Robert Anson Hoyt has been writing since he was first able to hold a pencil, often being assisted in this endeavor by his varying, (though consistently large) number of cats. He has sold two stories to DAW anthologies, Better Off Undead and Fate Fantastic, and currently has a novel under consideration by a major publishing house. He is not a werewolf, but would be willing to consider it if his cats were not certain to kill him.
I checked the seals on either end of the fluorescent light as I leaned back comfortably in a used office chair, reveling in the cold, musty scent so pervasive in storerooms everywhere. There are unexpected advantages to being a mall technician. One of them is that not only do people not give you a second glance, but most will go out of their way to avoid giving you a first one. When you have a tendency to grow hair unexpectedly in exotic areas depending on the time of month, any job with a certain acknowledged amount of privacy is instantly an advantage.
Admittedly, it was more comfortable now, than it had been. A hundred years ago, I would likely have been running through the forest for my life, pursued by villagers armed with silver-tipped arrows and a lack of patience with disappearing livestock; whereas today I was the executive engineer at an anonymous mall, and my only major worry was what excuse to make for my suspiciously timed sick days.
I picked up the needle-nose pliers from the toolbox and made a little tweak on the connecting wire of what would look, to anyone else, exactly like a normal fluorescent light. I glanced nervously at the door of the supply room as someone walked by. Of course, no one knew about my little invention, but all the same it made me skittish. According to my watch, a rather exclusive model which showed a little pictograph of the current phase of the moon in the top right hand corner, the pet store two floors down should have been opening now, which meant that Leroy would be calling any second.
Leroy was the manager of a fairly upscale groomer called the Pet Parlor, and he had always been very kind about helping me when I came up with a prototype for something. But this was perhaps my most important design yet, and Leroy had outdone himself in offering me a back room in the Parlor where I could test it. My skin was getting itchy, which was a sure sign I had too much wereglobin built up in my bloodstream as it was, and I was beginning to wonder if I would end up barking mad, when finally the phone rang.
I picked it up quickly, but tried to sound normal, just in case it wasn't Leroy. I had learned a long time ago to be guarded about answering phones, and had fallen back on the old tradition of sounding generic or bored. It didn't do to ask some poor non-were if he'd gotten rid of the fleas he got last month mating. If I had the ability for that sort of thing, I could have been a novelist, which, like maintenance, was not a bad profession for the naturally reclusive.
One had to wonder about Stephen "King."
"Maintenance department. Harry Silverbane speaking,"
"Good morning, Harry. Don't worry, it's me. Sorry, wereglobin had me feeling dog tired this morning, so I ran a little late."
I chuckled. "Morning, Leroy. Hold on a sec." I moved to hold my hand over the doorknob.
"All right, I can talk. Can I come down to install the moonlight tube in the back room? It's making me nervous bringing this thing into work at all, and I want to test it out as soon as possible. I have to know if it works."
"Actually, that's going to be a bit of a problem." He coughed on the other end of the line, and then, when he spoke again, was a great deal quieter, "I don't like talking about this on the phone. Can you see me downstairs in about five minutes? I'll tell the staff I'm double-checking our upkeep status."
I swore inside my head, and grimaced. It couldn't ever be simple or easy, could it? But Leroy was a practical business owner, and if he was concerned, there was a reason.
"All right," I said, frowning, "but I'm not happy about it."
"Believe me, neither am I," Leroy said, and hung up.
I looked around the room for a place to store the moonlight tube while I met Leroy, lest it get broken by someone waltzing in here. That was the last thing I needed.
The tube rack. That was the obvious answer. We tended to keep an extra box or two around in case the glass from a tube we took out broke. I hastily piled it on top of the pile, hiding it in plain sight. Mainly, I wanted to keep it off the floor and minimize chances of it breaking.
As I was leaving, the phone rang again. I hastily picked it up.
"Maintenance department. Harry Silverbane speaking," I said.
"Hi." A soft voice which brought to mind a twenty-something blonde and hinted at the sort of perfume that made men weak at the knees said, "Could you send someone around to Sherri Soda's? We've had a bit of an accident in the men's shirts and I was hoping we could clean it up before someone hurts himself."
I picked up a legal pad to write a note to any of the interchangeable maintenance workers who stored a tool belt here.
"I'll get someone right on it," I lied, scribbling down the note. Then I tacked it on the board, and hurried out the door.
As it turned out, Leroy had a very good reason for not having the tube installed today. Leroy—a well-built man with black hair and a jovial face—was a good friend, and when I had told him about the moonlight tube, which I hoped we could use to burn off wereglobin while the amounts were small enough, to prevent a change at the wrong time, he had set aside a back room specifically for the purpose. Unfortunately, like many business owners, he had investors who helped keep things afloat in return for a share of the profits, and one of those investors was coming to look things over, meaning the last thing Leroy wanted to do was draw attention to the room which had been recently wolf—and soundproofed at some expense. The second to last thing he wanted to do was fiddle with the lights for no apparent reason. Leroy wanted things to look well-oiled, smooth, and seamless.
"Murphy's law, I'm afraid. They had to pick today of all days to come by." he said, sipping what was billed as a "Moonlight Mocha" by the somewhat romantically minded coffee shop owner next door. He glanced as his watch. "In fact, I have to run in a minute."
He must have noticed me shifting nervously in my seat. He lowered his voice and leaned forward, "Harry, how long has it been since you burned wereglobin out of your system?"
I thought about it for a moment, and sighed, "Probably about two months."
He winced, and jerked his head to the side, "How did you even manage that? Shouldn't have been more than a month."
I shook my head. "Mall air conditioning system went haywire last month over the full moon. Thank Dog it happened close enough to summer that I could avoid being out at night, so I didn't have to abandon my post in the middle of a crisis. No moon, no reaction."
He looked up in the direction of his Parlor, and back down at his watch again. Then his clear blue eyes bored into me.
"You know that was a stupid idea. There's enough wereglobin in your system right now, I imagine that if you put silver near enough to you to bond, you'd be dead before we could say 'contact dermatitis.' You're a brilliant engineer, but you aren't going to help anyone if you're dead. Try to burn off tonight, you got me? Take a sick day if you have to." He took a final look at the watch, "I gotta go. Meet me tomorrow with the bulb. I'll call you, same as usual. And hey," he said, pointing at me as he stood up to leave, "I mean it about burning some off. I'd hate for the next thing to send along in the howl to be your obituary." And he hurried off.
It was an otherwise uneventful day. The worst little adventure was cleaning up after a kid in the obligatory slushy stand who took the dare of a friend to drink four extra large slushies in quick succession. I made the decision to leave my bulb alone. With this much wereglobin in my system, it was just best if I didn't do anything to aggravate my anxiety, in case I grew a spontaneous and sudden beard. In any case, the bulb was probably safer stored away than it would be if I took it home and were tempted to tweak it, especially while I was this wound up.
I made my excuses, and handed things over to the night shift at the earliest possible moment. The moment I got home, I started undressing, as much as anything because of the strange feeling that my clothing was beginning to have. I considered going to my "kennel," as we typically called it.
It was a fairly typical appointment for an older were's house to have some room where you could turn in without damaging anything, while the younger generation tended to have a cavalier attitude, and could be counted on to do it very nearly in public. This tended to be the most common explanation for why you occasionally saw a mysteriously orphaned article of clothing on a sidewalk in the city or suburb. Someone had lost track of time and shifted unexpectedly.
While I did have a room of this type, I was uncertain about using it. I could only afford to if . . .
I went to the kitchen and checked the calendar. It did not look pretty. I had about three of my sick days left, and more than three full moons coming over the course of winter.
Although I understood Leroy's concern, and knew he was right about the danger, especially with this much wereglobin in my bloodstream. If I transformed, I could still be in the process of burning it by tomorrow evening.
Wereglobin worked like gasoline, and once moonlight started metabolizing it, you were stuck for as long as it took to process everything. Usually, you metabolized it as much as possible with moonlight, but most people still had between six to eight hours left by the full moon, unless they used a metabolism enhancer like the moon bulb.
Unfortunately, that had served as an evolutionary advantage when humans and weres alike were nocturnal and moonlight exposure was guaranteed. Now it meant my blood composition got downright inconvenient when I spent most of my time indoors.
Which meant that I couldn't afford to risk changing. I was almost out of sick days, and for all I knew I'd be out for sixteen hours. That, and I absolutely had to get that bulb installed tomorrow.
So instead, I took two aspirin, and ate a raw steak out of the fridge. Protein tended to help calm things down. It took an enormous amount of protein to transform between a human and a wolf, just to repair damage wreaked by bone rearrangement and muscle realignment. If you sated your cravings, it helped deal with most of the nervousness.
At around nine o'clock, I crawled into bed, exhausted. It was going to be a restless night for certain.
And at nine-fifteen, give or take, it finally got unbearable, and I crawled out of bed and curled up in the corner of the room on top of my blankets.
When I dragged into work the next day, the place was far more exciting than usual. There was a gaggle of security guards crowding a very embarrassed looking young man. He was standing in the circle of rent-a-cops wrapped in a blanket.
I tapped a rubbernecker on the shoulder.
"What happened?" I asked, fearing the worst.
The guy turned around, laughing softly.
"Guess he lost a bet. Get this. Kid sends the security guards on a chase after some big dog he brought into the mall as a distraction, then runs out through the middle of the mall in his birthday suit, screaming at the top of his lungs."
My blood ran cold. Without bothering to make an excuse, I ran up to the maintenance closet. Sure enough, the box in which I had put the moonlight bulb was missing.
At that moment, I heard the door open behind me, and one of the junior maintenance workers came in, apparently looking for something in the toolbox.
"Oh, hi, Mr. Silverbane," he said quietly as he walked to the desk.
I cleared my throat and tried to suppress my nervousness. The last thing I needed to do was make this situation any hairier.
"Derrick, did you find out who did the maintenance job I posted on the board yesterday?"
The kid looked up with a slightly scared expression.
"I did that job, Mr. Silverbane. Someone had evidently been swinging one of the studded belts around and had broken a fluorescent light. I got to it as soon as I saw the note. You know how clothing stores are about lighting." He paused, and bit his lower lip nervously. I realized that I had been standing there with my mouth open, and the fact that I was shaking and sweating probably didn't make me look any more sane. It didn't help that I was plagued with guilt. The poor kid out there had probably just been a college student going in to buy a set of dog tags, which turned out to be quite literally useful, since they were loose enough they wouldn't strangle you when you changed, and stopped the younger generation from being dragged off to a kennel during a night of roaming. And he had unexpectedly become a victim of the moonlight. I had to see Leroy.
Derrick broke into my thoughts. "Is, um, something wrong? I didn't take too long getting there, did I?"
I nodded at him, in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.
"No, no, nothing is wrong. Would you excuse me a moment?"
At which point, I ran downstairs as fast as my legs would allow me to.
I found Leroy standing at the entrance to the pet shop when I got down. He didn't even chew me out for not waiting for the call. He just took me by the shoulder, and with uncanny smoothness led me towards the office.
"Ah, sir, I knew you would be worried about Fifi. Right this way, please. I'll take you to"—and as the office door closed, he changed direction completely, without even pausing—"we have a problem."
"I noticed." I said, gritting my teeth to stop from shaking.
"You can thank your lucky star, which in this case I would say is Sirius, that Frank, from security, is one of us. He's going to see about fixing up the security tapes, and trust me, that implies no small amount of danger on all of our respective parts. And before you ask, he was already talked to by one of our people down at the police station, and the kid'll probably just get a bit of steak and they'll call his parents to pick him up before he's even thinking like a human again. May I ask how on earth you lost the bulb? And"—he said, barely looking up—"why you're still hopped up like a Chihuahua on a barbeque grill?" he asked. And then his expression froze.
"I suppose I should have guessed from the fact that you showed up. You skipped last night, didn't you?"
I just nodded, and then added, "I lost the bulb because I didn't want to take the bulb home while I was feeling so nervous." I was starting to get hot, and my skin was itching like the blazes.
"Very sagacious of you," he said, quietly. Then, after thinking for a moment he added, "Then you can't go remove the bulb. If you did, you'd turn almost instantly. And, it occurs to me that the kid probably went roaming at least on the half and full moons, knowing kids, whereas you have nearly two full moons to burn off. We need an excuse for getting it out of there."
"We can't destroy it," I said. "A lot of the plans never got written down, in case anyone started looking for the maker."
He swore under his breath.
We needed to get that bulb out of there, and do it in a way that wouldn't attract too much attention.
And then a thought occurred to me. Maybe because I was so racked with wereglobin, I found my mind going at right angles to the way normal humans usually did.
It was fairly obvious, of course, that a non-were would have to change the light bulb. The trick, however, was giving a good reason why they would change it.
"I have an idea." I said, and picked up Leroy's phone.
"Derrick, maintenance department." A voice said on the other side.
I smiled.
"I'm not quite sure I follow you." Leroy said, as we walked along the corridor to Sherri Soda's.
"Look, just trust me here," I said, jittery with excitement, "The kid who changed the bulb is still learning the ropes, so I told him that the bulb he installed in the clothing shop was actually supposed to go to the Pet Parlor."
Leroy nearly dropped his jaw on the floor.
"Are you crazy? How can you tell him that?" he said in a frantic whisper, "Look, I've hosted your experiments more than my share of times, and I don't mind. But it's another thing entirely to stick me with a device I've never seen, in the public view, of all things. Did you even give him a decent explanation, or is he going to spend a bunch of time poking around to find out why?"
I smiled coyly. "He provided his own explanation. Figured that that 'weird tinge' of light might help to calm the dogs."
Leroy gulped. "If I understand your explanations correctly, he's too close to the truth for my taste."
I wheeled on him unexpectedly.
"Leroy? You are the absolutely most firm-minded businessman whom I've ever talked to. And I've just had a brilliant idea for field testing my moonlight bulb, without risking any more public exposure." And now my smile grew, "And not only that, but if you play your cards right, then I think you might get a ton of profit."
And then I succumbed to the urge and scratched at my ever-more-itchy skin.
"But first," I added, "I'm going to be your guinea wolf."
About a month later, I strolled into the Pet Parlor. I had heard on the howl, which these days was available in podcast for those who didn't want to sit in their backyard listening all night, that the keywords for the spa service today would be a pet name associated with mythology, and two words beginning with r. Changing the passwords on a regular basis and communicating on the howl made sure all the werewolves in town knew that Leroy had an answer to "that time of the month," and that anyone who thought something was suspicious would be kept guessing.
That, and it provided endless entertainment as people came up with something that fit to say to the receptionist.
I walked up to the counter.
"I'm here to see poor little Pegasus. You know how Romanian cats hate to get rinsed."
The receptionist, who so far believed that this was part of some form of promotional giveaway, nodded and pointed her finger.
"Just down the hall and to the left."
I stepped into the room, and saw Leroy standing in front of a Chinese screen. He turned around and grinned.
"Harry! Nice to see you. I think you'll be pleased to know that business is booming. In fact, the profit has been so good, pretty soon we'll need to hire a dishonest accountant to steal some cash, so we look a bit more even. We must have gotten half the werewolves in this town so far, and still more are on the way." He grinned.
"Glad to hear it. Besides, the credit has to go to you. There's no way I would have thought of calling it a 'Werewash.' That was inspired. I was laughing for the rest of the night when I got back to human form and translated that." I finished unbuttoning my shirt, and put it on a hanger.
"Thought it sounded better then 'wereglobin metabolizing treatment.' I have people requesting personal 'moonlights', but . . . " Leroy's eyes darted towards the door, and he lowered his voice as I undid my pants. "Between you and me, I wouldn't mind if it took awhile. I don't suppose that somewhere in the course of development, by the by, you could maybe ensure that they aren't so durable?"
"I thought you said you had too much money as it was?" I stepped on my socks to get them off and started rolling them into a ball.
He sighed, for a moment, and then came back in the voice of a businessman doing what he does best.
"I'm positive that we'll just have to grin and bear it."
I chuckled. "I'll see what I can do," I said, climbing into the kennel.
"Excellent!" he said, smiling to himself. And then he remembered what was going on. "I'll, er, just turn on the lights and give you some privacy, then, shall I?"
I merely nodded.
And then I remembered the receptionist.
"By the way, the receptionist isn't a were, is she?" I asked.
Leroy turned around grimacing and shook his head.
"No. We're kind of hard to find. I'm hoping we'll get a customer who wants work."
"You'd better get hopping on that." I laughed. "I'd like to see this place go to the dogs!"