Mongrels

by Stephen Graham Jones

Sheep are the weakness of all werewolves,

Those ones, they just have these wolf heads, a man body. They never understand what’s happening to them, just run around slobbering and biting, trying to escape their own skin, sometimes even chewing their own hands and feet off to stop them hurting.”

promised myself to keep Grandpa alive. The way I did it was with stories. By keeping him talking.

But a good wolf isn’t always a good man.

He had been telling me secrets ever since I could sit still enough to listen.

Everybody goes to jail at some point. Werewolves especially.

Getting a degree would be like I was deciding to trade in my heritage, my blood.

It was a big horned owl, probably three feet tall, with a wingspan twice that. A real grandfather of a bird, like from the dinosaur days of birds. It was flapping slow. Darren had bitten the feet off, it looked like, was just holding it by the bloody stumps.

the wolf blood was strong enough that, if every grown werewolf is half full of it—half man, half wolf—and they throw pups with some human, then that kid should just be a quarter wolf, right? Wrong. Because the wolf blood, it’s hungry. Even a quarter is enough to really be half. That’s just the way it is. But if a werewolf and a werewolf try to start a family, well. The pups live, but they never shift up to two legs. Being born half full of wolf blood, it’s like being nearly all the way wolf. There’s not enough man in there to rise.

“Blond,” the biologist says, then, quieter, “are there any blond werewolves?”

We’d learned it in English, when English still mattered.

Her pencil had singled me out. Not because of my blood, I didn’t think, and not because she knew my silhouette, but because I was the quiet one. I was the one she could save, the one she could transform into a hero, right here in front of everybody.

If Arkansas is heaven for werewolves, then North Carolina, that’s our hell.

For cannibalism. According to Grandpa, Darren and Libby and the rest of the werewolves of their generation, they’d all been born too late.

Werewolves aren’t proud. If we were, we’d have died out centuries ago.

Someday when I’m telling my grandkids about the one time we went to North Carolina, I’m going to end right there, I told myself. I’m going to end with three werewolves running hard for their homeland. As if there had ever been such a thing.

And, as there usually is, there was one wolf among them bolder than the rest, who tried to run off with a child from the village, but was too weak from what the madness was trying to do to him from the inside.

After that long, you can’t shift back on your own anymore. Not even when sleeping. Usually what it takes is some massive injury, some real near-death event to bring you back to your human form. Because, when we die, if we’re shifted, then we relax back mostly, if given a day or two to lay there dead. Being born, the shifting back and forth and sticking in the middle is like a seizure. Dying, it’s a lot calmer. Instead of tunneling back in, the hair all over you just breaks off, drifts away.

Pawnshop owners love to see us pull up. They know we’re never coming back.

Our rental, it was out past the outskirts, where you started seeing cars put out to pasture. Werewolf country.

“We’re all bastards,” he said. “Mutts, mongrels. Here’s how it started—how we all started. A woman who was dying anyway, she decided to make her death count. This is back when, peasants and scythes. So she drank a bellyful of some poison plant, then walked naked out to the wolves who had been snatching the village’s children. To kill them. But, because she offered herself to them, the wolves didn’t want her, wouldn’t eat her. Instead, they invited her into the pack, and when she died from the poison, they licked her eyeballs hard enough to roll them back around from the whites. She came back to life, and she bore litter after litter for them, and she never put clothes on again.”

Werewolves don’t care about breaking and entering. Werewolves care about their uncles.

Either stocked with clearance beef and pork or with roadkill, probably. To keep their golden goose alive.

His chin and jaw and cheek were baby-smooth, brand-new. He’d shifted so much that he was starved down to skin and bones. His body had probably even plundered his marrow, scooped it out to rebuild him again and again, from less and less.

It was a story, of course. It’s all we’ve got.

Instead of shot or slugs, though, he’s poured all the silver jewelry he could steal into it. His hands are still smoking from funneling the necklaces and rings and bracelets in.

I was happy for him, I think. And maybe it could work, even. Werewolves can’t ask for anything more than that.