I’m pretty sure Eli stopped being my boyfriend the moment I bit him.

We’d been dating for six months, my longest romantic relationship since high school, but we hadn’t…we didn’t…well…he got tired of waiting. I promised my mother I would remain chaste until I had graduated from college, and he knew that, so the instant we had our diplomas in hand we rushed to my apartment.

This was it, I thought. We didn’t speak, just kissed. He ripped off my cap and gown, I made various appreciative sounds, and we collapsed onto the bed. As I grew excited, I felt the tapping of my primal instincts. This was about as basic a desire as one could have, and I lost all my caution. Somehow Rushan ended up shirtless, and I licked his chest and my pulse rose and my thoughts raced and it grew within me it came here it was I couldn’t think I couldn’t see RRRRAGRHGH!

Eli screamed and jumped to the other side of the room. He had a deep, bleeding wound on his dark-skinned hip, still clad in Calvin Klein briefs with his blue jeans around his ankles. His deep brown eyes bulged and he pointed at me, mouth moving in meaningless syllables.

I realized everything had turned black and white. I still wore my bra and rather dull cotton underwear, but all my exposed skin was covered in thick blue-gray fur. Touching my ears told me they had become triangular and shaggy. My fingernails were halfway to becoming claws.

“I am really sorry. Really, really sorry. I have bandages. Do you want to call the hospital?” Color returned, meaning my eyes were human again, and they filled with tears. I pleaded with those eyes, asking for love, tolerance, and forgiveness.

Slowly, cautiously, Eli picked up the rest of his clothes, tying his undershirt around his waist as a temporary tourniquet. “Wolf,” he whispered, grimacing from the pain. Then he backed out the door. I never saw him again.

For a few minutes I sat still, recovering from the shock. I noticed dribbles of red stains on the sheets and wondered how I could clean that up before leaving. With a surge of anger, I lunged to my mom’s photo, which I had blown up to poster size, and ripped it into tiny shreds. “It’s all your fault. You got bitten, and you were a werewolf when you were pregnant with me, so I turned out a freak, freak, freak! You only changed at night, and most of the time you did it when you wanted to! You made me a shape shifter. How could you do this to me?” I sank to the floor, sobbing, then whining, and then transforming everything but my brain in order to howl.

I had to take a bus to reach the train, and then after leaving the train station I took another bus. I spent the time listening to Enya CDs in an effort to stay calm. Whenever I wanted to cry, I changed my eyes to yellow wolf eyes, which were incapable of releasing tears. Fortunately I wore sunglasses, so no one else noticed. I only had one duffel bag of clothes and books with me, and I held it in my lap, hugging it like a stuffed animal. The sun was setting by the time I got off the bus, which stopped at the community center of Laconia, a small town on the East Coast. Its main claim to fame was being surrounded on all sides by either national or state forest. The other interesting thing about Laconia was a secret to all but a few. The secret involved my father’s presence.

No one who hadn’t met Dad would think it was a notable secret, and I must admit that evening he looked fairly ordinary. He had been sitting on a bench by himself, reading Edgar Allan Poe out loud, mumbling “The Bells” to himself. We had similar appearances, both with Eastern European features, messy black hair, angular figures (though he was skeletal), and a fondness for dark clothes and sunglasses. The obvious difference was my tan, compared to his porcelain pale skin. The thing that made him special was: I was twenty-two years old – and he looked exactly the same age.

“Dianne!” he called, striding towards me. Even though it was summer he wore a long-sleeved, collared black shirt and brown corduroy pants. Next to him, I looked colorful in my emerald green blouse and stonewashed blue jeans – purchased at Wal-Mart for a total of twelve dollars.

We hugged, and I could feel his ribs poking through his shirt. For someone with such thin arms he squeezed tightly. “You need to eat more,” I told him.

He let go, adjusted his sunglasses, and smiled, revealing a row of sharp teeth and unnaturally long canines. “I try, but you know the difficulties involved. Where’s Eli? Wasn’t I supposed to finally meet him?” Dad took my suitcase under his arm and led me towards the car.

I sighed. “Up until this morning, he was going to come stay with us. But I got too excited, and you know what happens when my emotions spiral out of control.”

“Oh, Dianne…” Dad stroked my hair. “I know how much you were hoping.” He opened the door of his dilapidated, black Toyota hybrid for me. After stashing my luggage in the trunk, he stepped into the driver’s seat and started the car.

“I keep meeting new friends and boyfriends, but I’m always afraid of scaring people or hurting them. I haven’t had a close friend since Taylor Calvin in high school, and she wasn’t “normal” in the conventional sense. And Matt’s uncle was a werewolf, so he understood.” Matthew Spiralli was the boyfriend I had longest, the conventional sweet, charming boy next door for two and a half years. I lost him when he won a Harvard scholarship and chose it over going to the University of Virginia with me.

“But on the pleasant side, you won’t have to keep hiding. Not just what you are, but what Nat and I are. And I don’t have to pretend to be your twin brother.”

Five minutes after leaving the commercial part of town, with its carbon-copy Trader Joe’s, Target, McDonald’s, KFC, ad nauseum, we reached carbon-copy townhouses in miles of rows. People were out mowing lawns and playing in sprinklers. Eventually we came to Common Lane, house number 7761.

After some thought, I replied, “If I’m going to have any successful relationships at all, it has to be with someone who knows all these things and yet still loves me.”

“Definitely.” Dad parked in front of our house and scurried to take my bag.

“Dad, I can carry it myself.”

“I don’t get to do anything for you. Let me at least do this.”

The house was how I remembered it from my last visit. All the furniture was second-hand, including the easy chair that had an amoeba-like habit of engulfing Dad whenever he sat in it. There was Mom’s chair, a rocker with pictures of her glued to the backrest. There was also her human self’s favorite pillow, and her canine self’s favorite chew toy.

She had been a pretty but not especially beautiful woman, with gray eyes, sleek black hair that fell to her waist, and several scratches from her transformations. During nights of the full moon she had a fierce, wild glory, a silver wolf that could rip your arm off and often tried to. On the nights of the rest of the month, she was the ultimate creature – at will she could assume the body of a wolf, but retain her human mind and morals.

Dad was a naturally melancholy person, but after she died two years before, he had become a barely-functioning recluse. He was a novelist, but his books never did well even when he could find a publisher. To make ends meet, Dad rented our spare bedroom to Nathan Silver, a doctor who ended up being his only true friend. It was seven in the evening, which meant he was just about to wake up.

The walls were bare, since we sold all nonessential parts of the house to pay for Mom’s medical bills. Even before then, we never had mirrors anywhere but my room. I reached to turn on a light. Dad took my hand. “Nat and I haven’t been using lights, and we’re saving the electricity for the fridge and sometimes the TV. Nat watches a movie on Saturday morning.”

“Right, sorry. Every time I come back I forget about you and light.” I sat down on the moth-eaten couch, sinking into the bad springs. “I do not look forward to searching for a job tomorrow.”

“I’ve gone through the classifieds, and I circled the ones suitable for an undergraduate who majored in astronomy. There weren’t many options.” Dad took off his sunglasses, folded them, and placed them in his pocket. His red irises glowed in the gathering twilight. “Oh, and if you want to take a shower, try to not leave the water on for more than five minutes.”

I turned to him with a pang of worry. “Dad, we do have enough money for me to go to graduate school, right?”

He didn’t answer.

We locked stares for a full minute. “What if I get a good job this summer? Will that be enough?” Since the moon had such an effect on my life while I was growing up, I had become fascinated with the night sky and outer space, wondering how the great beyond managed to change my mother, and eventually me, in such a way. I dreamed of either being a professor at some high-ranking university or researching comets and asteroids, learning whether any were going to hit Earth hard enough to cause major damage, and what we could do about it if they were. The planets enthralled me, and I could find nothing more beautiful than a supernova as seen through a telescope.

Dad sat down across from me. “There’s something I need to tell you. I was hoping it could wait until you weren’t so upset about Eli, but it’s the only way I can explain our current situation. Grandpa Lyle is sick.”

“Mom’s dad?”

“Yes.”

“How sick?”

“Alzheimer’s.”

“But he’s a werewolf!” Mom’s family had a long history of relatives accidentally – or sometimes intentionally – biting each other.

Dad nodded. “That’s precisely why it’s so difficult. At night he changes back and forth uncontrollably, though he actually seems more lucid as a wolf than as a human, since being a wolf demands less thought. Since they can’t put him in a hospital, and Grandma Caroline can’t deal with him alone, Uncle Ben and Aunt Rita are moving in temporarily until they can hire a nurse. Our money is going towards that effort.”

I couldn’t blame Dad for helping out his father-in-law, especially since Dad always felt responsible for Mom’s death. As Dad warmed up a mug of pig blood for his breakfast, I examined the two kinds of want ads. One was help wanted, with requests for workers in an ice cream parlor, a demand for substitute high school teachers, and an offer for employment in some odd place called “Junglelaughter’s Pet Pavilion”. I decided to try the ice cream, since high school students were the scariest human beings I had ever encountered, and the name of what I assumed to be a pet shop sounded weird even for me.

The other wanted ads were offers of thousands of dollars for live members of the Raptors gang, who apparently set up base in Laconia and ran drugs through the town to the nearest major cities. They were blamed for a series of murders in recent years, though no one had any concrete proof.

As I read with interest, the stairs creaked, and with a bound and a cheer Nat appeared in the living room. He had his sunglasses in his hand and was dressed for work in an electric blue button-up shirt and yellow pants with purple polka dots, like some psychedelic sixties’ nightmare. His only concession to his calling was a stethoscope around his neck. Nat was as white and anemic as Dad, but he was covered in freckles and had bright orange hair, and looked closer to thirty than twenty. He grinned with long, sharp fangs and lunged towards me.

“Dianne glomp!” His hug launched me onto the floor, and he kissed me on the cheek. “I’m so happy to see you, sweetie. Ferdinand and I have been getting tired of each other. I’ve been working out; did you notice? No more driving to the clinic for me.”

“Hi, Nat. How do you get there, then? Bike?”

“I change into a bat and fly. Nothing like flight for travel, unless you have free tickets to a cruise ship or something utterly delightful like that.”

“Are you planning on letting me up?” I didn’t find my position embarrassing, as Nat was like an uncle to me, but it was difficult to breath.

“I think I might just keep you here. You look so adorable, Di – I could eat you. Maybe I will eat you. Mmm…”

Dad hauled Nat off me. “‘No biting my daughter’ is my first rule in this house.”

Nat sprang to his feet. “You never asked her what she wants. Maybe she’s dying to give me a taste, yes? How would you feel about that?”

“I prefer to be unbitten, thank you, but I can give you each a shot glass if you give me a needle.” I sat up. Both Dad and Nat were HIV-positive, which occurs very often in vampires, even ones like Dad who only bit one person in their life. Dad happened to have terrible luck and he passed the HIV to Mom. Vampires with AIDS are weaker, more prone to fatigue, and have shorter lives. They don’t make it past two hundred years. A temporary solution to the weakness is human blood, but both had sworn off attacking people for the stuff and relied on donations.

“That’s very kind of you, but I have three blood samples to take today and after I’ve tested them Ferdinand and I will drink them. Congratulations on the B.A.” Nat took Dad’s mug and drained it. “Thanks for making me breakfast, but I prefer cow to pig.”

Dad folded his arms and glared. “That was for me.”

“Oh. Whoopsie-daisy.”

“You actually say “whoopsie-daisy”?”

“Give me a break, I’m old. And my hundred and sixth birthday is in two weeks, don’t you forget it. I expect a hundred and six candles.”

“On what? You can’t eat cake.”

“I was thinking a huge mass of frozen cow blood…”

I made a face. “Ew. I’m glad I don’t live here with you two all the time.”

“We do get mired in the ickier zones of life,” Dad admitted. “Are you tired? Care to go to your room?”

“I’m off to work,” Nat announced, saluting me. “Farewell, mademoiselle.” He shrank into a bat, clothes conveniently becoming fur and the stethoscope miniaturizing. Hopefully no one would notice a bat with a stethoscope. Nat was a golden bat, with orange fur and little black eyes. He squeaked and flew away.

“What would you like to do? I bought you some vegetables and bread and meat, though I’ve forgotten how much there should be of each thing. I hope you can sort it out.”

“I don’t feel like cooking, so I think I’ll go wolfie and eat raw hamburger.”

“That’s fine, too. I’ve just started a new novel, set in ancient China and Southeast Asia. Nat’s been making dark hints about taking me to Thailand, though with the tightness of money lately I don’t know how he’s going to manage it.”

“Would he pay your way?”

“I told him I don’t accept handouts. I…” Dad sank to a sitting position on the couch. His mouth tightened, and he inhaled deeply, clutching his chest. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me. Is it all right if I leave you for a moment? It’s darkness, darkness so beautiful, yet so oppressive.” He wandered off to the basement, looking puzzled.

I spoke to the empty air. “Romantic disappointment, giggly monsters, and family tension – I really am back at the Anghel home.”