“Apparently,” I said.
“No.” His wolf shifted inside him, somehow growing bigger, taking up more space. “Danny—Danube—and I were…friends.” His gaze flicked to me and away, and I thought there was something there, something more, but before I could ask, he went on.
“He was kind. He stood up for me. Told Summer I would be a good addition to the Riggs. That I would pull my weight.
“He wasn’t wrong. I did my part for the pack. But there was a Shadow they were looking for. It had been taken from someone, or lost its way? I don’t remember exactly.
“They thought the Shadow might be hiding in the caverns. They needed to find it. I know that sounds like a prank you’d pull on a kid, but they were serious. Worried. There are so many caverns, and they’d been searching for a long time. I don’t know how long.”
“You went into the caverns to find a shadow,” I said.
“I went into a lot of caverns. But that last one…I woke up in there. In a cavern. Darkness all around. And I saw him. The Shadow. He wasn’t lost. He was trapped. Bound in spider silk. I tried to save him…”
We waited for him to say more. To finish the story. When he didn’t, I asked, “The Hush?”
He nodded. “I thought I heard Danny. Thought he was coming to save me.” He finally turned his gaze back to me, and there was a wry acknowledgment there. “I was wrong.”
We sat with that, his death between us, giving his truth space.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “No one deserves that kind of death. Alone and in the dark.”
“I wasn’t alone. The Shadow was there too. But trapped like me.”
“What about the rabbit?” I asked. “You said you remembered something about it.”
“I think the rabbit is Abbi.”
Lu slowed the truck and brought it to a halt there in the middle of the cracked two-lane road. There was no one coming from behind. Ahead, the road became an intersection where four roads, each facing squarely at the compass points, converged.
The horizon seemed to go on forever around us, fields of green dotted by old oaks, stretching endlessly into in a blue haze.
In the wedge of land between the road that led west and the road the led south, was a sprawling building that might have been a garage or warehouse a hundred years ago. Shaped in a horseshoe, the gray paint was peeling off the wood slats that reached up three stories from the brick cladding at the base. The windows on each floor cut a slice of sky, reflecting clouds and treetops.
Stuck on one side of the building, was a motel sign that I didn’t remember seeing before: an old neon arrow that saidTwilight Motel.
“What did Val say?” Lu asked.
“He thinks Abbi is a rabbit.”
He leaned forward, into our space, bringing a wash of cold with him. “When you say it that way, it sounds ridiculous.”
Lu shifted away from that cold, but turned toward him. “Why would Abbi be a rabbit? Is she a shifter?”
“No,” Val said. “Not how you’re thinking. You know there’s a reason us werewolves are so protective of her. She’s connected to the moon. I don’t know if she’s a goddess, exactly, but she’s in the legends, the stories. She’s the rabbit in the moon.”
“What did he say?” Lu asked.
“Abbi’s the rabbit in the moon,” I said.
Lu blinked. “The rabbit shape we see on the moon?”
I shrugged. “It’s not my theory.”
“There are stories,” Val insisted. “You know, how the rabbit does a good deed and ends up on the moon with a mortar and pestle making immortality juice. Or maybe it’s rice cakes?”
“There’s stories?” I asked Lu.
“Sure,” she said. “Stories about moon goddesses. But the rabbit who goes to the moon isn’t a goddess. Or not in the traditional sense. There are stories about that rabbit.”
