Free The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan Page A

standard, no consistency. It gets the hang of some in three moons,others are still going through hell decades after First Bite. But however long transformation takes to bed down,
debut
transformation’s something no howler ever forgets.
    In my dreams a small wolf slept inside me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved its heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what
it
was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up to touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.
    Days passed and being awake guaranteed nothing. You hold a teacup or the rein of your horse and there’s your hand, your arm, looking just the same as always—but the mass is wrong, the reach, the grip. On the outside it’s you. On the inside … not. It’s not
you
, Arabella kept saying. It’s still me, but it’s not you. I kept moving out from under her touch, her look. Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process. I watched the mystery of myself thickening between us into a carapace. Once you’ve stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart’s just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don’t love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim’s incredulity’s potentially hilarious. You
manage
not to laugh. But breaking the heart of someone you still love is a rare horror, not funny to anyone, except perhaps Satan, if such a being existed, and even his pleasure would be spoiled by not having had a hand in it, by the dumb, wasteful
accident
of the thing. The Devil wants meaning just like the rest of us. Once, in the small hours, when I’d thought she was asleep with her back to me, Arabella had said, Put your arms around me, and I had, cupped her breasts and buried my nose in the warm down of her nape—and felt another bit of her faith die because despite my skin against hers something kept us apart. Me. Can’t you come to me? she said, holding tighter. I’m still here. I’m waiting for you.
    The simplest tasks required immense concentration: descending astaircase, opening a door, pulling on a riding boot. I had memories not my own. Waist-deep mist dividing around me. Trees rushing past. Moonlight on a mountain tarn. A young girl on a forest floor with her thigh torn open, naked white doll body on a bed of dark green ferns, eyes wide, dead. Jacob, where
are
you? Arabella wanted to know. Are you seeing something? I certainly was. Harebells crushed under his wrinkled quivering heel. The three moonlit horsemen like a living Uccello. Mucus in his snout had rattled. I fell asleep in my chair with my arm hanging down and woke feeling the stream’s soft cold flow and my shirt warm-heavy with blood. I had to keep getting up and leaving the room, the house,
her
.
    So the two weeks since my return from Wales had passed and every day I’d suffered the torture of torturing the woman I loved, the woman who loved me. At moments of supreme self-pity I’d hated her for it. Last night, woken mouth open, tongue out, body at tearing point over the simmering shape of the wolf, I’d left her asleep and gone out onto the lawn. The moon knew. The moon knew I didn’t know what. The moon was an inscrutable pregnancy, a withheld alleviation, a love more cunning than a mother’s. The moon had a secret to share. But not yet. Not quite yet. I’d wandered the fields, crawled in dew-damp before dawn. For Arabella, waking to find me gone had torn off a further layer of denial.
    “This will almost, but not quite, kill me,” she said now, still with the ominous neutrality,