Bloodborn

by Karen Kincy

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Bloodborn © 2011 by Karen Kincy.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2013

  E-book ISBN: 9780738739816

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover image of couple © 2011 Pixland/PunchStock

  forest moon © 2011 iStockphoto.com/Ryan Howe

  Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Flux

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  Woodbury, MN 55125

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  To my dad,

  though there are no transporter accidents in this book

  one

  It isn’t working. The doctor said it would, but it isn’t, even though I keep taking the pills, and I keep seeing Dad sneak into the bathroom and count how many are left. As if I would stop taking them. As if I would let myself become a beast.

  God dammit.

  I tacked a heavy blanket over the blinds, but an icy pale glow trickles through a crack. I lurch out of bed to yank the blanket straight. My hand slices through the moonlight. The animal inside me leaps to the front of my eyes, and everything becomes bright and sharp until I close my eyes and stagger back into the darkness.

  I tighten my abs against the twisting in my gut. No. I’m stronger than that.

  For a moment, I can smell the old yellow stink of sweat and the furry mice in the wall and the sweet night air outside—

  Shit. I almost lost it.

  I close my eyes and grope for the curtain, then tug it over the moonlight and the mouth-watering night air creeping past the window. Sweat drips down my shoulders and sticks my T-shirt to my skin. I pad barefoot across the scarred floorboards, my bedroom as stuffy as July though it’s the middle of September. The doctors said something about a higher body temperature being normal. Yeah, like I’m normal.

  I snatch the bottle of pills from my nightstand, flick on the light, read the label again.

  Koeman, Brock

  Take 1 capsule by mouth twice daily or as needed for management of condition. Do not exceed 4 doses in 24 hours.

  Lycanthrox 325 mg Capsules

  I’ve only had three pills today. And I sure as hell need to manage my condition.

  I twist off the cap and shake one of the red pills into my hand. Right. Water. My sweaty fist clenched around the pill, I lumber to the bathroom. My shoulder hits the door frame and I swear quietly, so Dad won’t hear.

  I’m not sure, but I think I got bigger after it happened. Taller, stronger.

  I hunch over the sink, fill my free hand with water, then down the pill in a gulp. It slides down my parched throat, dissolving in my stomach, seeping through my blood, poisoning the animal inside me. Or at least it should be.

  I peel off my clothes and crawl into bed. Lycanthrox always makes me dead tired. My eyelids feel heavy, like granite, like they are thudding shut and trapping me in a tomb. I fight to stay conscious, out of reflex, out of fear, but the darkness wins. It always does. And in this darkness, I’m forced to face my nightmares.

  Black trees slash the sky. Rain hisses to the ground. I run naked through the forest while the moon dangles above, a cold white eye, watching me. My feet pound the dirt. I fight my way through brambles, ignoring the thorns and blood, and burst into a clearing. Moonlight gleams on my skin, makes me look shiny and unreal like those oiled-up bodybuilders. And I’m as muscular as them, too. Strong enough to crush trees.

  I tear into an alder sapling, my fingers, my claws, shredding the tender bark. I yank whole ferns from the ground and fling them into the air. I’m tough. I’m badass. I’m ready to defeat any fool who stands in my way.

  I want something to fight. To kill. My teeth itch into fangs, and I bare them at the moon.

  “Brock?” says a soft voice I know.

  I close my mouth to hide my fangs, then face her. “Cynthia.”

  Cyn stands by a tree, hesitant, her slender arm wrapped around its trunk. I try not to stare through her thin white nightgown. Her chestnut hair shines in the moonlight, and she looks as pretty as an angel who lost her way.

  “Oh,” Cyn says, covering her red lips with her hand. “Brock.”

  She stares at my naked body, but I’m not ashamed. The way she looks at me makes me feel like a man, not an animal. Heat pools in my stomach. I walk to her, my heart thumping in my ears, and see her smile. She’s so, so beautiful.

  I know what to do. I’m not clumsy or ignorant at all as I curl my hands around her hips and tug her to me. She flings her arms around my neck and kisses me, and I kiss her harder, devouring the delicious taste of her lips. She moans, urging me on, and I know that she wants me to lower her to the ground. I protect the back of her neck from the cold earth, and she looks into my eyes with such sweet trust and want.

  “Brock,” she whispers.

  I lean in to kiss her again, kiss her neck, her collarbone. Against my lips, I feel her pulse beneath her skin. I bury my face in the hollow of her neck and inhale slowly. I smell her sweat, her blood flowing, her tender flesh—

  “Brock?” Cyn’s voice sounds higher, birdlike with fear. “What’s happening?”

  The roots of my teeth itch; the tips press into my lower lip, sharpening into fangs. I grip her waist with claws. My mouth waters at her scent.

  “Brock! Brock, no!”

  Her voice, chirping, squeaking like a little animal, drives me wild. I grin at her, my mouth fully fanged, and my drool dribbles onto her face. Then I sink my teeth into her peach-soft shoulder, biting to the bone and drinking the juice of her blood. She screams, and the animal in me lunges to the surface. My skeleton shatters, dissolves, and in that agony, it reshapes and clicks back into place. Reborn, I tear into the girl beneath me, shredding and gnawing and licking while I satisfy the wolf I have become.

  “Cynthia!”

  I claw aside my blankets and fall out of bed. Panting, I crouch on the floor. Rivers of sweat run down my face and back. I rub my hands over my skin—skin, not fur. I’m still human. I still haven’t changed.

  Fuck! I hit the bedpost and wince when the screws groan.

  I’m al
ways afraid those dreams are real, that I’ve sleepwalked my way outside and transformed without even knowing it. Jekyll and Hyde.

  I fumble on my nightstand and grab a crumpled picture. It has that cheapass photo-booth look, but it’s still one of the best photos I own: me and Cyn, with her smiling while she pretends to sneak up behind me and strangle me.

  One photo still isn’t enough to soothe the ache inside me. I tug open my drawer and carefully unfold the sweater she borrowed. With my eyes closed, I press my nose to the wool and inhale. I know Cyn’s scent by heart: a sinfully bittersweet almond-vanilla aroma, lingering on my clothes and the places we slept together.

  I sigh, and fold the sweater again.

  For an unbelievable eleven and a half months, I was Cyn’s boyfriend. She dumped me two weeks before our one-year anniversary. She said I wasn’t “the right kind of guy.” Bullshit, of course, but her eyes told me what she really meant. She was scared of me and Chris going curhounding, and the murders in Klikamuks—

  There’s a rap on the door. Dad.

  “What’s going on, Brock?”

  I hide the photo. “Nothing.” My voice sounds harsh, and I cough. “Bad dream.”

  Dad jiggles the locked doorknob. “Brock. Open the door.”

  I climb to my feet, my legs weak, and do as he says. Dad stands in the shadows, already dressed in dirt-stained jeans and a red flannel shirt. His wiry salt-and-pepper hair looks as tousled as it always does. I glance at the clock. The glowing red numbers read 4:12 am. Almost time to herd the cows to the milking barn.

  “You been taking your medicine?” Dad says.

  “Yeah.” I clench and unclench my fists. “Of course.”

  “Good.” Dad clears his throat, like he wants to ask something else but doesn’t know how.

  “Dad, you need some help?”

  “No. I’ve got it under control.”

  He hasn’t let me near the cows since it happened. He doesn’t know, but I’ve tried already. When I get too close to a cow, its nostrils widen, its eyes roll back, and it trots to the opposite end of the pasture. They smell the wolf in me.

  “Get some sleep,” Dad says. “We’ve got a long drive to Grandma June’s.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  He clomps down the hallway in rubber boots. He never did that when Mom was still here; she was so proud of her peach pebble carpet. I shut the door behind Dad. That carpet … me and Chris slaved over it three years ago.

  Mom kept saying she wanted new carpet, but Dad kept complaining about the cost. Finally, he caved in after me and Chris promised to rip out the nasty old shit-brown carpet. We crouched at opposite ends of the hallway, cutting the carpet with razors and peeling it away. Just like skinning a rabbit. Once we got down to the carpet padding, we started yanking out a few billion staples with needle-nose pliers.

  Dad would wander by every once and a while, tight-lipped and silent, so we tried to beat each other by ripping out the most staples the fastest. Our clumsy leather work gloves slowed us down. Soon enough, Chris ditched his. Metal and splinters gouged his knuckles, but he was smoking me, so I ditched my gloves, too. Blood streaked our fingers. When Dad came by again, he looked at Chris, then me. I was farther along my section of floorboards and had more staples out, but Chris’s hands were rawer and redder.

  Guess who he thought worked harder.

  Pain means you keep going, no matter what. Pain makes Dad proud.

  I grab my headphones and turn on my radio. A driving beat, a surge of electric guitars, then the gravelly voice of a singer: “You left us in the cold hard ground/But we’re coming out tonight/Nothing you can do to kill us again/The time has come for fight or flight.”

  I recognize the song as “Undead and Unwanted” by Bloodless, one of the few all-vampire bands worth listening to. Dad would freak if he knew I was listening to them. He can’t stand that “those damn gick bands” made it onto the Top 20. Dad says when he was a kid, no decent person would be caught dead listening to music by Others.

  But hey, what the hell. I’m a werewolf. I guess I’m one of them now, whatever you want to call them: gicks, paranormals, Others. Lump me in with those vampires, faeries, and demons. Though for some reason Dad seems to think the medicine I’m taking will do more than slow the unavoidable, that it will actually cure me. I wish.

  In the morning—what normal people consider morning, not the insanely early time Dad gets up—I drag my ass out of bed and rub my gritty eyes. I didn’t sleep much more, but I did finally nod off around six or so. Dad is hard at work burning food in the kitchen, already back from the first milking of the day.

  I lumber to the bathroom and start shaving. I’m hideously stubbly; it grows so much faster than it did before. Something like the higher body temperature, I think. Everything in my body is accelerated. Which is cool, because I heal fast if I hurt myself, but the doctors also say I’ll have a shorter lifespan. I don’t know how they know. I don’t know if I even care. Live a long and fruitful life as a werewolf. Yeah, really top of my list.

  I head down the creaky carpeted stairs, sliding my hand along the yellowed roses on the wallpaper. On the bottom step I stop, my nostrils widening. Eggs and onion and bell peppers and cheddar cheese and thyme—smells rush into my nose, overwhelming me for a second, before I piece them together into omelet.

  “Hey,” Dad says. “You hungry?”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  Now, more than ever. Now, I can’t say I’m ever satisfied. Then I sink my teeth into her peach-soft shoulder, biting to the bone and drinking the juice of her blood. I shudder and shove that nightmare to the back of my mind.

  Blackjack, our brindled pit bull, lies under the kitchen table, his nose on the tiles, his eyebrows jumping as he glances around. Scars crisscross his neck and shoulders. I remember the day he got those scars, the same day me and Chris got bitten. I remember the silver-furred, yellow-eyed werewolf who did it.

  “Brock,” Dad says. “Bring your plate.”

  I grab a chipped plate and bring it to the stove. Dad shovels a giant omelet onto it, then starts cracking eggs for another.

  “Looks good,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “Welcome,” Dad says.

  Neither of us meet each other’s eyes. It’s always been that way.

  When I set the plate down on the kitchen table, Blackjack lifts his head with a rumbling growl. I freeze. Before it happened, me and Chris trained him as a curhounding dog, to hunt the very thing that I have become.

  “Down, boy,” Dad says sternly.

  Blackjack’s growl rises into a questioning whine. He glances at Dad, his ears pricked, his stump of a tail twitching with anxiety.

  “It’s me, boy.” I bend down by Blackjack and hold out my hand for him to sniff. “See?”

  The dog bares his teeth and growls again.

  “Brock,” Dad says. “Don’t.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, “he knows it’s—”

  Blackjack darts forward as if grabbing a scrap of meat, only his teeth close on my hand. I shout and hit him on the muzzle.

  “Blackjack!” Dad bellows.

  The dog releases me and skitters back under the table, his claws scraping the tiles. He whimpers, his eyes darting between me and Dad.

  “Shit,” I hiss. My hand has a crescent of red teeth marks on it; no blood, luckily.

  “Told you not to touch him.” Dad yanks open the back door and drags Blackjack out by his collar. “Stay out there, dog.”

  Blackjack whines as the door swings shut in his face.

  “It’s not his fault,” I say.

  It’s not his fault that I’m a cur now. He tried to protect me from the silver werewolf. He’s trying to protect Dad … from the wolf inside me.

  “Should put that dog down,” Dad says. “Useless animal.”

  “He didn’t break skin,” I sa
y, as if that makes any difference. I drag a chair out and wince at the screech of wood on tile. “Can I eat this?”

  Dad nods.

  We don’t talk much more during breakfast, mostly just nods and grunts. Then we head upstairs to get dressed for Grandma June’s. All my nice shirts are wrinkled. I don’t think the clothes iron has been out of the closet since Mom put it there. A lot of things have stayed the same, like the photos I can’t stand to look at and the withering rose garden outside the kitchen. This farmhouse is too big and empty for two.

  It’s been two years now since Mom passed away. I remember—even while I try not to remember—when she started wearing hats because she’d lost her hair, and how she got so, so thin, like a skeleton, and it scared me but I couldn’t cry, I was too old for that. Toward the end, when Mom stayed at the hospital more than at home, I remember Dad telling me to hold her hand. I was afraid of hurting her. She felt fragile, almost papery.

  Now, standing before my mirror, I blink and scowl at myself. Do I even look like Mom? Grandma June says I have my mom’s eyes, the same gray-blue. But my square face and my hair, cropped and dishwater-blond, are my dad’s.

  “You ready?” Speak of the devil.

  “Almost!” I holler back to Dad.

  I tighten a sloppy knot in my tie and yank my shirt straight. Grandma June insists that we all dress really nice when we visit for dinner. I hurry to polish the scuff marks off my fancy black shoes, then hear a horn honk outside.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I growl.

  I thump downstairs, yank open the door, and nearly trip over Blackjack, who barks and jumps aside. Dad’s idling the pickup in the driveway. He waves at me and I sprint to him, yank open the door, and haul myself inside.

  As I buckle my seat belt, he glances at me, his face blank. “Klutzy, huh?”

  I grit my teeth. Dad’s always going on about how clumsy I am. Not like Chris, who was the star quarterback for the Cougars of Klikamuks High. I joined up, too, but I never amounted to much of anything on the team.