Chapter 8
8
Devin woke up groggy to orange dawn spilling in through the dusty windows of the vet’s garage and someone singing Alanis Morissette off-key.
As he groaned and sat up slowly, a Florida State sweatshirt slid off his chest.
What the—? Without conscious thought, Devin brought the body-warm fabric to his nose. Oh. It was Alex’s.
The same astringent he’d seen her holding earlier permeated the worn cotton and stung his nostrils, but underneath there was the familiar, soothing scent of detergent and something sweeter, more organic, that made him close his eyes and sigh. Devin took a deep inhale, trying to parse the mingling smells apart.
The only thing he could come up with to describe this new, nice scent was “fresh rain,” which, cool, he was pretty sure that was the name of the fancy hand soap his housekeeper had once gotten for his second guest bathroom. So much for an evolved schnoz.
Alex seemed to have stuck what better not be a small rolled-up dog bed underneath him as a pillow. Leaning down, he sniffed that, too, but lucky for her, it just smelled plasticky and new.
Fuck his head hurt. He massaged his temples as another wave of tone-deaf wailing came from the corner. God, Alex was the worst singer he’d ever heard. And he’d once run into the Situation doing “I Will Survive” at karaoke on the Las Vegas strip.
For reasons he couldn’t understand, waking up prone on Alex’s murder tarp was less terrifying than the two times Devin had woken up after transforming at his own home. At least here, he wasn’t alone. Devin made a half-hearted attempt to fold her sweatshirt, ignoring a funny warmth tucked somewhere behind his pecs.
He figured you just couldn’t be that scared, scientifically, while held in the embrace of the finale refrain of “You Oughta Know.”
Devin followed the sound of Alex’s voice to the back corner and found her in a wheelie chair she must have dragged out here from the office, with her feet resting on a utility shelf. She had her laptop propped on her thighs, typing away while a huge honking set of headphones covered her ears. Every time the beat dropped, she tapped one foot against the metal, making the whole thing shake precariously.
Considering the lingering lethargy in his limbs, Devin would bet she’d had to use her horse drugs to take him down. A terrible sense of fear gripped him, and once again, he found himself instinctively following his nose for a diagnostic, trying to subtly sniff her for traces of injury. He heaved out a huge sigh of relief when he didn’t get any traces of blood or battery polluting her scent. The idea of having hurt her made him so sick his vision wobbled.
Devin recognized that relying so heavily on his nose to navigate the world wasn’t normal, but somehow it felt natural. As if he’d always known how to isolate scents and use them for diagnosis and simply forgotten.
In The Arcane Files , the wolf lay dormant in everyone. It was the kind of power people tapped into during extraordinary moments: an athlete with a broken leg dragging himself over a finish line, a mother lifting a car off her baby—things headlines attributed to the grace of god. But only Colby experienced the Change that let him access those kinds of superior skills and inexhaustible resolve on the regular.
It was why he had to serve his fellow man, taking on the kind of supernatural foes that other agents couldn’t. The skills and power the wolf granted were a gift, Colby’s Guild handler told him, but only if he embraced them.
Honestly, Devin didn’t give a shit about fighting crime or saving people, but he figured the better he understood what the fuck was happening to him, the greater chance he had of making sure no one else ever found out. So sure, he’d lean in like that Sheryl Sandberg lady said, even though he couldn’t remember whether or not she’d gotten canceled.
Once, when Devin was ten and still pretty early in his tenure on the daytime soap, he got the flu during sweeps week. Sands of Time was recorded live, and his character, Griffin Antonoff, had a big scene where the man he thought was his father got shot in front of him. In hindsight, it was kind of a fucked-up simulation for a kid, but whatever, Devin hadn’t considered that at the time.
His first agent, this guy named Clifford whom his dad had literally found in the yellow pages, said the scene was Devin’s big chance to show range. He wanted him to burst into real tears during the live filming for the mid-season cliffhanger. Devin practiced making himself cry for a week in front of the dingy bathroom mirror in the walk-up his parents rented near the studio. He’d picture the worst stuff he could imagine over and over. His parents dying. His goldfish, Gilda, dying. This one commercial about starving children in Africa that came on whenever his parents fell asleep in front of the TV watching Nick at Nite.
Anyway, he got pretty good at calling forth waterworks and totally would have nailed the scene if he hadn’t woken up on the day of filming with a fever and the shakes. It was the first time he remembered being really sick, the kind of hot where your brain feels like a fried egg someone accidentally left on the skillet to burn.
“I’m sorry,” he told his mom when she came to wake him up to get dressed. He didn’t know what they’d do, if they’d try to film without him or postpone the scene.
“What do you mean?” She went to the plastic dresser in the corner and started pulling out clean socks.
“I can’t go in,” Devin said. His voice even sounded painful, a muddy kind of croak. Was it possible she hadn’t noticed?
His mother came over and pressed her cool hand to his forehead. “People don’t care if you’re falling apart. They care if you falling apart makes their lives harder.”
You could be weak, Devin heard, as long as you didn’t show it and inconvenience everyone else.
“A lot of kids wanna be on TV,” his mother said, handing him the socks.
Devin got dressed and went to work.
Alex looked over and caught him standing there like a weirdo.
“Oh good. You’re up,” she said, apparently still not afraid of him despite whatever bad behavior he might have gotten into while his brain took a vacation.
She gave him a once-over, presumably because she felt guilty for having knocked him out cold.
“Are you hungry or nauseous? Those are the two outcomes I see most often when patients come off tranqs.”
Devin almost laughed. By “patients” she meant pets.
He checked in with his stomach. The idea of a big, rare steak filled his mouth with saliva. He pictured sinking his teeth in, juice bursting in his mouth. Devin licked his chops, and okay, that was probably the wolf kicking in again. He needed to get a better handle on recognizing the impulses. Right now they were overwhelming, so vivid and powerful he mistook them for his own.
Separating what the wolf wanted from what he wanted was an intimidating prospect. Devin had trained himself almost his entire life to repress his desires. He’d lost track of the number of times he’d been sore and hungry and alone— relentlessly focused —in pursuit of his career.
“You don’t have any meat here, do you?”
“Meat? Probably not.” Alex got to her feet and gestured for him to follow her back inside the vet’s office. “I’m vegan,” she explained, leading him into what looked like a break room.
She opened the white refrigerator and peered inside. “Can I interest you in a coconut milk yogurt?”
Before he could help himself, Devin screwed up his face.
“I will take that as a no.” Alex shut the fridge and climbed, surprisingly limberly, up onto the countertop to check a top shelf. “There might be some old beef jerky up here.”
In addition to Alex’s ass (which Devin was not looking at because he was a gentleman and also she was strange), the break room countertop supported a toaster oven, an ancient Mr. Coffee with a stack of foam cups, and the kind of honest-to-god watercooler Devin had never actually seen in real life. A schedule with different upcoming surgeries and shifts was listed on the whiteboard taped to the wall.
After a few awkward seconds of watching her balance on her knees, Devin decided he should go spot her. Just in case. He hovered behind her, not fully understanding this new protective impulse and scared that she’d ask him what the hell he thought he was doing if she turned around and found him directly beneath her.
“You gonna pull out a bully stick?”
Alex didn’t bother to turn around. “You’d probably like it.”
Devin huffed out a laugh. What the hell was with this woman?
And why was it working for him? His gaze kept sliding back to the curve of her ass, which, to be fair, she’d placed precisely at eye level. He kinda wanted to bite it…
Must be the wolf again. As Colby, Devin always played his wolf impulses like call-of-the-void stuff. He forgot where he’d first learned about that concept. Probably one of the makeup artists had a psych podcast on in her trailer or something. But apparently part of the age-old human survival instinct meant that when you stood at the top of a cliff and looked down, a tiny part of you thought about jumping. And while most people thought imagining such a thing, even for a second, meant there was something wrong with them, it was actually your brain’s way of protecting itself. That shiver of revulsion at the suggestion taught your body that would hurt and so you cataloged the situation and ones like it as dangerous—do not enter.
The urge to make sure Alex Lawson was safe, as well as the one to caress her butt, felt exactly like that: strange, other , even though Devin knew he didn’t have to follow through with them.
Maybe werewolves were abnormally horny? It would certainly explain some of the fanfic.
Devin made a mental note to do some follow-up research.
“Aha!” She leaned back from the cabinet holding an industrial-sized bag of cashews for his approval. “Okay, so it’s not beef jerky, but it’s got protein. You gym guys are obsessed with protein, right?”
“What’s a gym guy?” He held up a hand, offering to help her down.
Alex stared at it, blinking.
“I just meant you have…you know.” She raised her chin slightly toward the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“…arms?”
“Muscles,” she mumbled, placing her little tattooed hand in his.
Her palm was sweaty.
Devin grinned. He knew she wasn’t that opposed to making out with him.
They both took seats at the little round table, sharing the bag of cashews between them.
“How long you been vegan?” Thanks to extensive dating experience in LA, Devin knew that question and the corresponding lecture were a guaranteed boner killer.
Alex closed one eye as she considered. “Little over a decade.”
“Yeah?” Devin feigned interest while tossing back a handful of nuts. “You catch Babe: Pig in the City on Netflix or something?”
Alex looked very much like she wanted to knock the two legs of his chair that remained on the floor out from under him. “My dad got sick.”
“Oh.” Devin lowered his chair sheepishly back to the ground. “Mad cow?”
“What? No.” She plucked out a cashew and threw it at him.
Devin caught the nut in his mouth.
Alex traced the grain of the wood table with her finger. “He had a heart attack.”
Oh fuck. Devin stopped chewing.
“Is he…okay now?” The answer better be yes or he was definitely gonna have to let her kick him in the balls for being insensitive.
“Yeah.” Alex took her time selecting the perfect cashew. “They put in a few stents, and he’s on medication and stuff.”
“But you worry about him.” It wasn’t a question.
“Pretty much all the time,” she agreed. “The doctor suggested the change in diet, and my dad made the switch but not quietly.” Her eyes brightened with clear fondness for her father. “I thought he’d feel better if he wasn’t the only one trying to swap out bacon for seitan. And it was something I could do.”
“Ah.” He found himself studying her in that moment, the way he might a choreographer outlining footwork. Devin often observed normal families when he had the chance, trying to collect pieces of what it meant to be loved so that he could better play a son in future roles. “Hence the cashews.”
That made Alex smile a little, the sweetest little tilt of her taciturn mouth.
“Hence the cashews,” she repeated.
“That makes sense.” This was the closest Devin had ever come to agreeing with a vegan.
After a while, Alex got up and poured them big cups of water without asking Devin if he wanted any, which was a little pushy but also nice.
Devin decided to let her off the hook.
“You can just say it. You don’t have to figure out the right way to break the news. The drugs are out of my system and I’m fed and watered.”
Alex nodded. Devin got the feeling she was a woman who enjoyed directness.
“So,” she said, holding his gaze and everything, “you’re definitely a werewolf.”
At this point Devin had gotten a little better at the whole tuning-in-to-her-heartbeat thing. He didn’t even have to close his eyes. He just extended his breath and focused on tuning the radio the way she’d once instructed him, imagining the dial turning down ambient noises one by one.
The hum of the AC.
The chorus of soft snores from the animals in the other room.
The faint electric buzz of the overhead lights.
Until he found the beat of her heart, strong and steady. It was probably intrusive and weird, and Devin made a little vow to himself that he wouldn’t do this all the time just because he could, but he found the particular metronome of her pulse soothing. How come they didn’t put human heartbeats on white noise machines? Wait a second, should he go on Shark Tank ?
Anyway, didn’t the fact that he could hear her heartbeat from across the table already prove she was telling the truth?
At the grim confirmation, Devin expected to lose his cool. But all he found was a strange calm. A gratitude. At least someone was saying it out loud. Devin wasn’t having a mental breakdown. He wasn’t making things up for attention. Something impossible was really happening to him.
He drank a long sip of the water and found he was glad for that too.
“You’re taking this surprisingly well,” Alex said when he’d drained the cup.
Devin blew out a long breath. “I have been so shit-your-pants scared for the entirety of the last week, I think my system’s fried. It’s like, you know when you’re on a real ugly crying jag but then all of a sudden you just stop. You hit a wall. And you’re empty and exhausted and dehydrated as fuck but there’s relief in being wrung out.”
Alex gave him a look.
“What? You never watched Titanic ? When that old couple gets in their bed at the end and they’re just holding each other as the water rises?” Devin made a dismissive noise. “Grow up.”
She folded her lips together like she wanted to say something but wouldn’t let herself.
“I’m not saying I’m not scared,” he clarified. “But being scared won’t save me, will it? I’m a fucking actor. I can compartmentalize.” He zipped closed the top of the discarded cashew bag for safekeeping. “So…what do we do now?” Alex was the brains of this operation, after all.
She went and grabbed her laptop from the garage and then set it up between them.
“Okay, so while you were sleeping—”
“Does being passed out from ketamine count as sleeping?”
“—I used Python to scrape the metadata of all the Arcane Files footage uploaded to YouTube.”
On the screen some kind of software ran code he didn’t understand.
“Whoa, what the hell? You’re like Hugh Jackman in that hacker movie where Halle Berry gets her tits out.”
She laughed, low and raspy like her voice.
“Thanks. I think? Anyway, remember how in the whole first season, Colby went through the Trials? He had his Guild handler guiding him through everything, right? Monitoring him as he made progress, watching his back.”
“Yeah. Suzannah Jackson played Bathalda.” Devin’s heart twisted painfully. He’d read that she’d passed away from complications of COVID. “She tried to teach me how to knit once when the power went down on set.”
“Well, what if I did that?”
“Taught me to knit?”
“Made you some sort of werewolf trials. We’ve got three weeks until the next full moon. Here, look.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and spread it out on the table. “It’s a moon map.”
“Did you draw this?”
“Yeah.” She went pink around the ears. “It’s not a big deal. I just wanted to be able to show you that we’re at the last quarter moon right now, about fifty percent illumination.” She moved her pen along the chart, tracking the days as the moon’s illumination grew progressively dimmer. “You should have an easier time controlling the instincts and abilities for the next seven days, but after the new moon, things will ramp up relatively quickly.”
“So, assuming this thing works the way we think it will, the cycle is gonna repeat every twenty-nine days,” Devin counted. “No rest for the wicked, huh?”
“Now you know how people who menstruate feel.”
Whoa. Devin never really thought about periods before, but dang, what a scam.
He considered Alex’s offer. He’d trained for roles before. Combat training. Accent training, god help him, for when Colby went undercover. It had all sucked in different ways, but at the same time he found the exercise grounding, rewarding, progress broken down into bite-sized pieces when what people wanted for him to do—to be—seemed impossible.
“You don’t think there’s any chance we can reverse it? Make me human again?”
“Not according to The Arcane Files ,” Alex said, showing him another tab on her computer. “As I’m sure you remember, that was a major plot point in seasons one and two. Colby tried to reject the Change, but in the end he found the best he could do was control it.”
“Fuck.” This wasn’t a short-term setback. Like the time he’d broken his leg skiing or that one year he’d tried Botox at the urging of his facialist.
“I could keep looking,” Alex offered, “research werewolf lore outside of The Arcane Files . See if anything seems possible.” She sounded doubtful about the effectiveness of alternative routes, and Devin got it. There had to be a reason his transformations followed the textbook of the series bible.
“But in the meantime, I’ve got three weeks to figure out how to shift without blacking out before the next full moon.” Last time he’d gotten relatively lucky, finding his way back home with minimal bodily harm. There was no guarantee that next month, or the one after that, he wouldn’t run into an innocent bystander. Or a mountain lion.
“I think finding a way to keep your wits about you is your safest bet,” Alex confirmed. “You’ll still be operating ‘heavy machinery,’ but at least you won’t be under the influence.”
Devin smirked. “Nice metaphor.”
Mirroring The Arcane Files could work. At least they had a lot of reference material. At the very least Devin would go into the full moon with some mental and hopefully physical preparation. Besides, he had no fucking clue what he’d do otherwise.
If Colby could handle being a werewolf, Devin could too.
“All right. I’m in. You think of how to adapt the trials, and I’ll do ’em.”
He hoped Alex had the stomach to watch him suffer.