I cross the days off the calendar.

28th, 29th, 30th.

And then, just after sundown, the front door explodes like it’s been dynamited, and I hear Max yelping and then such screams and snarls as you’ve never heard before, like there’s a rabies outbreak at the zoo, and furniture is crashing.

Then Max is whimpering outside my door.

“It might hurt the Master and Mistress! It might hurt them!”

Crash! Smash! Howl.

It?

I pound on the door.

“Max, can you hear me?”

He whimpers and whines and slobbers. I hope I have his attention.

“Max! Let me out!”

“Can’t!”

The chaos downstairs continues. It doesn’t sound as if Mom and Dad are getting the best of it. The whole house begins to shake and sway. If this goes on much longer, the place may be ripped off its foundations.

“Max! I can help them!”

Max stops whimpering, and, in a voice that sounds almost like his old self, asks a surprisingly intelligent question. “But why should you help them after what they’ve done to you?”

“Max! They’re my parents! Can’t you understand that?”

Then he’s tearing away the boards nailed to the door, and in a moment, I’m walking downstairs into what used to be the living room, with Max shambling somewhere behind me.

There isn’t much of the downstairs left. The walls are out. The TV is smashed to bits and smoldering. Most of the furniture is in splinters. Wading through what used to be the dining room, a huge, hairy Thing faces off against my parents, circling as they do. Momma’s dress is in tatters. Poppa’s cape is gone, and his vest and starched shirt are shredded, and everybody’s claws are covered with I-don’t-want-to-know-what. Everybody’s eyes are blazing like furnaces. They lunge at one another, jump out of the way, parry, and thrust with their whole bodies like fencers.

“Stop it! All of you!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and somehow, like my hearing and my sense of smell, my voice has become something it didn’t used to be, and the whole house shakes with the sound of it, and they all stop and turn toward me, their eyes still blazing, fangs gleaming.

Quickly I reach into one of the few surviving pieces of furniture, a little sideboard cabinet, and take out two of the long silver nails I had carefully placed there when we opened my parents’ coffins for the first time.

It’s trite, I know, and not what you’d expect from someone of my background, but I actually hold up the two long nails like a cross as I say, “Now everybody back off.”

They do, equally recoiling from the silver nails.

“Mom, Dad… is that you, Heinrich?” The Big Hairy Thing nods, breathing heavily. “Mom, Dad, you have to learn to let go. I’m grown-up now. You have your life-or unlife or whatever it is-and I have mine. I’m not a minion. I’m your daughter. I ask you to respect that. Do you think you actually can? Do you?”

The fire fades from their eyes, and their fangs retract. Heinrich, a.k.a. the Hairy Thing, just stands there, panting.

Before anyone can say anything, I continue.

“Mom, Dad, I’ve got an announcement to make. I’m not the same as I once was. I’ve been… bitten.”

For an instant I can see Momma’s eyes beam with pride, in the sense of our little girl has grown up, but then she seems just confused, because she knows it isn’t what she thought.

I turn to show her the bruise on my neck, which I’ve had for a month now. “That ain’t a hickey, Momma.”

She just looks stupefied.

“Momma, I want you to meet Heinrich. I love him.”

The Hairy Thing leans over, as if to lick my face the way a dog would, but then whines and draws away from the silver.

That is when I realize my hands are smoking and the silver nails are burning me. I let them drop to the floor, and before anyone can react, I rush over to the window, tear aside the drapes, and let the light of the full moon flood what is left of the dining room.

I begin to change then. Fur grows on my arms and legs. I feel my whole body melting, falling down, hardening into something else. My senses are much sharper than they’ve ever been before. It’s as if I can hear a cloud passing across the face of the moon, like silk wiped across glass, and I can hear every sound of the night. I can see in ways that I’ve never seen before, through things, sensing heat and life. Were I so inclined I could tell Max where every bug in the whole damn house is hiding.

But I am not so inclined. Heinrich nuzzles me behind the ear. We play. I try to say something more to my parents, and I think I actually do manage to say, “His middle name is Wolfgang.”

And my mother sputters, “But he’s not Jewish!” and she is sobbing in Poppa’s arms. “We’ve lost our daughter!”

“No,” Poppa says, “It’ll be all right, Honey Love, as long as the… er… cubs are brought up Jewish.”

Howling, Heinrich Wolfgang Schroeder and I leap through the window, out into the night.

What beautiful music we make.

And Bob’s Your Uncle by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Sometimes when it was night and Uncle Bob and Mom were fighting, Jake would go to the park and sit on the swings, listening to the rush of traffic on Franklin Boulevard and enjoying the dark. Everyone said the park was dangerous at night, but Jake had never had any trouble there, in spite of all the rumors of bad things happening. Jake thought it was far more dangerous to remain at home when the adults were fighting: Uncle Bob was using his fists and Mom was throwing things. Just last week she’d smashed his PlayStation by accident; Uncle Bob thought it was funny.

Uncle Bob wasn’t Jake’s real uncle, or so his mother had explained a year or so ago. “But, Jake, he’s like family. He takes care of us, not like the rest of our relatives; you know what they’re like…” She stopped and went on in a more subdued but injured tone, “Since your father died…”

Jake couldn’t remember his father, not really: the man had vanished when he was four, and that was more than half his lifetime ago. He relied on his mother to keep his father’s memory alive, but the things Mom said about his father changed over time; Jake could still remember when Mom had said it was a good thing he wasn’t alive anymore-that was shortly before she met Bob. “I get it that you want to have a guy around.” He shifted awkwardly in his slightly-too-large running shoes. Jake was small for his age and was often mistaken for being younger than nine, and it didn’t help that, being undersized, his clothes made him look like a kid since he wore younger children’s apparel because it fit, a constant reminder about how dissimilar he was to his classmates; he hated the teasing he endured. Along with that, he also hated it when his mom got down on one knee to look him in the eye, and he knew from Mom’s voice what was coming next. “But does it have to be him? Uncle Bob?”

She dropped down on one knee, so that she had to look up into his face. “Listen, Jake, you’re almost ten, and you can understand things very well. You’re really mature for your age, and you’ve always been a bastion for me. I couldn’t have made it this far without you.” She often called him a bastion when she was about to ask him to do something unpleasant. “If you can just try to get along with him. Just a little.”

“I do try. He’s the one who picks the fights.” He rarely let himself be dragged into Uncle Bob’s ranting, but for the last six months, the verbal barrage had increased and had been punctuated with vigorous slaps which Uncle Bob justified by blaming Jake for making him angry. Jake’s mom always tried to make Jake understand that Uncle Bob didn’t mean it-it was just that work was so hard and he thought it was unfair to be denied another promotion, or that he had had a bad week at poker, or that he was really tired and didn’t want anything noisy around him.