I could tell she wasn’t happy about making the admission.
‘But we’re all quite rare and do not encounter each other often,’ she said.
Excitement rolled through me and I held the jalapeño popper a little too tightly, squirting cream cheese across the table. ‘What, exactly, don’t we encounter often?’
My grandmother exhaled heavily, a combination of frustration and defeat carving deep lines around her mouth. ‘Emily,let’s talk more after we eat. This wonderful food is going cold and I would hate to waste it.’
‘When we were in the garden, you showed me the aconite,’ I said quickly, the facts coming together in a way I really did not care for. ‘The wolfsbane. Catherine, are werewolves real?’
She put her knife and fork down and as the silverware touched the table, our server was back to clear away the barely eaten food. I closed my mouth, sitting still as a statue as he took my plate, his eyes glazed over with a milky glow.
‘We witches are protected by the fact history has a bad habit of underestimating women,’ Catherine replied while he stacked the plates. ‘People buy crystals and burn sage and they think we’re benign because they play at being witches too. But Weres are different. People do not like different. So they demonize them in books and films, then choose to pretend they don’t exist in real life.’
‘But they do exist.’
She smoothed a hand over her shining hair, securing one rogue strand behind her ear.
‘Some of the more reliable histories suggest they originated in Scandinavia, and there are an awful lot of Were stories in Norse mythology. The Romans claimed them also. I suspect there is no one singular origin point for them or for us. We simply are.’
I looked at my grandmother, the beautiful, elegant pillar of the community, sipping red wine in a beautiful restaurant and chatting away about werewolves as though it was the most normal thing in the world.
‘Is their magic inherited like ours?’ I guessed.
‘Not quite. Witches are born, wolves are chosen. The giftispassed down the bloodline but a family must select its protector. If they decide not to initiate a wolf in the next generation, their magic dies out and cannot return while ours lies dormant.Fewer and fewer families choose to subject their children to such a life in these modern times. It’s a difficult magic to live with, painful, isolating. A tough secret to keep in today’s world, I would imagine. Some Weres hide it even from their own family. The only people who know the truth are the members of their pack, who they might only meet with once or twice in their lifetime.’
‘Sounds lonely,’ I replied, unexpectedly grateful not to be alone in my magic. ‘I can see why they would choose to let it go rather than put their kids through something like that.’
‘The right thing to do is rarely the easiest,’ Catherine said with polite disagreement. ‘I’ve no doubt it is a hard life but it’s also a matter of legacy, and heritage. Their magic is their purpose, as it is ours.’
‘What else can you tell me about them?’ I asked, hungry for as much knowledge as she could give me. One thing I’d learned from my academic father, facts are more powerful than fear.
She touched her pointer finger to her aquamarine ring and twisted it from side to side, looking almost lost in thought. ‘Most Weres are male because, as I understand, the families used to initiate their eldest male as a matter of tradition. No one chose a female unless there were no males to continue the line. Absurd really, female Weres are much stronger than the males but their society is as susceptible as the rest of the world when it comes to believing what a woman should and shouldn’t do.’ She paused to take a drink, slyly toasting us both. ‘Female Weres are able to retain more of themselves after the change while the males are lost to the animal. Males must turn during the full moon. Females can choose whether or not to go wolf. We women have had eons of experience in managing our bodies once a month, after all.’
‘If the men in Were families freak out like my dad when I got my first period, I can sympathize,’ I muttered. ‘Sorry, not ladylike.’
‘First we’ll deal with the magic, then we’ll work on the art of conversation,’ Catherine replied with a frown. She straightened out her napkin as our server returned with our entrees, two huge pork chops with sides of macaroni cheese and collard greens. It looked delicious but I knew I wouldn’t be able to take even a bite.
‘Weres are physically strong and not only during the full moon,’ she carried on talking while he refilled my water glass, completely placid this time. The lavender added to the memory charm was doing its job. ‘They’re creative, perceptive and usually extraordinarily smart. I would love to know who started the rumour that werewolves are blunt instruments because it has served them well. If only we had thought to spread the same misinformation about witches, more of us might have survived. Less pleasingly, many years ago, they appointed themselves to the role of supernatural peacekeeper, playing judge, jury, and executioner in the magical world, mostly because they wish to remain hidden. As you might imagine, that has put Weres and witches at odds in the past. I wouldn’t call them our friends.’
‘But they’re not our enemy?’ I asked, full of false hope. ‘They wouldn’t try to hurt us and we wouldn’t hurt them.’
‘It’s a little late to worry about that, don’t you think?’ Catherine replied lightly. ‘You’ve already killed one, after all.’
It hit me like a punch to the gut.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, my mouth dry.
‘The wolf at Bonaventure,’ she said, slicing into her pork chop. ‘Honey, surely you’d worked that out for yourself by now.’
I was shaking, not trembling, but physically shaking so violently my water glass shuffled closer and closer to the edge of the table. My fingertips tingled, just for a second, before the palms of my hands started to burn. Catherine looked up with dismay as every candle in the vault flamed all the way upto the wooden rafters. It wasn’t just me who was shaking, it was the whole restaurant.
‘Emily,’ she hissed. ‘Stop it. Stop it right now.’
‘I can’t stop it because I don’t know how I’m doing it,’ I replied, every word catching in my throat.
Outside, I heard raised voices and panicked exclamations. While the room around us rattled, the other diners scrambled for the exits. Our server blankly observed the destruction as glasses and plates crashed to the floor inside the vault but made no move to leave, even when one of the heavy gold candlesticks leapt from the wall, smacking into his shoulder on its way down. When the painting above the fireplace began to shake, Catherine leaned across the table and slapped me, hard, across the face.
The tremors stopped at once.
