“Kill and devour the flesh of an innocent,” the old woman said as if she was reading from a grocery list.
It took Emily several seconds to get her voice working again. “Say what?”
“With your own hands, of course. And the meat must be raw, but that goes without saying.”
“You’re kidding. You have to be kidding. You’re not kidding?”
The old woman was scarcely even looking at Emily anymore. She was looking beyond her, a grin in the corner of
her mouth and her imagination flashing across her eyes. “Man or woman, young or old; makes no difference so
long as you hunt them down.”
“No! Out of the question,” Emily held both of her hands in front of her to block out the woman’s bloodthirsty
suggestions, “ I can’t kill a man just to become a werewolf!”
At this the woman seemed disappointed, “Don’t write yourself off so easily girl, there’s a beast inside you
yet. If it’s really that difficult you could kill a youth. Or an infant for that matter, but you might need a
few for it to count. Not that it’s hard to stop at just one.” Her eyes gleamed, “Did you know, they don’t have
a word for human veal? They would if they knew what it tasted like.”
“You’re crazy. Completely insane.” Emily should have left the store. She should have ran. But one thing was
still holding her there. “Isn’t there any other way to become a werewolf?”
The woman shook her head as she sat down behind the store’s front desk. “Why would there be? A werewolf is the
ferocity of a wolf and the hate of a man. Only one isn’t anything at all.”
Emily wanted to argue with the woman, like she had to defend the honor of a mythological creature, yet
everything that came to her were empty platitudes. She wanted to become a werewolf totally, but she couldn’t
name a single reason for the urge. She wanted to feel her soft fur, to run like the wind through a cold
forest, but she didn’t want to become a werewolf to do that. She simply wanted to be a werewolf more than
anything. More than she…
“OK, say I go through with this. Can I still be human afterwards? Can I control the change?” Emily couldn’t
believe the words coming out of her mouth, but it’s not like just talking about it was a crime, right?
The late evening’s setting sun caused the woman’s spectacles to cast long shadows over her forehead. “Do you
want to? Will you want to?”
“Then no, no deal,” they were some of the most difficult Emily had ever said. “I’m not paying you anything to
cast a spell on me.”
That elicited a sharp bark of laughter from the proprietor. “Darling I don’t charge for my services. And I’m
not going to cast a spell on you because there’s nothing to ensorcer. Whenever you want to take advantage of
my services they will be available.”
Relief and terror splashed into each other inside Emily’s chest. “What? No! Take it back! What if I-”
“What if you slay and drink the blood of an innocent by accident? Well that will be a terrible shame, wouldn’t
it?”
Too much was happening all at once for Emily to clear her head and focus on any of it, so she just took her
strongest feeling and ran with it. That feeling was that this creepy old woman had wronged her, and she must
pay. Emily shot her hand forward to grab the old lady by the hair, but her fist closed on shapeless air. The
woman smiled as her body, then the desk, then the entire store broke apart into black smoke. The smoke held
its form for only a moment before a stiff breeze blew through the strip mall and carried all of it away into
the sky.
Emily was left standing in a vacant parking space that had never, could never, have been a store, her fist
clasped before her. The shop had left her with no trace of its existence aside from its sinful knowledge.