understand.”
“We’re a pack,” he said, nodding at the people gathered around him. “We’ve talked it over, and we can help you. But you have to really want it.”
“Pack,” T.J. said. “Not a gang?”
“No.”
The people only looked like a group because they were standing together; they didn’t look anything alike— three were women, a couple of the men were young, maybe even younger than T.J. A couple wore jeans and T- shirts, a couple looked like bikers, like Price—leather jackets and scruff. One guy was in a business suit, the tie loosened, his jacket over his arm. One of the women wore a skirt and blouse. They were normal—shockingly normal, considering they were standing in an empty garage behind a bar, next to a large steel cage. T.J. felt a little dizzy.
“He’s not going to believe anything until we show him, Alex,” the woman with the curling brown hair said. She had a sly, smiling look in her eyes.
“Believe what?” T.J. said, off balance, nearing panic.
“You want to do it?” Price said to her.
“Yeah. Sure.” She looked at T.J., then quickly grabbed his hand and squeezed it. Her skin was hot—T.J. hadn’t realized that his hands were cold. She whispered, “I want to help. I really do.” Then she went to the cage.
This was a cult, he thought. Some weird, freaky religious thing. They had some kind of faith healing going on. Did Price really think a miracle had saved him?
T.J. stayed because
Without any self-consciousness, the woman took off her clothes, handing them to the woman in the skirt. One of the others opened the cage. Naked, she crawled in and sat on all fours, and seemed happy to do so, as the cage door was locked behind her.
“Ready, Jane?” Price said, reaching a hand into the cage. The woman licked it, quick and doglike.
As if this couldn’t get any stranger. T.J. inched toward the doorway. He ought to run, but the same horrified fascination that kept him from looking away from the crash kept him here.
“Don’t go,” Price said. “Wait just another minute.”
The woman in the cage bowed her back and grunted. Then, she blurred. T.J. blinked and squinted, to better see what was happening.
Her skin had turned to fur. Her bones were melting, her face stretching. She opened her mouth and had thick, sharp teeth that hadn’t been there before. This wasn’t real, this wasn’t possible, it was some kind of hoax.
T.J. stumbled back, launching himself toward the door. But Price was at his side, grabbing his arms, holding him. T.J. could have sworn he’d been on the other side of the room.
“Just wait,” Price said, calmly, soothing, as T.J. thrashed in his grip. “Calm down and watch.”
In another minute, a wolf stood in the cage, long-legged and rangy, with a gray back and pale belly. It shook out its fur, rubbed its face on its legs, and looked out at Price. T.J. couldn’t catch his breath, not even to speak.
“That’s right,” Price said, as if he knew the word T.J. was trying to spit out.
And that was the secret. That was how Price had survived. Because he was one of those, too. Every one of them standing before him was like her.
He tried to convince himself he wasn’t afraid of them. “It’s crazy. You’re all crazy.” He hated that his voice shook. He still pulled against Price’s grip—but Price had a monster’s strength.
“You’re not the only one who’s stood there and said so,” Price said.
“What are you saying? That’s the cure? Become like that?”
“We’re all invulnerable. We don’t get sick. We don’t get hurt. Oh, we still age, we’ll all still die someday. The silver bullet part is real. But when nobody else believes in this, what are the odds anyone’s going to shoot you with a silver bullet?”
“And the full moon thing is real, too?” T.J. said, chuckling, because what else could he do?
“Yes,” Price said.
“No, no,” T.J. said, giving himself over to the hysteria.
Price spoke softly, steadily, like he’d given this speech before. “All you have to do is stick your hand in the cage. But you have to ask yourself: If you’re not brave enough to deal with your life now, then why would you be brave enough to stick your hand in the cage? You have to be brave enough to be a monster. You think you’re that brave? I’m not sure you are.”
Of course he’d say it like a dare.
T.J. had spent the last few weeks in a constant state of subdued panic. Trying to adjust his identity from healthy to sick, when he didn’t feel sick and didn’t know what being sick even meant. Here he was being asked to do it again, change his identity, his whole being. He’d spent his whole life changing his identity, announcing it, feeling good about it, then feeling it slip out from under him again. He thought he’d done the right thing when he told his parents he was gay. They’d kicked him out, just like he’d known they would. He’d been ready for it—happy to leave, even, bag already packed and bike filled with gas and ready to go. But from one day to the next he’d gone from closeted son to outed and independent—free, he’d thought of it then.
He went to the clinic and got tested because he’d had a raw, nagging feeling that he’d done it all wrong and was paying a price for all that freedom. From one day to the next he’d gone from healthy to not. Now, Price was offering him a chance to do it again, to change himself in the space of a minute to an animal, a creature that shouldn’t exist, with sharp teeth behind curling lips.
The wolf’s eyes, golden brown, stared at him, gleaming, eager. The woman—still flirting with him.
He could face one horror, or the other. Those were his choices. That was what he had brought on himself.
But wouldn’t it be nice to be invincible, for once?
“It can’t be that easy,” T.J. whispered.
“No, it’s not. But that’s why we’re here,” Price said. “We’ll help you.”
“How do you know it’ll cure me?”
“Jane had an inoperable brain tumor. Now she doesn’t.”
If he asked for time to think about it, he would never come back. What did he have to lose? Wasn’t he dying anyway? He stepped toward the cage.
It was going to hurt. He repeated to himself,
Price stood behind him—to keep him from fleeing? The others gathered around to watch. All he had to do was reach. The wolf inside the cage whined and turned a fidgeting circle.
“You can still back out. No shame in walking out of here,” Price said, whispering behind him.
It didn’t look so monstrous. More like a big dog. All he had to do was reach in and scratch its ear. T.J. rested his hand on the top of the cage. The bars were smooth, cool, as if the steel had absorbed the chill from the concrete underneath.
Kneeling, T.J. slipped his hand down to the side, then pushed his arm inside. The wolf carefully put her jaws around his forearm. He clenched his hand into a fist, and by instinct he lunged away. The wolf closed her mouth on him, and her fangs broke skin.
He thrashed, pulling back, fighting against her. Bracing his feet against the bars, he pushed away. That only made his skin tear through her teeth, and she bit harder, digging in, putting her paws on him to hold him still so that her claws cut him as well as her teeth. Behind him Price grabbed hold, securing him in a bear hug, whispering.
The pain was total. He couldn’t feel his hand, his arm, the wolf’s gnawing, but he could feel his flesh ripping and the blood pouring off him, matting in the fur of her snout. All that infected, tainted blood.
He looked away and clamped his jaws shut, trapping air and screams behind tightly closed lips.
By the time Price pulled T.J. away from the cage, he’d passed out.
