I barely remember any of it.

Did Nehemiah help me get my dad to the car? Did I object at all? Were Charice and Rob there, or did I call them on the phone? Did Rob try to crack a joke to make me feel better? It was all so surreal my mind couldn’t handle it.

I do know that I didn’t have my ‘69 black Fastback Mustang. That was in Oakland parked near the Dearg Due’s warehouse. But Nehemiah had repaired enough cars by removing the Chaos that we’d found one of them with gas in the tank still working.

I remember things in bits and pieces, still images really. Finding my dad and the wreckage and not Tain. Checking his pulse. Lifting him into the back of a car and laying him across the back seat. Driving through Vallejo aimlessly, sitting at a stoplight deciding whether to turn right or left. Then understanding that I didn’t even know where I was going.

Cars honked at me. I had anti-déjà vu, that feeling you get when you are somewhere that you’ve seen every day for your whole life but you don’t recognize any of it. I’m sure that’s a thing.

Eventually I ended up laying my dad on my bed in my apartment, the only thing I had not moved yet. Per the usual, Eddy wasn’t there then, he was working graveyard shift. Being my best friend through high school, he knew my dad well and he’d been at the funeral. If he saw my dad it would open up a whole can of worms and word would get to my mom. And that couldn’t happen yet. For one, my dad wasn’t conscious at all. He just kept groaning and moaning.

At some point he had regained consciousness, but seemed groggy and didn’t respond to any verbal stimuli. A far-off gaze filled his eyes, as if looking through me.

I knew things were bad after I gave him a shower.

“Okay dad, we got to dry off now.”

He got out of the shower and rested on his knuckles and feet, like a dog, like Tain would. Then he proceeded to shake himself off as if he was still a German shepherd.

He remained on all fours when he followed me into the living room, AKA, my room. I had a larger T-shirt that fit him, and my boxers and jeans fit him as well because he was a lot skinnier than I remembered. He crawled over to Tain’s dog bowl and whined when there wasn’t any dog food in it.

“This is not good.”

So Tain was a werewolf because the werewolf was my dad.

I thought the Dearg Due had killed my dad. And Nehemiah had betrayed him. Nehemiah had erased his own memory, so he wouldn’t remember my dad, in werewolf form or otherwise. The Dearg Due thought she killed my dad too, several years ago, so she had no idea who the werewolf attacking her was.

My best guess was that after being beaten nearly to death by the vampires, his body turned himself into a werewolf instinctively as some sort of defense mechanism to keep him from dying.

But he’d been so injured, his werewolf form regressed even further into that like a German Shepherd mutt. And ever since then, he’d been locked in that dog state. Which explained why Tain showed up on my Mom’s doorstep one day a few years ago. Perhaps the trauma of near-death made him forget who he really was, like the way he acted right then. But whatever happened to him in the past, didn’t really matter.

“What am I gonna do with you dad? Tain?”

My dad tilted his head sideways and gnawed on the T-shirt I’d thrown over him, not liking the clothing in contact with the skin.

I could not keep him at the apartment because of Eddy. Also I moved out already. I couldn’t bring him to my mom’s house. Mom had just barely gotten over the fact that my dad died. She’d really lose it if she found out he was alive, only to learn that he was trapped in a dog’s state of mind. And then only to learn that he had been Tain the whole time. It was too much to handle, even for me. And I witnessed it all with my own eyes.

And there wasn’t only Mom. Aiden would have to hear the news too. I didn’t know how his young teenage mind would handle it, what with all the raging puberty hormones. It would wreck his little Minecraft world. And what would Gavin say?

Gavin.

He was all the way up in Washington, back living his own life. He had said he would come back soon. He probably didn’t mean that soon. He couldn’t help me right now, but he needed to know.

I picked up my smart phone and snapped a picture of my dad.

Right before I could call my brother, Dad began whining. He fell on the floor and curled up in the fetal position.

Before I knew it, he was back in the form of Tain.

I ran my hands through my hair. This was insane. I paced around the room, trying to decide what to do, but unable to think clearly.

I needed to talk to someone. Anyone. But in my rage I’d blown off Rob and Charice, again. I’d literally just done this last week. As a Ban-he, but still. Who knew where they were now. They probably wanted nothing to do with me.

I called my brother.

The phone rang and rang. A groggy voice answered eventually. “Hello?”

“Hey Gavin. It’s Sean.” My voice shook.

“Bro. It’s crazy late.”

I took a deep, quivering breath. “I gotta tell you something crazy, and I really hate that I’m saying over the phone. But if I sent you the picture text first, you’d probably pass out…”