If either Sheila or Lacy had told me it was possible, I wouldn’t have believed it for a moment. If the New York Times ran a breaking news story, or CNN covered it all day, everyday, for a solid year, I still would have thought it was a hoax, a giant lie.

How could werewolves be real? How could a man become a wolf?

And here it was, right in front of my eyes, not more than fifty feet away, and I still didn’t believe it.

We all—me, Sheila, and the bikers—watched in horror as fur sprouted from Richard’s body, as his legs became somehow larger, more powerful, as his ears shifted positions on his head, as his nose and face lengthened into a snout. “Run!” he growled with still human vocal chords. “Run, Jessica!”

Sheila and I stumbled back, silently screaming in horror as the man I thought I loved turned into a giant sandy colored wolf, the bikers dropping him from their grip as he slid from his jeans, the waistline no longer tight enough to keep them on.

A gun fired, Wyatt’s revolver I thought, but I couldn’t tell for sure, and one of the bikers fell to the gravel, screaming he’d been hit.

“Jessica!” Lacy shouted as she grabbed my arm, tried to pull me back towards the woods. “Sheila, Jess, we gotta go! Richard’s fine, okay?”

I brought the axe up defensively, both hands gripping the shaft as I spun on her. “You knew! Didn’t you? You knew!”

“Of course I knew!” she shouted in my face. “How else would I know he was going to be safe? Why else wouldn’t I be so worried?”

Behind us, lupine snarls filled the clearing. The night became a cacophony: brush breaking, limbs snapping, men screaming. More wolves were pouring into the clearing, their pony-sized bodies slamming into the leather-clad bikers.

“Come on!” Lacy screamed, “You don’t want to see this! The guys will find us in the woods afterwards!”

It was like my whole world was crashing down around me. Everything I’d known, about biology, about life, about the animal kingdom, about magic not being real, about monsters not being real, all of it was bleeding away from my mind, a whole building of beliefs and knowledge coming apart brick by brick by brick. I shook my head fervently and backed away from her. “Sheila,” I said shakily, “we need to go. Do you have your keys?”

“Yeah, girl,” she responded, her voice barely a mumble. I could hardly hear her over the din behind us.

“To your car. We need to get to your car,” I said, pausing to lick my parched lips. “We need to get to your fucking car right now, Sheila. Right fucking now!”

Lacy threw her hands up in the air. “I’m not invited? You’re just going to leave me here?”

“You lied to me!” I snapped back, raising my axe. “You all fucking lied to me! Of course you’re not fucking invited!”

“Look, Jessica,” she said. “It’s not something he can exactly broadcast. He cares about you!”

My eyes went wide with rage. “He’s a monster!” I screamed. “He has paws!”

“We have to go, Jess,” Sheila said, her voice becoming more frantic as her mind began to process what was actually going on, her hand tugging at my sleeve and pulling me back to her car. “We have to go now before they get hungry for more!”

“You’re safe!” Lacy called as Sheila and I both turned and ran into the edge of the trees, trying to circle back around to her car. “You’re safe, I promise! They can control themselves!”

Her words of reassurance fell on deaf ears as we scrambled around the fray and headed back to Sheila’s Lexus.

The clearing in front of the cabin was a battlefield. Men’s blood soaked the gravel; hobbled, disfigured men screaming for their mothers as the giant wolves with bloody muzzles continued to fall on them, cutting them down like grain before a scythe. Gunfire split the air, and a wolf yelped in surprise.

Sheila and I, though, we kept our heads down and stayed out of the middle of it. We reached the Suburbans and began to circle around the front of one of them. We were so close, we could almost reach out and touch Sheila’s car.

One of the bikers must have seen us, though, and he came running up from behind. “Wait!” he screamed. “Wait!”

I looked back over my shoulder, right into the terrified eyes of Wyatt Axelrod.

“You have to take me with you!” he screamed, gun in hand.

“Fuck no!” Sheila spat as she fumbled for her keys.

“Why should we help you?” I growled. “You’ve been terrorizing me for weeks!”

“What?” he asked, genuine confusion on his face. “Ain’t you that gallery lady? We just fucking met!” Sheila got the car door open and all but dove in.

“Jessica, let’s go!”

“No!” Wyatt shouted again, cocking back the hammer on his big silver revolver, leveling it at me.

A wolf, a big sandy colored one, came streaking out of the shadows from the other side, its white fangs bared in attack as it growled like a Harley.

I sprang back from Wyatt, screaming in shock. It was Richard!

Richard sank his giant teeth into the biker president’s hand and shook it like a Rottweiler with a hold on a pork chop. The revolver clattered from Wyatt’s hand and into the gravel as he yelled bloody murder, in a sudden tug-of-war with the giant-sized wolf in front of him. Richard released the grip on his hand, his slathering jaws falling open as he leaped paws first onto his chest, slamming him back into the Suburban. The biker screamed again, falling beneath the weight of the beast.

I lunged forward, landing on my hands and knees as I scrabbled for the fallen revolver. I picked up the heavy piece of steel with both hands and rose, backpedaling towards Sheila’s Lexus.

“Let’s go!” Sheila yelled behind me. “Jessica!”

“No!” I yelled back as I leveled the pistol at Richard and my tormentor. All those things he’d said? About what he was going to do with Richard dead and gone? Screw this guy. He deserved to be chewed apart by wolves, gunned down in this forest haven. He didn’t have a right to anything.

“No!” Richard yelled suddenly, his voice back to human as he looked back at me over his shoulder, his face and mouth covered in blood, all his cuts and scrapes from the fight perfectly healed.  I watched as the fur receded from the rest of his body and his limbs began to shorten and become human again. He was hunched down over Wyatt, naked as the day he was born. “Don’t! You can’t kill him, Jessica! I don’t want that, and neither do you.”

“Get out of the way, Richard,” I growled deep in my throat. “I’m going to end this.”

Sheila grabbed me by the shoulder. “Jessica! I can’t handle this shit! This is crazy, and I need to get the fuck out of here. Right fucking now.”

I glanced back at her, and she looked into my eyes with such pleading need. Her lower lip was shaking like a leaf and the hand she had on me was trembling. I realized then that she’d been crying this whole time, too in shock of everything that was happening around her, everything that she’d led these men into.

“Please,” she cried, “please, just let’s go!”

I finally nodded and let her pull me back to the car. I took the revolver and dropped it on the ground.

“Jessica!” Richard called as I went around and opened the door to the little silver Lexus. “Wait!” he yelled as Sheila started the engine.

I stopped and looked at him.

He stood there, completely naked, his body covered in blood, his eyes hurt. “I love you, Jessica Long. I only did this to protect you.”

“You lied to me,” I spat at him without thinking. “I don’t even know who you are—what you are. I never want to speak to you again.”

I climbed into the car, partly because I couldn’t handle the horror of this place anymore. Or the hurt in his eyes.