Liar (21 page)

The room was so dark. I wished I'd asked Dad to open the blind. Though it would be getting dark soon anyway. I tried stretching out. The cage was big enough that I could do sitting-down stretches. Problem was I didn't know that many.

I'd only been in the cage a few minutes but already I wanted to stand up. I wasn't sure how much more of this I could take.

The door opened. Thank God.

“Your mom will be home soon,” Dad said. “I called her.” He put his laptop on the bed and sat down next to it. Fridays Mom stays at work late to teach an advanced French class. Jordan is in chess club.

“I'm glad,” I said. “About Mom I mean.”

“Yes,” Dad said. He put his hand on his laptop but didn't open it. “How do you feel now?”

We stared at each other. He looked away first.

“Okay,” I said. “This is weird.”

“Yeah, it would be a lot easier if you were up at the farm.”

“Dad,” I said, “you promised.”

“I know. It's just—”

“Dad! I'd kill myself. This won't be so bad, right? It's not as if I can get out of this cage. We'll figure something out.”

“I hope so,” Dad said. He didn't sound convinced. I couldn't believe he was willing to sacrifice me to the Greats. Did he want me to be uneducated? To grow up without a computer?

I crossed my legs and leaned back against the bars. It wasn't comfortable. “Can I have a pillow?”

“Sure.” Dad grabbed one from the bed. “You feel hot yet? How're your teeth?”

“Not hot. Teeth are fine.”

Dad opened the cage, handed me the pillow, squeezed my hand. “It's going to be alright, Micah,” he said. He let go of my hand and locked the cage again. “I promise.”

I fought the urge to cry. I believed every word Dad and the Greats had told me, but sitting there in that cage
waiting to turn into a wolf
, it seemed so stupid. What if it was bullshit? They were all so full of lies. What if this was their biggest?

When Mom got home they traded places. Dad went to finish his stupid article for whatever stupid magazine, but not before I made him promise that Jordan would not be allowed in. My idiot brother was not going to see me like this.

Mom came in with two cheese, ham, and tomato sandwiches, handing the plate through the horizontal gap in the bars and patting my hand.

I wolfed them down. Hungrier than I realized. Mom chatted about her day, acting as if watching her daughter sitting in a locked cage eating sandwiches was perfectly normal. “Jordan is staying at Karl's place for the weekend,” she said, finally saying something that had to do with the bizarre situation we were in.

I was glad. Not because it's always wonderful when the brat's away but because they hadn't told him yet. I hoped he'd never find out.

I handed back the plate. “Thanks.”

“You are most welcome,
chérie
.” She reached her hand through to pat my knee. “How does it feel?”

“Fine. My arms are still itching but, look”—I held them out for her to see—“no hair yet. I don't feel hot either. My teeth don't hurt and my heart's not beating fast anymore.”

“Did your grandmother say how long it would take?”

“She said it varies. Sometimes it's very fast after the first sign. Sometimes it can take a couple of days.”

“Days!” Mom gasped. “We must keep you locked in for those days? I hope it happens soon.”

“You and me both,” I said.

BEFORE

It didn't.

Sunday morning I was still not a wolf. My arms had stopped itching and the bumps had cleared. When I used the bucket there was no further sign of blood.

“I think it was a false alarm,” I told my dad. “Does that happen?”

“I don't know,” he said. He held his hands out in front of him. He couldn't call the Greats—they had no phone. “I'll have to drive up. Ask them. I can't leave you in the cage if it's a false alarm.”

He did two hours up (breaking speed limits) and two hours back (breaking them all over again) to learn that, yes, false alarms happen and that if the change hasn't happened in that first twenty-four hours and the signs go away, then the change is not coming.

I could have screamed.

If the Greats had been there I'd've killed them.

Dad came home as fast as he could and opened the cage and let me out before he explained a thing.

I staggered. I had never gone so long without running, let alone standing. I was not sure I could do it again. Go back into that cage?

Mom and Dad held me tight despite the way I smelled. Despite the smell from the bucket.

I kept my back to the cage. When they let me go I went and showered.

It was only then that I wept.

I would not go back in that cage. I would not live with the Greats.

There had to be another way.

TOOTH & CLAW

“You may feed the wolf as much as you like; it will always glance toward the forest.”

Grandmother says it's an old Polish saying. (Great-Aunt Dorothy says Russian.) What it means is that wolves are wild. Their other oft-quoted saying is Latin:
lupus non mordet lupum.
“A wolf does not bite a wolf.” Which leaves the rest of the animal kingdom free for the biting.

We can't be tamed. We shouldn't live in cities.

Grandmother quotes those to me a lot. Said them even more back then, when she was trying to persuade me and Dad that it would be best for me to live on the farm. To stay there for the rest of my life.

I cannot explain to her why I love the city so. I have tried. But how can I describe it to someone who has never been there? To someone who fears it?

She hates the city because she says it destroys nature. She thinks there's no nature here.

She's wrong.

Nature is everywhere. I don't even have to go into the parks to find it. There are weeds and grass poking up between cracks in the sidewalk, out of the sides of buildings and walls. In the city there are no streets without plants. There are gardens in abandoned lots, on balconies, even on the roofs of buildings.

Plants mean insects, microbes in the soil.

Nature's the same in the city as in the country. It's just tougher. There are not many varieties of woodpeckers in the city, no deer, precious few raccoons. But rats, pigeons, mosquitoes, flies? They all do fine.

Nature's everywhere. Under my feet, rats and insects. Over my head, pigeons, sparrows, even the occasional red-tailed hawk. There's nowhere in the city—in the world—that a spider isn't within reach. There are bigger animals, too, not just the people, the cats, the dogs, but the occasional pig or llama, the horses, and the squirrels, the foxes and woodchucks and snakes and lizards.

The Greats cannot see how strong nature is. How it survives even in the least hospitable circumstances. Just like them.

FAMILY HISTORY

The Greats are divided on werewolf origins.

Grandmother says it goes back to the beginnings of humans. We evolved from wolves; they evolved from monkeys.

So why don't humans turn into monkeys once a month?

Grandmother has no answer to that.

Great-Aunt Dorothy tells about a deal made between a man and a wolf way back in the early days. They were escaping a predator bigger than either of them. They both ran for a narrow cave opening. There wasn't enough room for both of them so they fought. The predator came closer. The wolf proposed they share the space. He cut his belly open and told the man to crawl inside. Then the wolf wedged his way into the cave.

But when it came time to separate they couldn't. They were bound to each other. A mannish wolf, a wolfish man.

Dad said his grandfather told him that there was no cutting involved and that it was a woman, not a man. The wolf and the woman had squeezed so tight together trying to get into the cave that they melded into each other so that you couldn't see where the wolf began and the woman ended.

Great-Aunt laughed at that one. She said that's not how she heard her daddy tell it. The woman and the wolf fell in love, lay together, and werewolves were their babies.

The other story Grandmother told was that the Wilkins had made a deal with a pack of wolves way, way, way back before countries had names, when people lived in tribes, eking out an existence, moving from spot to spot. The pact was to keep from moving, to stay in the one spot, safe and sound even in the winter. The Wilkins would share food with the wolves; the wolves would fight their enemies.

The Wilkins were able to shift from hunting and gathering to planting and harvesting, raising goats and pigs and grains and vegetables. They fed the wolves; the wolves defended them.

They lived so close together that it wasn't many seasons before the human tribe and the wolf pack were indistinguishable. Not too many years before they were all part wolf and part human.

They're interesting tales though I doubt they're true.

Here's what I think:

Horizontal gene transfer.

You have brown eyes and the ability to curl your tongue, and your kids have brown eyes and can curl their tongues. That's because you passed on those genes, which is the regular way genes get passed on: vertical gene transfer.

But genes can also be transferred horizontally from one organism to another. It's called HGT. I know there's no documented case of HGT happening between big organisms. Humans and wolves are big. Each with at least twenty-three thousand different genes, way bigger than bacteria and viruses, who can have as few as eight. But if it can happen between bacteria why can't it happen between bigger organisms? If a tomato can have fruit fly genes in it or, more relevant (since humans put the fruit fly in the fruit), if cows can acquire a gene from a plant to help their digestion, then why can't wolves and humans do the same?

Though I'm not talking the one gene, I'm talking many. There'd be the gene (or genes) that makes the change possible. A gene no one's ever heard of, let alone mapped. Then there's all the wolf genes that express when I'm wolf and human genes for when I'm human.

Not to mention
why
. Could it be a means to preserve genes—wolf genes—that were approaching extinction? That would explain the
Canis dirus
werewolves. Increasingly the
Canis lupus
ones, too. Though when the first werewolves emerged gray wolves were everywhere. There are other animals of roughly human size that have gone extinct. Are there were-saber-toothed tigers?

I would love to map my own DNA. What would it show? Humans have 85 percent the same DNA as wolves. What do I have? Ninety-five percent? Ninety-nine? Or do I have the same 85 percent as everyone else? Along with hidden werewolf DNA.

When I'm a scientist—a biologist who specializes in wolves—I'll find out. I'll map my own DNA. Secretly. I'll prove that it is HGT. That we were made by a horizontal transfer of genes a few million years ago.

Unless it was a virus. Something that attacked an ancestor's DNA and caused massive mutations resulting in unstable genes that express both as wolf and as human.