The Curse of Immortality (3)
The Paw of Pablo.
Read Chapter 2 of The Curse of Immortality HERE
I awoke in a daze. Groggy, cotton mouth, and generally rundown. The week had been a chore to survive. My senses were too heightened and it led to sensory overload. By the time the Friday workday had come to an end, I rushed out of the building and drove home with the intention of locking myself in my apartment and hiding away from everyone and everything. I just wanted to sleep. Forever if that was my current option. Alas..
I was awoken Saturday morning. Sin was standing at the foot of my bed, tight white blouse, daisy duke denim shorts, an angel… or maybe a demon… and to her left was a man made from muscle with the look of a surfer from the cover of a GQ magazine. No smile on his face and his eyes were hidden behind sun glasses.
“Conner. Oh Conner,” she said, “Time to get up now. Chop chop, it’s a training day.”
“5 more minutes..”
“No!. Get up!”
I sat up, startled. Awake. This wasn’t a dream. How the fuck did they get into my apartment? Who gets up at… looking at my alarm clock, seven AM on a Saturday? This can’t be happening. There had to be some reasonable explanation for all of this. When I was crossing the street to get a coffee and a doughnut, maybe I got hit by a car. That’s it. I got hit by a car, now I’m in the ER or the ICU or some trauma center and I’m connected to a machine and in a coma. That makes perfect sense. More so than having a ménage à trois with two hot women and then waking up a fucking werewolf.
So I kept saying to myself, “It’s time to wake up, it’s time to wake up, come on Conner, time to wake up.”
“What are you doing? You are awake Conner. Did you get hit on the head or something?” Asked Sin.
Crap… I was saying that out loud.
“You need to get dressed. Pablo here,” motioning to the insane body builder beside her, “is going to be your trainer.”
“Wait…” I said.
“What?” She replied, somewhat exasperated.
“I was under the impression that you, as my maker, were to be training me. In fact, that was about the only thing in this entire cursed situation I was looking forward to.”
She laughed then said, “Oh Conner, that’s cute. But here’s the thing, my sister and I are a team and we’ve set up way too many recruitment goals for either of us to take time out of our busy schedules to do the actual training of you recruits. There are quotas to maintain, sex too be had, pups to be made, and sisterly rivalries to be won. Did you know, of course you didn’t, but let me tell you anyway. My sister and I have been the winners of the annual Pack/Coven award at the yearly Trans-Species Ceremony for the last two decades. A lot of fame comes from those awards and neither of us want to fall behind.
“Therefore… Pablo here, will be training you. You can trust him. I made him around twenty five years ago, or so, and he’s trained packs of pups in that time. He’ll get you on the right track, and then at the coming pack meeting, you will be pledged, inducted, and well on your way to becoming the wolf I know you can be. Now get up, get dressed, and get to it.”
She nodded to Pablo, waved goodbye, and then left my apartment.
Pablo took a step closer and said, “Up.”
I got up. He was intimidating. Were his muscles from working out or wolfing out?
As I was getting dressed he began the lesson, “I’m here to bestow upon you the rules of the road. The first rule of the pack is…”
“Not to talk about pack club?” I cut him off. I had to. You know I had to.
His brow scrunched up, eyebrows arching down behind the sun glasses, and his scowl grew more… “scowly”… Yes, I make up words when confronted with a three hundred pound werewolf man that doesn’t take kindly to my pop culture references.
“The first rule,” he started over, “is that the pack comes first. The pack is your new home. We are there for each other, no matter how annoying or insipid a new member may be, we are all part of the pack. Got it?”
I saluted him, he shook his head, and probably rolled his eyes. I could already see that I was most likely going to get punched in the face at some point in the hours ahead.
Dressed, no coffee, and still in a daze, I followed Pablo to his behemoth truck. A Ford F-350, because of course a tank of man would drive a tank of a truck. After hopping in, literally, he took us into the the city, and then down an ally to the back of a butcher shop, “There are three nights you go full on wolf. The waxing moon, the full moon, and the waning moon. Now for the waxing and waning moon, you will have full cognitive abilities on those nights, so enjoy them. Test out your abilities. Have some fun. But on the full moon, the wolf’s reality will overtake your own. With practice, you may be able to wrestle for control but for the time being, come here, to this butcher shop, ring the bell on the door, right there,” he pointed at the button on the door, “Pepe will answer the door, and he’ll give you a side of cow.”
“Excuse me? Side of a cow?”
“Side of cow. I’m speaking English here. Keep up.”
“And why will Pepe give me the side of a cow and how will he know to give me the side of a cow?”
Pablo dropped his face into his palm, “Christ, you are slow. Look, you’re part of the pack, the pack takes care of the pack. Pepe is part of the pack. He’ll smell that you are part of the pack. So he’ll give you a side of cow. Now if you’ll shut up, I’ll drive us out into the country and show you where and how to the set the side of the cow up so it will occupy you on the night of the full moon. That way, you won’t be going around murdering innocent people and bringing attention to yourself.”
So we drove until six lanes became four lanes and kept driving until four lanes became two lanes, and then pulled off on a dirt road that went right into the forest. And that dirt road went on forever. Every three miles or so there was a pull off, where a car could park. We finally stopped at one and then walked for about three miles into the woods and there was a clearing with a tree at the center. Here, Pablo showed me how I would tie the side of cow to the tree and then told me that this is where I will change at. I looked around, nothing but forest, and it made sense. As a wolf, I’d settle in to a meal of cow and when I had finished, it would be dawn and I’d change back.
“Now go to that central tree and take a piss,” said Pablo.
“Say what?”
“Take a piss. That way you will know how to find this place on the night of the full moon and how to get back to it when you wake in the morning.”
“Oh… Right… Mark my territory. Got it. I’ll just take a piss then.”
“When you turn onto the road, just roll your window down and when you smell your mark, park there and follow the smell to here. Got it, pup?”
“Yeah, I got it. Could you give me a bit of privacy here? I can’t go with you watching me.”
As I mediated to force myself to take a piss, he continued on with the lesson, “Use the waxing and the waning moon to get the lay of the land. You have around a three mile radius, stay in it. Otherwise you will be crossing into another pack members territory. That point, were their mark begins to overpower your mark, means turn the fuck back. We’d rather that pack members not get into fights out here. And just an FYI, no one is going to come and check on you in the morning. So if you get into a dog fight and get injured, you could very well die out here and then your corpse will end up being food for another wolf or some other animal.”
Truth be told, training was short, sweet, and to the point. All the how’s and why’s of why I am now this way, were ignored. Pablo kept saying he didn’t know. No one knows. It just is. My luck for not getting punched had held out this far so I didn’t want to push it.
Pablo dropped me off at my apartment building and then said he’d be in touch. I didn’t know if that meant another lesson tomorrow, next week, the day of the full moon… I still had a ton of questions so I decided to give Jeff a call. Maybe he had more insights from the vampire’s side of things. Shit, was I really living in this world now? Vampires, werewolves, what else was out there? Was this really my new reality?
Jeff told me to meet him at a bar called The Silver Stake. How appropriate and a bit morbid, If I do say so myself. So that’s where I headed next.
TO BE CONTINUED…