Jørgen gathers the sheet off the bed and offers it to Billy, who throws it over himself like an enormous drape. His legs still feel weak, and he collapses into the armchair in the corner. “Okay,” he says, and the questions rush out of him. “Where the fuck are we, and why are we here? Is this Hell? Are we dead? Did we live terrible lives and we’re now dead and stuck here forever? Oh, and, also, am I the only person who is going to mention that we all changed into fucking wolves a minute ago?”
“That is not exactly right,” Jørgen says, zipping up his jeans.
“Did you see us a minute ago?” Billy says.
“Yes, my friend.” Jørgen gathers up an undershirt, pulls it on over his enormous, squarish head. “But we weren’t changed a minute ago. We were never changed. We were born this way.”
“But,” Billy says. He looks from Elisa to Jørgen and back again.
“That doesn’t make sense. I’ve never turned into a wolf before.”
“I have,” Elisa says.
“As have I,” Jørgen admits, scratching his blond beard. “Many times.”
Billy grips his head. “We’ve been roommates for two and a half years,” he says. “How could I not have noticed that you were on occasion turning into a wolf?”
“I was out at night a lot,” Jørgen says, looking a little pained.
“You were in the music scene,” Billy says. “You told me you were going to shows!”
“Yes,” Jørgen says, remorsefully. “Yes, and for this? I apologize. I had intended to tell you the truth earlier.”
“I would have liked that,” Billy says. “You’re saying that you knew that I was … like this, too?”
“I did,” Jørgen says. He shakes his head sadly. “I knew it the first night we met, the night the toilets exploded.”
Elisa arches an eyebrow at this.
“I could smell it in you. I thought we could learn things from one another.”
“But you didn’t learn anything from me,” Billy protests. “I mean, I didn’t have anything to teach you. I didn’t even know that I was … this. Whatever it is that I am. That we are. How is that even possible? How could I be, like, a wolfman and not know it?”
“You didn’t know it,” Jørgen says, settling his weight down onto the edge of the bed, “because someone—a person, or a group of people—hid it from you.”
“Explain,” Billy says.
“I cannot fully explain,” Jørgen says. “I do not have all the answers. But I have pieced some things together. You remember last year, when I went home, to Norway?”
“I remember,” Billy says. “You were gone for a month. You told me you were doing audio engineering for some power electronics band.”
“And that was true. But on that trip I also did research. I found people who had some information about a thing, a type of being, called Fenrissonr.”
“Can you spell that?” says Elisa. She’s sitting at the desk and she’s jotting things down into a little Moleskine notebook. Jørgen assents to the request.
“Fenrissonr are creatures talked about in Norway, Sweden, Finland. But they are not animals. They are not organisms. They are not a thing that belongs on earth.”
Elisa pauses in her scribbling. “What the fuck are they, then?”
“They are demons.”
“Demons?” Billy says.
“Wolf-demons.”
“Hell-wolves,” Elisa says.
“If you like,” Jørgen says. “And on my trip I spoke to some people, old men, part of the Scandinavian occult underground. They claimed to be eyewitnesses to a ritual that occurred sometime in the early eighties. A sex magic ritual.”
“A sex magic ritual?” Billy says.
“Sex, magic, ritual,” Elisa says, copying down the phrase. Billy can hear her put a period at the end of it.
“A sex magic ritual,” Jørgen says, “presided over by Lucifer himself. And in this ritual, these old men said, three witches were impregnated by three Fenrissonr. They say that Lucifer was trying to breed a new race of creature. Not ordinary wolves. Wolves with powers. Wolves that could serve as an elite guard for the Devil himself. I think that we, the three of us, were the result of that ritual.”
Something starts to spin wildly in Billy’s head at this. “But wait a second,” he says. “We weren’t raised by witches. I mean—we have parents. Real parents.”
“I was adopted,” Elisa volunteers. Billy whirls, looks at her with wild accusation in his eyes. She lifts her palms and gives him a what-do-you-want-from-me expression.