Charlaine Harris: Wolfsbane and Mistletoe

“Wolves don’t run free anywhere closer than Canada,” I said, as I tried to mop up behind him. “Here in Virginia, if you see a wolf, it’s either in a cage or a rug in front of someone’s fireplace. They probably get shot at a lot, those free-range wolves. And unless it works way different than in the movies, it’s not that you can turn into a wolf—you can’t help it at the full moon. Take it from me, unavoidable monthly biological transformations are no picnic.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand,” he said, sounding a little sulky. “You have no sense of adventure.”

“You’re really going to try this?” I said, gesturing at the battered old book that lay on the table between us. “And what do you need my help for?”

“The spell’s written in this really antique language,” he said. “I thought you could help me figure it out.”

I shook my head—in exasperation, not refusal. I pulled the book closer to my side of the table and wrinkled my nose. It smelled musty, with faint undertones of matches and rotten eggs.

“Don’t get spaghetti sauce on it,” he warned. “Professor Wilmarth would kill me if I messed it up.”

“I’m surprised he let you borrow it,” I said. “Or did he?”

Tom managed to have a really big mouth of spaghetti when he heard my question, and took his time chewing.

“You stole it,” I said. “Tom!”

“I borrowed it,” he said finally. “He’s got a million of these old grimoires; he won’t miss this one for a few days. I figured you could help me translate it. I mean, you did live with a leading medievalist for five years.”

I bit back a sarcastic comment. I’d learned the hard way that telling the truth about Phil, my ex, only sounded like sour grapes. So when people mentioned how brilliant he was, how well his career was going, how happy he was with his new girlfriend, I just nodded and smiled. No one would believe me if I told them how much of the research for Phil’s dissertation I’d done. I wasn’t the same book-smart-but-street-stupid kid who’d agreed to support him while he got his Ph.D., only to get dumped when it was time for me to start mine. The new girlfriend could have him, whoever she was—and my money was on a bright young graduate student who could replace me as his researcher.

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask Phil to help you with this,” I said aloud. “Since he’s such a leading medievalist and all.”

“If I was still talking to him, maybe I would,” he said. “I told you—after what he did to you, I try not to have anything to do with him.”

Yes, he’d told me, but I hadn’t necessarily believed it. Though if he brought this crazy idea to me instead of Phil, perhaps I should.

“Besides, Phil would just laugh and tell me not to meddle with forces beyond my comprehension,” Tom added.

Now that sounded like something Phil would say. In fact, I was almost certain Tom was quoting him. And it explained one thing that had been puzzling me—how Tom had found a grimoire with a werewolf spell in the first place. Phil. The son of a bitch had probably dangled the grimoire in front of Tom’s nose, translated just enough to get him really hooked on the idea, and then refused to help him. Phil had always known just how to play Tom.

“Look, if you can’t figure it out—” Tom began.

“I can figure it out,” I said. “But I can’t do it tonight—in case you freshmen haven’t noticed, first semester grades are supposed to come out Monday, and I have papers to read and grades to turn in if I want to keep my TA assignment.”

“But you’ll do it,” he said.

“I’ll try.”

Tom’s good humor returned. I brought out the plate of brownies—one of his favorites—and we talked about other things for the rest of the meal.

“Don’t forget about the spell,” he said, as he was putting on his coat. “I don’t suppose you could just photocopy the right page so I can take the book back now?”

Back to Professor Wilmarth? Or back to Phil?

“No,” I said. “I might need the rest of the book. What if when I finally translate the spell it says, ‘Then add a pinch of bat powder—see recipe on page forty-three.’”

“Yeah, right.”

“Seriously, with something like this, you sometimes have to study a word or phrase in context. A whole book is a lot more context than a couple of pages. I need the whole book.”

“Okay,” he said. “But be careful with it.”

“I will,” I said. “See you Thursday.”

“Thursday?”

“Christmas dinner? Turkey and trimmings?”

“Oh, right,” he said. “I almost forgot it was so close. Thursday, then.”

Had he really forgotten it was so close to Christmas? Or was he deliberately ignoring the approach of what would be only the second holiday without our parents?

Of course, knowing Tom, maybe he was just laying the grounds for pretending he’d forgotten to shop for my present.

I watched as he strolled down the driveway from my garage apartment back to the street. In the main house, Mrs. Grogran’s evil little Lhasa Apso—the Lhasa Raptor, as we called him—heard Tom’s footsteps and barked furiously for at least fifteen minutes. I hoped Mrs. Grogan had peeked out and seen it was only my brother leaving. I didn’t think my lease would really let her turn me out for having late-night male visitors, but she could make my life a living hell while we fought it out.

I returned to grading the student papers. Not my favorite way to spend a Friday night, but at least if I got them out of the way, I could enjoy the rest of the weekend. I polished the last one off by eleven, finished the data entry into the departmental grading system a little before midnight, and went to bed.

But not, alas, to sleep. The moon was still almost a week from full, but it shone straight through my window, and when I finally got up to pull the shade down and block it out, I realized even that wouldn’t help my insomnia.

I went back out to the kitchen and opened Professor Wilmarth’s grimoire again. I felt a curious reluctance to touch the stained leather cover, and my stomach turned slightly at the faint smell of sulfur.

I remembered that the archaic name for sulfur was brimstone. Maybe I should have photocopied the relevant pages after all and made Tom take the nasty thing away.

Nonsense. I made myself turn to the werewolf spell, and as so often happens, I got caught up in the project. I looked up after what I thought was only a few minutes of reading and realized that day was breaking.

Just as well. I had to look up a few things in the university library.

By Saturday evening, I was pretty sure I’d puzzled out the werewolf spell. In fact, I’d puzzled out nearly all the spells in the book, some of them a lot more useful sounding.

Mixing up the powder needed for the werewolf spell would be challenging, since most of the ingredients weren’t FDA approved. I’d figured out that djinn’s eggs were mandrake roots. The devil’s trumpet was datura, or jimson weed. And I was reasonably sure that when the werewolf spell called for “the haire of the beast,” it wasn’t some archaic equivalent of “hair of the dog.” It meant real wolf hair.

The herbs were bad enough, but grinding up wolf hair and eating it? Yuck.

Tom could probably dig up a wolf pelt somewhere, but what if hair from a dead wolf didn’t work? Worse, what if it turned him into a dead wolf at moonrise?

Not that I necessarily believed the spell would work. At least half the herbs needed for the powder were strong hallucinogens. A few sprinkles of the stuff and you wouldn’t need to be a werewolf to howl at the moon.

Too many sprinkles would kill you. And annoying as he could be, I didn’t really want Tom dead.