echoed solemnly.
The Sheriff nodded briskly, “alright, Dianna, you can take Gabriel home.”
“Thank you again, Andrew,” she said as she gathered up her son.
Gabriel bade Jack a hasty goodbye, who answered with a cheery wave, as he followed his mother outside. He climbed into the passenger side of the old station wagon and waited for his mother to say what was on her mind. They drove towards home in silence for several minutes.
“Why do you let Jack talk you into doing these things? I know you know better than that,” Mrs. Bailey said at last, a note of tired frustration in her voice.
“Jack’s my friend,” Gabriel said, as if that explained everything.
“Well if Jack walked off a cliff, would you?” His mother snapped.
Gabriel shot her a startled look. “Of course not, and I wouldn’t let Jack walk off either.”
Mrs. Bailey let out a long sigh and gave her son a watery smile. “I know you wouldn’t; you’re a good boy, Gabriel. Lord knows I’ve done my best since your father died, but a boy needs a man in his life.”
“Why?” Gabriel asked. “We’re doing just fine”
His mother just patted his knee and repeated, “You’re a good boy, Gabe.”
***
Jack studied Gabriel intently as his friend flung rock after rock in a high, whistling arc over the stream and into the woods on the other side.
“So, your mom’s getting remarried, huh?” Jack said finally.
“Yeah. Kytor Alcott, businessman,” Gabriel replied, serious blue eyes snapping with unusual fury. At thirteen, Gabriel had finally gained some height on Jack, his dark hair hung down to his collar in its usual untidy fashion and his jeans were dirty and ripped from all the hours spent roaming the woods surrounding Blackridge. Jack remained rail-thin and lanky, though his ever-amused grey eyes were now hidden by a pair of square-framed glasses. He was dressed in jeans and a hoodie similar to Gabriel’s, though clean and without the holes.
“I take it you’re not happy about it?” Jack hazarded.
“I don’t trust him,” Gabriel replied, flinging another rock as hard as he could.
“Why not? He seems pretty cool to me,” Jack shrugged. “I mean, I know he’s not your dad or anything, but he seems alright.” Jack spent a lot of time over at Gabriel’s and felt he could speak with some authority on the subject.
“That’s because you don’t live with him. He’s always doing all sorts of weird things,” Gabriel dismissed.
“Yeah?” Jack asked curiously, sitting down on a near-by boulder to get comfortable. “Like what?”
Gabriel was silent for a long time, not that this bothered Jack; his friend rarely said anything without thinking about it at length. It was the reason that, whenever they were in trouble, Jack did all the talking. Gabriel was a bad liar; Jack could always tell.
“He goes out a lot at night, after Mom’s gone to bed.” Gabriel said quietly. “One night, when he came back he was covered in blood. I saw it.”
Jack snorted. “No way. Blood, Gabe? C’mon, you can’t think he killed someone?”
Gabriel looked back over his shoulder at his friend. “I’m not making it up, Jack.”
Jack knew that, but he didn’t buy that Mr. Alcott killed anyone. “He probably just cut himself--”
“Too much blood…”
“--or hit a deer or something, Gabe. We live in a small town, if someone were dead, or missing and all that, we’d have noticed,” Jack finished.
“You don’t believe me,” Gabriel said flatly.
“I believe you saw something. I mean, you’re a terrible liar, but I think that it’s not what you think,” Jack replied, holding up his hands in a placating manner.
“Maybe.” Gabriel conceded eventually. “I still don’t see why Mom has to get married. What was wrong with just the two of us?”
“Maybe she was lonely,” Jack suggested, echoing his father’s answer when Jack had put the question to him on Gabriel’s behalf.
“I would have been fine with a dog,” Gabriel grumbled.
Jack laughed. “C’mon man, it’ll be fine. You’ll see,” he said confidently.
Gabriel didn’t say anything, just let out a long exhale, staring off into the clear waters of the stream as if they held some secret for him.
***
Jack let out a startled yelp as, on his way to his father’s office before school, he was pulled into the shadows of the alleyway between the grocery and hardware stores. A hand was pressed against his mouth and an arm held him firmly against the wall.
“Jack, quiet, it’s me.”
Jack blinked, trying to get his eyes to adjust from the early morning sunlight of the street to the dim light of the alley. “Gabe?” He mumbled around the hand.
Gabriel was naked and shaking. His long hair was tangled and matted with the dirt and blood that covered most of his body. His eyes were glazed and they looked wrong to Jack somehow. Gabriel lowered his hand from Jack’s mouth, clutching at his shoulders instead.
“Jesus, Gabe!” Jack swore. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I don’t, I can’t…” Gabriel said incoherently, his voice thin with fear and exhaustion. “I, oh shit, I think I killed…I ate…It’s not my blood. It’s not my blood.”
Jack hurriedly shrugged out of the long duster he was favoring these days and draped it around his friend’s shoulders to protect against the early autumn chill. “Shit, Gabe, let’s get you to a doctor,” Jack said.
Gabriel recoiled, violently shaking his head. “No! No one can know. Jack, promise me, no one can know.”
Jack reached out to hold his friend steady, trying to make sense of the situation. “Know what, Gabe? What is going on with you? I’ve barely seen you in a month outside of class, and even then you hardly say three words in a day. Now this. What. The hell. Is going. On?”
Gabriel’s eyes finally locked onto Jack’s, pupils dilated, and Jack got a good look at what was wrong with them. Gabriel’s distinctive, serious blue had been replaced by a fierce molten-gold.
“Something happened to me. He…he did something to me.” Gabriel said, his voice sounding a bit stronger now.
“Who?”
“My step-father. He’s…God, this sounds so crazy…he’s a werewolf.”
Jack rocked back, frowning. “Is that supposed to be funny, Gabe?”
Gabriel pulled away, wrapping Jack’s coat tighter around himself. “Look, I know how it sounds, but…” He drew in a shaky breath. “Remember how I always said that my step-father disappeared at night a lot?”
Jack nodded cautiously, not sure if he wanted to know where this was going.
“Well, about a month ago, I decided to follow him. If he was cheating on my mom or something, I wanted proof to show her. I took my camera and followed him into the woods behind our house. The moon was past full, but there was still plenty of light to see by.” Gabriel paused, trying to find the words he was looking for. Jack felt the beginnings of guilt, he was the one who had said that Gabriel needed proof if he was going to keep bringing stuff up about his step-dad. “I followed him for about ten minutes until he reached the clearing, the one where we made that snow-fort when we were ten. He stopped and just stared up at the sky for, like, twenty minutes. I was ready to call it quits and head home when he called out my name,” Gabriel swallowed and looked at the ground for a moment. “He knew I’d been following him the whole time. I tried to run, but my foot caught on a branch. I got back on my feet just in time to see him finish stripping off his clothes and…Change. One minute there was my step-father and the next, the next there was this big, black…wolf.”
“And it bit you?” Jack asked, eyebrow raised.
Gabriel nodded shortly. “He said, later, that he did it because killing me would be too suspicious, but that this way I had to keep quiet because I was just like him now. That I could hurt people if I didn’t learn to control it and he was the only one who could teach me.”
“You realize how crazy this sounds, right?” Jack asked.
Gabriel pulled the duster off his right shoulder, wiping at dirt and blood to reveal the pinkish scar-tissue arranged in a telling crescent. “He turned me into a monster, Jack. I have never lied to you in my life and I’m not lying now.”
Jack was quiet for a long time, turning everything over in his mind with a troubled expression. Finally he looked up and met his friend’s desperate gaze. What was true at seven was true at seventeen; Gabriel was his best friend.
“You always were a terrible liar,” Jack said with a tight smile.
Gabriel’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Thank you, Jack, thank you. You’re the best friend I could ever ask for,” he declared fervently.
Jack snorted. “’Course I am. So, what are we going to do about your step-father?”
Gabriel answered with his rare, crooked smile.
