Was it scent? Something changing in the humidity of the air? Or was it just how, when the door opened into the hall, it created a momentary vacuum? The fine hairs on the back of Pat’s neck prickled and she looked up as an unfamiliar man, clean-shaven with a gelled coxcomb of short dark hair, opened the door to her office and leaned inside, scanning—not for her, but for the nameplate on her desk—Pat McGann, M.S.W.

“It looks like I’ve found you, Pat McGann,” he said with a grin. “The front desk sent me in this general direction. But I suppose you can’t get too lost—only five floors of offices.”

Pat sighed; the new receptionist—tattoos all down her arms, eyeliner for days—filed her nails at the front desk with an expression so confrontational that Pat had actually seen a client with anxiety open the door, spot her, and spin around to flee. Obviously she wouldn’t get up to walk someone to the right office. “Right,” she said. “And you must be Jack Smith. I’ve been expecting you.”

“Got it in one,” he said, pointing his thumbs at himself. He stepped inside, taking in her framed diplomas—BA in Sociology; Masters of Social Work—her various awards, even the way she organized her pens by color. She saw him note the one framed personal photograph on her desk—a classic lesbian wedding photo—too much white, all resentful pride and the accustomed humiliation of formalwear. Finally, his eyes rested on her.

Pat had grown stolid against looks like that, the tiny flick of his lips as he noted that his shoulders were slenderer than hers, that their hair was worn in the same cut—his full black, while hers was peppered with grey—and how ill-fitting her off-the-rack button-down was, compared to his tailored navy blazer. He wore it over a black T-shirt—the tech-bro uniform. Usually she’d despise him right back, but today a taunting voice niggled like a burr in her head: What do you call a woman with a barrel chest? Three guesses, all correct.

He sat in the chair across from her desk, swinging one leg up to cross his ankle over his knee, revealing pink socks. A little fey for the traditional tech bro, but he also wore poised self-confidence like it was a pair of beat-up Nikes.

“Thank you for coming down,” Pat said. “I had some questions about your app.”

The most curious part was that he was here at all. Emailing the support contact for an app didn’t usually get the founder to make personal visits. But he’d been unsettlingly accommodating.

His app was called Promises Promises, and its download page was one of the last things in Ellie’s search history—behind two hundred chapters of Fruits Basket and six clickbait articles with titles all on the pattern of “17 Spectacular Strategies to Strengthen your Psychic Supremacy.”

“Have you tried it?” Jack asked. “I really think of it as low buy-in, incredible reward.”

“Uh, no. That’s not really why—”

He swung his leg back down and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands steepled into the cone of a rocket ship. “I’m all about making tech relevant in the real world, ‘meatspace’ as we say. There’s no money involved at all—save for the initial download, of course. You could even say it’s powered by wishes. These days everyone is wishing, so much, for their lives to be better, safer, longer, happier. They want to be prettier. They’re terrified of illness and death. But all they get for their hard-earned money is snake oil and moon juice. That’s because the people selling something don’t actually have anything to give. But you have something to give—everyone does. We have time and skills and hair and teeth.” —Teeth? Pat recoiled, but he blew right past—“All my app does is make the matches. If someone has a wish, someone else can make that wish come true. With thousands and thousands of users, the algorithm makes networks out of wishes so that everyone with something to offer can have their wish fulfilled—”

“Yes!” Pat interrupted his flow in a desperate half-shout. “Thank you, Mr. Smith.” She blew out a breath. “It sounds very clever. I did read the webpage. I was hoping you could give me some information about a particular user.”

“Ah,” Jack said. He sat back in the chair, swinging his leg up once more. “I’m afraid that’s against the terms of service. If you cared to make a wish, however, I could connect you with someone who—”

“This user was underage and is currently missing,” Pat said, letting each word land like an iron bar. “The police have decided she’s a runaway, but I’m sure someone would be interested to hear about the connection between your app and her disappearance.”

“Oh,” said Jack. His voice was all smiles.

Pat sat up. That had been a very unveiled threat. He was not supposed to sound pleased.

“You want to know about the monster.”

It was the lying that sent Ellie to Pat. The school counsellor had called it “persistent and consistent” and “probably a psychological issue” and encouraged the VanPelts to send their daughter to a therapist. A school referral meant Pat was covered by insurance, and thus eight months ago on a Tuesday at 3:30pm, Ellie walked into Pat’s office for the first time with rainbow hair, a tie-dye t-shirt, and Birkenstocks. Pat’s first wry note in her file was: came through a time slip from the ‘70s.

Ellie’s last-straw lie had been about her older sister, who, according to Ellie, was pregnant with an alien baby. Ellie claimed to have seen the alien—a neon blue creature with oozing tentacles—leaving her sister’s room at dawn after she’d been kept up listening to horrible noises and moaning all night.

As a social worker, Pat was always on the lookout for trauma or a bad home situation or mismanaged mental health issues, but honestly, she’d laughed when she’d heard the lie, because it was so over the top that only a bunch of fourteen-year-olds could possibly take it seriously.

Except the family had taken it seriously enough to send Ellie here, as, in addition to the lying, she’d trashed her sister’s room.

“I was looking for my shirt,” Ellie had said.

“You thought she’d taken it?”

“I knew she’d taken it. She came into my room and took it without asking and wore it on her stupid Instagram and now everyone’s like, ‘oh my god, Jenni, you’re so fashionable and cool, here’s forty bucks because I love looking at your face’ and it was my shirt! God, fuck her. Fuck her! Fuck her!”

Ellie’s face had gone bright red, and her body lurched forward, rigid with the anger it carried.

Pat skidded her chair back a few inches, getting out of range.

The outburst suggested there were some boundary-setting issues and a need for development of communication skills. But as Pat worked her through the basics, she found herself becoming interested in this girl—pretty and privileged and ordinary—because of how clearly and openly she held the bitter anomie of not knowing what her life was for.

One of her issues was clearly the sister, a lower-tier Instagram influencer with a few MLM connections, no compunctions about borrowing her little sister’s things, and—according to Ellie—license to act like she deserved them, because her “brand”—don’t let anyone tell you you’re not perfect just the way you are—meant she deserved everything.

“Do you see yourself as not perfect by definition?” Pat asked, almost on a whim. “Like, because Jenni is there filling the perfect slot, you can never be?”

Ellie, this time in a fur stole and unbroken-in Doc Martens that made her steps pained and tentative, had hesitated—a direct contrast with her initial confident response to Pat’s “nice fur”: It’s real. Vintage. Fake fur is just plastic. Like pleather. Plastic, plastic, plastic. Disgusting.

“Do you wish you could take Jenni’s place? Become her?”

Pat had intended the question to show Ellie how limited “perfection” could be. No one really wanted to be someone else, especially if they knew that someone personally, and knew what they’d lose by becoming them. But Ellie didn’t quickly decide on “no.” She sat there, frowning.

She’d come back the next week in black leggings, an oversized sweater, and a silk scarf. Her hair had been “done” and looked sleek and shiny instead of stringy and over-dyed.

“It was interesting, what you said,” Ellie said. “Look.” She held out her phone and Pat blinked at the TikTok screen in front of her. It was @elliefashion2 and her client was showing off her new look.

Oh no. Had Pat encouraged Ellie to actually become her sister?

“It’s so boring, though,” Ellie said. She laughed and sounded like herself and not like the doll-faced influencer. “All about brands and shopping. Who cares what label’s on the newest thing made in Bangladesh?” Then she scowled. “Everything’s just boring.”

“Well, maybe you haven’t found the thing you want to become yet? There’re more things to be than an influencer.”

When Ellie’s eyes lit up, Pat was suddenly worried she’d said something dangerously misinterpretable.

“What monster?” Pat asked, her tone too flat to be believed.

Jack’s eyes narrowed and crinkled in laughter at the same time. “No one missed that video. Of course I checked to see if the girl was one of my users. And she was—Ellie VanPelt, she/they, Mont Verde Academy, missing. But if you’re worried my app had anything to do with it, you’re clutching at straws.”

Pat knew she was clutching at straws. But she’d been methodically clutching every straw she could find, ever since the call from Ellie’s parents, since the police shrugged and said there wasn’t much they could do about teenage runaways. Ellie wasn’t the type to run away … well, actually she was just the type. But Pat didn’t believe she’d run from without something compelling to run to.

“Your app is perfectly set up to lure children into danger.”

Jack shook his head. “My app is the place that girl was the least vulnerable. There’s no skill required to prey on children these days, not when they think radical vulnerability is a moral stance. They reveal everything about themselves online—their real names, their intimate identities, their ages, their fears, their traumas, the things they love and the things they hate. Don’t they know those things smell like blood? They open their veins on the internet and then they’re surprised when they’re hunted.”

Pat had had this fight a thousand times with her young clients—you need to be safe on the internet—but no, he wasn’t right. Yes, it was safer to keep your private identity close, but there was something wrong with a world where you couldn’t be honest with your friends because predators pored through search results made open for advertisers. “They just want to be able to be themselves.”

“Don’t we all?” He looked at her, and that look was like an axe, taking in everything about her that was a vulnerability, that people hated her for. She’d learned to live with those looks, to negotiate the world with visible targets on her life and body, but that didn’t mean she liked people making note of them. “But isn’t it … entitled? Waifish blonde girls like Ellie—not that she was all that waifish in person—claiming “she/they,” playing at rejecting the privilege they were born with, want to be vulnerable, like it’s an aesthetic. It’s one they can put on and take off, depending on the day. But how dare they? Too many of us have to be ourselves and are punished for it. These ones who don’t have to be anything just want to be different because they think it makes them special.”

Pat held her hands fisted tightly against her thighs. A lump had formed heavy in her throat. If anyone else had said those things, she might have agreed. But because it was Mr. Jack Smith, the fact that she’d had similar thoughts disgusted her. She didn’t begrudge people the ability to claim their own identity, to choose their pronouns, even pretty femme girls who said “I don’t really feel like a woman all the time.” Pat felt like a woman every day, because every day people looked at her, and saw her hair, her size, her clothes, and reminded her that she was doing “woman” wrong, just like a donkey could never forget he was a donkey because of the man with the stick. Without the stick, she might never have realized she was a donkey at all. Jack Smith was just another stick, and she wasn’t about to take a beating sitting down. “So what? Just tell me one thing—what did Ellie wish for?”

“Ah, that’s definitely private information.” But then Jack paused, cocked his head and considered her. “Can you guess? Do you know her well enough to guess?”

“Will you tell me if I guess correctly?”

“Yes. But you only get one chance.”

Pat stared him down, but didn’t see him. Her mind’s eye focused on Ellie. What did she want?

“It wasn’t something material,” she said, thinking back on the girl who seemed on a quest to try on every personality and outfit in existence. “That was never enough for her—having. She wanted to be.”

After trying to be her sister, Ellie had tried on other identities, imitating popular TikTokers, and got a bit of her own following from her imitations. She put on accents, wore cat ears, experimented with surrealism, and realized she was nonbinary—which was deeply annoying to her.

“I’d rather be a trans guy,” she said to Pat. “You have to know something about yourself to be trans. All I know, being nonbinary, is that I don’t feel like much of anything. If I was sure I wanted a dick, that would be wild. Knowing that. How do they know?”

Pat knew enough trans people to know that “they” didn’t. Nothing was that simple. “Sometimes all you know is that something’s wrong, and it seems like gender might be playing a role, so you start binding, or try T. And you find relief in that. The relief is how you know.”

“Gender like an ingrown toenail,” said Ellie, with a little smirk that said she was trying to be funny. Then she frowned. “I get that though. It’s just like, you catch sight of yourself, or someone says something, or you move the wrong way and feel something, and it’s like, ugh. Not that again. And if it happens more and more you realize that there’s this discomfort buzzing in your head all the time.”

“Do you feel that way?” Pat asked gently.

“Not about, like, girl stuff,” Ellie said. “But sometimes I remember that I’m in a body, with only two arms and two legs, and my skin is just so … naked. And boring. Did you know that we actually have stripes, but we can’t see them? Cats can see them. And I just see my own skin sometimes, and I’m like, where are my stripes?”

Pat had felt both dismissive and curious about Ellie’s issues. She tried not to be dismissive of the young people in her care, but they were so young, and they all seemed to think that they knew everything, when they’d missed the key aspect: the thinking about things part. She didn’t blame them. How could you think about things when you were always on the internet, always tethered, summoned, distracted, soothed, irritated, and pressured?

The stripes hadn’t come up again, but Jenni had a friend who’d had cosmetic surgery that had gone slightly wrong, and Ellie had brought in the pictures Jenni had surreptitiously taken of her “friend,” mesmerized by the little pig nose.

“I mean, it’s disgusting,” Ellie had said. “But it’s also interesting. Sometimes I think I’d rather be a monster than a human being.”

Pat had both been revolted by the ease with which she could say that and also compelled by it. Ellie only wanted to be different because she resented how easy it was to be the same. When you were different, like Pat, with the wrong shape, the wrong clothes, the wrong understanding of how to be a girl, you wanted to not be a monster. You wanted everyone to stop looking at you like one.

And yet, when Pat was outside the pressure of those eyes, she did want it. She wanted to be big and powerful and independent. She wanted to be … other than human. Inside the category “human” there were too many rules. But humans also had minds that could lift them out of the world they lived in. Sometimes Pat thought that if she could just put herself into the mind of a monster, she could be free.

Something clicked together in Pat’s head. She’d been back-footed too long. “Wait,” she said. “What did you mean, before? Not so waifish in person? When did you see her in person?”

Jack smiled, and the ice cracked. “Clever, clever,” he said. “Yes. I was there that night, on the Common.”

Pat’s hands balled into fists. What the absolute fuck? He’d been there? And he just sauntered in here like it was none of his business? “What are you? Some kind of psychopath? Why were you there? What did you do to her?!”

Jack’s hands raised and his mouth opened in shocked offense. “Me? You know all I do is grant wishes … with my app. What could I have done to her? What could I have done that turned her into that?”

The word that echoed in her head, and Pat’s mind kept generating images that she rejected over and over again. No. No. He couldn’t be saying that it was real.

“If you were there, you must have seen what happened to her. What happened? Where did she go afterwards? Did someone take her? Why did she leave her phone? Who—”

“I assume she didn’t take her phone because she didn’t have hands anymore.”

Pat stared at him, at his boring, smug tech-bro face, saying those words with a complete lack of wonder or horror, and the office around them went cold, icy-shivery, and open, as if abruptly, impossibly, the ten-by-eight office was cavernous.

She didn’t have hands anymore.

Oh, Ellie, did you trade your hands for stripes?

When Pat was sixteen, she’d taken the team bus to State College Pennsylvania for the Open, ending up with a gold medal in saber around her neck at the fencing house—a shitty frat with beer-sticky floors and ancient mite-riddled furniture, drinking because no one noticed. Then that épée kid, wearing their bronze, had said hi, said they liked her shirt. Together they’d pretended to be werewolves, bowwowwowing around the house, racing in circles in the yard, building a den up in the bedroom, where it had just been growls and nails and bodies, and not … the mortifying ordeal of being fat and breasted and puffy and as naked as a mole rat, and having Erin say, over and over again, “Women’s bodies are just better; don’t you love them; don’t you love being with someone like you?”

In what fucking way was skinny, pretty Erin like her?

The épée kid had been like her. They’d loved the same things, the same stories and legends, the same way of being in their bodies, in their beasts. Why did having the same parts matter, when you could speak and think and love and growl the same instead?

“My office is on the Common,” said Jack, cool and calm. “I was taking an after-dinner stroll. You need to move the blood to move the digestion, you know.”

“When did you see her?” Pat pushed. “What was she doing? Was she with anyone?”

“Hold on, hold on. Let me put myself back in the moment.” He shut his eyes and took a deep theatrical breath. Then he spoke. “I was walking on the Common because I like the way the lights look after dark. The large white globes, the blue zap of bugs-be-gone. I saw her there, standing under the lights, burrowed into a thick wool-lined plaid jacket. She was checking her phone, perhaps waiting for someone. I wouldn’t have looked twice at her, except she had an expression on her face, the one where it was clear that she wanted something—wanted it badly enough to make a mistake.”

“Is that … a familiar look for you?”

Jack’s gaze settled on her, unbearably steady. “Don’t you see it on your own face every day?”

“Why—” Pat said, then wished she hadn’t even started to acknowledge the question. But if she’d started she had to finish. “Why would I? Why is this important?”

But a creeping sensation down her spine said it was important. That desire, that hunger, it was like the scent of fresh blood to a carrion crow.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting things,” Jack said, his voice low and melodic. “Even the ‘wrong’ things. We all want things we aren’t allowed to have. These days all the bad things seem so close, so we panic and lash out, and claim that the rules are not about behavior at all, but thought. We expect everyone to want the right things, because if we all think perfectly, the monsters will all die. But no, we are all monsters, with dangerous, desirous thoughts, and sometimes we deserve to get what we want. And sometimes, if we make the right bargain, we can get it.”

That word “bargain” again tickled a long-unused antenna on the back of Pat’s brain. But she ignored it. “What does this have to do with Ellie?”

Jack sat back, his lips twitching to the side slightly, but not in his usual smug way. He almost seemed sorry. “Tell me,” he said. “Did you think anything was wrong with her?”

“What?”

“All of the comments on her videos, the discussions of her disappearance, they all said she was a deeply damaged girl. She’d been in therapy for a long time. She was a compulsive liar, she had some sort of complex. They picked apart everything she did and said—even her sister joined in on the speculating. But you talked to her. You were her therapist. What did you think?”

For a moment, even though she didn’t know where this was going, Jack didn’t seem like her enemy. Pat sat back, her lips parting, as she thought it through. “No,” she said finally. “No. She was a normal teenager—whatever normal means. She was fine. She just …”

“Wanted more.” Jack shook his head. “Her whole family is on my app. They’re simple people. Ellie, though … I noticed her because her wish was flagged as ‘ungrantable.’ You were right, you know, with your guess. She didn’t want to have. She wanted to be.”

After the conversation with Ellie about becoming a monster, Pat had spent a Saturday afternoon while Kate was out visiting her mother combing through Google to seek out a few websites from her childhood. The internet was like a farm field these days, the weeds and wild strains plowed under and sprayed with pesticides to let a monoculture grow on top, so she’d had to use the Wayback Machine, and give up on some things that had existed for too short a time to be archived, even if they had shaped who she was in incontrovertible, unexpected ways.

A few were still around—those ancient sites that were just artists sharing their pictures of fairies or wolves or toadstools. Some were archived—she even found a werewolf story she’d written a long time ago, back when you got it included in an archive by emailing it to the website’s owner.

But one forum she used to frequent was still going strong. She had to make a new registration to get in, came up with a new pseudonym, and then the threads appeared before her, rich and bold with unread posts: stories, art, and—as she looked deeper into it—something she hadn’t realized was there back when she was younger: porn.

She spent a long time clicking through those threads, images loading far faster than they had when she’d been a kid. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, and looked and read and read and looked.

It became a habit—much more relaxing than her usual pacing around waiting for Kate to come back from her weekly lunch with her cold and vindictive mother, getting ready to soothe and comfort. It had been fun. There were gorgeous pictures, exciting stories, Etsy shops selling playful and creative sex toys. There was a community—all pseudonymous—who shared an interest, and enjoyed coming together to please and entertain each other.

It felt queer in a good way. It felt like—it felt like what the LGBT+ community in college had been supposed to be, and ended up not being at all.

Back then she’d been looking forward to having a community big enough for her to actually feel like she belonged. But instead it was just her high school girlfriend Erin writ large. The group had been helpful at first—offering her new models, new words to try on and test for herself. But it came with new morals, new ways of judging the people around you. She’d wanted to be done with the judging.

Eventually, Pat decided she found the people boring. So she’d left. She got her master’s in social work, she found a gym where the women cared about how much weight they could lift instead of how much they weighed, and she met Kate, who was beautiful in the way lesbians weren’t supposed to be beautiful, and liked Pat in the way lesbians never liked Pat, and, well, once you got gay married, you didn’t have to prove your queer cred anymore. Kate was kinky and playful, and didn’t mind if Pat growled in bed, or pounced, or kept her clothes on mostly. “I like it,” she’d said. “It feels rough and desperate.” And Pat had thought—all right. This is enough.

“Just before I was about to leave the Common and head home, I saw her again,” Jack said, his voice smooth and enticing. “Maybe you don’t believe I could have been simply lucky enough to be there. But that’s your business. I saw the little wooden box she was holding; I saw her open it; I saw something warm and gold pour out of it, like draping tendrils, long, leafless vines. She laughed, so delighted, and stepped wide, opening her arms, letting the box fall, letting it happen.

“Then the tendrils looped around her, twined up her, climbed with needle threads across her skin, both over and under her clothes, until they sewed themselves into her shoulder blades, and burst out into abstract sculptures of wings. What did you think of those swirling patterns they made? More art nouveau or Lisa Frank?

“Was I concerned? Of course not. We all saw her grab her phone from where it had been propped on the lamppost and grin into the camera. ‘This is it,’ she says. ‘This is what I wanted.’ I believed her. You might protest: But the transformation continues, her skin goes rigid, the tendrils get so tight! But that’s all you saw. The view lurches, the phone falls; the stream dies. But I saw her throw up her arms; I saw the vines bind them into her wings, the fingers sprouting into feathery veins. I saw the new version of Ellie leap joyously, her wings clap the air, and then she was up, catching a thermal, in the wind, in the sky, and so soon, out of sight.”

Pat’s whole body felt numb, her skin buzzing strangely. She swallowed, and took an awkward, ragged breath, just now realizing that she hadn’t breathed the whole time Jack had been describing what had happened. “You—you’re saying that’s actually what happened. That you saw it happen.”

“You saw it too. We all did. If you don’t believe it, what do you think happened?”

Pat recoiled. “Kids these days can do all sorts of things with make-up, and AI and CGI and filters. She just wanted attention. She wanted—” revenge. On me.

“Can I use your computer?” Kate had asked. “Mine is shutting down every ten minutes again. I need to figure out how to reset it.”

“Sure,” Pat had said, carelessly. She was busy with a new book that had just come in the mail.

She lost track of time after that, but when she resurfaced from the novel, she’d frowned. Kate hadn’t come back from their bedroom where her laptop was. She got up and walked in. “Did you find what you needed?”

On the screen was a draft of the commission Pat had ordered a few weeks ago. It must have come into her email while Kate was on her computer. Beside it was the box containing her internet history. Kate was slowly and methodically going through it, page by page.

“What are you doing?” Pat asked warily.

Kate looked at her, her pretty, doll-like face unpleasantly flushed with red. “You paid three hundred dollars for this?”

It hadn’t ended there, of course.

There had been some shouting. Well, Kate shouted. Pat couldn’t figure out how to breathe deeply enough to say anything, the slimy mortification holding her down like a monstrous ooze.

“Do you really like that? You think it’s—” Kate’s face contorted in disgust—“arousing?”

How did you say yes to that?

Kate had packed a bag and gone off to stay with her (cold, vindictive) mother, and Pat had felt like her every word had gnawed a hole right through her, a hole that seeped pus and fluid every time she tried to move.

“I’ve found something,” Ellie said in their meeting the next day. She’d seemed happier and more upbeat since she’d named her desire to be more than human and had found an outlet doing cool make-up styles on her TikTok, making herself look like a mer-creature or an elf or a vixen.

She showed Pat a website that looked sketchy as hell: a blog by a blonde lady who claimed to have Cherokee blood and was explaining how to shape-shift into a fox through drumming and meditation.

“I tried it,” Ellie said. “And I felt it working, but when I opened up my eyes I was just me again. I don’t know how to make it stick.”

Pat eyed the sidebar full of “kill cancer cells with high heat” and “angel numbers” advertisements, and wanted to snarl. How stupid did you have to be to believe you could have what you wanted in life? “Ellie. You know these are scammers, or worse—”

But Ellie was off talking about a podcast where they did dream reading and told everyone they were secretly healers or communicators with the dead or something else. “And, like, I know that’s not true, because they talk like everyone has some secret psychic power, and clearly that’s cope. But I think I do.”

“Why do you think that?” Pat snapped. She’d suddenly, without seeing the fraying strands ahead, run into the end of her rope. “Why do you think that you’re different than everyone else? Who doesn’t wish they weren’t stuck being human? Clearly there’s a whole market for people who hate themselves enough to want to pretend that the secrets of crystals will save them from being ordinary. But no one gets anything more than a delusion! So you just have to get used to it—all you’re ever going to be able to do is use your imagination, until even that isn’t allowed anymore—”

Ellie was staring at her, mouth pinched, eyes wild, and Pat shut her mouth with a snap. She’d gone too far. She backpedaled hard. “I just—I mean you have to stay safe on the internet—”

But it was too little, too late. Ellie didn’t come to their next week’s session. And the week after, Ellie was gone.

The cops had given up. But Pat hadn’t. Pat couldn’t.

Not when it was her fault.

“Oh yes,” Jack said. “CGI and make-up. That would be an easy wish to grant. One of my users definitely knows how to do it. If she wanted to trick everyone and run away, she could have done that. But that’s having, not being, isn’t it?”

He was watching Pat, unblinking, a tiny quirk of a smile on one side of his mouth, as if he could see deep down inside her and know what was there that she didn’t want anyone else to see.

Slowly Pat put her hands on her desk, and then, abruptly, all in one go, she thrust upward, lunging halfway across her desk toward him. “What did you do to her?” she roared.

Jack startled back, the feet of his chair skidding a few inches away on the rug. But instead of afraid, he looked delighted. His grin spread wide. “You know exactly what I do. I grant wishes.”

“Bring her back. Turn her back.” Pat growled the words through clenched teeth.

“You’d steal her wish from her?” Jack tsked. “I can’t do that. So unkind. Almost like it’s just fairy gold.” He smiled, a flash of white enamel veneers. “Anyways, that’s not your wish. Guilt isn’t the same as wanting. I can’t take away Ellie’s, but I could give you yours.”

“I don’t want anything. And I won’t give you anything in trade. What did Ellie give you? What did you take from her?”

Of course, in truth, Pat wanted thousands of things. She wanted Ellie to be back and safe and satisfied with who she was. She wanted Kate to forget she ever found out about Pat’s internet hobbies. She wanted to not want the things she did, love the things she loved, because life was hard enough as it was. Those were grown-up wishes—when you knew you couldn’t change the world, so you thought if you could just change yourself it would be good enough. Being happy would be good enough, even if you had to sacrifice yourself to get it, even if you never got what you really wanted.

“I didn’t have to take anything,” Jack said. “I told you. I have an app. These days, people will click terms and conditions boxes without reading them, they’ll share their true-names, their true-selves, their credit card numbers, and what they desire most desperately with any semi-professional-looking Google form. I’d already gotten everything of worth from Ellie VanPelt. It was simply an act of honor to grant her wish.”

What?

True names. Honor. Fairy gold. Pat had spent weeks in the folklore sections of the library as a kid, starting with werewolves, then gulping down every book that held monsters. She’d never thought she’d hear those words at work. Was he joking, or did he mean it? Pat wanted to laugh with incredulity, and would have, if she wasn’t so angry.

“Of course, it was a pleasure to grant hers. An interesting wish. Everyone else just wants to have or to look. Ellie wanted her life to be magic. Of course I’d grant her wish.” He stared at Pat. “I’d grant yours too. But I’d need your name.” His eyes flicked to the nameplate. “Not that one. That one’s worthless. I want the name that holds your secrets.”

Pat’s hands balled into fists, but not the fighting kind, the kind where her hands clenched so tight that she was losing feeling in her fingertips. Jack—Jack be nimble, Jack Frost, Jack the Giant Killer, Jack, a generic word for “man”, Hugh Mann, not a man at all. No, he was as old as lies, as old as promises. He was the eternal stranger in the city, a predator on what made humans human—on their words. The part of her that was still like Ellie had suspected it, the part that believed the world was bigger than it looked, that it had to be more than what today’s fools had made it. But what did you do when you found out the dangers were real? What did you do when they asked for your name?

You said no. You didn’t bargain with the fair folk. You knew better than to make that mistake. If they took your name, they took you with it. They would grant your wish, but they’d make you regret it.

Just then, Pat’s phone lit up on her desk. Artwork for @WolfenMoon69, the message read. Attachment: 1 image.

Jack’s eyes flicked to it and he smiled.

He lifted his gaze to her. “There we go.”

Suddenly, he was on the wrong side of the desk. He reached out, and placed a light hand on top of Pat’s bloodless knuckles. Her heart jumped in her throat. She wanted to run, to shove both hands into his chest and hurl him over the desk and across the room, but she couldn’t move. None of her muscles moved, save for the organ that beat, beat, beat, like the frantic drums of retreat in her head.

“You did your best, pup,” he said, his voice purring the word. “You tried, so hard, to look after her. But you bind yourself. Not too long ago, people would light bonfires and dress up in animal masks and skins, and dance, because it warded off the weakness of civilization. Humans are so vulnerable within society, with their names and bonds and promises. Especially to people like me. But if they can remember how to become the nameless beast, they are safe. Wild beasts are free.” He tipped his head, his lids lowering, lashes fluttering against his cheeks. “So dance, WolfenMoon69. Wear your wolf ears and your wolf cock, and wrap yourself in the skins of your wild cousins, and keep your darlings’ secrets safe, from people like me, from those of us who wait on the mounds, in the glades, and at the crossroads, to grant your wishes, and free you from the world that humans made.”

He removed his fingertips, and the backs of Pat’s hands started to itch.

Then he was away—back on the other side of the desk, straightening his shirt and adjusting his blazer. He gave a little smile—a “thank you for your time”—and moved to the door, putting his hand on the handle. “I’m so sorry I can’t help you find that poor girl,” he said. “But good luck. I know you’ll find her eventually. Just follow your nose.”

Pat cupped her hand over her face. Her nose—cold and a little wet, and not quite where it should be—pressed against the rough pad of her hand.

Then the door was opening and he was in the hall, and then he was just gone, as if he’d never been there at all, and Pat’s door was closed without it ever shutting.

She took one ragged breath and then looked down. She’d hit her phone, somehow, and the commissioned image had opened up. She saw the final version of the avatar portrait, the rageful wolfen head, the proud shoulders, the blooded claws, and on either side, she saw her own hands braced desperately against the desk, with lush, dark fur sprouting from the backs, and spreading.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors