My Sister's Werewolf

Jane's POV

Did you know---

That armadillos inflate their intestines like a balloon so they can float across rivers?

I know this because I am a wildlife biologist, and knowing deeply unsettling facts about nature is basically my entire personality at this point.

It comes up more often than you’d think...

Mostly at dinner parties, where it reliably kills the conversation. And occasionally in moments like this one... where I was staring at a series of photographs on my sister’s camera and trying very hard not to look as rattled as I felt.

“How can you be so calm at a moment like this?!” Steff whisper-shrieked, which is a specific vocal register she has developed over twenty-four years of being unable to contain her own excitement. Even when containing it is, strategically, extremely important....

“This is the find of a lifetime, Jane! This is----" She made a small jump and spun around like a ballerina at Christmas. "This is National Geographic cover material! This is ‘buy a house with the proceeds’ material!”

I took a deep breath---

And let it out slowly...

“Did you know,” I said, in the voice I use for calming down startled interns--- and overexcited younger sisters, apparently! “That there’s a snail that lives in a volcano and its diet is entirely made up of metal?”

Steff stared at me.

Disgusted!

“What does a snail have to do with this?”

“And there’s a frog with what is basically antifreeze in its veins, which lets it turn into a frog-shaped ice cube every winter and then just---” I snapped my fingers. “Come back. Thaws out. Hops away. Never even seems annoyed about it.”

“Okay?”

“And there’s a functionally immortal jellyfish. A microscopic tardigrade that can survive the vacuum of space---"

I held up fingers to count, which was mostly for dramatic effect at this point, because I’d made my point three animals ago.

"And my personal favorite: Did you know that cows have best friends, Steff? Like actual, documented, measurable best friends!"

Steff gave me a look telling me: "I know what you're doing. Stop it!"

I--- didn't!

"No, seriously! They get stressed when they’re separated from their preferred cow.”

"Your point, sis?!"

“My point is, I am a professional," I calmly told her. Not to rub it in her face or anything, but to get her to stop thinking with her excited, childlike brain and to think rationally.

Although at this point, I would have settled for a single rational thought from my sister...

"I have built an entire career out of nature going ‘ha, you thought you knew the rules’ directly into my face. A werewolf is not, statistically, the strangest thing I have ever had to accept as real.”

That last part was, unfortunately, a fact!

I didn't mention the second, more relevant fact. Which was that I was currently having this conversation while pointedly not looking at the extremely irritated ghost hovering in the corner of our living room. It had been trying to get my attention for the better part of ten minutes and was, at this point, gesturing with the kind of aggressive full-body energy usually reserved for people directing airplanes on a runway.

I ignored him!

This is, historically, my whole strategy. He’d been haunting the apartment since before we moved in. Some previous tenant, presumably, though he’d never once managed to communicate anything as useful as his own name - nor was I interested in trying to talk to him! In the three months since we'd moved in here, I'd successfully managed to totally ignore him 85% of the time...

I didn't want to talk about the other 15%, simply because I had decided they didn't exist!

Scientists are allowed to have loopholes like that...

Here is the situation, for anyone keeping score:

Six months ago I’d been offered a contract position doing wildlife survey work for the state, based out of a town so small it had one stoplight and considered that a point of civic pride, tucked into the middle of nowhere in northern Minnesota.

Steff, my ever-enthusiastic younger sister, had taken one look at the job listing and announced that she needed to expand her portfolio and invited herself along to shoot the surrounding wilderness for her thesis project.

OK, then...

We’d found a two-bedroom apartment above the hardware store, split the rent, and settled into a routine that mostly worked... if you didn’t count the part where my sister was, at any given moment, roughly one exciting discovery away from an aneurysm.

Tonight, apparently, was the exciting discovery...

She’d come back from a hike a little after dark, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with the trail, and thrust her camera at me the second she was through the door without even taking her boots off. Which — for Steff, a woman who treated her gear with the reverence most people reserve for religious artifacts — should have told me this was serious before I ever looked at the screen.

“OH MY GOSH. OH MY GOSH! OH. MY. GOSH! You've GOT to see this! Look, look, look, loooooooook!!!!!!”

She'd shrieked the second she entered and turned it toward me.

I looked---

And looked again!

Because for once---

My sister might be on to something...

The first photo was a wolf.

A big one — bigger than any wolf had any right to be. A Gray Wolf if my expertise was to be trusted. But this one was pure white, making it look stunning, mid-stride against a wall of pine trees. Backlit by the kind of late-afternoon light that photographers apparently sell organs to capture.

Genuinely a gorgeous shot!

I remember thinking, distantly, that Steff’s composition had really come a long way since senior pictures...

The second photo was the same wolf, except the light was doing something---

Wrong!

Something was bending.

Elongating...

The wolf’s spine was arched at an angle that made my own spine hurt sympathetically just looking at it.

The third photo was---

Not a wolf!

The fourth photo was a man... kneeling in the underbrush exactly where the wolf had been standing. Dark hair, broad shoulders, and — and I want to stress that my brain clocked this detail with the same detached professional interest I’d give a rare bird sighting, and I resent it! — extremely, inconveniently well-built...

As in, I made myself a copy right then and there to save for later!

The fifth photo was the same man, now standing, and pulling on a pair of jeans he had apparently produced from absolutely nowhere.

The sixth was him tugging a plain gray T-shirt over his head.

The seventh was him getting into a Jeep and driving away, as though he had not, four photographs earlier, been walking around on four legs.

I---

Just sat there...

I looked at all seven photographs twice. I did the thing I do, where I quietly catalog and process and let my brain sort information into the correct drawer before I say anything out loud.

And Steff...

Well, she has known me for twenty-four years and has learned to read the difference between Jane Thinking and Jane Being Weird! She watched me do it with the barely restrained patience of a golden retriever waiting for a ball to be thrown.

“Well,” I said finally. “Apparently you captured a werewolf transforming ---!"

"I captured a werewolf transforming!" She cut me off, screaming and squealing, doing the "happy feet, happy dance".

I shrugged.

"So you did."

That---

Stopped her dead in her tracks...

"That’s your reaction?” Steff’s voice cracked with the sheer indignity of it. “Jane--- I just proved werewolves are real! And you’re doing the thing where you go quiet and logical like you just found a slightly unusual beetle!”

“I found a slightly unusual beetle once that turned out to be a completely new subspecies,” I pointed out, defending my accomplishments with the vigor of a mamma-bear. “I got a paper out of that beetle. Don’t disrespect the beetle.”

Steff gave me a deadpan look.

"I hate you!”

I laughed.

But here is what I did not say to my sister, because I have spent seven years perfecting the art of not saying it to anyone: I have, on a near-daily basis since I was eighteen years old, been forced to accept the existence of things that shouldn’t exist.

Werewolves were, quite frankly, a nice change of pace!

Werewolves had fur. Werewolves left tracks and shed and presumably needed to eat regular meals and could, in theory, be photographed, studied, and understood, the way every other impossible thing in nature eventually surrenders itself to a sufficiently stubborn field biologist with a notebook.

The ghost, however, currently attempting to climb into my peripheral vision from the corner of the living room could NOT be photographed, studied, or understood by anyone.

Except me, apparently...

And I had exactly zero interest in adding “also I see dead people” to the growing pile of things about myself I had decided the world didn't need to know.

I glanced at him.

Just once...

Just to communicate: "I see you, and I'm ignoring you on purpose! This is a choice!"

He was mid-gesture, arms flung wide in what I can only describe as theatrical despair. And even in the lamplight I could see the translucent shimmer at the edges of him that meant he’d been dead a long time and had never quite figured out how to look solid anymore.

I didn’t know his name.

I didn’t know how he’d died, or why he’d apparently decided a two-bedroom apartment above a hardware store in rural Minnesota was worth haunting for what I strongly suspected was several decades.

I’d never asked.

Asking led to answering, and answering led to exactly the kind of life I had worked very hard not to have.

I turned back to my sister, who was still radiating the specific energy of a woman who has just been handed the plot of every book she has ever loved.

Oh, yeah...

Forgot to mention...

My sister---

Also the biggest werewolf romance fanatic you'll ever meet! As in, she could legally identify as a furry at 14 and dumped all her boyfriends because they weren't "alpha" material.

Please don't ask and don't judge...

She's family, and we love her, quirkiness and all---

“Okay,” I said, deciding that I'd messed with her long enough. “Let’s talk about what you’re actually going to do with this.”

Steff’s whole face lit up.

“I want to publish it. I could send this to---”

“No,” I said, and watched her face fall in real time. “Steff. Think about this for one second. You post seven photos of a man turning into a wolf on the internet. What happens?”

“People lose their minds?”

She suggested, innocently.

“People will call it fake,” I said sternly, annoyed that I sounded like Mom. “Best case scenario, people call it fake, you get a week of attention. Somebody debunks it as a costume and CGI within forty-eight hours, and you get a reputation as the girl who faked a werewolf photo for clout. Worst-case scenario---” I hesitated, because the worst-case scenario was the one that actually kept me up at night...

“Worst-case, somebody believes you. And then they find him. And I don’t know what happens to a werewolf who gets found, Steff. But I’m going to go ahead and guess it’s not a group hug and a segment on the morning news.”

Steff, to her credit — and people underestimate my sister constantly, which is a mistake I have made myself more than once — actually stopped and thought about that. I watched the excitement in her face shift into something more careful.

“So we can’t tell anyone,” she said slowly.

“We can’t tell anyone,” I agreed. “Not until we know more. Not until he’s okay with it, whoever he is..."

And fuck me, but I'd give a kidney to have his number!

DAMN!

The man was fine...

Anyway---

"Because it’s his life and his secret. And not actually ours to sell.”

I softened a little at the way her shoulders dropped.

“I know this is the whole reason you got into wildlife photography. I know you’ve read approximately four hundred werewolf romance novels and have been waiting for the universe to deliver on the concept. I’m not trying to ruin this for you.”

She snorted a laugh.

“You kind of are, a little.”

“A little,” I allowed. “But we do this right, or we don’t do it at all.”

She sighed, the specific sigh of a woman putting her dreams gently back into a drawer for later, and flopped down onto the couch beside me to steal a handful of my popcorn out of pure emotional necessity.

Boots and all...

Which under any other circumstances would have earned her a lecture about the couch.

I let it go.

Priorities...

That was when the ghost in the corner started actively vibrating.

I’d learned, over the years, to tell the difference between ordinary dead-person theatrics — the pointing, the pantomiming, the increasingly unhinged charades that were apparently my permanent lot in life.

And---

Whatever this was!

He’d stopped trying to communicate anything coherent and had moved on to just flinging both arms toward the kitchen, over and over, his mouth working around words I couldn’t hear, his whole translucent body flickering like a bad signal.

I gritted my teeth, doubling my efforts to ignore him!

I have a very strict personal policy about not engaging with ghosts. I have upheld this policy for seven years with the discipline of a woman who has learned the hard way that engaging only encourages them.

I broke it...

"What?" I snapped, low enough that Steff didn’t look up from scrolling back through her photos with a small, wistful sigh.

He pointed at the kitchen doorway again. Then he cupped both hands and mimed something rising, flickering, spreading his fingers out like---

OH!

I smelled it half a second later.

Smoke!

Not anything cozy, but the specific, wrong, electrical-and-plastic smell of something that was not supposed to be burning, drifting out from under the kitchen door along with a faint orange flicker that had no business being there.

“Steff.” I was already off the couch. “Steff, did you leave the stove on before you left this afternoon?”

“I made tea before my hike, yeah! Why---?” She followed my gaze toward the kitchen doorway and went white.

“Oh, my god!”

And for once, I think my sister was on the right track calling for help...

Because our kitchen was on fire!