His great talons pierced the pup in four places when he hit, each puncture instantly mortal, and then he was gone again, banking hard to the other side of the meadow, which is perhaps an instinct in birds of prey.
Where he drifted down was a mere span before my copse of trees.
Holding the shattered, leaking pup down with one claw, he drove his beak down for a morsel, came up with it fast, leaning his head back so as to straighten his neck, work this meat down.
And again, and again, three bites in all. It was all the pup had to it. The bony tail yet flopped on the ground, and Zeus’s eagle eyes, attuned to just that type of movement, watched it, perhaps curious, perhaps amused.
At which point I stepped out.
He turned to face me, taking on his divine aspect in a matter of two steps.
“Lycaon,” he said, his voice thunderous, the whole realm trembling from it.
“Mighty Zeus,” I said back to him, and dipped my head in a show of respect, if not respect itself.
“What brings you to my field this day?” he asked, moving to the side to see me better, I think, his head actions still that of a bird even though he stood on man legs.
“Did you like your meal?” I said to him, and in a divine instant he saw the smile in my eyes, and he registered that he had just eaten one of my sons after all these years. He turned away, looked up into the sky, where presumably his boy-child was still falling, and would continue falling until fetched.
“You know not what you’ve done with this, Lycaon,” he said at last, licking a speck of the pup’s blood from the corner of his mouth and spitting it harshly down into the grass.
“It was to honor your greatness,” I told him. “You never allowed that possibility, did you?”
“To honor me?” he said.
“He was my own son,” I said, a growl rumbling in my chest. “The most precious thing I had to offer.”
He shook his head, looked to the sea in sorrow.
“Your least son,” he said. “Your weakest son. Did you even dispatch him yourself, or have it done, Lycaon?”
I only stared at him about this.
“And so you insist on honoring me in this fashion,” he said, turning back to me, his eyes sparking, flashing, the air around us crackling. “Despite the fact that I resist it, you continue the motion you started those many years ago. Did you ever stop to think there might be a reason for my reaction that day, Lycaon?”
“You would not be hoodwinked,” I said, my words barely crossing my lips.
“Such is the shortened sight and apprehension of mortals,” Zeus said. “When—when a god such as myself tastes of human flesh like this, Lycaon, even disguised human flesh, so begins the corruption.”
“You were already corrupt,” I said.
“Not like this,” Zeus said. “Never like this. This is the end of us, Lycaon—of the gods. This is the end of this age altogether.”
“And the beginning of mine,” I said, just loud enough.
“If you had kept from eating human flesh yourself,” Zeus said, “you would have become again who you used to be, did you know that, Lycaon?”
“I am who I am.”
“You are at that,” he said, still circling, still considering this new situation, these new terms. “This, I think, will be your age, your kind’s age. Hark, can you hear, can you smell it already, can you see it in your mind’s eye?”
With the benefit of his augmentation, or just because he willed it, I could: far away, in the stone house where I’d slaughtered the family, one of them was now rising. The daughter I’d taken in my mouth, shaken, and tossed aside.
I hadn’t bitten her deeply enough.
She was . . .
“No,” I said, taking a step back.
“Yes,” Zeus said, with force, and as we watched together, her frail form began to tremble and seize.
My bite, my teeth, my saliva—they were changing her.
Just as had happened with me, claws punched through the ends of her fingers, her legs broke backwards, and her mouth elongated into a muzzle.
She stood then, not on four feet like me, but on two, as I had been when I’d attacked her.
“I should have gelded you that day,” Zeus said, “and I cannot undo what you’ve started, but I can correct my mistake, anyway.”
He turned his hand over, palm up, and bade me rise, rise, and I had no choice: just like the newly born wolf-girl miles away, I stood up on two feet like this, and felt the world solid beneath me. Whereas before my balancing up on two legs had been a rare treat, due to my preferred sustenance—a rare treat I had to concentrate to maintain—now, due to my reshaped limbs, standing up on my hind legs was natural.
“No longer can you run down the fast little rabbits of the field,” Zeus proclaimed. “They twitch this way and that way with no notice. You’re too slow for that kind of hunting, now. Now the only prey you can easily catch, it will have spears to lob against you, walls to build to keep your hunger out.”
I forced myself back forward, onto what I now have no recourse but to call my arms again, though they were furred, though there were yet claws at the end.
Zeus chuckled at my awkwardness. I was born again, a third time, but now I was no longer wolf, no longer man, but a form locked between the two.
“And from this day on,” Zeus said, squatting to see me eye to eye, “you will no longer couple as you’ve been doing, Lycaon. Now the only way you can procreate will be the way you just did, with your mouth, with your bite. Thus says Zeus, even if it will be my last proclamation.”
I turned my head again to the idea of the wolf-girl, staggering through her stone house.
“You would have me mate using only my teeth?” I said to Zeus.
“And what fine teeth they are,” he said, standing again, cocking his head to the clouded sky as if gauging the descent of his boy up there.
“But I’m a king!” I screamed. “And I was—I was only honoring you, the mightiest of the gods!”
“Mighty no more,” Zeus said, and we watched together as the boy thumped down from the sky, coming down on the rocky shore face-first, his back folding over the wrong way, shards of white splashing up, a lone gull banking over to investigate. “With what you’ve introduced to my stomach,” Zeus went on, “I now must live out the rest of my days as a mortal. As must we all in Olympus.”
“I can take it back,” I pled. “Let me—I can bite it from you, if you’ll but—”
“Run off now, Lycaon,” Zeus said, waving me away. “I still have enough of myself left to lodge another punishment, should you so desire.”
For a long moment I glared at him, then I stared across at his broken boy on the rocks, and then I looked out to the trees, arrayed against me like everything else.
“We will tear the throat from your precious mankind,” I said to Zeus at last, my chest growling the promise true. “There will be no more pretty children for you to steal.”
“Perhaps,” Zeus said. “And perhaps they will come for your kind, Lycaon. For your children. Perhaps you will be hounded for ages, until you become but a legend.”
He stared at me then as if daring me to rush at him, finish this now. When I didn’t—I didn’t know whether to try on two feet or four—he gave me his back, walked to the beach, perhaps to mourn his broken boy, perhaps to feast on his liver.