Moonburn

by Alisa Sheckley

  Red gave me a hard, direct look. “What you just said. Take away the electricity and the supermarkets, and I figured I’d look pretty good to you. Because you didn’t receive the marks. If you’d gone all the way, then I would never have …” He broke off. “If it makes any difference, Doc, I regret the hell out of it.”

  “How charming. But it changes nothing,” added Bruin.

  I pivoted and walked up to him, my heart pounding so fast it was difficult to speak. “Maybe not. Maybe I can make a deal. Can’t I ransom Red? I wasn’t ready to complete the bonding ceremony before, but I am now.”

  “It’s too late,” snapped the hawk woman.

  “But why is it too late? Doesn’t it mean more now that I understand what’s at stake?” I moved toward Rocky. “I don’t think it’s too late for anything. You don’t want the manitous to lose their ancient pathways. I understand that. I don’t know when you decided that it was all or nothing, but we don’t have to be enemies. We can work together.”

  “Bullshit.” Bruin’s voice shook with rage. “You think I don’t know how it works? We make a deal with you, the next thing we know, someone new is in power and the old deal don’t fly no more.”

  Rocky and Ladyhawke moved around to stand beside Bruin, and I looked past them, at Lilliana. A bead of sweat was running down her forehead; she was broadcasting. But was she working for me, or against me?

  “What about Lilliana? She belongs in this reality. You can’t just hijack this whole town into another dimension, with all the people here inside it.”

  “She loves me,” said Bruin smoothly, running his hand over her arm. “For me, she make this sacrifice. Don’t you, cherie?”

  Lilliana looked up at Bruin, putting her slender, dark hand against his cheek. “I don’t want to lose my world,” she said. She called him a name I hadn’t heard before, something long, with little pauses in it. “I don’t want to live in permanent exile any more than you do.”

  Bruin looked thunderstruck. “But you said … I thought …” His expression was almost comical.

  “But there is another way,” I said. “You could trust us. Work with us.”

  “Trust you,” sneered Bruin. “Do you know how many times I have trusted? How many treaties I have made?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rocky, flicking Red’s switchblade open and shut. “I think she might be telling the truth.”

  I held out my hand. “Let me have the knife, Rocky.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and there was mischief in his face, and seriousness as well. He was Red’s adopted son, all right. He threw the blade and to my shock, I caught it. I was doing pretty well without glasses.

  “Here,” I said to Bruin. “Take it.” And then I went over the stone altar and clambered awkwardly on top of it. “You guys like sacrifice, right? Well, I’m ready to give up whatever it takes to make a deal.” Taking a deep breath, I reached out and pulled the ponytail holder out of my hair. Then, with only my long hair veiling me, I spread the blanket. This was high-stakes poker, and I figured naked sacrifice counted for more than sacrifice with a woolen blanket.

  Bruin loomed over me. The knife glinted in his hand.

  “What are you bargaining for?”

  “For another chance. For the town. Here’s the deal. We keep your old paths open, and tear down anything that was built and we don’t allow anyone to build anything new.”

  Bruin looked at the knife, considering. “And you would trade your life for this?”

  “I will let you spill my blood.” But if my heart kept pumping like this, I could wind up spilling more than I intended. I tried to take deep breaths, slow my racing pulse.

  Bruin took a step toward me. “Bleed you but not kill you? Interesting.”

  I put my hand up. “Wait,” I said, my voice squeakier than I would have liked. I had given up trying to slow my heartbeat, but I wanted a little more insurance that Bruin wouldn’t go carving me up. “There’s one thing more. I get another chance to bond with Red.”

  Bruin touched the tip of the knife to his thumb, testing it. “That is not up to me.” He hesitated. “I do not know if it is too late or not. You can try.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Bruin raised his hand high. Lilliana gasped but she didn’t say anything: Maybe she was expending all her energy on broadcasting peaceable emotions. Or maybe she was in shock. I was hoping for the former.

  Red’s hand grabbed Bruin’s before it could come down. “No,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Are you sure?” Bruin hesitated.

  Red just held out his hand.

  Their gazes held for a moment, and then Bruin handed over the knife.

  This time, the hand that held the knife over me belonged to my friend and lover. “You sure about this, Doc? It can’t just be a scratch, you know. Not for this.”

  “I understand.” In the past few minutes, he seemed to have aged years. In the flickering light of the torches, he looked like a cancer victim, or a prisoner of war.

  Red turned my head to the side and raised the knife. And a horrible thought occurred to me. There was something familiar about the story Bruin had told me. Which wasn’t really strange. We were in the realm of myths and fairy tales now, where themes and motifs crossed the borders of different cultures.

  At the end of the original fairy tale of The Little Mermaid, which my mother used to read to me at bedtime, the mermaid stands over her faithless love, the prince. Like Red, she had bargained away her long, magical life for a chance at an immortal soul. But the prince had married another, and the mermaid was doomed to die—unless she traded the prince’s life for her own, and sprinkled his blood across her legs, transforming them back into a fish’s tail.

  With the moonstone still around my neck, I knew this was no fairy tale. If Red killed me, he could become Coyote again.

  “I’m so sorry to do this,” Red said, and his voice had tears in it as he brought the knife up in a swift motion.

  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” said a voice coming from the entrance to the Chapel, speaking in a low, flat, John Wayne drawl.

  I turned to see the good sheriff, leveling a rifle at Bruin. Malachy, bringing up the rear, was covering the rest of the room with a gun. And it was Malachy, gaunt and sardonic, and not Knox, who took in the sight of Magda and the others hog-tied while I lay naked on an altar, covered only by my long hair.

  “Thanks for the assistance, guys,” I said, “but I’m here of my own free will.”

  “How embarrassing,” said Malachy. “And here we thought you were about to be filleted against your will.”

  “Somehow, Mal, I ain’t convinced of the veracity of her statement,” said Emmet.

  “It’s true, Emmett.”

  “You know, that’s what my name means in Hebrew,” said the sheriff, giving me a level look. “Emmett means truth. Take away the first letter—you get death.”

  I nodded, remembering how I’d recarved that first letter into his forehead. “He’s not going to take anything I can’t stand to lose.”

  “If he does, he’ll stand to lose something of his own,” said Emmet.

  Bruin growled. “Then it does not count as sacrifice.”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting up. “Listen, everyone. Whatever Red does to me, nobody is to retaliate. Understand?” I looked up at Red. “I’m ready.”

  Red shook his head. “Not yet.” Then he took my hair and gathered it in his hands, as if he were going to brush it, leaving me totally exposed to everyone in the room. “Lie down,” he said. I did, with my hair hanging down over the stone table, feeling a little less sure now that my whole body was revealed. I knew lycanthropes were supposed to be casual about such things, but I wasn’t. And then, at the last moment, I realized what Red was intending to do.

  I sat up on the stone altar, shouting, but I was too late. Red had plunged the knife into his own chest. He seemed to fold in on himself as he collapsed to the floor, and I slid down beside him, despe
rately trying to assess the damage. God, there was blood everywhere, bubbling up from my hands as I held them pressed to Red’s wound. Glancing up at his face, I saw Red’s lips move, forming a word. But no sound came out, and as I looked in his eyes the light went out of them. Not all fairy tales end with happily ever after. Like the little mermaid, he’d chosen to sacrifice himself.

  Screaming Red’s name, I checked for his pulse, and then frantically began doing chest compressions. I knew it was futile, but I ignored the voices telling me to stop, and fought the hands that tried to grab my wrists.

  Until I realized that my patient wasn’t just alive; he was smiling.

  EPILOGUE

  A month later, I came home to find origami hearts and birds all over the cabin and a delicious smell of burning meat in the air. I’d hoped my carnivorous appetites would wane with the moon, but these days I was ravenous for animal protein all the time. I guess I was a lapsed vegetarian now—one more change to add to my list.

  I took off my hat and fluffed out my hair. I was surprised at the feel of my bare nape, and sometimes it felt as though I had removed a limb instead of just cutting off four feet of hair. Still, I was glad that Bruin had decided I didn’t actually need to spill blood to seal our pact. I guess Red had spilled enough for both of us.

  Of course, it would have been nice if the tricky bastard had let me know he actually had one more life left in him. Especially since I nearly had a heart attack when he sat up and pulled the knife out of his chest.

  But I don’t really hold it against Red. He’d possessed one last chance to gain a soul, and he had been willing to trade his very last life for it—the one he’d kept up his sleeve, as it were. So I couldn’t blame him for making sure that I wasn’t holding anything back.

  And I think Red had really believed that he could keep me from sacrificing anything. He hadn’t looked happy when Bruin had insisted that I take the knife and complete the bargain.

  I touched my shorn hair again. In any case, Marlene had done a fairly decent job of making the ragged ends look like a deliberate style. Red even claimed he liked it, saying he thought it made my eyes look bigger, and that the nape of my neck was his new favorite body part.

  My mother said it would grow out and look better in a year or so.

  I touched one of the origami hearts. “What’s this for?”

  Red came up behind me to take my coat. “Let’s warm you up first. How is it outside?”

  “Cold.” Four weeks after the manitous had plunged us into an unnatural summer, and I was so sick of winter I half wanted to ask if they could do it again. But then I thought of the paperwork involved.

  Being town supervisor, as well as being a veterinarian, didn’t leave me a lot of free time. And that was what I had become: de facto mayor of Northside. It turned out that reviving Emmet had made me his boss, and then the town board had decided to make it official.

  “How did the meeting go?” Red knelt down and pulled off my wet boots.

  “Long. The council is still arguing over the zoning issue. But we have agreed to fund the Brownies’ Maypole festival, and there’s an agreement on the table that will protect the sacred ground on Old Scolder Mountain.”

  “Bruin must be pleased.” He’d attended the session to ensure that the manitous’ interests would be represented.

  “Bruin looked preoccupied, actually. I think it’s because Lilliana went back to the city last week.”

  Red rubbed his palm along his jaw, considering. “Or maybe he’s just not supposed to be awake in the middle of February.”

  “I guess you’re right, but….” I stopped, looked around at the origami decorations, and realized what they meant. “Crap. It’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it? I bought you a card, but I haven’t had time to write in it yet.”

  “I don’t care much for cards, anyhow,” said Red, his hands moving up my ankle and around my calf.

  “How can I make it up to you?”

  Red paused, his hands halfway to my thighs. “Now, there’s a question.”

  “Mmm. Speaking of questions, where are the dogs?” Now that we had been adopted by four enormous wolfdogs, Red was getting more serious about building our canid dream house.

  “I sent them out to play while I cooked the flank steak.” Red stood up and I wrapped my arms around his neck.

  “How did you know I felt like meat tonight?”

  “I’ve got a piece of your soul growing inside me, remember?”

  I did remember, because when I spent too long away from Red, I felt a hollow ache in my chest. What was harder for me to bear in mind was that the same man who sometimes ticked me off by leaving the toilet seat up was actually Coyote, the most Liminal of the Liminal creatures, who had passed back and forth between worlds until he belonged to both and neither. As far as I could tell, Red had been honest about his family history. He’d had a rebellious mother who had left her clan, and he’d been taught by his grandfather in the ways of the Limmikin. Red just hadn’t mentioned that he’d had quite a few other lifetimes, or that Coyote was all about dying spectacularly and then being reborn. Red was hard to pin down on the subject, but it seemed that Coyote was always born to the Limmikin—they were his special children, his tribe. I wondered what would happen to them now; maybe some other trickster god would adopt them. But when I was with Red, I got caught up in the seductive normality of day-to-day life, and forgot about his mind-bendingly long and checkered past.

  I nuzzled Red’s neck. He smelled delicious, clean and woodsy, with a faint, musky tang. “New aftershave?”

  “Uh-uh. You smell pretty good yourself.” He trailed his fingers over the moonstone choker. Red was looking in my eyes, a knowing, masculine smile curving his lips. And all of a sudden, I felt a rush of arousal so strong Red broke out into a broad grin.

  “You look a little too smug, Buster.”

  “I have to admit, I’m feeling pretty smug.”

  “You know, this isn’t exactly natural. I’m not in heat anymore.”

  “I guess I’m getting domesticated,” Red said, grasping my wrists and pulling me closer. “Dogs do it all year long, don’t they?”

  “You don’t feel domesticated. But the dog part sounds about right.” Ever since that day in the cavern, Red had revealed a more confident, mischievous side. Maybe it was because I knew his big secret. Or maybe it was because of the marks branded into my arm, and his, that marked us and linked us more closely than we had ever been before. I couldn’t read his mind, thank God. But I did know what he was feeling, and vice versa.

  It had given us both permission to play with more of an edge. “Listen, Redneck, I haven’t even had a glass of wine yet.” I twisted my wrists free of his grasp. “Besides, I don’t think I’m really ready yet.” I walked over to the wine cabinet and pulled out a bottle of merlot.

  Red pounced on me, taking me down to the ground, his arms stopping me from hitting the floor. “You smell ready.”

  “Get off me or I’ll bite you.”

  “Bite me.”

  We thrashed around, rolling on the floor, until Red had me pinned again, my wrists held over my head. “Now, where to begin …” He bent his head to my right breast, nipping me through the fabric of my blouse.

  “Oh, Red,” I said, suddenly on the verge of tears. Red smiled, his body lean and hard against mine, his calloused hand soft as he reached under my skirt to cup my abdomen. I didn’t look pregnant yet, I just looked like I’d been eating too many doughnuts, but neither of us cared. We were going to have a baby, and even the fact that Magda was pregnant as well didn’t bother me. The only thing that did niggle at the back of my mind was my desperate promise to the Grey sisters the night when reality got a little porous over Northside. But there were so many things to worry about when you were pregnant. I was just relieved that I wasn’t whelping a litter.

  I tugged at Red’s hair to stop him from kissing my belly. “Hey. Coyote. You have any idea how much I love you?”

  “I was hoping
for a demonstration.”

  “What about the steaks?”

  “Darlin’, I put those in the warmer the minute you walked in the door.”

  My phone rang, and Red stiffened against me, so I bit his chin to get his attention. As he kissed me with real concentration, the message machine clicked on and Marlene began nattering on in her nasal voice about some kind of building variance. I ignored it. A little while later, while Red was kissing his way down my belly, the phone rang again, this time my mother, wanting to know about whether we’d come any closer to deciding on a venue for the wedding.

  We got into a laughing fit, but recovered. The third time the phone rang, Red threw my phone against the wall.

  In nature, coyotes are among the most adaptable of animals. They can live in mated pairs like foxes, hunting mice and voles, although when they yip and howl, they can throw their voices and fool you into thinking there are many more of them. But when conditions are right, coyotes can live like wolves, forming large packs and taking down big game.

  They are opportunists and con artists, and are notoriously difficult to destroy. In the old Native American myths, Coyote died a thousand ignominious deaths, only to rise again. But despite his reputation as a trickster, I knew that Red had made his choice. He had only one life left to live. And that one would be with me.

  For my part, I had made my peace with loving Red, and with the knowledge that I might not have chosen him if I’d never become a lycanthrope. If I’d been human and living in Manhattan, I might not even have gone out on a first date with him.

  Which would have been a shame, because I would have missed out on the kind of man you wait a lifetime to find. But then, humans work at such a disadvantage when it comes to selecting their mates. They get distracted by clothing and hair texture and skin color, by age and accent and, most of all, by the enchantment of words and the illusions they can conjure.

  Red and I had a more fundamental connection, and once a month, we were reminded that love, like territory, needs to be maintained. There’s a lot to be said for being human, but if you want true loyalty and undying passion, let a wolf be your guide.