Moonseed: The Origin of Louis Pine’s Lycanthropy

By Seth Greening

Suspected werewolf Louis Pine is missing in action after documenting his search for the truth about his lycanthropy, and his mom is full of regret for not telling him the truth about their family, including the secret of his missing dad. Loretta Pine always thought she was protecting her son Louis from the supernatural worlds at war all around us, but now she can see how this actually had the opposite effect. Is it too late to set the record straight?

Loretta hopes that she can reach Louis with this document, Moonseed, in which she finally tells the truth about herself and Louis’ father and about their role in the supernatural skirmishes at the centre of an arcane prophesy that could spell doom for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780986825590

Book preview

Tale…

Lauga’s Tale Begins

I never knew how my mom died, just when. I was still a baby. All I had to remember her by was her ring that I wore every day - a silver ring in the shape of a dragon coiled around my finger with a small, dull stone set in the tail. Your mom wanted you to have this- always keep it safe, Dad told me. And that's all he ever said about her.

You might think it strange but I never questioned this much. Maybe because I loved my dad and life with just him and me was actually pretty good.

Okay sure Dad left me home alone a lot, in fact sometimes for days on end. But I always felt happy and safe. And I wasn’t exactly alone. I did have a kind of babysitter - giant, shaggy gray canine with a zigzag pattern on his fur I called Lyca.

Lyca stayed with me whenever Dad went away and he was the best babysitter ever! He let me eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Ice cream and brownies for breakfast or midnight snack. I could make my own bedtime and if I fell asleep playing on the floor he would nudge me awake to go to the bed. And when I finally did put myself to bed, Lyca would lay at my feet, his gray fur so soft and thick on my toes, I felt warm and safe. If I woke up from a bad dream or a strange noise, I would find Lyca’s gentle eyes staring into mine from the side of the bed where he stood vigilant, hackles raised, ready to attack until he was sure that I was okay.

So you see, I actually never missed my dad very much when Lyca came to babysit.

I actually cried on those mornings when I awoke to find my trusty dogsitter gone and Dad beside the bed now in his place.

Shhh Lauga don’t cry, Dad said, drying my tears with a bemused expression on his face. Lyca will be back soon I promise.

How soon Daddy?

Just you count the days on your fingers and toes, Dad said, tickling my hands and feet as he counted my fingers and toes to twenty. Then add your ears, your mouth and your nose…

Before long I'd be giggling.

You might wonder now, as to why my dad was not the least bit offended his only daughter seemed to prefer the company and care of a giant canine over his presence. I for one believed it somehow perfectly normal to have a giant pooch for a babysitter. Like, every kid probably had one.

Unfortunately for dad and I, one nosy neighbor did not agree.

One day a lady in a thick sweater and an even thicker metal cross around her neck started snooping around our place. Before long, there were a whole bunch of them. An entire fleet of nosy social services agents began making a series of surprise visits and inspections.

As you might expect, they were not impressed to discover Dad’s babysitting deal with Lyca.

You can’t leave your daughter home alone for that long!

I’m not alone… I cried. Daddy tell them about Lyca…

Try as I might, I could not make them understand and they remained unmoved by my tears. Now whenever Dad had to go on business, he had to leave me to their stupid school for orphans until his return.

I hated everything about this so-called school. Hated my room, the metal bars that made a cage over the only window, so high up and tiny it felt like a prison. I hated sharing a bunk with a bunch of other sad girls, always different ones, all crying quietly in the cold, damp bunks at night. I hated the food. Eating in silence in a dining hall where you couldn’t even go to the fridge and open it let alone help yourself to the chocolate ice cream whenever you wanted some.

Most of all, I hated the teachers who tried to cheer me up with their fake sad-happy smiles and silly songs to teach me stuff that I already knew. They couldn’t even say my name right, calling me Loretta now instead of Lauga. I decided to never correct them. I didn’t want anyone at this horrible school knowing my real name anyway. If they couldn’t say my real name, it meant they didn’t have the real me.

I hate it here! Please don’t leave me here! I begged.

Lauga my Lauga I’m not leaving you… this is just for a while… shhh… just a few nights… Dad would say.

Promise me!

I made him promise, every time. And he kept his promise. He always came back.

That is, until the day that he didn't.

The Conservatory

On Dad return days I always waited for him in the conservatory. Its greenhouses were the only place I could tolerate to be on those days - and because I could spot him approaching from miles away through the glass. Dad always arrived on foot, jogging between the East buildings where the rectory and the boys’ annex are situated.

On those days, the conservatory caretaker, Sister Therese, would give me a bucket to help her in the gardens — or at least keep me busy. In actual fact I completely forgot to water a single one of the exotic plants I would later love so much. Instead I passed the time just pacing, stopping to press my face to the warm sunny glass, searching for any sign of my dad’s arrival.

I recognized his posture first, long before I could make out his face, his loping jog on the horizon. The instant I spotted him, I began to wave and would just keep waving until finally he was close enough to see his tired face, his eyes searching for mine beyond the glass. Dad’s face broke into a huge smile when our eyes met and he sprinted the rest of the way to find me inside and gather me into his arms. I remember his damp mossy-woodsy smell, pine needles clinging to his clothing.

Except on the day he never came back.

He’s not coming today, they said. He signed a form, they said. A form to let them keep me this time. To keep me there forever.

YOU’RE LYING! I screamed over and over.

They showed me a piece of paper, my dad’s signature at the bottom.

LIARS! HE WOULD NEVER…

But he did. He signed it.

Or did he?

I still don’t know what or who to believe.

All I know for sure is this, he never did come back.

So you see Louis, I know how much it hurts to lose a parent. Not just one parent but two. Your father and I never wanted that for you. But I do understand how you felt and I hate that you had to experience that same terrible pain.

How do you recover from a thing like that?

Answer: you don’t.

You never recover, not really. You never really feel better about it.

But in time you learn to let it be part of you without letting it hurt you more.

You grow through it and heal around it, like a hardy eucalyptus tree, until one day you flower into something strong and beautiful, in part because of it.

At least that’s what I tried to do. Later, of course. Much later. Not on that day. On the day dad didn’t return, I refused to leave the conservatory. Again and again they tried to drag me away but I kicked and screamed. Not just on that day but again on the next day. And the one after that and for the rest of the days and weeks that followed the day that dad didn’t come back for me.

No matter how hard they tried to keep me away, I always found my way back to the gardens, unwilling to admit the truth, that he would never return for me, there or anywhere else for that matter.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that they all tried to keep me away from the conservatory because they didn’t all try. In fact one individual in particular worked very hard at great personal cost to keep me in the gardens. That was of course, the conservatory caretaker, Sister Therese.

To say that Sister tended St. George’s famous conservatory, is an understatement. More accurate to say she lived, ate, breathed and slept those gardens. Sister Therese knew every inch of every plant in every one of those great greenhouses, all 13 of them. And she knew me before I even knew myself.

You see the gardens of St. George’s form a clocklike labyrinth of Eden around a very famous sculpture of old St. George himself, he who slew the dragon, that is. His sword drips with stony dragon blood where he crouches over a felled dragon in a statue that rises from a gushing fountain in the middle of the greenhouses. The statue is more than a little creepy and makes you want to cry for the poor dragon drowning at his knees. But together the fountain and the gardens are so beautiful that people from around the world come to see and photograph them. And Sister Therese, who lived in a tiny room at the very back, tended all of it. Up to and including me.

I remember the night she caught me, fast asleep on the highest branch of the biggest palm tree in the main greenhouse, the one that overhangs the statue of St. George. I snuck in before bed time and climbed as high as I could to avoid detection, but in the wee hours before sunrise I fell asleep and the good sister spied my long red hair hanging down in a tangle amid the Jade Vine blossoms.

I woke to her cries of surprise.

Mon enfante de Dieu! Sister Therese almost jumped out of her jammies before fetching the ladder.

Don’t move! You’ll fall! she said climbing up to save me, though in fact it’s fair to say that she was in more danger of falling than I. Still sleepy-eyed and busted, I let Sister Therese help me to the ground where she wrapped me in a blanket and gave me a steaming cup of lemon verbena tea with honey.

Then as we sat by the fountain drinking tea, she asked to see my hand.

I gave it to her and she unfolded it in her hands, revealing my mother's ring. She gasped. I thought she must be angry with me about the tree thing.

Are you going to tell on me? I asked.

No! Sister Therese gave my hand a gentle pat. I promise you. I will never tell anyone. And neither should you. Do you understand?

Sister Therese looked deep into my eyes to drive the point home and little girl though I was, I immediately understood the importance of her words.

And now you must promise me something too.

What’s that?

These gardens are very big and I am getting old. I could use a little help around here. From now on, you will join me every morning at this hour and you will help me.

Every morning?

Every one of them without fail.

Sister Therese knew it would take at least that long to teach me everything she knew about not being a witch!

Or to put it another way, which is to say the way Sister Therese would later explain it when I was old enough to understand: everything you need to know about being a secret not-witch.

And that’s how I became a not-witch apprentice.

Seth on Witches and Naught

Now you probably recognize here, as I do, the marks and signs of a so-called witch. But these were the dark days before the invention of the Interwebs or The Monstrometer so at the time Lauga had no idea of witches beyond the pointy hats and broomsticks of a child’s Halloween costume. For all she knew then every gardener could do magic with plants and every little girl got a mysterious ring from her mother.

A belief the Sister herself took great care to teach Lauga by declaring war on the very word itself.

Never let me hear you say witches enfante, she would say. There are not real witches! You understand? There are only real not-witches!

Lauga did not understand, but she did learn, among other things, to never say the word witch or to admit to being anything other than a real not-witch.

Anyhoo, let’s see how Lauga’s training goes.

Green Thumbs

I didn’t know exactly how I would keep my new commitment to the sister, but I knew that I would. Not just because she could have reported me for any number of offences that would have landed me any number of institutional punishments, from eternal dish duty to early curfew but also because for reasons I felt without yet understanding, I needed to be there, where the sound of the running water and the smell of jade would banish my nightmares. At least for a while.

My not-witch training had begun. I followed the Sister on morning rounds as she checked on each and every plant, in each and every greenhouse, welcoming it to the new day. No small task with thirteen greenhouses growing a tangle of plants, an organic symphony of biological beauty and chaos. This ritual alone would take several hours. But I didn’t mind. I stayed close behind her on the stone path, drinking it all in and time stood still. The sister’s hushed tones soothed me at least as much as it did the plants.

Slowly, carefully, day by day Sister began teaching me everything she could about each plant. About when and how to touch or not, and when to leave them completely alone. About pruning and watering and bathing their leaves. About the history and character of each one. To the sister each plant was an individual, a beloved family member. Her lilting voice carried the sound of such love they came alive for her and later for me too as I grew to love them as much as she did.

Until finally one day the good sister decided that I was ready for something.

Today you begin to learn how to call the plants, she declared.

But I already know! I reminded her, rattling off a long list of Latin words. Family, phylum, kingdom, order… I took some understandable pride in my ability to memorize the scientific taxonomy of each plant in every one of the thirteen greenhouses, having already done so with minimal complaints about the insanity of using a dead language like Latin for something so alive.

No mon enfante, not the scientific name, Sister explained in a hushed tone. The secret name. Just like you, little Lauga, they each have a secret name.

It surprised me to know that Sister Therese knew my real name since everyone else at the school still called me ‘Loretta.’

Only the few may speak the secret name which call on the plant.

Call on the plant?

Listen and watch.

Watching the demonstration, I realized that I had actually seen the sister do this a million times before now and thought only that she must enjoy singing weird, tuneless songs under her breath while they worked. Now I realized that my teacher was doing something very special. Something that began with learning a secret name.

This secret name as it turned out, would be both easier and harder to learn than the Latin name. You see, the secret name of a plant needs to grow in your brain, like a catchy tune, each the very shape and smell of the plant itself.

More complicated still, to call the plant, you must sing it out in a certain way, a secret song. Each song has a different effect, each way of singing each song calls on it to a different power. One calls it to stretch up tall toward the sun and flower, another to reveal its seeds for you to harvest, or another to accept and support another plant to grow around it.

Knowing all ways of the different songs, that is the hardest part. For one thing, there’s no words, just tunes. For another, you don’t sing them just with your voice but with your whole body. One out-of-place hand gesture or movement can change the whole meaning as I soon found out the hard when my first attempts to sing one ended in an epic fail.

I chose the Jade Vine blossom, one of my favorites. The green-purple blossoms hang in iridescent bunches from vines that wind around the entire garden, with no apparent beginning or end. To me these dragon-shaped claws seemed to hold and preserve the life of the bleeding stone dragon, in defiance of the sword of St. George.

But to my horror, at the first bars of my song the blossoms shrank away, retracting like a cat’s claws into itself, its brilliant colors turning to a terrible black-gray bruise spreading across the leaves.

Oh no Sister I killed it!

Sister Therese just laughed.

No, no, not dead! She hides only! Sister reassured me before singing out the blossoms once again using the correct tones.

Did I hit the wrong note? Face the wrong way? I fumed, unable to hide my distress and frustration. I’ll never get it!

You WILL get it right. You will and you must for this is your life work, Sister Therese grasped my hands and looked into my eyes. You have the hand.

"What hand? What do you mean the hand?"

Watch now, she ordered and held her palm above my own and the veins normally blue and red barely visible beneath the surface of my skin began to pulse and glow with a warm, purple-blue light of their own.

I watched as my own blood vessels changed color and rose to the surface of my hand. My mouth fell open.

Voila la main, Sister said. "In English you say maybe a green thumb. You have the green thumb."

The jade glow spread up my forearm and beneath my blouse before Sister dropped it again and it faded, the veins retreating back. Then she turned my hand over and touched my ring, the dragon coiled around my thumb, the only finger big enough. "This ring. Where did you get it?

My mom. Dad said it belonged to my her. She died when I was born.

Sister Therese traced the shape of the silver dragon’s tail, the small dull stone clenched in the very tip. Her long skinny fingers cool, tickled my hand.

What does it mean? I asked.

Listen well little Lauga her voice now filled with an urgency that startled me. You must not allow this ring to be seen by anyone else. Do you understand? Never!

Okay but why?

The Sister gave me a long leather string to hide the ring around my neck and under my blouse, so that nobody would see.

May you never know why enfante!

The bitterness and force of the Sister’s normally gentle voice confused me even as it