Moonbound (Moonfate Serial Book 1) (2 page)

“Well?”

“No,” I say firmly. I’m probably not going to hurt anybody else, either. Here I am, wiping out the last of my savings when I’m not even planning on pulling the trigger.

Edward lowers his chin, looking at my face for the first time. “Okay. Well here ya go, then. We have classes on Thursdays and Saturdays if you’re interested.” He slips a yellow sheet of paper into the plastic bag before reluctantly handing it to me.

A dingy kind of twilight filters in from the exit, making the strip mall outside look even sadder, if possible. Better get started. I’ve got a long ride home. Sighing, I head toward the exit.

“Are you gonna kill him?”

I stop. “Who?”

“The one who got away. The werebeast that didn’t turn himself in.”

I swallow, trying not to picture my parents’ bodies. It’s hard because I relive their deaths almost every night in my nightmares. The crooked limbs, the glassy eyes. The screaming howls of the werebeasts. Every night the outcome is the same. They die. I can’t change it, and I can’t change real life, either.

“I’ve got enough problems already without going hunting for more. And even if I didn’t, I’m not that brave.” I open the door, and it gives one last whingy
ding
as I do.

“But that’s what’s great about ’em. Guns,” he shouts after me. “They make it so you don’t have to be.”

Chapter Two

The first thing I do when I get to the house is cram the gun into the duffle bag leaning against my air mattress. I can’t afford a real bed, even though I’ve been here for a couple of months now, and my aunt didn't have any furniture either. She was in the process of selling the house when she had the aneurysm, so it’s a husk of a building. The only things left adorning the walls are the electrical sockets.

I told myself I didn’t mind the Spartan-ness of the place, that it was easier to forget the past than confront it, but as I strip out of my sweaty bike clothes and go to the shower, for the first time it feels truly empty. Maybe it’s because I saw my parents’ faces, but now I can’t help but remember what used to be here.

Once upon a time this was my room, my sanctuary from chores and homework. I invented imaginary friends here, wrote songs here, cried here when Arnold Harris, my first crush, broke up with me at recess because the other boys were making fun of him for liking a “fattie” who ate too many cookies. He told me he still really liked me, but he just couldn’t take the teasing. That was when I swore that if I ever liked someone, I wouldn’t let what other people thought of me make me stop. And I wouldn’t stop eating cookies, either.

Instead, I barricaded myself up in my room, and listened to the Backstreet Boys’ “Bye Bye Bye” over and over again. When my mom screamed at me to turn that auto-tuned abomination down, I yelled at her that “IT’S JUST AS DEEP AS OPERA. JEEZE!”

I smile to myself as I slip into the shower, but it’s a bittersweet expression. I’ll never be that girl again. My parents will never be alive again. But as I towel off and shimmy into my oversized sleep t-shirt, I realize something else. This is still my house. I have the deed to prove it and the means to protect it, if I have to. I can make it safe here again.

A grim optimism tightens my jaw. Then I open the door to my bedroom and what little hope I had evaporates.

Moonbeams spill through the windows and cast the whole room in a dreamy glow. I flinch and look outside. There, beyond the ramshackle roofs of the other duplexes, hangs a giant full moon. A hunter’s moon. The nightmare is going to be strong tonight.

I learned a long time ago that there’s no point fighting the dream; the only way for it to ever stop is if my mate finds me. But I don’t want that either. My mark aches as I fall into bed, my skin feverish under the white fur. Absently, I scratch at it as gravity drags my eyelids down and I fall asleep.

The nightmare always begins the same way.

I am inside a tent I can’t leave. Not until it’s too late. Miniature fortresses of library books surround my sleeping bag. Usually I can read every spine, but now all I can see are Nina Strike’s over-romanticized history of werebeasts and
Twilight
. Why is it so dark?

I rise to my knees. Across the nylon of the tent my parents’ silhouettes play like shadow puppets. They’re fainter than usual, and the light around me is a dirty yellow.

Pressing my hands against the tent fabric, my eyes widen as I realize why it’s dark and the light yellow instead of white. The moon is gone. And without the moon, the werebeasts can’t shift. Maybe I won’t have to watch my parents die tonight. I close my eyes and my chest tingles with a hopeful warmth.

Outside, my father is twanging on his acoustic guitar, and my mother is singing. It’s almost midnight and they’ve already run through all the happy campfire rounds and settled into the slower ones. Their voices drift through the air toward me like leaves floating on some dark, endless stream.

“By the waters, the waters of Babylon,” Mom sings. Her voice is beautiful and strong; it has to be—she was a voice teacher for a living and almost a professional opera singer until she had me. She used to say that she lost her voice when I was born because she transferred all her talent to me. She would hate that I don’t sing much anymore.

Dad joins in on the second phrase, his voice blending into the harmony in a folksy counterpoint to her smooth tone. “We lay down and wept for thee, Zion.”

Their voices weave together, but like the house, the song feels empty. It’s missing something. A third voice. In real life, I was engrossed in a stupid book. In every nightmare since, I can never bear to sing along, knowing what comes once the song ends.

But tonight is different. Tonight I sing with them.

“We remember, we remember, we remember thee, Zion,” I whisper, my voice hoarse from disuse and emotion.

My hands press against the tent, warping my parents’ shadows as if I can gather them up and keep them safe. Maybe tonight, on this moonless night, I can. “We remember…”

A bear roars.

Oh, please, no.

I clench my fists, waiting for their screams and the crunching of bone, but it never comes. Instead, their shadows begin to fade.

“Mom!” I yell. I lean all my weight into the tent, but it doesn’t move.

The firelight flickers out and all at once darkness consumes my parents’ shadows. And they’re gone.

“No, Momma!” I scream, using a word I haven’t spoken since I was small enough to fit in my mother’s arms as she whispered special lullabies just for me. She said she’d love me forever. She promised. “Please don’t leave me!” I tug at the zipper of the tent, my muscles practically tearing from the effort. It doesn’t give.

Suddenly, the temperature around me plummets, and my whole body burns with the abrupt transition; I don’t care. “Dad!”

Silence. And then a response, but not my parents’. A low, melodic howl arches through the air. I freeze. I know the sounds of my parents’ killers’ cries, and that’s not one of them.

With one last yank so hard I practically dislocate my shoulder, I finally open the tent flap, and the force of it sends me tumbling out into a clearing that is not my parents’ campsite. Snow flurries through the air, coating the primeval pines around me in white. Beyond their branches is a moon so full it devours half the sky.

“Mom! Dad!” I take one cautious step forward. “Where are—“

I stop.

There, standing on a crop of jagged boulders, is a wolf.

Oh, God.

I fall back, but only get two steps before a frozen stick cracks beneath my feet.

The wolf’s gaze whips toward me.

And I know. Oh, how I know. It’s him. It’s my mate.

I can’t move. His gaze pins me in place with a lazy, predatory intensity that instantly burns my blood. Maybe it’s his eyes; the longer I look at them the stranger they seem. They flicker with the colors of the aurora, one instant green, the next blue.

With a long satisfied growl he leaps to the ground. Snow plumes around his white paws and he pants, low and rhythmic.

The heat in my belly pulses in time with his breath and radiates out to my fingertips. I can’t think, can’t move, can’t even dream of being anything else but his perfect prey. I hunger for it, the oblivion of being consumed by something primal, like a snowflake dissolving into the sea.

How had I ever thought a gun would help against that?

He lifts onto his hind legs, and it starts.

First the shadows come, gathering at his paws, mixing with the snow, twisting around his body like dark vines as his form lengthens and stretches. Fur contracts to reveal thick ropes of pure muscle. Soon I’m sure the only hairs he has left are the messy platinum strands on his head.

His body is smooth and defined, and as he straightens, I can’t help but notice the perfect pelvic V below his six-pack. It points down to a tuft of pale pubic hair.

He isn’t hairless everywhere after all.

I blush and look up.

His snout has shrunk, revealing a jaw so strong it shouldn’t be as beautiful as it is and full lips curved into the suggestion of a smirk. Only his eyes remain the same, wide and full of some emotion I can’t name. I’d almost call it relief. But then it’s gone as his pupils expand with desire. Another shock of need throbs through my lips, making it clear that I’ve never wanted anything more. But something swells at the back of my mind. Something important. Something I’m forgetting.

He opens his mouth and his deep, gravelly baritone scrapes the air. “Hello there, Little Mate.”

“I—I’m not your mate.”

He prowls forward, sizing me up like
I
am the wild animal. One he has no doubt he can tame. “What would you like me to call you, then?”

“My name is Artemis,” I say slowly. It doesn’t even occur to me to lie.

“Artemis.” He claims every syllable with his tongue.

“You’re not real,” I rasp. “This is all just a dream.”

“Of course it is, but we are such stuff as dreams are made of. You and I.” He gives an exaggerated wave with his right hand, and I notice a crescent of white fur there. Just like mine.

“See you soon.” His tongue darts out to wet his velvety lips. “Artemis.”

And I remember.

In order for my mate to affect my dream, he has to be close to me in real life. And what’s worse, just like the light, I’m fading too. I’m waking up.

And he is very, very real.

Chapter Three

Everything is white. I blink. For one crazy moment I’m convinced I’m still in the snowy forest, but then, as my gutted childhood bedroom comes into focus, I realize I’m staring at a ceiling. I’m awake.

Something’s different, though. But what?

As I roll onto my side, my pulse slows enough that it’s no longer deafening.

That’s when I see a gaunt shadow lurking in the doorway, illuminated by an afternoon sun. My mate. The shadow must be him.

I need to get my gun.

With a speed wrought from fear, I careen over the side of my bed and grab the duffle next to it. I unzip it and pull out the gun from its nest of clothes.

“Artemis?”

I cock back the magazine the way I learned in YouTube videos.

“Artemis!”

The voice is familiar, and it’s not my mate’s. Bullets tumble from my trembling fingertips and into the clothes. The gun soon follows.

I look up. Lawrence, my roommate, stands at the foot of my air mattress. I pull my tank
top and a pair of harem pants over the gun and bullets to cover it up, breathing hard.

“Artemis. Calm down,” Lawrence soothes.

I can’t believe I ever mistook Lawrence for a were. My roommate is everything a were is not—willowy where they’re square, delicate where they’re thick. Not to mention the were in my dream was a white wolf and Lawrence is the color of burnt coffee. He looks especially thin today, bony arms akimbo, hands on his tiny, skinny-jean-clad hips.

The dream has messed me up, but panic overwhelms my guilt. My weremate might not be in my room, but he has to be close. There's no other way he could’ve been in my dream. ”The doors?”

“Locked.” Lawrence breezes over to me and offers me a hand.

I look at it skeptically. “The windows?”

He tilts his head in the direction of my bedroom window, which is shut. “What do you think?”

I take his hand and pull myself upward onto the air mattress. “What about on Tracker?”

He joins me, crossing his legs daintily at his ankles. “Tracker’s had no alerts of nearby weres in the last minute.” He pulls out a black smartphone almost as large as a paperback and about six years out of date. Holding it out to me, he hits the blue Tracker app icon and a map of our street pops up. “No red dots.”

I sigh and squeeze his hand in thanks. His presence takes the edge off my anxiety, but doesn’t eliminate it entirely. Nothing does. “When was the last time you refreshed?”

To Lawrence’s credit he doesn’t roll his eyes, just calmly touches the edge of the screen. No new red dots appear.