I suspected, at times, everyone felt alone. As much as we all needed to associate with others, to have some sort of consistent human contact, that drive competed with our respective individualities. Each of us was different, our thoughts and perspectives uniquely our own; so it could be overwhelming, the amount of people who were wired in ways we couldn’t understand. For some it was just more obvious than others.

     Pulling open the front door to our New Orleans condo, half of a cute Creole cottage in the Faubourg Marigny, I noticed the air was stale from not moving, and warm. It was a nice March morning, seventyish. Vaguely I picked up the piney scent of my neighbor’s tall evergreen. The sensation made me laugh. The name “evergreen” only made sense up North. I heard it a lot the Winter I spent with my aunt in Nova Scotia. But down here, most of the trees were green year-round. Not all, but most. And down here the so-called “evergreens” were rare. Personally, I hated them. They reminded me of the North. It’s like I went cold every time I saw one. Luckily, the palm tree in front of our house blocked the view of the pine tree in our neighbor’s yard. The palm wasn’t exactly something that screamed “New Orleans,” but it was prettier and at least representative of tropical climes. I wished we had a Magnolia tree, though Magnolias shed their enormous leaves periodically. Really, the Live Oaks were my favorite. There’s something about the way they stretched out and across the streets and houses, forming an arboreal urban canopy, casting cooling shade on the walk ways underneath.

     Reaching into the large side pocket of my beige cargo pants, I pulled out a pack of cigarettes. The plastic wrap around it crinkled as I removed a single cigarette; I held it in my mouth as I put the pack away, patting my other pockets for a lighter. I twisted and glanced at the black wrought iron patio set on the porch. Sure enough, there was a blue plastic lighter sitting next to a black ashtray half-full with cigarette butts. I sat down and enjoyed the morning sun leaking through the palm tree leaves as I lit up.

     No sooner than had I set the lighter back down on the small table, I heard Marcel curse me from inside the house. “Fuck, man,” he growled from the living room. “You always gotta smoke so much? That shit reeks, and it makes our house reek.”

     Marcel had this amazing sense of smell. He could smell anything, anywhere. He used it almost like most of us used our sight. A lot of times, that came in handy. Like when he knew that the rank smell in the condo was a piece of raw hamburger that had fallen between the half-inch gap between the stove and the kitchen counter. (The installation was cheap work; we’d have to improve on that sometime.) Prior to that, my father and I had looked around for half a day, trying to find out what the hell reeked. Marcel had walked in, took one whiff, and said, “Beef, between the stove and counter. Probably about a foot back.” Both my father’s jaw and mine had dropped. Sure enough, he had been right. That was Marcel for you.

     My point was, we all had our vices. I smoked. Besides, Marcel was hardly one to talk. By the sound of ice clinking against glass, I guessed that he was working on his good morning Bloody Mary. Many a morning I had woken to see the Tabasco brand Bloody Mary mix next to the Taaka vodka on the kitchen counter, a fixed drink in his hand. For whatever reason, there was never the trademark celery stick in his Bloody Mary—I think he was much too much of a carnivore to even consider that—he just went for the seasoned tomato juice and booze.

     As I puffed on the cigarette, I tossed my feet up on the green metal railing along the edge of the porch and closed my eyes to the sun. I didn’t answer Marcel. I just enjoyed the nicotine flavor that maybe only addicts and rare freaks understood. I considered muttering something under my breath about him being a drunk, but thought better of it. Marcel also had a freakish sense of hearing. Besides, he wasn’t really a drunk. It was hard to describe. It seemed he mostly drank to regulate his wild mood swings, trying to dull the edge of his sharp emotions. Sometimes he worried me. But the weird thing was that he almost never got drunk. His body just didn’t process it like most of ours. He would drink and drink and drink and his metabolism dealt with it, processing it like it would any other pathogen. So when I say he would wake up and have a few Bloody Marys, I’m not saying he would go to work drunk. Not at all. Fuck. Two or three had almost no effect on him. Only it must have, psychologically, because he did it almost every day.

     Crushing the remnant of the cigarette into the ashtray, I got up and walked back into the condo, pushing the door closed behind me. I turned past our small wooden dining table, set in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and moved into the narrow kitchen. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked back into the main room, moving toward Marcel, who was sitting on the sofa, examining his bare arms.

     He couldn’t help it. Even with the hair gone, he couldn’t help it. Marcel tried to avoid it by regularly waxing his body. But it didn’t always work. Marcel was a trichotillomaniac. In other words, he compulsively pulled out his hair. It depended upon the day and the stimulus. He’d see someone absently scratch their arm and he’d sit there for hours, fixated on his arm hair, slowly pulling out those he didn’t like—as if trying to make it look just right—until eventually there would be an empty patch of hair and embarrassed he would wear something to cover it, which left him feeling worse than when he had begun. Other days, someone would run a hand through their hair and he’d see that. Then he’d be pulling out the hair on his head. So Marcel had decided to pull an end run around the compulsion by taking away the target; he regularly shaved his head and waxed his body. The only hair left on his body was his eyebrows. He considered that his test. But sometimes he picked at them too; he would have a subtle thinness some days, others there was an awkward gap. Marcel had carefully considered his battleground: he had taken away the worst parts, the distracting vertigo of too many choices; now he could just focus all his concentration on not plucking the one spot of hair that remained. Yet here he was, staring at his bare arms.

     “Leave them alone,” I said. “They look fine.”

     Marcel laughed at himself, a kind of half-snort. He shook his head, but he wouldn’t look at me. He picked his glass up off of the clay coaster sitting on the wood coffee table and leaned back into the deep maroon sofa with his Bloody Mary, the ice clinking against the glass again.

     “It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

     Marcel shrugged, looking into his drink.

     I had to get him out of the house. He spent too many weekends just sitting on that couch, not sure what to do, or just immobile, lost in thoughts about his past. He was a good guy and I hated to see him like that. For the most part, Marcel just didn’t do much. He’d watch a little TV, read a little, but he had no real hobbies and really no friends other than me. But there was one thing he always loved. Music.

     “Listen,” I lied. “There’s this album I’ve been wanting to pick up for a while now. You wanna go with me to that music shop over on Magazine?”

     Marcel’s head perked up. There was something beyond the dull in his brown eyes. He raised his too-thin eyebrows. “Sure,” he said.

     “Sweet,” I replied. Let me just grab something to eat and shower and we can head over.

     “Okay,” Marcel said.

     He was looking at his arms again.

               #

     As we waited to cross Magazine Street, a collage of cars whizzing by in each direction, I turned to look at Marcel. His head was drooped, his gaze absently on the ground, maybe staring at an errant cigarette butt or possibly just at his feet. His feet were in the street. He wasn’t paying enough attention. Hearing a deep rumbling noise, I looked back up, terrified to see a truck hurtling right at us, almost on top of us. I leapt back to the sidewalk, no longer so eager to inch forward or anxious for my turn to cross without the benefit of a stop sign or red light.

     “Fuck,” I cursed, turning to flick off the driver. Was he even paying attention? It was then that I saw it. I hadn’t seen the front wheels go by, but as I looked up to curse at the driver I clearly saw the back wheel rolling off of Marcel’s foot. He was still staring at the ground, absently. I looked over both shoulders. No one else had noticed. I grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back. He looked up at me, startled and annoyed.

     “What?” he asked.

     “Fuck, Marcel,” I said. “You have to watch yourself. That dude ran right over your foot.” I looked around again, self-conscious. “I don’t think you want to have to explain that to anyone else.”

     Marcel just shrugged and crossed the street. There were no cars coming now. But I was only half-convinced he had looked. I stood there for a moment, shaking my head with a frown, but then realizing the opportunity I was missing, I trotted off after him.

     Marcel didn’t smile until he entered the store, and only then did his gaze pick up off the ground. Suddenly, his eyes were bright and he was scanning all the different rows, trying to figure out where to start. He liked a little bit of everything. He pointed to the local rack. “Amanda Walker,” he said. “Amazing songwriter-pianist. Caught her at the Parish last week. You should’ve come.”

     “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll have to see her next time she plays out.”

     The music shop was one of those local ones, where maybe the place wasn’t dusted and vacuumed every night after closing by a separately paid cleaning staff, and maybe they had too many boxes lying around with unpacked CDs waiting to get put on the shelves, with rock t-shirts strewn in the corner over a set of those boxes. Marcel liked what he called the authenticity of it. He detested the corporate music stores in the malls; he called them the death of music. Whatever that meant. I walked behind him.

     “Screaming Trees,” he said, tapping the band’s logo on the CD. Marcel had a particular fondness for nineties rock music: the “grunge” era. I liked jazz or blues mostly, maybe a little country. He was still tapping the logo. His feet had stopped moving. His body was still other than for that one finger. His one hand was under the CD case, holding it, and the fingers of the other were cradled over it, placed gingerly, like a blind man reading Braille; only his long index finger kept tapping that logo. I stepped to his side, looking at his face. He seemed to be looking at the CD case cover, but his eyes were dull, like he wasn’t really looking at anything, as if he was just looking.

     “Marcel,” I said.

     “Ha,” he laughed. It was like an admission. He kept tapping. He didn’t look at me. He just kept staring at the nothing on that CD case cover. “You, of all people,” he said softly, “know what I really am.” He kept tapping.

     I looked cautiously around to make sure no one else was within earshot. Someone on the opposite end of the store was rifling through a pile of records. A bored clerk fiddled with a small TV monitor; he looked to be clicking through channels. I double-checked the clerk. I think Marcel knew the dude.

     “And knowing that, knowing what I can do,” Marcel said, still softly, “can you fucking believe I’m saddled all these years with all these fucking problems? With these fucking psychoses?” His finger kept tapping, only now he looked at me; he had a look on his face like I just told him his mother had died. But it was just tapping.

     “Stop it,” I said.

     “Ha,” he laughed again. It was that same sort of laugh. It was the kind of laugh that was one step away from being a burst of tears. “Don’t you think I want to?” he said.

     I grabbed his hands, holding them tight. “Stop it,” I said.

     He tried to pull his hands away but I held firm. I mean, I know he could have ripped them free—or done much worse—had he really wanted to. But he didn’t. So I held tight. I took the CD case gently from his hands. He let it go.

     “Fuck,” he said, shaking his hands hard, like they had fallen asleep. He gritted his teeth, grimacing. His head turned right to left, like he was looking for an escape.

     “Let it go,” I said, setting the case down on top of the stack. “It’s cool, man. You know how it is. It comes and goes in waves and you just have to ride it out. You know you’re stronger than this.”

     He held up his hands, fingers askew, muscles taut; I could see the veins bulging on his forearms. His mouth opened to speak, only he closed it again. He gritted his teeth again. “It’s not enough that I’m a freak created through arcane rituals over two hundred years ago, but with that comes this fucking emotional and psychological instability. Each of us Therians is like this. We’re all damaged. They don’t tell us that, but every single one I’ve ever met has had some kind of problem. Humans aren’t meant to be what I am, man!”

     “Lots of normal people have obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

     “Yeah, I’ve read all the stupid books,” he said. “How my depression and trichotillomania are outgrowths of it, etcetera, etcetera. Fuck, man. How many of those normal people that you’re talking about have to endure it for centuries because they have regenerative properties that accidentally heal all their organs as they fail and force them to live on until they are fucking finally and mercifully killed by someone?”

     “Marcel!” someone yelled.

     We both turned around. It was the store clerk.

     “What the hell are you all moping about over there? Can’t you see it’s a beautiful spring Saturday? You’re not out there busting your hump on some damn construction site today and you’re all sour over something today of all days? It must be seventy outside, man. Sunny too. I’m the one that should be bitching. I’m stuck in here all day, while tools like you two get to dick around doing nothing all day.”

     Marcel laughed. His smile outlasted the laugh. It was weird. It was like his little episode had never struck. He picked up the Screaming Trees CD. “Dust” it said on the cover, with a picture of some kind of tortured devil or something on the cover in pale blue art. “Yeah, I know,” Marcel said to the clerk. “I know. So ring this up and let me get out there under the sun where I belong.”

     The clerk took a look at the disc and made a face. “More grunge? I thought you had all that shit already?”

     “Me too,” Marcel said. “But I guess not. I noticed looking through my CDs the other day that this is one of the few I don’t have.”

     “One of the few what?”

     “Grunge discs. I separate my collection alphabetically, but I’ve cross-referenced the genres as well. I noticed that this is one of only generally available grunge albums I didn’t have.”

     The clerk shook his head and laughed at me. “This lunatic,” he said.

     “If only you knew,” I said with a half-smile.

     Marcel smiled too, but even as he did, reaching into his pocket for cash, he was looking at the floor again. I should have known the smiles wouldn’t last. It was like behind each one there was something dark. In a weird way it reminded me of my mom. She was the kind of person that always smiled. It wasn’t a bad thing exactly, but it was like you could tell her that the dog died, and she still had that awkward smile on her face, tears behind it, and you knew she didn’t really want to smile, but that’s just how her face, or maybe her brain, worked. Marcel was the opposite. There were few happy expressions of his that I believed. When most people saw his smile, and smiled back, they looked away, content. But I always kept my eyes on Marcel, because that smile almost always gave way to the straight line of his lips, fallen eyes, and a lowered head; it was like that sad look was his by default and he had to fight to smile. I hated it for him because I knew it was all he knew and was therefore comfortable for him.

     “You like heavier stuff, too?” the clerk asked.

     “Sure,” Marcel said.

     “That guitarist from Alter Bridge is in town tonight with his metal side project.”

     “Tremonti?” Marcel asked, looking up again, his eyes lighting up. This time, the upturn of his lips stayed the course.

     “Yeah, that’s him. Down at One-Eyed Jack’s in the Quarter.”

     “I thought that place was more punk hardcore?” Marcel said.

     The clerk shrugged. “Yeah. But who fucking knows. They have an eighties night on Thursdays.”

     “Is he on tour, or just putting on a special show? I thought he was back in the studio with Alter Bridge.” Marcel asked.

     “I don’t know,” the clerk said, shrugging. “Just read about it in the Gambit and thought you’d be interested.”

     Marcel turned to me. I knew before he said anything that I was going to the concert. I nodded. “Sure,” I said.

     He beamed. The smile stayed.

     He was still smiling when we were outside and he went on and on about this guy’s history, his bio, his discography, his songwriting talents and all that. Hell, I just loved the Quarter. I’d go just for that. If it made Marcel happy, all the better. Most days we just made it through the day. It would be nice to actually enjoy ourselves.

     “Open here,” Marcel said, trying in vain to tear the plastic shrink wrap off the CD case. “Is that sarcasm?”

     I laughed.

     We hopped into my car and he was still trying to get the plastic off. “You want my keys?” I asked.

     He cocked his head at me, his eyes narrowing to slits. He pursed his lips, smirking. He shook his head.

     I looked down at the case. His fingernail protruded lighting fast, suddenly more of a talon than a regular fingernail. With one quick swipe across the face of the plastic, he sliced through the thin plastic. Almost faster than I could register, the talon retracted back into his finger and looked like a regular nail again. He pulled the torn plastic off easily. He held up his index finger, showing it to me. “No more tapping,” he said.

               #

     That night, Marcel and I walked to the French Quarter, as we usually did when there weren’t forecasts of flash downpours or tropical storms—though I could remember walking home through more than one of those wet nights. One-Eyed Jack’s was on Toulouse Street, close to Chartres, so it was just under a mile’s walk. It was a beautiful night, probably high sixties. The sky was clear, a crescent moon bright in the sky. Overhead, Orion stood out clear in the sky. I wasn’t a big stargazer, but everywhere I went, I always made sure I could pick out one constellation, as if it meant something. Marcel was more into it, fond of the historical or mythological hunter for whom those stars stood. Me, I just knew I could almost always see it in the New Orleans sky.

     Any way, we were running late, so Marcel and I decided to avoid busy Bourbon Street and cut down Esplanade to Chartres. What a lot of people didn’t realize was that much of the downriver side of the Quarter, especially the lakeside, was just residential. The old buildings were so thick and sturdy they killed most of the sound from the loud bars and clubs upriver. It was uncanny how quiet those parts of the Quarter would be even at night; you didn’t hear about that in the travel magazines. I could only imagine what that real estate went for, though. The Marigny was bad enough.

     For most of the walk Marcel had been again excitedly talking about the singer we were going to see, his back story, musical influences, and a host of other information about which I didn’t really care. I just nodded politely and said “uh-huh,” or “really?” every now and then. It seemed to make him happy to keep talking, so who was I to stop him?

     Like many New Orleans Bars, the doors to One-Eyed Jack’s were thrown back, leaving a space wide enough for about four people to walk through at once, letting people come and go, the warm March air blowing in and back, askance along the ephemeral whim of air currents. The club had a small antechamber, already filled with people, prelude to the larger concert room in the back. Out the corner of my eye I caught Marcel disappearing, darting left through the entrance toward the bar. I let him go, looking out across the rest of the room. In one of the brown leather couches on the right side of the room, its back dotted with small brass buttons, a thin blonde pushed her hair out of her face as she looked around the room. We locked eyes briefly, a smile creeping I think on both our faces before her gaze darted away and buried itself in the red-pink drink in her martini glass, which she set down on the small brown table before her: shaky on its center post and uneven legs; she set it down cautiously, trying to steady the table’s sway, and then sat back. Shrugging, I let my gaze meander to the identical sofa facing that one; a couple was half sitting on it, half on each other, voraciously making out. I shook my head with a chuckle.

     Pulling a cigarette pack from the front pocket of my black long-sleeved shirt, I tapped out a single cigarette, holding it in my lips while I fished in my pants pockets for my Zippo. Finding it, I lit the cigarette and looked for Marcel. He was squeezed between two brunettes sitting on plush brown backed stools with black metal frames. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was interrupting their conversation. There were no ashtrays in reach so I ashed on the floor. Marcel leaned over the blood red countertop and said something to the bartender.

     Continuing to soak in the ambiance, I admired Jack’s decor. The place had a funky red wallpaper that looked antique; some sort of repeating pattern, mostly that same blood red as the bar, mixed with gold and black trim. By the window on the wall was a painting of a nude woman with auburn hair on a black background. An old man sat under it, reading a newspaper. Go figure.

     As the bartender brought back Marcel’s drinks, I noticed an ambient gold glow behind the rows of liquor bottles, which in themselves bookended one of those old-fashioned silver cash registers—you know, the ones with actual buttons. Behind the register was an enormous mirror, which must have been three feet wide and five feet tall. Amidst the small crowd I caught myself in it; a few feet forward, the brunettes made faces at Marcel. Only then, when one song stopped and another began was I conscious of the loud, somewhat melodic, punk music. That struck me as weird. I thought Marcel had told me that tonight’s band was metal. I looked around the room. A few feet past the bar a young guy and girl stood in front of a classic-style jukebox, laughing and punching buttons. The entire music collection was lit by the same kind of gold glow as behind the bar, with fluorescent red lights lining each border. Someone had put a lot of thought into the interior decoration. As for the two music lovers, the bull-rings and neck tattoos on each of them explained their choices in music.

     I felt cold glass touch the back of my hand. I snapped back to attention. Marcel was holding out a pint glass filed with a dark beer. “New local brew, from Royal Brewery,” he said.

     “Thanks,” I half-shouted with a nod of my head. I pointed at his drink. “What’d you get?”

     “Cuervo, rocks,” he said, raising his eyebrows, and holding up a clear rocks glass and a brown-gold liquid on ice. A big smile was on his face. “Let’s go,” he said, nodding toward the concert room.

     I shrugged. It was all the same to me. So we went up the small set of five stairs past the jukebox and stopped before a pair of dark brown wooden double doors; you could almost see through the diamond-shaped brass-rimmed porthole-style windows in each door, but the big guy collecting money kind of screwed it up. I paid for Marcel and I and in we went.

     On either side of the concert hall tables ran along the walls for about half the room, surrounding a long bar in the middle of the room that opened up just past the doors. Already all the seats at the tables and the stools at the bar were full. The only empty space was the hardwood floor between the bar and the stage. There were maybe one or two hundred people already pressed up against the raised stage, which was populated by big black amps and silver mic stands. Off to one side of the stage, almost in the background, was a red rack of electric guitars. There were two smaller amps at the front of the stage, too—what Marcel called monitors—so the musician could hear what the audience heard, or something like that.

     It wasn’t long before the show started. He was good, I had to admit that. You could tell these guys loved what they did, lived to perform these songs. The singer and guitarist, the eponymous Tremonti, belted out every song with an ardent passion and accompanied it with impressive guitar work. At the end of the day, I was intrigued more because it reminded me of a great blues guitarist, dumping his soul out onstage, than that the songs themselves meant anything to me as a rock hit parade. Marcel, however, was not the casual music fan that I was. He was entranced. I lost him up front early on, so I steadily inched my way back toward the bar with each refill. I just kept ordering tequilas for Marcel and he’d come and get them every now and then and then just disappear back into the crowd. I thought most Acadians could drink, but I had nothing on Marcel. Of course, he wasn’t strictly human.

     Finally giving up the pretense of moving back into the crowd, I leaned back against the curve of the bar closest to the stage, resting on my elbows. I sucked in on my third or sixth cigarette of the night and like she had come out of nowhere, the blonde whose glance I had caught earlier appeared at my side. “I’m out of cigarettes,” she said, leaning into my ear so she could be heard over the loud music. “Do you mind if I bum one from you?”

     I stood up straight, patting the front of my shirt until I found the pack. “Yeah,” I said loudly, leaning in. “No problem.” After that, we struck up a conversation and our stories were remarkably similar. Apparently, she had met a friend there, who like Marcel, was more into music than she. The blonde ordered another of the red-pink drinks and then another, and I had another beer or three and then they started to all blend together; whether time was passing faster or I was just more oblivious to its standard passage I didn’t know and though I thought I wasn’t wasted maybe I was; maybe it was more like something had been slipped into my drink; but what were the chances of that when she was there with someone else who apparently was not a boyfriend but a girlfriend (and not that kind of girlfriend) who maybe would hit it off with Marcel if only I could just keep my shit together until the show was over and by then have not let her notice how boring I really was: just another Joe working a construction job for my father’s company—why was she talking to me and were we still smoking? It blurred.

     It was all one moment one cigarette one drink until we were making out in an alley somewhere on Toulouse and my hands were groping as were hers and this I thought was the Quarter, yet what the hell was I doing and how did I get into this alley? Had I blacked out? I pushed her away for a moment, trying to catch my breath, trying to stop the walls from spinning. “Wait,” I said.

     I caught a toothy grin from her. Maybe it was lopsided. Or maybe that was just me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “the best is yet to come.”

     Everything was still spinning. Except for her. Impossibly, about the only thing I could make out from the blur of my vision was her face; it was like looking through a monocle, where everything outside of that one angle was the blur of farsightedness. I put my hand out to her again, but she caught my wrist and twisted it back.

     “What the fuck?” I swore. Bending at the knees, I tried to sink to avoid the sudden flash of pain. I didn’t see her leg move, but I felt a blow to the back of my knee and collapsed to the pavement, landing hard on my knees. I grunted in pain.

     “Be silent!” she hissed.

     My lips had been open to question her again, but for some reason they closed. It was like she had put her fingers on my lips and closed them herself. A shiver ran down my spine. Instinctively, I thought of her actual fingers on my lips again; the thought excited me.

     “Feel grateful,” she said. “Now you’ll live forever. As part of me.” She held up a sharp pinkie fingernail and slashed a two-inch gash over my wrist, cutting from the edge of my palm up toward my elbow. It wasn’t like she had a claw or anything, her nail was just filed razor sharp.

     For some reason, I was just staring into her eyes, still breathing heavily, not doing anything.

     She smiled. Then she pulled my wrist to her face and sucked. I could feel her dull teeth rake against my flesh; the feeling was odd. Giving blood was one thing, the blood just flowed slowly out of your body; but here, she drew it in in ebbs and flows; and though inconsistent like tides, I knew it was leaving me impossibly fast. Within twenty seconds I felt lightheaded. I was pretty sure she was going to kill me.

     Then I heard a feral bark and her head snapped up and looked away from me and back down the alley. The next thing I knew there was a splash of hot blood across my face and I collapsed. As I lay on my back I couldn’t see much. I could only hear a furious lapping sound. I felt something roll into me and I numbly twisted to look. It was the blonde’s head. I probably should have recoiled in disgust or screamed like they do in the movies. Honestly, I was probably in shock. I just looked at her vacant eyes, inches away; moments ago, they had been so commanding. Now they were dead. I rolled to my side to see a wolf on top of the woman’s body, slurping blood from the stump of the neck. Impossibly, the wolf’s front paws had not animal claws, but human hands, each of which pinned the woman’s arms to the ground as it fed. Marcel had saved me.

     Growing up, they called them the Rougarou, or Loup-Garou in proper French; a half-man, half-wolf, cursed to drink human blood to cure his madness, created by the blackest magic. As we grew older we assumed it was an old Cajun folk tale to scare kids into behaving. Watch out, or the Rougarou will get you, they would say. Say your prayers, hold to the Lenten fast, obey your parents, they would say. Or else the Rougarou will get you. Only thing is, they’re real. But they don’t drink blood because they’re cursed. Therianthropes, as Marcel called his kind, were arcane amalgamations resulting from a bonding of human and animal souls at the moment of birth, thereby creating something much more than a sum of either’s parts. These Therians had been created to safeguard other humans from supernatural threats, the most dangerous of which was humanity’s only natural predator: the vampyre. Marcel had explained to me that these vampyres could regenerate if any blood was left in their bodies; thus, to destroy them, Therians had to incapacitate the vampire and drink all their blood. Therein lied the mistaken lore of the curse of the Rougarou.

     Again, it occurred to me that I should be revulsed or scared watching Marcel in his mostly wolf-form, lapping up the blood of another. Yet all I could think about was the day I had learned what Marcel was. I had come home to see a wolf curled up on Marcel’s bed. Freaked, I had run to my room, retrieved my gun, and shot it. The thing had barked, spun on me, and stood there glaring, its fangs bared, as if it hadn’t even been shot. Then I shot it again. It faltered back, but just stood there all the same. But then, before my eyes, its hair melted into its skin and its flesh stretched out to human portions. And it was Marcel. He was naked and almost immediately burst into tears. It quickly became obvious that Marcel was drunk and had probably passed out. Hysterically, he told me that if anyone would understand, it would be a fellow Acadian, and a Gravois at that.

     It was then that Marcel had told me that he had been created by ancient magic in the 1760s by the first Acadian settlers to Louisiana. It was then that he explained that an accidental by-product of this arcane ritual was an extended lifespan, that his ability to regenerate the damage from wounds apparently extended to any organ that failed: each atrophying sense of time replaced with the mechanical certainty of clockwork repair. When Marcel told me this, I thought it all the most amazing thing I had ever heard.

     But then he told me the flip side of the coin. That this unnatural bonding with an animal soul always left the Therian out of touch with the rest of the humans he had been charged to protect. Moreover, it often resulted in emotional or psychological damage that the Therian never outgrew. I still hadn’t understood.

     I asked him if his offspring would be like him. At this he reached under his pillow and grabbed his own gun. “Whoa,” I said, immediately clicking the safety on my gun and dropping it on a nearby desk. I remembered spreading my hands out defensively. “Don’t do anything rash,” I said.

     “I’m sterile,” he said. “We all are. Something about the magic that makes us. As if we were even socially capable of interacting with the opposite sex. We’re bred from about two to be warriors. We’re taught no social skills. Fuck, no one would trust their daughter with me. Why would they? And back then it was all about marriage and family. What use was marrying a man you knew could have no children?”

     “Okay,” I said then, more scared than understanding. “Just put the gun down.”

     “Rash?” he had said, like he hadn’t heard me. “It’s not rash to kill yourself if you’ve thought about it every night for the last decade.”

     “I thought you were impervious to that kind of harm?” I asked.

     “Regular bullets, sure. Would barely feel it. But silver bullets?” he said, laughing.

     “Wait, that shit’s real?” I asked, surprised.

     “Ha,” he laughed. “Yeah. You see, they built in safeguards, ones that everyone knew, so in case we flipped out, which we occasionally do, they could put us down. Put us down!” he repeated, spitting as he spoke it. “Like fucking dogs!” I could still see him simulating shooting downward, gesticulating with his gun.

     “Calm down, Marcel,” I had said. “Come on, man.”

     “I didn’t fit into human society when people knew who I was. Now what am I supposed to do?” His eyes had been wild, his wiry body twitchy. I remember watching the trigger, praying that he didn’t mistakenly depress it. “The threats I was created to destroy are all but gone and humans now would probably kill me if they knew what I was. And every decade it gets harder to hide the fact that I was not born in the last thirty years. What good am I in this world? I have no place. I don’t fit.”

     “Man, just do what we all do,” I said. “Endure. Enjoy what you can from life.”

     “And then what?” he said. He set the gun in his lap. His head drooped. Then he looked up at me, tears in his eyes. “I have to endure forever.”

     I couldn’t possibly have empathized with his problem, but I do remember putting my hand on the pistol and looking into his eyes. “Just don’t do it today, Marcel,” I had said. “I know what you are. Maybe that’s worth something.” And he had just sank into a fetal position, rocking, but he had let me take the gun. Shortly thereafter, he had passed out.

     I really hadn’t understood him then, but now I did.

     Watching as Marcel slipped back into his human form, his clothes torn, blood smeared across his face and chest, there was a moment when I looked into his eyes. He was still breathing heavy, slumped against the building wall, his hand on the woman’s corpse. And there it was. There was a calm fire in his eyes and a look on his face, not of happiness exactly, but more of serenity: the Zen-like calm that came with knowing exactly what you were put on Earth to do and having just done it. It was his gift and his curse. Unlike most of us, he knew what his purpose here was. Unfortunately, it was not something he could do in all but the most rare instances. He looked down, away from me. After a moment, when he looked back into my eyes, the look was gone.

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