by Leah Rhoades
Creep. Stalker.
“You think you’re going to convince me that I need to hole up here with you because I might start sprouting fur and gnashing my teeth at strangers? You can’t think I’m that stupid! I won’t let you manipulate me into becoming your prisoner here, Luke! I’m sorry you’re here with your father, stuck in limbo and lonely, but I won’t be the victim of a sick obsession or you’re depraved need to have a play thing here at your disposal.”
He stiffened, and if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was taken aback and truly offended by my accusations. “What do you take me for, Crystal? Have I given you any reason to doubt my motives?” He took a step forward, and I flinched, glancing at the counter and looking for something I could use as a weapon. The knives were out of reach, and I chided myself for not bringing one in with me from the car. I was a stupid, infatuated girl, too trusting, especially with my history.
To his credit, he stopped moving and held his hands up in surrender. “That injury isn’t just a regular claw mark, Crystal, and I need you to trust me. I know it sounds crazy, but you thought I wouldn’t believe you about strange creatures in the woods. Here I am, confirming your story, and you think I’m trying to trap you?”
When he put it that way, I was being unreasonable. I felt frantic, and I couldn’t process what he was saying, couldn’t make it align with what I’d told him, even though in some strange way, it made sense.
There was a loud shuffling sound, and then Everett stood in the doorway to the kitchen, looking sweaty and enraged, his eyes wild as he swiveled his gaze back and forth between me and Luke. He seemed to be trying to assess the situation, and I held my breath. My gaze darted to his foot, the source of the shuffling noise, and I felt dizzy.
I’d expected it to be wrapped or maybe in a boot or cast. Luke said his father stepped off the porch wrong, and I assumed a fracture, sprain or twist. The bloody bandage wrapped around his foot triggered something in me, and the face of the beast leaning over me, snarling and drooling, returned. I could almost smell the sour breath, and a tear streaked down my cheek.
My knife. A big, black paw. A horrible cry.
Werewolves. Jersey Devil.
My grandmother’s remains. Everett’s foot. My bloody knife.
Intelligent eyes on the shotgun. A desperate howl.
It circled around, over and over, and I grew lightheaded, faint. I gripped the counter as my knees buckled and the edges of my vision darkened. I saw Luke lunge for me and nearly screamed, but no sound came out as something hard hit my ass, then my back, and then finally, my head.
Everything was black, and I could hear Luke’s voice, muffled and distant. I moved, but not on my own, and I felt like I was floating before I my head touched something soft. I tried to focus, heard elevated voices speaking in frenzied tones, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. With the overwhelming urge to hide from a truth that couldn’t be real, I let the darkness take me.
Chapter 13
“I told you, boy, and you didn’t listen, with that thick skull of yours. You should never have brought her out here!”
Luke gaped at his father in utter disbelief. “Are you really going to point fingers at me for this?” He gestured to Crystal’s shoulder, which was a bloody, ravaged mess that would scar and likely curse her for the rest of her life. “You think that’s my fault? Go look in the mirror, Pops!” His memories from two nights ago had been scattered, and he’d had an ominous feeling about what Crystal had witnessed. But he’d been unable to piece anything together until she showed up tonight and detailed everything.
Only now did Luke even remember chasing his father away before he’d done the unthinkable, and still, he didn’t remember taking note of injuries to Crystal. He might have killed his father right then and there.
Jabbing a finger in Crystal’s direction, Everett seethed, “That wouldn’t have happened if you’d listened to me in the first place and not let your cock make your decisions.”
Luke lunged toward his father but caught himself before he launched an attack. Still, he yearned to pummel the old man for that remark. “For your information, I told my little head to calm down and used the big one. That’s how all this happened, because you made me doubt myself. And then you caused this.” Still horrified, Luke focused on the wound, wishing there was something he could do to stop the spread of the infection. But it didn’t look good.
“She’s not bitten,” Everett said behind him, his voice calmer now. “There’s a chance she won’t turn.”
Luke scoffed. “I know the difference. This is bad.” Maybe she hadn’t been bitten, but Luke would bet his life saliva had dripped into the open gash before she got away. It was the same outcome in the end. He scrubbed a hand down his face. “If you’d stayed in the bedroom, she’d still be on her feet.”
“And you would have let her run off and broadcast our business to the world!” Everett countered. “We can’t have hunters crawling these woods, Luke. And if she’s turning, we can’t let her get back to the city.”
Shaking his head and raking a hand through his hair in frustration, Luke asked, “What do you expect me to do, tie her up? I can’t hold her prisoner. She already accused me of manipulating her and trapping her here.”
Part of him wanted to do just that. Not because she posed a danger to herself or the rest of society. Not because she was going to howl at the next full moon. But because he couldn’t imagine her walking away and never coming back. And that’s exactly what he believed she would do when she woke up, if given the choice.
She’d fainted, probably from fear and overwhelming emotion, coupled with pain and the fever of the wound. It wouldn’t have been more than a deep scratch, had it not been infected. But the ragged tears had a spider web of lines coming away from it, stretching in all directions over her shoulder. They closed in on her neck, ran down beneath the curve of her bra.
When he realized she was still exposed and that his father stood there, ogling her, a feral instinct took over, and Luke turned to snarl at his father. “Get out of the room. It’s not decent.”
Everett rolled his eyes. “You think she wants you in here, pawing at her and thinking about what it would be like to get her under you?” Luke felt the loss of control as he whirled to face his father in warning. Finally, looking flushed and pale at the same time, Luke’s father grumbled under his breath, his face tight as he tried to mask the agony he was in, and he turned toward the bedroom, calling over his shoulder, “Fine. You better take care of this mess, or I will.”
The open threat didn’t help Luke’s disposition. How could this have happened? Crystal had escaped this fate once before, and then she’d come back here because Luke couldn’t stay away from her. He’d essentially chased her back to this place, a place of danger and curses, and he might as well have caused this injury himself.
If only he had arrived sooner.
He was responsible for the fact that the only woman he had ever wanted would be as much of a monster as the creatures she studied. And god help him when she opened her eyes and showered him with her hatred for it.
***
Crystal stirred, waking Luke from a light sleep. He’d dozed off sometime after midnight, and the deep darkness outside spoke to the fact that dawn was hours away. But as he glanced at where Crystal rested fitfully on the couch, he knew what woke him. She writhed in her sleep, her hair wildly mussed around her and small whimpering sounds emitting from her throat.
Moving from his seat in the armchair, Luke knelt beside her, noticing instantly that she had soaked through the blanket with sweat, several strands of hair stuck to the dampness on her face. Touching her forehead, he found her fever worse, her skin so hot it nearly burned him. He feared what would happen when the full moon came, if she already experienced this sort of reaction to the infection. She wouldn’t make it out of this without turning, he knew.
She opened her eyes, but they didn’t focus, rolling wildly around, and she started mutt
ering incoherently. Luke couldn’t make out the words, and he leaned in closer, the scent of her infection almost offensive in its strength but something else riding just under the surface and teasing at his keen sense of smell. What was that?
“Luke!” The word came out as a scream, a cry for help, and Luke put a hand on her forehead again to try to calm her. She thrashed against him, swatting at his arm, and he backed away, giving her space. She sat up, hugging her knees to her chest and wincing with pain as it must have pulled on the wound on her shoulder. “Luke!”
“I’m right here,” he told her, not reaching for her and careful not to raise his voice. He didn’t want to alarm her when she was already frantic. “I’m next to you.”
“Can you hear it?”
The tremble in her voice made Luke’s heart ache. He wanted nothing more than to ease her mind, to ease her pain, and to take away the affliction. This may not directly be his doing, but he could take fault for himself with very little stretch of the imagination. “Hear what, Crystal?”
She laughed, a tiny giggle that sounded less than sane. “The voice. You don’t hear it, do you?”
He shook his head, but she didn’t look at him. “No, Crystal. I don’t hear anything. What does it say to you?”
She inhaled sharply, and for the first time since she’d woken, she turned her gaze on him, her eyes seemingly clear and lucid. “It’s the forest,” she whispered. “The woods. The trees are calling me, just like they always have.”
The fever must have caused hallucinations. Luke had a high fever with pneumonia once, as a teenager, and he remembered seeing things that didn’t exist. It looked like Crystal experienced auditory hallucinations with her fever. “And how would the forest call you, Crystal? It can’t speak.”
“It can,” she insisted, a calm expression on her face but the heat in her cheeks glowing, even in the dark space. “It’s spoken to me since before my grandmother’s accident.” She laughed again, softly. “Unless that’s you, Luke. Maybe it’s you talking to me. Don’t wolf packs have some sort of psychic link? Were you here when I was a child? Was it you I heard and you I hear now? I bet it is. I bet it was never the forest at all.”
She rambled, and she faded into mumbling something he couldn’t understand again, but something about her question, her accusation, settled uneasily in Luke’s stomach, making it churn. She didn’t know the level of truth to her words, how close she came to the facts, and she couldn’t know the exact relationship between wolves and their families. After all, she had only just been scratched. She hadn’t been born into the curse, and she hadn’t had any exposure other than her grandmother’s attack until now.
Did the strange conclusion come from something in her cryptozoological studies? What Luke wouldn’t give to get his hands on that research now! He’d never really cared what people claimed about werewolves. The falsehoods tended to protect them rather than put them at risk, always wrong and full of dramatic claims that sold well off shelves.
Maybe, somewhere along the way, he’d missed a publication by someone serious, maybe an insider, that gave away more than a little reality. Still, the words that had fallen from Crystal’s mouth in her wild, fever-ridden state came much too close to reality for comfort. He would have to get her lucid and talk to her, find out what the research said.
And unfortunately, in this condition, Luke wondered if she’d get back to lucidity again before she made the first change. The full moon didn’t come for nearly two weeks now, and he needed to find a way to have her excused from classes, distanced from friends, without raising suspicions. She couldn’t go back to a normal life until the fever ended and, likely, until she’d made it through the first full moon.
Suddenly, Crystal started crying, sobbing heavily, and it raised alarms for Luke. “What’s wrong, Crystal? Talk to me.”
She shook her head, her face buried in her hands as tears streamed hard enough to leak between her fingers and from her chin. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, that’s the problem! Something’s wrong, and I feel like I know what it is, but that can’t be right. It can’t be real!”
Had she come back to herself? It sounded like it, like she’d come to a point of facing the truth and denying it heavily because it seemed so ludicrous. “Crystal, talk to me. What do you think is wrong?”
But she shook her head. “No, I can’t say it. I can’t be. You can’t be. It’s not real. The Devil. The Jersey Devil. Big Foot. Chupacabras. None of it’s real. It. Can’t. Be.” She shuddered, and Luke carefully tucked the blanket more tightly around her, sliding up to sit next to her on the couch without touching her. He wanted desperately to hold her, to kiss her, to soothe her so she could rest again. But none of that behavior seemed appropriate under the circumstances.
“What can we not be, Crystal?” She would have to say it sometime, have to face reality, and the sooner she spoke the word she had avoided in that list, the sooner she could start the healing process. The acceptance would make all of this easier for her. Changing would only shock her body worse and hurt more if she didn’t prepare her mind for it, and he couldn’t stand the thought of her in such agony.
He remembered his first change, and that had come with a life of preparation, knowing what he was from the time he could comprehend speech. Having lived a normal, if tragic, human life up to this point, Crystal wouldn’t have it easy. So, he pushed her again and asked, “Please, Crystal, can you tell me what you know? What it is you want so desperately not to be real?”
She pulled her hands down to her throat and looked at him with absolute terror. “Tell me you’re not a werewolf, Luke,” she groaned with excruciating emotions. “Please, tell me I’m not going to be a werewolf.”
With all the sympathy in the world, hurting for her, Luke shook his head. “Crystal, you already know the answer to that. You don’t want me to lie to you. That’ll only make it harder.”
“I can’t accept that, Luke,” she said, nearly choking on the words as tears continued to fall liberally. “I’ve been obsessed with cryptozoology since I was seven years old, but I’ve never really believed. I can’t…” She trailed off, her eyes dulling as she drifted off to another place. What experience did she relive this time? Her grandmother’s attack? Her own? Or perhaps the way he’d attacked her in her apartment, wanted to rip her throat out as much as he wanted to tear her clothes off?
“You have to accept it, Crystal. You know there is no other truth.” Her shoulders curled in, and she buried her head against her knees. He knew without her saying so she’d accepted it as a horrible fate. This time, he did wrap her in his arms, pulling her so she nearly hid in his chest. She cried herself back to sleep, her head falling into his lap, and Luke found himself stroking her hair in a soothing manner until he, too, drifted off again.
Chapter 14
I didn’t understand why the voice changed. Perhaps it was a dream, but it felt real. The forest spoke, the trees whispering softly and calling my name. But they didn’t sound the same. The voice resonated in my head, and it belonged to Luke. How could he be the source of the voice? I hadn’t known him as a child.
My mind played tricks on me, the face of the beast morphing into Luke’s handsome one. And then, the glowing eyes of the beast replaced Luke’s, like embers that burned softly, driving me into absolute terror. And then he aged, until he became Everett, foul smelling saliva dripping from fangs that cut into the old man’s lips while he hovered over the torn body of my grandmother.
I woke with a start, none of it making sense as my body seized, and I didn’t recognize my surroundings for a moment. When I found myself in the cabin, I had a moment of panic, thinking I had gone back in time to my childhood to experience my grandmother’s death all over again. The darkness hung thick around me, and I couldn’t pull myself out of it.
“Crystal, are you awake?” Luke’s voice trickled in with reality, and suddenly I jumped. My head lay in his lap, and I sat up, not quite comfortable with that, all things conside
red. I still didn’t know the details of the situation, my brain not ready to admit to the truth as I came fully awake, even though I vaguely remembered doing so in the middle of the night.
“I feel weak,” I said, my throat dry and aching as I forced the words out. Then, I sniffed the air, scenting something vaguely familiar but far stronger than I’d ever smelt it before. “Bacon,” I whispered.
Luke stared at her oddly, and then he nodded. “I took it out of the freezer last night to defrost. I was going to cook it for breakfast.”
Odd. How could I smell uncooked bacon? And how could that scent entice me to the point I salivated? “I’m hungry.” The words came out harsh and painful as my stomach churned and twisted in knots of starvation. I had never eaten last night, but I shouldn’t have felt like months had passed since my last meal. It was excruciating, and I almost felt like I would retch if I didn’t eat soon.
Luke got to his feet quickly. “I’ll cook it now. Give me five minutes, and I’ll have a plate ready.”
I wanted to follow him, but my legs didn’t seem capable of holding me up. I wondered about the infection, but my shoulder hurt less than before, and I didn’t feel the burning sensation of the fever in it. Had it started to heal? I couldn’t see from this angle, but I didn’t want to risk falling on the way to the bathroom, so I had to wait.
And then the aroma of the bacon, before and after it started to sizzle, called to me, and I found myself stumbling toward the kitchen without my conscious consent. I dropped into a chair heavily, my legs about as useful as blocks of gelatin, and Luke passed me a slice fresh out of the frying pan, which I almost swallowed whole.
The flavor intensified the smell. It awakened my taste buds as I puckered with delight, and I could barely keep from lunging at the raw pile of pork on the counter. What had come over me? I didn’t even like beef, and yet, raw pork enticed me.
