Chapter 11
11
When Alex initially told Devin that she’d found evidence of someone else turning into a werewolf 150 years ago, his first thought was Damn, that fucker’s definitely dead .
“Wait, are they dead?” he asked Alex, who had driven over to his hotel directly from the library to break the news in person and was now perched on the couch in the “office area” of his suite.
Who knew how long werewolves lived? The show ended with Colby still alive.
“So, yes.” Alex picked at the plate of fries he’d ordered for her from room service. “Public death records confirm Zachariah Dempsey died in Maine in 1927.”
“Sucks.” Devin rolled a little in the office chair he’d brought over to sit across from her. It would have been cool if being a werewolf made you immortal, even though in movies that always ended up making people miserable.
“Do you know how he died?” Devin didn’t want to say the words “silver bullet,” but he was thinking them.
“It might be best if I don’t tell you. It’s pretty unpleasant.” Alex folded her hands in a gesture that seemed unnaturally prim. “Let’s just say it makes sense that Brian Dempsey doesn’t talk about him much.”
“Come on. I can handle it.” Her reluctance to offend him surprised Devin. This was the woman who upon hearing for the first time that he was either turning into a monster or having a mental breakdown basically said, “Sounds like a ‘you’ problem.”
“Okay. Fine,” Alex said. “He was caught feral in the woods behind his home, naked and covered in chicken blood, and later hanged…”
“Yikes.” Devin swallowed.
“…and then his corpse was stolen and put on display in a traveling circus, where people booed and threw rotten fruit at it.”
“Right. Not ideal.” When Devin pictured word getting out about his being a werewolf, he mostly imagined a flaying in the tabloids, followed by a quick and bitter descent into irrelevancy. But if people started hunting him…Shit. Was he the new most dangerous game?
Alex toed off her sneakers and slipped her socked feet up onto the couch beside her. “Do you think there’s any chance Brian Dempsey believes his great-great-whatever really was a werewolf?”
“No.” Devin didn’t have to think about it. “I worked with the guy for thirteen years and he was completely bought in on the idea that The Arcane Files and everything that went with it was like a golden volcano erupting from his brain. He might reluctantly credit family folklore on some blog that only reaches people who are—what did you call it?—‘extremely online,’ but he absolutely convinced himself over the years that Colby’s story belonged to him and him alone.”
If a magazine or industry guild tried to recognize Devin’s performance publicly, Brian always came into work sour the next day. It was almost funny. It got so bad near the end of the series run that he’d direct his notes over Devin’s left shoulder.
“Brian Dempsey is one of those guys who isn’t ugly but he’s, like, forgettable-looking. You know how ugly guys can have rizz?”
Alex gaped. “Did you just say ‘rizz’?”
“Did I use it wrong?” Devin thought he’d correctly identified the meaning using context clues, but you never knew what those kids really meant in their Reels.
“No…I think that’s right.” Alex looked like she wanted to laugh.
It was an expression Devin was starting to recognize on her. This withholding. Even though he’d never been invited to SNL and was still bitter about it, Alex made him want to be funny.
To earn the harsh huff of her breath. The shake of her shoulders. A glimpse of that gap in her teeth. But he couldn’t just start spitting That’s what she said s. Unlike the conveyor belt of women who petted his arm in Santa Monica, Alex wouldn’t give it up for something cheap.
“I’m just saying”—he brought himself back to his point—“Brian Dempsey is the human equivalent of wallpaper. He might have an HBO contract now or whatever, but back when TAF first came out, he needed the world of The Arcane Files to be something he made up, because making it up was the only thing about him that was special.
“If he thought it was possible that being at the sublunar point during a wolf blood moon eclipse really turned you into a werewolf, I would’ve been stealing bacon-wrapped scallops off his plate at that perfume launch party.”
Alex nodded, like that tracked with what she’d heard about the showrunner from the outside. “So we have confirmation, then. Or at least the closest to it we’re likely to get before you, you know, go all hairy. The lore at the root of the show is real.”
Even though evidence had been building since the wolf moon, Devin still couldn’t quite believe it.
Looking back, he could see the seams where the show began branching out from this core story, expanding as the seasons went on and the narrative got bigger. They hadn’t added Nathaniel, the first supernatural creature other than Colby, until the second season.
The original concept had been so zoomed in on Colby—one man’s agonizing journey to accept and harness his werewolf identity.
Devin played it like the five stages of grief. Maybe that experience had primed him to accept what was happening to him in real life. All those months turned into years of using an emotional melon baller to hollow himself out and make room for the character.
In the narrative, the thing that saved Colby from falling to pieces was joining the FBI to solve crimes and battle evil in the way that only he could. Now more than ever, Devin needed to keep the flame of a reboot alive. If fate or destiny or whatever existed, they couldn’t be sending him a clearer message about what he was supposed to do.
“Do you want to try contacting Brian anyway?” Alex said with about as much enthusiasm as someone might offer, We could try contacting a giant pile of shit and see if that helps . “If you show him the partial shift in person, he should be predisposed to believe you.”
Devin immediately recoiled, sending his wheelie chair back a few inches.
“Absolutely not.” He could practically hear his parents in his ear. It’s a liability. It’s a weakness.
In terms of unhealthy coping mechanisms post–series cancellation, turning into an actual werewolf was worse than getting a face tattoo. Devin couldn’t imagine showing Brian, someone he’d worked so hard to please for so long, something so wrong about himself. Even if the showrunner thought it was fascinating, he’d never look at Devin the same way again.
Besides, according to Jade, Brian thought looking too tied to TAF at this point would tarnish his reputation with HBO.
No. Devin’s only chance at coming back from the Venice video reputation massacre was getting the reboot green-lighted so he could play the whole thing off as an early PR stunt, making it look strategic rather than erratic.
“I don’t want anyone else to know.” He held Alex’s gaze across the table. “Just you. I trust you.”
“Oh,” Alex said, small and surprised.
“I mean, you’re nobody.” He meant it neutrally; there were pros and cons to her anonymity. Sure, she was poor, but it also didn’t get splashed all over the Internet every time she wore something unflattering or said the wrong thing or got her heart broken.
Alex’s face fell. She leaned down and started tugging on her shoes.
“I should get out of your hair.” Even with his werewolf senses powering in at less than twenty-five percent, he could smell the hurt and anger coming off her in waves as she headed for the door. “We have a plan to attempt the first trial tomorrow; let’s stick to it. Hopefully by the full moon, you’ll have this whole thing under lock and key.”
“Right.” That was the goal. On the show, Colby could curl up, docile, at home in his wolf form during the full shift. If Devin could get back to LA by the full moon, his expensive-ass security system should take care of making sure no one got in or out while he was in that state. With any luck, over time, his allergy to working during the full moon might just become a quirky little detail of his rider. Between Stevie Nicks and Lana Del Rey, someone was probably already doing that.
Only, Devin didn’t want Alex to leave, especially not like this. He meant what he’d said about trusting her, but more than that, he found that he wanted her to trust him. He didn’t kid himself that it would be easy, that he was anywhere close, but he could see the fragile thread of it building between them.
“Alex. Wait. I’m sorry.”
The apology caught them both off guard. Alex stopped with her hand on the doorknob.
Devin had to dig deep to explain himself; he wasn’t used to it.
“I’m starting to think LA is like an asshole trigger for me.” One mention of Brian Dempsey and he’d panicked, reverted right back to being self-conscious and afraid. “I’ve felt better here these last few days.” Around you. It was almost like…he could be better here. If he tried. “Must be because there’s less smog, you know?”
She turned, a barely there smile behind her eyes. “Sure.”
“You don’t have to leave. We could…” What? Hang out? Was Devin really that lonely?
I mean, yeah.
“We could…?” Alex surveyed the small hotel room, as if also trying to figure out why they’d spend time together if not to talk about werewolf stuff.
Hey—there was an idea.
“We could watch The Arcane Files . I can tell you all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff,” Devin said, trying to play to her old archive moderator interests.
And sure enough.
“Okay,” she said after a beat, her heart rate speeding up. “I guess I have a few hours before work. But the gossip better be really juicy. I’ve already listened to the DVD commentary a hundred times.”