Story
After a passionate night with a stranger from out of town, Harriet McAvoy fell pregnant, and nine months later, she had a baby.
...no. Not a baby.
A monster.
She knew something was first different when her baby boy was just three says old. When she first saw his eyes open in the dim light they glowed bright and yellow and bit as saucers.
Her child slept a lot in the first month. Never a fussy sleeper. Where he struggled was eating- mother's milk was only acceptable for so long before he began to bite, chew, and gnaw. His finger and toenails grew long.
And then came the full moon.
Harriet screamed when she saw the tiny beast in her son's crib. Covered in hair from head to toe, claws an inch long, barely able to stand for the size of his head- she didn't even recognize her boy for what he was. A monster… but still her son.
After the long and sleepless full moon her son withdrew back into himself- a baby once more- and she took him immediately to a specialist to see what could be done.
The answer, as it turned out, was nothing.
Her son, her baby, little Les, would grow up to be a beast. He was a weretiger, and there was no cure or magic spell that would reverse this. Only his death would bring him peace.
At the age of 4, Les hunted for birds in his backyard. He could change shapes at will- from a young boy with bright eyes and a mop of curly hair, to a chubby tiger cub who slept on his mother's lap and ruined her couch.
At the age of 6, his mother uprooted the family and moved out of town, away from the prying and judgemental eyes of their neighbors.
At 8, he snuck out of the house at night to chase livestock in the nearby pastures. He got into fights at school regularly and by 10 was expelled for a particularly violent altercation with another student.
They moved again. At age 11, Les ran away from home for 4 days. His mother did not go looking for him. He came back with blood on his clothes and under his fingernails and dirt in between his toes.
At age 12, he fought with and killed a neighbor's dog. Les was becoming increasingly more violent each full moon. Harriet didn't know what to do. The condition was so rare that there were few books on the subject and all of them ended in the death of the weretiger in question.
It didn't help that her son was becoming a young man, a young man who had no place in the world and no outlet for his frustrations, his anger, his energy. He closed himself off to her and all others: just he and his primal anger.
One full moon Harriet caught him in her bedroom. He didn't know she was awake, but she could hear him: the clicking of his claws on the floor, the shuffling of a body- once so small she could tuck him under an arm- now rippling with muscles and dense fur and so tall that he dwarfed her by a foot. She heard him sniffing- for what? For her? And she was only able to breathe again when he'd gone.
