“Because, you tool, I can’t talk to humans. You know that.”
“Ah, big boy,” he said, shaking his head as if I were quite the opposite of clever. “You don’t have to talk to them when you look like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean. Guys that look like this—” he waved in my direction, “—don’t have to talk. Not when they’re all long black hair and ice blue eyes.” He sucked his cheeks in and dented his chin with his thumb. “Not when they’re all chiseled cheekbones and cleft chins. Come on, you know that.”
I knew full well how I looked, but I couldn’t see how that was going to help me, since it never had in the past.
“You don’t have to talk, Sully. You just have to smile. The girls are waiting for you. They’re dying for you. They just need an invitation. They just need to know that you aren’t as scary as you look.”
“I don’t look scary.”
“You look scary as fuck. You’ve got that whole snarly thing going. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d be scared of you, too.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You shut up.”
“Youshut up.”
He slapped me lightly on the chest. I punched him on the arm and the next thing, we were rolling around on the floor of our living room, knocking a mug and its contents off the coffee table and onto the floor. I was laughing helplessly and so was he. I let him pin me as usual. It was perfectly normal. It was just that when I did it, a flicker of something inside me stirred. Something that didn’t feel good. I let him pin me; it wasn’t that I didn’t. It was just that for the first time, I found it hard to do it.
My eighteenth birthday came, and with it, I got the same talk from Dalton that Jules had gotten.
“You’re eighteen now, Sully boy. You know what that means, huh?” He gave me a lascivious chuckle. Kevin and Llewellyn laughed as well.
“What does it mean, Dalton?” I wanted to make him spell it out.
“Well, it means you can get stuck into them human gals. Go for your life. Just mind you don’t knock anyone up. Us wolves can’t catch STDs and the like, but we can get humans pregnant. That’s the last thing we need. After you’ve shifted, we’ll find you a nice shifter gal to mate and you can get onto making a whole litter of pups for the pack.”
He kept talking for a while about how I should scent girls to tell if they were ovulating and told me I should avoid them if they were. Now and again Llewellyn interjected, and Kevin or Keith laughed.
I was respectful but something about the conversation didn’t sit well with me.
That night, I dreamed I was deep in the woods. I was running. Branches and trees were flying past me. I was me, but I wasn’t. My breathing was different. So was my heartbeat. I was tracking something. No, not tracking exactly. I was hunting. I was a predator chasing down prey. I looked down at my hands. They were my hands, but they weren’t. I had claws and they were fully extended. Milky white claws glinting in the moonlight. The dream changed then. I was still running but I was fueled by rage. It coursed through my veins. My limbs crashed into the limbs and torso of a man. I wasn’t hunting anymore. I was fighting. My claws were swiping through the air, drawing blood each time they made contact. I loved it. I craved it. I wanted it with everything I had. I was completely and irrevocably wild.
I woke with a start, heart pounding, both hands clawing the sheets. I had the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I was instantly confused. As soon as I opened my eyes, the dream started to fade.
“It was nothing,” I whispered to myself. “It was just a dream.”
I closed my eyes and willed myself to fall back asleep. By morning, I could scarcely remember the dream, but it took a lot longer for me to forget that the man in my dream had dark eyes and dark hair, a gray beard, and a sardonic glint in his eyes.
“Do you ever have shifting dreams?” I asked Jules as we walked home after school.
“Sometimes,” he said. “They started a few months ago.”
“What are they like? Are you, like, fully shifted?”
“No, I’m always partially shifted. Just claws and canines. You?”
“Same. In yours are you hunting, or . . . fighting or something?”
He raised an eyebrow and looked bemused. “Nah. Not at all.”
“What are you doing then?”
His other eyebrow traveled up his forehead, just as high as the first one. “Sully, my shifting dreams are basically, well, they’re pretty much sex dreams.”
