Mark of the Moon

by Beth Dranoff

  “You were chained and being slurped on by bloodsuckers,” I said, to save him from going there himself.

  “Yeah,” he grunted, reddening slightly. “Yeah.”

  Lightbulb moment.

  “It’s okay, you know,” I commented. “They had you in their thrall. You must know about the power of the bite. It’s not your fault you got turned on.”

  Morgenlark made a sound that was a cross between a chirp and a growl. I felt for him, I really did. And I was very very fortunate that Jon wasn’t the kind of guy to turn my head around like that. At least I hoped so.

  Plus, there was my tattoo and the vaccine and...crap. Clearly all of which had been so effective when that idiot Claude had scratched me.

  It’s not paranoia if people are actually out to get you, right?

  “So, how does Ezra fit into all of this?” It was the question at the crux of the lunacy that seemed to have become my life.

  “He’s the guy sitting upstairs, probably enjoying his brandy and a cigar, laughing his ass off at the show we’re putting on for him down here.” Morgenlark’s words ended with a sigh. “You’re supposed to shift so he can catch it on tape, prove that you are what you pretend you are not. But I guess he’s got it wrong, eh?”

  “How’s that?”

  “If you were a shifter, you would have turned by now,” he replied. “Look at me. I’ve been what I am since I turned thirteen and even I can’t keep it together at high moon time. But that’s okay. Maybe he’ll stick with me and leave you alone after this. I mean, if you’re not a shifter, then you can go.”

  I didn’t want to burst his idealistic bubble. I didn’t know why I was suddenly so important to everyone, but no way Ezra was going to let me go regardless of which side of the fence my genetic pattern fell on. I shook free some more white powder that had fallen down from above us, dusting the floor with a dandruff not my own. What the hell was going on up there anyway?

  Every few seconds there would be a thud, then a puff of ceiling falling. I tried to ignore it. Just as I tried to ignore the tug of fur beneath my skin, straining to erupt for real.

  Morgenlark cleared his throat, indicating the camera with his chin. “Isn’t the moon beautiful? You can get such a clear view of it,” he said, moving from the cot to the curtainless bars-over-glass window. He made a show of running his tongue over his teeth and up, even farther, until he was licking his nose with a darting pink tongue.

  Oh.

  I sunk back into the shadows, the gloom just beyond what the camera could capture, and touched my face again. Or at least what was left of it. I felt like I needed a shave, like everything was covered with a fine baby fuzz of fur that hadn’t been there before. Crap.

  Morgenlark had noticed and was trying to distract our captors from my unintentional changes. But defer and deflect would only work for so long, after which point I would have to come out of the proverbial cat litter box and greet the world—with whiskers and pointy ears.

  Chapter Thirty

  I realized we were no longer alone.

  “Hi, Dana.”

  Ezra’s voice was more gravelly than I remembered it. And less dead.

  “Ezra,” I replied. “You’re looking well.” I paused, choosing my words carefully. Visualizing puffy clouds drifting across a robin’s-egg-blue horizon; anxiety would only trigger another shift. “Better than expected. Weren’t you a head separated from a body in a puddle of cooling blood the last time we saw each other?”

  Ezra inclined his head slightly as though listening to words, instructions, from a frequency I wasn’t tuned into. Then he focused back in on me, pushing sincerity behind those brilliant blue eyes.

  “That wasn’t me,” he replied simply.

  “If you say so,” I said, shrugging. We both knew it had been him. But I was starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, there was more than one version of the Ezra I knew.

  Sometimes reality was more surreal than fiction.

  Morgenlark cleared his throat to get our attention.

  “So can I go now?” The moonlight was glinting off the reds in his fur. “I did what you asked,” Morgenlark continued. “Tempted her into the shift and you can see how well that worked. But the moon is up now and it’s time for me to be out and about.”

  Ezra nodded, once, and reached out to open the door. He had the keys in one hand and a cattle prod in the other. As the keys inched their way towards the door, the prod was angled in my direction in case I got any bright ideas. Like whacking Ezra over the head with the prod and making a run for it. But what would Morgenlark do if I did that? Was he a traitor or was he an ally?

  I realized I couldn’t count on the were-tiger’s allegiances. Instead, I tracked his movements towards the door of the cell as it opened. He crossed the threshold as Ezra held out the prod in brandishing readiness to use it. On me. I watched and counted, ticking off the seconds. Morgenlark cleared the pathway with a swish of tail that distracted Ezra’s attention for just a moment, an eye-blink max. It was all I needed to leap forward, smash down the prod with the palm of my left hand and thrust down and away.

  Ezra, caught off-balance, stumbled back and reached out to the wall behind him. I grabbed the handle of the prod and used my foot to sweep his feet out from under him. Ezra’s head snapped back and banged on the cinderblock wall with a satisfying thunk. Morgenlark turned to me and winked before vanishing out the double-plated glass and metal doors at the end of the hallway.

  So. No more help from Gothy Tiger Guy, but no hindrance either. Okay. Good to know.

  I shoved Ezra with a strength and speed I didn’t realize I had, remembering at the last possible second to snag his keys from his white lab coat before slamming the door shut. His watery eyes peered back now from the other side of the cell bars, slightly unfocused but trained on me.

  “Dana?” Ezra’s voice was weaker and querulous. “What are you doing here?”

  I stared.

  “Uh, you tell me,” I replied. “Isn’t this your party?”

  “What party? What am I doing in here?” Gerbrecht’s confusion was palpable as his eyes darted up and around the confines of his current space. What I couldn’t tell was whether or not it was real. “Dana, what’s going on?”

  I took a breath and held it a moment before releasing to the count of five. Although the pressure had lifted; with Ezra behind bars, my urge to spontaneously shift had weakened. Opened my mouth, thought better of it, then repeated my breathing exercise one more time before trying again.

  “Ezra, when is the last time you remember seeing me?”

  Ezra’s eyes tracked up and around as though trying to sequence the scattered images scrawled on the uneven walls of his mind into some kind of logical pattern.

  “Did you come to visit me at my office earlier this week?” His voice, so hopeful, I almost believed him. Wanted to believe him.

  “You know I did,” I replied. “What else do you remember?”

  “I remember getting called away by my assistant. And...you were gone when I got back? Or did you have to go to work?” Ezra rubbed his eyes and I noticed that his knuckles were chapped red and lined with tiny white-scaled diamond patterns, wizened and wrinkled beyond his sixty-odd years. As though he was aging before my eyes. But how was that possible?

  It wasn’t, I reminded myself. And yet the evidence was there, sitting on the floor not ten feet away.

  How do you reconcile the person you trusted for so many years with the person who was willing to cause you pain and suffering an eye-blink later?

  You don’t, I realized. All you can do is deal with what you have in front of you.

  I crouched, rocking back on my heels as I watched Ezra try to sort through his thoughts. I leaned back against the wall and waited for some kind of sign that would cause any of this to make sense. B
ut there was nothing. No lightbulb, no flashing neon sign pointing to the next step.

  Just a big chunk of ceiling that came down with a crash a few inches from Ezra’s head, encircling him with a kind of luminescent halo I knew damned well he no longer deserved, if he ever had. A head ducked down and looked around, familiar and flaked with plaster.

  “Dana?”

  “Over here, Sam,” I called, waving my hand to get his attention.

  “What are you doing there?” Sam peered down at the cell, then at the enclosure beyond where I sat.

  “Getting ready to interrogate the prisoner,” I replied. “What are you doing here?”

  “Rescuing you?” Sam no longer sounded so sure of himself. “Or maybe,” he said, glancing over at Ezra, “given the circumstances, you’d prefer me to help with the interrogation?”

  I heard the clacking of scrabbling nails circling around above; scented shadows reeking of recently oiled metal. Gargantuan mice with swords? Maybe I was starting to lose it.

  “You called in reinforcements, eh?” I forced nonchalance to dance over the faint smile on my lips.

  “Uh, yeah,” he replied. The sound of an explosion had him looking up and over his shoulder. “Hang on,” Sam said, pulling his head back up. “Let me check on something here.”

  Another crash, then silence. I watched Ezra through the bars of the cell as he watched me, trusting that my backup team could take care of themselves.

  “Ezra,” I said. “What’s really going on here?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said. Awareness and focus seemed to flit back and forth across his features like wisps of taffy clouds stretched thin and drifting across a clear blue sky. His face shifted as well, planes and shadows forming and reforming in waves. Could be the passing light from the moon playing tricks. Could be.

  “Why don’t you try me,” I said. “Let’s keep it simple, start with the basics. Are you actually Ezra Gerbrecht?”

  His smile was faint, hovering on lips whose very movements, whether upwards in approval or downwards in disappointment, had impacted me so strongly for so very long. So very long ago.

  “I both am and am not Ezra,” he said. “I am he that was and is but will be unlike that which came before.”

  “Okay, nice riddles, sensei master,” I said when he didn’t elaborate. “Let’s try this again. Am I currently speaking with Ezra Gerbrecht, the man who recruited me out of university?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “Ezra is still a part of me, and yet not. We are one but also many. We remember you, the gosling that became the swan, the one we watched and waited for. Who left us. Who is here before us once more at the time and place of the key alignments in the sky and here on the ground.”

  Ezra stopped, like a robotic recording that had run its preset message and now had fulfilled its duties. He didn’t close his eyes, exactly, but he did do a single long blink. It was unnerving.

  Focus, Dana.

  “What does Alina, or Cybele, or whatever her name is, want?”

  “Alina has a portal issue,” Ezra replied. Oh hello, return of the cryptic. “She needs one opened, and thinks you can help with that.”

  “How?” But Ezra was done with the sharing if not the caring on that subject, his lips pressed together and his eyes wandering.

  “Why do you care about the Moon with Seven Faces pack?” I tried a different line of questioning. Since I had him here and all.

  “They are the key,” Ezra replied, zoning back in on me.

  “To...?”

  Ezra refused to elaborate, shaking his head and biting ever so gently on his lower lip as though needing that tang of blood to ballast his resolve. I decided to switch up the path of my questions.

  “Tell me about the Moon with Seven Faces pack,” I said. “I hardly know anything about them. Help me out here.” I mentally crossed my fingers and kept going. “What’s the deal there? Can I trust them?”

  Ezra gave a laugh; short and sharp.

  “Trust is something we should never give away lightly,” he said, an abrupt shift back to the Ezra I recognized. “You must kukn mit di aoygn. Look with the eyes. Everyone has an agenda, everyone has something they want to achieve. If you’re a key player in someone else’s scenario, then you can never fully trust them—they will always put their own priorities above yours when the ultimate goal is on the line.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t trust them?” Shaking my head at myself; I cared what Ezra thought why exactly?

  “Use your own judgment, Dana,” Ezra said, eyes closing in apparent weariness. “You don’t need me to tell you what to do.”

  My mouth gaped open. That voice...

  “Dad?”

  Ezra quirked his head at me, tilted to the side. With an impish grin that lifted the corners of his mouth up and over, his skin peeled back like a well-greased zipper. All that remained of Ezra was a pile of skin and a ball of green sparkling dust which came together and then exploded outwards, shooting streaks of glitter that quickly vanished into nothingness.

  * * *

  Sam found me like that, sitting on the floor, staring into the space which had been Ezra a couple of minutes earlier. This time he’d come down the corridor leading to the outside. He looked through the bars at what wasn’t there, then down at me, assessing.

  “Dana?”

  “Mmph.” About all I could get out. I knew I should be surprised that Sam was there, and I was, but I was running low on shock and awe at this point.

  Sam surreptitiously looked me over, nostrils flaring, checking for any signs of blood or other damage. Finding none, he lowered himself on his haunches and then eased back to sit beside me against the wall.

  “What are we looking at here?” Sam nudged me with his shoulder, trying to snap me out of whatever reverie I was in.

  “Ezra,” I said.

  Sam looked pointedly at the empty cell in front of us, then at me.

  “What about Ezra, Dana? Where is he?”

  “He’s gone,” I managed to choke out. “Dust.”

  “Hmm?” Sam looked at me, nonplussed.

  “Ezra turned into dust and vanished. Or he took off his skin. Or...” I zoned back in again as I noticed the camera on the wall once more tracking us back and forth and back and forth again. “Shit,” I muttered, then touched Sam on the knee and indicated the video camera’s red eye on the far wall. I felt him jump, startled, before making a big show about helping me stand up.

  “We should probably take a look around in there,” he commented. “Do you happen to have a way in?”

  I handed him the keys. The door swung open and Sam strolled in, looking up and around and away from the camera until he was right beside it and out of view. Crack. Camera out and in his hands. No more remote spying on us; at least not using that particular methodology.

  “Well, that was easy,” I said. But I was forgetting something. Oh yeah. “Wait. How did you find me?”

  “Jon,” he said. Huh? “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  * * *

  “So Claude shot me with some kind of tranq gun,” I said, rubbing my shoulder. “Then he said some kind of incantation. Claude knew an incantation to mutter?”

  Sam nodded.

  “And it threw up a wall of ice.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Ice pellets everywhere. We could see you, but we couldn’t get to you. And then you were gone.”

  I digested that.

  “And how did I go from gone to found?”

  “Jon,” Sam said. “He picked a side. Yours. He hunted down Claude and got answers.”

  I pressed for more details, but Sam got vague on me. Who did what to whom, who cleaned up afterwards, where Jon was now. Guess share time was over.

  That Jon and C
laude were definitively no longer together was a developmental factoid not lost on me. Fun times to be sorted out at a later date. Here’s hoping it was a timeline of my choosing.

  * * *

  The moon was still up and the night only into its early adolescence when we arrived back at the lakeside house in Cherry Beach, flanked by a white cube van, an orange VW van and a single black Suburban. Subtle.

  My partially shifted features had reverted to human on the ride over. So much for the group impact effect on my ability to fully shift into something other than what I was currently.

  Sam, on the other hand, suffered from no such limitations. Once safely deposited at a safe house on the shores of Cherry Beach with a full reconnoitering of the layout and provisions (blanket—check; hot chocolate—check check), I was left to my own puttering with a quick peck on the cheek. Apparently still not quite solid, Sam and I. Too bad.

  I wrapped myself in a worn duvet covered in bold but faded red orchids, pulled on some warm fuzzy socks and took my steaming mug of cocoa to the second-floor veranda to look up, leaning over the solid wood railing.

  Full moon. Only one more night until the climax of the cycle. Until the lunar power was at its strongest, and one of us would prevail.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I leaned my elbows over the railing, watching the tiny waves as they nibbled, toothless slurps, against the edged shelf of ice that made up the shoreline. In the moonlight the feathered expanse of gulls, ducks and swans flanked the snowy embankment like a pebbled path of bobbing stones.

  Strange that no one noticed this beautiful house, as big as any Rosedale Valley mansion, overlooking such a prime Cherry Beach piece of Lake Ontario. Sam had tried to explain to me about the glamour surrounding the place—how anyone who didn’t know it existed saw a ramshackle, abandoned old lifeguard hut. But he got a bit tongue-tied in the middle. Part of the effects of the spell, I guess.