Nine moons, six human victims. Simple arithmetic.

“Yes.”

“Did you try that?”

“Yes.”

It was raining. The motel was almost empty. The room smelled of damp plaster and furniture polish. A truck honked on the wet highway half a mile away. She was thinking about her parents. Her mother dead and her father living alone in the big maple-shadowed Gilaley house in Park Slope. A lot of her strength had gone into not letting the Curse rob her of the warmth between her and Nikolai, who would without thinking run his hand softly over her cheek as if she were still a little girl.

“Of course it was no good,” she said. “I knew even when I was doing it it wouldn’t work. You can tell.”

You can indeed. Have no illusions, the Curse specifies: human flesh and blood. This isn’t a nicety. An animal won’t “do,” at a pinch. Refuse the Hunger what it demands and see what happens. The Hunger isn’t at all pleased. The Hunger feels it incumbent on itself to teach you a lesson. One you won’t forget.

“I thought I was going to die,” she continued. “Throwing up afterwards it felt like I was trying to turn myself inside out. I was relieved. I thought I’d solved the problem, poisoned myself, accidental suicide. But of course it passed.”

My hand rested just above her mons. The question was whether to use what was coming next erotically. I could feel she was aware of the option. She was undecided. Mentally, too much was mingling: her mother’s death, her father’s loneliness, we can’t have children , innocent victims, the prospect of a four-hundred-year lifespan.

“It got worse,” she said. “The next time. After the third month I knew I wouldn’t make it through another Change without feeding properly.” It cost her something to get that “feeding” out. Her voice hardened for the word. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time she’d had to put it into words. Kurtz’s unspeakable rites. “I was crazy,” she said. “Two hours before moonrise just driving around aimlessly in Vermont. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe get myself killed. Walk into a hotel and just go through the whole transformation routine in the lobby.” She paused. Closed her eyes for a few moments. Opened them. “Well, of course not aimlessly. You know what you’re doing but you pretend you don’t. There was this place I knew from a vacation years back. A big woods between two little towns. Houses far apart. I picked one at random. I wasn’t careful, just went straight in. The doors weren’t even locked. It was a nineteen-year-old boy. His name was Ray Hauser. It was the last week of his summer vacation. His parents were in town watching a local theatre production of Titus Andronicus . I read about it afterwards in the papers.”

I didn’t say anything. Therapists and priests and interviewers know all about not saying anything. When you die and go for judgement God will sit there and infinitely not say anything and you’ll do all the damning work yourself.

“Feel,” she said, opening her legs slightly.

Her cunt was wet. There was the killing. There was the eating. And there was this. The central monstrosity. The way it made you feel. What it did for you. You couldn’t live with it without living with this.

I kept my hand there. Stroked her. This central monstrosity had nearly made her kill herself. But she hadn’t. And once you don’t kill yourself it’s all over.

“I’m smarter when I Change,” she said. “In all the worst ways. In all the ways that matter.”

“I know, Lu.”

“You think some sort of red cloud would come down, some sort of animal blackness to blot everything out and leave just the dumb instinct, but it doesn’t.”

“No.”

“I know what I’m doing. And I don’t just like it—I don’t just like it …”

“I know.”

“I love it.”

We left a respectful silence. Her hair was a dark soft corona around her head on the pillow. Evil has to be chosen.

“I tasted it,” she continued calmly. “All of it. His youth and his shock and his desperation and his horror. And from the first taste I knew I wasn’t going to stop until I had it all. The whole person, the whole fucking feast.”

She moved her hips very gently in response to my stroking. The argument with herself about what she was, what she was willing to be, was effectively over. Her bigger self had gone on ahead and accepted it. These were residual emotional obligations.

“Then afterwards,” she said, lifting slightly as my finger slipped into her anus. “The big talk, the promises to myself I wasn’t ever going to do it again.”

It’ll get easier, I could have told her. It’s the story, the human story, the werewolf story, that the hard things get easier. Carry on and in a year or two you’ll be taking victims as you might grapes from a bunch.

“It’s the worst thing,” she said, turning towards me, forcing herself against my hand. “It’s the worst thing.”

We’re the worst thing, she meant. We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.

There are times when saying “I love you” is blasphemy worthy of the Devil.

“I love you,” I said.

Much later, after we’d lain for a long time listening to the rain in the dark, I felt the last barrier between us dissolve. It was as if the night’s tensile apparatus suddenly fell apart. She said: “You killed your wife, didn’t you?”

She already knew the answer. Had fucked me knowing. Was lying here with me knowing. Accommodating this, even more than accommodating her own slaughters, was the proof of having entered a new world.

“Yes,” I said.

Silence. But of cogitation, not shock. I could feel her trying to find a justifying angle— because sooner or later you’d have had to, the alternative would have been turning her, which would have felt as bad as killing her, with four hundred years for her to spend never forgiving you —then finding the unjustifiable truth: because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.

“It was good,” she said. Conclusion, not question. The insight that withers the old flower and lets the new one bloom.

“Yes.”

“Because you loved her.”