Blood on the Moon

by Jennifer Knight

  “Stop it!” I yelled. “You’re hurting him.”

  Julian ignored me. “Change!” he commanded, squeezing harder. “Change, Lucas. Now!”

  Lucas wriggled stubbornly one last time and then slumped in defeat. His body jerked with the change, and he morphed back into a buck naked human. I sagged against the door, still holding the handle in a death grip.

  Julian let go of Lucas and stood up. He tossed a bed sheet over to him, and Lucas wrapped it around his waist, coughing loudly. He put a hand on Julian’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he puffed.

  Julian’s jaw clenched as he regarded his brother. His kind green eyes were a mess of anger, magnified by his vibe. “That was close, Lucas. You’re pushing your luck around this one.” He jerked his head in my direction.

  “I’ve got a handle on it.”

  “Doesn’t seem like you do. You would have killed her if I hadn’t been here. It was sheer luck I was coming to see you.”

  Lucas winced, his eyes troubled. “I know. Thank you.” He turned to me. I was still pressed against the door, clutching the handle so tightly it made my hand cramp. He took a step toward me, and I put my hand to my throat, gasping. Lucas stopped, his face fluctuating from pained to hard and emotionless. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice breaking. “I thought I was under control.... I’m so sorry, Faith.”

  My heart broke at the sound of his voice. I’d confirmed to him the thing he feared the most, and I couldn’t stand being the one to have caused him this torment. I ran to him, wrapping my arms around him, stubbornly refusing to be afraid of him. He hugged me back tightly. “Some first kiss, huh?” he said, a hint of laughter in his voice.

  I laughed too, realizing I was crying at the same time.

  Julian cleared his throat, and we both looked over, not releasing each other.

  “I got bad news for you,” Julian said to Lucas. “Dad’s calling you.”

  Lucas’s arms stiffened around me.

  “What? Why?” he asked, his voice tense.

  “I think you know why,” Julian said, as his eyes flickered to me. “And he wants you to bring Faith.”

  Lucas cursed and crossed the room, rubbing his hands over his eyes. He spun and rounded on Julian. “If he thinks I’m bringing her into this he’s crazy! I’m not doing it. I won’t.”

  Julian looked unconcerned. “You don’t have a choice, Lucas. He’s summoning you.”

  Lucas swore again and punched the bedside table. I heard the wood splinter and I jumped. Lucas’s back quaked.

  “Calm down,” Julian said. “Maintain control or I’m going to have to kick your ass again.”

  Lucas let out a puff of strained laughter. He turned around, shaking his head defiantly. “I’m not bringing her.”

  “You have to. I don’t want to get people hurt any more than you do. But Dad’s being ... Dad. You have to bring her.”

  Lucas ground his teeth, glaring at his brother.

  “Lucas, you have to—”

  “Fine!”

  Julian seemed to deflate, and his eyes grew gentle. “Good. I’m on your side, Lucas. We won’t let them do anything that’ll hurt her, all right?”

  Lucas sneered at him and said, “Just get out.”

  The two werewolves stared at each other for a long moment, and then Julian said, “I’m on your side, brother.” And he left, brushing past me in a blast of wind that blew my hair back.

  Lucas glared at the door for a long time and then looked over at me. His gaze was contemplative, and I wondered if he’d felt me try and control him again. If he did, he didn’t mention it. After a moment of silence, Lucas sighed.

  “So,” he said with a half-smile. “You wanna meet my parents?”

  Lucas woke me at eight the next morning with a kiss on the cheek that felt like a fire poker. I jolted awake and saw him smiling down at me.

  “It’s so great to know I can touch you,” he said, putting his hand against my face as if to prove his point.

  I smiled back at him. “I like it, too,” I said. “Now, why are you waking me up so early? Class isn’t till ten.”

  “Got a long trip ahead of us. We’re going up into the Rockies.” His face turned stiff. “Gotta meet my parents, remember?”

  Oh, do I ever. “How long of a trip is it?”

  “Couple hours. But we gotta get going. I don’t wanna spend the night up there. Some of the newbies get a little ... frisky.”

  I laughed and sat up. “That’s a nice way of putting it.”

  Lucas grinned at me, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “Aren’t you worried one of them is going to lose control?” I asked, pretty worried about it myself.

  “Nah, I’m with you.”

  “Oh, well, that’s comforting, considering last night.”

  He gave me a withering look. “It won’t be like how we’ve been for the past few months. This intense urge to change—I only feel it with you. Around any other human, I’m in control. The other werewolves will be in control, too—the older ones at least. And if any runts come around, I’ll be there to protect you, all right? You’re safe.”

  Satisfied, I got ready to leave. Lucas and I ate a hurried breakfast and then piled into his tiny car. We headed north onto the expressway toward Gould. As we drove, I looked over at Lucas’s perfect profile and said, “Don’t think you’re getting out of telling me what happened in the woods just because you changed last night. I have no mercy for you today.”

  Lucas frowned dubiously.

  “I have a million questions I still want to ask you,” I said, pressing forward.

  “And I have a million answers I won’t give you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What’s going on between you and Vincent? I know there’s something bigger than just werewolf-vampire drama.” I glanced at him, but his face showed no reaction. I pressed on, trying to strike the nerve that would get him talking. “Vincent said the other night that it was your fault he was dead.”

  “He did that to himself!” Lucas shouted.

  I smiled. I’d struck a nerve.

  “Vincent is demented,” Lucas said. There was distinct note of disgust in his voice.

  “I know that much. What I don’t know is the details. If he became a vampire out of choice, like you say, then why does he hate you so much? Why is he trying so hard to kill me? Is it just to hurt you?”

  Lucas’s scowl deepened.

  “Come on,” I urged. “I tell you secrets all the time. I’d never told anyone about the time I stole my mom’s slutty lingerie and danced around singing ‘Like a Virgin,’ but I told you. It’s your turn to spill.”

  Lucas laughed despite his discomfort. “All right,” he said. “I guess you gotta know anyway since you’re involved. Plus you’re so damn stubborn. I’ll never hear the end of this until I tell you.” He gave me a pointed look, which I returned with a triumphant smile. “So I told you I was born in Scotland in 1624, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, Vincent was my best friend when he was alive. We both worked in my dad’s shop and our families were close. When my dad died, Vincent was there to help me through it. We were like brothers. But one day everything changed. When we were nineteen, we went hunting with some friends. We got separated from the group and got lost. Night fell and we heard wolves. We ran, but that was useless. One bit me. Vincent escaped, thinking I was dead.

  “But I wasn’t dead. I’d been infected. Eventually, I found my way back to my village and told Vincent the whole thing. He didn’t believe me at first, but soon my instincts overcame my small measure of control and I was able to show him exactly what I was.

  “Those first years were nightmarish. . . . I was tortured by the beast inside me. The moon was my catalyst, forcing me past the edges of my restraint and turning me into what I feared the most. Turning me into the monster I am.” His voice was strained with emotion, and I put my hand on his knee, trying to comfort him.

  “Vincent was there with me,” Lucas went on, “helping me t
hrough the pain, helping me gain control. He had to leave me when I changed, of course. And there were some very close calls.... I almost killed him many times. We were lucky. But Vincent saw how this new life tortured me, and he wanted desperately to help me. So without telling me what he had planned, he went back to the woods and searched for the werewolves. But it wasn’t a werewolf that found him. It was something darker, something much more dangerous.

  “Vincent was made vampire that night. He was missing for months before he found me again, and I knew exactly what he was. I could smell the dead flesh on him, the blood. His eyes were wild with bloodlust. His need overcame his every thought. I had to fight him off and protect my village from his hunting. He would come every night, sneaking through the alleys, preying on hapless humans.” Lucas paused and his knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.

  He drew in a breath and said, “And then one night he found my baby sister, my Reece. He told me that I was to blame for his transformation, that I was the cause of his death, his trip into madness. We fought, but I was wounded and unable to stop him from killing her. He killed my sister and drained her in front of my eyes.” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat.

  I stared at his shadowed, tortured face, thinking I could never understand the pain he felt, when I suddenly realized that I did—at least a little. Lucas’s best friend, someone who had been like a brother to him, had betrayed him, just as my stepdad had betrayed me. It wasn’t exactly the same, I knew. Seeing your sister drained of her blood was a whole different level of horror than what I’d gone through, but still. It was pain. And I understood now where his hatred for Vincent came from.

  I closed my hand around his, clenching it tightly.

  “After that,” Lucas went on, “any love, any feelings of pity or friendship I had for him were gone. We’ve spent the last three centuries locked in an eternal war, neither one of us able to kill the other. The things we’ve done to each other ... the people that have been hurt and killed because of us . . .” He looked away, his eyes hooded. “I just want it to be over now. I tried to run from him, to start a new life here with my pack. But his thirst for revenge has possessed him. He won’t stop now ... can’t stop anymore. This war will last until one of us kills the other—for good.”

  I didn’t know what to say, or even how to react. Lucas glanced at me. “So now you know the truth,” he said. “You know why he wants to kill you. Why he hates me so much. Why he’ll never give up, no matter how long it takes. Why I have to find a way to get you out of this mess alive ... hopefully this meeting with my pack will help with that last part.”

  “Hopefully,” I whispered.

  “Are you freaked out?” Lucas asked, casting another glance at me.

  “I’m just ... absorbing.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking how alike we all are.”

  “Alike?” he asked, a little dubious.

  “Yeah,” I said, still working it out in my head. “You, me, even Vincent, we all have this same hang-up. . . . We can’t feel what’s supposed to be the most natural thing in the world and it eats at us, making it impossible to live like normal people.”

  Lucas glanced at me, eyes fierce. “You’re wrong. I can feel everything just like a normal human. Vincent? I don’t think there’s much more human left in him. It’s just bloodlust . . . and vengeance.” He turned his eyes to me. “But you,” he said more gently. “You have what both Vincent and I have longed for since we were changed. You have life ... mortality. And everything that goes with it. The ability to love, to feel freely without having to worry about killing anyone. You don’t know what a gift that is.”

  “Yeah,” I grumbled. “Vincent said the same thing. But what neither of you get is that I’m as screwed up as you two. I don’t have some freaky supernatural thing going, but I have my own issues.”

  “You don’t want to feel love—or won’t let yourself, I don’t know.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s that I don’t believe there’s any love in this world at all.”

  Lucas shook his head at the windshield. “Jeez, what the hell happened to you that made you so cynical?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you try the truth?”

  “I just—I had something happen to me when I was younger. And it made me see the world for how it really is—a horrible, evil, loveless place.”

  “You wanna tell me what happened or am I gonna have to guess?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said softly. “You need to.”

  I stared out the window, watching the trees streak by, blurring into a mass of evergreen. My eyes clouded with tears. I heard the words in my head, begging me to say them out loud. Begging to be felt. To be accepted—something I was never able to do no matter how hard I tried because the more I thought about it, the harder it was to deal with. Talking about it with Heather had been more than enough, and I hadn’t even told her the whole thing.

  “What happened, Faith?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it, but I knew deep down that I would never recover if I didn’t. And I wanted to be better. I wanted to trust Lucas, not just with my life, but with my heart. I wanted to love him like he deserved. It was now or never, and if anyone could understand, it was Lucas. He always did. It was as though there was a part of our souls that simply got each other.

  I took a deep breath. “My stepfather . . . he went to prison. When I was thirteen.”

  “Why?” Lucas asked.

  “Because he . . . did something to me and my mom.”

  “What did he do?”

  I swallowed hard, trying to stave off the tears I knew would come. “He was a drunk. And he—he beat my mom. Terribly.” The tears strangled me, and I took a second to steady myself. Lucas waited patiently. Not touching me. Not saying anything. The wind rushing by the car was all I could hear, deafening wind. “I loved him so much,” I said, choking. “He was my dad. We used to bake pancakes every Sunday; we used to go to the beach together; he used to sing to me when I was scared at night. He was my dad and then he—and then he”—sobs racked my body—“and then he wasn’t him anymore. He got drunk and went crazy . . . stopped being my dad and became this ... evil person.” I took in a breath to steady my voice. “And then one day I came home from school, and he had a gun in his hand. He was raving around, and he . . . he beat my mom and then he shot me when I screamed for help.”

  For a moment there was utter silence.

  “He shot you?” Lucas’s voice was uncharacteristically calm. I nodded and rubbed my upper thigh where the scar still shone bright pink against my skin.

  “And they put him in prison?” Lucas asked. I could hear a hint of bite in his voice now.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I’ve never told anyone about this before ... not the whole thing, how it really was. Derek is the only one who knows.”

  Lucas pulled the car onto the shoulder of the highway. He turned toward me and put his hands over my cheeks. He bent and kissed them, mopping up the tears with his lips. I turned toward him, and his lips brushed against mine, so feather light I might have imagined it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. There’s so much evil and wrong in this world. But it’s what makes the good things so precious. Things like love.”

  “There is no love,” I said dully.

  “There is. I know it because I feel it. I used to think like you. I used to believe that love was this made-up thing for books and movies. But if you open your heart—if you ignore that voice screaming at you to keep it closed—then you’ll see that there is love, and kindness and goodness in this world. You’ll see it, just like I have.” He laughed a little. “It’s kind of ironic when you think about it.”

  I sniffled. “What is?”

  “That you—the nonbeliever—wo
uld be the one to make me believe. To have faith.”

  I smiled and a few tears leaked out of my eyes. “I don’t know if I can believe it. I want to trust you. But I’m scared of what will happen.”

  “Faith, look at me.” Lucas’s voice was like steel, hard and unbending. “Look at me and hear this. If you hear nothing else I’m telling you, hear this. I will never hurt you. You have my word on that, okay? Hurting you is the last thing I’d ever want to do. It goes against my very nature. I’m meant to protect you from harm—not cause it.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my face against his cheek. I felt his words deep inside my heart—sinking in and soaking up my fear and hurt with the absolute certainty that Lucas would never hurt me.

  “I believe you,” I murmured into his shirt. “Even though I know I shouldn’t, even though that voice is screaming at me. I know you’ll never hurt me.”

  He turned my face toward his and did something we both knew we shouldn’t do, something that would likely kill me. He kissed me.

  And he didn’t stop.

  18

  GOULD

  The rest of the trip’s conversation was considerably lighter. It felt amazing to get that thing out of me—to voice it and face it head on with Lucas at my side.

  We stopped for lunch at a Wendy’s and then got back on the road, both of us silent for a while. I listened as Lucas hummed to the radio and watched the sun climb higher in the wintry white sky.

  “There’s something I don’t understand, though,” Lucas said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You said that the incident with your stepdad is the reason you can’t trust men, but you trusted Derek enough to go out with him?”