The forest expels me into the little graveyard, and I hiss at the moonlight falling across the overgrown grass. This was where the first one started. This was where I was reborn as a monster, where I first felt the killing moon’s silver light on my skin, the way I feel it now.
I didn’t deny it then. I’ve never tried to deny the call of the killing moon, because why would I? As my father told me, over and over as we stalked the streets of Schenectady, that this is what my people are designed to do.
Don’t deny it,my father told me one night, the two of us still drenched in the blood of our victims. I don’t remember anythingabout them. Just the conversation afterward, the two of us sitting in a dusty old barn, my muscles aching from the kill.You had control tonight, but when you deny it, you lose that control. And the wrong people might die.
Now, dozens of years and hundreds of miles away, I roar out my frustration, the sound echoing up into the silvered night. The wrong people might die.
Like Chloe. Or Oliver.
I can’t deny this. It will hurt them, what I’m going to do, even if it’s not physically. But after I die, they’ll be free to go far away from here, and Chloe can take care of Oliver, and that’s what really matters.
I stalk out of the cemetery, blood pumping furiously through my body. The night seems tinged red at the edges. Red and silver. Over the roar of the wind, I swear I can hear the human heartbeats across the water, and the same cold whispering I always hear under a killing moon.
They aren’t supposed to be there this is YOUR territory.
My cabin looms up ahead, a dark silhouette against the blazing moonlight. Has it gotten brighter? It feels brighter. Almost blinding.
I stalk inside, slamming the door open so heavily that the walls shudder. My weapons are still in storage, where I placed them after the campout. That night feels distant now. Or really, not like a memory at all, but a dream. Like I dreamed of being human one night, and that’s what it looked like.
I pry the bricks of the fireplace away, their edges crumbling in my heavy grip. My box of weapons greets me, and I drag it out, muscles tightening at the metal clanking inside. Flip the lid open. Everything shines in the moonlight spilling in through the window, sharp as the blades sitting in their loose pile in the box.
I knew this was coming, deep down. That’s why I cleaned them in the same slow and methodical way I always clean myblades before a killing moon. I tried to lie to myself, tried to convince myself that it was Chloe who kept pulling my attention across the lake. And she certainly did.
But it was also the killing moon. It was the poison in my blood that drives me to kill.
I pull out the axe, the largest of the weapons, and hold it with both hands, staring down at the dull grey of the blade. It looks like moonlight.
I don’t want to do this. I want everything to be like it was the night of the campout, Chloe and Oliver laughing beside the fire and me feeling this strange, unfamiliar warmth deep in my chest. But if I don’t do this now, then it’ll be worse when I finally do. I can feel that truth deep in the marrow of bones.
At least this way, if I go across the river, I know I can keep control. I know I won’t let them die.
And when I’m in the ground, maybe both of them can finally be free.
29
CHLOE
Ishudder awake with a sharp gasp of air and blink at the shadows flickering from the ceiling fan. Moonlight creeps in from around the bedroom curtain, making my room feel brighter than it should.
I don’t know what woke me.
“Theo?” I sit up and fumble around at my bedside lamp. Warm yellow light floods the room, but there’s no sign of him.
I slump back against my headboard.Somethingwoke me up. I was in a dead sleep and dreaming, although the dream is already fragmenting into nothingness. Something about a beach crowded with palm trees, a warm, salty sea, the fear of a monster lurking in the water.
A scream rings out through the night.
I freeze, my skin prickling with goosebumps. My first thought is that I didn’t actually hear anything, that it was the last remnants of the dream. My next is that it was an owl or a mountain lion, some night animal.
My third, the sharpest of the three, is that Theo crossed the lake.
But he’s not at my house.
I leap out of bed with a renewed sense of terror, and I’m not even to the hallway when I hear another scream, this one undeniably real. It’s not coming from the direction of Oliver’s house, though, but from the other side. The neighbors I never speak to. Janet and Robert.
I think of every one of Penelope’s warnings: that Theo isn’t human, that I can’t trust him. That he’s a killer.
I think of the news reports I read, the YouTube videos I watched. The killing sprees that happened along Hanging Lake every fifteen years or so.
