Page 44 of A Malicious Menagerie
“They just get a head start,” I reason. “With the fangs and claws and all.”
“Certainly doesn’t hurt,” he concedes with another dimple-popping smile.
Suddenly, my watch starts its incessant, tinny beeping, letting me know I should be done with the woods and moving on to the mountain section by now. “Shit, I have to go.”
When I jump up, he follows, straightening to his towering height that makes me feel pocket-sized by comparison. I reach out for his now-empty takeout container, and he hands it to me with another grateful ‘thank you.’
“Will you come back before you leave?” he asks as I move toward the door of the enclosure. I glance back at him, wondering if he’s as desperate to see me as I am to see him.
But his expression is impassive, and I can’t tell if he particularly cares either way. “Of course.”
Now, he does give me a faint smile, just the slightest movement of his beard giving him away. “Then I’ll see you later.”
* * *
While I finish up in the woods and head to the mountain to chase a pig into the wendigo enclosure, my thoughts are stuck on Chase.
Of course they are. It’s not like I’ve been able to think of much else since I first learned that he was a werewolf. When I’m not thinking about how unnaturally attractive he is, with his perfectly sculpted muscles, roguish grin, and gilded eyes, I’m reliving our conversations in fine detail. Picking apart his every word like a high schooler with her bestie, trying to figure out if her crush likes her back.
But beyond those thoughts that make me feel fizzy and bright like a glass of expensive champagne, there’s the darker side of things, too. Because he’s a prisoner here in this glorified zoo, and regardless of how repulsive I find the whole situation, I am, for all intents and purposes, his jailer.
Those thoughts deflate me as I finish up my chores in the mountain section. I trudge back to the breakroom with my shoulders curved inward and mychest feeling like it’s caving in.
So lost in my misery, it takes me far too long after I walk into the breakroom to realize that I’m not alone. I lift my head, intending to exchange my usual curt greeting with whatever security guard is on break, but my words die on my tongue when my gaze meets flashing scarlet eyes.
Having barely been able to make out the Mothman’s silhouette the first and only time I laid eyes on him, it’s a shock to the system to see him fully illuminated by the wavering fluorescent lights. His shape is as I remember it, waspish with powerfully built shoulders but an almost gaunt waist. Fine steel-gray velvet covers most of his skin, highlighting the dips between his ropy abdominals and sinewy biceps, though he has a ruff of fur around his neck as well as over his hips and continuing down his thighs that’s a blend of white, gray, and mahogany. His hair is similarly colored, with streaks ranging in color from milk to silver, graphite, cinnamon, and sable. The messy locks are long enough to brush his shoulders and hang haphazardly into his reflective red gaze and over a surprisingly human face. His eyes are a bit too large, his cheekbones too sharp, his ears too pointed, his skin—bare over his face and neck—too pallid to pass as belonging to a human, but all the requisite parts are there.
Those antennae, though… those would never pass as human.
White, heavily fringed, and about a foot long each, they rise from his crown from between strands of untidy calico hair and dip slightly at the ends as if burdened by their own weight. And that’s to say nothing of his wings, which are folded neatly behind him but still visible at his sides and between his muscular calves like a striped cape.
But honestly, I don’t know what’s stranger—his general appearance, or the fact that he’s casually leaning back against the aged linoleum counter of our small kitchenette while spooning yogurt into his mouth.
Yogurt…
“Is that John’s yogurt?” I blurt out, and in terms of first things to say to a cryptid harbinger of doom, it’s not bad.
“Not anymore,” he replies serenely. His voice is low and smooth with an almost buzzing undercurrent. Even with the width of the room between us, Ican almost feel his words as readily as I hear them.
“He’s been blaming me for that, you know,” I pout, and really, this conversation has bypassed surreal into the realm of ridiculous.
“Apologies, Anna,” he says with a formal dip of his head. “I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble. But there’s only so long one can subsist on aphids and rotten fruit.”
I sigh. “Let me guess: John lied to me when he said you prefer your fruit rotten.”
“No, I do,” he says, popping another spoonful of yogurt between full lips. “It satisfies the moth part of me, but the human part, not so much.”
“Human part?” I ask curiously. “Are you… human?”
“Partly,” he answers, waving his spoon in a vague gesture. “My people are descended from humans and banshees.”
“Banshees,” I repeat flatly. “Like, screaming-into-the-night, doom-and-gloom banshees?”
He snorts in a charmingly human-like way. “Like fae-spirits-from-Ireland banshees.”
“Ahh,” is all I can think to reply. Then, something else occurs to me. “Is that why I felt so terrible the first time I saw you?”
His lips droop, and he looks apologetic. “Unavoidable first impression, I’m afraid.”
