The night of the hunt, Artemisia made dinner.
He spared no expense. A primer of miso soup paved the way for a mountain of fried rice topped with chopped carrots, fresh peas, corn, water chestnuts, and panko-fried tofu, covered with a thick reduction of vinaigrette and soy sauce and, of course, runny fried eggs. For dessert, Artemisia served up guava pastries with ice cream on top.
Mercy wept as she ate. He barely touched his plate.
In the hours before sunset, when he’d normally start the process of tying himself down for the evening, he strapped on his apron, freshly-bleached and free of blood, and attacked the pile of dishes in the sink. Outside, Mercy sat on a tree stump by the chicken coop, sharpening her ax. He heard it over the sound of the water in the basin, a slow, deliberate scrape.
The moon wasn’t completely full that night, but it was getting close. The physical change would hit hard and fast, but as he did the dishes a different kind of pain closed in on him, a psychological panic born from disobeying routine. Hide, it implored him, chain yourself up. You’re running out of time. You can’t help the other werewolf. You can’t even help yourself.
All true. But the second werewolf fascinated him. It was dangerously naive to think he could simply waltz into the forest and talk to it. But in all his years of keeping chickens here, they’d never once been attacked by anyone other than himself. If the second werewolf really lived in the Everfree, then it could certainly smell the birds. Why would it wait until now to show itself?
Artemisia sighed. It was complicated. Like his family. Like his life. Like everything. He sunk his hooves to the bottom of the sink and let them stew in the sudsy water. The water refracted the light so it looked like his hooves jutted out at an impossible angle. This is me, he thought. It was, and it wasn’t.
The ghost of dessert haunted him in the form of a stomach-churning belch. He laughed at himself, and when the laughter died down he realized he could no longer hear any scraping sounds from the backyard.
Mercy had already taken off.
The smile dropped from Artemisia’s face. His plan to slow her down with a big starchy dinner had failed.
The only thing left to do now was fight.
He left the house through the front door, circling the neighborhood twice before ducking into a wooded riverbed that led into the forest. He couldn’t overlook the possibility that Mercy, or the other werewolf, was waiting just within the treeline.
The transformation took hold just as he reached the forest. One moment he looked up, shocked at how the canopy thickened all at once and blotted out the light. The next, his vision popped into the infrared.
Burning convulsions wracked his body. He threw himself beneath a fallen tree, pressing his body against the soft dirt, willing the burning to go away, knowing it wouldn’t.
It was over in barely a minute. The first thing that hit his senses was the unmistakable smell of chicken.
Panic curled its fingers around his heart like a murderer gripping a knife. He couldn’t lose control. Not now. Not when there was so much to do and so little time to do it.
He dragged himself out from beneath the fallen tree and ran through a mental checklist of tasks. Find the werewolf. Or find Mercy. Eat–no. Somehow reason with whoever he found first. Eat–no. Fight Mercy off. He couldn’t hurt her. But he had to stop her. What if she came after him instead? What if the werewolf was hostile to him? EATTTT SO HUNGRY PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE–
An inarticulate howl escaped his lips. Birds took flight.
Something large disturbed the foliage nearby. Artemisia turned tail and barreled through the brush. He thought he was running away, but as he broke through another line of brambles he realized his instincts were taking him towards the forest’s edge. He slowed up for just a moment. That was when he heard the sound of something running towards him.
To his right, the forest went on forever into blackness. To his left, faint light from the outside world broke through. That and the smell of chicken. Another branch snapped, closer this time. He went towards the light.
Out of the forest, he saw a familiar lonely cottage on the dirt road into town. Nestled between two shire hills sat rows of animal shelters, ranging from miniscule mouse hollows to a bonafide bear cage. In the middle of it all was a single grand chicken coop with a pristine wire pod protecting the precious birds inside.
His birds.
Artemisia lost it completely. Threats forgotten, he lumbered across the grass and slammed against the chicken wire mesh with all his might. The supports bowed inward. Metal whined and wood moaned under the weight.
In a single practiced motion, Artemisia snipped a piece of the wire using his thumb and index claw. Then he dug his paw in, ignoring the bite of metal against his thickened skin. He wrenched back, and the whole side of the wire mesh peeled away like the tin top of a can.
Just as he was about to leap into the coop, however, he heard something running up from behind him. He turned around and saw the second werewolf barreling down on him, murder in its eyes.
He barely had time to register fear before the beast slammed into him.
The two hit the ground hard and tumbled backwards. The second werewolf wound up on top, its claws wrapped around Artemisia’s neck.
“If you leave and never come back,” the werewolf snarled, “I’ll let you live.”
Every rational part of Artemisia’s mind implored him to speak. But he was trapped inside his own mind. With his nostrils invaded by smells of feathers and blood, with the air in his lungs slowly squeezed out, his cooler head didn’t stand a chance.
He wriggled one paw free and swiped the other werewolf in the face. It leapt back, gritting its teeth in pain. Blood weapt from a wound in its cheek, but it seemed like all Artemisia did was make it angrier.
“You’ll be my first kill,” the werewolf sneered. “I’ll bet you taste terrible.” It feigned an attack, baiting Artemisia in. While he was off-balance, it dove in for real, tackling him to the ground again. He kicked it in the ribs as hard as he could and was rewarded with a grunt of pain. But it recovered fast and leveraged its larger size to pin his arms. With the full weight of a ten-foot werewolf sitting on his chest, he was completely immobilized.
The werewolf leaned down to bite his neck, flashing its razor-sharp teeth.
“The chickens,” Artemisia wheezed. “The, the.” He gasped. No more air.
The werewolf paused. “The what?” It shifted its weight backwards, alleviating the weight on his chest the slightest bit.
“The chickens,” he said. “You can’t have them.”
“Why not?”
Paternal instinct collided with the urge to devour. “They’re mine.”
He tried to throw the werewolf off him, but its weight was too much. Its eyes flashed from Artemisia to the coop. The murderous glint fizzled.
“Your chickens?” it asked, pointing to the coop. “Those are your chickens?”
Artemisia redoubled his efforts to wriggle out of the werewolf’s grasp. Against all that leverage, though, he was utterly powerless.
The werewolf reached for a strand of mangled chicken wire and twisted it off with no more effort than a gardener plucking a flower. It twisted the metal into a complicated loop, then tressed Artemisia up. Ignoring his howls of protest, it dragged him back into the woods, leaving the birds behind in their coop.
The beast seemed intent on dragging Artemisia over every tree root, rut, and rock in the Everfree forest. After what felt like hours of rough handling, they broke through the treeline again, this time into Artemisia’s neighborhood.
The werewolf made a straight path for his house and went right in the back door like it owned the place, pausing only when Artemisia’s shoulders became lodged in the doorframe. Plates rattled in the cupboard as it lumbered into the living room.
The immediate panic subsided, swallowed by the familiar faint rumble of the air conditioner and the lingering smell of neutral oil and fake-lemon cleaner from the kitchen.
The werewolf said, “What did you mean, your chickens?”
Artemisia strained at the chicken wire restraints, but only managed to cut himself in the process. “Don’t hurt me,” he whimpered.
“You’re doing a better job of that yourself. What were you doing out there?”
Artemisia said nothing. The dam holding his anxiety at bay was crumbling right before his eyes.
“If you want to wait until morning, we can do that.” The werewolf curled up on the floor opposite him. Her eyes met his, and he looked away. He didn’t like standoffs, but he hated staring contests even more.
He wasn’t sure if he fell asleep or not. Morning, and the familiar burning pain of ten million long hairs retracting into his body, snuck up on him. He leapt upright, but with his limbs bound he fell right back over again. His eyeballs deflated, his vision shifting blue. The restraints fell off his legs. He didn’t try to run away.
The other werewolf started to grow smaller. Its bones shrank and snapped into their original pony shape. The paws glued themselves back into hooves. It bore the pain with a hard-set grimace.
When the transformation was complete, Mercy ran a hoof through her mane and sighed. “I knew it.”
“Surprise,” Artemisia mumbled.
“So you were killing your own chickens? That’s sick. Were you trying to bait in other werewolves?”
“It was never about you.”
Mercy got up and stretched her legs. “I’ve never met another werewolf before. Well, pony-turned werewolf. You know what I mean.”
“You said you’d killed five.”
“Marketing.”
He scoffed. “Some monster hunter you are.”
“Hey, I’m the best monster hunter in the world.” Her tone softened. “You and I aren’t monsters.”
Artemisia’s eyes turned towards the door. The faint sound of chirping chickens drifted through the screen. “Yes we are.”
“No, we’re not. I get hunger pangs too.” He fixated on her teeth as she spoke. Regular, flat pony teeth. “I just found better ways to deal with them.”
“Like how?”
“Let it out.”
He pictured a coop of chickens in Mercy’s yard, the occupants all lined up in a row waiting for their caretaker to gobble them up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, I get outside and run around. What do you—” A lightbulb went off. “Those restraints in your bed. It’s not a sex thing.” Her face went pale. “Oh my gosh, you’ve been chaining yourself up.”
“It’s the only way to keep them safe.”
“How about you think about yourself for a second!” Genuine anger flashed in her eyes. “Have you ever thought about what all that keeping it bottled up is doing to you? No wonder you’re so cooped up and crazy. You gotta let yourself breathe, Arty.”
“Not a chance.”
She took his hooves in his. “Please. Just try it. Tomorrow night. I’ll go out with you.”
It wasn’t possible. Everything he ever knew told him that this was wrong. That he was wrong. And letting himself go outside was a quick and easy way to wind up with no more chickens and a lot of little grave plots to dig. Every past failure, all the mornings he woke up covered in feathers, came rushing back. Blood memories.
As if she could read his mind, Mercy wrapped Artemisia up in a crushing hug. “If you don’t make a change, nothing changes.”
Artemisia’s breathing quickened. He needed the chains. He needed to hide. “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
His stomach churned. Was it hunger? He needed zip ties and boat anchors. “I just can’t.”
Mercy took him by the shoulders and looked him square in the eye. She saw through him, all the way down to his carnivorous core. “Then you don’t really care about them.”
With no chains to hold him back, he crumpled into Mercy’s arms.
“I do,” he sobbed. “I love them so much.”
“Prove it.” She stroked his mane, the first comforting touch he’d felt in years.