Only At Night update (Patreon)

“Of course you’re not,” I said, sitting down beside her. “Not that there’s anything wrong with other girls, you’re just—“

“I’m a lycanthrope,” she said forcefully.

I was stunned. “I’m a Pisces.”

She wasn’t amused. “Dude… you know what a lycanthrope is, right?”

“Yeah, like a werewolf, yeah.”

“We don’t like that word,” she said. “It’s kinda… well, the literal translation is ‘man-wolf’. Do I look like a man-wolf?”

“No!” I said quickly. “But, so you… every full moon…?”

“Turn into a wolf,” she nodded. “It’s why I live out here in the sticks. This is a lycan community. We can’t do much harm to each other. It’s like a watering hole. Or not. It’s a little hard to explain if you’re not…”

“A were—lycanthrope.”

“Well, not just a lycanthrope. There are wereleopards, werebadgers…”

“I’m sorry, is there a pamphlet?” I asked. “This all seems a little—“

“There is. I don’t have it on me,” Carina said apologetically. She chuckled suddenly. “You can relax. It’s not the full moon for another two weeks.”

“I’m not worried.”

“And we don’t feel compelled to hunt down and kill our boyfriends when we’re wolves. Not unless there are serious intimacy issues at work.”

“Okay.”

“The important thing is that there’s another side to our dating lives. Most female lycanthropes are betas and we find ourselves drawn to alphas—“

 

I laughed a little disbelievingly. “I’m an alpha?”

“This is why we don’t like to use words like that, it gives false impressions—we’re working on better terminology. Dominant’s the most popular one, but that has all kinds of implications of its own. But yeah. We look for guys who are assertive and protective and good providers—hey, shut up,” she said suddenly, picking up a cushion and bopping me with it.

“What?” I demanded, holding my arms up to defend myself. 

“Don’t get a big head!” she said, now mounting me and shoving the cushion down into my face. I should’ve been able to shove her clean off of me, but even with her slight frame, Carina had the strength of a battleship or something. “It’s not a hundred percent. We read a lot into things and sometimes they’re not there.”

I pushed the cushion aside, at least. “Hey, I can be assertive… and protective… and a good provider…”

“That’s good,” she said. “It’s part of our biology. We try to pack-bond and… well, it’s not like I’m going to turn into Suzy Homemaker out of nowhere. I don’t really know how it works. I’ve never felt this way before. And some people say it’s like a fetish and other people think it’s our natural biological state… I just don’t want to freak you out and have you thinking I’m some sort of crazy person. I just have some inclinations.”

“I’ll Google it,” I promised.

“Oh God!” She shoved the cushion into her face. “Please don’t Google it. I have met so many guys who found some ‘how to seduce betas’ website and think I want to go walkies or something.”

“Do…” I coughed. “Do you not like going… for walks?”

“I like going for walks just fine. But not with a leash and collar!” She got up off me, sitting down beside me again. “I do like playing with Frisbees,” she said in a small voice.

“What?”

“You heard me. I said it. I’m not embarrassed by it. Plenty of people play with Frisbees!” 

“Okay, I will find some non-skeevy literature on were—lycanthropes and not freak out at any of your wolf stuff. Promise.”

Carina nodded hopefully. “A lot of guys prefer lycan women, you know. Our time of the month, we turn into dogs. It’s a lot more manageable.” 

“I bet.” I got up, pacing a moment as I tried to process all this. I couldn’t, really, aside from the fact that Carina had trusted me right off the bat with something she considered pretty private. And this just as we were cuing our relationship up. It made me feel like a bit of a heel for not being totally honest with her. “Can I tell you something?”

Her face fell. “I knew it. You want to back out of this. You can’t take it. I knew it, I knew it—“

“Carina—“

She got up too, her hair standing on end. “No, it’s fine, it’s fine, most people won’t even let their dogs up on the couch…”

I took her by the arms and she relaxed a degree, just like that. I was starting to see how the alpha/beta thing worked. “It’s not that,” I stressed. “I’m not going to break up with you just because this is a bit more complicated than I thought it would be. I just wanted, want to tell you something.”

She sniffled. “I’m listening.”

I wiped an unshed tear from the bottom of her left eye. “I’m not exactly normal myself.”

“Oh God, if you tell me you’re a dhampir or something…”

“No, nothing like that, it’s just this—“ 

I realized this would work better with an object lesson. Getting down on my knees, I scrounged between the couch cushions.

“Okay,” Carina said, “if this is some weird fetish, I really want you to explain it thoroughly beforehand.”

“It isn’t!” I insisted, coming up with a tube of chapstick. I opened it up. The actual chap was almost gone. “I have this… I guess you’d call it magic. Anything I own, I can change. Upgrade. See, look—“ I showed her the chapstick.

“Can you turn it into gold?” she asked, getting a bit excited.

“No, not unless I had a million points—“

“Points?”

“Later,” I said. I called up the menu of the chapstick and looked it over. “Okay, restoration, that’ll only take fifty points. Watch.”

I spent the points. It was like watching a time-lapse video in reverse. The chapstick lost a bit of fuzz and re-accumulated its glueyness until it was a pristine stick, pearly and new. Carina looked at it, solidly impressed.

“Wow,” she said, taking it from me. “That is the coolest and most useless thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It makes me a pretty good IT guy,” I reasoned. 

“Does it only work on objects or…” She grew a slightly naughty grin. “Is that how you went all nine rounds with me?”

“Well, yeah.” I blushed. “You’re worth it.”

“And… points?”

I sat back down and gave her the whole spiel. I don’t think I’ve ever actually spelled it all out for anyone before. I’d hinted at it, Googled it, trying to find someone like me, but never really put it out into the world. It’d just felt too risky. And, saying it out loud, I realized just how weird it all was. I’d gotten used to it, but to Carina, I might as well be saying that I took my UFO out on weekends and did some anal-probing with the gray boys.

“So it’s like an RPG?” Carina asked at the end. She held up the chapstick. “Like you could give this thing elemental damage? Make it so that when I throw it, it turns into a grenade?”

“It doesn’t really work like that,” I said. “But in theory, I suppose it’s as likely as anything else…”

“It definitely sounds like magic. Did you play RPGs as a kid? I’m betting these… ‘stats’ are just the way the magic presents itself to you. Me, I love flowers, and when the full moon is getting close, I start feeling like a flower about to bloom. My hair gets shinier…”

“I might’ve played a dungeon or a dragon when I was a kid… is that really it? It’s just some subconscious thing?”

“Yeah, maybe.” Carina ran a hand through her hair. “Maybe in the old days, someone with this magic would see it as blessing an object, or a person. I mean, anything can be reduced to numbers if you try hard enough. You see it as numbers, someone else could see it as musical notes or… Tarot suits… who knows? Hey, have you ever used this to fix your hair on a bad hair day?”

“I’m a guy. I don’t think I have—“ I yawned suddenly. “Bad hair days.”

“When’s the last time you slept?” she asked me. 

“At the office, waiting for you. But I had my blood drained, so that’s got me feeling pretty drowsy lately…”

“You had your blood drained?” Carina demanded shrilly. 

“Well, you know, not by choice…”

 

“When was this?” she asked, hauling me to my feet.

I gave her the Reader’s Digest version as she led me to her bedroom.

“So you healed yourself,” she concluded, getting a nod from me. “I guess you’re not casting from your own life force if that works. Could you spend points to make yourself not tired? Just be completely awake without having to sleep?”

“Yeah, probably,” I said. “I pulled some all-nighters that way in college. But I don’t like screwing around with my bodily functions too much. It seems like it’s all set up the way it is for a reason.”

“Yes,” Carina agreed. “Who knows what effect it would have on your mental health if you stopped experiencing REM sleep? I want you to sleep here tonight. It’s a long drive back to the city and I don’t know if you’re fully recovered. Vampire bites can do a real number on people. It’s not just blood loss, it’s—well, it’s nasty.”

“I feel fine,” I yawned. “Just a little tired. But I will graciously sleep on your couch…”

“In my bed,” she said, steering me up the stairs. She didn’t push or shove me, but kept up a relentless pressure on my back that made it clear refusal was not an option. “You need real, comfortable, natural sleep. The pack-bond will help restore you.”

“Pack-bond?” I asked.

Now she gave me a push, sending me the last few steps up the stairs. “Didn’t you ever let your dog sleep in your bed when you were a kid? Pack-bond. You’re his master, he’s your dog. You shared life force.”

“We did?” 

“Not very much,” Carina clarified. “There’s sort of a filtration, purification… thing. When you have bad juju attached to your life force, and that life force is shared with another living being, only the life force goes. Your juju can’t apply to them, so it just disappears.”

“Juju?” I asked. “Is that the technical term? And are you sure we have a pack-bond? We only just—“

“It doesn’t take long,” she said, then stopped herself at the head of the stairs. “Get ready for bed. I think I have a package downstairs…”

“A package?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Lycanthrope,” she repeated. “I sleep in the nude and I don’t feel comfortable doing that with you yet. So I’m going to put something on.”

“Okay,” I said, still not quite getting it. Maybe it would make more sense in the morning… evening. 

I did feel tired. Or maybe that wasn’t the right word for it. Drowsy, sleepy, overexerted… it wasn’t a physical thing, but a spiritual one. Maybe Carina was right with her talk about life force and mental health. A lot had happened in my abbreviated, sickly day—getting together with Carina, learning she was a werewolf, revealing my own secret to her—and I could see all those seismic changes taking sledgehammers to something deep inside me. My sense of self or my reserve or just my mojo. I needed to close my eyes and let Mr. Subconscious deal with this crap for a while. Mr. Awake had taken it as far as he could go.

I got ready for bed. I didn’t have any elaborate nightly routine. I used Carina’s toilet—what was it about a woman’s bathroom that seemed to automatically make it so much nicer than a guy’s? It wasn’t like I peed on the walls when I was at home, but despite my best efforts, there got to be crud in places that I had been a total gentleman to…

I also found a spare toothbrush, still shrink-wrapped, in Carina’s medicine cabinet, so I put that to use, trusting it was intended for this sort of occasion. Then I washed up, undressed, folded my clothes into a semi-neat pile, and got into bed. It felt soft and sleek and comfortable—I supposed a werewolf would know how to get a good night’s sleep. Don’t dogs always look comfortable when they bunk down for the night? When I got home, I resolved to change and wash my sheets. If this was what a bed could feel like, mine clearly wasn’t operating at peak efficiency.

Then I heard Carina’s bare feet padding up the stairs. No click of claws on the bare wooden boards. I idly wondered what she had put on. A set of pajamas? An oversized football jersey? I’d gone too long without dating—I had no idea what women wore to bed.

Then I saw her come up, stopping, posing for a moment in what little light there was. She was wearing lingerie. No, that was understating it. She wore a negligee that was completely translucent, floor-length, with nothing on underneath except a set of panties, and that was just a waistband and a leaf of fabric covering her groin. The negligee wasn’t just some gossamer sack, either. It clung to the curves of her body, with detailing across the chest like a giant, abstract butterfly. The upper wings, projecting out from her sternum, covered her breasts with enough obscuring to make her nipples not totally obvious, although the size and shape of her breasts was still plain to see. There was no fabric between the two wings, so while the rest of her body was a spectral white, her cleavage glowed with a healthy tan in comparison.

The lower wings, meanwhile, crossed to the flanks of her hips, their opening forming a sort of hourglass with the spread of the upper wings. Not that I paid much attention to that, as cute as her belly button was. The whole effect enhanced the delicacy of her slim, petite body, like a flower’s petals made it look better than just one bare bulb.

“When I ordered this,” Carina began, standing there with an irresistible mix of confidence and nerves. Confidence because she was proud of her body and how it looked in the negligee, and nerves because she still wanted everything to be perfect. “I couldn’t wait to have a boyfriend and see the look on his face when he saw me in it. I never dreamed your face would be so… oh, Ivan, you really like it, don’t you?”

I could only nod.