We watched a horrible shark movie on the television while we ate our pizza. Derek and I had decided that it would be fun to have a picnic in the living room. Levi didn’t care. He was just happy to be in his recliner. I’ve never seen anyone that happy to be reunited with a chair.
“So, this time, the full moon—” I paused. “It won’t be the same, will it?”
Levi picked up the TV remote and turned the volume down. The shark was circling a girl swimming topless in the ocean. Her friends were on the shore, yelling at her, but she seemed to only have eyes for the surfer with dark hair and wild green eyes in the distance.
“It’s going to come sooner,” he answered.
“Sooner?” I almost choked on my wine.
Levi turned so he could look at me. “The days are shorter, which means the moon is going to be out earlier.”
“But will it be like last time?”
“Somewhat,” he replied. “You’ll get the fever again before the pain. It’s going to be harder, she’s close already and she’ll want to come out—”
“What if I just let her out?” I asked, the sound of a mother screaming in the background on the television drowning out the sound of rain. My hands rubbed along my thighs as tension filled my joints.
“It will kill you.”
“But if—”
The shark had eaten the girl in the movie. Her friends started to walk away like she had never been there in the first place while the green-eyed boy caught a wave, completely oblivious to the red staining the ocean nearby.
I looked back at Levi who was looking right at me. “It takes three moons for a reason. Otherwise it will kill you.”
I closed my mouth and nodded. “So hold her back.”
He nodded. “Hold her back.”
Derek took a seat next to me on the couch. “You’ll know when it’s too much.”
“Can’t you give me something for the pain?”
“No,” Levi replied into his glass. “You need your mind to be sharp, and those meds will just make you sloppy. Saw a human die badly that way.”
My stomach took a slight nosedive at the thought. “And if I don’t make it?”
“We all have to die, Charlie girl, all of us,” Levi said, and then turned the volume on the television back up, the shark’s jaws doing anything but drowning out my worries.
I tried to watch the movie and put it all out of my mind, but nothing was helping. Even as I dozed off to sleep, my nerves filled my slumber and anxiety fueled my dreams.
Soon enough, Nate was chasing me through the house into the little bathroom where a man with sickly golden eyes was waiting for me. He smiled, winking at Nate before he reached for me. I turned to Nate for help, but Nate’s fangs were dripping with blood.
“I always liked when you ran,” he said.
The thunder hammered me out of sleep.
Sweat was pouring over me while rain beat at my window. She was scratching hard at my mind, scratching at dark places both of us longed to rip out. I tried to go back to sleep but it was useless. Instead, I walked to the kitchen to get something to drink, but cold mist pouring through the front door caught my attention.
Levi was sitting outside in a rocking chair, with a bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. An ashtray was on a table next to him that looked more ash than tray.
Instead of getting water like I probably should have, I got a coffee mug and walked outside. He eyed my mug then uncapped the bottle of bourbon and poured some into the mug for me. I took a seat in the chair next to him, curling into the cushion while rain fell around us.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked.
He shook his head, the end of the cigarette lighting up as the other end met his lips. “I haven’t slept for years.” His eyes were glowing as he looked straight ahead into the forest.
“What was keeping you up so late that you had to ruin my date with this lovely bottle of bourbon?”
Levi looked over at me for a moment, something behind those silver eyes creeping closer, as if it wanted a better look at me. “You’re scared. Good. A healthy dose of fear never hurt anyone.”
“Do you honestly think I’ll make it?”
“I’ve seen stronger people die. That doesn’t mean you will and it doesn’t mean you won’t.”
World’s best motivational speaker.
I took a long sip, cringing as the liquor burned my throat. The rain was starting to die down into a steady mist, but the thunder wasn’t letting up. “I didn’t know you had a nephew.”
He side-eyed me then took a sip of bourbon. “How about this?” He flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette into the tray shaped like a salmon next to him. “You can have a question, and I can have a question?” I nodded in agreement.
He took another long drag. “How long were you with him?”
It was my turn to take a long drink. “Around five years.”
“Never married?”
My gut twisted bitterly. “No.” He was never going to keep that promise, I knew that now. It was just a future he used as a carrot for me, always holding it close enough to seem attainable but never truly in reach.
“That’s two. I get two.”
“Fine.” He threw back his drink and opened the bottle.
I bit my lip. The liquid was giving me the courage to ask the ones I would have not dared ask in the daylight. “Why does Derek live with you?”
“Long story short, my father saved Derek and Elliot’s asses a long time ago. I think he feels like he’s paying that back in his own way.”
“How long has he been here?”
Levi paused as he poured his bourbon to think. “Eight years, I think. He’s always been in the area. Elliot too. Their coven has always had good relations with the pack.”
I threw my drink back. Levi laughed at what I assumed was the expression on my face. “So.” He swirled his drink around, silver eyes looking over at me like they were trying to pick apart a Jenga tower. “How did you meet him?”
I wanted those memories to die. I hated that I had to repeat them. But what I hated most was how much a small piece of me wanted to hold on to them.
“He was the graduate assistant for a class I was in. I picked up a paper one day—a big midsemester paper—and he was there instead of my professor. He tried to tell me that I would have gotten a better grade if I hadn’t had some issues with the structure. Which of course he was wrong about, and I made sure to point it out—”
“I’m sure you did.” Levi snickered with a shake of his head, amused.
“After, he asked me out. The rest was history. We were inseparable after that.”
I’d had such a crush on him in that class. I remember seeing him, this boy with blond waves and sleepy hazel eyes.
We played eye-tag for weeks. I remember wanting it to be him there when I picked up my paper. He didn’t just ask me to dinner, it was coffee. Then drinks, then dinner, then it was the two of us between a set of navy sheets. When I woke up to the sight of him smiling sleepily at me, I thought magic in the world was truly alive.
“And what did you do before all of this?”
The happy memory was gone at the sound of his gruff voice. “That’s two questions.”
“Fine.” He rolled his eyes and took another drink.
I mirrored him and leaned back in the chair. “I transcribed notes and did administrative work at his father’s law firm.”
I had been so devastated. I had majored in journal-ism and had interviews at reputable magazines, but never received an offer. I had built up my résumé all through college so I would look like that person you had to have, but it had been worthless.
Nate had tried to cheer me up. He already had a job at his father’s law firm and got me the position, which was supposed to be temporary. But if you tell yourself that for too long, it becomes devastatingly permanent.
“Is it my turn?”
“Yap.”
The light at the end of his cigarette illuminated the tired lines on his face. I took another drink and mustered up some courage. He wasn’t the boogeyman, and I wasn’t the same girl he’d saved.
“Who do you talk to at the stone columns?”
He continued to stare out at the mist, this tired sadness coming into his eyes. “My brother mostly.”
“And why are those there? The columns.”
“To keep the pack safe,” he admitted quietly.
“From what?”
Levi paused before he looked up. “From me.”
I felt frozen in my seat. This thing in the back of my head quieted, as if it was as stunned as I was.
“It wasn’t the first time, was it?” he asked.
It was a knife twisting in my gut. Truth ripping open the infection to let it drain. I shook my head. It wasn’t the first
“accident” or the first time I had been “clumsy.”
“You did the right thing.”
“Why doesn’t it feel that way?” I asked. Because at times it still didn’t feel that way. At times I still wished I was lying in his arms.
Levi was looking at the purple irises around the yard that still had droplets of rain on them. They had already started wilting. There wasn’t much of them left standing. “It never really does.”
“I hate this. I feel—you know, my friends told me in school. They knew something was off, and I didn’t listen.”
I should have listened. I should have walked away so many times before.
“You got away,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”
I shook my head because when I closed my eyes at night it felt like he was right there. “I wish the nightmares would stop.”
He sighed, looking into the night. “Me too.”
