Once You Go Werewolf, You Don't Go Back

The werewolf I couldn’t stop thinking about sent me a death certificate instead of a second invitation.

It arrived folded between a gas bill and an advertisement for bathroom tile. The paper was the yellow of old teeth. In the space marked deceased, someone had typed my name.

MARA VALE. AGE: TWENTY-ONE. DATE OF DEATH: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER’S MOON.

I read it standing behind the counter of Granddad’s clock shop, a screwdriver still between my fingers. The wall clocks were all a minute apart because I had not finished setting them after the power cut. Their uneven ticks made the room sound crowded. The certificate looked too formal to be a joke and too strange to be a city record. It had a seal, a witness column and a paper edge cut with a blade that had snagged at the lower corner. No return address. Someone had walked it through the rain and slipped it into a closed shop without leaving a name.

I checked the date against my phone even though I knew it. The Hunter’s Moon had risen over the quarry while I was with Rowan. I had gone there to photograph an abandoned hoist for a restoration course, not to meet a werewolf. When he stepped out of the shadow beneath the old lift, he had told me what he was before he asked for anything else. I had thought he was teasing until his eyes caught the moonlight and changed. He gave me the path back to the road, pointed out the nearest occupied cottage, and said he would leave if I wanted the quarry to myself.

I had stayed. Not because the moon had told me to. He had waited while I packed my camera, then walked beside me without touching until I reached for his hand. Later, beneath the one working lamp, he had asked before he kissed me. I made him stand where I could see his face first. I could still remember the warmth of his coat around my shoulders and the startled laugh he gave when I said I liked the scar on his chin. We chose a night together after that. I had not chosen a pack, a ceremony or a place in somebody’s records.

That was four weeks ago. I had spent the night alive, gloriously awake, and thoroughly distracted by a man whose laugh had been more dangerous than his teeth. I had been longing for another full moon ever since. Apparently his pack had been planning a funeral.

I checked the envelope. There was no stamp, only a smudge of black wax embossed with a wolf’s head. At the bottom of the certificate, below a column of witnesses, was Rowan Thorne’s signature.

I looked for the name of a county office and found a pack seal instead. The difference should have comforted me. It didn’t. If someone could get a false record into one system, how many calls would it take to put it into another? My bank card was in my pocket. My student account was overdue. Granddad’s shop lease had my name on the emergency contact line. I was suddenly imagining a clerk telling him I couldn’t sign anything because a stranger had filed me away. I set the paper flat before my shaking hands tore it. I needed to know what this document actually controlled before I let it control me.

The shop had a camera over the front door. I opened its feed on my phone and rewound to the last hour. A hooded person had come from the bakery side, stayed out of the clearest angle, and slipped the envelope under the door. The figure could have been any height from five-foot-six to six-foot if the hood was deep enough. I saved the clip before the camera’s short loop could overwrite it. That was the first useful thing I did. The second was to check the locks instead of running into the street to demand an explanation from a shadow.

I knew the shape of his R. He had written his number on the back of my hand that night, then watched me copy it into my phone before I washed the ink off. I’d called twice. The first call had rung out. The second had reached a voice announcing that the number did not exist.

I still had the photograph of my inked hand because Alina had teased me about keeping a souvenir. The digits on the screen matched the ones Rowan had written. I had not dialed him wrong. Whatever had happened to the line had happened after he gave it to me.

For the first week I had made excuses for him. Full-moon customs. A broken phone. Fear of the ordinary woman who had asked him to stay until morning. By the second week I had stopped inventing messages I could send. I went to class, repaired the shop’s backlog and told Alina that a memorable night did not oblige either of us to a sequel. The problem was that I still wanted one. Wanting did not make the missing month kind.

My phone lit up on the workbench. Unknown caller.

“If that’s an apology,” I said, answering, “it’s missing a few paragraphs.”

“Mara. Don’t take that paper to the police.” Rowan’s voice came through the speaker, low and unmistakable. I hated the warmth it sent through me. “Come to your door.”

I went to the front window instead. The clock shop was closed, its brass sign turned to BACK AT NINE, and the street outside had become a strip of wet amber under the lamps. Rowan stood across from it in a dark coat. He wasn’t alone. A white van idled behind him, the driver’s face hidden by reflected light.

“Why does it say I’m dead?”

He looked straight at the window, though I hadn’t turned on the light. “Because somebody needs you to be.”

“Somebody with your handwriting?”

His head jerked as if I’d struck him. For one moment he looked not predatory but frightened. Then the van door opened.

“Go upstairs,” he said. “Lock the door.”

I hung up. He had lost his right to give me orders when he vanished, and I had lost my taste for being managed by a beautiful stranger at about age nineteen.

I called the front camera up again and zoomed on the van’s plate. Rain blurred the last two characters. I saved what I could see. If the paper was a threat, I needed evidence. If it was a mistake, someone had chosen a cruel way to tell me. Either way, opening my door to three people whose names I did not know would not improve my chances of understanding it.

My grandfather’s witness clock sat on the bench beside the certificate. Most people saw a heavy silver pocket watch fitted into a flat signing plate. He had built it to catch altered maintenance entries: a minute wheel with one blunted tooth left a pressure pattern when someone signed over the plate, while a small second dial helped a clerk log the time. Clever engineering, no magic, though I’d spent my childhood pretending otherwise. The pattern could show separate acts of signing. It could not tell me whose hand held the pen or what day a different board had been set.

The certificate bore a shallow circular mark under Rowan’s name. Whoever had prepared it had set the page on a witness clock like mine.

I fitted the paper over the plate and angled the lamp. Two impressions emerged. One signature directly under the printed line; a second, almost perfect, a few millimetres to the left. Same letters. Different pressure. The first R cut hard enough to leave a ridge. The other barely touched the page.

Two acts of signing claimed Rowan Thorne’s name. Whether two hands had made them, I couldn’t yet tell.

A knock sounded at the back door. Three even taps, patient as a metronome.

The shop’s back entrance opened onto the narrow alley beside the bakery. Rowan couldn’t have crossed from the front that fast. Unless he’d changed shape and climbed the roofs, which was not a possibility I wanted to test by opening the door.

“Mara?” Rowan called from the alley.

The phone in my hand rang again. Rowan’s name, the same impossible number, glowed on its screen. Through the front glass I could still see him beneath the lamp, one hand pressed to his ear.

The man at the back door spoke again, his voice an exact match. “You kept my number. That’s sweet.”

I turned the key in the deadbolt. Then I slid the certificate into my apron and took the heavy witness clock off its hook.

Outside, the front-door Rowan lowered his phone. His face changed when he heard the voice from the alley. Not surprise, exactly. Recognition, followed by a fear so old it seemed to belong to both of them.

The back-door man stopped knocking.

“Ask him,” he said through the wood, “which one of us was with you under the moon.”