The Last Werewolf

butt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. “But I’m not built for it,” she said. “Loneliness.”

I put my arms around her and kissed her, felt the compact warmth of her under the leather jacket. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke and fresh air. I was very aware of the precise dimensions we occupied just then, two bodies, all the miles around us. “You know what you look like?” I said. “You look like one of those actresses in an episode of a seventies cop show. Cannon or McCloud or Petrocelli.”

“I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve never heard of any of those.”

“ ‘Guest starring Talulla Demetriou as Nadine. A Quinn Martin production.’ They were so beautiful, those girls, they hurt men’s hearts. It’s your beauty spot and your high forehead and your centre-parting.”

“That doesn’t sound very attractive,” she said. “And you can call it a mole, you know, since that’s what it is.”

I held her slightly away from me and looked at her. The Hunger had thinned the skin of her orbits but her face still had its centres of wealth, the long lashes and dark eyes, the mouth the colour of raw meat. A look of fragile control over demonic energies. It had been so much just the two of us that there had hardly been need to address each other by name, but earlier that day in a convenience store she’d said something and I hadn’t heard and she’d said, Jake, and I’d loved her, a sudden access of ridiculous piercing love just because there it was in her voice saying my name, the new deep thrilling familiarity.

Later, driving again in the dark, she said, “I toyed with the other thing too, in the beginning. The radical solution.”

Suicide.

“But?”

She didn’t reply immediately. Cats’ eyes ticked by. The Hunger’s night shift was limbering up. Lust was available to me, moved as with aching muscles towards her hands on the Toyota’s wheel, the small taut weights of her breasts, her knees, the beauty spot by her lip. She kept her eyes on the road. “Turns out I’m not built for that either,” she said. “I didn’t want to die. I put on a show of wanting to die for a while, that’s all. I couldn’t believe I was going to carry on, but there I was, carrying on. No point saying pigs can’t fly when they’re up there catching pigeons.”

The universe demands some sort of deal, so you make one. Yes.

“The truth is I was a monster long before any of this. I got my mother’s narcissism and my dad’s immigrant overcompensation. If it’s me or the world, the world’s had it. Of course that’s disgusting. And liberating. That’s the problem with disgust. You get through it. You feel bigger and emptier.”

Which observation broke some barrier in her, some last resistance to dealing in bald specifics. I felt it—we both did—as surely as we would have felt a tyre blowing out. She understood the genre constraints, the decencies we were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured pride. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. By rights, Talulla knew, she should have been orphaned or raped or paedophilically abused or terminally ill or suicidally depressed or furious at God for her mother’s death or at any rate in some way deranged if she was to be excused for not having killed herself, once it became apparent that she’d have to murder and devour people in order to stay alive. The mere desire to stay alive, in whatever form you’re lumbered with—werewolf, vampire, Father of Lies— really couldn’t be considered a morally sufficient rationale. And yet here she was, staying alive. You love life because life’s all there is. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the top and tail of the case against her.

That night, lying on our backs side by side in a Motel 6 bed, I knew what was coming.

“I killed animals,” she said, quietly.

Nine moons, six human victims. Simple arithmetic.

“Yes.”

“Did you try that?”

“Yes.”

It was raining. The motel was almost empty. The room smelled of damp plaster and furniture polish. A truck honked on the wet highway half a mile away. She was thinking about her parents. Her mother dead and her father living alone in the big maple-shadowed Gilaley house in Park Slope. A lot of her strength had gone into not letting the Curse rob her of the warmth between her and Nikolai, who would without thinking run his hand softly over her cheek as if she were still a little girl.

“Of course it was no good,” she said. “I knew even when I was doing it it wouldn’t work. You can tell.”

You can indeed. Have no illusions, the Curse specifies: human flesh and blood. This isn’t a nicety. An animal won’t “do,” at a pinch. Refuse the Hunger what it demands and see what happens. The Hunger isn’t at all pleased. The Hunger feels it incumbent on itself to teach you a lesson. One you won’t forget.

“I thought I was going to die,” she continued. “Throwing up afterwards it felt like I was trying to turn myself inside out. I was relieved. I thought I’d solved the problem, poisoned myself, accidental suicide. But of course it passed.”

My hand rested just above her mons. The question was whether to use what was coming next erotically. I could feel she was aware of the option. She was undecided. Mentally, too much was mingling: her mother’s death, her father’s loneliness, we can’t have children, innocent victims, the prospect of a four- hundred-year lifespan.

“It got worse,” she said. “The next time. After the third month I knew I wouldn’t make it through another Change without feeding properly.” It cost her something to get that “feeding” out. Her voice hardened for the word. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time she’d had to put it into words. Kurtz’s unspeakable rites. “I was crazy,” she said. “Two hours before moonrise just driving around aimlessly in Vermont. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe get myself killed. Walk into a hotel and just go through the whole transformation routine in the lobby.” She paused. Closed her eyes for a few moments. Opened them. “Well, of course not aimlessly. You know what you’re doing but you pretend you don’t. There was this place I knew from a vacation years back. A big woods between two little towns. Houses far apart. I picked one at random. I wasn’t careful, just went straight in. The doors weren’t even locked. It was a nineteen-year-old boy. His name was Ray Hauser. It was the last week of his summer vacation. His parents were in town watching a local theatre production of Titus Andronicus. I read about it afterwards in the papers.”

I didn’t say anything. Therapists and priests and interviewers know all about not saying anything. When you die and go for judgement God will sit there and infinitely not say anything and you’ll do all the damning work yourself.

“Feel,” she said, opening her legs slightly.

Her cunt was wet. There was the killing. There was the eating. And there was this. The central monstrosity. The way it made you feel. What it did for you. You couldn’t live with it without living with this.

I kept my hand there. Stroked her. This central monstrosity had nearly made her kill herself. But she hadn’t. And once you don’t kill yourself it’s all over.

“I’m smarter when I Change,” she said. “In all the worst ways. In all the ways that matter.”

“I know, Lu.”

“You think some sort of red cloud would come down, some sort of animal blackness to blot everything out and leave just the dumb instinct, but it doesn’t.”

“No.”

“I know what I’m doing. And I don’t just like it—I don’t just like it …”

“I know.”

“I love it.”

We left a respectful silence. Her hair was a dark soft corona around her head on the pillow. Evil has to be chosen.

“I tasted it,” she continued calmly. “All of it. His youth and his shock and his desperation and his horror. And from the first taste I knew I wasn’t going to stop until I had it all. The whole person, the whole fucking feast.”

She moved her hips very gently in response to my stroking. The argument with herself about what she was,