The sun was setting over the Pacific and the mountains were lit pink and gold. The car was warm with evening light and spoke in its fuel and vinyl odours of America. I drove carefully, holding focus. Wulf heckled, spooked my hands and face with claw and muzzle. My scalp loosened and shrank, hot and cold by turns. Close, now, brother, very close. But I drove to my beloved, carefully.

43

THE FOLLOWING EVENING we parked the Toyota, now with its California plates, in a twenty-four-hour gas station and diner just off Route 1 about a mile north of the Andrew Molera State Park. Talulla wore a blond wig while I sported a false moustache and a Yankees baseball cap. Sunglasses for both of us. The disguises felt excessive but the gas station had CCTV. It was cool and damp. Moonrise was three hours away. Lu’s mode had changed again. Last night’s fidgets had subsided. Now she was quiet, clear-eyed. This was her penultimate pretransformation stage. The final stage would come ten minutes before Turning. Not pretty, was how she’d described it.

It was an hour’s trek to the change site I’d selected. Redwoods mixed with coastal oaks at least a half mile from the nearest trail. From there a seven-mile romp to the target. Kill. Seven miles back. Two miles to the car. Timing was the issue. Timing’s always the issue. Moonrise was 8:06, moonset tomorrow morning at 7:14. Eleven hours and forty-six minutes on the Curse. Hunting alone I’d hold off till 4:00 a.m. Two hours for killing and feeding and an hour-fourteen to get back to base camp. Once you can manage the Hunger, whet and dandle and tease, you want the shortest possible time between werewolf crime and human flight—for the simple reason that if the remains are discovered and the alarm raised you don’t want to be nine feet tall covered in hair sporting a gory muzzle and bloody claws when the sirens start to wail. But I wasn’t hunting alone.

“It’s coming,” Talulla said.

“In here. Quick.”

I lifted a branch and she ducked under. Her face was strained and sweaty. “Get undressed,” I said. “Can you manage?”

No one near, according to my nose, and in any case we weren’t visible. Twilight on the roads and trails was coagulate darkness under the trees.

“Oh,” Talulla said, down to her underwear, holding her belly. She swallowed, repeatedly. Dry heaved, once. I got her out of the bra and panties and stuffed them with the rest of our clothes into the rucksack. Kit-checked: wet wipes, water spray, liquid soap, bin liners. I climbed fifteen or twenty feet into the oak (as rehearsed yesterday) and secured the pack with the clip cables. Back on the ground I found Lula on her knees, doubled up, arms wrapped around herself.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Very close.”

“I know. Me too.”

They were the last words we exchanged that night.

She was quick. Quicker than me. I had assumed—as a male? as an elder? (as a moron , Marlowe)—I’d be fully transformed and at her service while she was still in the throes. But no. Her damp face rendered an appalling small-eyed in extremis version of itself, she vomited bile, jackknifed, rolled onto her side, curled her pretty lips and went in less than twenty seconds with an extraordinary symmetrical fluidity through the Change, while I was still untidily crunching and popping out of my human lineaments. Cutting-edge CGI versus fifties stop-motion, an embarrassing discrepancy I wondered if we’d be able to laugh about later.

Not that there was much time for wondering, what with the fully released scent of a She filling my hybrid nostrils. Oh. Oh. The weeks of human-leaked olfactory hints were no preparation, really no preparation for the merciless clout of the female werewolf stink. Standing, I nearly fell. At the first inhalation my balls filled with a riot of libidinal jazz, my cock shot up like a sprung—like a booby-trapped—device. Talulla, still on all fours with her hindquarters raised, issued a low sound and slowly spread her legs for my questing snout. And there, dear reader, wet for my wet muzzle’s tip was her lupine cunt, larger, slyer, darker-skinned than its human sister, murder-silked and blood-fattened, firm and soft as a ripe avocado and releasing a sweet scent just at the evil edge of rot.

Not yet .

She growled at the injunction, delivered to both of us in simultaneous telepathy, but we knew the waste it would be to come together now, with the Hunger holding our innards at knifepoint and the gift of the kill not yet unwrapped. I let the tip of my cock nuzzle her for a moment, felt the slick entrance hotter than a fevered baby’s mouth, almost, almost failed the dalliance test at the last—but withdrew, and watched with a sort of vicious admiration as she rose to her full height, looked at me with her wiser animal eyes, grinned, and moved off ahead into the darkness. I shot one hot arrow of piss to mark the tree, then followed her.

We understood each other. Clairvoyance that in our human form was no more than the standard new lovers’ allowance increased posttransformation to near-total mutual transparency. She knew, for example, where we were going, though I hadn’t told her. The route I’d traced yesterday led her like an aboriginal songline; it was there in front of her as clearly as if I’d left a trail of phosphorus. Ditto, since she was at liberty to rummage any of the relevant mental files, the image of the house I’d selected, binocular-watched and eavesdropped-on long enough to establish a lone male inhabitant for whom the sub–Frank Lloyd Wright pad was a second home–cum–recording studio retreated to at times of creative crisis. “Look, if they’re going to keep changing the cue-points the whole thing’s a complete fucking waste of time, Jerry.” Under my surveillance yesterday he’d come out on the deck with a coffee, a joint and his cell phone. “No. No, I’ve got all the software here. It’s the same shit. The same useless shit if they’re going to keep changing the cues. I really … Seriously. Tell me how someone making his third feature thinks you can score from footage that isn’t the final fucking cut? I mean … Exactly. Seriously. Seriously. Yeah. Well. That’s the fucking indie wunderkind for you …” He was handsome, with dark blond hair chopped to create a look of boyish self-obliviousness, a good thin mouth, a hard jaw and a long-muscled body. More than enough success with women for resolved misogyny. Or so I thought, perhaps wishfully. I’d picked a man (and a looker at that) lest a woman complicate things for Talulla, which rationale I felt her now perceiving—she turned her head back to me with a grin—and being in equal parts touched and offended by.