Werewolf Wedding(43)
“What did happen?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I have heard both of them talk about wars, or clans... packs, whatever. I’ve heard them talk about stuff that honestly sounds like it came out of a fairytale.”
With a gentle patting of my hand, Greta drew her thin lips into a crooked smile. “That you think of them as fairytales should tell you how well we’ve been hidden.”
“I never thought about it like that,” I admitted. “Of course, with how weird my head has been this last few days, I haven’t thought about very much except trying to keep the thin, broth soup Dane feeds me in my mouth instead of on my shirt.”
She shook her head again. “He is a savage in the truest sense of the word. Our people – the lycans, werewolves, whatever you want to call us – have had a past much longer than yours. There’s not much known about where we came from, or why we have the wolves inside us, and the reason we do not know is because of the wars Dane wishes to restart.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, if there have been all these things lost, and all these problems because of... okay I’m gonna need like the super-remedial version of all this. Give me some context – how long ago are we talking?”
With a blank look on her face, Greta shook her head. “We simply don’t know. There are some elder storytellers who talk about wolves being old when the pyramids were young, but as far as specifics go, we have nothing. All we know is that our people are older than yours, and we’ve never exactly gotten along.”
“Big bad wolf, three little pigs, all that?”
She nodded. “The beast of Bordeaux, unexplained kidnappings, assassinations and deaths the world over. We might not be very good at wrangling our own children, but if there’s one thing wolves are true wonders at, it’s manipulating human politics. Your president is—”
I put my hand up to stop her. “Nope! Nope, not that. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough, but for now let me be the kid in sixth grade who still believes in Santa because I want to, not because I’m dumb.”
“Very good,” she said with a jollier laugh than before. “Although all I was going to say is that some of them have known about us, but this one doesn’t. But the point is, we’ve always been here, always been in and around human affairs. But – and this is what Dane doesn’t understand – we were hunted almost to extinction.”
My jaws just about hit the table. “Big bad wolf?”
She smiled again, very sadly this time. “Those damned fairytales. Those Grimm boys, they really had it out for us. The story goes that one of them lost a girlfriend to one of us, or maybe it was a wife – and by ‘lost’ I mean ‘the woman picked the wolf’ and nothing involving killing or eating.
“Okay, stop right there. Wait just a second. You’re telling me that The Brothers Grimm, all the stuff they wrote about werewolves weren’t actually folk tales? They just made it up to get back at werewolves for stealing their girlfriend?”
“Oh, to be sure,” Greta said, “a great many of those were actually popular fables. But as you said – the ones about the wolves? Quite invented.”
I sat back in my chair and slid down until my head rested on the top of the wide-backed rest. “I’m not sure why I even care this much. I mean those stories never had any effect on my life, I wasn’t some kind of Grimm super-fan or anything, but... Jeez, that sorta makes me question the rest of history.”
“As you should. But before that, long before that, we’d gone into hiding. We had our packs and our own politics to worry about. Human affairs became too messy.”
“This is all starting to make sense.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dane,” I said, “with all his anger and ridiculousness about not wanting to be in the shadows anymore. He says it so dramatically... how wolves should be kings, and not peasants, that kind of business.”
She sighed. “That does sound like Dane. There have been other attempts to overthrow pack rule and do what he wants. They invariably fail though, because so many of us are so comfortable.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”
Greta nodded. “Anymore, that comfort isn’t the case. After all, even though we prefer to pretend humans don’t affect us, it isn’t true. Just as how it isn’t true that the Grimm stories don’t affect you. If not for that...”
“Oh God you’re right.” My stomach twisted into a knot. “I guess everything is connected if you think about it hard enough.”
“When you get to be my age, you sure don’t see many coincidences, if I’m certain about anything, it’s that.”
In the living room, someone was shouting “say ‘pecker’ damn it!” at the television, which was far more excited than I’ve ever heard anyone be about Family Feud outside of my visits to my auntie Belgia at the rest home. I guess the person in question said something at least as funny as ‘pecker’ because the entire gang in the living room exploded with laughter.
“But,” Greta said, dragging my attention back from the hell of mid-day gameshows, “if there are no coincidences, then you’re not one, either.”
“What part could I possibly have to play? I’m just a college dropout who barely makes a living crafting gaudy yard art and carving dolphins out of chunks of ice,” I said, sounding more dejected than I’d intended.