For the next two weeks she existed in a sort of dream world, always expecting to walk into work and see Dorian and yet knowing that she wouldn’t see him: a curious case of double-think if ever she had experienced it. Dorian had become Schrodinger’s Dorian: there and not there at the same time until she walked into the office. And each time she walked in, even though she knew the likelihood of him being there was diminishing with each day that went by, she somehow expected to see him, smiling up from his desk. “Were you worried?” he would say. And Daisy would lie and say: “Not even a little bit.”
But the truth was that she was worried. She couldn’t account for it. After all, did she really know these men? And yet she couldn’t help but worry. What had happened to them? Had they—it was an awful thought—but—could she contemplate it? Had they died? What, both of them? she thought. Both of them died, at the same time, and no one knew anything about it? No one at work knows that one of their employees is dead? Why hasn’t there be an all-hands meeting about “mourning”, etc.?
After a month had passed she was almost ready to accept that she would never see them again. She met up with Jessica and Angela, had coffee, went to movies, and had drinks after work. She resumed her normal life. But always, in the back of her mind, she saw – and felt – Tooth and Dorian. She saw their white-blue eyes, their same white-blue eyes, and she felt their hands and their lips on her. Sometimes she would look up from her desk and then flinch. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t there. He hadn’t been there for a month.
And then she came home one day to a letter. She rarely received letters – no more academic correspondence for her – and yet this was, undeniably, addressed to her. She tore it open with an eagerness spurred by the hand-written address, not the printed address of bills and other miscellaneous drudgery. The words were written in a beautiful, flowing script.
She read:
I must apologize, dear Daisy, for leaving so abruptly. Tooth and I have taken an interest in you. I know how that sounds, but it is true. I cannot tell you where we are. This letter could be intercepted and that would be bad for us. But I can tell you that we haven’t forgotten about you. We will be back in a month. There are things we need to discuss, important things. You will understand soon enough. Just wait a month, and it will become clear.
Dorian.
Daisy read the letter over twice more and then lay it upon the coffee table, went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine, and returned to the table to read it again, trying to convince herself that any of this made sense. But what made sense about it?
He might as well have written in Latin for all the sense that it made.
She finished off another glass of wine and then pinned the letter to the refrigerator. One month and they would be back, he said. Well, she thought. I better get some kind of goddamned explanation.
*****
Daisy did get an explanation, but it was not one that filled her with a great deal of comfort. Confusion and fear and a dangerous break with reality were more that explanation’s specialty. She jived to the tune of Normal Life for another month, doing all the things normal people did: movies, drinks, walks, and so on. She tried to push the one-month deadline from her mind, like a schoolgirl avoiding homework for the longest possible time. But it kept returning, in the unhurried moments when her mind was left to explore. She couldn’t help but be ravenously curious about what the hell Dorian and Tooth were doing, and how she fitted into all of it.
Eventually – as normal life trundled along like a cumbersome beast – another month had passed. She was walking home on the day of Two Months Passed, trying to trick herself into believing that it was just another normal day. And then she saw Tooth outside of her apartment, leaning against the wall. Her heart began to beat in her throat. Her palms began to turn into pools of water. Her legs became wobbly. And then she righted herself. You’re not a teenager, Daisy, she thought. Pull yourself together.
She pulled herself together as best she could, and then walked on steady(ish) steps to where Tooth stood. He moved away from the wall and stood opposite her. She wanted to hit and kiss him at the same time. He was, after all, half of a whole that had given her immense pleasure. And he was, after all, half of a whole that had given her immense anxiety. But in the end she just stood there, waiting for him to talk, unable to form words of her own.
He nodded. His hair was longer, his beard was longer, and he was wearing a black t-shirt with faded blue jeans. “I suppose you are angry,” he said.
“Yep,” Daisy said. “But more than that, I want some kind of explanation.”
“I think you should invite me in,” Tooth said, fingering the tooth-pendant around his neck. “You may want to sit down when you hear it.”
“If I need to sit down, I’ll sit in the street.”
“Really,” he said, and something about the way he met her eyes, the hardness in in the icy pools, made her listen. “Invite me in.”
“Fine,” she said, and minutes later they were sitting at opposite ends of the couch.
“Where’s Dorian?” Daisy asked.
“At home,” Tooth said.
“Why isn’t he here?”
“He wanted me to explain.”
“Explain what?”
He stood and began to pace the room, arms out at his sides, like an aggressive pedestrian. He looked at Daisy and nodded again. “First of all, you need to know something. Dorian told me you like to read, right? Well, what was it Shakespeare said, something about there being more in heaven and earth than we can see?”
Daisy was half-ashamed, half-proud that she knew the proper quote. She said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Yeah, well, you need to know that that’s true,” Tooth said. “There never was anything truer, as far as I can tell.” He fingered the tooth. “Look,” he went on, and sat on the coffee table, his knees touching Daisy’s. “You see this tooth? This tooth is from the Wolf that Made me. This tooth is from my Maker, the one that called the moon into my life. You see, Daisy, Dorian and I are werewolves.” He powered on before Daisy could say anything. “For the past two months he and I have been at the Council of the Wolf Brethren. Where to start? Okay, look. Dorian only got a job at your place of employment because he Scented you. We both did, about half a year ago. We Scented a woman so wolf-like – so wild and strong and loyal – that we had to come to this city and see you. We have Scented you now, and nothing can change that. But it is forbidden by the Council for Wolves to receive pleasure from humans until permission has been granted. That is why we could—do what we did in the park—and—”
“That is why you wouldn’t let me do anything in return,” Daisy mumbled.
Tooth nodded.
Wait, Daisy, you’re not actually going to believe this crap, are you? How can you? It’s absurd? It’s the stuff fairy stories are made of. (Well, no, that’s fairies.) You know what I mean! It’s make-believe! Werewolves don’t exist. Just because you go around calling yourself “Tooth”, it doesn’t make you supernatural. “How do I know what you’re saying is true?” Daisy said.
Tooth shrugged. “You don’t,” he said. “There’s a full moon in two weeks. You’ll be able to see then, if you like. But for now?” He shook his head. “We don’t have much in the way of powers, except for our sense of smell, which is about as good as a dog’s.”
“And that is very good, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “I know you had a tuna sandwich for lunch, and I know you ate mints to try to cover the smell. I know for breakfast you had a banana and strawberry yoghurt. The perfume you wear is expensive, smells like lavender, but you haven’t worn it in three—no—four days.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Daisy said, somewhat uneasily. “You could just be stalking me.”
Tooth held out his hands. “How can I prove it to you?”
“Go into the bathroom,” Daisy said.
He inclined an eyebrow.
“Just do it, please,” she said.
He did as she said and walked into the bathroom. Daisy shut the door after him and then went around the apartment closing all the curtains. Call her paranoid, but for this to work properly she needed to make absolutely sure no one could see into the apartment and relay the information to Tooth—what, via an earpiece? You’ve been watching too many movies. Well, maybe she had, but she would try this anyway.
When all the curtains were closed, and cool evening sunlight filtered through turning the room a dark shade of orange, she went into the kitchen and collected a selection of food: cucumber, tomato, a half-full bowl of leftover tuna pasta, a bag of cheese and onion chips, a quarter-block of cheese. She set the food around the apartment, hiding it in different nooks, and then stood in the center of the room.
“Right,” she said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yep.”
“What I’m going to do is, walk around the apartment and stand next to food. If your sense of smell is really as good as you claim, you’ll be able to tell what kind of food I am standing next to.”
“Okay,” Tooth said, without any apparent hesitation.
Daisy walked across the apartment stood next to the cucumber, which she had placed on the coffee table. Before she could ask Tooth if he knew what she was standing beside, he called out: “Cucumber.” She cursed, silently, whether out of fear or amazement she didn’t know. She walked to the television, next to which she’d placed the tuna. “Tuna,” he said. “Tomato, cheese and onion chips,” when she was stood next to them. She walked into the bedroom, far back into the bedroom, beyond the range of any human smell. She closed the door behind her, making it doubly hard. Then she shouted: “What now?” There was a slight pause – I knew he was making it up – and then he called: “A block of cheese—a half or quarter block. It’s going moldy, by the way.” She looked down at the cheese and, sure enough, it was going moldy.
Tooth sat on the couch as he returned the food to the fridge and cupboards – the cheese to the bin – and when Daisy joined him he nodded and said: “Have I passed your test?”
“I don’t—how—what—”
“It is a shock, I know,” Tooth said.
“It’s more than a shock,” Daisy said. “It goes against everything I have ever learnt. There is a divide between fiction and reality. Even a bibliophile knows that, even if they don’t feel it—they know it. But now? What am I to make of this? What else is real? Are vampires real, ghosts, ogres?”
Tooth shrugged. “Not that I know of, but anything’s possible.”
“And what is it you want with me?”
“We want you,” Tooth said. “Dorian and I. We have Scented you. When a Wolf Scents someone, it is impossible for us to forget the scent. We need you, Daisy. Both of us need you.”
“What, in your—” She felt silly even saying it, but forced herself on. “In your Wolf form?”
“Preferably.”
“And what is that? Is it like the movies?”
“We’re more humanoid than you’d expect, and can control ourselves more, but it is similar, yes.”
“I don’t think I could do that, not right away.”
“So then spend a night with us in our human forms,” Tooth said, and moved across the couch to her. It wasn’t until he put his hand on hers that she realized she was shaking. “Just spend one night with us in our human forms. We will not hurt you – a Wolf cannot hurt one he has Scented unless the Scented gives him permission. It is literally impossible for us to hurt you. Look.” He drew his fist back, and then shot it straight at her face. Daisy lurched back. She would’ve been too late – the fist would have driven straight into her face – except that Tooth stopped short, seemingly against his will. His muscles strained and he pushed forward, but some invisible force restrained him. “See,” he said. “You’re perfectly safe with us. On top of that, a Wolf is forced to protect one he Scents.”
“But—but—why me?”
“You probably have Wolf blood in you,” he said. “Not many people do, but you do.”
Daisy thought about the steady tenacity with which she approached her reading: the steady tenacity to trawl through difficult text after difficult text. Was it so different from the steady tenacity of a wolf against faster prey, steadily following it, waiting for it to tire? Daisy had done well at school and college, not out of any exceptional brilliance, but by the ability to follow something through to the end consistently, without getting distracted; and she had since come to see that as a more important characteristic. Could her Wolf-blood explain that?
She shook her head, trying to shake the thoughts away. This was all too complicated. “I—don’t—know,” she breathed. “I need a drink. I need sleep.”
“I’ll get you a drink,” he said, and before she knew it she was sipping a glass of wine.
“You want me to spend one night with you in your human forms?” Daisy said, sounding idiotic with each word. This is a trick! part of her screamed. They are tricking you. They’ll fuck you and then post some sick blog about it! But Daisy found – in some deep part of her – that she really, really wanted to spend a night with the two men. What pleasures would she feel? What unchartered territory of human connection would she brave? More importantly, how many sweet orgasms would she have?
“Yes,” Tooth said.
“I don’t know,” Daisy said, finishing off the wine. “I need to think about it. Give me a day—no, two days. Give me two days. I’ll tell Dorian my answer. Wait, will he be back at work?”