Not Until Moonrise (3 page)

  
“Come with me, Katie.” His voice carried on the still air. “Now or never.”

  
From the corner of her eye she saw Howard standing motionless and pale in the doorway. The will to use the knife on him passed; it wasn’t Howard she’d come for.

  
She lowered the blade and stepped out into the night.

  
Jackson met her at the truck, stopped her when she reached for the door. She flinched from the touch of his hand—too warm, his skin electric like the air before a storm—and he drew back.

  
“I’ll drive,” he said.

  
“You’re joking.”

  
He extended his hand, palm up.

  
“Fuck... Fuck it.” Kate clenched her jaw, and handed the keys over. She stalked around to the passenger side, climbed in as Jackson’s door slammed and the engine revved to life.

  
She sat ramrod straight, every muscle tensed as she ran through a mental inventory of the truck’s defenses. Throwing knives under each seat, a crowbar in the back, brass knuckles and a spray can loaded with colloidal silver.  She still had the gun, of course, but would only use it if she had to.  The sound would attract too much attention, even in this hick town.

  
“Relax,” Jackson said wryly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  
She didn’t reply.

  
The truck eased onto the road headed north, away from the cluster of buildings that made up Porter, toward the woods and the dark outline of mountains.

  
Kate watched Jackson while he drove. His elbow rested on the open window, his other hand draped casually over the wheel. His hair had fallen down to hide most of his face, all but the prominent nose and lean, stubbled jaw. He must have felt her looking; he glanced sideway with a dry half-smile, and the familiarity of the expression opened up a gulf of pain in Kate’s chest. She turned her gaze out the window as they turned onto Thresher Road and the woods thickened.

  
Half a mile, and they veered off again onto a narrow path that ran back between the hemlocks and oaks. The path was more overgrown than she remembered. The trees pushed close on both sides of the drive, wild grasses grown tall enough to slap against the truck’s sides. A shadow leapt away from the headlights, and Kate sat up straight before she saw it was only a deer.

  
She almost missed the farmhouse. When she’d left town—when
they
had left—some of the framework of the first floor had still been standing, charred beams reaching for the sky. Now there was only a low crumble of debris where the base of the house had once been.

  
And then there was the barn, a looming structure of rotting boards and peeling paint. Once it had been her sanctuary. The place where no one could find her, no one except the one person she wanted to be found by.

  
Jackson parked in front of the building and got out. Kate followed more slowly, running her gaze over the place. It didn’t feel like a sanctuary anymore. She stood in its shadow and thought of the farmer who’d hung himself, of Joshua Kutcher’s body strewn across the inside.

  
Somewhere in the long grass, crickets began to sing. Kate realized she was alone.

  
“Jackson?”

  
“In here…”

  
She followed the echo of his voice to the barn’s entrance. One of the big double doors had fallen off its hinges and lay in the grass. When she stepped on it, the boards squelched under her boots.

  
She stood on the threshold looking in. She had walked into traps often enough to know what one felt like. It felt like this—a cavernous dark, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. Jackson could be waiting just inside the door. Except it wouldn’t be him anymore. Even now, the thing inside would be shedding Jackson’s skin, shucking it off to bare glistening teeth and bone-white claws.

  
In the car she’d had every chance to kill him, and hadn’t even tried. Maybe the things she told him hadn’t all been lies. Maybe—the thought burned—maybe she really did need answers.

  
Slowly, knife ready, she stepped over the fallen door and into the barn.

  
Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the blackness inside, to pick out the edges of the building and realize the hulking shape in the corner was the old tractor hidden under an ancient tarp. Not a pile of bodies, not Noah and Adam rotting quietly.

  
A low creak filled the space. Kate whirled to spot Jackson at the top of the ladder that fed into the loft. He climbed through the door in the ceiling and disappeared.

  
“Where are you going?” Her voice echoed through the hollow interior of the barn, uneasiness churning in the pit of her stomach. “I thought we were going to talk.”

  
“We will,” he called. “Come up here.”

  
“No thanks. Why don’t you come down?”

  
“Come up, or you won’t see it.”

  
“See
what
?”

  
No answer returned.

  
Kate crossed to the bottom of the ladder and gazed up. She waited, but Jackson didn’t reappear. He could wait her out forever—he had always been the patient one. If she wanted him, she would have to go up after him.

F
ourth

THE LADDER GROANED AND SHIFTED as she began to climb. Kate steeled herself, took the knife flat-side between her teeth, and ascended. Unlike the entrance to the barn, there was a glow coming from the loft that grew brighter as she climbed. She took the top rungs in a leap, and landed crouched in a moldering pile of straw.

   Light spilled down on her shoulders. She turned her face up and found wide patches of night sky exposed where the barn roof had caved in. Stars glittered far above, and from among them she picked out the bright belt studs of Orion, the hunter.

   “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

   Jackson was sprawled on his back in the straw, arms folded behind his head. He gazed at the stars with a half-smile on his lips, and had never looked more content.

   Fear of a trap still crawled up Kate’s spine, but she glimpsed a more sinister kind of trap now—one designed to make her question everything that had brought her here. She’d arrived in Porter with no doubts and every intention of killing Jackson, because it was the right thing to do. But now he smiled, played songs they’d once danced to, and gazed at stars.  She knew it was a lie, but every second felt like he was winning at a game she hadn’t even known they were playing.

   “This is it, a bunch of stars?” Her voice came out hoarse. “This is what you just had to show me?”

   “It’s worth seeing.” He shrugged, the motion rustling the straw. “I remember the first time you brought me here. You must have been fifteen.”

    “Sixteen.”

   He nodded. “Sixteen. I was crazy in love with you.”

   She remembered. Most days it felt like a lifetime ago. Tonight, it might as well have been yesterday.
   She had been coming here for a year by then, to get away from Howard. Anyone approaching the barn could be seen and heard when they were still a quarter mile off, leaving plenty of time to slip away. Couples came out to hook up, and when they did she gave them their privacy, slipped into the woods until they’d gone. But mostly, the barn was a quiet, safe place. Sharing it with Jackson—that wasn’t something she’d done lightly.

   “You asked me…” Jackson paused.

   Kate glanced back and found him studying her with the same vaguely wondering look he’d given the night sky. He lay very still, and she had the strangest sense that he was trying not to frighten her, the way he had tried that first time with her here.

   “You asked me, if anybody ever hurt you, what would I do? And I said, if anybody laid a finger on you, I’d take care of them.”

   Kate remembered the words, the way he’d said them so seriously, and then the way he’d kissed her, and laid her down in the straw. It was the first time she’d made love, but she wasn’t a virgin.

   “You should have told me then,” he said. “Instead of all the guessing games. I would have done something.”

   She looked away. “Nobody would have believed you. They didn’t believe me.”

   “We would have left. Right then.”

   “I don’t want to talk about that.” She flicked the knife point through the straw, thunked it against the softening boards beneath. “Tell me about the night you disappeared.”

   Jackson looked skyward again. Kate studied him from the corner of her eye, unshaven and still so beautiful it made her hurt.

   “You were on a job,” he said. “I was hanging out, watching the game. Thinking about going to pick up some stuff for dinner, when somebody knocked on the door. I thought maybe it was one of the neighbors, or you were back early and forgot your key.”

   Kate’s stomach tightened. She struck the floor with the knife, over and over.

   “But this blonde at the door, I’d never seen her before. Her lip was split, still bleeding. She said she got in a fight with her boyfriend, and could she use the phone to call her sister to come get her? So I let her use the phone in the kitchen, and went out to the living room to give her some privacy. And then...” Jackson’s brow furrowed. “Then I don’t really know. I could feel her come up behind me, but… that’s it. Everything after is a blank.”

   Thunk, thunk
, went the knife, and Kate looked up at the sky, at anything but Jackson.

   “When I woke up I was in this cage. This huge fucking cage, inside a warehouse or something. I tried shouting for help, but nobody came. After about an hour, the blonde showed up again with a bunch of friends. She asked, do I know how my girlfriend spends her nights? She hopes I do, because then I’ll understand what it means when she says the full moon rises in ten minutes, and when it does, they’re all going to rip me into a hundred pieces and eat me up till there’s nothing left.”

   Kate sat heavily. The knife slid from her fingers.

   “Unless—unless staying alive means so much to me that I’m willing to be a living lesson to my werewolf-killing girlfriend. In which case, they’re still going to fuck me up, but they’ll leave me just alive enough to come back as one of them. And then I can go home, and find out how much you really love me.”

   Jackson fell silent, but his voice continued to echo through the loft, and his words came back to Kate again and again. How much did she really love him? And hadn’t that always been the problem? Wanting so desperately to be loved didn’t mean being willing to give love in return—or being capable of it.

   She reached into her back pocket for her pack of cigarettes, lit one with unsteady fingers. The smoke got in her eyes and made them burn.

   “Was it the wrong choice?”

   She took another drag off the cigarette and stared into the shadows.

   “Kate.” His voice softened. “Did I make the wrong choice?”

   When she looked down he was watching her with an inscrutable gaze. In the dark there was no difference between now and two years ago and ten years ago. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

   His mouth tilted up at one edge. “That’s better than a flat out yes, I guess.”

   “Christ, Jack—” Kate laughed, forgot what she’d meant to say as her throat closed up. She had to turn away again, before the words that came out weren’t the ones she’d intended. Her eyes were watering now from the smoke, and she was afraid he would misinterpret that.

   Roughened fingertips grazed her cheek, confirming her fears. Kate stiffened, but Jackson cupped her chin in one hand and didn’t let go. His hand was warm, his fingers branding her skin. In one powerful motion he sat up, took her face in both hands and drew her to him until their foreheads bumped together, and she smelled the pine-forest scent of his hair. She didn’t realize she was crying until his thumbs brushed her tears away.

   “It’s okay,” he murmured.

   She shook her head violently against his grasp. “It’s not.” Her voice threatened to crack. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be. You were supposed to get old, and grow a long beard like your dad, and hang out talking about Nascar and… and...”

   Jackson grinned, teeth flashing white in the darkness. Kate looked hard through the blur of tears, but they were all blunt, human teeth. “Hey,” he soothed. “I’ll still get old. And I can grow a beard if that’s what you want.”

   “This is my fault. I should never have gotten you involved in this. If I hadn’t…”

   “Katie, don’t. I’ll make it all okay. Trust me.”

   Kate choked on a bitter laugh that cut off abruptly when Jackson pulled her the rest of the way to him, and covered her mouth with his.

   For half an instant she froze. It was wrong, so wrong. But Jackson had always known just how to kiss her, lazy and deep, and if his lips were warmer now than they had been once, it only made his kisses that much more drugging. Her hands found their way into his hair and tangled in the coal-dark softness. The smell of him was wolf musk mingled with the green of lush forests and freshly turned earth. It excited something deep and primitive inside her, the same part of her that came alive with each hunt, and she kissed him back urgently, pressed herself to him. If she kissed him back hard enough, she could erase all the mistakes.

   Jackson broke the embrace.  He drew back to regard her from a distance of only inches, smiling so slightly that Kate thought anyone else would have missed the expression altogether—anyone who didn’t know him inside out, upside down.

   “I missed you,” he said.

   She wasn’t crying now. The taste and touch of him had altered the ache inside her to longing, and now she was torn between that longing and the anger that had shielded her all night. Anger was the safer of the two, but when she reached for it, it seemed to drift away, leaving her soft and weak. She raised her cigarette, but the inhale scorched her lungs, and she ground it out against her boot.

   She eased out of Jackson’s arms, wiped the back of her hand over her mouth. “You knew were I was the whole time. If you missed me so much, why didn’t you come back?”

   “You know I couldn’t.”

   “Why?”

   Jackson pushed the hair out of his eyes. His hands were large, broad across the palm with long, strong fingers. Each finger was rough and scarred, marked in ways Kate didn’t recognize. “You would have killed me,” he said simply.

   “I—”

   He shrugged. “It’s what you were trained to do.”

   Sickness rolled in Kate’s stomach. He was right, of course. It was what she still ought to do. But she could no longer imagine driving the blade into his chest, watching the dark heart’s blood well up while his eyes went dull. She was trained, but he had tricked her into forgetting her training. Maybe, two years ago, she might have been strong enough to finish it. But two years was a long time to miss someone, a long time to be worn down by hope after shattered hope. She had struck once tonight and failed; she didn’t think she had the will to do it again.

   “Do you remember the question I asked you when we left here?”

   She curled her hands into fists and hated him for asking.

   It was ten years ago, but she recalled the moment perfectly. Jackson’s eighteenth birthday had been a week away. She would still be seventeen for three months. His rusted Chevy station wagon had a bad muffler that sputtered and growled as they left Porter in their rear view mirror. Jackson drove with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes. He turned to her as they passed the last gas station and said,
Hey, Katie, marry me sometime?
And she had panicked, hadn’t known what to say, so she’d tried to smile and replied,
Sure, sometime. Not yet though.

   He’d asked again on her twentieth birthday, on his knees with a ring, and again when she was twenty-five, only a week before he disappeared. Her answer was always the same:
Not yet.

   “Why wouldn’t you?” Jackson asked, not a boy anymore, not even really a man.

   “I guess…” She hesitated. “I was afraid.”

   “Of me?”

   “Of disappointing you. You loved me more than I loved you.”

   “Katie, if that was true, I’d be dead by now.”

   When she looked up, he was smiling again, that peculiar half-twisted Jackson smile that always made her melt. She melted now. The rest—it would matter later, she knew, but for this one moment, she didn’t care.

   She went to him, climbed onto his lap and straddled him, set her nails into his shoulders and dug in hard. “What are you waiting for?” She glared down at him. “Kiss me again already. And for god’s sake,
touch
me.”

   The smile twisted wider. “Yes, ma’am. Anything you say.”

   Humor laced Jackson’s voice, but not his touch as his arms came around her, as he pulled her down to him. She had just an instant to see that his eyes had gone that eerie silver again, and then he caught her mouth, and he was kissing her hard and hungry. His hands ran down her sides, over her hips. When they slipped under her shirt, Kate felt the sharpness of lengthening nails, and shivered.

   “Trust me,” he murmured, mouth moving to the corner of her jaw, to kiss the skin over her pulse. Then down the side of her throat, kiss deepening as it roughened, until she felt his tongue dip into the hollow between her collarbones. Her heart beat wildly beneath his mouth. His teeth were no longer blunt. She could feel the points of a dozen sharpening fangs, and that only made her heart beat faster. Two years since she’d had a man’s hands on her, and no matter how she’d tried to move on, let the past die, this was the only touch she had ever ached for.

   When she rocked her hips down against him, Jackson’s growled response sent a thrill through her. She knew what she was doing was foolish, and beyond foolish, it was dangerous. But in the deepest part of her, she still trusted Jackson and always would. She thought of the men in the woods who had died for her, and was glad they had died.

   Jackson worked a hand into her hair and pulled out the band holding it back. Loosed, her hair fell in thick waves over her shoulders, the heaviness of it a luxury that felt almost wicked.

   “Kate…” He bit her shoulder hard enough to hurt, and then kissed the bruised skin. “Katie…”

   She couldn’t answer him. The air in the loft had gone thick and hot, shortening her breath. She yanked at his shirt ineffectively until he pulled it off himself, and then she laid fevered kisses down his chest, felt the beat of his heart under her lips. His flesh was furnace-hot; her lips burned from touching him, but she wouldn’t have stopped for anything. She rubbed her body fiercely against him, desperate for his friction and heat. When he groaned, the vibrations from his chest went straight through her, and she ground her hips to ease the building ach within her.