Crystal Meth and Silver Bullets

In case you have been wondering where I have been the past several months, the answer is simple: in a Sisterhood hospital recovering from bullet wounds.  How I got there is a rather long story.  It began in a London club and took me first to Estonia, and then to Venezuela and finally to the Mexican state of Michoacán, where I took three silver bullets.

That I wound up being shot was ultimately my own fault.  Following the unpleasantness in Libya last year, I had steadfastly refused all assignments to the Middle East – especially Syria – so my section chief at MI6 decided to deal with my intransigence by lending me to the organised crime unit of our domestic sister organisation MI5.  I considered this job to be well beneath my abilities and took the matter much too lightly, with nearly fatal results.

The task as assigned was ludicrous: I was to assist in tracing the origins of some particularly high-grade crystal meth which had been appearing recently in the London club scene.  The stuff was much more potent than what was usually cooked in amateur labs, and intel had suggested that the Russian mafia was involved.  As I was fluent in the language and had many contacts within the ex-KGB, it was argued, there was no one better qualified to support MI5 in this investigation.  Of course, if I chose Damascus instead, they would find someone else to play drug cop. 

Since I had little interest in spending another desert holiday fighting an Arab dictator, the next evening found me in an upscale West End club wearing a psychedelic miniskirt I had not worn since 1969.  The clubbers called me “retro girl” and I was soon the centre of attention.  It didn’t take long before they invited me into a back room to share some whizz, as they called it.

Take my advice and keep far, far away from crystal meth.  Don’t try this stuff even once.  It is probably the most dangerous substance humans have ever concocted.  Werewolves cannot be harmed by it, of course, but we are not immune to the effects.  After snorting a small amount of the innocuous-looking white powder, it required every ounce of self-control to restrain myself from shifting and tearing everyone in the room to shreds, and this after only one hit.  After recovering from the initial burst of aggressiveness caused by the drug, I managed to collect my wits sufficiently to ask how I could hook up for more.  They gave me an address in Brick Lane.

Needless to say, I didn’t visit the house directly.  Instead I planted myself on the roof of an adjacent building and eavesdropped.  Other MI6 agents would need special equipment for this, but my wolf ears proved quite adequate to the task.  After two days of surveillance, I had learned the names of several middle-level dealers (subsequently turned over to Metropolitan Police) and followed one of them back to a Georgian terraced house in Camden owned by a respectable Lithuanian businessman.  At a distance of thirty metres from the front door, I caught the scent of an Apostate.  It didn’t surprise me that they had taken to drug smuggling, as there are few professions too despicable for those beasts.

A Lycanthropic Coming-Out in Eighteenth-Century London

“So just how many humans really do know your secret?” Brian had finished reading my last blog post and seemed sceptical. “All this business about ‘coming out’ seems rather dubious, considering that the laws of your Sisterhood prohibit revealing yourselves to humans. Or at least so you have told me: any human who learns the truth about you is condemned to be eaten. Obviously that doesn’t apply to everyone, or I should have long since been served up as a main course.”

“You’re more like an hors d’oeuvre,” I said. “We generally like a bit more meat on the bone.”

“But I weigh nearly fifteen stone.”

“I said meat, not fat. But to answer your question: I have only revealed myself to three humans who lived to tell the tale. The first was Lord Kendrick Llewellyn, twenty-fifth Duke of Caerfyrddin, the father of my eighteenth-century incarnation, who discovered my secret quite by accident on a December evening in 1755.”

“You mentioned him once,” recalled Brian, “saying that, of all the fathers in all your incarnations throughout the centuries, he was the closest to your heart.”

“That’s right, not least because he never stopped loving me, even after learning the truth – unlike the father before him, Rhioganedd Llewellyn, the twenty-first Duke of Caerfyrddin, who ordered that I be burnt at the stake for witchcraft in 1648.”

“Not very civilised of him,” said Brian, “but I suppose the seventeenth century was prone to that sort of thing. Tell me about Lord Kendrick.”

“He raised me alone after my mother had died in childbirth, and was always terribly concerned about my welfare, though his ideas of a proper upbringing for young ladies hardly coincided with my own. To put it succinctly: he intended to marry me off to some English gentleman to improve the family income, since we were richer in titles than in gold. However, once the killings began…”

“Killings?”

Werewolves of the world unite! Stop discrimination against lycanthropes! Fight speciesism!

When I decided to come out of the supernatural closet and admit to my friends and relatives that I am a werewolf, some were truly shocked. Of course, they already knew I was lesbian, but that seemed normal enough to most of them. However, the fact that I regularly sprout unsightly underarm hair was patently offensive to those with traditional values about personal hygiene. I lost some friends because of that, and I suspect that others broke relations out of fear that I might tempt their children to try the “alternative lycanthropic lifestyle”. I tried to tell them that being a werewolf is not a choice – I was born this way. Probably they have been watching too many Hollywood films, and think that one can “catch” lycanthropy by being bitten. Don’t they know that only works with vampires?

Anyway, one of those friends who has remained faithful is Brian, the human I have often written about. Naturally he had misgivings at first, especially when I brought some of my werewolf associates to stay in his house last year while we were hiding from the CIA (long story, see here and here), and they threatened to eat him. Nevertheless, Brian has been very supportive, especially of my efforts to find Lysandra, my one true love, who had been my Companion through many incarnations until were tragically separated during the closing months of World War II. It was his suggestion that I use modern means of communication – Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook – to aid in my search for her.

So far, I have not found Lysandra, but I have made a number of new friends along the way – friends who live “out there” in the Internet. Some of them even claim to be werewolves themselves. Since I have not gotten close enough to detect their scent, there’s no way to tell whether they really are lycanthropes, or merely wish they were.

I was discussing this phenomenon with Brian the other day. Why would a human want to be a werewolf? Being one myself, I can say truthfully that, while it may have certain advantages (such as being largely invulnerable to injury when no silver is involved), I have often suffered great loss and pain because of what I am. There are some things which are too horrible to be forgotten, like eating my first girlfriend. No one had told me that sex would be so messy. This is why I do support the abstinence movement among teenage werewolves, as I’m convinced that it will help lower the rate of unwanted mutilations. Don’t mistake this for social conservatism on my part, however, as I wholeheartedly endorse the legalisation of lycanthropic marriage and vehemently disagree with those who believe that God intended matrimony for humans only. I can’t understand why allowing werewolves to marry would diminish the value of human relationships.