Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

Taking Loup Bruce Glassco

YOU STUDY YOUR DATE’S fingers intently when you give her the flowers, because you read in a magazine once that women on loup have unusually wide knuckles. You don’t know the exact dimensions of a normal woman’s knuckle, though, so you don’t learn much. Her fingers are long and slim, and you’ve heard that’s a good sign, but the nails look awfully strong, and they curve downwards a bit at the ends.

You remember when it all started, how men were warned to watch out for hair growing in unusual places. But women had been shaving their bodies for years, so that wasn’t much help. Men might not even have known what an unusual place was, back then; they might have thought an armpit was unusual. Linda’s hair is as black as the night, and if she changed and it covered her she would blend into the night and you would never see her coming.

The fact is, there aren’t any signs. The fact is, if a woman is taking loup you won’t know it until it’s too late, until she’s already ripping your chest open and swallowing your heart. The fact is, as Linda takes your flowers and admires them and goes to the kitchen for a vase, her freezer might be filled with parts from a dozen dates, ready to be thawed out for a late-night snack. The fact is, you thought you were sure about the last woman, and you were wrong.

You try not to think about that as she comes back with her handbag and leads the way to the parking lot. She’s small, a lot smaller than you, but mass doesn’t count for much anymore. Pete Wilhelm at your new job weighs twice as much as his wife, but all summer he came into work wearing long-sleeved shirts. Sometimes there are bandages on his face, and he claims that he cut himself shaving or fell through a window. Sometimes he doesn’t come to work at all.

You were fifteen when you first heard about loup. It started with athletes, you think: some kind of steroid that worked a bit too well. They’ve studied it for years, but they still don’t know exactly how it works or where it comes from. All they know for sure is that it doesn’t work on men. Something about chromosomes and estrogen and the phases of the moon.

There is a brief quarrel over whether you’re going in her car or in yours, but you give in after some token resistance. She opens the passenger door of a silver Porsche. As you sit down you check the velour seat covers for fur or blood.

Tom Schneider was a kid from your hometown — your age, but from a different school. You’d never met him. He hitchhiked home from an away game one night, and no one ever saw him again. You joined the hunt, moving as straight as you could across a meadow, peering in clumps of grass and bushes, bored and scared at the same time. They found a shinbone with tooth marks on it, and that was all they ever found.

You made sure to tell your roommate exactly where you would be, exactly when you expected to get in, who to call if you were late. You wish you could say that you took no chances, but if that was true you would have stayed at home.

At the restaurant there is an awkward pause. You were brought up to offer to take a woman’s coat. That’s not the custom anymore, and for a moment it looks like she’s going to try to take yours. Finally you each awkwardly shrug off your own, and then you take them both to the coat-room while she sees about her reservations.

New customs are hard. New customs — an oxymoron. On the freeway she was listening to the Cleveland Howlers against the Green Bay Pack. Sheila Breen, Cleveland’s best runner, had carried the bag to mid-field when the Pack caught up with her, and between them they tore the bag to ribbons. It was the fifth new bag of the game. Sometimes you miss football.

“So tell me about yourself,” you say when you sit down, and she happily goes into her story. She’s on the fast track at an ad agency — a campaign for those new quadrupedal workout areas. Your roommate Karl didn’t tell you much about her when he set the two of you up. He just said you’d been moping around too much, you needed to get out more. Only a few women do the stuff, he said, and most of the ones who do aren’t dangerous. Most of them are nice. And of course you know that, except for deep down in your gut where you remember heavy paws on your chest, where you remember hot hot breath and saliva and pointed teeth grinning inches away from your face.

Still, you let him make the date for you, because you hate it when it gets cold at night and the only warm place in the bed is the place where you are. She seems nice enough, stopping to ask you a few questions and sounding as if she’s interested in your answers. Oh the other hand, she orders the steak. She’s carving it up and popping chunks into her mouth and chewing heartily, and suddenly you feel your supper shifting inside you. She catches your look and asks you what’s wrong.

The first time you left your wife, you called a friend to come pick you up in the middle of the night. She changed back to her trueform then, standing on the lawn apologizing and begging as you drove off. She was so beautiful that you almost told him to turn around, but you could see your blood on her fingernails in the moonlight as you held your bandaged arm.

She must have rubbed some of the blood on one of the tires in the confusion. You can’t think how else she could have traced you to the hotel, later that night. She had to pay for eight hundred dollars in damages to that room, and you went to the hospital with a broken rib.

The next time, you planned your exit more carefully. You left work early, went to the bus station, and never looked back. No, that’s not true. Sometimes you miss her so much it burns; sometimes you would go back and serve her your liver on a platter, if only she would eat it and smile and tell you it was good.

Linda is very kind, she’s holding your hand as you tell her the story, and she’s telling you how sorry she is you’ve been hurt. She asks if you still want to go to the movie, and you say not really, you’d rather go home.

She parks in the street behind your car, outside her apartment. Then she leans on your hood for twenty-five minutes and tries to persuade you to come inside. I won’t pressure you once you’re in, she says. Truly I won’t. I just want somebody to talk to. I want to hear your story.

There’s something about her that still makes you uneasy: the way the moon looks over her shoulder, the way her hair moves when there wasn’t any wind, the way her nostrils flare when there is. Finally, though, you give in. She’s stroking your arm, and her voice is gentle, and the bed in your own apartment is cold.

When you get inside she offers you a glass of wine and puts on some soft music. There’s a dull ache inside you like a lump of congealed blood, and you aren’t sure whether it’s lust or loneliness or fear. You hope it’s not just fear. You want her the way you want air, the way you want your nightmares to leave you alone. A part of you is screaming no, no, we’ve done this before, but when she reaches up and strokes your cheek the lump in your gut dissolves, and there’s nothing you can do anymore. You need to touch her, need to touch someone, there’s an empty feeling in your fingertips like parts of them are missing. You stroke her arm and she kisses you. Her mouth is as hot as blood.

She pulls you toward the bedroom and you don’t resist. She pulls off your clothes and lays you out on the bed, then climbs on top of you and engulfs you. Her hands clutch your shoulders and she cries out as she forces you inside her. For this one moment you’re important to someone else; for this moment you’re her world. As she rides you and cries out into the night, you are a part of something larger than yourself, for you are hers. Even as her arms stiffen and grow hair, even as the fingers on your shoulders grow heavy and sharp, still you are hers and she is yours, and as you see her teeth shine in the moonlight you climax in ecstasy and fear.

Some women never turn all the way. Sometimes it’s just an ear pointing, a claw sharpening, a muscle that tenses suddenly with the strength of wind. “That was wonderful,” she says, and you see the loup passing from her face like a shadow; the newly grown hair fades and turns wispy and falls like snow. Her nose is still wide, though, and she sniffs the air above you. “You’re afraid, darling,” she says. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you. Were you scared that I would hurt you like your wife did?”

Mutely, you nod. She climbs off and lies down beside you, resting her head on your shoulder. “Not all of us do that,” she says. “That’s not really what loup is about.” She strokes your chest for awhile with a thick finger, and then she says softly, “I’ll protect you, darling. I’ll keep you safe.”

“What is it about?” you ask, and you turn to look into her deep gray eyes. You think you see the answer inside them: It’s something that’s strong, and young, and very, very old.

“The night is where we belong,” she says finally. “Out where the moon burns white-hot at midnight. The stars go on forever, and the only thing for us to be afraid of now is the sound that the moon makes in our blood. Do you know what that’s like?”

I remember, you tell her. I remember.

Later you fall asleep. You dream that you are lying in the moonlight, and dark shapes are gathered around you. They are ripping you open and feasting on your warm insides, but you feel no pain. If anything, you are glad to be a part of them, for it is good to feel needed. Then one of them moves up and kisses you with bloody lips, and you see that the eyes on her dark face are your own.

You wake up and check to make sure you are still in one piece, and you think back to the time when a woman’s heart would grow cold at the sound of a man’s footstep in a lonely place at midnight. How long, you wonder, how long until both of the moon’s twin children will be able to walk beneath her without fear? And without fear, would love still taste as sweet?

She is sleeping behind you, her breasts pressed against your back, her arms around your chest. The backs of her hands are covered with short black down, and her fingernails are as thick as dimes. Her breath on the back of your neck is hotter than blood.

Feeling her hot breath on your skin, staring into the darkness, you lie awake until dawn.