As the sun begins to rise in the east, Carmen sits back up and stares down at her dead lover, wondering how her body can berighthere, right here beneath her hands, and yet . . . and yet she’s just gone. She wonders what happens when you die, when your soul leaves your body and crosses over the veil to whatever place souls go. Is Lacie already there? Is she truly free from the pain of this place?
Carmen can’t stand to think of her being alone someplace in the dark, tucked inside a rip in the world with no way back to her. She definitely can’t stand to think about what comes next on this side of the living, on having to figure out how to eat or sleep orbreathewithout her.
The idea comes to her quickly.
She looks up and spots her blade on the ground where she dropped it, glinting in the morning light. It takes a great deal of effort, but she manages to crawl to it. To grip it tight in her hand. And then she moves back to Lacie’s side, curling herself around her body.
“I love you,” she whispers into her ear, pressing a kiss to her cooling cheek. “Wait for me. I’m coming.”
She lifts the knife to her own neck, closing her eyes and steeling herself for the pain. But just as she’s about to press in and pull, to rip the knife’s blade clean through her own throat, something overcomes her, a sweep of shimmering light flooding all around her.
Carmen opens her eyes to find not just the light of dawn in the sky, but a cloud of sparkling dust, of tiny, glowing particles of gold and silver and colors she’s never even seen before lighting up the space where their bodies lay. The dust swarms around her, overcomes her, humming against her skin. Goosebumps explode along her flesh from the top of her head all the way down to her toes as the light seems to nuzzle her. Comfort her.
Her eyes fill with tears. “Lacie,” she breathes out. “Is that you?”
Tendrils of light move to float in front of her before curling around that hand still clutching the knife. Her hand relaxes, the knife dropping onto the hard dirt beneath her. It curls around her once more, flowing against her skin and through her hair.
And then it shoots toward the sky.
Leaving Carmen alone again.
CHAPTER 12
Carmen pulls her Impala into the parking lot of the bowling alley just as the sun fully sets, its rays of light disappearing as the dark of night overtakes the sky. She again finds the moon, a blood moon, full and heavy and tinged red, and can’t help the smile that spreads across her face as she takes a moment to really look at it. It serves as a beacon for Carmen, a lighthouse beckoning her in. A hunter’s moon for her cold, black heart.
Tonight . . . tonight everything finally comes to an end. Anticipation bubbles up inside of her until she’s overflowing and buoyant, grabbing a bag and the two tanks of accelerant out of the trunk of her car. Her feet seem to float across the forest ground, carrying her toward the dark, abandoned factory in the distance.
When it finally comes into view, she hardly sees it. The image of Lacie in her mind’s eye is so real, her breaths come in shudders. One final act, and she can leave this ugly, ruthless world behind and join her lover in the afterlife. Lacie may have stopped her once, but this is a fair trade, she thinks. She’s spent two fumbling years searching for this pack, and when she’sthrough with them there will be nothing else to live for—she can only hope Lacie will understand.
Glass clinks roughly inside the backpack slung over her shoulder. She’s moving too quickly, and if she’s not careful she’ll destroy the makeshift grenades she’s been assembling in her dim motel room over the last few days. She’d only been able to get her hands on eight empty liquor bottles from the dumpster behind The Rusty Saloon: half of them whiskey and the others rum and vodka. She almost felt bad for tearing a pillowcase from the motel’s bed to shreds so she could soak the cotton in kerosene before stuffing the wicks inside the neck of each bottle, nearly passing out from the fumes.
She needs to be careful and make sure the bottles don’t break, or her plan will start to unravel. She needs the bombs to create a distraction while she works to douse the heart of the building with fuel. Based on the blueprints she saw, there’s a storage room that might still have all the old drums full of synthetic materials used to make plastic—they would still be highly flammable even after all these years. Either way, her last hurrah will be torching that fucking den to the ground with all those feral monsters inside. Only then can she be free of this need for vengeance.
Honestly, at this point she’s come to realize that none of it actually matters—not really. Darkness always wins, always finds you either way. Carmen knows that even if she succeeds tonight, even if she ends the lives of every beast she finds in that den, there are likely still hundreds, maybe thousands, of other packs out in the world, feasting on the terror they create in communities just like this. She followed this one all the way from Arizona, losing their trail dozens of times in the frustrating chase. They never stay in one place for long, infecting more and more cities as they stay moving to protect themselves.
This is the only pack that matters to Carmen. There are other hunters out there, striving to protect the innocent, to keep the balance between good and evil. They can also keep the burden. She only has the capacity for these fucks, and then she’s done with it all.
As she stalks closer to the abandoned building, keeping herself hidden in the shadows of the trees around her, she realizes how much quieter it is tonight compared to all the boisterous sounds of the party last night. There’s no music blaring, no shouting coming from inside the boarded-up windows. Dread pools within her—she hopes she’s not too late, that the pack hasn’t already shifted and set out to hunt.
She looks up at the moon again, sees it’s still rising higher, growing redder. She’s not an expert, but she knows from her experience with Warren that wolves usually wait until a full moon is at its highest peak in the sky before shifting, the ability to change from human to wolf forms much easier when there’s more moonlight flooding the land around them. Try too soon, a wolf might get stuck in the middle of the transformation—especially the pups, or newly Turned.
Warren used to force Lacie to lock him in a shed he’d built in the middle of the plains of Kansas. It had nothing but padded walls and a carpeted floor, a bowl of water in the corner. There were no windows, no way to open the door from the inside. Lacie would padlock the door closed and wrap a thick chain around the entire structure, ensuring Warren couldn’t break himself out of there.
It helped that the shed was smack dab in the middle of the country, only a couple days away from wherever they might be before an oncoming full moon. They always made sure they made it on time. He’d go in at sunset on the night of and stay until sunrise the next morning. Lacie wouldn’t open the locks until she heard him call for her with his human voice, ensuringhe was a man again before daring to get too close. They did everything they thought they could do to protect each other. To stay together.
And it turned out it wasn’t enough.
Warren turned against his own kind, hunting them down across the country along with any other paranormal nuisance that came into his path. And in return, the wolves hunted Lacie down. Took her away from them both.
Carmen blows out a breath, watching the building, waiting for any signs of life. Eventually, she gets one: the sound of glass breaking. Like a bottle being thrown against a wall. She quickly checks that her knives are all still in place after her hike through the woods, tightens the straps of the backpack around her shoulders, and then grabs hold of the tanks before making her way closer to the building.
She holds her breath as she sprints from the cover of trees to the building’s stone wall. With the boarded-up windows she knows it’s unlikely that anyone can see out from the inside, but if anyone were to walk out the door right now, they’d definitely spot her. She needs to move fast now, needs to get inside and figure out how to keep herself hidden, which isn’t exactly easy to do carrying two heavy jugs of firestarter and a backpack full of bombs.
She considers leaving it all behind so she can get an easier look inside, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before the wolves sniff her out. She probably only has about fifteen minutes once she makes it through the door to set off a diversion somewhere inside. She’ll use what few precious minutes she has left to get to the heart of the building and start pouring fuel on every surface she finds—and then she’ll set it all aflame.
Carmen moves toward the back door of the building where she’d watched a number of werewolves in their human forms walk in and out of their party last night. She keeps her breathingsteady and slow, careful to listen for any signs that someone is in there waiting for her.
But there’s nothing—at least not that she can see or hear.
