Even in the din of rock root stubbornly resisting powderization, focus came easily to Mel that night. She started with a minor blessing on the water Rosa had set to boil. Her ego slid aside, ushering in the will of the universe to take its place. The merest suggestion from Mel ignited the process: blessings from creation cascaded into the base of her skull, flowing rapidly down her spine toward the earth, into which they would return unless directed otherwise. She split the energy into two even paths down her arms. Rather than letting it pour out in thick streams from her palms, Mel further diverted the flow through her fingertips, allowing her to disperse it slowly and evenly over the water.
The last of the blessing left her, and Mel’s own will was invited to return. She opened her eyes. The water was no longer boiling. Still and clear to the point of near invisibility, it shone with one of the strongest enchantments Mel had ever managed.
She turned to show Rosa, who was frantically pointing both at the standup mixer and to other side of the lab. Mel could hear yelling now that her senses were coming back into the foreground. She shut off the mixer in time to hear Arthur finish out a particularly spirited string of curses.
“I assume the phone must be broken,” he bellowed, slamming a key down on the lab table nearest him.
“Yes, Arthur,” Mel answered, utterly at peace. The sensation would ebb quickly; she tried to make the best of it in the meantime. “I’m glad we weren’t cut off before I could explain the situation to you.”
“How are things going? I’m surprised you had time to worry about the keys with how busy you kept telling me you were going to be. What were you even doing in the front?”
“Nothing, really. We heard a sound and I went to check it out. It was nothing.”
Arthur lost a little of his color. “You didn’t think to mention that on the phone?”
Rosa chimed in, “We didn’t want to worry you for no reason. Mel checked. Everything’s fine. Oh!” She’d caught sight of Mel’s enchantment. “It’s beautiful!”
Mel had been about to return the compliment by pointing out how quickly and with what impressive precision Rosa had inscribed the bottles with freshness sigils when Arthur announced, “I’m leaving. Someone lock up after me.”
“Happy to,” Mel volunteered. She encouraged Rosa to keep working with a wave and moved to follow Arthur. All three of them froze at the sound of glass breaking from the front of the store.
“Are you sure no one’s here?” Rosa whispered.
Mel was going to say she hadn’t seen anyone, but before she could get a word out, Arthur shouted, “Who’s there?!” He charged ahead and flung the lab door open.
Peering around Arthur, Mel caught a silhoutte in the front of the shop. It towered over the display cases, far too large for any human, and turned to face them. Any vagaries in its shape didn’t matter; Mel knew exactly what she was looking at.
The werewolf locked its glowing eyes on Arthur.
He slammed the door shut and pushed his body up against it. “Help me!”
“What’s happening?” Rosa asked, approaching them.
“Rosa, sweetheart—“ Mel started, but Arthur interrupted her:
“There’s a fucking werewolf out there!” It almost, absurdly, sounded like an accusation.
The wolf beat itself against the door in a deafening blow. Mel staggered back, watching the hinges cling to the frame by a hair, and shouted, “The door won’t hold!”
“It has to,” Arthur screamed.
“The walk-in!” Rosa opened the door to the walk-in refrigerator and pulled Mel inside along with her.
“Arthur! Get in here!” Mel watched in horror as the door began to swing shut. Arthur caught it at the last moment, slipping in just as the werewolf tore through the front-of-house door. It tried to follow Arthur into the walk-in, but misjudged its own size and strength; it accidentally slammed the great metal door shut in its efforts.
Rosa half fell and half sat, trying to catch her breath. Arthur pounded and kicked the walk-in wall. Mel stared at him, slowly coming to the realization that she wasn’t half as frightened over being trapped in the lab with the werewolf as she was to be trapped in the walk-in with Arthur. She shook herself out of her thoughts and said:
“We’ll be safe in here.”
“Yeah,” Rosa agreed- Mel suspected more out of need for comfort than belief. “It can’t get through that door.”
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“How did this happen?!” Arthur rounded on them, fuming. It was the exact same tone he used when someone misread or misplaced an order.
“Did you lock the door when you came in?” Mel asked.
“Of course not! I was coming in and out! Who would have locked the door?”
“It probably followed you in, then,” Mel suggested.
“Oh, okay. It’s all my fault.”
Mel took a seat next to Rosa. “No one was trying to blame anybody.” This was a bold lie, given his accusatory tone, but Mel sold it well. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter how it happened. We just need to stay calm and call for help.”
Rosa and Mel both looked to Arthur, who furrowed his brow and asked, “What?”
“Our phones are in the basket,” Mel reminded him.
“Well, I didn’t bring mine. This was supposed to be a five minute trip. We’ll get the landline. It can’t be more than ten feet from the walk-in.”
Mel shook her head rapidly. “It’s too risky. You saw how fast that thing moved. We’ll just have to wait it out. It will either lose interest in us or transform back into a human in the morning. Right?”
“Right,” Rosa echoed. “What time is sunrise?”
Mel didn’t even know what time it was then. “Around five, I think.”
The wolf threw itself at the walk-in, but it was fruitless aside from the disturbing sound of muscle and bone bludgeoning metal.
“It’s not losing interest. You just said it was probably following me. You saw how it lunged at me. It’s not going anywhere.”
“I didn’t mean that it was targeting you,” she said gently. “It would have followed anyone, probably.”
“It’s not after anyone. It’s after me.”
Struggling to keep frustration from entering her tone, Mel asked, “Why would it?” She went to exchange a look with Rose, but found her staring in horror at Arthur. Mel turned back to him. She asked again, any pretense of patience gone as the realization sunk in, “Why would it be after you, Arthur?”
Rosa said, “Is it because you were the one who turned Gus in?” His refusal to answer or even meet her gaze confirmed it.
“Arthur,” Mel breathed, stunned.
“How could you do that to him?” Rosa hugged herself.
“What I did was bring him to justice,” Arthur yelled.
The werewolf crashed into the walk-in again, keening with the pain of impact.
Mel looked Arthur over, thinking through the past few hours in a new light. “That’s why you didn’t stay for the team meeting,” she said. “Why you were so reluctant to bring the key. You knew something like this might happen.”
“And I was right, wasn’t I?”
“And you didn’t even bother to warn us,” Mel concluded.
Arthur rolled his eyes. “Stop making everything about yourself. It’s after me, not you. You were already so determined to be freaked out over a couple of extra orders; I knew you couldn’t handle anything else.”
Eyes on Rosa, who was curling herself into as small a shape as possible, Mel said, “You put us both in danger.”
Arthur laughed incredulously. “I’m not even the one who wanted to be here tonight! That was YOUR idea! Or do you not remember threatening to call the police if I didn’t come before you hung up on me?!”
“I didn’t know there was a threat, Arthur. I didn’t know you betrayed a sweet, harmless kid who trusted you. Gus defended you!”
“How did you speak with Gus?” He lost a little of his footing. “Did he escape?”
“No,” she said, putting her hand to her forehead and closing her eyes to keep from screaming. She needed to speak clearly, to make him understand. “Gus didn’t escape. He’s almost certainly dead. I’m saying that he defended your behavior in the past. He wanted to see the best in you, in everyone, and you…” Mel couldn’t finish.
“You’re not making any sense. You’re freaking out and you need to calm down, not make everything worse.” Pointing first to Rosa, then to himself, he said, “We’re trying to stay calm and ride this thing out. You need to take a deep breath and stop escalating the tension.”
Mel’s vision darkened as she considered whether to respond. He could keep going indefinitely without acknowledging fault, she knew, but ending it there would only be admitting that he was right about her needing to calm down.
The werewolf took to clawing at the door like a dog begging to come in from the backyard. She wanted to open the door and push Arthur out.
Instead, Mel repeated in an even tone, “You betrayed him and you put us in danger.”
“I’m not going to talk to you if you can’t be reasonable. We can continue this conversation another time, after you’ve had a chance to cool down.”
He wasn’t hearing her. She needed to find a different way to get through to him. Exhausted, Mel waved to indicate she was done. Arthur turned his attention to the door. “Probably shredded out there. I’ll be shocked if I don’t have to get it replaced. Fuck, we didn’t need this.”
Rosa got Mel’s attention and whispered, “At least the door is holding.”
“Yeah, we’re safe,” Mel reiterated.
“Do you think my wives are going to be ok?”
“Of course. How do you mean? I don’t think any of us were targets.”
“No, I mean… Do you think they’d be ok… if I didn’t come home?”
Mel understood and took Rosa’s hand. Arthur muttered, “It’s just one night. You’re grown women. You’ll all be fine.”
Rosa said, “Vera and Jenny are strong. They’ve got each other.” Leaning in close, she asked, “They’ll be ok if I die, right? Because they know how much I love them, and that’s… that’s enough, right?”
“That’s right,” Mel assured her. She knew Rosa didn’t want to hear that everything was going to be fine. “We really are safe, but if the worst happened, they’d get through it together.”
Rosa mouthed the words thank you. Outside, the wolf took a break from clawing at the door to pace the lab. They could hear its claws scraping the linoleum with each step.