Moonburn

by Alisa Sheckley

  Red looked down at me a moment longer, then knelt down and embraced me, rocking me back and forth. “Oh, my girl. My beautiful girl.” Red kissed the inside of my wrist, then worked his way up to the crook of my elbow. “Take off your clothes.”

  I did, but not as quickly as he did. Naked, I gave him my left arm.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “That was the key—you trusting me.”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “So the blade … it’s symbolic?”

  “Not exactly.” Red buttoned up his jeans, then drew his switchblade from his back pocket. I blinked in surprise. I felt a sharp pain and made a high-pitched sound as Red tightened his grip on my arm and made a neat, small slice on the inside of my elbow. As the blood welled up, my gaze flew up to meet Red’s. He had made a horizontal cut across the vein, but before I could say anything, the knife flashed as he made a vertical slice across the crease of his own elbow.

  “Are you insane?” For a moment, all I felt was the astonishment that he had actually cut me. It occurred to me, belatedly, that this was payback.

  Red shook his head, then pressed his mouth against the wound, drawing the blood to the surface. I saw his eyes go wolfish with the taste of me, and my animal nature responded with a warm rush of arousal. I was not thinking as a woman, but as a wolf when I brought my mouth to his arm, filling my nostrils with the scent. I ran my tongue over the blood slowly welling from his cut, and then planted my mouth more firmly on his flesh. Red gave a low grunt, pain or pleasure or both, and then we both broke away, panting hard.

  I was vaguely surprised to realize that my arm burned a little, and that the room had grown hazy. I never grew faint at the sight of blood.

  “What is this?”

  “Magic.” With his knife, Red cut a strip from the bottom of the shirt I had been wearing and wrapped it around our arms, binding us together. Then, taking my face in his free hand, Red kissed me with such tenderness that I knew that with him, it was more than the pull of moon and scent and heat. This was intensely personal.

  “I know it’s probably a little late to ask, but the danger … does the fact that I screamed out ‘are you insane’ mean my hand is going to fall off or something?”

  I felt Red’s chuckle against the skin of my throat. “No.”

  “Would I know if I were still in danger, or has it passed?”

  “How do you know I meant you were the one in danger?” His lips dropped to the hollow of my throat.

  Realization came over me in a cold wave. “You mean you’re the one who … I put you in danger and you never said …”

  “Doc.” His lips claimed mine, and he kissed the breath out of me.

  “What?” I came up, gasping for air.

  “Shut up.” He kissed me again, his free hand tangled tightly in my hair, a welcome, anchoring pain.

  “Please, please, please.” I pulled Red on top of me, trying to undo his jeans. With my left arm tied to his right, this was a little like participating in a carnal three-legged race.

  “Easy, easy,” Red said, a hint of laughter in his voice.

  “Fuck easy,” I snarled, too wound up to play nice.

  Something flared in his amber gaze, turning his eyes golden. He entered me in one quick thrust, so roughly that it would have hurt both of us if I hadn’t still been moist from the last time. But I was ready for him, more than ready, and his almost violent movement sent off wild bursts of pleasure inside of me, the tensile strength of his wiry muscles as he worked himself in and out of me pushing me back along the floor with each heavy thrust. I was beyond pain, and as I crossed my ankles at the small of Red’s back, I lost myself in the rhythm of his pumping hips, in the heavy, slapping sound of flesh against flesh, and Red’s low, hoarse steady chant of curses or prayers. I planted my heels on the floor, rising to meet Red’s thrusts, trying to get him deeper, and then I felt something shift inside, and Red’s chant grew harsher. As the pleasure began to climb, I realized that whatever Red was saying, it wasn’t in English. My eyes flew open, and to my shock, I saw that as Red plunged in and out of me, we were blurring together, our outlines blending and fusing. I blinked, and it appeared as though we were composed of glowing points of color and light, as if the very molecules and atoms of our being had become visible, and for a moment I thought: Maybe we’re shifting. We had shifted during sex before—in fact, it was pretty usual for orgasm to trigger the change—but this felt very different. This was as though the very essence of our beings was mingling and combining and recombining. I no longer knew where Red left off and I began.

  This wasn’t mere chemistry drawing us together; it was alchemy, magical and transformative. For a moment, I remembered another day, long ago, when I had lost my grip on reality, and felt panic surge up inside of me. But I couldn’t hold on, not to myself and not to the panic, and as the pleasure built I quit trying and just let go.

  Red claimed my mouth, swallowing my cry as we dissolved into each other, simultaneously crossing over from one state of being into another.

  TWENTY-THREE

  For the next five days and nights, I was a wolf. In the movies, werewolves revert to human with the rising of the sun, and in the beginning, that had been true for me. But now, as the moon remained visible in the winter sky, I remained a wolf. Red, who could have chosen to become human, kept to his canid form as well. I suppose it was a honeymoon, although an unusual one.

  I remember snuffling my nose through the snow, searching for the scent of hibernating mice and voles, listening for their slow heartbeats under the earth. When we found one, we scrabbled at their holes with our front claws, digging them out and then jumping up and pouncing on them like cats. I remember chasing a young rabbit through the woods, Red racing alongside me, bumping me and teasing me until our prey escaped and we wound up in a pile, nipping at each other’s necks and then licking each other’s faces.

  Our mornings and evenings were spent mating, nuzzling, wrestling, and hunting. In the afternoon, we slept curled into each other, breathing in the beloved scent of the other’s fur, inhaling the aroma of the places we had been the way a human might look over photographs. It was like being very young again—the continuous sense of being cared for, touched, petted, and adored. When I moved too far away from Red’s side, I had felt a slight burning sensation in my left side, close to my heart. I had known without having to ask that this was a result of our blood bond, but it was only now that I began to wonder how long this side effect would last. Not long, I hoped. Feeling the equivalent of heartburn every time I got more than a mile from my boyfriend was going to put a cramp in my working style.

  Except that he wasn’t just a boyfriend now. According to Red, we were now married, Limmikin style.

  In our wolf forms, we wandered the borders of our territory. First we traveled up Old Scolder Mountain, where we howled in harmony with Jackie’s pack, watched by a mournful Pia in human form, her pale face peeking out of the fur-lined hood of her parka. We invited her to join us, our voices rising and falling. We needed a beta in our little pack, and she did not seem to belong with her old friends, who prowled around Jackie’s trailer, leaving a scent barrier that said: Keep away.

  Come on, Pia, we howled, and for a moment, she harmonized. We don’t care that you’re human, I sang, but it was no use. In the end, she just trudged back to Jackie’s trailer, a woebegone figure in snowshoes.

  As we made our way through the forest, we could feel the presence of manitous, both like and unlike the animals they resembled. Around them, the air had a strange distorted ripple to it, and there was a feeling of pressure, as though they compressed the atmosphere, folding it over itself, making it dense with overlapping realities. I didn’t fear it the way I might have had I been on two legs.

  Still, I whined a little when we passed a large area where the air at the boundary line weighed down on me so heavily that I felt as if I were making my way through deep water. This, I knew, was the amount of our
reality displaced by the great bear. I tried to think of him as a French Canadian lumberjack, but in this form, I could only sense him as ursine, vast and powerful. Still, as wolf and bear, we were not enemies. There were old treaties between us, that allowed for us to share in some of a kill, if there was enough meat.

  And there was a fresh kill. I could smell blood, and for a moment, I didn’t know what kind of animal it had come from. Then it hit me: It had come from a human. I whimpered almost inaudibly and began backing up, wanting to get as far from this charged and dangerous place as possible. Red licked my ear, reassuring me, as he scent-marked along the dividing line between our woods and the Liminal. I noticed the designs scratched onto the trunks of trees, and there was just enough human in me to recognize the symbols from Red’s knife: bear claw, shaman’s eye, coyote’s tracks. I didn’t know if they were mystical wards or trail markers, but I sensed that at the very least they served as visual reminders, marking a boundary, delineating territory. For the moment, they seemed to be holding.

  As we trotted away from the dead human, however, my wolf mind stopped worrying about Bruin going postal in our backyard, and what was human in me could not hold on to the thought of him. Wolves are creatures of the present.

  When we reached a copse of trees, Red paused to sniff the air, then set off at a gallop as something big started from its hiding place. I followed hard on his heels, catching a glimpse of the bouncing, fatty white tail of the deer we were chasing. My heart pounding, I felt my entire consciousness tunnel down to the pursuit of this prey. She was an old doe, and we chased her through the forest and down the snow-covered cornfield on the east side of town, near the Behemoth caverns. As we tired her out, the crows and hawks and turkey vultures started circling, alerted to the prospect of a meal. Foxes and coyotes were also gathering, but keeping a respectful distance as Red and I did all the hard work of dealing with the doe’s flashing hooves and bringing her down.

  And then, just as we began feasting, we heard it: the howling of a rival pack. At first, it was just Hunter and Magda, telling us they were near. And then there were two other voices, young males. These must be Magda’s brothers, come to join her. And with them, her pack was twice the size of ours. We could not see them, but the wind carried their scents to us, and we could tell that these new males were not able to shift completely into wolf form. Which made them poor hunters, but good fighters.

  When we returned home, as the moon began to wane, we discovered that Magda’s pack had scent marked into our territory. There was a rich, oil-gland scent that had come from someone rubbing his head and cheeks against the bark of trees, your basic “Kilroy was here” graffiti from a buff male in his prime. And there was also the sharper, more acrid scent that said “Keep Out,” “Guard Dog on Premises,” with a “Trespassers Will be Prosecuted” thrown in for good measure. It wasn’t Hunter’s scent, but one of the brothers, and I realized that Magda had chosen to claim one of her kin as her alpha, while retaining Hunter as her mate. It wasn’t unusual in the wild for brother and sister wolves to rule as alphas, but I had a feeling that Hunter wasn’t going to be too pleased with his new lack of status.

  Red reclaimed our boundaries, and after a moment’s hesitation, I joined him. As his mate, I was also responsible for keeping our scent-fences in good repair, but I knew from the set of Red’s jaw that we were going to have to deal with this new threat next month.

  In the small hours of the night, Red and I made our way back to our cabin. Red must have shifted to open the door, but I was so tired that I can’t recall it. I woke up in the bed, which surprised me; I was pretty sure I’d gone to sleep curled up on the floor. When I first opened my eyes, I felt a rush of disappointment at being human again. My first thought was, Holiday over, back to reality.

  But some things hadn’t gone back to normal.

  “Good morning.” Red was smiling down at me, holding out a cup of coffee. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, and he smelled warm and clean, as though he’d just bathed. “Have some coffee—it’s fresh.” He held out a mug, and I struggled into a sitting position. I had believed that Red was in love with me before, and I had thought I loved him back, but what passed between us now was infinitely stronger. This was love the way I had felt it for Hunter in the early days, a constant glow, a continuous sweet ache, a fierce and bone-deep tenderness. Except that with Hunter, that love had been tinged with anxiety, and the knowledge that the intensity of feeling was not reciprocated. With Red, the feeling was magnified and amplified by being returned, as if we were our own little feedback loop of power and emotion.

  Red sank down on the bed next to me and watched me inhale the coffee and then take a sip. The clean, masculine scent of him filled me with the wolf-sense of rightness and belonging. As if he could read my mind, Red nuzzled my cheek and whispered, “Pack. Mate.” His fingers rested on the crook of my elbow, where he had cut me in the ceremony. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m not sure.” My voice came out in a rough croak, and Red held the mug for me while I took another sip of coffee. I had that warm feeling of being a kid again. “Did you carry me into bed last night?”

  “You were so out of it, I kind of had to.”

  I looked out the window. It was still dark, but at this time of year, that didn’t tell me much. And it felt like morning. “What time is it?”

  “Five-fifteen. I guess our bodies are still on wolf schedule.” He leaned over and kissed me, his work-roughened hand cupping my jaw, his mouth a benediction on mine. I wanted to breathe him in, all of him, and I turned into him, trying to move my legs to press against him. Red broke apart, laughing with delight. “This is one definite advantage to being human, darlin’, but I’m about to spill your hot coffee all over us.” I realized that he’d been trying to balance my mug in his hand the whole time we’d been kissing.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “How about I just put this down and we try that again? I kind of missed having hands, too.” Red set down the mug, but before he could reach for me I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

  “As much as I want you with hands, there’s something I need to do first.”

  “Understood.” Red moved aside, and I gasped as I stood up and saw the scratches and bruises all along my arms and legs. On closer inspection, Red was pretty banged up, too. There were tooth marks on his arm, and on my thigh.

  “Oh, my God. What happened to rapid healing?”

  “We probably overtaxed our systems a little. Do you want some of that bear ointment?”

  “Ugh. Is there any other remedy?”

  Red gave me a sly smile. “A warm bath, a hot breakfast, and a lovin’ man.” He was deliberately playing up his Texas twang, and I laughed.

  “Sign me up.” I dragged the quilt off the bed and wrapped it around me. I didn’t feel like showing off my poor battered body at the moment, especially when I couldn’t see clearly. Putting my hand up to my nose, I said, “I don’t suppose you know where I left my glasses?”

  “Here. I found them on the floor, but I don’t think they’re scratched.”

  “Thanks,” I said, examining the lenses in the light.

  “And here’s your pocketbook and stuff.” I put on the glasses and turned to see Red handing me my pocketbook, along with a pile of neatly folded clothes—the outfit from my Manhattan shopping spree with Lilliana. “Where did these come from?”

  Red shrugged. “I don’t know. I just found them on the table last night. She must have come by while we were both still out.”

  Still feeling groggy, I noticed a note tucked into the pocket of my folded blouse. I took a sip of coffee before opening the note, which said: I’m leaving this at the cabin and hoping you are all right. Call me when you get back—No judgments, I promise. Remember, I’m your friend and will always be sensitive to your situation. Lilliana. The page was crumpled and a little dirty, as if it had been trampled on. Except that it had been inserted very carefully into the pocket of the blouse, wh
ich looked pristine.

  “Hey, nice specs, Doc.”

  “Thanks.” I looked up, flashing him a surprised smile. There was something about the note that kept bothering me, and I was about to ask Red how long he’d been up and about when I realized that I needed to go to the bathroom and quickly. I would rather have used our outhouse for privacy but didn’t think I could make it that far. “Excuse me,” I squealed, then rushed into the little bathroom.

  Funny how all the romance novels I’ve read don’t mention the toll lovemaking takes on the female body. I winced, thinking that I needed a good week to recover—or rather, I would have, if I couldn’t heal like a lycanthrope. Strangely enough, there was still a faint line on my wrist where my blood had mingled with Red’s.

  When I came out, Red had drawn me a bath; he helped me inside and handed me my coffee. As I soaked away my various aches and pains, Red washed my hair, his fingers so soothing against my scalp that I almost fell asleep.

  “I wonder how Malachy’s been getting by without me,” I said, as Red wrapped me up in a warm towel.

  “Worry about it later,” Red murmured, lifting me and carrying me toward the bed.

  “I’m too sore to make love,” I said.

  “Damn, the honeymoon really is over.”

  I laughed, then watched as Red cooked us both a breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage. We ate from the same plate, fighting over bites of the sausage until I remembered, belatedly, that I never ate meat unless I was right before the change.

  Fighting a wave of nausea, I laid down my fork. “That’s weird.” I took a bite of dry toast, hoping it would settle my stomach.

  Red understood instantly. “You’ve just spent three solid days and nights as a wolf,” Red said. “It’s only natural that your body would need a little time to adjust. Besides, it was free range and organic, so that pig died happy.”