Mongrels. Stephen Jones Graham

church is an outside church. They’re not the first ones there. There’s no fire, no light, not even a clearing, really. But there are shapes streaking past in the darkness. One of them brushes the vampire’s uncle and the uncle starts to stand the vampire up on the ground like a big chess piece, but the aunt looks back, shakes her nun-head no.

      “But—” the vampire’s uncle starts, a whine rising in his voice.

      The ghost nun stares at him with her faceless face and the uncle gathers the vampire back up.

      “It’s only Halloween …” the uncle says.

      “It’s Halloween when I say it’s Halloween,” the aunt says, and reaches back with her hand sideways like the coach at school says you do, to take a baton you’re being handed. It’s for them to follow her around the smelly pond, through the blown-over trees with their roots sideways in the air. To the center of the clearing that’s not a clearing. To the nearly caved-in side of the trailer part of a trailer-tractor rig, like the vampire’s uncle is learning to drive.

      This one’s old and rusted. Grown over with bushes and vines.

      On the panel part of the side, where the picture goes when there’s a picture—it’s why they’re here.

      A wolf head in a circle of yellow.

      This is a holy place.

      The vampire rearranges himself in his uncle’s arms to look around them, at all the motion in the darkness. It feels like whispers. It sounds like smiling. It smells like teeth.

      This is the one night a call to the police about werewolves isn’t going to get answered. The one night werewolves who don’t usually see each other, see each other.

      The vampire feels his uncle’s arms go from normal to steel.

      Nosing up to the vampire’s aunt, on all fours but only about as tall as her ribs, is her ex-husband. The vampire can tell from his hair. And from his eyes.

      “Perfect,” the vampire’s uncle says, standing the vampire up on his own two feet without any permission from the vampire’s aunt.

      The vampire finds his uncle’s belt loop with his fingers.

      “It’s okay,” the vampire’s aunt says back to them.

      Her ex-husband is touching his wet nose to her hand now. His whole body is rippling with tension. And it does look like a man in a suit, bent over onto his too-long arms. Only, this is the best suit ever. With the best mask. The most alive mask. The long snout that twitches. The same eyes.

      “Red,” the vampire’s uncle says, like you say hello. But it’s not that. It’s a warning, the vampire can tell. Because you can’t trust the ones that shift and never come back.

      How long they live is ten or fifteen years if they’re lucky, and have found a big enough place to run, to eat.

      The vampire’s aunt says it’s selfish, it’s stupid, it’s not heaven being a wolf all the time, and some nights she cries from it, from all the ones dead on the interstate. From all of them running away with bullets in them like pearls made from lava. From all of them stopping at a fence line, a calico cat in their mouths, something about that yellow window in the house keeping them there. Some nights the aunt cries from all of those wolfed-out werewolves kicking in their dreams, strange scent-memories rising in their heads: barbecue sauce, pool-table chalk, hair spray.

      Not dreams, nightmares. Of a past they can’t recall. A person they don’t know.

      Her ex-husband can’t say anything to her about it either, the vampire knows. Werewolf throats aren’t made for human words. Human words would never fit. There would be too much to say.

      They can lift their lips, though. They can growl.

      “He knows, he remembers,” the vampire’s aunt says loud enough for the vampire’s uncle to definitely hear.

      “That car’s long gone,” the uncle says. “It wasn’t that fast anyway.”

      “Shh, shh,” the aunt says, “it’ll be all right this time.” The back of her hand is still to her husband’s velvet muzzle. But when he snaps his teeth together a heartbeat later, her hand’s already back to her chest, her lips drawn back from her own teeth.

      “You idiot,” the vampire’s uncle says, stepping forward, and when the vampire looks up, his uncle is peeling the rubber mask off.

      The wolf snout remains. And the ears.

      The uncle doesn’t even wait to finish shifting. He dives into the ex-husband and it’s a frenzy, a tangle, a fight on this of all holy nights, snapping and snarling and long curls of blood slinging out, other churchgoers coming in to stand up on two legs, to watch, to wait—two of them are human, naked—and what’s going to last forever for this vampire is the image of his aunt in a white nun costume. She’s stepping away from the fight but she’s reaching in, holding her other hand to her mouth.

      “Now it’s Halloween,” the vampire whispers, just for himself.

      After that it’s all running. Faster than before. So much faster.

      The vampire’s aunt, she still has most of her billowy white nun costume on, but she’s on all fours now, her sharp dangerous killer teeth clamped over the high collar behind the vampire’s neck, and even though he’s eight years old, they’re going so fast through the trees that the vampire’s face is cracking into a hundred pieces, into a thousand.

      It doesn’t matter to the aunt once she shifts back, reties her nun-suit back on, turning her face into a shadow, into a face at the end of a long tunnel.

      Coming back through town, she stops all at once in front of the last house with the porch lights on, explains to the vampire what he’s supposed to do here, then fishes a burger sack up from the floorboard, dumps the trash. She shakes the sack open, makes him take it.

      “Just knock,” she tells him, waving him up the sidewalk with the back of her hand.

      Halfway to the house the vampire hears her crying in the car behind him, but he doesn’t turn around.

      “Oh no, cover your neck,” the unsteady woman who answers the door says in a too-high voice.

      The vampire holds his paper sack out and waits for whatever the next part is.

       CHAPTER 3

       American Ninja

      We were in Portales, New Mexico, just long enough for me to wear a dog path between the back door of our trailer and the burn barrels. That’s what Darren called it when he came through, and then he’d punch me in the shoulder and get down in a fighting stance, his shoulders curled around his chest like he was a boxer, not a biter. Sometimes it would turn into a wrestling match in the living room, at least until a lamp got broke or Libby’s coffee got spilled—I was twelve and tall by then, needed a yard to wrestle in, not a living room—and other times I’d just hike another half-full trash bag over my shoulder, slope out the back door again.

      Because night was falling. Because night’s always falling, when you’re a werewolf.

      There were eighty-nine steps to the burn barrels.

      And it wasn’t a dog path.

      That was just Darren funning me about not having shifted yet. It was probably supposed to be him reminding me not to worry, that I was like him, I was like Libby, I was like Grandpa.

      It didn’t feel that way.

      I didn’t mind the trash runs, though.

      You can always tell who might be a werewolf by if they’re careful