Moonburn

by Alisa Sheckley

  I glanced at Malachy, mildly irritated. “I keep telling myself that we have ten acres between us. In the city, that wouldn’t even mean the same zip code.”

  “But you’re not in the city.”

  “True.” And considering how close we all came to killing each other last year, I’d probably have felt crowded even if Hunter were on the other side of the state. But Red wasn’t about to sell the cabin, because it was situated on some kind of crucial supernatural fault line. According to Red, the town of Northside was an ancient crossroads between worlds, which meant that a lot of old magics had soaked into the earth and stones. Not everyone in Northside was of the supernatural persuasion, just as not everyone in the Hamptons was a movie star, but this was one of the few places where a seven-foot sheriff with strange tattoos on his forehead could walk around without generating comment. And Northsiders treated supernaturals the way Hamptonites treated movie stars—with a sort of studied nonchalance.

  Of course, you were more likely to spot the strangeness in some parts of town than you were in others. Red’s cabin formed the point of a triangle between Old Scolder Mountain and a cavern that ran underneath the cornfield on the east side of town. If a preternatural pest were to sneak into Northside, Red was the guy who was going to stop it before it became a real menace.

  So if I wanted to stay with Red, I had to put up with living next to Hunter and Magda.

  “Turn here?” Malachy’s question took me by surprise, and it took me a moment to realize that we had reached the road that leads to our house. I nodded and Malachy turned his ancient Jaguar onto an unpaved driveway that looked pretty much identical to Hunter’s. Except there was a fantastic, dilapidated old Gormen-ghastly mansion at the end of his dirt road, and a log cabin with an outhouse at the end of mine. I half expected a snarky comment, but Malachy didn’t say anything as he turned off the ignition.

  I tried to tell myself that I had no reason to feel embarrassed. After all, the outhouse had a hand-carved toilet seat, and we did have an indoor toilet for blizzards and emergencies. Besides, the cabin was only temporary. Red and I were still working on the plans for our new home, which was going to be a shapeshifter dream house, intended to accommodate both our human and canid forms. Red intended to build it himself as well, as soon as he had the spare time. And I knew Red meant what he said. Unlike my former husband, he didn’t specialize in saying what people wanted to hear and then doing whatever the hell he pleased.

  Still, for the time being, I was living in a log cabin with no electricity, and sharing the space with various rescued wildlife, including a half-blind red-tailed hawk, a bat with a broken wing, and a raccoon kit with an eating disorder.

  Malachy pulled the key out of the ignition. “Are you finished contemplating the view? Can we go inside now?”

  “You don’t need to see me in.”

  He paused. “Actually, I thought I’d wait for Red.”

  “Come on, Mal. There’s no telling when he’ll be home. Leave. I’ll be fine.”

  “I need to speak to him about another matter.” Malachy opened the car door and started heading toward the cabin. From the back, he looked like an emaciated thoroughbred. His shoulders and chest had been designed to carry more flesh and muscle, and the thick Irish cable-knit sweater and loose corduroy trousers hung on his rangy frame. I wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with him.

  “Are you coming, or do you require assistance?” Malachy paused, ostensibly in annoyance, but I could see the puffs of his breath on the cold air.

  “I just wanted to watch your ass move,” I said, grabbing my handbag.

  Malachy ignored me, making me wonder if my last comment had been too crass. He had that odd English quality of being dignified when an American would have been easy, and then saying something so crude no American would have dared mention it in public. Once he and Red had gotten into a discussion about the difference between bear dung and human feces that had turned personal enough to make me leave the table. But sex wasn’t something that Malachy talked about, so maybe I’d stepped over some line.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” I said. “The truth is, as far as I can tell, you don’t even have an ass.”

  “You’re being unusually tiresome. Is there anything in particular that has you on edge?”

  As soon as he asked the question, I realized that I’d been baiting him. This wasn’t our typical mode of teasing; I’d been spoiling for a fight. “I’m not sure why I’m so cranky,” I admitted, taking a deep breath. There was a sliver of moon in the sky, a wink of light between two half-bare birches. Something cramped low in the left side of my abdomen, and I wondered if I was ovulating.

  “Hang on a moment.”

  “Are you feeling dizzy?”

  I tried to shake my head no, but got stabbed by another cramp. Malachy grabbed my arm, right above my elbow, and with his touch my head really did begin to spin. It made no sense. This wasn’t even close to the full moon, and it was still broad daylight. My throat was parched. I couldn’t swallow. I thought of losing control in front of my boss and something clogged in my chest, making it hard to breathe. Reaching for the high neck of my turtleneck, I tried to pull it away from my skin.

  “All right, Abra, hang on, let’s get you inside.” I felt one of Malachy’s arms come around my shoulders, the other around my waist. He’ll never be able to support me, I thought, but I couldn’t seem to keep my weight from leaning into him. I tried to tell him just to let me sit down, but my voice seemed a long way away. I managed to get my foot onto the front step, then sagged more against his arms. We both went down hard, and I banged my head against something, a rock or a tree. The ground was cold and slightly damp.

  “Bugger,” I heard Malachy say. “All right, let me up, I’ll get my bag from the car. Abra? Abra?”

  But as I tried to get up, I found that I couldn’t breathe. I wrestled with my turtleneck again, trying to tear it off me, but found my wrist pinned to the floor.

  “Abra? Look at me. Try to focus. Abra!” My boss’s sharp voice brought me back and I stared up at his craggy face. He looks different from this angle, I thought woozily. Then it struck me that I was belly up to him, submissive. That wasn’t right; I always argued back with Malachy, I never just rolled over. Tightening my wrists, I was about to break his grip and flip him over when my boss narrowed his eyes and leaned more of his weight into me. “Stop that,” he said, and there was no doubt in his voice. “Stay still!”

  I obeyed him without thinking. He was lying on top of me, which should have made it harder to breathe, but instead I felt comforted by the pressure of him weighing me down. “Do you know where you are?” He was still pinning my wrists. I nodded, coming back to myself enough to feel embarrassed, then tucked my chin so that my nose was close to the armpit of his sweater. I caught a hint of his scent in the wool, faint and muted but still discernible. But underneath the familiar smell of the man there was a trace of something unusual. It was an illness, but not one I recognized. Not the warm, deep musk of a lycanthrope, but not a conventional disease, either. I couldn’t detect any of the putrid sweet tang of cancer or diabetes, or the acrid, singed edge of some of the neural disorders.

  From this distance, I could see the strands of silver woven into Mal’s tangle of dark, unruly curls. Without thinking, I dipped my nose closer, trying to isolate that last layer of scent.

  “Stop that!” A hand, clenched in my hair, tugged my head back. I stared back at him, noticing for the first time that his eyes were the pale green of early spring, when everything is bright with untapped potential. I could feel how close I was to the change, but he was holding me back by sheer force of will. Even with natural wolves, it is not always the strongest male who leads the pack.

  “Sorry,” Malachy said, a moment later. His hand eased its grip on my hair. “Did I hurt you?”

  I just continued gazing up at him, passive, waiting. For a moment, I had a dazed impression of him as an ancient tree, his outer layer
s gnarled and ailing, his inner channels still filled with sap and the possibility of life. A tremor went through Malachy, not muscle fatigue but something that rippled through him like the change that transformed me from woman to wolf.

  His knuckles were white with strain, but I was no longer struggling. I didn’t know what Malachy was holding back by sheer force of will, but it wasn’t me. His arms shook with another spasm, and the long muscles of his thighs contracted where they pressed against mine, hardening until my own body yielded in response. His eyes began to glow with an uncanny light. It called to me like the moon, and I could feel the dull ache of my bones as they began to shift under him.

  Just as I could feel something shifting in him. Not a wolf; something else, monstrous and strange, that tore at him as it tried to emerge. His face turned white. “No,” he whispered through clenched teeth, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “No.”

  Lower down, the change didn’t seem to be paining him.

  Arching as my muscles rippled convulsively, I threw my head back, staring up at the blue sky, the crescent moon, the tops of the trees … and Red, frowning down at us.

  FOUR

  I was caught in some bizarre redneck version of a French bedroom farce. There we all were, seated around the kitchen table, trying to act as though two of us hadn’t just had a close encounter of the ambiguous kind. The one-eyed hawk, a female, was perched on top of a high kitchen shelf, where she’d made a nest out of paper towels, twigs, and a fair amount of hair, most of it mine. She was watching me with one unblinking golden eye, like a hostess who suspects you might make off with the silverware, or the host. Our other fosterling, Rocky the raccoon, was curled up catlike on the hammock chair that hung from the ceiling. The bat, who had no name, was hanging upside down from the dream catcher beside the bed.

  I wouldn’t have minded escaping into sleep myself.

  Red and Mal and I were being awfully polite to one another, but there was a peculiar undercurrent in the room, a low level hum from the conversation we weren’t having.

  At least, Mal was clearly too sick to have been doing anything carnal to me. And it hadn’t been carnal. At least, I didn’t think it had been.

  Mal had explained that I had nearly fainted, and I’d just finished telling Red about my earlier encounter with Marlene. It seemed like the safest subject at the moment— well, the safest for me, at any rate. I was pretty sure Red wouldn’t be paying Marlene any house calls, even if she found a timber rattler in her basement.

  Red winced when I got to the part where Marlene told me she’d have to take care of the problem herself. “No wonder you wanted to bite her. What made that fool woman think her dog had been bred by a coyote, anyway?”

  “She said she heard coyotes howling,” I said. “I guess she just assumed.”

  Red shook his head in an almost canid gesture of bafflement. “I hear it all the damn time. People see a stray dog, start insisting I come by because it looks like a coyote. So I show up and take a look, and it’s some poor mutt that got left by the side of the road. But no one ever believes me. ‘It must be a coydog,’ they say. ‘Kill it before it eats my babies.’ I tell them it’s more likely to be a wolf hybrid than a coydog, but no one ever listens.” Red stood up and took a Budweiser out of the icebox. “Either of you want one?”

  I started to say something about it being a little early for drinks, but then realized that the winter sun was already dipping below the horizon. It had been so warm lately that I’d forgotten it was January, the dark month when the ancients used to light candles and look for omens, and modern folk plan tropical vacations.

  “I’ll stick with my tea, thanks.” Malachy was frowning. “Tell me, why is it so unlikely that a coyote male might breed a domesticated bitch in heat?”

  Red popped the top of his bottle. “Because the coyote male would have to be in season, too.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Folks always seem to think that wolves mate for life, and coyotes don’t, but they’re wrong.”

  I busied myself examining my nails and realized that, once again, I’d forgotten to wear the golden topaz engagement ring Red had given me last year. I hoped he didn’t think it was symbolic; the ring just wasn’t practical with latex gloves, and besides, my divorce still wasn’t final. We’d decided it was a friendship ring for now.

  “Fascinating,” said Malachy, stirring sugar into his tea. “So coyotes do mate for life?”

  “Sometimes.” Red took a swig of his beer. “But sometimes wolves lose a mate and then take another. They don’t all just pine away.”

  Still, wolves were a hell of a lot more faithful than people. After all, wolves didn’t wake up one morning and decide they were bored with their old mates. You didn’t get packs splitting apart because the alpha male had decided that the alpha female just didn’t do it for him anymore. Werewolves, on the other hand, were as monstrous as humans when it came to fidelity. Or maybe it was just my former husband who was monstrous, in either form.

  I stood up and checked on our European-style coffeemaker. It didn’t require electricity, and Red swore it made a better brew, but I had yet to taste the evidence.

  “Don’t be so impatient,” said Malachy as I started to press down on the plunger. “It’s not ready yet.”

  I sat back down, feeling petulant. “I hate this coffeemaker. It makes weak brown water with grounds.”

  “It needs to steep, and then you have to press down slowly.” Malachy sounded his usual autocratic self, but I noticed the tremble in his hands as he tried to lift his mug of tea. His face was even more pallid than usual, and perspiration beaded his upper lip.

  Red took the water pitcher out of the icebox and poured him a glass, then said nothing as Mal reached into his pocket and extracted a pill container. “Here,” he said, as Malachy tried for the third time to open the top, “let me.”

  “Thanks.” I couldn’t help but notice that the container had no label, and the pills were capsules, without any markings. I didn’t ask what they were; Mal took three, his hand shaking as he lifted the glass of water to his mouth.

  Without my noticing, it had grown darker in the cabin, and Red began walking around the room, lighting the good oil lamps, the ones from the antiques store. We also had a few Coleman lanterns stashed around the cabin, which were easier to use but not as pretty. We did have an indoor bathroom as well as an outhouse, but since we were off the grid, the toilet had to be flushed mechanically by pouring in a bucket of water.

  Sometimes I felt like I was on a very long camping holiday. And like I was living somebody else’s life, to boot. It had never been my ambition to have the smallest carbon footprint in town, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was only a temporary arrangement, until Red could build our permanent home.

  The little brown bat had begun to flit around the room, and Red caught her and put her in the bedroom; in a confined space, bats really can get tangled in your hair.

  As Red returned, he passed by the hawk, who jumped down onto his shoulder, reaching for a strand of his hair. “Easy, girl, you’ve got to leave me a few.”

  “You have plenty of hair,” I protested. “You just need to let it grow out more.”

  “I leave the Tarzan look to my friend here,” said Red, indicating Malachy’s woolly mane. Removing the hawk’s sharp talons from his shoulder, Red transferred her to his forearm. “Hey, Ladyhawke, why don’t you pick on him? He could use the pruning.”

  Mal fixed the bird with a hawklike stare of his own. “I wouldn’t advise it. Say, isn’t it a bit early for her to be nesting? I thought red-tailed hawks’ breeding season was in the spring.”

  “She’s young,” said Red. “And confused by the artificial heat inside.” He set the bird back on her perch.

  “She also appears to consider you a prospective mate.”

  Red’s smile was subdued. “You overestimate my charms.”

  “No, she does. Didn’t you see, she was attempting to preen you—see, look at her, grooming herself
like a teenager preparing for a date.”

  Sure enough, the hawk was fluffing her feathers and cocking her head in what I now perceived as a flirtatious manner. “So why does she keep trying to pull my hair out? Does she have a crush on me, too?”

  Malachy took another sip of water. “Doubtful. Perhaps she’s trying to drive you away. On the other hand, it might just be general bloody-mindedness. It’s very common to find females displaying higher levels of irritability and stress just prior to choosing a mate. Often, she’ll alternate between inviting and rebuffing various males until she chooses.”

  “I never realized the term ‘cock tease’ had avian origins.”

  Malachy didn’t acknowledge my pun, making me feel slightly foolish. “As I recall, Red, you had the same effect on a young great horned owl a year or so ago.”

  “Yeah, that’s me, the ladykiller. I think your coffee’s about ready, Doc.” Red reached up into a cabinet for a coffee cup and the hawk made another unsuccessful attempt at his head.

  There was a loud, clinking sound as Red knocked the mug he was bringing down, which surprised me. Usually, he managed to move around the confined cabin space without bumping into anything, a trick I had yet to master. There were so many things to admire about Red: his many practical skills; his calm, efficient manner; his wry sense of humor; and above all, his basic goodness and decency.

  So why was I feeling so testy with him these days? I knew it was superficial, but part of it was his lack of care in his own appearance. When I’d first met Red, I’d thought he looked scruffy and a little disreputable, like one of those marginal men who do odd jobs and rent their rooms by the week. It didn’t take me long to see behind the local yokel disguise and discover how attractive he really was, lean and high-cheekboned, with steady, clear, light hazel eyes that took in more than they let on.

  But now, as Red poured me a cup of coffee, I found myself wishing that he’d make a bit more of an effort. As soon as Red’s silver-flecked auburn hair grew long enough to soften his sharp features, he went to see our local Sweeney Todd to have it all mowed off again. And then there were those burlap-tough Carhartt coveralls, with “Red Mallin, Wildlife Removal Expert” stitched over his right pocket. I was never one of those women who drooled over men in Armani jackets, but still, you didn’t catch me wearing my bloodstained lab coat to the kitchen table.