Love Lines

15: Eat or Else

"The twin founders of Rome." I nodded. "I've heard of them. Some say it was only Romulus who founded Rome. Their uncle left them to die but through some very good coincidences, they survived and a she-wolf..."

"You can stop right there. There are various werewolf families but the one Lycaon and his fifty sons started is the important one, the oldest one. Do you know the legend of..."

"He was the King of Arcadia who offended Zeus by killing a boy and serving his dismembered parts to the God to test his omniscience."

"It wasn't just some random boy though." Cecil pointed at the page. "It was Lycaon's youngest son. As punishment, Zeus turned Lycaon into a wolf and slaughtered all the sons who took part in the barbarity. Somehow the sons that remained alive contracted their father's curse and turned into wolves on the next new moon. You asked why new moon? It was because neither the sun nor the moon wanted to look upon the monsters they'd become. The she-wolf that fostered Romulus and Remus when they were disposed of just happened to be a descendant of Lycaon. But the wolves the twins turned into were different from the ones Lycaon and his sons became. Their wolves were...gentler I guess you could say, less feral. The twins also retained some semblance of their human selves when they were in wolf form as did their descendants. But those from Lycaon's direct line don't. They're full on animal, no human conscious at all."

I studied the drawing in front of me. Cecil had flipped to the next page where the stages of transformation were drawn out and I had to admit, it looked pretty horrible.

"So this is what Andrzej has to go through every month?"

Cecil nodded. "For the couple of the days the moon is considered new. Technically, a new moon only lasts one official day, a whole twenty-four hour period but to us, it looks like it's new for days. Same with a full moon. There are rumors that go around about him and I don't know if any of them are true. The rumor mill in the Elite world is worse than anything you've experienced before. You shouldn't listen to half of it."

I tried to sit there and imagine exactly how hard it was for Andrzej to go through the transformation three nights out of the month. If I thought he was cranky now, it would just get worse as the days drew closer to...

"How much longer? Till the new moon?"

"It starts in two days. On Wednesday, they'll put him in a cage before sundown and from what I hear, they leave him alone until dawn."

"Our time or their time?"

"The cage is on this side of the veil. I don't know where because the sides don't usually exchange information about their secrets."

"But Andrzej isn't a secret, he's a human being."

"He's not completely human. None of us are completely human. You can't think of it like that."

"But it's not even his fault. What happened to him..." Cecil frowned at me in concern as I tried to think up exactly what Andrzej told me and possibly remember what I'd seen. All I could get, however, was the emotions left over from that particular vision. I didn't even know how it was I saw it but that's not what mattered right now. "He wasn't born a werewolf, Ce. He was made into one."

He shook his head. "All our information states they are born as werewolves but don't fully turn until they hit puberty. It's been documented..."

"And they also documented Elite don't sleep but we do."

"Tally," he took my hand, "werewolves are born. Not made. They either have the gene or they don't. That's the way it is."

"But even you said Andrzej was of the Lycaon line and I'm sure he said..."