Chapter Text
Perhaps, in another universe, Keith liked wolves.
Perhaps, in that same universe, he had even befriended a wolf. A space wolf, because space anything made that thing better, and that space wolf had helped him defeat an evil, alien empire. Oh, and in that same universe, perhaps Keith was also a red-cladded space warrior who flew a giant robot lion around because giant robot things were just as cool as space things.
But that universe wasn’t this universe. In this universe, the closest thing that Keith got to such a lifestyle was dressing up as the Red Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger for Halloween when he was four. Which didn’t include a giant robot, because duh, and wasn’t nearly as rewarding as being an actual red-cladded space warrior, because, at the time, he lived on a block full of dentists who thought candy was the Devil’s appetizer.
Also, in this universe, he was terrified of wolves.
The exact moment when he developed lupophobia was twenty-five years ago, back when he was a young boy living with his father in northeastern Nevada. He remembered sitting there beside Tex in their truck that day, reading through a rented copy of R.A. Salvatore’s Siege of Darkness. They were heading north on Mountain City Highway, which connected Elko to Owyhee, with a plan to visit some of Tex’s friends near the turnoff to Tuscarora. Like always, Kaltenecker had accompanied them on their journey, her snout protruding from one of the holes in her trailer so her lazy eyes could settle on the vast mountain ranges in the distance.
“I should’ve been a cowboy,” Tex sang, loud and proud, in sync with the Toby Keith song playing through the radio. He poked Keith in the side in his usual attempt to get his son to sing along with him, which never worked, but he still tossed the boy a goofy grin. “I should’ve learned to rope and ride. Wearin’ my six-shooter, ridin’ my pony on a cattle drive…”
After following a dirt road off the highway, through a fence gate, and around some knolls, they parked close to a small herd of cows grazing by a stream. Two cowboys watched the herd from horseback, one of whom -- Bethany -- approached Tex as he stepped out of his truck. She was dressed in a collared shirt, jeans, and a wide-brim hat, with her red hair tied into a braid that rested over her shoulder. Her smile had a loving touch that made Keith wonder if his mother, wherever she was, smiled the same way.
“Howdy, Tex!” she said. “I’m glad you could make it out. It’s been a while since we’ve seen you. And Keith, look at you! You’re growing like cheatgrass. You’re gonna be taller than your dad someday.”
“Tall folks make for good astronauts,” said Tex, pleased.
Bethany whistled, impressed. “An astronaut, huh? Is that what you wanna be when you grow up, Keith?”
Keith grinned. “Or a drow ranger!”
“A what now?”
Tex leaned in to whisper to Bethany: “It’s one of those things from Dungeons and Dung Beetles.”
“Dungeons and Dragons,” corrected Keith with a pout.
“That’s what I said.” Tex looked back at Bethany. “Rangers have something to do with animals, I think.”
Bethany laughed. “Maybe you’d make a good rancher then!” She patted her horse on his neck. “You need to be good with animals when it comes to steering stubborn, old mules like Rosco here. Or herding cows, which can be a lot like herding cats.”
“Speaking of cows,” said Tex, “why don’t you get Kalt out for some exercise, son?”
As Keith ran toward the back of the truck and got to work on opening Kaltenecker’s trailer, Tex and Bethany talked about their lives and all that had happened since they last spoke. Most of it was boring adult stuff that Keith didn’t really understand. Much to his dismay, though, the conversation soon shifted to a topic that he had hoped everyone had forgotten about.
“You hear about those cows in Crescent Valley that got eaten up a few weeks ago?” asked Bethany.
“Yeah,” said Tex. “Gavin thinks a wolf did it.”
“A wolf? Really?”
“Yep. He said it must’ve come down from Plaht.”
Bethany snorted. “Gavin thinks everything came from Plaht. He got scammed into overpaying for a new truck there once, and he’s never let it go.”
“Still, it couldn’t have been a wolf that ate those cows. Especially not one from Plaht. There ain’t any more wolves in Oregon than there are in Nevada. Folks killed them all back in the day.”
“I wouldn’t count them all out,” said Bethany with a shrug. “Maybe a few of them have just gotten really good at hiding.”
“How’s that?” asked Tex.
“I don’t know. Sneaky things, wolves are. Maybe they’re dressing up like sweet, little grandmas to fool us.”
He chuckled. “You better keep a close eye on your cattle, then. Unless you want them gobbled up by a vicious pack of ‘sweet, little grandmas’.”
Bethany rolled her eyes. “Don’t jinx me. Domino wandered off earlier, and Henry over there” -- she gestured toward the other cowboy, her husband -- “is still looking for her.”
Despite his agitation, Keith finally managed to get the trailer’s ramp deployed. When he opened the doors, however, Kaltenecker didn’t move. She stayed in the shadows, hesitant to leave. Keith tried to coax her forward, but she wouldn’t listen, so he shut the doors and joined his father’s side.
“Kalt doesn’t wanna come out,” he said.
Tex hummed in thought. “Can’t say I blame her. It’s a bit warm today. I’d wanna stay in the shade, too.”
“You’re free to stick with us, Keith,” said Bethany. “We could use a ranger to help us catch that wolf that’s running around!”
Keith shifted in place, agitated again. “Actually, can I go look for arrowheads?”
“Sure,” murmured Tex. “Just don’t go far -- and watch out for rattlers.”
“I will!”
With that, Keith took off down the dirt road.
“And if you see Domino,” Bethany called out to him, “shoo her back here!”
He waved in acknowledgement and disappeared around a hill, far away from any conversations about cows, wolves, and wolves dressing up as cows.
From there, he hiked among a sea of dirt and sagebrush, enjoying the freedom and peace that nature offered. He scoured the ground, searching for the familiar sheen of chert, amused by all the Mormon crickets that hopped around frantically at his approach like tiny people fleeing from Godzilla. It didn’t take long for him to find scatters of stone flakes, knapped by humans thousands of years ago, and the occasional arrowhead hidden among them. He examined every arrowhead, tracing his fingers across the scars that shaped them. None of them were complete. Some had a missing tip or a missing tang, and some of them had been snapped in half by either the maker or an animal’s hide. He admired how beautiful and sharp they still were, even when broken.
He stopped in place when he spotted a cow ahead, laying still on the ground.
“Domino?” he said. “Is that you?” He moved closer. “What’re you sleeping out here for, girl?”
Something growled, and a massive shape rose up from behind the cow’s body.
Keith froze.
It was a wolf, with gray fur, green eyes, and a snout soaked in blood. It turned to glare at him, fangs bared.
Keith yelped and fell back. He scooted away as fast as he could, gasping as he did.
The wolf stepped toward him.
It roared.
And Keith screamed.
Which was the main reason why, twenty-five years later, Keith would be sitting on the floor of Katie’s kitchen the morning after he had followed her home -- sleep-deprived, muttering to himself like a madman, and pointing a chef’s knife directly at the basem*nt door.
Upon witnessing the thing that Katie had turned into, he had fallen into shock, to say the least. Too much shock to call the cops. Too much shock to try clawing his way through the shutters. Too much shock to even consider asking CHIP for help, not that it would have responded to any of his inquiries. All he had done was grab the nearest weapon he could find, brace himself for the inevitable moment when that thing would come charging through the basem*nt door to eat his face, and sit there, wide awake through the whole night, as he faintly wondered if he should have obliged Alistair’s request to convert to Scientology when they were dating so he would’ve had some sort of religion to cling to during his untimely demise.
The sun now peeked in through the grating in the shutters, an old friend that Keith thought he would never see again. It stirred the chicken that had escaped its cage earlier, the sole survivor of its flock, that, at some point in the past eight hours, had decided to roost on top of Keith’s head.
“The sun has risen,” said CHIP, the sudden intrusion of its voice nearly sending Keith through the roof. It finally stopped the punk music that had been playing all night, and the shutters slid open. “Good night to you, Pidge, and good morning to you, Katie!”
The basem*nt door unlocked.
Keith, trying not to hyperventilate, raised the knife again.
Something pushed the door ajar, just enough for an arm -- a very human arm -- to reach out and blindly grab the blanket and glasses that had been left on the countertop. After a moment of shuffling, the door swayed open completely.
Katie stepped out, that blanket draped over her otherwise nude form. She ran her hand down her face, as if she was hungover, and Keith couldn’t help but notice the goat and chicken blood that still coated her chin.
His eye twitched.
With a sigh, she donned her glasses and met his gaze.
“I…have a lot of explaining to do, don’t I?”
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
After Keith shooed the chicken off his head and Katie washed her face, they both moved to the dining room table to talk. Sitting across from one another, she sunk a bit beneath his stare. He still had that knife pointed in her direction, while his other hand continuously tapped a single finger against the table’s wood in a vain attempt to ground himself. The sound was deafening, given the initial silence between them, but it helped hide the fact that Keith was seconds away from a nervous breakdown.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
“I’m sorry that you had to meet Pidge like that,” said Katie. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, for anyone to find out, and--”
“Hold on,” said Keith, raising a brow. “‘Pidge’?”
“Yeah. That’s her name. Well, it was my name when I was a kid. A nickname, I mean. I use it for her now because it helps remind me that she’s me and also not me. It’s a psychological thing, y’know?”
“Can’t say I do.” Keith scowled. “But you couldn’t have used a more intimidating name? Like ‘Deathclaw’, or ‘Razorfang’, or -- I don’t know -- ‘Thunderstorm Darkness’?”
Katie thought for a moment. “I kinda like that last one.”
“It’s a Monsters and Mana character I used to play back in college, but that’s beside the point.” Keith tightened his grip around the knife. “How the hell did ‘Pidge’ come to be? What is she?”
“Do you want the short answer, or the long answer? I don’t think the short answer is gonna work, but--”
“I want an answer.”
“Alright. We’ll try the short answer.”
With that, Katie sat up straight, looked Keith right in the eyes, and spoke firmly:
“I’m a werewolf.”
Keith’s finger stilled.
His eye twitched again.
“Werewolves don’t exist,” he said.
“I thought that, too. Once upon a time.” Katie frowned, sensing his skepticism. “I told you the short answer wasn’t gonna work.”
“Then give me the long one.”
“Sure, but can you put the knife down first?”
“No,” said Keith, “I don’t think I will. How do I know you won’t turn into that thing again?”
Katie shook her head. “Her name is Pidge. Also, it doesn’t work that way. It’s only during a full moon, and it only lasts for the night.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that? You haven’t exactly been truthful about these things.”
She grimaced, ashamed. “Fair enough.”
“How long has Pidge been around?” asked Keith. “Could you always” -- he felt weird, disgusted even, to say it -- “turn into her?”
“No. Not always. And I’ll tell you why if you put the knife down.”
“Not gonna happen.”
Katie shrugged. “Worth a shot. Like I told you yesterday, when I was a kid, I got into a lot of trouble, and my parents would argue about it. The yelling would scare me, on top of everything else that was going on. My brother, Matt, tried to support me as best as he could.
“One day, he decided that we should take a road trip together. Just him and I. Something to get me away from it all. I was really into cryptozoology at the time. You know, like Bigfoot and stuff. So we took off in search of cryptids all over America. The Mogollon Monster, right there in Arizona. We never found it. West Virginia for the Mothman. We never found it. The Jersey Devil in New Jersey. We never found that one, either, or the Pope Lick Monster in Kentucky. I knew even then that a lot of cryptids were just a bunch of scary campfire stories, but I didn’t care. I was with my most favorite person in the world, and I was the happiest I had felt in a long time. I never wanted it to end.”
She hesitated, eyes a little wet, and she cleared her throat to help compose herself. Then she continued:
“Our last stop was Wisconsin, for the Beast of Bray Road. Also known as the Wisconsin Werewolf. We stayed in Elkhorn and went out into the forest during the night of a full moon to see if we could spot it. In hindsight, that wasn’t the smartest idea, but we were a couple of dumb teenagers on a mission. We didn’t see anything at first, so we went to leave -- but then something attacked us. We managed to get away from it, but…”
She lowered the blanket around her left shoulder. It revealed a large scar from a wound so gruesome that Keith was surprised she hadn’t lost her arm when it happened.
“But not before it bit me,” she said, and she raised the blanket over her shoulder. “I was rushed to the hospital after that. The doctors there didn’t believe my story about the Beast, and they didn’t see anything weird in my blood tests, so they just chalked it up to a wild animal attack, gave me some stitches and a few shots, and called my parents to come get me.
“After I got home, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that I was now transforming into a wolf with every full moon. Thankfully, Pidge never got around to hurting anyone back then, and I managed to keep it a secret from the world, including from my family. Over time, I designed the system I have for her now, like CHIP.”
“And feeding her farm animals,” muttered Keith.
Katie made a face. “Yeah. I try to tell myself it’s just nature. A ‘Circle of Life’ type of thing. I still feel bad about it, though.”
Keith’s eye twitched once more. “Last night, I watched you -- Pidge -- rip a goat in half with your bare claws, and, as it stared into the eyes of God, you sucked its intestines out like they were spaghetti.”
Katie opened her mouth, faltered, and closed it. “In Pidge’s defense,” she then said, “how else are you supposed to eat goat intestines?”
“You can’t just buy a bag of dog kibble?”
She scowled. “Wolves don’t eat dog kibble. Besides, she needs to hunt, not just eat. It’s hard for her to do that when I have to trap her in a basem*nt so she doesn’t hurt people. Live animals to pounce on is the best compromise I can make. If I don’t do it, if I don’t give her a chance to follow her instincts, I get sick the morning after, and I stay sick for a while.”
“Then that night at Sal’s, when you ran off, it was because--”
“It was a full moon that night, which I had admittedly forgotten about.”
Keith glared. “You forgot?”
“And that’s why I got sick afterward -- I’d forgotten to get animals! Look, I always plan ahead. That’s what I do, and that’s what I’ve always done, especially for Pidge. Alarms. Reminders from CHIP. Hell, I have color-coded Excel sheets to keep track of all the errands I need to run for her. I have never failed to ensure that she has what she needs. But, last month, when I ran off like that, it was because I had never done something as simple as miscalculating the day of the full moon. Never. I was…distracted.”
“By what?”
“You.”
Keith frowned. “Me?”
Katie avoided his eyes, sheepish. “I meant it, when I said that I really liked you.”
In any other situation, Keith would’ve been flattered. Ecstatic, even, that Katie really felt the same way about him as he did for her. But all he could think about was that thing he saw last night. That thing that resembled his worst fear. That thing that could easily throw him around like a ragdoll. That thing that had mauled a goat so brutally that he had actually felt bad for it. That thing that was now hiding inside of the woman in front of him, ready to come out and strike again when the time was right.
So, for his own sanity, he chose not to dwell on what Katie said and instead asked: “What’s with all the Green Day?”
“They’re my favorite band. Remember when I said I was doing research with dementia patients to see if music can help restore memory and cognitive function? When I turn into Pidge, it’s like blacking out. I lose all control. When she takes over, I don’t remember anything she did the morning after. All the computer equipment you saw in the other room is meant to study her while she’s active. I’ve been trying to find a cure for my lycanthropy for years, and I think that triggering my memories when I’m her is the first step. I have her listen to music I like because, in theory, it’ll help me remember and give back control. But, so far, I haven’t had much luck. She hasn’t even responded to any of the songs from Dookie -- which, mind you, is one of the greatest albums to ever grace this planet.”
“Tragic,” deadpanned Keith.
Katie sighed. “I told you that night at Sal’s that being honest about who you are would make you a better person, and you’ve since opened up to me about a side of yourself that you’re not proud of. It’s time I do the same. This isn’t something I’ve shared with anyone else before, but it’s a part of who I am.”
She watched Keith, waiting for his reaction. There was hope in her eyes. There was also fear, exacerbated by his silence.
“Keith,” she whispered. “Please. Say something.”
Keith stood up.
“I need to go.”
Her face fell. “What?”
He placed the knife down on the table and headed for the front door.
Katie scrambled out of her chair to follow him. “Keith! Wait! You’re not gonna tell anyone about this, are you?”
“Who would believe me?” he spat, scowling when he almost tripped over that chicken in the hallway.
Katie used the opportunity to pass him and block the front door with her body. “Keith, I’m serious! You can’t tell anyone!”
“Get out of my way.”
“If the wrong people were to find out about Pidge, I’d end up in a lab. I’m supposed to be the scientist, Keith! The dissector. Not the dissected!”
“Should I close the shutters again to halt his escape?” asked CHIP. “I will remind you that the most efficient means of solving this problem is still complete neutralization of the witness.”
“f*ck off, Alexa!” snarled Keith.
Thankfully, Katie seemed hesitant toward any idea of trapping or neutralizing him. It was good to confirm that she had, indeed, regained her humanity with the sunrise. She also wasn’t physically a hulking wolf anymore, so it was possible for him to push past her and walk out the door.
She didn’t follow him this time.
“If you never want to see me again,” she called from the threshold instead, “I understand! I won’t hold it against you. But please, Keith, don’t tell anyone about Pidge!”
At that, Keith whirled around. Angry. Scared. Tired. Even more heartbroken than before. He stomped up to her. “Why the hell would you go out with anyone and make them remotely think that there could be something special between the both of you, when you’re that monster?”
She stared at him, devastated, and she responded meekly: “I just…I just thought that I deserved to be happy, too.”
He hesitated, feeling vaguely like a hypocrite. But, as he stood there, wanting to hold her, all he could see were large claws, sharp fangs, green eyes, and a young boy screaming for his father.
“I won’t say anything,” he muttered. “But stay away from me and Gwen.”
Then, without looking back, he headed down the porch steps, got in his car, and drove away.
