“You know what I am.” I have to sit up to talk to her. “The things I’ve thought about doing to you would probably make you scream.”
She smiles shyly at that.
“Tell me what you think about,” I say. ‘And I’ll tell you whatIthink about.”
My heart’s pounding furiously against my ribs as I form the words, knowing I could be making a terrible mistake. But I’ve never wanted to share a piece of myself with a human before. Or with anyone. My father kept me at arm’s distance, the way a leopard mother does her cub. I did the same with others of my kind, the few that I’ve met over the years. We’re all solitary predators, hunting in our respective territories. The blood was what mattered.
Until Chloe showed up across the lake.
She takes a deep breath, fingers trailing along my arm, a reminder that she’s real. “I would just—think about dying,” she says, and there’s a faint rasp in her voice that I know I put there. “Imagine being strangled, like you just did.” She blushes. “Or being cut. Bleeding.”
My cock pulses.
“What do you think about?” The shyness in the question makes it seem to curl in on itself.
“Blood,” I say. “I think about blood, too.”
“My blood?” She signs it, and she says it, making the words echo.
I nod. “Splitting you open.” I wonder if she sees how my hands shake. “So I can worship the inside of you.”
Chloe stares up at me, her eyes wide with fear. With something else, too.
“Are you ever going to do that to me?” she whispers. “For real?”
“No.” I shake both my head and my fist forcefully. “I told you that.”
We stare at each other, and she looks so luminous in the lamplight. It doesn’t matter how much I would like to see her split open like that, to feel her blood on my skin. I can’t destroy her.
“I just don’t want you to be ashamed,” I finally say. “Because I think those desires are what brought us together.”
Chloe breathes out, eyes shining. And then, like I think it might prove it to her, I drag her into my chest and lie down with her on the mussed blankets. She doesn’t pull away. Actually, she does the opposite, tucking herself into my chest, her warm fingers spreading against my waist. I nuzzle into her hair and trace along the outline of her skin. Along her arms, and the curve of her hips, and the side of her neck, where I know bruises are already starting to bloom. The evidence of the violence I did to her, that violence that marks her as mine.
We stay like that, wrapped up together on her bed. Chloe doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to, because I can feel her contentment and her hesitation and the last lingering threads of her fear, all warring together. Eventually, though, contentment wins out, and her breaths slow until she’s asleep in my arms. Vulnerable. Safe.
I’m aware of how fragile she is, holding her like this. Humans are unbelievably fragile to a monster like me. It’s so easy to rip them into pieces, to creep into the places where they think they’re safest and paint them red with blood. Whether I use a knife, or an ax, or my bare hands, it doesn’t matter. It’s always easy.
I squeeze Chloe a little tighter. She mumbles in her sleep and tilts her face into my chest, warming my skin with her breath. And I know I won’t hurt her.
But there’s a silvery line of moonlight spilling in through the gap in the curtains, and I feel it again. That sense of something snapping inside me.
The killing moon, calling me home.
I close my eyes against as dread coils in my belly, and I press my nose into Chloe’s hair. I really thought I had chased it away. But there’s no denying the way it’s pulsing through the air. I only have a few more days until it rises.
I wish there were a god for me to pray to, but I know there’s not. What god would listen but the devil?
So instead, I pray to Chloe. I pray to her blood and her fear and desire.
I pray that the killing moon will pass me by.
25
CHLOE
He’s gone when I wake up.
I roll onto my back and blink at the rectangle of sunlight spreading across the ceiling toward the fan. My throat burns furiously, like when I got sick a few years ago with a cough that stripped it raw. I swallow against the pain, testing it. Nothingseemsbroken.
