The Taste Never Leaves

I've escaped the memory, but I can still feel it clinging to me like blood under my fingernails.

The walls of my childhood home were painted red—not the warm red of Mum's favourite curtains or the faded red of Dad's old jumper, but the red of what I did to them. What the wolf did. What I did, because there's no separating us anymore, is there?

I was standing there again, looking down at my paws—massive, clawed, still dripping with their blood from that first night I lost control. Mum's body sprawled across the kitchen floor, her chest torn open where I'd... where the wolf had... God, I can still taste the metallic warmth of her heart between my teeth. Dad by the back door, almost made it out. Almost. His ribcage gaped like a broken birdcage, empty of what I'd devoured in my frenzy.

But then something impossible happened.

The bodies... they started to move. Not like the dead rising—like something was moving inside them, wearing them like ill-fitting clothes. The gaping wounds in their chests began to close, hearts reforming where I had torn them out and consumed them. Mum's chest began to rise and fall in mechanical breaths. Dad's neck straightened with a wet crack that made my stomach turn.

And then he stepped out of them.

A skeleton, impossibly animate, emerging from within my parents' corpses like he'd been hiding there all along. Their bodies collapsed back into death as he brushed himself off with an almost casual air, as if climbing out of the dead was just another Tuesday for him.

"Hello, Cailean," he said, and his voice was warm despite coming from a throat that shouldn't exist. "Common tea with cows' milk and two sugars, wasn't it? And you always preferred the bacon bap over the sausage roll."

I stared at him, my blood running cold in a way that had nothing to do with the carnage around us. "How do you—who are you?"

He smiled—God, how does a skull smile?—and gestured around the blood-soaked kitchen. "Someone who knows you better than you might think. And someone who can fix all of this."

That's when the real horror began.

With a casual wave of his skeletal hand, the scene started to shift. The blood faded from the walls like it was being gently washed away. Mum and Dad's bodies began to stir, wounds closing, breath returning. But it wasn't natural—they moved like marionettes, jerky and wrong, their eyes glassy and unfocused.

"There," the skeleton said, settling into our old kitchen chair like he belonged there. "Much better, don't you think?"

Mum sat up, her movements stilted and unnatural. "Cailean, love," she said in a voice that was almost hers but not quite. "Are you alright? You look upset."

Dad approached with that same puppet-like gait, no recognition of what I was, no memory of his own death. "Son, what's wrong?"

They were alive but... hollow. Like beautiful shells with nothing real inside them anymore. The skeleton had reanimated them, but whatever made them them was gone, replaced with his false approximation of love.

"I can give you this," the skeleton continued, gesturing to my puppet parents. "I can sew up the past, mend what was torn. No more guilt, no more nightmares. Just a loving family and a son who never lost control."

It was everything I'd dreamed of in my darkest moments. Every night I'd woken up screaming their names, every time I'd wished I could take it back, undo that first transformation...

But looking at these hollow versions of my parents, I felt sick.

"This isn't them," I whispered.

"Does it matter?" the skeleton asked. "They love you. They forgive you. Isn't that what you've always wanted?"

"Not like this." My voice grew stronger. "Not as puppets. Not as lies."

The skeleton's smile never wavered. "Even if it means carrying this pain forever?"

I looked at my parents—these false, empty versions of them—and felt something solidify in my chest. "Yes. Even then. Because the real Mum and Dad... they deserve better than being replaced by comfortable lies. Their deaths have to mean something, even if that something is just the lesson that taught me control."

The skeleton tilted his head, studying me. "Interesting. Most people take the comfort I offer."

"I'm not most people. I'm a werewolf who learned that running from the truth only makes you more dangerous."

He laughed—actually laughed—and the sound was surprisingly pleasant. "Very true, little wolf. Very true indeed."

For a moment, I thought he might force the issue, trap me in this modified reality whether I wanted it or not. But instead, he stood gracefully from the chair.

"Very well," he said. "If you insist on carrying your truth, then carry it you shall."

The false reality crumbled around us. My puppet parents collapsed back into death, the blood returned to the walls, and I was alone with my guilt and this mysterious skeleton who somehow knew my coffee order.

"Who are you?" I asked again.

"Someone who understands the weight of choices," he replied. "And someone who respects when those choices are made with wisdom rather than fear."

The memory began to fade at the edges—not into comfortable lies, but back toward the present where I belonged. I could hear my friends calling my name somewhere in the distance.

"Will I see you again?" I asked.

"Perhaps," the skeleton said, his smile the last thing I saw before the scene dissolved completely. "When you're ready for a proper conversation over tea."

And then I was free.

Back with my party, back in the real world where my parents are still dead and I'm still a werewolf who killed them. Where the guilt still lives in my chest like a second heart, and where I have to choose every day to be better than the scared boy who lost control.

But I'm also back in a world where my choices matter. Where growth comes from accepting difficult truths, not hiding from them. Where some puppet strings are meant to be cut, even when cutting them hurts.

The skeleton offered me everything I thought I wanted. And I chose the pain of reality over the comfort of lies.

I think that might be the most human thing I've ever done.

Which is funny, considering what I am.