Blood on the Moon

by Jennifer Knight

  The wolf barked and snapped, its fangs dripping with ropey saliva.

  Vincent lowered himself into a crouch. “Bring it, mongrel.”

  Instantly the wolf tore at Vincent. A scream ripped through my lungs as I watched Vincent dodge with impossible speed and punch the wolf. He grabbed it and sent it flying toward me. I screamed again and launched myself to the side.

  I moved just in time. The wolf careened into the tree and let out a yelp as the wood buckled, almost splitting in two.

  But the wolf wasn’t fazed. It jumped up and barreled toward Vincent. It clamped its jaws around his thigh and yanked.

  My stomach churned at the sound—screeching, tearing, muscles separating. Vincent roared and brought both fists down on the wolf’s head.

  It let go, and Vincent hobbled backward. Strangely enough he wasn’t bleeding.

  But the wolf was. Blood poured out of his mouth in a stream of gore. Amidst my fear, I felt bad for the wolf, my defender. My savior.

  Vincent stepped forward, his face distorted in rage and pain. He lunged, hissing like some sort of evil, giant snake. The wolf dashed away just in time for Vincent to miss his mark. He seemed to be attempting to bite the wolf. Bite him with those inhuman fangs.

  The wolf backed away and shivered violently.

  Vincent straightened, and a nasty smiled spread across his face.

  “I knew you had little time to spare,” he said. He strolled toward me, and I shrank away. The wolf growled and trembled again. “So what will it be, old friend? Shall we finally finish this now or will you delay the inevitable once again? We both know you will have lost your leverage in only a few minutes and that is not enough time for you to defeat me.” He knelt down next to me, huddled into a heap in the dirt. He faced me and said softly, “What will he do, I wonder. Will he choose to fight these last few seconds to try and save you? Or simply reveal himself and save me the trouble of tearing you apart? For the knowledge of such a thing will surely do just that.” He came closer and whispered in my ear. “The knowledge of what your lover really is.”

  The wolf barked and then whined as a tremor rippled down its spine.

  “It would seem that his decision is being made for him,” Vincent said pleasantly. “Not that it matters. Either way, Faith is dead.” He picked up my arm, which I had clutched to my throat and brought it to his lips. I struggled against him, but his grip was unrelenting. His eyes sparkled at me, darkening until the pupils blacked everything out like an ink spill. Even the whites of his eyes were filled in. I felt the tips of his teeth scratch against my skin, and I screamed.

  Suddenly the wolf lunged, catching both Vincent and me by surprise. Its gaping jaws made contact with Vincent’s throat, and he let out a choked cry, fighting against the wolf’s mighty grip. Finally managing to overcome his shock, Vincent produced a slim silver knife and stabbed it into the wolf’s side.

  It fell to the dirt and didn’t move.

  Vincent held his hands over his throat, his eyes wide with alarm. I could hear a gurgling, rattling sound in his chest ... but there was still no blood.

  How can there be no blood?

  Vincent limped over to the wolf for a moment, shot one last venomous look at me, and then disappeared in a blur of shadows.

  I remained flattened to the ground, staring at the spot where Vincent had just stood. I stayed that way for a long moment before a noise jolted me out of my stupor. I looked over and saw the unconscious wolf tremble and shudder; the air around it seemed to vibrate. I started inching away as the shape of the animal began to morph right in front of my eyes.

  The matted black hair disappeared, turning straight and short. The paws became big, tan hands. The tail shrunk away into nothingness, and his massive chest turned into smooth, graceful muscles. Naked muscles.

  The wolf had just turned into a man.

  It had become Lucas Whelan.

  9

  REALITY

  My mind rejected everything: Lucas, the wolf, Vincent’s superspeed and strength. His fangs. None of that had happened. I had to have been imagining things.

  But the body lying on the ground told me differently—my scalp burning from where I smacked it on the tree and the coppery scent of blood in the air were unequivocally real. And it was this, the irrefutable evidence lingering in the quiet aftermath that made my head rush. My vision spun, and I felt faint. I managed to stay conscious, but my stomach cramped and I threw up.

  As I got to my feet, it dawned on me that Lucas might not just be some sort of supernatural being, but also that he might be dead.

  He wasn’t moving, and his side was bleeding steadily.

  Tentatively I inched toward him, afraid that at any moment he might switch back into a wolf and chomp my head off. He was totally nude, but thankfully his front side was facing the ground—although his backside was spectacular all on its own. But I couldn’t dwell on that.

  Regardless of the strangeness of what had just happened, there was one thing I knew without a doubt. Lucas—wolf or not—had just saved my life. I knelt down beside his head and put my hand under his nose to see if he was breathing.

  He is. That means he isn’t dead.

  But he was definitely hurt. I pressed my hand over the wound on his side, feeling the gush of warm blood between my fingers. I stifled another wave of nausea.

  Only the right side of Lucas’s face was visible, but I could see that his mouth was already crusted with dried blood and his cheek was bent inward from one of Vincent’s insanely strong punches.

  I reached my free hand out and touched the broken skin over his previously perfect cheekbone, gasping when his skin shocked me so violently it left a welt on my finger. But I wasn’t concerned about myself. Lucas had just saved my life. I ran my fingers through his thick, black hair, touched that someone would actually risk their life for me.

  But it didn’t make sense. Lucas didn’t even like me. I pushed his hair away from his forehead. It concerned me that I couldn’t feel his vibe when I always felt it with him. He was calm, peaceful, so unlike his normal angry self. I prayed that I’d get to see his face crumpled into that familiar scowl again.

  I wasn’t sure what Lucas was, but I knew he needed a hospital. Fast. The blood flowing from the wound on his side was beginning to ebb so I let it go and cast around for my purse. I found it pasted to the ground a few feet away. Someone had stepped on it, making it impossible to open. I smacked it against the tree, angry that it was defying me in my moment of need.

  Realizing that I had no phone and no way of contacting the police, I returned to Lucas and knelt beside him.

  “Lucas?” I said softly. “Can you hear me? I’m going to go look for a phone and call 911, okay? I’ll be right back, I swear.” I waited a beat to see if he’d heard me when I noticed a scab had formed on his stab wound, as though the cut had happened weeks ago rather than minutes. Baffled, I looked up at Lucas’s face and found the skin on his cheek wasn’t broken anymore—just a bit of dried blood caked over smooth, unharmed skin. I wiped the blood away and ran my fingers over his cheek.

  “What the—”

  Suddenly a hand snatched my wrist. I jumped back and fell over. Lucas’s eyes popped open, and he sprang to his feet. His gaze darted to mine and filled with something close to panic. I stared at him—it was quite a sight—but then I looked away embarrassed. He didn’t even make an attempt at modesty. He just stood there above me, whirling around and peering into the forest as though searching for something.

  Once more, his eyes fell to me, sprawled on the ground, and he started forward. “You’re hurt?” he asked urgently. His tone rang with alarm.

  For a second I didn’t know what he was talking about. It was rather hard to concentrate with him standing naked in front of me. It was the first time I’d ever seen a naked guy before. But I focused on his face and realized he meant the little wound on my head. “No—it’s just a cut,” I said, reaching up to feel that it had already stopped bleeding. I looked up at h
im, felt my heart stutter, and averted my eyes.

  Then I saw his feet scamper past me, and I whipped around to watch him run into the shadows.

  “Wait!” I said, jumping up. “You can’t just leave!”

  “I’m not!” I heard him call back. “I got clothes back here, you mind?”

  I fell silent, blushing all by myself among the trees. A moment later, Lucas returned wearing the same white shirt and khaki cargo shorts he’d been wearing earlier. The wound on his side was completely healed and left no blood stain on the shirt. How is that possible? He walked casually toward me as if he hadn’t just turned from a big black wolf right in front of me.

  I put my hands on my hips.

  “You want to tell me what the hell that was?” I asked.

  He leaned against a tree and began putting his shoes on.

  “What? You can’t figure it out?” he said, not looking at me.

  “Hey,” I said angrily. “I just got mauled and almost killed by your buddy Vincent, I saw you change into a human after being a wolf, and I’m being pretty cool about it all, considering. You’d better come up with a damn good explanation for this in a hurry, and it better be sugarcoated with extra sweetness. No more sarcasm, got it?”

  He tugged on the laces of his sneakers and looked up at me. He walked slowly closer, his eyes glinting silver even in the night. They were the exact color of the wolf’s—metallic and cold.

  “You wanna know what happened?” he said, standing just inches from me.

  I was scared of him then. He was so menacing, eyes roiling in fury and his body quivering with energy. But I was also excited. I felt as though I was on the cusp of discovering something unimaginable, something so unreal it just had to exist. I tried not to betray my tumultuous emotions when I said, “Yeah. I want to know everything. Right now.”

  “What happened was that you ignored what I said about going out with Vincent, which then forced me to change and get my head bashed in. Now I got a screaming headache, Vincent knows where I am, knows about you, knows how to find you, and now he’s coming after you. That’s what the hell happened!”

  I backed up, hysteria rising in my chest. “What are you talking about? What do you mean he’s coming after me?”

  Lucas pursed his lips and cursed savagely. He kicked a pinecone into the darkness.

  “Listen,” Lucas said, turning on me again. “You weren’t supposed to find out about this, and I’m sorry that you did. But now you’re kind of stuck knowing about it, so I guess—” He looked to the sky and dragged his hands over his face. “I guess you’d better come with me so I can explain it all.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you. You can tell me right here.”

  Lucas began rooting around in his shorts for something. “It’s not safe here,” he said. “He heals fast. He’ll be back. We’ve gotta go to my place.”

  He started walking out of the woods.

  I didn’t move, nor did I have any intention of doing so. There was no way I was going any place with him. He was just as dangerous as Vincent—perhaps, even more so.

  Lucas stopped when he realized I wasn’t following him. “You comin’?” he asked, not turning around.

  “Nope.” I planted my feet. I was surprised to hear that my voice sounded more confident than I felt.

  Lucas turned his head and I could see his sharp profile etched out against the yellow moonlight flooding in from the field.

  “Look,” he said. “You can either come with me nicely or we can do it the unpleasant way. It’s your choice, but either way, you’re coming with me.” He kept his voice low, threatening.

  I felt my resolve disintegrate at his words. “Where are we going?”

  “My car. We gotta get out of here fast.”

  “I—I’m not getting into a car with you. Not after what I just saw.”

  Lucas turned all the way around, and I saw his face soften.

  “Faith, this is hard enough for me without adding your stubbornness to the picture. Just trust me. I’m not the one who was trying to hurt you.”

  I took him in, silently weighing my intense desire to find out what had just happened and my equally strong apprehension of Lucas’s abilities—of what he might do to me if he got me alone. Then I looked at his face, his easy, soothing eyes and the tepid energy rolling off of him, and in that moment, I knew I could trust him.

  “Okay,” I said. “But if you hurt me, Derek’s going to kick your ass. He already wants to, so don’t give him a reason.” I hoped he didn’t know Derek and I weren’t talking anymore, otherwise my weak threat would be utterly laughable.

  Lucas’s lips tilted upward in a lopsided smile. “I won’t.” He turned and began walking, not even bothering to wait for me. I picked up my purse and hurried after him. We crossed the field swiftly and in total silence. Lucas was always several steps ahead of me, never looking back, never slowing down. As we neared the barn, it became clear that the party was becoming crazier instead of tapering off like I would have thought. The music was louder than ever, and the people were drunk. I was secretly glad to be leaving.

  We went to the makeshift parking lot, and I saw Lucas’s glittery red parked car shining like a bloody gem in the moonlight. He was already inside it by the time I reached the dirt road, and he pulled up in front of me. I heard the door unlock, and I tugged it open, enduring yet another staggering electric shock. I looked down at my hand in wonderment. Another angry welt had appeared beside the one I’d just received when touching Lucas. First Vincent’s vibe had all but consumed me, and now I was being zapped to death. What the hell is happening to me?

  “C’mon,” Lucas said impatiently.

  I looked down at him, wringing my numb hand out. “Where’d you say we were going?”

  “My place.”

  “As in ... your dorm room?” I asked, thinking of Mark’s scary description of his community in Gould and hoping it wasn’t there we were heading.

  “Yeah. Get in. Now.”

  I obeyed and Lucas took off before I even had a chance to shut the door.

  “Jeez,” I said. “In a hurry much?”

  “Yeah, actually. Vincent might be back anytime now, and the further away from here we are, the better.”

  “Why would he come back?” I asked, shaking a little because I already thought I knew the answer.

  “Because he’s got his eye on you now. And I’m pretty sure he had some of your blood, which means he’s gonna be able to find you quicker.”

  I turned to stare at him, aghast.

  “Had some of my blood?”

  “I’ll explain it when we get to my room.”

  Twenty minutes later, Lucas pulled up in front of the dorms and hopped out. I jumped out too, happy to be back on school campus. It felt safer here somehow.

  We got to Lucas’s building and went upstairs to the second floor. He slammed his key into the door and held it open for me to pass. Lucas came in behind me and flicked on a lamp by his bed, which cast the room in deep, orange light. I was surprised to see that Lucas had a single room, complete with a minikitchen and a couch.

  I was less surprised to see that Lucas’s room was a mess. Mountains of clothes lay in random piles around the floor, and papers hung out of drawers and over books. Old food was piled in the bathroom sink, and I swear I saw socks stuck to the wall.

  Lucas cleared a spot on the couch and thumped down, throwing his head into his hands. I stood in the doorway, afraid to move, lest I found something alive in there. He motioned to the chair at his desk and I tiptoed over. I stood by it, tucking my hands into my armpits.

  “So,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  Lucas scratched his eye and kind of laughed. “I’ve never had to tell anybody like this. Outright, I mean. Usually if somebody sees me change they guess it right away.”

  “Sees you change,” I repeated slowly. “Change into a wolf, you mean.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes searched me, waiting for me to get it. He seemed to
realize I wasn’t, so he shot me one last pleading look, took in a breath, and held it. “I’m a werewolf,” he said in a rush, like saying it faster would make it less incredible. He eyed me anxiously, probably waiting for me to start hyperventilating.

  I nodded for a moment, taking it in. Letting the concept of werewolves sink in . . . then remembering that werewolves are fake and that Lucas must be crazy.

  But then I’d have to be crazy too because I saw him change from wolf to human. A naked human. I saw his body shaking, his fur turn to skin, and his fangs shrink into teeth. I saw it.

  But I couldn’t believe it.

  I smiled at him coldly. “This is a joke, right? Some kind of Halloween prank? Did Vincent slip some LSD into my drink to make me hallucinate? Is he going to pop out now and start laughing?”

  Lucas shook his head solemnly. “You didn’t drink anything tonight,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I was watching you.” He said it so simply, so unrepentantly.

  The thought of Lucas lurking in the shadows of Vincent’s party, his bright, lupine eyes fixed on me and me alone sent a odd mixture of fear and pleasure coursing through my veins. Lucas scared me, yes, but knowing that he cared enough to follow me? I didn’t know how to feel about it. But when I thought back on the night, I realized he was right. I hadn’t had a sip of anything while I was with Vincent. It hit me then, harder than ever. What I saw was real.

  “Oh, my God,” I murmured. “You’re actually serious. You’re really a . . . a . . .”

  “Werewolf. Yeah, I am.” He stood up, and I started backing away involuntarily. He stopped short. His lips thinned. “You should sit. You look pale.”

  “That’s because a crazy person is telling me he’s a werewolf and I actually believe him.”

  Lucas took a bottle of water out of his minifridge. He slid it over to me and returned to his side of the room, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Drink,” he said. “I swear there’s no LSD in it.”

  I let out a puff of air. “Jokes . . . right ... funny.” I cracked the seal on the water and took a sip. I inhaled deeply, sitting down. “This is so surreal. So, I guess I have to ask, are you . . . dangerous?”