Wild (9 page)

In her head, she pictured herself as a slim woman with long dark curls and smoky eyes. Young and smooth-skinned. Not as physically fit as she’d been as a young teenager, but not a total wreck either.

In the uncompromising glare of the mirror, she saw dark, sunken eyes, lank hair and dull skin. She saw a woman who was verging on gaunt. She saw someone aging before their time. She lifted her hand and touched her face with quivering fingers. Her skin felt dry, her lips cracked. Her eyes glittered with tears as she studied herself. When did this happened?

How could she stop it?

Slow-burning frustration exploded within her, transmuting into a quicksilver mixture of rage and fear. “Dammit!” She slammed her hands down on the dashboard and leapt out of the car.

She walked without direction, shoving through the throngs of shoppers and students making their way towards the city centre. Normal people, heading towards Liverpool One to buy designer shoes, or maybe skipping their lectures and waiting for their favourite clubs to open. Girls with orange tans and white jeans, boys in hoodies and Everton shirts. Normal people. Lizzie didn’t feel like one of them anymore.

It didn’t really surprise her when she lifted her head to discover she was outside the Barfly.

ten

I
T WAS HOURS
before Nick’s gig, but the Barfly was open anyway. Tucked away down Seel Street between a building site and a second-hand clothing store, it was a typical student dive: scuffed red leather seats, fruit machines, low lighting, and cheap vodka. Lizzie had come here a lot in her first few months at uni. She’d met Harris at a gig here, taken her first pills here with him a week later.

With a heavy sense of morbidity, she ordered a vodka and orange at the bar and sat down at a corner table. The place was mostly empty; just a few lads playing pool across the room. One of them stood at the jukebox, flicking through the song choices with a frown of concentration.

She nursed her drink, didn’t have enough money for a second, and wondered if she was just going mad. Maybe she’d broken her brain, one too many pills, one too many k-holes.

Someone slid into the chair opposite her and she looked up with a start to see Nick. They started at each other silently for a second, Lizzie pumping her broken brain for something to say.

He simply watched her with keen eyes and said nothing. His silence heightened her nerves and she found herself dragging her nails along her legs, scratching herself through the denim.

“Alright?” he asked eventually.

“No.” She slumped down in the worn leather seat, gazing at the cuts in the wooden table top. She felt about five years old under his cool gaze, clumsy and outclassed. “Something’s wrong with me and I don’t know what.” She fought the urge to scream and wail. Nick’s studied calm wasn’t doing anything to relax her. “So I came to see you.”

“You got scratched,” he said, reaching for her drink and taking a swig. She glared at him but he continued drinking anyway. “You got scratched by a wolf, and now you’re craving red meat, and everything pisses you off, and you feel like you might explode any minute.”

She glanced around the bar. Nobody was within earshot, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was listening in. “Yes,” she hissed, voice hoarse with the relief of saying it. “Yes, that’s exactly it. I don’t get it. I … I saw the wolf that attacked me today. At the park.”

He drained her drink and pushed the glass aside, reaching for her hands. She pulled them away automatically, but he was faster than her and he caught her fingers with his. His touch was as warm as his eyes were cool, his grip firm and gentle, restraining her without hurting her. But memories of her fight with Harris made her want to struggle, want to fight his grasp, and raw anger rose up in her, tinting the world blood red for a spilt second.

And in that split second, her world ripped wide open.

It was like being high, all her senses magnified, everything around her given new importance, new brilliance. She could smell the ginger shampoo in Nick’s hair; smell the fusty odour of each individual lager and ale and bitter behind the bar. She could hear every word being spoken in the pub, every minute sound, from the buzzing of a broken neon light over the pool table to the flushing of a toilet on the floor above her. She could see every fine detail of Nick’s face, every line and eyelash. She could taste smoke and salt on the air, filling her with a burning thirst.

It was overwhelming, frightening and rapturous. It was like opening a battered old chest to find it full of sparkling jewels, beautiful and blinding. She choked on the smells and tastes, blinked away the sharpness of the sights and the terrible clarity of the sounds.

“Lizzie?” Nick was squeezing her fingers, she realised, coming back to herself with a jolt. “Lizzie, look at me.” He sounded concerned. She forced herself to concentrate on that, her overloaded senses slowly returning to normal. It was like suddenly being rendered deaf and blind, she noted distantly. Everything seemed a little far away, a little unfocused.

“What just happened?” she asked numbly, pulling free of Nick’s grip.

“Lizzie,” Nick said softly, “are you listening to me?”

She pressed her hand to her mouth again, nausea churning insider her. “It was a wolf,” she whispered. “I had an accident … Everyone said it had to be a dog but I knew it was a wolf and nobody believed me.”

He took her hand again and she didn’t resist this time. “I believe you,” he said simply. “Now you have to believe me too. You weren’t hurt by a wolf. You were hurt by a werewolf. And he made you one of us.”

One of us.
It took a few seconds to sink in, and then all she could think of was circus midgets dancing round toasting each other with goblets of wine.
Gobble gobble, we accept her, one of us …
She clamped down on the urge to laugh. It didn’t seem appropriate. “One of us,” she echoed. She looked him over with fresh insight, checking for some sign of werewolfism in his sharp features. No monobrow, no fangs, just a grim expression and a little fashionable stubble. “You’re one too?”

He nodded. “Got turned in Dublin three years ago. Best thing that ever fucking happened to me.” He paused as his phone rang. “Sorry,” he mumbled to her, leaving his seat to take the call.

Lizzie tore a beer mat to shreds while he answered his phone, her head pounding and pulsing with doubt. How could he say it so casually, like it was normal, like they were discussing their favourite bands or whatever? There should have been thunder, maybe a dramatic drumroll. Not just
you’re one of us
, nothing as simple as that. He was mad.

Except she believed him. She knew what she’d seen that night, and in Whitley Gardens, and even if Nick’s explanation was insane, it was also oddly reassuring. It hadn’t been drugs fucking with her, it had been a real-life, flesh-and-blood werewolf.

The thought made her laugh, and she couldn’t stop the sound this time. A few people shot her curious looks as she sat there, holding her head in her hands and laughing hysterically. Fucking hell.

What sort of life was she living where being a werewolf was better than being a drug addict?

Nick returned to the table, tucking his phone back in his jacket pocket, and Lizzie forced herself back under control. She wiped her streaming eyes and tried to ignore the slightly pitying look Nick favoured her with.

“That was my drummer,” he said. “They’re heading over here now to set up and play a few rounds of pool before the gig.”

“Are they werewolves too?” she asked. The city could be crawling with them for all she knew.

“No, just honest-to-God dirty rockers.” He grinned at her, then fell solemn again. “Stick around, yeah? We’ll talk properly afterwards. We’re on at six, so there’ll be plenty of time.”

She shrugged and started work on another beer mat. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

****

A couple of hours later she was in the band room at the back of the Barfly, a dark, sticky pit lined with faded posters and stinking of sweat. Good Thinking Batman were opening for Light Mantled, who billed themselves as “a prog-rock extravaganza,” which Lizzie took as meaning they’d be pretentious wankers who’d just discovered Dragonforce via Guitar Hero. Shit, in other words. She glanced around at the gathering audience – mostly over-the-top goth girls in thick eyeliner and black lipstick. That sense of alienation hit her again, the sense that she didn’t belong with these people anymore.

Depression hit her, and she wished desperately she had some pills. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on a night out without them. With a couple inside her, these people would suddenly be fascinating, adorable, ravishing. The band would be triumphant and glorious. Without pills, they were all just wank posers listening to a wank band.

She was just summoning the courage to go on the prowl and see who was holding when the lights went down. A cheer went up from the audience as the stage lights came on; yellow spotlights illuminating the opening act. A heavily pierced and tattooed singer, clutching the mic stand for dear life, his Mohawk glowing gold in the lights. The pink-haired girl she’d seen in the King’s Head, pretty and punky, pouting at the lads in the audience, who chanted
Daisy, Daisy, Daisy
at her. A drummer obscured by shadows, as drummers were wont to be, and there at the side, Nick, bent over his bass with an air of sullen edginess, as if he’d rather be in Light Mantled.

The drummer clapped his sticks together and the band launched into life. Good old-fashioned punk rock, to Lizzie’s surprise, fast, funny songs about skipping school and fancying cheerleaders. Nothing about werewolves, no coded messages about full moons and silver bullets. She only realised she was enjoying herself when she found herself dancing with a boy in a Greenday t-shirt and laughing breathlessly as he grabbed her hand and swung her around in a mock-Highland dance. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that without pills either.

When the band finished, the boy melted into the crowd, and Lizzie slumped against the wall, exhausted and overheated. Good Thinking Batman disappeared off-stage, and she felt lost immediately. Where was Nick going? Did he have groupies to attend to or something? She loitered in the band room, hoping he’d show up before the next act came on and everyone started singing about the fallen empires of the sun or some shit.

Ten minutes later, Nick caught her hand, making her jump, and dragged her back into the bar. “I need some fresh air,” he said, flicking his sweat-slicked hair from his eyes. “It’s a fucking sauna in there. Let’s go for a walk.”

Outside, the cool autumn air sent shivers down her spine. Somewhere out towards the Chinese district, kids – or maybe not kids – howled and wailed at the fat moon. A homeless woman fell out of the shadows towards them, pawing at Lizzie’s arm with torn nails. “Gotta fag, chick?” she slurred.

Lizzie pulled away sharply, disgust roiling through her. Nick scowled at the woman, giving her a good shove that sent her staggering back into the dark. “Fucking ghouls,” he muttered, steering Lizzie away from the woman and up the hill towards the boxy silhouette of the Anglican cathedral.

He lit a cigarette and turned to Lizzie. “So,” he said conversationally, “I expect you’ve got loads of questions.”

Did she? She supposed she ought to, but none came to mind. She felt numb, empty, as if someone had scooped out her skeleton and just left her nothing but mush. Nick seemed to be waiting for a torrent of interrogation though, so she forced herself to speak. “What will happen to me?”

“You’ll change tomorrow night. And every full moon. You’ll probably meet some other wolves, maybe get along with them, maybe not.” He shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal, just another part of the daily grind.

“How did you know?” she asked. An insidious little thought wormed its way into her mind. “You weren’t there, were you? When it happened?”

He hesitated. “I can smell it on you. See.” He held his wrist up under her nose as if offering her perfume to smell. “See how I smell? All wolves smell like that.”

She inhaled, taking in the mixed scents of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke, but picking up something else under that. Some base, earthy scent that made her think of woods and wild places. She sniffed her own wrists experimentally but couldn’t really make anything out. “This is insane,” she said. “You’re insane. For all I know, this is one massive wind-up. I mean, werewolves? In Liverpool? And nobody knows, nobody says anything, and we all just go around being normal and human?”

They were at the top of Seel Street now, into the Chinese district. All-you-can-eat buffets, and newsagents selling plastic temple dogs and cheap kimonos lined the streets. Up ahead, the cathedral looked menacing, overshadowing the whole area like a warning against sin, not a salvation from it.

“If you really thought it was bollocks, you wouldn’t be here now,” Nick pointed out.

She supposed that was true. It felt true, as much as her mind wrestled with it and railed against it; it felt true. She hated that.

“So what do I do?” she asked, stopping and catching Nick’s arm to make him face her. “Are there support groups? Secret handshakes, what?”

His eyes shone under the street lights, calm and strangely old, like he’d seen everything and found it all lacking. “We’ll meet up tomorrow night,” he said, squeezing her hand. “You shouldn’t be alone for your first change. It’s scary.”