Chapter 6
“Is the coast clear?” I ask as I unscrew the vent cover with my stolen mini-screwdriver.
It’s a calculated risk. Just asking would be enough to send a hospital staff member racing to the nurse call button, but I always like to announce myself before joining a patient in their room.
After walking in on a vampire feeding on his wife, snow monsters mating, a naga peeling off his own shedding skin, and an ogre whose meal tray was late, I’ve learned my manners.
“Yes, dear,” answers my favorite patient to visit. Millie May Mills is the kindest, sweetest monster I’ve ever met. “Why are you climbing through the vents again? I thought you said you were under Dr. Stein’s protection.”
“Liam is on the rampage again,” I reply, slapping the dust from my patient gown.
“Must be going around like a flu. Y’all just missed Dr. Stein fussing over my wing.
I can’t believe my surgery is tomorrow—not a moment too soon,” she says, giving me the side eye.
That’s something I love about Mrs. M. She can discern by the tone of my voice whether or not I want to talk about something, and she doesn’t pry.
“Why’s that, Mrs. M?” I ask as I rest the vent cover against the wall.
While I will probably end up telling her about how my holistic efforts are failing, it will be on my terms. I’ve got to warm up to her before explaining my diagnosis and the treatment plan I insisted on trying.
We aren’t close enough yet. Maybe when I know she won’t try to take over like my parents, Pack Leader Grant, Liam, and even Dr. Stein have.
“My butterflies will pass over the sanctuary soon. I must be there to guarantee them safe passage through West Virginia,” she says with a sparkle in her eyes.
She pats the comforter at her feet, and I don’t hesitate to join her.
Mrs. M is the soft, compassionate mother I wish I had.
Her three sets of twins visit her throughout the day to show they care, while I seethe with envy in the ventilation shaft.
Why couldn’t I have been adopted into a Mothman family?
They all live in the Appalachian Mountains of the human realm, with the more moth-like members living in the forest with Mrs. M.
The human-presenting ones are their conduit to the resources of the human world.
Best of all, there is no pack leader.
“Tell me more about West Virginia,” I beg, grabbing her wrinkly hands.
“There’s nothing left to tell, pumpkin,” she says with a laugh. “You’ve heard about everything from the majestic Smoky Mountains to the humble coalfly. While I don’t have any fresh stories, I’m glad you visited. Dr. Stein asked about you—”
“Oh, Mrs. M, not you too!” I wail and throw my arm over my eyes in a fake swooning gesture. “I thought you understood.”
“What I learned from him is that you have the same horrid disease that took my Horus. When were you going to tell me?”
Never? I can’t believe my condition reached her. Who else does Dr. Stein talk to about me? Will I be guilted by all the friends I’ve made in the hospital? I’ll have to stop making friends, which will ruin my existence.
“Guilt colors you pinker than the underside of an opossum, little miss. Don’t play poker.
You will lose your shorts in the first hand,” she says with a raspy giggle.
I love her colloquialisms; they make her sound exotic.
She’s a classy lady with a style that I’ve never seen, making me curious about her area of the human realm.
Her kids even bedazzled the sling holding her broken wing until her surgery.
How I wish I could leave with her family!
“I liked being your friend without my issues getting in the way—”
“Can you live without them getting in the way? Don’t sugarcoat it.
I loved my Horus through the worst of his flares until they consumed him.
Don’t look at me with pity. Horus gave me six children to keep me company until it’s my time to join him.
They hadn’t invented the surgery Dr. Stein wants to give you when my Horus passed. Why won’t you hear him out?”
“Because I’ve heard about the surgery from my parents, my pack leader, other weres…it’s been shoved down my throat for years. I just want to live happily in my whole body.”
“Are you happy sneaking around a creepy monster hospital?”
“Honestly…” I stammer as she lowers her glittery bifocals halfway down her nose to peer over them at me.
“I know that look. I’ll be honest, I swear.
I’ve never had the friends, the freedom, and the joy in the pack that I’ve felt here.
This is the closest I’ve ever felt to belonging.
Sure, half the patients look at me as lunch, but the other half are wonderful people. ”
“But they aren’t people.”
“More like people than the werepack,” I reply with a shrug. “I have no future there, Mrs. M. I don’t have the inborn allegiance to the pack leader. I sneak onto the human internet every second I can. It’s as if my life began when I escaped from my wheelchair.”
“I remember when the internet was my only lifeline to the human world, too—before I tried to kidnap Horus,” she says with a distant smile. “That was a long time ago.”
“Then you understand how talking to actual, real-life friends is a treat, even if it’s in a hospital gown that blows open at the worst moments. The werepack consists of nothing but a bunch of bullies—”
“Okay, you don’t have to convince me to release you from that smelly old pack. You’ve told me all about how unfair it was for you in the forest—you talked my ear off about your trials,” she says with a throaty chuckle.
“It’s less obvious here that I don’t belong,” I say with a sniffle.
“Oh, honey,” she replies, rolling her bed desk over her lap between us.
As she passes me her box of tissues, she removes the lid of the two dinner trays.
“There, now, dry those tears. Dr. Drake left your dinner tray from Dr. Stein since she knew you’d visit me.
There’s noodle soup if you can stomach the grease, gluten-free crackers if you can’t, but I added a piece of strawberry pie that I’m sure will disappear first.”
“Oh wow, thank you,” I say, peeling the cling film from the slice of pie.
“Little thing, you have a sweet tooth bigger than Texas,” she says as I shovel a big bite into my mouth. “Never met someone who ate so much sugar. I know it’s not the colitis because my Horus’s palate was as salty as his attitude.”
“Do you miss him?” I ask, swallowing my second bite.
“Every day, darlin’, every day,” she whispers toward her hands. “Like Dr. Drake was telling me, he lost his battle because they didn’t have the surgery Dr. Stein wants to offer you. Why won’t you take the chance? My Horus was an old man with grown kids and a dried-up wife when he was hospitalized—”
“Dried up? You’re more lively and fabulous than most werewomen my age.”
“I’ll take the flattery, but menopause should be called pruning. Not because they cut my branches, but because it dries you out…like a prune…making certain activities need…well…you’ll figure it out.”
Oh. Oh dear. I guess lubrication must be hard to find in her human realm…
“You should see your face, darlin’! You look like someone cut the string to your balloon, when in reality, you have your whole life ahead of you. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-eight,” I reply with a shrug. “But I’ve been so sheltered, I haven’t done half the things I want in life. According to Leader Grant, I should be mated and having pups, but I haven’t found my other half. I haven’t had time to look between flares…and dodging complaints about my flares.”
“What if the surgery gives you a new life? If you weren’t sick, I bet you’d be a better advocate for yourself and earn some freedom from the pack.”
“It's kind of like the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg,” I start, twisting my fingers with anxiety. “I can visit the human world after I’m better, but the human world has other interventions that could make me better if I visited when I was sick. There are alternatives to the surgery on the human’s internet that I want to try first.”
“Like what?”
“Well, there are low-inflammatory diets, like being gluten-free—”
“Says the lady who just inhaled a piece of sugary pie, but go ahead,” she says with a squeeze to my hands to stop fidgeting. “I’m sure your werewolf family eats mostly game meat, so that shouldn’t be an issue.”
“The holistic approach is more than diet; it’s medications, vitamins, meditations, and other stuff. I read about chiropractic care. It’s when a wizard moves your body into magical alignment. The videos were fascinating, and nobody was carved to bits.”
“Magical, fascinating, wizards? These aren’t words I’d use when gambling with my health. Trust me—”
“I’m probably explaining it wrong,” I reply with a sigh. “I don’t know the words because I haven’t learned about them—us—me.”
“What about those notes you pass back and forth to Dr. Stein?”
“You got me there,” I say with a sigh. “They say I have more flares than I thought, with more pain than I thought. Even with my half-attempt at changing my diet and habits, I’m growing worse. I still haven’t tried the human pharmaceuticals. Mrs. M, all I want is a chance.”
“You know how many times I yelled at the stars that I wanted one more chance with my Horus? One more time to listen to him gripe about something. One more time watching him play with our kids. There are days I even miss cleaning his bathroom after he destroyed it. You get the surgery, and you get your chance to visit the human world. Hey, you can stay with my little Kimberly—she lives in New York City. That town holds a cross section of humanity!”
“That sounds heavenly,” I say with a little bitterness.
I don’t want a carrot dangling between me and the surgery, even if a trip to New York City would be a dream come true.
I want something real. A life like Mrs. M and Horus had, with a house, family, and vocation.
Mrs. M is a mothlady, yet she still runs the environmental center she built with Horus.
“Because, dear, some things are worth living uncomfortably for,” she says, handing me a note. I recognize the large, boxy handwriting through the folds of the paper.
“Is he giving up on me?” I whisper as I take the note.
The top of the paper has the logo of Haunted Health, and beneath it indicates that it is from the desk of Dr. Frank Stein.
I envision him, hunched over his desk, painstakingly crafting each letter with his hand tools.
The brief message, meet me in the butterfly garden, must have taken him away from his busy surgical schedule…
as will the meeting itself. Yet when I look up, there he sits outside Mrs. M’s window.
He’s probably been there the whole time I’ve been whining to her about going to the human realm.
Guilt squeezes my heart as I watch the breeze ruffle the hair on the back of his head.
“I would say quite the opposite,” Mrs. M says, biting her lip. “When I ask that you give him a chance…I don’t just mean the chance to save your life.”
“Mrs. M, are you trying to match me with a monster?”
“Oh no, Dr. Stein is no monster,” she says with a chuckle.
“He’s just a prickly man of science—like My Horus.
They are a different type of monster than those who sport claws and fangs.
Men of Science are held hostage by their brilliance and need a softness to counterbalance their logical minds, to remind them they have a heart.
I was that reminder for Horus, and together, I believe we made the world a better place. Dr. Stein…well…”
“He just wants to cut me open. There’s no—”
“Just hear him out,” she says, sipping from her Styrofoam cup of ice water. “Really hear him. The surgeon wants to save you…but so does the man.”
“The man who traded his human life for surgical instrument hands.”
“Far be it from me to push you, dear,” she says when I shoot her a glare. “But maybe the humanity that your heart longs to embrace isn’t as far as it seems. What you seek may be right under your nose.”