Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

“You can’t do this. You’ll have to talk to someone. Sooner or later.”

I hooked my arm around hers and pulled her to the door, glancing at Macy over my shoulder one last time. I met his gaze. He seemed calm, determined, without an ounce of trepidation. Before I turned away, he smiled at me, gave a little nod. He was a wolf confident in his territory. I’d do best to slink away and avoid his wrath.

Larson and I left, and the door closed behind us.

Silent, we made our way back to the lobby of the arena. I said, “That went well.”

She’d gone a bit glassy-eyed and had lost the purposeful energy in her stride.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she murmured.

“You need to get to a bathroom? Go outside?” I started hurrying.

She shook her head, but leaned against the wall and covered her face. “This must be what the rabbit feels like after it gets away from a fox.”

Post-traumatic stress from a simple interview? Maybe. Most people considered themselves the top of the food chain. Few of them ever encountered something that trumped them.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m usually not on the rabbit side of things.”

She stared at me and didn’t have to say it: I wasn’t helping.

“Is he going to come after me? Was he really threatening me? If I run this story, am I in danger?”

I urged her off the wall and toward the doors, so we could get outside and into the air. The closed space and pervasive odor of sweat was starting to get to me.

“No. It’s intimidation.” It was what people like him-boxer or werewolf-were good at. “He can’t touch you without getting in trouble, even if he is a werewolf.”

A few more steps brought us outside, into the night. I turned my face to the sky and took in a deep breath of fresh air, or as fresh as city air ever got.

“What are we going to do?” she said. “The story’s going to look pretty half-assed without a statement from him.”

The lack of an exclusive interview wasn’t the end of the world. I’d dealt with worse. We could still break the story.

“You’ll have a statement from me,” I said. “And I’ll have one from you. We’ll do the best with what we have.” What Larson had told Macy was true: the truth would come out eventually. Maybe by being part of the revelation, I could mitigate the impact of it-mitigate Larson’s ire over it.

“It’s not fair,” she grumbled. “It’s just not fair.”

I wondered if Macy was thinking the same thing.

As it turned out, Jerome Macy scooped us both. He held a press conference the next morning, revealed his werewolf identity to the world, and promptly announced his retirement from boxing, before anyone could kick him out. Jenna Larson’s exposé and call to action, and my interview of her on my show, were lost in the uproar. Almost immediately there was talk of stripping him of his heavyweight title. The debate was ongoing.

About a month later, I got a press kit from the WWE. For the new season of one of their pro wrestling spectacle TV series, they were “unleashing”-they actually used the word unleashing -a new force: The Wolf. Aka Jerome Macy.

So. He was starting a new career. A whole new persona. He had chosen to embrace his werewolf identity and looked like he was going gangbusters with it. I had to admire that. And I could stop feeling guilty about him and his story.

This changed everything, of course. He was going to have to do a lot of publicity, wasn’t he? A ton of promotion. Sometimes, patience was a virtue, and sometimes, what goes around comes around.

I picked up my phone and called the number listed in the press pack. I was betting I could get that interview with him now.

I am Emmeline. I am six.

I am a city werewolf. I live in Central Park. It is very near the Plaza Hotel.

I don’t like the Plaza because it is full of all these people who are always asking, “Where are your mommy and daddy, little girl?” when they see me in the lobby. It is absolutely annoying. Then I have to scootle right out of there as fast as I can go on two legs, which is not as fast as I can go on four, but if I were scootling around the lobby on four legs, I would not even get in the front door of the Plaza Hotel, or the side door or even the delivery entrance, for Lord’s sake.

Lily Packmother says that when I am older and have got some self-control, I will be able to walk right in through the front door of the Plaza Hotel and march right through that lobby and straight up to that check-in desk and tell them “One room with a view of Central Park, a dozen raw prime sirloin steaks, a fat bellboy, and charge it, please.” Then I will be able to get right onto that big elevator and ride up to the very top floor-even if my room is not on that floor-and get off and find the best place to lurk until the moon turns full. Then I can eat people.

Oooooh, I absolutely love eating people! I am much too small to eat a whole big one now, but when I get older, I will be able to eat sixty-eleven dozen of them without so much as batting an eye. Lily Packmother says, “Emmeline, you can’t be serious about eating so many people. You will give yourself a tummy ache.” But I am mostly entirely serious, even if it takes us werewolves longer to get old than people. Lily Packmother says it is something to do with dog years or backwards dog years or something. All I know is I will have to wait. I am good at waiting. It is all a matter of seeing it through until the Revolution. That is what my daddy says.

Central Park is my most favorite place in the whole city. It is full of all of these trees that are very good to hide behind in the dark and also to pee on if you are a boy werewolf, which I am not, thank heavens. Boy werewolves do not have any good manners like me, Emmeline, even if they are my fellow proletary fighters in the workers’ struggle and Daddy would say that I owe them solidarity. Solidarity is awfully important but boy werewolves smell bad and sometimes they try to rip your throat out to establish pack dominance. I completely dislike them.

There are lots of good smells in Central Park. Sometimes I am able to find the hot-dog man and take some mustard right off his cart to put on my food because everything in New York City tastes much better with mustard. I never eat the hot-dog man. There would be no more hot dogs. I am enormously fond of hot dogs. Central Park also has all of these pigeons, which are not very good to eat even if you completely slorsh them all over with every drop of mustard in the entire universe. Lily Packmother says that they are all right when you are incredibly desperate and about to starve to death right this very minute, which happens more than you might imagine when you are a werewolf. She says beggars cannot be choosers and that there are werewolves starving to death in China, so we should count our blessings because we are living in America and not Communists.

Then I hit her on the ankle with the leash I took off the last doggie I ate and remind her that my daddy is a Communist.

Lily Packmother doesn’t want me to grow up to be a Communist. She says that it is bad enough I am a poor motherless cub without my daddy having been a Communist and doing something as stupid as what he did when he heard about the Rosenbergs getting lectricuted. I don’t know what she is talking about. I don’t know what he did. I don’t know who the Rosenbergs are. No one in our pack is named Rosenberg. I think maybe they live in the Plaza Hotel and that is where my daddy is, too.

I wish he would come out. Nine months is an awful long time to be visiting people and leaving your daughter all by herself in the middle of Central Park one night when it was absolutely dark and there were all of these big monster sea lions from the zoo rampaging through the trees everywhere. My daddy told me to sit down on that park bench and not to move even one inch from there, because someone would come to find me eventually. He said that he was sick at heart about the Rosenbergs and witch hunts and all of those clowns and lapdogs in Washington, D.C., and that there was only so much one man could take, for Lord’s sake.