Chapter 2
I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.
-Scott Adams



My life seemed like a secluded part of a beehive; the air all around me seemed to be humming with energy now. I couldn't sit still. I must have paced around the kitchen for hours, but I couldn't stop moving. My head was throbbing, I hadn't had a decent night's sleep in days, we were out of coffee, and I found that drinking about a gallon of water only made me sweat a bit more with anxiety.
I opened the refrigerator, knowing I should eat something, and then closed it, wringing my hands. Who would eat at a time like this, anyway? I frowned crabbily, grunting as I started to pace again.
I stopped, and then groaned. My head.
There was a werewolf in my house.
I could accept that.
I could.
In another hour or so . . .
I had run the details over and over through my head; I'd press pause, then rewind, and play the scene repeatedly in my mind's eye. I'd almost rendered myself to a shivering blob of goo after the twenty-sixth time of recalling the experience. The boy upstairs-and he was upstairs, because I could hear him shuffling about up there-had morphed into a wolf. He'd just become a wolf right in front of me . . . maybe. It could still be a hallucination or coma dream.
My God, there was a lycanthrope in my house.
Was it perverse to feel this ecstatic? Probably. Maybe it was just a lot of adrenaline pumping through my system. I shouldn't be this happy. But I was still dead uncertain about what to do. On one hand, I wanted to scream like the girl most people wanted me to be, and on the other . . . no, I should just be quiet and cool about the whole thing. I'd scare him off if I acted like the fantasy-absorbed maniac I really was.
Right. Play it cool.
God, that sounded lame.
Relax, Liberty, relax . . . you'll get over it. He's probably a little jerk anyway. Remember how he called you ugly?
I winced. I wasn't beautiful, of course, but he'd caught me on a bad hair day. You couldn't judge a person for that.
I imagined what I looked like right now. Bruise-like circles hanging under my eyes like half-moons, my dark brown hair pulled back into a short, stubby ponytail at the base of my skull. I wasn't wearing any make-up, so, considering how crummy I felt and the fact that I hadn't bothered to wash my face this morning, it probably wasn't a good idea to convince myself I was only having a bad hair day.
Ah, now I felt worse.
The inner voice purred, satisfied by my reaction. Damn my vanity. He's just your charge for a few days. And then he'll be gone.
Right.
And I still didn't know if he was a werewolf or not.
I sighed, suddenly depressed.
Might as well make him a sandwich or something . . . I thought, trying to cheer myself up. He hadn't eaten anything for a while, I bet.
I began to organize the ingredients. What did a werewolf eat? All we had was healthy food. Most of it was vegetarian, thanks to Dad-at least my Mom still had some sense in her. As I rummaged through the refrigerator, I found we had ham and cheese. They were organic, of course, but did we have regular bread? Ooh. Sourdough. I cut two even slices and popped them into the toaster, whistling.
Whistling only increased my adrenaline. I stopped.
Frowning as I severed a couple of thick slices of cheese off the brick, I set them aside and began to saw at the ham before I realized it was already pre-sliced. Oops. No one saw that, no one saw that . . .
Ding!
I grabbed a plate from the old mahogany cupboards, and tossed the bread onto it before I could burn myself. I placed the cheese on the bread first, and then the ham before I put the entire thing in the microwave. Like everything else in this house, it was old, so I set the time for twenty seconds.
I'd never questioned my family's ways before. I'd never actually even thought about how large my house really was. There were three floors, not including the attic. Five bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, an office only I used, an office for my parents, a library, an entertainment room, two parlors, a kitchen, a breakfast nook, and a dining room. I only ever used my bedroom, bathroom, the office, and the kitchen, so it should be okay that I had never realized that I did in fact live in an old Victorian mansion-Queen Ann's style, in fact. Life was weird like that, I suppose . . . and I guess I was weird like that, too.
The microwave beeped impatiently, waiting for me to get a brain for once.