Page 10 of Fifty & Feral

“Nice to meet you. I’m Jack.” Both our words were stilted, assessing each other. Like we weren’t sure how the other one would react.

The image of two wolves circling each other, determining if they were friend or foe, flashed through my mind.

“Right,” he said. He didn’t offer me his hand, and I didn’t offer him mine, even though good human manners dictated that I should.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

I really didn’t want him in my house. I needed to sit outside in the moonlight.

“How about we sit on the deck? I was just about to have some tea and sit outside,” I said, gesturing to the back deck. I wouldn’t get the moonlight from out on the front porch, and I really didn’t want him in my home, though I had no reason to be wary of him.

“That’s fine,” he agreed.

He followed me into the house and to the kitchen.

“So, how are you?” he asked, like he was genuinely curious, like he knew I had been struggling and wanted to know how I was faring.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

“No, you don’t.” He let out a breath. “Fuck, this is more difficult than I anticipated. I haven’t had to do this in a long time. I’m a little rusty at it.”

“Rusty at what?” I said.

I filled up my mug and one for Mason with water from the kettle and handed it to him. I gestured to the assortments of teas, cream, and sugar. We both selected one and we made our way outside. We sat down in the chairs and gazed out at my backyard full of trees and birds singing.

“This is a beautiful place,” Mason said.

“Thanks. I lived in the suburbs before I retired. I just needed space and nature.” And I was thankful for that space now that I spent my nights on four legs prowling the woods, terrorizing all the woodland creatures.

“Nature,” Mason said, and took a sip of his tea. “That’s typical. When we’re young, we like to have people around. As we get older, we need nature, trees, forest. Forest animals to chase. We still need the people, though. The pack.”

“What are you talking about? Who is we?” I said. I was beginning to think I had let a crazy person into my house. Then again, I didn’t have a lot of room to judge. I turned into a wolf. Maybe. Technically, I hadn’t gotten actual confirmation from another person about that.

“You’ve got some weird things going on with you these days, right? Some lapses of memory where you can’t quite remember what happened, but everything’s hazy, like a dream where you ran through the forest chasing rabbits. Maybe you had fur and fangs?”

My jaw clenched. I wished I thought those were dreams. But I knew they were real. I may have been crazy, but I knew reality from dreams.

“If you pay any attention to moon cycles, you’d probably note it started right after the last full moon, and it will get increasingly more difficult to control as we get closer to the new moon, which is only a few days away. Do you know who your parents are, Jack?”

I shook my head. “I was adopted. There was a house fire…” I didn’t really love hashing out the details of my very young life. My parents had died in a fire. They had no relatives to speak of, and nobody around them knew much about them. They had been loners as far as my research had been able to dig up. I remembered that they loved each other and they loved me, that was it. So I was placed in foster care. I bounced around a bit but eventually was adopted by a very nice family when I was in my teens. They had been great, but I still missed my parents. I always longed for one of those large families with lots of cousins.

Mason grimaced. “I’m sorry to hear that. I come from a big family, sometimes too big. Everybody’s in everybody’s business all the time. Anyway, that’s not important. Do you have children?”

“A daughter,” I said.

“You’re married?” he asked, glancing toward my bare hand.

“Divorced. It was amicable. We just grew apart.” And why I was sharing all of this with a complete stranger, I didn’t know. There was something about Mason that called to me. Like he might understand what I was going through. Though, part of me worried I’d be institutionalized if anyone found out.

He nodded again, as if cataloging all the information I was giving him. I didn’t have the energy to interrogate him at all. I was thankful just to be talking to another person.

“Okay, so the werewolf thing. Fuck! I should be better at this. This is why I’m not the best leader.”

I raised a brow. Werewolf?

“Never mind. We’ll get to that later. Werewolf. Let’s see… how to start.” He scratched his chin as if he was thinking. “Werewolves can be born and also made. We have longer lives than humans, so we kind of live our human life, and then when we go through our transformation, our second life begins. Average age for transformation is thirties. I think. We don’t actually keep track. These late-in-life ones like what you’re going through aren’t typical. It might be because you weren’t raised in a pack.”

“Like a midlife crisis? That’s what I feel like I’m going through. I should enjoy not working, right? But I’m just bored.” Well, I was. Until I started turning into a creature at night. Now I was mostly terrified and exhausted.