You ever sleep on your ear wrong? It gets folded up under your head somehow and you wake up with that creased cartilage throbbing, way too much pain for such a stupid little injury?
That’s how my whole body feels for a couple of days before the change. Looks normal but feels like I’m caught in some kind of torture origami—everything folded wrong and forced to hold there. Knees screaming, finger joints in agony, breasts aching. Sometimes I have to call in to work, mumble something about cramps. It’s not exactly a lie.
It’s such a relief when I can step out into my backyard, let the full moon hit me and unfold. Talons bursting from fingertips, jaw thrusting out and filling with fangs, warm silvery fur rippling across my chilled skin, everything right and proper.
And then? I have a date.
I trot into the woods behind my house, pad through it to the other side that backs up Fraternity Row.
This is where I first discovered the smell that guides me now, gives me a mission and a purpose. I was running through the trees near a frat house, with no intent but to hunt down one of the local deer, and sighted a circle of guys gathered on the back porch, sniggering. Slowed and looked closer, and they were surrounding a passed-out girl lying on the floor.
I paused, listening harder. And when I heard what they were planning, I ran, I leapt, I clawed.
I ended a couple of them, terrified all of them. A good night. But it was only after I awoke, crammed back into human form, that I remembered: all of them smelled the same.
At first I thought it was whatever they were drinking that night. Or some terrible cologne they all used. Axe for Assholes.
It was only when I crashed another party just in time that I realized—it was the smell of a predator.
You’d be surprised to learn how many of the frat boys have that smell.
Or maybe you wouldn’t.
So tonight, I have a date with some undergrad boy or other. Age inappropriate, I think to myself, and give the little whuff that passes for a giggle in this form.
Doesn’t take long to find one—never does. It takes longer to wait for him to be by himself, to wave off the friends he was talking with as I stalked them silently, paralleling their path a few dozen yards into the woods. He was talking about the townie girl he’d meet tonight, about exactly how much alcohol he was planning to force into her if she wasn’t willing to start with. And he reeked.
His laughing friends head off townward, and he walks another mile to the water tower. Looks like he chose a really isolated spot to meet her. He thinks that’s good for him. It isn’t.
He checks his watch and huffs out a little disgusted noise—how rude of her to be late for her own assault.
I burst out of the trees, so fast on all fours I’m almost flying, leap into him and take him down. I love this moment of sheer fucking terror, the moment he was so sure that he was going to be on the other side of tonight. I love the disbelief in his face as my claws pin his shoulders down, as I press my muzzle against his face, pant hot breath against the soft meat of his cheek.
I always try to say something in this moment. Tonight I try to say, “Out walking by yourself? You were asking for it.” But like always it just comes out as a howl, spiraling out of me, echoing off the water tower and the trees as I sink my long fangs into his throat and tear, and tear, and tear.
Kelly Dalton is a Virginia librarian who knits, obsesses over Canadian television, and sublimates her dark streak into her writing. She's had disquieting poems published in Apex Magazine and Stickman Review.