Stephen Jones - Mongrels

Published by Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 2016

Copyright © Stephen Graham Jones 2016

Illustrations by AldanNi/Shutterstock, Inc.

Stephen Graham Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008182427

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008182441

Version: 2016-04-18

Thea Lucas

1914–1999

thanks, Pop

Eventually I went to America.

There no one believes in werewolves.

—JAMES BLISH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Chapter 2: The Heaven of Werewolves

Chapter 3: American Ninja

Chapter 4: The Truth About Werewolves

Chapter 5: Billy the Kid

Chapter 6: Werewolves on the Moon

Chapter 7: The Lone Ranger

Chapter 8: How to Recognize a Werewolf

Chapter 9: Layla

Chapter 10: Here There Be Werewolves

Chapter 11: Bark at the Moon

Chapter 12: Year of the Wolf

Chapter 13: Sad Eyes

Chapter 14: The Werewolf of Alcatraz

Chapter 15: The Sheep Look Up

Chapter 16: Never Say Werewolf

Chapter 17: The Mark of the Beast

Chapter 18: Wolf Like Me

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Stephen Graham Jones

About the Publisher

My grandfather used to tell me he was a werewolf.

He’d rope my aunt Libby and uncle Darren in, try to get them to nod about him twenty years ago, halfway up a windmill, slashing at the rain with his claws. Him dropping down to all fours to race the train on the downhill out of Booneville, and beating it. Him running ahead of a countryside full of Arkansas villagers, a live chicken flapping between his jaws, his eyes wet with the thrill of it all. The moon was always full in his stories, and right behind him like a spotlight.

I could tell it made Libby kind of sick.

Darren, his rangy mouth would thin out in a kind of grin he didn’t really want to give, especially when Grandpa would lurch across the living room, acting out how he used to deal with sheep when he got them bunched up against a fence. Sheep are the weakness of all werewolves, he’d say, and then he’d play both parts, growling like a wolf, his shoulders pulled up high, and turning around to bleat in wide-eyed fear, like a sheep.

Libby would usually leave before Grandpa tore into the flock, the sheep screaming, his mouth open wide and hungry as any wolf, his yellow teeth dull in the firelight.

Darren would just shake his head, work another strawberry wine cooler up from beside his chair.

Me, I was right at the edge of being eight years old, my mom dead since the day I was born, no dad anybody would talk about. Libby had been my mom’s twin, once upon a time. She told me not to call her “Mom,” but I did, in secret. Her job that fall was sewing fifty-pound bags of seed shut. After work the skin around her eyes would be clean from the goggles she wore but crusted white with sweat. Darren said she looked like a backward raccoon. She’d lift her top lip over her teeth at him in reply, and he’d keep to his side of the kitchen table.