FEVERCHAIN 13

Lesbian werewolves, et cetera. FEVERCHAIN is a contemporary horror-romance serial set in the fictional Pinetown, New Jersey.

Voiceover by Emily S Hurricane!!! I’m really putting her to work here with all these characters, and she performs them all differently and beautifully! So tasteful! So tonal! My ear buds are tingling…

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Your lover’s condition????????

Is contagious????????????????

Gwen’s face, red getting redder, is blurring in my vision. I think she’s speaking, her expression all “I can explain.” I turn away from her and shove the door open, blood loud in my ears and jaw popping, eyes already stinging before the outside cold hits them.

I forgot my jacket. Erica is wearing some kind of pajama shirt off one shoulder, her flesh pink and fevered. She’s fidgeting with something in her hand and sighs as Gwen appears, hunched and looking angrier than me. That pisses me off.

“You can’t just come here,” she seethes at Erica, stopping in front of me.

“Excuse me?” Erica tilts her head. “You don’t own this establishment.” She shoots me a grin and offers Gwen the squat vial pinched between her fingers. “I need your cheek swab. Then, I’ll go. Easy enough?”

Gwen swats it from her hand, and the vial tinks on concrete.

“Whoa!” Erica and I harmonize.

“Why do you want that? Why?” Gwen is too loud, veins too visible on her neck. I reach for her arm, but she flinches from me before I can touch, glancing back with glassy eyes.

“To test your DNA—”

“No.” Gwen sniffs, collects herself marginally. “You need to leave. Right now.”

“Sorry I didn’t take ‘I’m a werewolf’ at face value.” Erica’s eyes return to me to assess my reaction; I offer none, but inside, inside… I pee a little. I think I pee out whatever my heart thought was solid.

“You still need proof?” Gwen’s grasping and wrenching at the pockets of her jeans, bandage starting to leave a dark stain. “I showed you my scar.”

On her left collar bone. My guts twist like someone died.

“I warned you to stay away…” Gwen’s increasingly talking with her teeth.

“I drove all the way here for your sample, and I’m not leaving without it,” Erica snarls back, steps closer. She’s hot too, I can feel it from here. “Want me to take a blood one?” She lunges for Gwen’s wrist, just misses it. They’re breathing hard, taking wide steps as they circle each other, steaming.

“Want me to rip your lungs out?”

“What!” Erica almost smiles. “The least you can do is let me rip your lungs out—”

“Hey!” I yell. “Hey!”

They stop.

“What the fuck is happening?”

Erica points. “She fucking bit me.”

My face quakes. I turn my wrath towards Gwen, who shrivels.

“She, uh, smelled like a coyote—”

“YOUSLEPTWITHHER, DIDN’TYOU!”

Gwen blinks, short-circuiting.

Erica covers her mouth before convulsing with cackles, nearly rolling head-first onto the dead grass.

I peel my eyes from her to Gwen, who takes a shuddering breath. “No, Bianca. I was sleeping and felt something on me. I smelled coyote, but it was Erica carrying all those fucking fur samples.”

“Sorry I have a job?”

“Yeah, well.” Gwen rubs her neck. “Good luck getting that PhD now.”

“Oh, I’m getting my PhD. Also, you weren’t just ‘sleeping.’ I thought you were—“

“Shut up!”

“Stop it! Both you. Wait a second.” I hold up my hands. They tremble. “What are you saying? Erica’s a werewolf now?”

“So she claims,” Erica says, voice more confident than her expression.

“It’s true.” Gwen stares at the pavement. “I’m sorry.”

Erica looks between us and scoffs, but her eyes are bright with panic. “Just give me your sample.”

“Are you trying to get us locked away?”

“There’s no ‘us.’” Erica picks the vial from the ground and inspects it. “I’m giving you one more chance before—before I contact the authorities.”

“Erica, please,” I beg.

“This is bullshit,” Gwen says. “You know what you are. You couldn’t stand being in the city, could you?”

Erica makes a fist around the vial.

“Could you sleep there?”

She stares at Gwen like she has three heads.

“Last night, could you sleep in your apartment?”

Erica’s nonanswer answers.

“Where’d you sleep?” Gwen smiles joylessly. “In the woods?”

Silence.

Gwen nods once. “Werewolf.”

“Or you fucked with my brain chemistry. Have you been to a hospital? I’m going to a hospital—”

“Gwen’s telling the truth,” I interject. “I’ve seen it.”

Erica squints at me. “You’re in on it, too? This has got to be the stupidest way to try and cover your ass.”

“You almost ate my hand!” Gwen flashes her red bandages.

“Only after you bit me!”

“Duh! Are you getting it now, professor?”

“Stop yelling!” I plead. Sheriff would be here any minute.

“Give me a DNA sample!” Erica waves the vial. “Give me proof!”

“Fine!” Gwen snatches it, steals a glance at the empty road. “If you show anyone, know that you’re only screwing yourself over. ‘Cause we have the same condition.”

“There’s nothing to show, understand? The DNA that I’d extracted from myself immediately decayed to the point of unreadability. I used multiple samples. The whole batch was busted. The machine isn’t broken.” She watches as Gwen jabs the inside of her cheek with the Q-tip. “If the same happens with your DNA, I’ll start believing something.”

Gwen pushes the vial into Erica’s palm. “Believe whatever you want, I don’t care as long as you keep quiet. And stay away during the full moon.”

“The full moon? Please.” Erica places the vial in her black denim mini purse and removes her car keys. They jingle and judder in her grasp. While her back is turned, her shoulders tighten and she asks: “What am I supposed to do? Find my own campground to terrorize?”

“Yes,” Gwen says. Behind her, through the diner’s huge windows, I see Emilio watching us inside her reflection. I don’t know how long he’s been there. “Find your own campground.”

↟↟↟

“She’s gonna come back.”

February’s moon is full next week. Gwen is beside me in the darkness, keeping me warm as she smells the wind coming through my opened window. She said it’s like watching TV. Apparently, it’s just as distracting.

“Gwen.”

“Hm?”

“Erica. She’s not going to give up on finishing her thesis.”

Gwen rubs her face and laughs at that. “We’re not gonna be in Pinetown much longer, anyway. She can take it, coyotes and all. I’d like,” her eyes focus on me, “I’d like to be gone before the end of next month.”

I frown and she turns away. “We can’t just bolt. There’s going to be a funeral, a will, insurance stuff, bank stuff.”

“They have a lawyer.”

“Someone has to contact the lawyer,” I sigh. “I can’t do this stuff for you. I can help you. But you’re going to have to stick around and manage things for a little bit. Use your business administration skills.”

“Ha, ha,” Gwen growls. Her skin burns and bristles, probably against the prospect of spending so much time inside. Opening my bedroom window has been our most recent compromise. I just hope Mom doesn’t notice it and ask more questions.

I press my face into Gwen’s back and stroke the side of her body until her breathing slows.

I’m slipping into unconsciousness when she whispers: “If you were like me, we wouldn’t have to worry about money.”

I sit up, wide awake. She watches me sidelong. Braces herself, biting the inside of her cheek.

“What the hell are you talking about? If I wasn’t poor?”

“No! God.” She covers her face. “If you were like me.”

I gasp. “I’m not, and you’re human most of the time. Where would we live? What would we wear? What would we eat?” I imagine us half-naked, running around in the Pine Barrens or some Northwestern woodland like a fucked up version of The Flintstones. Maybe an RV is involved. I’m not cut out for that life—I was thinking we would have more of a cottage situation—

“I’m not fully human, even when I’m human,” Gwen says. I try to speak, but she holds up her hand. “That’s why I bit Erica before looking—I have different instincts.” The same hand wraps around mine, hot and insistent. “One day, you’ll get it.”

I pull away; she tenses. “I don’t want you to bite me. You said you could manage that.” Her cheeks are flushed but her expression, cold.

“The moon is full for three days, Bianca. Three.”

Slimy dread licks and sticks to me. “And?”

“That’s a long time to… manage.” She raises her lips to my ear, panting lightly. “Better to get it over with while it’s safe.”

I slide from her, from the bed. Smokey stirs beneath it.

Gwen’s timing, her approach—it infuriates me. So thoughtless and reckless and—

“Please,” Her voice strains. “It’d be harder for my parents to hurt you. You could help me, even—I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“You’re happening to me. You bit Erica.” Even from where I stand, I feel her shudder. “We already have a plan, Gwen.”

“What am I supposed to do for the two nights after?”

“Run around in the woods like you always do. Stay away from people.”

“I’m going to want to be with you.”

“Then… I’ll go camping.”

“You know what happened to Erica, and I wasn’t even turned then. Clearly I—” Gwen yanks the hair on her scalp, folding into herself. “It doesn’t matter what promises I make.”

I suck in a breath, imagining when her mouth becomes bigger than her brain. “You said you love me. Does that matter?”

“And you said you love me.” She gestures to herself. “Knowing this.”

I shut my eyes. She’s right, but I know I don’t want to be like her, I don’t want to be like Erica, I don’t want to be more beholden to the lunar cycle than I already fucking am. Not until I have to. “Get out.”

She does. Without another word. It disappoints me, and I feel like the idiot I know I am. I cry as my fingers crimp and struggle to push the window down, my head rocking in and out of my visible breath. I weave, sink to the floor, and sleep there with my dog, wondering about the chasms between us, and between Gwen and me.

↟↟↟

Gwen doesn’t reappear in the morning, or later, at the diner. So that’s great.

She’s my only hope for saving Mom. For saving me. For saving herself—yet she doesn’t trust herself. She didn’t set out to bite Erica, it just happened.

Unfuckingfortunately, this is significant.

Gwen has another point: It’s true that, I, Bianca Panco, would rather be a werewolf than dead. But right now, my desire starts and ends there. Thinking about it forces me to think about the future, and I really can’t get past the upcoming moon, protecting Mom, getting through the death of Gwen’s family and moving on somehow with something like a healthy relationship and mental state. Hope of maintaining normalcy, or my life as it currently stands, is rapidly crumbling like the stale coffee cake I tried to eat, then threw up, after breakfast.

Once again, I watch the windows, waiting for Gwen. It’s almost noon, but the morning fog still stretches out from the woods, obscuring the road.

After one o’clock, the gray oblivion births an evergreen Jeep. It parks in the diner’s lot. I watch it idle there, staring me down until Thornton leaves. I curse Gwen for refusing to have a phone. Maybe I should run out back and scream.

Instead I’m seduced by pretending everything is normal, and that Wade can’t, wouldn’t hurt me. Mom is singing in the kitchen. I’m drying and stacking our oval, checkered plates, eyeballing the tremor in my hands as it expands to my arm and chest and entire being. When Wade Dyer finally walks in, he doesn’t even look at me and sits at a booth. He looks stressed—hair unbrushed and greasy, but he can’t feel worse than me.

The plate I’m holding clatters as I stack it unsteadily. I hate him for making me this way. Ignore him for as long as I can until he starts clearing his throat and glaring.

Before I reach his table he has the audacity to ask: “How are you?”

I slap a menu down in front of him and he flinches. “Like you care.”

“Look,” he sighs. “It’s a bad situation.”

I shake my head, holding back a torrent of emotion behind chapped lips. “Why are you here?”

“You lied about Gwen staying with you last night. Don’t ask how we know.”

I grit my teeth.

“Where did she go?”

My heart trips and falls. “The woods.”

Wade pretends to look at the menu. “Did you two get in a fight or something?”

“No I—I can’t control what she does.”

“That’s not good.” He clears his throat, lowers his voice. “If she doesn’t come back soon, my parents are gonna take matters into their own hands, if you, uh, catch my drift.”

I look out the window, helpless. “Did they tell you to say that?”

“Jesus, Binny. I’m trying to warn you—”

“YOU DON’T GET TO CALL ME A FUCKING NICKNAME!” I catch myself on the table, trembling all over. His eyes are huge, but he isn’t watching me. The kitchen door swings on its hinges.

“What’s going on in here?” Mom asks, shyly stern.

Wade forces a laugh. “We’re just messing around, sorry Miss Panco.”

I do my best to fix my face, and smile back at her. “Sorry, got carried away.”

“Thank god no one else is in here.” Mom frowns and ducks back into the kitchen, eavesdropping for sure.

“Listen, Bin—Bianca,” Wade whispers. “Whatever happens, I want you to know I’m sorry. For everything. For not telling you the truth, until now.”

I stare daggers and sharp teeth and bullets and death, death, death.

“We just have to control this situation, because, like, what if people get hurt? Then it’s all over.”

It’s already over, but I bite my tongue.

He bends closer to whisper, covering his mouth with the menu. “My dad thinks the werewolf thing can be cured. We’re getting close to starving it out. It’s getting weaker, and I think it’s about to give up. After that, everything will be normal again. The nightmare is over. That’s all we want.”

“You threatened my mom, you piece of shit.” My voice shakes with the rest of me.

“Bin—Bianca. I didn’t threaten anyone. And my parents… they wouldn’t actually hurt your mom. They’re trying to get everything back to normal. Murder isn’t really the path there.”

“I don’t know what game you’re playing at, but—”

“This is the truth. No more games. My parents are more bark than bite, they just thought they could scare you. Now they’re worried you’re planning something stupid. So I’m warning you not to do anything you’ll regret, got it?”

“Got it. Thanks, Wade. Want some coffee? You’re so full of shit, a laxative might help.”

“Nice one.” He stands. “I know you hear me. I’m sure you’re getting to know how dangerous her condition is, day by day. So, yeah. Just—think about what I said. If you really care about Gwen.”

I don’t speak. Flick away the tears on my cheeks. Gwen was right. I want him gone.

Thank god he’s too fucking stupid to actually manipulate me.

The door chimes as he leaves and my mom enters, her footsteps careful as she places a hand on my shoulder.

“Bun, that didn’t sound like playing around.”

I swallow a sob. It burns.

“Why is he messing with you? You’re both too old for that.” She hesitates. “Did something happen between you and Gwen?”

I shake my head.

Mom whispers sharply: “Does she have an STD?”

I choke on my spit.

“I’m sorry, Bun. It’s just, the other day I heard that girl with the green hair come in and say Gwen’s contagious. You’ve been so upset that I’ve been too afraid to ask but, Bunny, I want you to know I’m not gonna judge. Still, you need to go see a doctor.”

I laugh, almost honestly. It gives me time to think. “Mom, that was about—that was about a stomach bug.”

“Oh, god. Really?”

“Yes. Erica wanted to know if Gwen was contagious, but I told her I felt fine.” I smile, but Mom remains suspicious.

“Alright,” she sighs. “I don’t mean to pry. You’re an adult, after all. But remember: you’re my baby, too.”

We hug. “Mom I—I can’t wait for the cruise.”

“Me too, Bun.”