She read everything she could find online about werewolves, which told her a great deal about horror movies and very little about actual biology, which made sense because actual werewolves were not, conventionally speaking, a biological phenomenon.
She read mythology. She read about the berserkers of Norse tradition, who wore wolf-skins and were said to transform in battle. She read about the loup-garou of French Louisiana, the skin-walkers of the Southwest (and promptly closed those tabs, understanding enough to know that was not her story to research). She read about Romanian strigoi and Hungarian werewolves and the clinical condition lycanthropy, which was a psychological disorder characterized by delusion and bore no relationship to what was happening to her body.
She was not delusional. Her senses were telling her things that turned out to be true. That morning she had known, from the smell of the air, that rain would come before noon, and it had. She had known, from the sound of footsteps, that it was her mother's particular morning rhythm before her mother's door even opened. She was not imagining. She was receiving information the way she had always received information, just through new channels.
The full moon was on a Friday. She had not planned for this. She should have planned for this.
She knew something was building three days before. The ripples under her skin became more frequent, lasting longer, and she had to concentrate to keep them down — breathing through them the way you breathe through a cramp, deliberate and focused, waiting for the wave to pass. She started waking at three in the morning, fully alert, her body crackling with a restless energy that had no outlet, and she lay in her bed and gripped the mattress and watched the clock.
The night of the full moon, she didn't sleep at all.
At midnight, when the moon was at its height and its light was coming through her curtains in a pale wash that made everything in her room look submerged, the change came.
It was not graceful. It was not the smooth, cinematic transformation of movies, the beautiful violence of wings spreading. It was biology. It was her body doing something her body was not built to do, and it hurt, and the sound she made into her pillow was low and private and desperate. Her spine flexed in a direction that spines do not flex, and she slid off the bed onto the floor and stayed there, hands pressed to the floorboards, panting, while her skeleton made itself new.
Her hands spread on the floor and she watched them with her face against the hardwood, and watched her fingers lengthen slightly, and felt the shift in her shoulders, the drop in her center of gravity. She bit the back of her hand to keep from making noise.
And then — in the middle of the pain, underneath it, running through it like a vein of ore through rock — something that was not pain. Something large and clean and wolf-shaped, a version of her that had no self-consciousness and no doubt, that stood on four legs in the dark forest of its own nature and knew exactly where it was and what it was and felt no wrongness in any of it.
She lay on the floor of her bedroom for an hour, breathing.
The change did not complete. Not fully, not that first time. Later she would understand that this was a mercy — full transformation required experience, required something like permission given to the animal part of herself, and she hadn't given that permission yet. She hadn't known there was permission to give. So her body did what it could: it shifted, incompletely, leaving her in a state between, and then the moon moved and the pull eased and slowly, over the following two hours, she came back.
She lay on the floor of her bedroom in the pre-dawn dark and took stock of herself. She was exhausted. She ached everywhere, the ache of muscles used in new configurations, the ache of a body that had tried to be something and then tried again to be something else. She was still herself, recognizably, by every measurement — she had not grown a tail or fur, had not been monstrous. But she was also not the exact same Mara Vasquez who had gone to bed the night before.
There was more of her. That was the only way she could put it. More of her than there had been.
At five in the morning she got up, dressed, and went to Abuela Celia's apartment.
Abuela was already awake. She was always already awake. She was sitting at her kitchen table with her tea and her rosary, and when Mara came through the door Abuela looked up with an expression that told Mara she had been waiting for this.
"Sit down, mija," Abuela said.
Mara sat.
Abuela Celia set down the rosary and folded her hands and looked at Mara for a long time. "How bad was it?"
"You know?" Mara's voice came out rough. Not with emotion — though there was emotion — but just rough, the way it had been all week.
"I had a feeling." Abuela's voice was steady. "I've had the feeling for a few weeks. The dream about the wolf." She paused. "Your grandfather's grandmother had the same gift. We thought it had skipped in the family. We hoped."
"Gift," Mara said flatly.
"I know it doesn't feel like one right now."
"Abuela, my body tried to turn inside out."
"I know." Abuela got up, slowly, and moved to the cabinet over the stove where she kept things that were not spices, jars of dried plants and small cloth bundles tied with string. "And I know it will happen again. And I know it isn't only that." She turned, holding a small jar. "I know what's changing."
Mara looked at the table. "What is changing?"
Abuela set the jar down and sat back across from her. "You are," she said simply. "You are changing. In more ways than one." She paused. "And I think, mija, if you are very honest with me, and very honest with yourself, you have maybe been changing for longer than the wolf bite."
The silence in the kitchen was warm. It smelled of candles and dried rosemary and the particular safety of a place that had held you when you were small.
Mara looked at her hands. "My voice is different," she said. "My face feels different when I touch it. My body is —" She stopped.
"Different," Abuela offered.
"Different." Mara swallowed. "And some of the different feels wrong. And some of it —" She looked up. "Some of it doesn't."
Abuela Celia looked at her granddaughter with the full weight of seventy-two years of paying attention to people she loved, and nodded once. "Then we start there," she said. "With what doesn't feel wrong. And we work outward."