The Frenzy Page 7

  After his death Elena used the curse. She had never resorted to it before. It can destroy the lives of everyone it touches. But Elena felt she had no choice. She came to your grandfather one night and told him but he pretended not to hear her, pretended she was a dream. But none of it was a dream. You are the result.

  Of your mother’s curse? I asked.

  Sasha nodded.

  I looked down at my body. Of course. I was a curse. That was all I was.

  Sasha went on: You were born cursed but your mother didn’t know. Your grandfather could have told her but he didn’t and she probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. Some years later my mother was dying. She called Peter and me to her bedside and told us to go kill your mother. The curse wasn’t enough. She wanted the ultimate revenge.

  My mother killed your father. Your mother wanted to kill my mother. I didn’t pose these as questions. It was clear to me, as if I’d heard it all before.

  Yes.

  Who is Peter?

  Sasha turned her head away and stared into the darkness. Her eyes glowed brighter. Peter was my husband, she said. He’s gone now.

  What happened to him? I asked, dreading the answer.

  Peter, Sasha said, was killed, too.

  I heard a low growl come from the large wolf beside me. Victor.

  I shook my head. I don’t want to hear it.

  Yes. By your mother. Four years ago. We had come looking for her and he couldn’t get close enough to do what we had to do. She wore the silver cross. Sasha shivered violently. And she shot him.

  I could see the dead wolf in the back of my mother’s truck. I could see him as clearly as if he were bleeding to death in front of my eyes. But he wasn’t a wolf. He was what I was.

  That was when I changed, I said.

  Sasha nodded. I know, she told me. I was there. And now you have changed again.

  Why? Why has it only happened twice? I felt like it was going to happen more than that but it didn’t.

  It’s different for everyone but for most of us it’s connected to powerful emotions, Sasha said. For female shape-shifters there is also the menses factor. And the moon, of course. These things have to be working in concert. The rage can be controlled in various ways but not the other things, obviously.

  Shape-shifters? You mean …

  Lycanthropy.

  Werewolves? I had read books and seen movies and TV shows about them. I knew that they changed during the full moon, that they could be destroyed with silver. It couldn’t be true—they weren’t real—but if it was true then suddenly everything made sense. All the memories I had tried to keep at a distance, repress, send back to the dark place where they had come from rushed back at me. The wolf in the truck. The smell of blood. The hair on my body. The pull of the moon.

  The rage in my soul.

  Sasha nodded. But I prefer to call it the frenzy. One can be born that way or one can be cursed.

  So my mother had done this to me somehow. My mother had looked out across the pale terrain that winter over seventeen years ago, seen the wolf in its freedom and in its glory, and she had shot that wolf down. And because of this I had been cursed. All the weirdness about me, all the wildness and the violence that my mother sensed and hated, and that I feared and hated, too—all that was her fault. It was as if she had put it all on me without realizing it so that she could appear pure to the world, an angel. My mother had denied every dark part of herself and here was Sasha who lived it out in each breath of forest air and each bite of bloody meat.

  And what am I supposed to do now? I yelped. I’m a monster. I can’t even tell my boyfriend what I am. My mother doesn’t know what she did. My father hits me.

  I heard Victor growl again. He won’t anymore. Victor almost sounded, what? Protective? I didn’t understand why he cared. What interest could he have in me?

  Sasha came and knelt beside me, nuzzled my face with hers. I closed my eyes, entranced, letting myself be soothed and comforted in that moment. My pulse slowed. There was a long silence. I opened my eyes and looked up at her.

  Then:

  Kill your mother, she whispered.

  Kill her? My mother? My mother? Who was this thing instructing me to do this? Who was Sasha and why had I allowed her to speak to me, how had I ever imagined that I could be hers? The hair on my body pricked up as I thought about the deaths in the woods, the way the woods I loved were so full of so much violent death. And that is where Sasha lived.

  As cold and detached as my mother could be, at least she loved me; she was human. Sasha was an animal. But I had wanted to kill my mother. Maybe I was more like Sasha than I knew.

  Even though I now understood more about what had happened to me, I still didn’t fully understand the consequences of what I was.

  I didn’t want to understand. I wanted to escape. I stretched my spine and stood shakily; my legs were stiff. I shook them out and pawed the ground until I could smell the murky, mineral sustenance of the earth and then, with that, I ran.

  Help

  When I got home at dawn it was my mother who was waiting for me. She sat on the porch wrapped in a robe. She had her glasses on and there were pastel foam curlers in her hair.

  My mother didn’t look like someone who would hurt anyone, not even a wolf. And she certainly didn’t look like anyone I would ever want to hurt.

  I, on the other hand, must have looked hideous because she gasped and stood up when she saw me.

  Then I realized. I was naked and shivering. I stopped in my tracks, trying to cover my chest and between my legs as best I could. There was blood on my mouth and hands. Memories of the night came rushing back to me and I felt like vomiting.

  “What happened?” she said. “Who did this to you?”

  I couldn’t even begin to tell her any of it, or even let myself acknowledge it. “I’m okay, Mom. No one hurt me.”

  She ran down the steps, taking off her bathrobe as she went, and wrapped me in it. She was wearing striped pajamas underneath. We went inside.

  “We need to get you to a hospital,” she said.

  “No. I’m really fine.”

  “Liv, you are not fine!” She was reaching for the phone and I stopped her.

  “I was at a girlfriend’s,” I said.

  “Girlfriend? You haven’t had a girlfriend for years. Who is this girlfriend?”

  I ignored her.

  “We were swimming at this party and some boys stole our clothes. And they … locked us out.”

  “Locked you out? Of where?”

  “Where the party was. I was afraid to come home and get hit again.”

  She touched my mouth gently. “This is blood, Olivia. I’m telling your father.”

  “No!” I pulled away from her and tried to calm down. “Listen. Mom.” My teeth were chattering so much that it was hard to talk. “I had a hard night. But I’m okay. No one hurt me. Except Dad last night.”

  She put her hand on my arm and I jerked it away automatically, then, when I saw her eyes, regretted it.

  “I’m sorry he did that,” she said. “He loses control when he’s drinking. But you need to learn that you just can’t go AWOL on us. Not in a place where things … happen.”

  “What do you mean where things happen?” I asked defensively.

  “You know what. I’m talking about the murders in the woods. There’s a reason we’re protective.”

  “Mom,” I began, but I didn’t even know what I was going to say. I was so tired I could barely stand.

  “We need to get you some help.”

  “Help” came the next day, in the form of an exam by the family doctor (proving I had not been molested or physically injured in any way and, luckily, not revealing anything else abnormal about me) and a visit to Dr. Nieberding. He fell back into the reclining chair as he always did, as if that motion and the sound it made signaled the beginning of his fifty-minute hour.

  “So, Olivia, do you know why you are here this time?” he asked me.

 
“Liv,” I said. “It’s still Liv.”

  “Do you know why you’re here, Liv?”

  I shrugged and looked past him out the window, wanting to escape to the forest. There was a small tree in the courtyard of Nieberding’s building. I imagined that it was dreaming of the woods, too.

  “Do you think that you might have some new issues that need to be addressed? Some things that you feel you can’t express at home?”

  I picked at my cuticles. “Not really.”

  “Your mother still feels that this condition of yours is affecting your self-esteem.”

  I folded my arms in my lap to hide the hair.

  “Would you say that is accurate?” he asked.

  I needed sarcasm to keep him at a distance. What if he got me to reveal too much? “The hirsuteness? Because you can just come right out and say it.”

  “She thinks you might have internalized it even more than before. She says some of your behavior has seemed almost … animalistic.”

  What if they knew? They would never believe it but what if they knew something? “Like what?” I asked warily.

  “She told me you didn’t come home last night. Until the morning. And without your clothes? You seemed to imitate some of the qualities of a … well, a wild animal.”

  I tensed in my chair. “My mother has a tendency to exaggerate,” I said.

  “You sound angry at your mother. Would you say that is accurate?”

  I shrugged and looked at my shoes.

  “Have you been taking your medication? Do you think this may have something to do with the behavior?”

  I had to change the subject. “I’m angry. Yes. I stayed out once one night and my father hit me in the face. Then I stayed out again because of that and my mother decides I’m an animal and need treatment.”

  “Your father hit you?”

  “He has before.” Besides that last incident there was the time when I turned thirteen and my mother killed the wolf. When I came back from the woods my father smacked me hard across the mouth. But I didn’t mind it so much that time. I almost welcomed it as punishment for the thoughts I’d had about my mother. It didn’t make me mad or make me frenzy again; I only hung my head that time.

  The doctor made a note on his pad. I resisted the impulse to snarl at him and lick my chops. He continued to ask me questions about my parents, my friends, starting school in the fall. I evaded everything. I was thinking about Corey and part of me wanted to talk about him, just to be able to get it out, but I knew I couldn’t say a thing to this doctor person. Corey and I hadn’t spoken since our argument the day before when I had run away from him. We usually saw each other, or at least spoke, every day.

  Nieberding asked me more about the night before and I told him the same story I’d given my mom, emphasizing the fact that I was afraid to come home because I thought my father would hit me again. The doctor warned me about the dangers of the woods, of being out in this town alone at night. Finally the session was over.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to stop now,” Nieberding said, as he always did, with a touch of condescending concern in his voice, as if I’d be upset.

  I stood and curtsied.

  “Watch out for your sheep and chickens, good Doctor,” I said.

  I couldn’t resist.

  When I got home I lay in a fetal position on my bed, holding my cell phone, not even able to write in my diary, trying to send Corey a psychic message to call me back. I had tried him repeatedly since that morning but he hadn’t answered. My heart actually felt like a hard thing that had cracked, almost like a broken rib, and every breath seemed to make the pain worse.

  It was terrible not talking to Corey. I wasn’t complete anymore without him. I really felt like a part of me had been severed and all my blood was draining out through the place where the part had been. And so much had happened; it was hard to handle it alone. Not that I was ready to tell anyone yet.

  When the phone rang I gasped for breath but it wasn’t Corey. It was Pace. He sounded about the way I felt.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” Pace said.

  We both just sat there silently. Then he spoke.

  “I need your help.”

  I still hadn’t heard from Corey when I met Pace the next day after work at the Fairborn house on Green. He was sitting on the carved front porch in the shadows with his head down. D’Argenton, the Great Dane mix from the pound, was sniffing his ear. I went and sat next to them. The heat in the air was almost unbearable, like you wanted to run screaming from it. Sweat trickled down my neck.

  “What happened?” I realized how much had changed for me since I’d talked to Pace last and I felt bad that I hadn’t called him before. I’d been trying to focus on Corey and deal with all the weird shit that had gone down but I’d neglected my friend.

  He looked up at me and his eyes were rimmed with red. “It so makes fucking sense.”

  “What? Pace, what?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and clutched at his shoulders, rocked gently back and forth.

  I grabbed his bicep. “What is it?”

  “I’m losing my mind. I must be losing my goddamn mind.”

  “Okay, start at the beginning.” It felt like the first time in days I wasn’t fixated on my own problems. Pace looked like he was going to start sobbing any second.

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Is it something with the guy? Michael?”

  Pace stopped and stared at me, like he was pleading with me to make it better. “I feel insane. Am I going insane, Liv? Will they lock me up again?”

  “It’s okay. Everything will be okay,” I told him.

  “You’re not crazy.” But what did I know? I was crazy myself, it seemed. I’d just been told that I was a lycanthrope. D’Argenton started to whine softly and I stroked his long haunch, as much to comfort myself as to quiet him.

  Pace looked back toward the house. The arched windows were dark and reminded me of giant eyes raising their brows at us. I remembered the terrible cold inside there. It would have been refreshing today, if it didn’t make you feel like throwing up. That kind of cold wasn’t natural.

  “Do you want me to go inside with you?” I asked.

  Pace stood up. “No. I want to get the hell out of here. I never want to come back.”

  I stood, too, and walked with him up the path. D’Argenton followed regally behind us.

  “Or maybe I do want to stay,” he said, looking back at the house that was looming up darker in the gathering twilight. “Maybe I want to stay here forever.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? Pace?”

  We stood facing each other on the sidewalk in front of the house. It was eerily quiet and Pace seemed far away in his thoughts.

  “I’m worried,” I told him.

  “Never mind,” he said, and I didn’t press him. I let him brush me off even though an uneasy stirring in my belly told me I shouldn’t have.

  Pace’s gaze focused back on me and I recognized the friend I knew. “Come walk with me. You don’t look okay.” He put his arm around me and I almost started crying.

  “Corey hasn’t called me. We had a fight.”

  Pace squeezed my shoulder. “Jesus. What’s happening here? If you guys can’t get along, no one can.”

  “We don’t have to talk about me.”

  “Yes, we do. What did you fight about?”

  “No, Pace. Forget it. I’m really worried about you.”

  “I’ll be okay.” He pulled his T-shirt up to wipe the sweat from his face. His abs showed, perfectly cut. He did thousands of sit-ups a day, it looked like.

  Pace seemed perfect in every way although I knew he wasn’t. I never knew all the details of why he was hospitalized. I wondered if maybe he’d tried to hurt himself back then.

  Pace didn’t want to go home, so after he dropped D’Argenton off he stayed for dinner that night. When we’d eaten, or sufficiently picke
d at food in my case, Pace and I went to my room and lay on my bed and I told him more about Corey and me, how I was afraid if we had sex something bad might happen. Pace kept encouraging me, telling me it was obvious that Corey loved me and that it would be a beautiful thing and that he wished he had such a great boyfriend. But he seemed weary and distracted and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about the frenzy and why I was really afraid to make love to Corey. I wanted to ask Pace more about Michael but his eyes had a panicked look when I tried to bring it up again so I dropped the subject and let him go on about how I should sleep with Corey. This made everything worse for me. I wanted my boyfriend so badly by the time Pace left that I felt as if I were going to climb out of my skin.

  I picked up my phone and texted Corey.

  meet me at haunted house on green please i am so sorry i need you love liv

  I didn’t even wait to hear back from him, just climbed out the window, scaled down the wall and started running.

  When I got to the house I still hadn’t heard from him and he wasn’t waiting for me. I went up to the door—it was locked. I rattled the doorknob anyway and all of a sudden it opened, as if someone had unlocked it. The wicked cold hit me again and I wished I had brought a sweater but the night had felt so warm. The furniture looked like ghosts hunkered down around the room and there was a strong musty smell. Walls creaked and popped with noise around me.

  “Corey,” I said softly into the darkness, just to comfort myself with the sound of his name; I didn’t really believe he would be there. Then I added, “Michael?”

  Someone grabbed me and I screamed and whipped my head around.

  It was Corey.

  “You scared the hell out of me!” I shouted at him.

  “I’m sorry, Liv, but you picked this place to meet.”

  Then I looked into his eyes and my sadness and relief at not having seen him took over. I fell into his arms and started crying. His familiar scent and warmth calmed me down almost immediately. I stopped shivering and closed my eyes, pressing my damp face into his chest. He led me out of the house and we sat on the porch behind the fir trees.