“You can change if you like, you humans. Stop drinking, stop using, go to a 12-step process. It’s so easy. But every full moon, I change. I become the wolf and I kill. There’s no 12-step program to quit being a werewolf. There’s no quitting what I am.”

Tati nodded to the bottles on the floor. “I drank all that: a quart and a half of vodka, a fifth of Scotch, I don’t know how much beer. I must have passed out cold about midnight. I don’t remember any of it.”

She picked up the only unbroken glass on the table and hurled it against the wall. It shattered, ricocheting shards everywhere.

“I can’t remember getting blind drunk, but I can tell you that the full moon rose at seventeen minutes after one. When it did, I was nearly to the woods. The moon came over the edge of the valley and I felt myself transforming into the beast. I felt the booze in my system metabolize in an instant and I felt alive and powerful. The anger and the vodka and the meth were gone, replaced by the single-minded certainty that I was the master of the forest – and that I would kill.”

“Pastor Omar, you counseled Tatiana Lang, didn’t you?”

“I did, Detective, for several months. Her death was unexpected and it hit us all pretty hard.”

“Was she violent? Did she ever attack you?”

Omar shook his head. “The content of our counseling sessions is private and will stay that way, even after her death. But no, I never felt unsafe in her presence.”

Pope leaned forward. “I didn’t ask if you felt unsafe. Did she attack you?”

The pastor leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Detective Pope, I’m happy to assist the police, but my sessions with Tati Lang are private. I can give you the dates of our sessions, but what we discussed is off-limits.”

Pope smiled. “You said ‘our sessions are private.’ Twice. Not ‘were private.’ Like maybe she’s not really dead?”

“Sorry. It was a slip of the tongue. Like I said, her death hit us pretty hard.”

“The Book of Lycaon is a marvel, Ms. Lang. It records more than three millenia of blood lore, thirty-three hundred years of werewolf history and genealogy. I’ve made it my life’s study and have translated dozens of obscure, extinct dialects–some recorded nowhere else. The volumes describe how werewolves are created and how they die, and how they are cured.”

Gallard gripped Tati’s arm and drew her to the leather-bound books.

“This is your history now, Tatiana, and your salvation.”

“Being a werewolf isn’t like what Hollywood says. Sure, for a night or two around the full moon you’re on top of the world. The wolf takes over and your body changes into this magnificent beast that owns the darkness. Then the bloodlust rises and you slay indiscriminately, blindly. And suddenly you’re human again and you wake up naked behind a dumpster or deep in the woods or in some farmer’s stock yard. And for four weeks you live with the horrific knowledge that you’ve killed yet again. And one night the full moon rises and the cycle begins again.”

“This isn’t something you ‘come to terms with’. That makes it sound like a negotiation. No, one day you’re a normal person with a normal life and the next you’re an inhuman monster stalking the helpless under a full moon. The smell of blood is the smell of madness–and release.”

Tati cut a thick piece of the rare, juicy steak.

“You know what’s funny? Before I became a werewolf I was a vegan. Ain’t that a kick.”

“You and I have seen the face of abject horror in our victims, the look when the wolf is at their throat and there’s no escape. They soil themselves or attempt to flee from what lies before them. It’s absolute gibbering helplessness.

“But there was one–a girl by a lake in Ontario four summers ago–she welcomed me in utter, loving fearlessness. It wasn’t resignation or some weary longing for the release of death. Death, even in the brutal, tearing jaws of the wolf, held no terror for her. She welcomed what came after, the life after the death. From that time I’ve sought that peace.”

Tati snorted. “Don’t preach to me, Omar. I’m cursed. I’m a werewolf, a creature of the night and all that. Your human morals don’t apply to me. “

The preacher shook his head. “You don’t get off that easy, girl. You’re as human as I am. The difference is you have the wolf pathogen in your blood. When the bloodlust comes on you at the full moon, you’re not making choices, the wolf is.”

He pulled back his shirt collar to reveal a livid scar. “And for the record, you’re not the only werewolf around here.”