Chapter 3
3
“You’re not listening to me,” Devin said into the speaker of his cell phone while pacing the confines of his home office. “I can’t tell you how I got prosthetic claws to pop out because I don’t remember any of it.”
Three days into the worst PR news cycle of his career and his team was trying to triage. Ramona, his publicist, set up this conference call after Devin refused to meet in person.
“We understand you’re under a tremendous amount of stress,” she said, her voice corporate calm, “but we do have to ask these questions. The more details we have about the night in question, the better chance we have of regaining control of the narrative around the video.”
Yeah, no kidding. Devin would love for her to grab the reins on the narrative. Page Six was calling him a deluded has-been. They had a live chat where makeup artists and VFX experts debated whether the fangs Devin sported in the video were made from organic materials or added in post.
The whole industry thought he’d torpedoed his reputation in one elaborate, desperate bid to retain Hollywood relevancy. Fans of TAF had immediately made the connection with the super blue blood moon eclipse thingy from the show, and now everyone was making fun of him for orchestrating a fake transformation one night after the full moon.
And listen, Devin wouldn’t claim to be above doing goofy shit for attention. He had once asked his barber for frosted tips on his wedding day . But even he didn’t think it was a good idea to pretend to be a supernatural monster in public. Especially not the exact one he’d played on TV.
“So to confirm.” He could hear Ramona’s keyboard clicking in the background as she typed. “You were drinking prior to the performance and that’s why you don’t remember the details?”
“Uhhh…yeah.” It seemed safer to let them think he’d done this on purpose (and likely also that he had a substance abuse problem) than to admit he had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Devin was scared shitless. Clearly something was medically wrong with him. It had been three days and his hangover symptoms had barely let up. Everything was too bright, too loud, too much.
He tried lowering his blackout shades and running a white noise machine 24/7. He wore sunglasses inside and ordered industrial-strength earplugs off Amazon. During last night’s thunderstorm, he’d physically hidden in the closet.
Nothing changed the fact that he’d blacked out twice in the last week. And the second time whiskey wasn’t even involved. Devin didn’t know what triggered these…episodes, or whether it might happen again.
Just in case, he hadn’t left the house since the footage went viral.
If he went to a doctor, they’d ask him the same questions as Ramona. Ones he didn’t have answers to. What was he supposed to say? Lately, every time someone hurts my feelings, I lose control and whip out my dick? They’d send someone to arrest him.
If he did have a brain tumor, maybe it would go away naturally.
“I tried talking to a shrink,” he confessed to his team. Dr. Palmindar Jaswal’s initial assessment was that Devin had an acute anxiety disorder, the suppression of which had resulted in a nervous breakdown. “He gave me some breathing exercises to try.”
Those helped a little when Devin remembered to do them. But then the guy started asking questions about Devin’s “childhood trauma,” which, yeah, hard pass.
“Hey, that’s good, man.” Devin’s manager, Ellis, jumped in. “That’s real good. Listen, this is not that big a deal. All the greats get into a little method acting now and then. Daniel Day-Lewis almost offed himself trying to live solely on almonds during filming for The Last of the Mohicans . And they nominated that guy for an Oscar. You just need to lie low for a little while. Keep your cool and let this blow over.”
Right. Lie low. Devin could do that. Today’s headline was tomorrow’s hamster-cage liner or whatever.
He grabbed a pen off his desk and scribbled on a notepad: Breathing good. Keep calm. Then he underlined the word “calm” until the pen ripped through the paper.
His office made him feel stupid. It was full of books he’d never read, some of which didn’t even have text printed inside. He’d gotten bored once and checked. Apparently even his interior designer never expected him to reach for one.
After making a bunch of promises to his team about how he wouldn’t talk to any reporters and would consider cutting out gluten again, Devin hung up, feeling like a puppy that had pissed all over the carpet.
He reached over to his keyboard and unpaused the video that was still up on the screen of his laptop. Devin must have watched the security cam footage that the tabloids had gotten ahold of a hundred times over the last seventy-two hours, cycling through the stages of grief for his career.
The strangest part was, though he clearly recognized his face, his body, his clothes—Devin couldn’t move like that. Thirteen years of playing Colby going into a shift and he’d never gotten his muscles to bulge and strain in that way. He’d never growled like that either, a vibration so deep it made his chest visibly rise and fall even from a security camera’s vantage point.
A terrible shiver shot down his spine.
He wished he could call Jade. She was the one person in this town he truly trusted. He had other friends, sure, but no one he’d let see him like this—at his most pathetic. Jade had already abandoned him for being obsessed with Colby. Why would she believe now, when no one else did, that he hadn’t orchestrated this whole thing?
Fuck. He was trying so hard not to go to pieces.
Every night, he went to bed hoping tomorrow he’d wake up normal.
Every morning, he didn’t.
Eyes, claws, jaws.
Devin slammed his laptop shut.
It wasn’t possible.
Except…what was the rational explanation for how he’d somehow managed to make his nails extend and turn gunmetal gray? How could he have lengthened his incisors in the span of a moment without touching his teeth?
He held his hands out in front of him. They looked normal, human.
For now.
He wished there was some way to check. Like a COVID test for werewolf germs.
Hell, maybe there was. His computer was right there…
Devin opened a web browser, then, on second thought, switched over to incognito mode.
how to know if you might be a werewolf , he typed into Google, with his tongue between his teeth.
The first returned hit was a webpage called Werewolf Support Group .
Holy shit. Devin’s heartbeat began to pound. Maybe there were others.
What if this blackout / sinus pressure / possible animal-morphing thing had happened to more, less-famous people?
It would be kind of sick if he stumbled across a whole secret underground werewolf community forced to hide for fear of prosecution, like in the 2003 cinematic masterpiece Underworld . Devin’s dick jumped a little at the mental image of Kate Beckinsale in that black leather catsuit.
Once the website finished loading—you couldn’t get decent Wi-Fi in Topanga Canyon to save your life—the whole page looked janky as shit. On the banner stretching across the top of the page, someone with an entry-level understanding of Photoshop had overlaid tiny text in a script font on top of an overexposed picture of the moon. Normally Devin would need readers to make it out, but for some reason that wasn’t an issue at the moment.
Hi and welcome to… Oh god damnit. Somehow he’d stumbled upon some kind of fan archive for his own show.
As Devin scrolled down, he saw widgets that linked off to episode guides, character summaries, and what looked like some kind of forum.
Great. People were probably talking about his latest exploits over there.
With his stomach in knots, Devin clicked through.
As it turned out, the comment section had been locked. There was a note at the top explaining that the forum had been frozen in 2018 but that previous queries would remain online as a resource until the site’s web-hosting contract expired in 2026.
Can a werewolf get a vampire pregnant? the first question read. Apparently, user Nathaniel’sJuiceBox99 was writing a fic and wanted to feature something called “mpreg.”
What the fuck was that?
Devin knew about fan fiction in the abstract. They were little stories people wrote about the characters. Occasionally someone brought a printed-out copy of one to a convention for him to sign. From what he gathered, most of them were real horny.
He kept scrolling. Man, these people had a lot of questions about werewolf dicks. And some of this stuff sounded painful.
Eventually Devin got nervous enough that he shoved down his sweatpants, just to check. But as far as he could tell, everything looked the same. Thank fuck.
At one point he noticed a search bar at the top of the site—aha!—and reentered his Google query, but no results came back. Apparently, the nerds who hung out on this thing had plenty of time to go back and forth about the finer details of self-lubricating assholes and male lactation but couldn’t be bothered to dig into the basics.
Still, this was the closest he’d gotten to any kind of answers.
Before he knew it, Devin blinked and realized he’d been scrolling for almost four hours. Maybe it was because he was fraying at the seams, but the content on here was strangely fascinating.
He was about to click out of the browser when a little gray box at the bottom of the page caught his eye. Questions or concerns? it said. Email the mod , along with—he laughed—a Hotmail address.
Devin hovered his cursor over the link. What were the chances the person who ran this thing still checked that inbox?
As he’d read through the various user-generated questions and moderator responses, Devin found himself agreeing with the mod more often than not. First of all, they really knew their shit when it came to the show, but the best part was they would occasionally roast Brian Dempsey in a way that was objectively hilarious.
Whoever the mod was, they’d clearly once cared enough about The Arcane Files to spend countless hours of their life building this fan site. They would probably want to help out the actor who had carried the torch as the one and only Colby Southerland.
So yeah, Devin wrote the email. He made his request for assistance sound like a secret mission. Our little secret , he called it, figuring he might as well give the über-dork on the other end of the Internet a bit of a thrill.
He was already LA’s latest laughingstock. At this point, what did he really have to lose?
Two hours later Devin awoke to the ping of a new email on his phone.
He fumbled blearily for it on his nightstand and then winced at the harsh glow of the backlight as he thumbed to his inbox.
The mod had written back!
Devin bolted upright.
They wanted to meet!
Whoever it was had sent a date, a time, and an address in…fucking Florida?
Well, his team had told him to lie low. Devin might as well hit rock bottom.