Stolen

D Demonic "Please tell me you don't believe in that stuff," said a voice beside my shoulder. I looked at my seat-mate. Mid-forties, business suit, laptop, pale strip around his ring finger where he'd removed his wedding band. Nice touch. Very inconspicuous. "You shouldn't read crap like that," he said, flashing a mouthful of coffee stains. "It'll rot your brain." I nodded, smiled politely, and hoped he'd go away, at least as far away as he could on an airplane flying at an altitude of several thousand feet. Then I went back to reading the pages I'd printed from the believe.com Web site. "Does that really say werewolves?" my seat-mate said. "Like fangs and fur? Michael Landon? I Was a Teenage Werewolf?" "Michael...'" "Uh, an old movie. Before my time. Video, you know." Another polite nod. Another not-so-polite attempt to return to my work. "Is that for real?" my seat-mate asked. "Someone's selling information on werewolves? Werewolves? What kind of people would buy crap like that?" "I would." He stopped, finger poised above my papers, struggling to convince himself that someone could believe in werewolves and not be a complete nutcase, at least not if that someone was young, female, and stuck in the adjoining seat for another hour. I decided to help. "For sure," I said, affecting my best breathless blond accent. "Werewolves are in. Vampires are so five minutes ago. Gothic, ugh. Me and my friends, we tried it once, but when I dyed my hair black, it went green." "That's, uh-" "Green! Can you believe it? And the clothes they wanted us to wear? Totally gross. So then, like, Chase, he said, what about werewolves? He heard about this group in Miami, so we talked to them and they said vampires were out. Werewolves were the new thing. Chase and I, we went to see them, and they had these costumes, fur and teeth and stuff, and we put them on and popped these pills and presto, we were werewolves." "Uh, really?" he said, eyes darting about for an escape route. "Well, I'm sure-" "We could run and jump around and howl, and we went out hunting, and one of the guys caught this rabbit, and, like, I know it sounds gross, but we were so hungry and the smell of the blood-" "Could you excuse me," the man interrupted. "I need to use the washroom." "Sure. You look a little green. Probably airsickness. My friend Tabby has that real bad. I hope you're feeling better, 'cause I was going to ask if you wanted to come with me tonight. There's this werewolf group in Pittsburgh. They're having a Grand Howl tonight. I'm meeting Chase there. He's kinda my boyfriend, but he switch-hits, you know, and he's really cute. I think you'd like him." The man mumbled something and sprinted into the aisle faster than one would think possible for a guy who looked like he hadn't exceeded strolling speed since high school. "Wait 'til I tell you about the Grand Howl," I called after him. "They're so cool." Ten minutes later, he still hadn't returned. Damn shame. That airsickness can be a real son of a bitch. I returned to my reading. believe.com was a Web site that sold information on the paranormal, a supernatural eBay. Scary that such things existed. Even scarier was that they could turn a profit. believe.com had an entire category devoted to auctioning off pieces of spaceship wrecks that, at last count, had 320 items for sale. Werewolves didn't even warrant their own classification. They were lumped into "Zombies, Werewolves, and Other Miscellaneous Demonic Phenomena." Miscellaneous demonic phenomena? The demonic part kind of stung. I was not demonic. Well, maybe driving some hapless guy from his airplane seat wasn't exactly nice, but it certainly wasn't demonic. A miscellaneous demonic phenomenon would have shoved him out the escape hatch. I'd barely even been tempted to do that. Yes, I was a werArmstrong, Kelley is the author of 'Stolen', published 2003 under ISBN 9780670031375 and ISBN 0670031372.