Full Moon
I make it back to the terminal on legs I don't remember operating.
One second I'm running through the parking lot with the wind tearing the sound of my own breathing away, and the next I'm inside, bent over a luggage cart, hands on my knees, trying to remember how lungs work.
The fluorescent lights are too bright. The vending machine hums its same mechanical song.
A baby is crying near the gate. Normal sounds, ordinary sounds, and underneath them I can still hear it: the wet crack of bones rearranging themselves, the sound a tree makes when it comes down, except the tree was a man.
The problem is that I don't believe it. Not for a second.
I saw what I saw. The charcoal coat lying empty in the snow.
The gold eyes. The way his voice broke on my name like he was spending the last of himself to say it.
Run. He told me to run, and I ran, and I left him out there, and now I'm standing in an airport with my hands shaking and I don't know what to do with any of it.
The bus is loading. Snow has piled against the terminal doors, and beyond the glass the world has gone white and featureless, and the passengers are pushing toward the exit with their coats half on, ready to be somewhere warm.
I should tell someone. That's the rational thought.
I should find the airline representative and say the words out loud: my seatmate turned into a wolf in the parking lot.
Then I should enjoy the look on her face, because it will be the same look I'd give me, and I'll spend the night in a hospital room with a paper gown and a very concerned nurse.
I tell nobody. I get on the bus.
Someone touches my elbow before I reach the steps. Denise Walsh, the nurse from the vending machine, holding a paper cup of coffee and looking at me the way I imagine she looks at children with fevers, head tilted, reading symptoms.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Something like that."
"You're shaking."
"I'm fine. Cold."
"It's not the cold." She studies me for a second, then reaches into her bag and hands me a granola bar. "Eat that. You're white as the snow."
I take it because it's easier than arguing.
I don't eat it. I hold it in my hand while the bus doors open and the crowd surges forward, and somewhere in the middle of it Omar Haddad is explaining to the driver that the airline owes him approximately seventeen million dollars and climbing, and I let the noise carry me up the steps and into the warm dark of the bus, into a seat by the window.
Twelve miles. The driver says it like it's nothing, like it's a trip he's made a thousand times, and beyond the glass there is nothing but snow and wind and the occasional orange pulse of a plow light, and I press my forehead to the cold window and watch the dark go by.
Somewhere out there, in all that white, is a coat and a bag and the shape of everything I used to believe.
The bus is loud with complaints, phones held to ears, the woman from 13C telling her husband about the mechanical issue, but nobody asks why I got on last or why I'm staring into the snow like it owes me an answer.
Denise checks on me once, halfway through the ride, and I manage a smile I don't feel.
She lets me have it. I'm grateful in a way I don't have words for.
The Juniper Motor Lodge appears out of the white like a ship.
A long, low building, wood-paneled, a neon sign that flickers between J and R, snow drifted halfway up the doors.
The bus groans to a stop and the passengers surge forward, suddenly eager to be somewhere warm, and I let them go ahead of me.
I'm the last one off. The cold hits me again, that same wall of it, and the air smells like wood smoke and diesel, and I follow the crowd through the front door into a reception area that smells like old carpet and coffee and forty years of wood smoke.
Ruth Bell is behind the desk. She's small and steel-gray, and she looks like she's been running this motel since before the highway was paved, and she hands out keys like she's dealing cards.
No small talk. No sympathy for the seventeen million dollars or the missed connections or the ruined weekends.
Room numbers. Sign here. The doors are at the back, past the ice machine, and don't track snow down the hallway, and the heat in Room 11 doesn't work, so nobody take Room 11.
Somebody takes Room 11 anyway. Ruth sighs like she's seen it all before, which she has, probably, forty years of it.
I'm reaching for my key when I see him.
He's standing at the end of the hallway, at the door that leads to the parking lot, one hand braced against the frame.
Barefoot. His feet are bare and red with cold, and he's wearing a flannel shirt that doesn't fit him, too small across the shoulders, and there's blood on it, a dark bloom across the left shoulder dried to rust. His hair is wet.
His face is pale. He looks like a man who walked out of a car wreck and couldn't tell you which way was home.
Dean.
Our eyes meet across the reception area, across the crowd of passengers, across everything I have been trying not to think about for the last hour. He doesn't move. Neither do I. The world narrows to the two of us, and I can hear my own heartbeat, and underneath it, the sound of bones.
"That one came in about an hour ago," Ruth says. "Says he's from your flight. Walked up the road in a storm with no shoes, if you can believe it." She sounds more annoyed than concerned. "Gave him the key to 7. Said he'd pay for the shirt."
"I know him."
"Good. Then you can tell him the ice machine is broken, since apparently nobody reads the sign."
The passengers drift past me toward their rooms. Denise pauses, looks from me to Dean and back, and I can see her filing away details the way she reads a waiting room, noticing who is pale, who is favoring an arm, who is breathing wrong.
Then she nods at me, once, and follows the others down the hall.
Dean doesn't wait for me. He turns and walks through the door into the cold, and I follow him, because there's nothing else I could possibly do. I've been following him since seat 14A. I might as well keep doing it.
The parking lot behind the lodge is dark, snow falling thick and soft, and he's standing at the edge of it with his head up, looking at the moon.
The moon is still there. Of course it is.
It's been there all night, riding high and white over the trees, and I can see the way he holds himself against it, the way his hands are clenched at his sides.
"You walked here," I say.
"Mostly."
"Mostly?"
He turns to face me. "I ran part of it."
"Ran." I hear myself repeat it. "Ran as in jogged, or ran as in—"
"As in the other thing." He says it flat, watching me, waiting for the moment I decide he's too much. "I made it to the trees, and then I couldn't hold it anymore, and I ran. When I came back to myself I was closer to the lodge than to the airport. I walked the rest."
"You came back to yourself. Naked. In a blizzard."
"Barefoot," he agrees. "I lost the boots somewhere in the first mile."
I think about that: a man coming to his senses in the dark, in the snow, alone, naked, twelve miles from anywhere, and just getting up and walking. I think about what kind of life teaches you to handle that.
"How did you get the shirt?"
"Ruth. She found me on the road. Gave me the shirt and a lecture about frostbite and a key." He looks down at himself, at the too-small flannel, the blood. "She didn't ask many questions. I get the feeling she's seen stranger things than a barefoot man in a blizzard."
"She's from Montana," I say. "That's probably it."
The corner of his mouth moves. It's not a smile. It's smaller than that, sadder than that, and it's the most human thing I've seen on his face since the plane.
"You know what I am," he says. "You saw."
"I saw something. I don't know what I saw. I need you to say it."
"Megan."
"Say it."
The wind picks up, throwing snow between us. He takes a breath, and I watch him let go of something, some last hold, and when he speaks his voice is quiet and flat and absolutely sure.
"I'm a werewolf."
I hear myself laugh. It's not a happy sound. It's the sound your body makes when the world stops making sense and there's nothing left to do but make noise.
"You're a werewolf," I repeat.
He says nothing.
"An actual werewolf."
"Megan."
"I sat beside a werewolf for three hours and complained to him about my Uber driver."
"Four hours."
"That's the part you're correcting?"
"It's the only part I can correct."
I stand there in the snow, in the dark, in the middle of a parking lot at the end of the world, and I look at the man from 14A, barefoot and bleeding and impossibly real, and I ask the only question that matters.
"Do you eat people?"
"No."
"Good."
"Megan."
"That's a fairly important checkbox, Dean."
The almost-smile again. Something loosens in his shoulders, just a little, and I realize he was braced for screaming, for running, for a call to the police, and instead he got me, standing in the snow asking if he eats people, because apparently this is who I am now, the woman who negotiates with werewolves.
"Come inside," I say. "You're barefoot and you're bleeding and I have about nine hundred more questions."
"I don't have answers for all of them."
"Then you'll have to improvise."
His room is at the end of the building. Room 7.
Small and clean, the same wood paneling as the lobby, a bed with a quilt older than I am, a radiator that ticks and clanks, a window that looks out at the trees.
He closes the door behind us and stands with his back to it, and I stand in the middle of the room, and the quiet between us is enormous.
"Start talking," I say.