Seven Kinds of Hell Read online

  But the apartment was empty, and my footsteps reverberated strangely now that all our stuff was gone.

  Now that Ma was gone.

  I hadn’t let myself feel her absence before, driving myself with the details of my flight. The place wasn’t really ours anymore, not now that she was gone. The apartment was bereft, the way Ma’s body had been when she passed.

  I’d been fending off emotion for weeks. Tonight was just too much. I didn’t even care anymore if my pursuers were hallucinations brought on by stress, sadness, mania, and fear, or if the world was actually full of monsters who were after me. Who were just like me.

  I curled up on the stripped bed and let the tears come, my sobs echoing though the empty rooms.

  Chapter 2

  The first time the Beast had come, eight years ago, I was certain I’d lost my mind. It was shortly after I’d turned sixteen. Ma was at work when the landlord came up to badger us for the rent. We’d already told him he’d have it when Ma got paid that night, but he was being a prick, yelling and threatening eviction. When he opened the door—something he should not have done—I felt something come over me, and all I could do was think about ripping out his throat. The images played out in my mind, and I knew exactly how it would go down. Never had I felt rage as simple and clean and demanding as that before. The look on his face as he backed off rocked me. It was all I could do to shut the door and chain it behind me.

  That kind of violent response shouldn’t have felt as good as it did. That was my first clue that I was going nuts. The experience was like opening a door to a whole different suite of rooms I never knew existed inside me. I was as terrified as I was exhilarated. If I hadn’t felt the alien, destructive feelings—and if I hadn’t seen the flash of retracting fangs in the mirror as I splashed cold water on my face—I would have spent the whole day trying to get that feeling back. As it was, I was so convinced I was going crazy, I had my bag packed and was ready to leave when my mother came home. All I could tell her was that the landlord was hassling us—hitting on me—and I wanted to move on.

  No, I didn’t tell her the whole truth. If you had no family, and friends you only saw once in a blue moon because you’re always moving, would you risk losing the only person you had in the world when you thought you might be mental?

  We left. Ma was ready to jam anyway, and I did my best to convince myself it was a flash of hormones, or a bad burrito, or anything besides me going loopy. Until that point, I had never touched drugs and had sneaked a beer only once in a while, so I had no idea the Beast would return.

  Until it did.

  A year after the landlord visit was the first time the Beast caught me out in public. That time wasn’t the worst, but it changed me forever and sealed the deal for me that Something Was Not Right With Zoe. I wasn’t exercising good judgment that night, and I now wondered if this had been purely coincidence. Yes, it was a full moon, and some nutcases claim they can feel the moon directing them, strengthening them. I felt those urges myself, and rather than try to figure it out, I tried to blot them out. That night, I found myself at a party at a friend of a friend’s. Being young and stupid, and thinking it would be all right this time, I drank too much. It didn’t work, not the way I needed. No matter how much I drank, the more I wanted to get drunk, the less I could shut off my feelings. I craved a little oblivion, even at the cost of a raggedy, personally embarrassing night. But it wouldn’t happen. No matter how hard I tried to get wrecked, I couldn’t.

  Eventually, very late, I said good-bye and took the long way home, hoping the cold air would somehow force the alcohol into my system.

  Down the block, the last lights in the darkened cinema clicked off, the late show having let out twenty minutes earlier. A young man set an alarm and locked the door. The manager, maybe, or the last of the late-shift workers.

  He looked around, put the keys in his pocket, and set off down the street ahead of me, another lonely soul.

  Lonely, maybe, but not alone. Three men stepped out of the shadows in front of him.

  “Faggot. We told you we’d be back.”

  He kept his head down, kept walking. It was a pretty stupid thing to do; if someone is threatening you, you don’t turn your back on them. I knew from experience you can’t wish away trouble like that. But he quickly lengthened the distance between himself and the others, so maybe he knew what he was doing.

  “Hey, faggot! I’m talking to you.” One of them raced up and, before he could move, grabbed his arm.

  The kid did know what he was doing; he pulled out a can of pepper spray and soaked the guy with it.

  The attacker grabbed his eyes and screamed. The kid stepped in and aimed the stream at him. He should have run. His attacker flailed and, with a lucky shot, managed to knock the canister out of his hand.

  The kid ran, then. The guy he nailed was screaming curses and crying, rubbing his eyes, which only made things worse. Made it worse for the kid, too, because the other two decided it was time to join in. One rushed him, throwing hard punches at his head. The kid went down.

  The other, having checked on his blinded friend, was now screaming himself. He kicked the prone kid several times.

  It all happened in less than a minute. It took forever.

  I was frozen, unable to scream for help. I stared as the scene unfolded, unable to think. The cheap, prepaid phone in my pocket never even occurred to me.

  Everything slowed to glacial pace. Eternities passed between heartbeats, and even as the violence seemed to pause, it was as if a movie was running in my head, several minutes faster than the reality unfolding before me.

  I knew exactly what was coming next—

  I had no idea. How could I have known?

  —They would drag the barely conscious man over to the sidewalk, blood streaming from his face, his hand bent back at an unnatural angle. They would place his head on the curbstone, open his mouth, and stomp his head, splitting his jaw on the anvil of asphalt.

  I shuddered. An orgasmic surge tore through my body. I felt the confinement of flesh fall away, and a strong, sure connection with the universe seized me. It was coupled with an equally foreign feeling of strength, and suddenly the men before me, between punches two and three, sloooowed and stopped.

  Two thoughts struggled to make themselves known in the tumultuous rush of emotions and sensations.

  One: The energy drinks and vodka had definitely caught up with me. I was unhinged with power and, oddly, goodness.

  Two: If I’d once been labeled a “troubled child,” trouble was calling me, louder and more comprehensively than ever before.

  I was going to stop this.

  I could smell the sweat on each of the men, scents as individual as the men themselves. The dissipating odor of pepper spray tingled and burned. I could practically taste the blood as it streamed from the prone man; its molecules dancing, ruby-luminous and hypnotic. I could hear heavy breathing and heartbeats, crickets from an empty lot down the street, a radio from a car a mile away.

  And the moon, oh, the moon. The cold silver light suffused my veins, animating me, making me magic.

  Time snapped back into its groove, but the men did not continue the beating. The idea of the curb—so vivid in my mind, as if a direct link from them—faded. They turned away from their victim and froze.

  They were staring at me. I was growling.

  It was not the noise of a small woman frustrated with the unfairness of the universe. Not a personal, muffled noise of determination or resistance. It was animal violence, loud and warning. The louder it got, the more I felt it and the strength, omigod, the power…

  I stepped forward, and found myself hindered, tangled in my clothing. Nightmarishly, I couldn’t make my hands pull at my jeans.

  I had paws.

  A distant part of me wanted to stop, but I didn’t. It felt too…right.

  Instinct drove me now; if I had paws, I had claws. I had a mouthful of teeth. I snapped and tore at the fabric. My legs—and
tail—were freed.

  With the moon singing in my blood, power coursing through me, a lifetime of unfairness and fear falling away, I had one objective: fix this.

  There was one other thought in a corner of my brain:

  What the fuck was in that Red Bull cocktail anyway?

  I turned back to the men, who were still staring when they should have been running. Three long, leaping paces, and I was on them.

  Although I felt entirely capable of tearing their throats out, something kept me from doing so. An impulse suggested they weren’t worthy of that kind of punishment. My intervention would make them reconsider their role in the world and their all-too-willing use of violence.

  How could I have known that?

  I shook one by the scruff, then nipped at the other one, almost playfully, savoring their fear, enjoying my power. If it was a hallucination, it was a good one. I’d willingly pay six or seven hangovers for that sensation again.

  The first two ran. The other remained, stunned.

  I didn’t feel the same urge to limit violence with him. I felt a compulsion, a need to end him. A natural urge, and unnatural.

  I hurled myself at him, my soul blazing with its righteous mania. I clamped onto his shoulder with my teeth, reveling in his screams. His blood was ambrosial and…wrong. The taste of his wrongness told me I had been correct in my assessment. He needed to go.

  Instincts ablaze, I should have anticipated he wouldn’t run away. I should have anticipated the response, a yank on my clothing and the brick upside my head.

  I fell, stunned, a cathedral landing on top of my skull. Yet the compulsion to attack remained.

  I struggled up, shaking my head, and saw him heading around a corner. To a car, I knew, somehow. I tried to run, but tangled up in my clothing, I stumbled, landing hard, skidding on my chin.

  I saw stars. I passed out, and awoke with my clothes knotted around me, twisted, torn, and dirty. The young man who’d been the victim of the attack was sitting up, gingerly dabbing at his nose, which was streaming blood. He stared at me, dragging himself away painfully, his wounded hand useless, cradled in his lap.

  “What. The. Fuck.”

  “Sorry…I…they’re gone?”

  He shook his head. “You turned into a wolf.”

  Somehow I was less concerned that he and I were having the same hallucination than the fact that he seemed to believe it. That increased my panic. I shook my head, rearranged my clothes as best I could without seeming too nervous. Time to leave.

  Terror filled his eyes. His back hit the wall; he couldn’t get any farther from me. “What are you?”

  “I’m…” I’m really scared. “I’m…I’m…late. Gotta go.”

  Then I got up and ran away, hard as I could.

  I got home, sneaked past my mother, and stripped off my remaining clothes. I got into the shower, as hot as I could bear, and scrubbed off all the blood. Then I turned it all the way to cold until I knew I was neither drunk nor dreaming.

  I stared at myself in the mirror. Nothing unusual there: bloodshot eyes, bad haircut, lips faintly blue from the cold shower. I was shivering, too, but that was nothing to do with temperature.

  I stuffed the torn clothes into a bag and threw it into the back of my closet. I didn’t want my mother to find bloody, torn clothing. I went to sleep.

  At the time, it was easiest to ignore it all, write it off as a bad alcohol experience. After that I had three choices. I could either hide the Beast, stifling it with beer and dope, shutting the door that had opened unasked. Or I could tell someone I thought I turned into a wolf when threatened, then probably eat the leather strap while that someone jabbed my brain with a cattle prod. The third choice was even less palatable.

  I could remove my dangerous self from the equation altogether.

  For the next several years, until I graduated high school, I made it my mission to become the calmest teenager in history. It wasn’t easy; my sudden interest in the occult and ancient history wasn’t the most direct path to the Kingdom of Cool. Vodka and pot became my best friends; I was too scared to try anything stronger, afraid it would unleash the Beast forever. The reputation as a stoner was marginally preferable to that of a target. The bad days were when I had to pull up my hood and keep my head down to keep the fangs from showing.

  Summoning up all my courage, I tried once, when Ma was cooking, to ask her about any…unusual behavior…in our family. She scowled, but asked like what.

  “Uhhh, I dunno. Anger issues? Mood swings? Violence?”

  She froze, her face went ashen. “What?”

  “I was…just wondering. You know, about family traits. And stuff.” Inspiration struck me. “It came up in biology.”

  She tried to replace the lid on the pot, but slipped, hitting the pot at an angle. Spaghetti sauce splashed onto the stove, vivid red against cracked white porcelain. “Why are you asking me this, Zoe?” Her hands were trembling; it took her three tries to turn off the heat.

  “Uh…”

  “Why is this coming up, all of a sudden?”

  Her urgency scared me. I wasn’t about to tell her about my problems, not with this kind of reaction. “Uh, class—?”

  She let my lame answer hang there, too caught up in her own thoughts. She wiped up the spill, rinsed out the sponge, and gave me a questioning glance.

  “You know we don’t want to run into your father’s family. They’re bad people, nothing but trouble. But you listen to me. You and me, we’re nothing like them, do you understand me? Nothing.”

  She grabbed my shoulders, her fingers still damp. “The only reason I left your father was that he was…in something over his head. He wasn’t a bad person, just…lost. I couldn’t risk you getting caught up in his family’s antics. I work as hard as I can, don’t I? Our life isn’t the greatest, but we have nothing to be ashamed of, do we, Zo?”

  No way would I ever say anything about her not working hard enough for us. “No, Ma. I…we don’t. No way.”

  “And it’s getting better, slowly but surely. Right?”

  “Yeah, Ma.” I let a little exasperation into my words, trying to diffuse the situation, trying to sound like a normal teenager. “I get it. I’m just asking, because of class, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well.” She turned away from me, reached into the cupboard for the box of spaghetti. “Anyone ever says anything different, anyone says anything about your father, you tell me, right?”

  “Yeah, Ma. ’Course. I know the drill.”

  “OK, then.” She smiled weakly. “Dinner’s in ten, so go ahead and set the table.”

  As I got out the plates, somehow I knew Ma wasn’t evading me. She believed everything she was telling me, even if she wasn’t telling me everything she knew. I could tell, in her mind, our life was about keeping on the straight and narrow, about family dysfunction and crime. Not about monsters.

  That was the only time I’d tried asking her about the Beast. She’d never seen me when I was in the thrall of the Beast, and I never saw her sprout teeth, so I assumed it was my own exclusive problem.

  If others fled, seeking refuge into comic books, fantasy, and arcane books on witchcraft, I devoured them wholesale, hoping I could learn something about myself and the Beast. I don’t know whether I hoped I’d find more like me or find the cure to what I was. A simple, logical explanation would do. All those museums we loitered in—free on Wednesday nights, and warm and full of security guards—they had reproductions of cave-wall paintings and statues of people with animal heads. Or animal bodies with human faces. I thought there must be some connection. I told Ma I was interested in art history and the past because it took me away from the present. The past can’t hurt you, I said. Archaeology did calm me. The focus it demanded kept the Beast away, and, later, the quiet of libraries and labs made me feel safe.

  I tried to tackle the problem head-on, though. I read, but there’s only so much useful information a teenager can glean from psychology texts. Worse, the more
I learned, the more afraid I became: “psychotic” and “schizophrenic” are terrifying words, especially when you believe they may apply to you. So it was only when I was feeling exceptionally safe—and brave—that I took that direct approach.

  I tried twice on my own to talk to a professional. Once, after narrowly avoiding a fight in school, I was sent to a counselor there, and I got the impression, after two or three mandatory meetings, that I could trust her.

  One day I told her I had dreams about being a wolf. About attacking people.

  She didn’t laugh. She didn’t mock me. She listened, and after I finished, she asked questions.

  I think I eventually might have opened up to her even more, but Ma got one of her feelings, and we moved on the next week.

  For a while I began to believe what little the counselor had told me, that the “dreams” were a way for me to feel some control in my unsettled, and sometimes scary, early life. And shortly after, during my first attempt at college, I sucked it up to try another session, but by then I realized: I could talk all I wanted about dreams and urges to violence, but I’d never be able to prove what I was. I had no control over the Beast. I couldn’t show anyone.

  I canceled the appointment and never tried again.

  But it started to get better after that. As I delved into my all-consuming interest in the past, I developed skills, which led me to finding a place where I felt I belonged. I began to wonder if my own personal demon would be banished. It gave me hope then, but now I knew otherwise.

  Ma had no reason to doubt me, seven years ago. I’d learned to be a good liar, and thanks to my “research,” I always had a glib, deflective answer. In any case, now I had to obey her last instructions to me.

  Up until now, I’d worked awfully hard not to use the word “werewolf” to describe the Beast.

  Until my first encounter with my father’s people, I had no idea there really might be others like me.

  Chapter 3