Cúan

The speedometer was pegged at fifteen and still felt dangerously fast. She’d been driving through the fog like this for almost three hours, creeping, not running, away. Nancy Felan squinted, trying to catch sight of the patch of pavement immediately in front of her car.
She was a plain woman, not too pretty, not ugly, either, about five eight, medium build. She would be virtually unmemorable on the street. Unmemorable save for the eyes, smoky green-grey slits behind heavy lids that looked out on the world with a cold intelligence. They gave her a detached, unconcerned appearance, which kept people at a distance. Those eyes stared into the impossible fog.
Headlights were worthless. Instead of illuminating the road ahead the light bounced off the solid wall of white. She’d switched them off an hour earlier. There was no way she was stopping, though. The thought of the pick-up drove her to keep moving, to get as much distance from it as possible.
She glanced down at her naked body: a living maze of scratches and purple welts. There was open flesh showing through flaps of skin on her flat stomach. Despite the cold night, she was sweating. A wisp of hair slipped down into her face and she carelessly moved to tuck it behind her ear with one hand, but the sight of her hand, covered in blood to the wrist, stopped her. Her other hand was stuck to the wheel with the stuff.
The blanket of fog thickened, if that were possible, as the Buick rolled cautiously downhill and over a bridge. Nancy heaved a sigh of relief as her tired thudded over the ancient wooden planks and thought of her fierce, tough-as-nails mamma who would be roused from sleep by Nancy’s nearness just on the other side of the hollow. She felt a little quake at the thought of coming back to her mamma, especially after how they’d parted.
She needn’t have worried.
“It wasn’t pretty, Mamma,” Nancy finished. “There was blood everywhere.”
“Don’t matter, darlin,” said Marletta firmly, her back to Nancy as she filled a kettle with water and pulled dried herbs from where they hung on the ceiling. “What’s done is done.”
Nancy dabbed blood from her face with the towel her mamma had wrapped around her shoulders. “I know Mamma, but I thought . . .” she shuddered and was silent.
Marletta turned slowly and pressed a poultice to a particularly deep gouge in Nancy’s lower back.
Nancy winced as her mamma put another hot towel full of foul smelling herbs against a particularly painful wound and thought about her daddy, Big Carl. She turned to look at her mamma, but all the questions died in the back of her throat. The kitchen buzzed and popped in its ordinariness.
Big Carl didn’t talk much about his past. Every evening, he read from the Bible which he kept prominently displayed on the mantle above the fireplace. As they got older, after they started going to the school over in Minerva, Nancy and Little Carl read from the book, too. On Sunday mornings he’d preach up a storm, the neighbors all shouting out the approval and terror and longing he whipped up in them with his words.
One night in mid December, a few years before his death they were sitting in the front room of the big farmhouse, watching the snow gather on the window ledge. Big Carl was working on his Christmas Eve sermon. The radio was on, humming out classical music. Nancy didn’t know any other house, in Connal’s Gap nor in Minerva, where she spent some afternoons playing with school friends, where Beethoven was ever heard. Big Carl hummed along.
“Daddy?” said Nancy, looking up from her book. “How come you got to be the preacher?”
Big Carl put down his notebook and smiled at her. “Well, it’s what I’m called to do. Like you’re called to go to school and play. I studied to be a different kind of priest a long time ago. But that was before.”
“Oh.” Nancy was quiet for a moment. Big Carl watched her, waiting. But everybody goes to school and plays.”
“So?”
“So that ain’t special.”
“Sure it is. You’re called to be you. And school and play is part of tht, but it isn’t all there is to you, is it?”
“No. Where was it? Your priest school?”
“Mundelein, Illinois.”
“Oh.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Are you from Illinois?”
“Yes.”
Little Carl looked up from the Jungle Book picture book he was pretending to read.. “Is that why you talk funny?”
Big Carl chuckled. “I suppose so.”
Now little Carl was interested. “How come you come here? Did your daddy and mamma bring you?”
“No,” interrupted Nancy. “Mamma told me you come here when you was grown an that your parents died when you was little.”
“Well, I wasn’t so little. I was old enough,” Big Carl said, and a shadow moved over his face. “I was in school to become a priest. I was twenty-one.” He shook his head slowly.
“How’d they die?” asked Little Carl, eyes wide.
“They were killed. And no,” he saw Nancy start to speak, “I can’t tell you about it. Not now. Ask me again when you’re older. Then I can tell you. But I will tell you this. After they died I had to spend a lot of time walking about the country by myself. But then I found Connal’s Gap and your grand-dad and the whole Filtiarn clan took me in and healed me up and now I return the favor by preaching for them.
“And now,” he said, standing up and catching them up in his long arms, “it’s bed time.”
It was her daddy who taught Nancy to fish, swim, and hunt, and how to move through the trees at night like a grey shadow, invisible. From the old ones of the village all the children learned the stories, obligations, and rituals of their peculiar people.
But her real love was books and reading. Even in her shocked state as she sat wrapped in drying herbs in her mamma’s kitchen, she smiled, remembering the times she spent on the back porch, reading. She could see herself sitting on the front porch reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, twirling her grey hair absent-mindedly with her finger, when she sensed Big Carl coming. She looked up to see him loping across the field toward the barn, which he entered. He came out, brushing the knees of his overalls with one hand, glancing briefly toward the road. In his other hand was a brace of young rabbits. Nancy stood to greet him.
Big Carl’s green eyes narrowed to slits and he yelped at his daughter, canines flashing. “Watcha reading there, Pup?”
When she told him, he laughed, “Grass!” in his short, barking laugh, shook his head. Then he sat down and listened as she read about the glories of working people and the beauty of every continent on earth.
When she was fifteen her daddy was accidentally shot and killed by a farmer one county over on a hunting trip. Uncle Lou was with him at the time.
“Why?” Marletta howled in grief. “Why?”
Lou just shook his head and sank low. “I’m so sorry, Marletta. I’m so sorry. We wasn’t payin attention.”
After the funeral Lou had tried to pull himself back together, but the strain was too great. Even though no one blamed him, he blamed himself. One night, under the full moon, he trotted across the wooden bridge and away from the clan.
After her daddy’s death Nancy’s restlessness seemed to swell inside her until she sometimes thought she would burst open and flood the world with longing. She spent more and more time alone, walking the hills with books of poetry, coming home only to sleep and occasionally eat. Little Carl and her mamma tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t put into words her need to fill her eyes and mind with new things. Two years after Lou left, Nancy walked across that self-same same bridge.
Marletta ran to her daughter, a paper sack in hand. In the sack was canned fruit and dried meat.
“Mamma,” said Nancy, “I ain’t going to the Arctic. I’m going to Frankfurt. They got supermarkets there.”
Her mamma stared. “Here,” she said, pulling from her pocket a small silver mirror Nancy had seen before.
Nancy was stunned. “Mamma, I . . . I . . . Thank you. I’ll . . . treasure it.” She looked at the mirror, a tear drop of silver half the size of her palm, a chain attached to the handle. Marletta’s mamma’s mamma’s mamma, she knew, had brought one very like it across the ocean in a wooden hulled boat. Since then girls in their family had taken one into her new home, wherever that might be.
“You go an find whatever you’re looking for,” Marletta told her daughter stonily. “An when ya caint find it there, yu’ll come back, where ya belong, with your tail atween your legs. An thet’ll suit me jus fine.” Then she turned and walked ramrod straight back to her kitchen and began preparing supper. But for a month she sat in the road after dusk had washed the land with its grey shadows and howled her sorrow to the moon.
Life in Frankfurt was exciting and bewildering. Her days were taken up learning to negotiate the city she’d visited only a handful of times, napping in the city park, and ravenously working her way through the library. As to plans, she thought she might try to enroll at the University and study literature, but in her honest moments that seemed like an empty dream. Her daddy had done it, so she could, too, but with no one to guide her through the world of academia, she was as lost as a blind cat in a snowstorm.
On her third day, she sat in the park reading the newspaper and eating a sandwich because, as she’d been told by a pinched looking woman in the library, “the library is not a cafeteria.” She turned to the section marked “The Nation” and read through a story about a serial killer suspected to be operating in Kentucky. It seemed to Nancy that the writer might be trying too hard to make something out of a series of unrelated murders stretching back over twenty-five years. What caught her eye, though, was the word Mundelein, the place Big Carl was from. There were no names mentioned, just a sentence about two deaths, possibly three, near a lake at a seminary. She thought she’d write home and see if her mamma had ever heard Big Carl talk about something like that.
The rest of the story moved closer to home. Three old men, Bob Naegal, Raymond Cormick, and Douglas McDell, all from Frankfort, had been savagely beaten and robbed over a three year period. Then there was the homeless men and pack of wild dogs that had terrorized some of the trailer parks near the river for several summers, but even Bill Adams, who wrote the story, admitted that that had stopped two years ago.
She stuck the story in her pocket and moved on to the Want Ads. So far, nothing had caught her eye, but today she saw –
Butcher needed. Must be good with knives. Apply at Betty’s Fast-Mart in person. Ask for Betty.
There was a trash dumpster beside Betty’s Fast-Mart, a tiny Mom-n-Pop in a mostly black neighborhood. She was walking past it when she noticed a newspaper lying on the broken asphalt nearby. Without thinking she stooped and picked it up and absently made her way through the door of the shop, vaguely hearing the jingle of the bell overhead.
Splashed across the front page of the paper was a fuzzy photograph of what looked like a man in a dog mask. “Floridian Swamp Monster Prowls Appalachia” read the headline. Nancy frowned and stared at the crude pencil drawing. The picture was like nothing she’d ever seen. She thought it must be a joke. She folded the paper back over and read the masthead: NATION’S NEWS. IT’S ALL REAL!
She frowned at the oddity of it. The picture was surreal, and the accompanying story didn’t fit with any of the legends and stories she’d heard as a girl. Couldn’t the writer at least have consulted a few folklore books before concocting this flight of fancy? She grinned to herself, thinking what her mamma would have to say about the picture in her hands.
Nancy kept reading in parched amazement as she walked toward the back of the store. She was so lost in thought that she didn’t even look up when the back door slammed open and a woman in a white smock stepped in out of the gathering twilight. The woman’s eyes were huge behind her glasses. She blinked slowly, a snowy owl. She smiled at Nancy, who blinked back and stuck the paper into her pocket.
“Can I help you?” the woman said.
Nancy’s mind went blank. She struggled momentarily to remember why she was here. Her cheeks blazed as she stammered, “Uh, I’m uh, lookin for a job.”
The older woman looked skeptical. “That a fact? Well, you in the right place. I’m lookin for a butcher. I’m Betty.”
“Yes, Betty, Ma’am,” said Nancy. “I been cookin all my life, Ma’am, and my mamma says I’m the best butcher we’ve ever had up to Connal’s Gap.”
“Well, you certainly well mannered. Whose Gap?” asked the woman. “You must be from up in the hills. Alright,” appraisingly over her enormous glasses, “can you read and write?”
Nancy flushed, laughing high and nervous. “Yes, Ma’am. Of course I can.”
Betty squinted and said, “Well, why don’t we start you off with two days a week an see how you work out.”
Yes Ma’am,” said Nancy, relieved.
Being the butcher at Betty’s Fast Mart was an easy job for a girl who had held a knife as soon as she could balance on Marletta’s kitchen stool. Before the week was out, Betty had given her a full week’s schedule. With Betty’s help she found an apartment and a few odds and ends of furniture for the main room which hosted her kitchen, dining area and living room, but shuttered off the bedroom and threw piles of blankets on the floor. Betty visited often, usually hinting that this was no way to sleep, but Nancy laughed her off.
It was two weeks later that Nancy found another serial killer story in the L. A. Times while she was sneaking her lunch in the library. She tore it out and took it home.


Marty Vargas was an ex-con who had moved in up the street from Betty’s Fast Mart a few months before Nancy had been hired. Betty couldn’t stand him. She was sure he was up to no good. “He was sent up for assault and battery,” she told Nancy. “He’s bad news,” she said. “Stay away from him.” But Nancy knew the moment she saw him. She knew before she ever laid eyes on him, by the smell of him drifting, wafting, lingering through the aisles. She’d come around from behind the meat counter and stared at his back as he bent to pull a bottle of cheap whiskey from the shelf. He had bristled before turning to run his green eyes over her. His lips peeled back and he and showed her his long yellow canines, running a hand over his slick black hair. Wordlessly, he’d pointed at a package of pork chops and one of steak before throwing some crumpled stained bills at Betty and stalking out of the store. She knew like she knew her own name that their futures would collide like rocks rolling down a hillside. She knew it, and she was afraid.
Betty noticed her watching him and warned her away. “Girl, you know that man’s no good. There’s something wrong about him. Puts me to mind of a wild dog up home who got to bitin folk and liked it. You know they say there aint no going back after that? Menfolks had to put him down, they did.”
“I know, Betty, I know,” avoiding her eyes. “I don’t trust him either.”
Betty rolled her eyes and sighed before she flipped off the lights in the front of the store.
In the parking lot she said, “Why you still walking? Aint you heard about the serial killer? And don’t you like my old car?”
Nancy squinted a little in the moonlight. “I love it, Betty. You don’t believe any of that serial killer stuff, Betty. I just like walkin under the moonlight is all. It’s almost full tonight. You’ll see it in about an hour. It’s big and orange. A pregnant moon, my mamma calls it.”
“You plannin on going home for Thanksgivin, Nancy?” Betty asked. “I’ll bet your mamma would love to see you. I can’t wait to see my girls. If you don’t go,” she added hastily, “you stay and eat with us.”
“That’s sweet, Betty. Maybe I’ll just do that. I don’t know if my mamma’s ready for me just yet.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Betty laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Nancy got phone calls so seldom that when the phone rang the next morning she wanted to hide beside the couch for the first few rings before she got the courage to walk over to it and, with a start, pick up the receiver.
“Nancy?” Betty’s hoarse voice croaked from the tiny speaker. “I need you to open the store this mornin. I got the flu or something. Think you can handle it by yourself?”
“I can, but do you need me to come take care of you?”
“No, child. This is one of them twelve hour bugs. I’ll be back on my feet by tomorrow. Just mind the register.”
“OK,” said Nancy.
The beautiful November day turned into a bitter November evening and Marty delayed his visit until nearly closing time. He grabbed his usual family size packages of pork chops, round steaks and whiskey.
He threw the money on the counter, frowning.
“Closing time?” he grimaced at her.
Nancy nodded, her eyes on the money she was pretending to unfold and count. “I got some other things to do, though. And I have a friend coming by in a few minutes.”
“No, you don’t.”
She nodded again.
“Can I give you a ride? They got this serial killer and all.”
Nancy nodded.
The cold north wind scattered the remaining cloud cover, revealing a swirl of stars in the moonless sky.
As she locked the door and slid the key into the gap between the doors, Nancy thought about Betty. She knew what the older woman would say if she could see her sliding across the cracked front seat of the Monte Carlo.
On the drive, they talked very little. Marty’s adam’s apple worked up and down a few times when Nancy pointed out that the moon would be full tonight. He licked his lips before saying, “Really?” She fingered her necklace and said nothing, noting to herself that the wind had died down.
She wasn’t at all surprised when he turned not toward her apartment, but in the opposite direction. He glanced sidelong at her with his cold green eyes, lip curled around his yellowing canines, but she said nothing and wondered in a detached way what was coming next. Her teeth itched.
Marty pulled the truck down an empty street in the old industrial section of town and parked beside a concrete culvert so big he could have driven through it. He turned to look at her, a lopsided grin on his face. His teeth gleamed dully in reflected glow of the headlights. His nostrils flared and she mirrored him. He licked his lips and swallowed powerfully, then looked intently out the window.
“Full moon tonight,” he said. “Supposed to rise about,” he checked his watch, “ten minutes from now.”
“I know,” Nancy said.
“Let me ask you something, Nancy,” Marty interrupted her thoughts. He sounded more comfortable now. “Do you believe in ghosts? Monsters? Werewolves?” He ducked his head and grinned again.
Nancy nodded slowly, suddenly unsure of herself.
“You know more about werewolves than most people, don’t you?” He leered toward her.
“I know enough. You can see that,” her voice cracked.
“What ‘s your daddy’s name, darlin?” he asked, putting a hand on her arm. “Maybe I know him. Maybe he’s a varg.”
Nancy snarled. “Big Carl Felan aint no varg,” she said, slipping into her mamma’s pattern of speech.
Marty threw back his head and laughed. “Big Carl? When I knew him it was just plain ole Carl. And he wasn’t no werewolf.”
The moon, which had been struggling at the horizon, began to push its way into the night.
“And,” Marty continued, “he wouldn’t have become one, if I had had my way. We were on a tear up in Wisconsin,” he said in response to confused look, “Willy and me. They had started calling us the Bray Road Beast in the papers, even though there were two of us. We were out hunting one night when we spotted Carl and his dad out fishing. You know grandpa’s name? No? I do, because it was in all the papers. It was Harold.”
Marty casually pushed the automatic locks on the driver’s side door. “We were stalking these two when Carl’s mother comes out to bring the boys a snack. She was a big ole gal, and I always did like a little marbling in the meat, you know. So Willy threw Harold in the water and took off after Carl, you know, and I went for Nancy.” He paused and grinned at her gasp. “That’s right, Nancy. So, I chomped that ole gal pretty good, tossed her around a little while she was screaming and trying to run for help.” He smacked his lips.
Nancy began to cry.
He frowned. “But when I came back to ole Willy, he was dead and Carl was good and gone.” Marty sighed. “I never knew where he went, or how he killed Willy. I figured his body would turn up sooner or later. Werewolf bit is poisonous, you know. Maybe not, then. But now here you are. If Carl wasn’t dead, I reckon what I’m about to do to you would just kill him.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Nancy said in a bare whisper.
“No?” Marty growled. “You ought to be.” His voice was rising. “I’m a varg, I’m the Bray Road Beast, I’m the Kentucky Killer.” He pulled up his dirty t-shirt and lowered his face with a salacious grin, revealing a long strip of wolf skin around his waist. “Ever seen one of these before?”
Nancy nodded her head. She’d never actually seen one, but she’d heard enough stories, learned enough lore to recognize an ulfsband. Not even the Neuri understood them, despite their eons-long work tracking and killing vargs.
“If there’s anything left of you, I might make another one out of your hide,” Marty was laughing.
Nancy took deep breath and turned toward him, tucking her leg under herself and smiling with false confidence.
“Have you heard of the Cúan?”
“No,” Marty said, with a hasty look through the windshield. “Tell me about it.” His voice sounded drawn and anxious.
“OK, I can tell you the story my mamma and aunties told me when I was young.”


A long time ago, around the time of the American Revolution, a handsome dark haired Irishman named Aidan Tiarn went out to the local pub and tied one on. It was a foggy night out on the peat.
“A night not unlike tonight,” Nancy laughed with a look out the window. “They always add that when they tell the story. My mamma and aunties do.”
Aidan Tiarn, though, did not fear the fog that rose like unhappy spirits all around him as he bid his fellows farewell and mounted his mare beneath the full moon. He knew Maggie would carry him faithfully north; all he need do was to hang on. As they started off, he faintly hoped she’d stay away from the tinkers camped along the road which ran parallel to the open peat.
He dozed on the way until he felt the donkey stop walking beneath him. Thinking the journey done, he swung out of the saddle, expecting to walk into his own home. As soon as his feet hit the springy ground, Maggie bolted upright and whinnied. She pawed the earth, turned, and ran back toward town, abandoning her master.
He ran cursing after her, but she kept running. It was no use. As the thundering hoof beats faded, he heard something that sounded like the devil himself clearing his throat. Instantly sober, Aidan Tiarn turned to face the sound. He found himself face to face with the largest grey wolf he could ever imagine. Its ears were flattened against its skull and a long strand of saliva hung from its jaws. Aidan shook his head, trying to lcear the whiskey stewing his thoughts. When his bright blue eyes met the wolf’s green ones, the growl dropped an octave.
Aidan Tiarn was thought by the neighbors to be a brave man, not given to hysterics, but his heart shriveled in him. He choked in a gasp and felt the piss run warm down his leg. He sobbed and drew himself up to his full height and shouted and stamped his feet in an attempt to frighten the creature. He was rewarded, momentarily, by the beast raising its ears and cocking its head. He shouted again. The wolf’s eyes opened wide and a grin formed on its mouth. Then it laughed.
“Laughed?” said Marty.
“That’s the story,” said Nancy. “It wasn’t no gentle laugh, neither.”
It was a low menacing laugh that grew as it went on. The wolf sat back on its haunches and laughed like a man in a pub who had just heard a new limerick. Finally it stopped and wiped its eye with a paw. In a rough, familiar voice it said, ‘Are you trying to frighten me, Aidan Tiarn?’
Aidan recognized the voice. It was Weylyn to the east of the peat bog, a man who lived alone in a filthy hovel dug partly out of a hillside. He had moved to the county some years earlier. His story, that he’d been driven from his home by the British, was readily believed. His scrawny cow and bald chickens were a contrast to Weylyn’s own sleek body, a fact not lost on his neighbors. Aidan remembered in some detached part of his rapidly numbing brain that he’d seen Weylyn that evening, had maybe sung with him.
No, probably not. Weylyn didn’t sing. He wasn’t very friendly, really. In fact, most of the women of the town kept a closer eye on their children now he was around. There were whispers that he had stolen the little McNair girl and several sheep in the bargain, but no one could prove anything.
In the time it took to turn this over once in the mind, Weylyn curled his lip over his teeth and without another word jerked toward the man, who fell sitting onto the soft earth. Weylyn’s breath was hot in his face and flecks of saliva covered him as he blocked the full brunt of the attack with his right hand on the wolf’s throat. He could feel the rumble of Weylyn’s growl and the pounding pulse of his blood under his palm. With his left he reached under his vest, clutching the paper bound package he’d gone to town for those many hours earlier, before the pub, before the dirty limericks, before the bawdy songs with Brennan and Timothy, before the unfortunate ride across the bog. Weylyn’s teeth snapped the air, grazing Aidan’s cheek, nearly drawing blood.
Aidan’s fingers curled around the package and he wrenched it out from between their two bodies as they heaves against each other. Weylyn was using his forefeet now, driving him to his back. He brought the package up and swung it toward Weylyn’s right eye. The wolf, though, was faster than he was and snapped at the swing, cutting the back of his hand and tearing the brown paper wrapper. He shook his head back and forth, exposing the tear-drop shaped silver mirror, purchased that very day from Seamus Reilly’s silver shop.
Aidan brought the mirror hard into the side of Weylyn’s muzzle. The wolf howled with pain and fell back. Aidan scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily, his hand pouring blood. Weylyn lunged again, but Aiden kicked his throat before turning to run across the uneven ground toward a hill he recognized. Weylyn yelped a curse and collapsed to the ground, where he shook his head and gurgled.
As he ran tripping and stumbling over hummocks in the uneven ground, fighting his way through the clammy fog, Aidan caught sight of the wolf in the mirror in his hand. Shocked, he stopped and threw a glance over his shoulder. The wolf was still there, gathering his wits for the pursuit. He shot another look into the mirror and saw, once again, the bloated visage of his neighbor, farmer Weylyn. Lungs blazing with the exertion, he sprinted to a stop at the top of the hill, where the air was lighter, where the full moon cast a deathly glow across the misty peat.
Weylyn had recovered by now and was covering the quarter mile Aidan had just run at twice the speed. Aidan, too tired to run any further, turned to face his attacker, holding the mirror before himself like a dagger. They circled each other, panting and growling. Weylyn leapt forward, foaming spittle flying from his open mouth across Aidan’s face. His snapping teeth closed on Aidan’s right forearm, shredding loose a large strip of skin. The wolf’s paws were on his shoulders when the mirror reflected a splinter of moonlight into his eyes. He yowled as though he’d been stabbed, then fell back, swinging his head wildly. Aidan dodged sideways and Weylyn turned his head in the same direction, eyes empty and stupid.
‘You can’t see me, can you, doggy?’ shouted Aidan.
Weylyn snarled, ‘I can sure enough hear and smell you. And soon I’ll taste you, neighbor. Then I’m on my way to your house for a little dessert.’ He pounced toward Aidan’s voice, who lurched sideways, and plunged the sharp handle of the mirror into the wolf’s neck. Blood spurted through the air, pumped like a geyser. Aidan plunged the handle again and again into the creature, shrieking with every strike. Finally the beast stopped moving. Then he fell exhausted to the ground.
He woke a few hours later, blinking in the pale grey of the predawn. Beside him lay the naked body, not of Weylyn the werewolf, but Weylyn his neighbor, his neck nearly severed. Clenched tightly in his teeth was a ragged flap of flesh that neatly matched the gaping wound on Aidan Tiarn’s arm.
Marty was staring at her. “So?” he said. “So Aidan Tiarn became a werewolf? A Cúan, or whatever the hell you called it?”
“No,” breathed Nancy, more deeply affected by the story than she had been in a long time. “I mean, yes. Or, yes and no and then yes.”


Aidan Tiarn looked at his dead neighbor and groaned. Despite the neighbors’ agreement that he was odd and perhaps dangerous, Weylyn was still a man and no one would believe that he had killed a werewolf in self defense. And why was the man naked? How would he explain that?
As Aidan thought about this, he noticed that Weylyn wasn’t completely nude. He was wearing a belt. Gulping back the bile and revulsion, he bent over the dead man for a closer look. It was a belt, and, despite the blood dried in it, it looked to be made of fur.
Aidan felt pain in his shredded arm and groaned again. In the vague light he could see he was too far from home to walk there. Not in this condition. He sat up and scanned the bog under its patchy blanket of mist. A glimmer of orange caught his eye and he sat up straighter, then shrank back. It was the tinkers’ camp.
It’s either go to the tinkers or die, he thought to himself. And if they kill you, where’s the harm? You’re already half eaten. His head floated as he struggled to his feet. He swayed in place for a few seconds, stepped forward and kept going. He opened his mouth to cry out, but his throat was empty. Soundlessly, he collapsed.
When he woke this time the day was full. He lay beneath a blanket and there was a cold rag draped across his eyes. He tried to sit up, but tiny strong hands restrained him. The rag slipped to one side and he caught sight of an old woman so wizened she might have been carved from the oak tree behind her. She shook her head and spoke to him in a voice as ancient as the peat.
Aidan shook his head and said, “I don’t know what you’re saying. Where am I? Who are you?”
“She saying lay you back down,” said a man’s voice. Aidan stopped struggling against the tiny woman and looked over her shoulder. The man swam into focus: large black eyes, dark skin, a large moustache. His greasy black hair was pushed back over a high forehead. He blinked once. The old woman nodded and patted his chest. He lay back, staring at the canopy of green above him.
“Who . . .” he began, but the man interrupted him.
“We are called Neuri. From . . .,” he waved to the east. “Over water. Going America. We hearing the battle last night. You and the varg. My mother sends me to getting you from the . . .” the man raised a dark eyebrow.
“Hill?” offered Aidan.
“Hill. So, I bring you to her and she works to stopping poison.” He bowed his head sadly. “I am sorrow I am not able stop him before . . .” he waved his long fingered hand at Aidan’s injuries. “I am to be watching and I failed.”
The old woman clucked at her son, then smiled toothlessly and took Aidan’s injured arm in her dirty little left hand. She hummed and held her right an inch above the gaping wound. Squeezing her thumb and fingers together, she inscribed a triangle in the air, then the sign of the cross, three times. She reached for a small clay jar, uncorked it, and dipped a green branch into it. Then she wiped the branch, covered in something red, over the bloody mess that was his forearm.
Aidan screamed in horror and pain. The skin of his arm sizzled and bubbled wildly. His eyes watered and his head spun. He could feel the burning penetrate through the muscles and into the bone, where it stopped, hollowing him out. Through his gritted teeth he gasped, “What is that?”
The man’s voice came to him as though from a long way off. “Ulfsbane, holy wine. Blood for blood. We borrowings from church for you.” Then everything was black again.
There was sharp pain when he woke. The toothless old woman sat nearby, fanning the fire absently. She pulled her dark blue scarf higher over her head when she saw him blinking awake. He closed his eyes and felt the stabbing pain again. A moment later two dark haired, dark skinned girls bent over him. Their hair was covered like the old woman’s, one in green, the other in red. The one in red probed the open wound on his arm with a white stick. Aidan shouted hoarsely and sat up. The girls smiled at him then burst into laughter.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Stick,” said the girl who held it, simply.
“Stick?” he said, scooting up into a sitting position, throwing a look at the old woman to see if he was about to be wrestled back down, but she didn’t move.
The girl smiled again and waved the femur in her hand. “Stick,” she said, soberly, before bursting into a giggle. The other girl joined her and they collapsed in a heap on the ground, arms twined around one another. The old woman spoke harshly and the girls quieted. They sat up and smoothed their colorful dresses, looking to the ground. “She says you may ask about your condition.”
The girl in the green scarf was subdued and proper. Her accent was mild but exotic, and carried a sense of adventure. Aidan wondered at her English, but shook off his curiosity.
“What condition?” he asked, looking from the old woman to the girls.
The old woman muttered under her breath. The red girl said, “You have been bitten by a varg and survived. You were not eaten, which is because of your own bravery and strength.”
Her sister finished the thought, “And you will not become a werewolf, which is because of her.” Both girls looked to the old woman, who cleared her throat and nodded.
“You killed the wolf, which began the work, and you have been washed with holy water,” continued the girl in green, “and proper prayers have been said over you. You owe our grandmother a great debt of gratitude.”
Aidan sighed and looked to the old woman. She waved him off and bowed her head.
“But there is more,” said the girl in red. “You still contain the wolf, but not like the other one. Yes, we know him. In the varg, all the worst of man and all the worst of wolf resides, crowding out that which is noble.”
Aidan nodded, trying to take it all in.
Her sister continued for her. “Not so for you. You possess the good and the evil, the wisdom and the folly of the wolf and the man. You need not fear the full moon. Holy water will bless you, not harm you, and silver will continue to be your friend. You will have no need of the ulfsband in order to change, and the transformation will be painless for you.”
“Our grandmother says you ought to leave this place,” the other girl took up. “You will not be welcome. Your children will inherit your changed nature, and they will find this place difficult. She says you should go to America.”
Aidan stared, then nodded. “Can I . . .” he began.
The old woman muttered again. “You may take your wife,” said her grand-daughter.


Nancy looked at Marty. “That’s how I recognized you,” she said. “Aidan Tiarn changed his name to Filtiran and came to America. He was my great-great-great grand-daddy on my mamma’s side. The Filtiarns are Cúan. So are the Neuri. They know a lot. I don’t know how my daddy come to be a Cúan. Maybe he was born that way, like me, but I don’t think so. He never liked to talk about it, and he died.” She looked at him almost shyly.
Marty grinned and shook his head. “Why are you telling me this, darlin?”
“I just wanted you to know a little about the wolf who’s going to kill you.” Her voice was light and patient, as though explaining that she’d have to give him two dimes and a nickel instead of a quarter.
By now a full quarter of the moon stood on the hill across from the pick-up and Nancy knew she had waited long enough. She stared at Marty, whose ears were growing. His forehead was flattening, elongating his ugly face toward her. The yellow canine teeth were growing, too, even as his hands shrank back into the sleeves of his jean jacket. He yelped in pain as the transformation increased.
Nancy didn’t wait for it to finish. Although she’d never seen a varg up close, she knew about the ripping anguish he’d undergo before he would run and tear with lightening speed. She leaned across him to pop open her locked door, then bolted into the thickening mist. As she ran she stripped off her clothes, feeling the moonlight on her skin as her own transformation began.
The teardrop mirror swung between her forelegs as she fell to all fours and sprinted away in a grey streak. At the top of the hill she turned to at the pick-up. Marty crawled from the cab, a long black wolf with flashing yellow teeth. Pointing his head to the sky he howled a long wail. Nancy resisted the urge to answer and betray her place, but Marty saw her anyway. She turned and ran with everything she had in her, realizing as she went that she had no plan. She cursed silently, wishing she hadn’t been so impetuous. She laughed, though, remembering her threat to kill him and resolved to make good on it.
She was quick, but he was an experienced hunter, a killer who knew how to move among the abandoned buildings all around them. She could hear his claws clattering on the rough asphalt. Her ears turned back to gauge his speed. He was rapidly closing the distance between them. She skidded past an abandoned doorway and turned into an alley.
Nancy waited, panting slightly. Her keen ears heard him slow and she smelled his hesitation. She crouched in a doorway in the alley, trying to plan, trying to think, but the panic choked her.
Marty stopped at the end of the alley and growled into the fog, “I can hear you, you know. I can smell what you’re thinking. And you’re right. After I kill you, I’m going to hunt down that fat bitch and eat her.”
His paws scraped through wet autumn leaves as he entered the alley. Nancy didn’t wait; she flung herself too early into the open and toward the sound. Marty was ready and met her with a vicious swipe of his paw, knocking her to the ground. He followed with his teeth, ripping and slashing the air above Nancy’s head, who kept on rolling forward and away from the attack. The silver mirror banged violently against her chest. She gripped it in her mouth and tried to focus the moonlight toward Marty, but the dense fog obscured the light. She could hear Marty laughing as she turned to run. His teeth closed around the small of her back and she felt herself lifted in the vice grip of his jaws. She could feel her skin popping and tearing as he shook her. She yelped and whined in agony, which only seemed to spur him on. Finally he tossed her into a wall. She lay crumpled in a ball, trying to assess the damage to her internal organs and instinctively playing dead.
“I know you aren’t dead,” Marty’s thoughts came thickly to her. “You’re going to be, though. Before that, you’re going to wish you were.” He walked closer, laughing a horrible combination of wolf and human wickedness. Nancy steadied herself and lunged forward, aiming for Marty’s throat. She felt her teeth close around his skin and pulled herself backward with all her weight. Marty yowled and beat at her with all four legs, gouging and scratching. Nancy responded with the same action, and for a moment they dug and tore at each other with abandon. Eventually Marty’s rear legs found purchase and shoved her away.
Nancy leapt to her feet and ran back the way they’d come, heading for the pick-up. As she went, she willed herself back to human form, jumping and catching a window ledge as she went. Her right fist shattered the glass in the window and cleared an opening for the rest of her. Behind her Marty barked in frustration, nipping her heel as she dragged herself into a filthy living room. He jumped and snarled at the window opening, a chunk of Nancy’s skin hanging loose from his teeth before he gulped and it was gone.
Above the fog, Nancy could see the moon glowing orange and beautiful: pregnant, she thought. She poked her head out through the broken glass, holding her mirror in her shattered hand hand. Blood ran down her wrist from a dozen small cuts. Focusing the moonlight, she aimed carefully at Marty’s upturned face. As the silvery-orange light crossed his eyes he shrieked in pain and fell to the ground. Nancy jumped from her perch, landing on the rough fur of his back. She swung the mirror hard plunging it twice into his reeling eye beneath her, ignoring the aqueous vitreous fluid that poured out of the emptying socket. The third strike sunk the mirror into his neck and Nancy reached beneath him, pulling the slender silver chain it hung from around Marty, throat. The silver sizzled and hissed.
Nancy jumped away and ran again. Marty shook his head viciously and the mirror clattered to the sidewalk. He chased her with a howl. As they approached the pick-up, Nancy transformed again, leaping through the open window and into the cab. Marty fallowed and landed on top of her. His fangs sought and found a hold, buried deep in her chest. Nancy lurched beneath the heavier wolf, tied to him by her own flesh. She pawed wildly at the empty hole where his eye had been. Her claws entered the hole and she dug at it until she felt his teeth loosen from her chest.
Now Marty was backing away, trying to get away. Nancy’s teeth drove through his thick hide and into the jugular. Marty jerked spasmodically and lay still. Nancy held on until his neck grew soft and hairless, then looked at him.
The pick-up was coated in blood and Nancy’s strength was seeping from her. She ran the three miles to her apartment and dove into the old Buick. It started on the first try.

A Story in a Sentence: Not the Man

“You’re not the man I thought you were,” she said, shutting the door behind her.