Chapter 25

“I was more afraid of you than you could ever be of me, I assure you.” However, when you tried to “define” us, I thought you were going to say that word. You know, the one that has become so popular. “Lycanthropes.” I hate that word.

“Lycanthrope” comes from a Greek legend about a cruel king who dishonored the name of the gods by feeding them human flesh. The gods cursed him, and he was turned into a half-human, half-wolf monster, uncontrollable and wild, a murderer. It is just a legend, and yet it has managed to inspire even science itself. In psychology, lycanthropy is considered a mental illness in which the subject believes himself capable of changing into the form of a wolf. And we are not sick.

Each and every one of us was born like this and we will die like this; the change of form is not imaginary.

I suppose that once the initial shock of both of us had passed, Johanna achieved on her own what I would not have expected in a million years: she understood us.