“I’m fine. Really.” I sit up, take a deep breath. “Look, if it makes you feel better—I won’t go over there again, okay? I’ll stay on my side of the lake. If he comes back, you’ll be the first to know.”
Penelope breathes softly. “He really is a wolf,” she says quietly. “The man-eating kind. They all are.”
And our ancestors tamed wolves, didn’t they?
But I don’t say that out loud.
17
THEO
I’m late making my rounds, but I don’t care. My whole body feels like a lightning storm, and Chloe’s scent is everywhere. Not just on the air. Onme.On my hands. On my clothes. Every time I breathe in, I smell her—not just her,but her desire. Her pleasure. The scent of her orgasms. It was intoxicating, the way her body came alive for me, all her muscles clenching and rippling against mine. It was like the seconds before someone dies, how there’s this big rush of blood and adrenaline that comes spilling out of them. But instead of death, I gave her pleasure.
And I want to do it again and again and again.
I stomp through the woods and force myself to concentrate. It’s easier on the other side of my territory, near the little strip of land that connects my peninsula to the mainland. There’s a bigDANGER: KEEP OUTsign posted there. Not by me. It showed up about ten years back, after I killed a quartet of hikers and left their bodies hanging from the trees not far from here. That was my idea of a warning.
People ignore the sign, of course, although not often. Over the last decade, I’ve had fewer and fewer trespassers. Whether it’s from the sign, from the ghost stories, from some otherwarning put out by the state of North Carolina, I don’t know. But it’s keeping me isolated out here, the way I like it.
I walk up to the sign, which is currently overgrown with honeysuckle vines. No flowers, not this time of year: just lush, dense greenery. I suck in a deep breath of air. No sign of humans. Not in my territory, and not on the winding hiking trails over on the other side of the lake, either. I can vaguely sense the humans in their lake houses, though. I’ve grown more or less accustomed to them over the last few years, enough so that usually their scents fade into the background and become part of the woods, like the scents of all the animals that live out here, the squirrels and opossums and raccoons and deer.
This afternoon, though, something kind of cracks inside me. I breathe again, taking in the scents. The crack widens.
A quiver of fear works down my spine.
I freeze, wondering if I really felt it. The last time I felt real fear was during my last killing moon, twenty years ago. One of my would-be victims had a shotgun pointed at my head, and I looked at her through the blood dripping into my eyes and dropped my knife. That’s always how it has to end, during a killing moon. With my death.
And no matter how many times I do it, I always feel fear in the seconds before I die. I felt it then, a little tremble of terror, right before she pulled the trigger.
It had taken me longer than usual to wake up from that death. Half my brain had been blown out, and although my kind don’t really diethe way humans do, that was the closest I’d ever come to a real death. Usually, I can sense the world around me while I’m in that half-living state, all its comings and goings. That time, though, everything sank into shadows. I don’t even remember, even now, how I managed to burrow myself into the dirt the way my father had taught me.Underground is better, he said.You’ll heal faster.
A faint headache throbs in my temple, like a distant memory of that death. Jesus, why am I even thinking about it? Why am I remembering that fear?
The crack shudders inside me.
I whirl away from theKEEP OUTsign and stalk into the woods proper. It feels better in there, being hidden away. Out of sight of the sky.
The empty sky.
There was hardly any moon last night, while I was rowing across the lake. We’re close to a new moon, which means a new lunar cycle. In another two weeks, the moon will be full.
The thought makes my jaw tighten. My belly squirms around.
A killing moon.
The thought hits me hard. Like a punch. Like a shotgun blast, actually. I slump against one of the nearby poplar trees and suck in a sharp breath. “No,” I mutter, tilting my gaze up to the sky. Not that I can see it beneath the canopy of tree leaves. “No. Not now.”
The forest answers with its rustles and insect song. I close my eyes and try to concentrate. If this is the start of a killing moon, it doesn’t feel the way it usually does. But I’ve been all mixed up since I caught my first glimpse of Chloe. Wanting to be near her feels so much like the killing moon that maybe that’s why I didn’t sense the real thing lurking underneath.
“No!” I shout, slamming my fist into the tree trunk. The tree shakes, and a few birds erupt out, making leaves rain down around me. Over twenty years since the last one. And how long since my last kill? A year? Year and a half?
Don’t go too long without killing, my father told me.You’ll lose yourself in the bloodlust. You need that control to function, son.
He never did tell me how long was too long, though. Just said it depends. Just said,You’ll know.
I tear away from the tree and stalk toward my cabin. I don’t feel like I’m losing myself. I know who I am. Where I am.WhatI am. I know I only want to kill trespassers unless the killing moon tells me otherwise, and it isn’t quite whispering to me yet. There’s just an empty hollow feeling in my chest.
I know I don’t want to kill Chloe.
