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Stay here.
The words linger in Ryoko’s brain, and she rotates them over and over in her mind as she stares up at her bedroom ceiling, covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. It’s been long enough that their glow, charged by the light throughout the day, has faded nearly entirely; she’s already counted them and found the “real” constellations and recreated her own constellations, and she should be asleep by now because her parents say it’s like counting sheep, only it’s not really like counting sheep, except—
Mukie’s been feeling sick lately.
Ryoko crosses her arms and stares up at the ceiling.
Her mama said that Mukie was just going through puberty early, which sounds horrible, actually, and Ryoko wasn’t looking forward to it anyway, but she really doesn’t want to feel all sick and everything like Mukie’s been. That looks even worse than what she was told it was.
And – and! – her mama won’t let her and Mukie share a room anymore. Which is the absolute worst! Mukie’s already feeling bad, and now Ryoko can’t make her feel better, and Mukie had to move to an entire other room, so she doesn’t have their stars or their constellations anymore, and…and….
Ryoko lets out a huff.
Her mama and papa are probably asleep. Mukie probably isn’t; she’d always stayed up super late, even later than Ryoko, looking out at the dark sky with the moon and all covered in stars. (That’s why they had the glow-in-the-dark stars in the first place! To try and help Mukie settle!)
Without another thought, Ryoko pushes herself out of bed. Her mama said to stay here, but if her mama’s asleep, then what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her!
And she’s gonna go see her sister.
(No one can cheer Mukie up like she can, after all!)
Ryoko patters on bare feet to her sister’s new room. She doesn’t even knock on the door before throwing it open; Mukie won’t care, other than being happy that she’s here. “I came to make you feel better,” she whispers as she slips into the room and shuts the door behind her. “So—”
It’s only then that she takes in the empty room, the shaft of moonlight through the open window illuminating shredded clothes all on the floor. Ryoko steps forward, crouches down, and takes the cloth in her hands, recognizing it as Mukie’s least favorite pajamas. Her face scrunches up. “Mukie?”
There’s no answer.
Ryoko walks to the open window and glances outside, pushing herself nearly half out the window. She scans the world around them but sees nothing. Just the trees in the distance moving in the wind, followed by the sound of something howling. “Mukie!” she shouts, not really caring that her mama or papa will probably hear her now and know that she’s where she’s not supposed to be.
This time, when there’s no answer, she looks up and catches sight of the full moon peering down on her.
It clicks into place.
Oh.
Ryoko considers her mama’s warning again but doesn’t think better of it. She pushes herself out the window and starts racing towards the trees, towards the howl she’d heard. Maybe she should be scared, but she’s never had any reason to be scared of Mukie before, and she’s not gonna start being scared of her now.
Werewolves aren’t uncommon in the world, of course.
It’s just that there are two types of them: those who can control their change and those who can’t.
The werewolves who can control their change are able to shift whenever they want and however they want. They can pass for human most of the time but then decide they want their wolf ears or paws or tail for whatever reason. Sometimes, they want the ears to hear better; sometimes, they want the tail to intimate their annoyance when they can’t figure out how to speak it in words; sometimes, they want the paws because they don’t feel like wearing shoes today. When necessary, they can go full wolf, but that happens less often than you’d think (outside of certain jobs or relationships).
Certain things, however, are true of all werewolves. For instance, regardless of whether they are in some part of their wolf form or not, all werewolves have heightened scent and hearing. And all werewolves change during the full moon.
Those who can control their change don’t necessarily have an easier time of it, but they don’t go on a potentially murderous rampage. They maintain control of themselves during the change; they can keep themselves to themselves.
But those who cannot control their change….
Well.
Ryoko pauses just outside the trees. Standing this close, she hears the evergreen needles brushing against each other, the leaves fluttering, as the wind passes through them. There’s a whistling and the sharp scent of pine.
And something else.
Stay here, Ryoko seems to hear her mama say, but in her mind and louder, which means really it’s just her remembering its being said and not her mama at all, which means maybe she’s scared. Or cold or something – it is kind of cold out here, with the wind and the whistling and everything, and she didn’t bring her sweater with her. It’s not as cold as walking to school in the morning in her uniform’s skirt because her pajamas have pants, but it’s still cold, and she shivers from it.
The cold, not fear.
Ryoko takes a deep breath and runs into the woods.
The leaves brush against Ryoko’s skin as she runs, nicking it – nicking her – but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it should. She hears another howl; it’s sharper now, and louder, because she’s closer, but she hears others, too – softer, around her. The louder one sounds the most familiar, so she follows it, and the others drop away until all she can hear is the louder, untamed one and another one piercing through.
Her mama, maybe, or her papa.
If Mukie’s a werewolf, one of them is, too.
(If both of them are, she will be, too.)
Controlling the change isn’t something that a werewolf can learn.
Not initially, anyway.
Once the initial break is there, finer tuning can be learned, but there’s no teaching that first break.
Which is the problem.
A lot of werewolves never make that first break, and so can never learn any form of control. There are spaces set apart for rampaging werewolves to hide when the full moon comes, and many wildwolves live in areas where their rampages will not matter, far from humanity. It isn’t a fun thing, being wild. It simply is.
But that’s only helpful for wolves who know they will change.
It’s less helpful for one who doesn’t.
The responsibility for that sort of thing usually falls on the parents – whether it’s one parent or both, they are expected to look after their offspring during those first fits of shifting, and to navigate hopefully towards that first break. But the thing is that the break itself happens differently for every werewolf – what might work for one doesn’t always work for another – and—
Ryoko doesn’t make it into a clearing because there is no clearing in these woods, but she does make it close enough to hear something more than howling, something more than whistling, something more like thrashing and yelping.
A small fuzzy something zooms past her – thrown, from something on the other end. It thwacks hard into a tree just beyond Ryoko, and while Ryoko freezes when it flies past her, she turns as soon as it lands. It’s a wolf, and it’s small, but it’s still larger than she is, and it’s covered with shaggy brown fur so dark that it would look black if not for the moonlight shimmering through the trees. It blinks its blue eyes twice and then growls.
“Mukie?” Ryoko asks, stepping towards the wolf with one hand outstretched. “Is that you?”
Stay back.
It’s not really words that are spoken so much as something that is growled out from behind her, and Ryoko probably shouldn’t be able to understand it, but she’s seen so many werewolf documentaries and so many shows with werewolf characters speaking in their wolf forms (with subtitles, of course, for the viewers who can’t understand it at all) that she does, somehow.
And maybe she should turn back to what she’s certain is her mama – a full wolf, probably – behind her, Ryoko doesn’t. Instead, she steps closer to what she’s just as certain is her sister. “It’s okay, Mama,” she says. “Mukie would never hurt me.”
But before she can even finish the sentence, the tiny wolf that must be her sister staggers to her feet and slashes out with one long clawed paw.
They don’t know how the first werewolf became what it is.
They’ve never been able to track it.
(Hah.)
It’s not something that’s communicable through a scratch or a bite – although it might have been once, long, long ago. Perhaps that’s how you ended up with the two veins of humanity: the wolves and the non-wolves. Maybe whatever virus or disease might have caused the transformation – maybe those who maintain their human selves and never shift simply have a natural immunity, born form the humans before them who never transformed, even after plentiful contact with their werewolf counterpart.
Which is to say – werewolves are werewolves and humans are humans, and what one is cannot be changed.
Fortunately for some.
Unfortunately for others.
Ryoko barely has time to blink back tears before her sister stands in front of her and wraps her arms around her.
“I’m sorry,” Mukie murmurs, burying her head in the crook of Ryoko’s neck. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I—”
It’s only possible to transform so abruptly back to the human form under the light of the full moon during that initial break.
They don’t write that in the textbooks.
Maybe they should.