Dead by Morning (Rituals of the Night Book One)

by Kayla Krantz

  “You’re gonna live,” he informed her, pulling his hand away.

  “It didn’t stop it from being unnecessary,” she pointed out, trying her best to pull the dress back down.

  He smirked as he reached toward her wrists. Reflexively, she flinched away from him.

  “Stop it,” he said, frowning slightly as he paused for a moment to watch her.

  Luna’s eyes glinted, and she flared her nostrils as she looked back at him. All she could think of was the hole in her stomach. “I can’t help it. Consider it a conditioned response.”

  With a quick flick of his key, he ripped open the handcuffs before he shoved the keys into his pocket. He grasped her arm as gently as he could. He helped her up off the bed and kept his hand on her arm after she balanced herself.

  “Okay, I have something I need to do,” he informed her, “and now that you’re better, you’re gonna help me.”

  “What am I supposed to be helping with?” she questioned, turning her face away from him slightly.

  “Well, we don’t want Susan’s body getting found like Kate’s did, do we?” he asked, and his voice was overly calm as he watched her fidget nervously as she stood beside him.

  In a way, his calm, sweet voice held far more of a threatening quality than his angry voice ever could. She couldn’t tell what he felt inside. After the odd act of kindness, she wasn’t sure what to make of his mood swings anymore and thought maybe it would be best to play along.

  She shook her head uncertainly. “No, we don’t.”

  “Exactly right,” he said, a smirk lighting up his features as he ran his fingers along the skin on her arm almost as if he were petting her.

  He pulled her gently back into the main room—the room from the dream, the room which still held Susan’s body, the room that started it all. Luna clamped her hand to her mouth again at the sight of the body. After not seeing it for a while, it somehow made it much worse.

  With his free hand, Chance grabbed the collar of Susan’s dress in a tight fist. He walked toward the cabin door, dragging Luna in one arm and Susan in the other. Luna winced as the body came close to touching her feet. She forced her eyes to look away. Shivering, she walked a bit faster so she was beside Chance rather than Susan’s remains.

  They made it outside the cabin, and she realized she had been wrong about it being nighttime. The sun just barely dipped below the horizon; she had slept through the entire day. Surely her dad would notice she wasn’t at home, but what difference did it make? He wouldn’t call the cops unless she didn’t show up in a few days thanks to her running away from home stunt. Chance let go of her suddenly, and the movement brought her back to her surroundings. He gave her a sharp warning glare before he dragged Susan’s body to a halt before her. He dropped the corpse and backed up to where Luna stood.

  “What are you gonna do with her?” she asked him quietly, eyes darting between Susan and Chance as a variety of scenarios flashed in her brain.

  “Get rid of her the easiest way I know how,” he replied.

  He pulled out a small box from his pocket. He opened it and removed a match. Was he actually going to burn her body?

  “You’re joking, right?” Luna couldn’t hold in the only thought she had at that moment.

  He shook his head. “Nope, how do you think I’ve never been caught?”

  She shuddered at his words. He had been a wolf in sheep’s clothes his entire life.

  Beside her, Chance struck the match, and it caught fire. He watched it for a minute before he tossed it onto Susan’s unmoving body. Right away, her clothes caught fire and within a minute, it had completely consumed her in red-orange flames. The smell of burning flesh filled the clearing, and Luna lifted her sleeve to her mouth as she gagged on it. Her eyes started to tear up as she watched the hungry flames devour every part of Susan. Chance remained seemingly unfazed.

  “Look at that fire burn,” he admired, clasping his hands together behind his back as he rocked on his toes.

  She couldn’t take it anymore and turned away from the body. Bile rose up into the back of her throat, and without thinking, she doubled over and vomited into the grass beside her. Chance stepped forward, looming above her as she retched. When she had finished, Luna wiped her mouth on her sleeve as she looked at him through narrowed eyes, swallowing roughly to clear the taste of vomit from her mouth.

  “We can let this finish burning in peace. We got other business to take care of.”

  “Like what?” she asked him, feeling that sickening trill again.

  He pointed behind her and Luna turned. The stone temple from the dream stood next to the cabin. Half of the stones had fallen out of place in the ancient walls and ivy had made its home there too. Chance pushed her, and she swallowed as she realized he wanted her to go inside. She peered at him from the corner of her eye. No matter how she felt, she wouldn’t let him know that the calm part of her mind had left her. She stepped toward the stone temple slowly, and Chance stayed behind her. When she reached it, she climbed up the rounded stone stairs, one at a time, to go through an open gothic archway. Inside, a hallway sloped down into pitch-black darkness. She paused, her senses disoriented.

  “We’re not there yet,” Chance said from behind her.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  Luna sighed silently. She took a breath to regain her senses and padded forward. The tunnel seemed to stretch on and on forever. When she thought it wouldn’t lead them anywhere, it emptied them into a small, smoky room, dimly lit by only a few sparse candles. With no ventilation, the smoke had formed a haze in the room, making it hard to see. She narrowed her eyes against it.

  In the middle of the floor lay Amy. Her wrists were bound behind her back as well as her ankles with thick, white, lacy ties. A gag blocked her mouth, but at the sight of Luna, she mumbled around it. Her face was purpled with a trail of bruises, and Luna guessed Chance had hit her. As Luna’s eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness, she gasped. Amy lay on a pentagram that looked to be drawn out of blood.

  Luna knew from Chance’s reputation that it was human.

  “Chance, let her go,” Luna begged, dragging her eyes off of her as she set her hands on his forearm.

  He shook his head. “No, Luna—you let her go.”

  She blinked at him once, letting go of him before she took a step closer to Amy.

  “I didn’t mean untie her.”

  Luna turned back to him and realized what he clutched in his hand. As her eyes caught sight of the small dagger, she realized what he had meant; he wanted Luna to sacrifice her.

  “No.”

  “This is getting old,” he said, extending the handle to her.

  Staring at the snake-handled dagger in disgust, Luna knew she wouldn’t let it taste Amy’s blood. Chance was the psycho, not her. He could never force her to kill. She’d have to make the choice to comply on her own. If he killed her, at least she’d die a good person. She knew too well what the knife felt like—she didn’t ever want to inflict that kind of agony on another person.

  Luna stared at Amy again as she lay on the floor. She stared back at her through wide brown eyes. They shone in the faint light with her glistening tears, and Luna could only imagine how scared she must truly be. Luna thought back to when she had gone over her house, how different Amy was from everyone else. She wouldn’t rip her future away to save her own life. Luna remembered that Amy had saved her from Chance before.

  A life for a life.

  He tilted the blade, and it glinted in the candlelight. Luna reached forward and slapped it out of his hand. Without the knife to hold, his hand curled into a fist as the dagger skittered across the floor. She looked up at Chance’s face and saw his eyes glowing with a pale green fire.

  In that moment, she knew it. She knew this was it, the final showdown.

  “Pick that up,” he commanded calmly though he spoke through clenched teeth. He had used the same voice just before he decided to stab her
.

  “No,” Luna said, standing to her full height. “And you know why? Because I’m not helping you!”

  He pulled the gun from his pocket and cocked it back as it pointed toward the ground. “It’s either you kill her or I kill you. You choose, Luna.”

  His hands shook as he lifted the gun up toward her. She thought about what Max had been trying to say to her back in the forest before Chance had shot him. Chance was scared of being something…but what? She frowned and looked at Chance, holding her chin high as she studied him.

  “Is something the matter?” she prompted innocently, eyes probing him as she tried to get inside his head.

  “You, you’re defying me…you can’t do that to me. I’m all you have left,” he spat, a sheen of sweat glistening across his forehead as he exhaled loudly.

  “You mean I’m all you have left. You’re scared of being alone, aren’t you?” she asked him quietly.

  “No.” His hand trembled again as he tried to hold the gun steady.

  “That’s why you took my friends away from me…so…so I’d depend on you. You thought that way, I’d never leave you,” she whispered, her head tilting slightly and her eyebrows pulling downward as understanding took her. “You stabbed me, but in a place you knew wouldn’t kill me so I wouldn’t run—so I couldn’t run. You didn’t want to be alone.”

  “I said I’m not scared of that,” he growled, his voice louder as he flared his nostrils, shifting his weight to the leg closer to her.

  “Why is that your fear?” she asked him, holding out her palms with the legitimate desire to know. “You’re the most popular boy in school!”

  He blinked, and for a second, the green hue in his eyes disappeared. “They’re not interested in me for who I am as a person; they’re interested in my reputation, the popularity. But you…you never cared about that. You saw me for me, and it made you different.”

  Luna had caught the color change in his eyes. She had been right about what Max wanted to tell her.

  “Of course I didn’t care about your popularity,” Luna said in shock. If she could keep it up, she might be able to cancel out his fusion, then she could get Amy and herself out alive. It was far-fetched, but it was hope.

  “That’s why I wanted you, really, fuck your ability,” he admitted, kicking the ground slightly as he shifted the gun to his other hand, fidgeting with his shirt collar before he stilled. “It would help me, but I easily could’ve found someone else with it.”

  “You’re a jerk, and you’re ruining my life,” Luna said, trying any barbed insult to see its effect.

  “Excuse me?”

  “All the stuff you’ve done to me over the years?” Luna scoffed, pressing her hand to her abdomen. “I have a hole in my stomach thanks to you!”

  “How dare you. I’ve done everything for you,” he spat. “It’s not my fault you wouldn’t listen.”

  She scoffed. “Oh, really?”

  “I took you out on a date, an expensive one, and you got to go to that dance with me,” he said. “You should be thanking me, especially since I saved your life on that bridge. I could’ve just let you fall. With anyone else, I would have.”

  “I will never thank you. You may have saved my life once, but you threatened to take it too many times to count.” She held up a finger for each time she named off a way he had wronged her. “You choked me; you got me grounded; you made my dad think I’m an alcoholic; you killed my friends; and I’m supposed to thank you?”

  “Those were just a small fraction of problems, they don’t count,” he hissed, curling his lip.

  “Yeah, they do,” she growled back.

  “You’re really gonna leave it with that?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her. “You think I did nothing for you?”

  She looked back at him through equally narrowed eyes. “You made me lose my friends and you turned my own father against me. I can never fix what you’ve done to me. You’ve made my life a living Hell.”

  “It doesn’t have to be permanent. I can easily get David to believe you again,” he boasted, “with just one meaningful conversation.”

  He literally doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong.

  “What are you going to do about Max and Violet? They’re dead! You can’t bring them back to life. Besides, my dad never should’ve thought I was a bad kid in the first place, because I wasn’t. It was you…it’s always been you.”

  “Now you’re being harsh,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “The truth hurts,” she retorted, glancing at Amy once. The girl had gone silent as she watched their exchange. It was a reminder Luna wasn’t just doing this for herself, but for her last remaining friend as well. Luna took the moment to swallow once before returning her attention to Chance. “Listen to this, and listen good—I don’t like you. I never liked you. You and my dad may have had some twisted arrangement, but I would rather chew off my own arm than go through with devoting myself to you. I can’t wait for graduation, and you know why? I hated having classes with you because that meant I’d have to sit by you and listen to you talk on and on about your inane problems. I dreaded seeing your face every single day because it makes me sick. I was the only person you couldn’t get under your spell because I don’t want to be around you.

  “I have one wish in life. I just want you to go away,” Luna finished, saying each and every word slowly to enunciate her hatred for him.

  She hoped he realized that he truly was alone in the world. She felt no guilt after everything he had done to her. Speaking her mind made it feel as if a weight had been lifted off of her chest. If he killed her now, at least she had expressed herself first.

  “That’s not true,” he said, taking a step closer to her before he halted, moving back to his original place. She could hear the emotion in his voice as he raised the gun at her again.

  She wasn’t worried about him shooting anymore. She was utterly calm, too determined to win to give up with the feeling that for once she had the upper hand. Chance’s eyes flashed their normal blue color again, and this time the color stayed.

  “It is true, and all the other people at school? Your ‘friends?’ They only like you for your popularity, like you said.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but let out a scream of agony instead. Luna watched, her mouth falling open as she took a hesitant step backwards. As she watched, his whole body began to glow a pale green—the same color his eyes had been. A sudden, deafening tearing noise filled the room as the pale green color rose to look like Chance had been engulfed in flames. The color stretched almost to the ceiling, and he screamed again. The gun went off as he clutched it tight in his agony.

  Luna heard the bullet speed past her ear by a mere inch. She barely noticed it as she watched a purple mist seep out of Chance’s body and up into the heart of the green flame. It hovered for a moment inside the green mist before it shot upward and vanished. At once, the green hue disappeared, and Chance fell backwards against the wall, the gun clattering to the ground beside him. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t move as he lay crumpled on the floor.

  Is he dead? Luna wondered solemnly.

  Chapter Fifty

  LUNA CREPT OVER to him carefully, unsure if he’d wake up. When she reached him, she nudged his side with her boot. He still didn’t move, and she started to think maybe he was dead. Crouching beside him, she studied his face. His eyes were closed. She held her fingers to his throat. There was a pulse…but it was faint.

  Luna stood up and turned back to Amy, who looked at Chance wide-eyed before she focused on Luna. Luna walked over to her. She pulled the gag out of Amy’s mouth and the binds off of her wrists and ankles before she threw them onto the floor beside her. Amy sat up right away.

  As she rubbed her sore wrists, she turned to Luna, her face stained with tears. “Is all of this real?”

  For so long, Luna had that same question on her mind. She hadn’t known what was real or fake and part of her still didn�
��t know. Luna glanced at where Chance lay and then back at Amy. She thought of Violet and Max, who were dead somewhere out in the forest.

  Sooner or later, Amy would find out the truth.

  “This is real,” Luna replied finally.

  “What happened today?”

  “It’s impossible to explain.”

  Amy frowned, her small brown eyes filled with horror as her face blanched. She had seen more than her mind was willing to accept.

  I know the feeling.

  “Are you okay? Can you stand?” Luna wondered, eyeing the trail of bruises on the girl’s face again.

  “Yeah,” Amy muttered quietly, standing to her feet. “Thank you for saving me, Luna. I was so scared. I…I thought I was gonna die.”

  “There was no way I’d help him kill you,” Luna replied with a disgusted glance at his shadowy figure against the wall. “Let’s get out of here.” She wasn’t eager to stay in the tiny, smoke-filled room, worried Chance would wake up at any minute.

  Amy nodded weakly in agreement and turned to lead the way down the long, dark hallway that led outside. Neither of them spoke as the darkness engulfed them. After a few minutes, they emerged on the other side, narrowing their eyes against the deep orange light.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Luna asked Amy again.

  The small girl bobbed her head but didn’t say a word as she made her way to the edge of the clearing and disappeared into the trees. Luna wanted to follow her, but she had worse problems to focus on at the moment.

  She glanced at Susan’s smoldering body as she passed by it to see a mess of charred bones and ashes. Pushing the thought out of her mind, she walked quietly through the forest. She wanted to get as far away as she could. Her heaving sobs echoed around her as she stumbled through the trees. She felt weak from blood loss, and her stomach ached as if she had undergone surgery. She felt the thin scab that had formed over her skin and knew it had broken from her effort. Blood seeped through her white dress. She prayed she would be able to get somewhere safe before Chance regained consciousness.