Crissa's Mate

Chapter Seventy-Eight

David smiled at the two girls as they approached silently. Julie looked fresh and rested in Crissa's clothing, her hair still wet from the shower. Crissa stood at a distance from Julie, still waiting for more signs of her return to humanity. David had earlier found three wine classes in the kitchen closet and had washed them. Greeting the two by holding up a bottle of red wine he had brought with him on the bike, he stood ready for a toast that things had finally been brought back to some sense of reality—a place they had all been painfully away from.

He looked at the bandage on Julie's ear, and reflected on the raw wounds he himself still sported on his nose and forearms.

"Well Julie . . . welcome back," he said loudly. "You look like the same girl I used to share those environmental classes with up in Fairbanks."

Crissa could see David was doing his best to remove the tension in the cabin, while at the same time attempting to take Julie's emotional temperature.

"Yeah. Lots has happened since then," she said, forcing a pensive and shy smile.

"Well, they say . . . what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger, huh, girls?"

"You really believe that?" Julie asked, walking to the sink. She took one of the wine glasses off the counter, while David handed another to Crissa and uncorked the wine.

"So, I think we all have a lot to celebrate tonight," he added, assertively.

"Oh really?" Julie said, holding her glass up, waiting for the others to be filled.

"Yeah. It's all good, now," David replied, smiling at the two of them. Filling their glasses.

"Next you're going to tell me we don't have to worry about Dekker anymore," Julie said, strangely. "Chasing us to the ends of the Earth."

She made the comment with a look of veracity that was surprising to both the others.

David's eyes met Crissa's subtly. Both seemed to be silently asking: Could it really be that she was unconscious of the professor's death? Unaware that in her own state of rage and mutation she had murdered him?

Crissa could not let Julie's statement pass without exploring it further. Julie's mental state was just too important to her now. As David took his first sip of the wine, Crissa held her glass steady.

"Julie . . . Professor Dekker . . . is dead!  He was killed a week or so ago."

The girl's eyes widened. She looked credibly surprised. Certainly shocked.

"Dead?"

"Yeah," David said calmly. "He was . . ."

"Brutally attacked," Crissa went on. "By a wolf . . . in his lab."

"Julie looked at David questioningly, and then back, deeply into Crissa's eyes. She seemed to be trying to digest it all. Truly as if she had just learned it.

"God. . . Really?"

"Yes, Julie," David corroborated sadly. "Brad learned of it right after it happened up there."

The girl put her glass of wine down on the counter. She seemed to be turning pale. Both Crissa and David could see she was in an immediate and obvious state of disbelief.

David moved closer to her.

"Julie . . . are you . . ."

She spoke mechanically at first. "He was . . . he was molesting me." Her voice then became defensive and emotional. "My parents had no idea what terrible things he was doing to me in there!"

Both Crissa and David were silent.

"He wouldn't stop! I fought him off and . . . felt the change coming . . . out of nowhere!"

"Alright, Julie," David said. "It's OK now."

"I just blacked out . . . And ran! I escaped the lab and hid at my parents' house. Until the moon finally released me . . . and then I came back up here."

"OK, Julie," Crissa added. "All that's passed now. Just . . ."

"Yes, but . . . Murder?"

"More like self-defense," David said comfortingly.

Crissa was beginning to finally understand. There had to be obvious individual differences as to how one mutated from the condition Julie and David suffered from. What and how much they could remember. How much they could hold their instincts in check. David had a different path—in and out of the changes. Julie seemed to have a more primitive strain of genes or viral agents which brought a person into the realm of wolf and back again. It was all now making sense to her why Julie behaved so differently from David in both worlds.

Crissa suddenly felt overwhelming sympathy. For how pervasive the curse had manifested itself in Julie. Was it in the end about one's genes? Their human personality? The presence of epigenetics—that theoretical construct only recently being discussed in her biology class?

She could not resist exploring this further with one simple question for Julie. Knowing David seemed to have some carry-over of human control when he morphed into being a wolf—remembering much of his experiences of it when he returned, Julie seemed to have little or no memories. Lesser still, was any evidence of self-control or self-determination in Julie when she crossed over into the realm. This made all the difference to Crissa as to how to look upon Julie now—knowing, nevertheless, she would try to avoid her the rest of her life.

Julie remained in a quiet mood, reflecting on what she could not in all fairness control or remember. It was then that Crissa asked the definitive question.

"Julie . . . do you remember coming into the cabin the other night, as a wolf and attacking me?"

She held her forearm up to her, exposing the half-moon bruise on her arm.

"I did that? Attacked you, Crissa?"

"Yes. And from it, I cut your ear, Julie."

The girl was silent, staring at Crissa's bruised arm and reaching up to touch her own bandaged ear.

"God! I have to get out of here! I have to be isolated! Locked up!"

The girl dropped to the floor and put her hands over her face while sobbing.

Both David and Crissa knew well the dangerous liabilities of Julie's out of control emotions—somewhere between panic and an instinct for 'fight or flight.' They both sat down next to her on the floor and held her silently in their arms. It was a visceral attempt to cool down the engines in her that had on other occasions sent her immediately back into the more lethal realm of wolves. This was, obviously to Crissa now, some survival-related mechanism, characteristic in some of the unique species but apparently not in all members. As in the case of David.

When the girl showed her first signs of calming down due to the physical support of both Crissa and David, a long-standing plan was explained to her which would be initiated that very week with the help of both Josh and Mary from Illinois. At the mention of Germany, a certain mountain village, and the handsome Andreas—all in the context of providing her the airfare—Julie's demeanor changed from one of despair to an expression of hope.

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