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Story: The Elf Beside Himself

Early on in the pandemic, there’d been incidents of vampires and ghouls in hospitals getting triggered—in the bitey kind of way—by being around too much blood. But if what Dr. Zhou at Broad Street All Night Vet (and clandestine shifter clinic) said was correct, that was a matter of staying fed and having basic self-control. Early in the pandemic, we didn’t know our asses from our faces, much less how to help vampires or ghouls control the blood lust. But you could hand a ghoul some fucking bologna or a goddamn summer sausage, and they’d befine. And as long as a vampire had eaten within the last like three days, they’d also be fine.

A point of comparison—you don’t see people just going apeshit on a bakery counter just because they haven’t had breakfast yet. People can execute some basic self-control. Just make sure your vamp or your ghoul isn’tstarving, and it’ll be fine. But they’d put the HCPL—the Health Care Protection Law—in place before they’d really understood how vampirism and ghoulism worked.

And that wasn’t even counting the likely thousands of both who had died pretty early on because they’d tried to eat people’s faces when they ‘woke up’ from being declared dead. Working in the morgue had also been a pretty risky prospect at that stage in the pandemic—now, whether you were an attendant or a medical examiner, you had a veritable arsenal of ways to subdue a vampire or ghoul that weren’t lethal—even if youalsohad that last resort weapon that meant a giant ream of paperwork if you used it.

There were also entire separate areas in most morgues for Arcanavirus deaths that could easily be locked down if one of them happened to ‘wake up’ again.

The rest of us—elves, orcs, shifters, fauns, and Arcs—never died to begin with, so we were a lot easier to cope with. Those of us whose bodies transformed usually spent quite a bit of time unconscious, so we could be transported somewhere else where they could deal with us. Arcs usually did a lot of panicked screaming—because suddenly there were dead people or visions or whatever happening to them—so they tended not to be too much of a physical challenge, either.

So far, though, the only law on the books that barred Nids or Arcs from holding any kind of position was the HCPL, and it only targeted vampires and ghouls. Not that there weren’t other laws being thrown around various state- and municipal-level governments. There had been several attempts to bar vampires, ghouls, shifters, and orcs from holding any jobs that dealt with kids, for instance, although none of them had stuck, at least that I knew of, anyway.

But that kind of talk—the kind where people saidbut what if somebody eats your kids—was what had been leveled against Janice Butcher. Not that School Board members were actuallyinclassrooms, mind you, butthink of the children.

Jesus fuck.

As far as I knew, no shifter or vampire or orc or ghoul who was a teacher had ever eaten somebody’s kid. That one I did take personally—not for me, of course, but for Taavi. Who loved kids and was about to start school in January to be a fucking teacher. So, yeah, I was going to take it fucking personally if somebody wanted to argue that he might go feral and eat somebody’s kid.

The level of stupid to which humans—okay, yeah, not just humans, butpeoplein general—can descend will never cease to amaze me. And I’m not really an optimist when it comes to the general capabilities of people. People are fucking stupid. And, yet, they continue to surprise me, and not in a good way.

Taking a page out of Doc’s book, I started a spreadsheet of possible victims. Janice Butcher might not belong on it, so I put her in with a question mark.

Janice Butcher?

Fox shifter.

Half Indigenous.

Possible suicide?

After that, I added Gregory.

Gregory Crane.

Badger shifter.

Indigenous.

Mock-suicide by hanging with a belt.

Then I added Tara Redsky.

Tara Redsky.

Bobcat shifter.

Indigenous.

Mock-suicide by hanging with a belt.

I wondered if there were any others.

Going through obituaries looking for the kind of oblique wording people used—or, rather, didn’t use—when someone dies by suicide makes figuring it out rather difficult. Gregory’s just saidtaken from usso that we didn’t piss off the cops, which was suitably vague.

It wasn’t easy, on multiple levels. First, sorting through obituaries, even though Shawano County is small, is a time-consuming and fucking depressing process. Reading paragraph after paragraph about people’s grandparents, siblings, spouses, friends… People who were loved and mourned.

Even when they’d died in their sleep at like ninety-five or a hundred, it was still a loss.

The really hard ones were the kids, teens, twenty-somethings. Accidents, car crashes, mostly, or unexpected illnesses like leukemia. Those without causes I made note of—even in obituaries, people don’t like to talk about suicide.