Not Until Moonrise (5 page)

   When the lament ended, there was only an instant before the sounds of destruction began. The snap and crunch of bone, the tearing of flesh.

   Kate swallowed her tears and sickness, until something heavy smacked down in the grass near her. Then her eyes flew open, and when she saw Howard’s head, she fell to her knees and wretched.

   In the grass at her knees, the forget-me-nots still bloomed in rebellion against the season, a riot of blue now flecked with blood. When she was sixteen, after they made love for the first time, Jackson had plucked the flowers and handed her a tiny bouquet. It felt forever ago.

   Finally, silence. Blessed silence.

   She waited until the cramps in her stomach passed, and the night stopped spinning. Then lifted her gaze.

   The wolf was gone, as if it had never been. Jackson knelt in the long grass. He wore a man’s skin, but his clothing hung in shreds, and his jaws were bloodied. His face was turned up to the moon, eyes silvered.

   “Jackson…” Kate called out in a voice raw and cracked with fear. She thought maybe it wasn’t him at all, that this was the moment the man she loved vanished forever into someone, something, else. “
Jackson.
”

   He stirred. Slowly, he moved, climbed to his feet with a disjointed awkwardness and stepped over the ruin in the grass that moments ago had been Howard. Halfway to her he paused, bent to retrieve the crumpled paper bag from the ground.

   Kate knelt shivering, watching him come. She couldn’t think why she had called him. She should have run while he was distracted. Suddenly that was all she wanted, to run far away from this place and never look back.

   Jackson stopped. He dropped the bag, and went down heavily on his knees before her. “Take it,” he said with a rasp.

   Kate opened the bag with trembling fingers. She’d known what it must be, but still she couldn’t help feeling surprised as she looked in and saw the thick stack of bills rubber-banded together. She’d thought, somehow, that Howard would have tried to outsmart them, would have tried anything rather than simply hand over what had to be a small fortune to him. But then, she supposed he’d never really intended to leave the money. She flipped through the bills and counted five thousand, maybe more. A fortune to Howard, but to her? “What do you think I’m going to do with this?”

   “Run away with me.”

   She dropped the bag and stared at him. All the strength had gone out of him. He stared back at her with eyelids heavy and shoulders sagging. “You’re serious,” she said.

   “I
miss
you, Katie.”

   It wasn’t the first time he had said it, but it was the first time she understood how much he meant it. Strange, to think that all the nights she’d lain awake thinking of him and the life they might have had—marriage, children, that ridiculous island—he might have done the same. They could have had it all, years ago. Why had she always pushed him away. Some game of who loved the other more? Of proving that no matter what her past, she would always be the strongest?

   He reached for her, but Kate scrambled up, panic beating in her throat. “I don’t know why you’re saying this now. Am I supposed to forget you just murdered my brother?”

   And that she’d wanted him to do it?

   “He wasn’t your brother. You’d never call him that if he was alive.”

   “What I call him—”

   “He hurt you.” A muscle in Jackson’s jaw twitched. “The only thing I regret is not being able to rip his fucking heart out before he ever touched you.”

   “Jesus, Jackson.” She scrubbed furious hands over her face. The night stirred, wind rising and whipping coldly through her loose hair. The sound of whippoorwills drifted from the wood. “That was ten years ago. I got over it. Why couldn’t you?”

   “
How
?” The word was nearly a snarl. He glared up at her. “How, when every time I was with you, every time I kissed you, touched you, all I could think about was not protecting you when it mattered most. You asked me to leave, and I didn’t.” He exhaled hard through his teeth. “I should have known something was wrong. I should have
known
.”

   Kate shivered again. “It wasn’t your fault.”

   He looked down, worked his jaw. “I’ve told myself a hundred times that all I want is what’s best for you. I came here to do what I thought was right, only you tell me it’s wrong. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe if I really cared, I would have stayed away. But I didn’t. I’m here. I’m here, and I’m asking you to leave everything you’ve got to come and be with me.”

   “Jackson…”

   “I’m tired, Kate.”

   He lifted something from the grass. At first Kate thought it was the bag of cash. But he raised his hand with her knife balanced across his palm. Silver and steel caught the moonlight and reflected it in his eyes. “You have no idea how difficult it is,” he said. “When you become a wolf, it feels like dying. It feels like every inch of you is ripping itself apart. You remember that feeling every time you turn. But the worst part isn’t the pain. It isn’t the things you do—
bad
things. It’s knowing that no matter what you had before all this, you’ll never have it again.”

   There had been too many lies tonight. Kate could no longer tell them apart from the truth. Or had it all been truth?

   “Two years should be long enough to get over somebody, shouldn’t it?” Jackson asked. “Forget and move on? Only I can’t figure out how that works. I loved you all my life. I can’t seem to live without you. Maybe I don’t want to.”

   He raised the knife, holding it out hilt first toward her.

   “No.” She stepped back, alarmed. “Don’t be stupid.”

   Jackson rose swiftly to his feet. He caught her hands before she could even think to stop him, pressed the blade into her hand and curled her fingers around the smooth grip. He loomed over her, bloody and blocking out the moon. His eyes made their own light, hard and glittering.

   She tried to draw her hands back, but he pulled them forward until the tip of the blade pressed directly over his heart. Silver parted flesh, spilled dark blood down his chest beside the healed bullet wound.

   “
Stop
—”

   “It’s your choice. The rest of the cash is at the last gas station on the west end of Main. Look in the phone booth. There’s about twenty grand, total. It won’t keep us forever, but it’ll get us the fuck out of here. We can get the money and take off, go somewhere new, start over. Or—” His grip on her hands tightened.  “Or you can finish me right here, and go home, and pretend tonight was no different from any other job. But you do
not
get to walk away and make me someone else’s problem.”

   Her heart beat like a drum behind her ribs, hollow and loud. Jackson was too strong; she couldn’t pull away. She could only stand helpless with the knife against his heart, his body radiating heat, and even with the scent of death on his skin, she wanted nothing so much as to fold herself against him, close her eyes and pretend she was dreaming.

   She drew an unsteady breath. “This isn’t fair.”

   “It’s not.” Jackson’s lips thinned in a hard smile. “I guess I shouldn’t have taken you to the loft, huh?”

   A startled laugh caught in her throat. “No, you really shouldn’t have.”

   He stroked his thumbs over the back of her hands one last time, and released her. “Do what you have to do, baby.” He held her gaze. “Whatever that is.”

   Kate thought her hands would shake without the warm reassurance of his grip, but they were as steady as they had ever been. She kept the blade against his chest

   It should have been an easy choice, one way or the other. She wanted there to be no hesitation, and yet she did hesitate.

   Leaving with him solved nothing. He was still a monster. For now he turned his attention on men who deserved no defense. But if killing was part of a werewolf’s nature, how long before he found an excuse to turn on others? Finishing him now would save those lives. It would save her, from going down a path she couldn’t come back from.

   And it would send her down a different path. One in which she lay awake at night not under the guilt of having allowed death to come for Jackson, but of having driven the knife in herself.

   The blade was already darkening as blood ran down the groove toward her hands. She tried to shift her grip back, but there was nowhere to go. In another moment it would run over knuckles, and she knew she would never stop feeling it there.

   She couldn’t. She never could have.

   Kate dropped the knife. It glinted for a moment, and then fell into the darkness at their feet, and left nothing between them.

   “Katie…”

   “Get in the truck.”

   “Are you—”

   “
Get in the truck.
”

   He watched her an instant longer, brow furrowed. Slowly, his eyes darkened to something nearer their old blue, and he nodded, stepped away.

   Kate stood still, breathed in air that didn’t reek of wolf and blood. The arc of the moon rocked crazily in the black sky. She squeezed her eyes shut, counted to ten, and when she opened them, it was still again.

   She left the knife in the grass, collected the money, and walked to the truck. Jackson was there already. She expected him to climb into the driver’s seat, but instead he handed her the keys, and crawled into the back. He collapsed, his big body taking up the whole of the bench and then some. He sighed, so deeply that all the breath in him seemed to go out.

   Kate pulled herself up into the seat. She started the engine but sat without shifting gears, her hands clutching the wheel white-knuckled. Staring straight ahead, she asked, “Would you really have let me kill you?”

   “I don’t know...” His answer was barely audible over the truck’s growl. “I hadn’t decided yet.”

   “Nothing like cutting it to the last minute.”

   “I had faith.”

   “Christ,” she hissed, and dragged the hair back from her face. “Don’t bleed on my seats.”

   She jammed the truck into drive and spun it hard, away from the sight of the old barn rising against the forest. Trees flew past. The grass made a sound like a scream as she tore through it. The drive spit them out onto the main road, and she punched the gas.

   Tension ran wires up her neck, through her jaw. They would never get away with this. The new body would be found. Word would get back to the Division, back to Eddie, and they would be tracked down.

   Kate realized that for the first time in a very long time, she was thinking in terms of not just herself, but
them
: her, and Jackson. It felt strange, and too new for her to be sure of. It felt like… a relief.

   She rolled her shoulders to loosen the muscles, as they sped past Solomon’s, past the ramshackle group of buildings that made up the town’s center. When the last gas station on Main Street came into view, she slowed and glanced into the rearview mirror. She started to call Jackson’s name, to ask what his plan was, where this blood money was supposed to take them.

   But he’d fallen asleep. Hair drifting across his face, and in the darkness he looked younger than he had all night. He’d stopped bleeding. Finally.

   Kate let him sleep. There was no plan, and she knew his answer.

   Anywhere. Anywhere as long as it’s you and me, baby.

   As answers went, it would work.

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