Moon Bitten

by Angharad Thompson Rees

  It feels warm. It feels right.

  “I’ll get the fire going…” his voice trails off and I can hear the concern in his unspoken words.

  My teeth chatter too much to reply, and so instead, I take pleasure in watching him begin the simple ritual of fire starting. A pile of dried leaves. A selection of brittle twigs and kindling. Small logs that will light easily. Flint and steel.

  In moments, there is a crackle and smoke smoulders from the leaves, wafting with the aroma of pine and forest. A small amber light glows, getting bigger as each flame touches another. And I stare at Blaxton now, knowing this is how our love developed. A small flicker, growing with each touch, each kiss of burning passion. And yet, the flames have not engulfed us entirely—not yet. For I have been smothering the final flame. Saving my virtue.

  Wait for marriage. Passion will kill you. Love will keep you alive, that’s what Grandma used to say. And I wonder whose love kept her alive, and whose love killed her. I know nothing of my grandfather, or my father for that matter. I have no real knowledge of men at all other than they have only become alluring this past summer. One more than any other. But I do know one thing—Grandma needed no love from a man to keep her alive, and in some ways, I think she wished the same for me.

  But I am not her, nor my mother. And now, more than ever, I need to feel the touch of a true flame to sate the burning wilderness that has become my thoughts.

  Blaxton’s eyes squint as he watches me, and he holds his breath as if he is building up the courage to speak to me or waiting for me to speak to him; to give him answers, because the last time he saw me, I ran away like a wild thing into the storm alone. And now, I realise with sudden clarity, I have returned, covered in blood.

  Again.

  It’s my turn to hold my breath, imagining how this must look to him.

  Does he truly believe I have lost my senses?

  I want to look at my wound but I am too scared to draw attention to it. I want to tell him about Woolsey but I’m suddenly too worried about what he may say. How can he believe me? How can anyone believe me?

  I need a distraction, a reaction, to stop the crazy thoughts and imaginings for one fraction of a moment.

  Blaxton excuses himself and when he returns with bundles of blankets in his hold, I am staring at my arm.

  There is no wound, I hear the doctor say, yet, it is there, glimmering beneath the surface of my skin.

  Four Full Moons.

  Blaxton drops the blankets in a heap on the ground and sits with me, taking my arm in his hand. He kisses my fingers, my palm. His lips trail the soft underside of my arm from wrist to elbow where pale and unexposed skin sings at his touch. And he kisses what was once my wound. Each place the wolf’s fangs pierced. I squirm with unease. Exactly where the wounds were.

  Blaxton stops, aware of my sudden tenseness. “Shhh, Red. They have gone.”

  Yes, they have gone. Disappeared, sunk into my skin. Wait. “What has gone?” I quiz him.

  How would he know? I thought he had not seen the wounds. I thought they were only in my imagination and…

  “The hallucinations,” he says softly, his lips tracing a line to my shoulders, his breath hot now against my neck.

  I try to forget my swirling thoughts and my need to hang onto my memories, whether real or not. They felt real and I can’t stop wondering what this means for me.

  Let them go.

  They have gone.

  I clench my jaw. Yes, the hallucinations have gone, for now. The wounds have gone. Grandma and Kaya too. What happens when another blackout occurs?

  I shudder. But this time with bliss.

  Blaxton’s hands grasp at my thighs, my hips, hands tracing forbidden lines beneath my white night shift towards my heart. I am cold no more, but I am breathless.

  His tender hands turn into a strong embrace, pulling my body into him. And I allow him, melting into his skin. My fingers grasp at his sandy blond hair and we soften to the ground, the soft blankets surrounding us. He stops and stares at me, looking past my eyes and into my soul. A soundless ask for permission and, biting my lip, I nod.

  Yes, I want this. I want you.

  Without taking his honey eyes from my own, he pulls the slip up over my body, inch by inch. Each glimpse of skin revealed is a delicate and terrifying exposure.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, breathless. Eyes wide, wandering over my body, he tries his hardest to keep eye contact, then shakes his head. Blaxton moves towards me, cupping my face in his hands. “You are beautiful,” he whispers. And in this moment, I believe him. And I want nothing else but him and I together. “I want to make you mine.”

  You can’t have her.

  It whispers in my mind and I want Grandma to shut up and leave me alone. Leave me alone and in peace for this one perfect moment.

  I pull at Blaxton’s homespun top, ripping it over his shoulders and head as he lays me down, his body atop mine. His skin is soft and warm and the fire crackles, flames stronger and hotter now. I feel like we, too, are flames—dancing with one another. Becoming one another as he parts my thighs that quiver with nervous excitement.

  “Are you sure you are ready?” he asks.

  And I am.

  I am.

  I am.

  I feel him and pull him towards me, deeper, running my hands down his back.

  I freeze.

  “Do you want me to stop?” Blaxton asks, pausing.

  And I say nothing, I just stare wide-eyed as a millions thoughts and ideas flash through my mind.

  Tentatively, I run my hands down his back once more, feeling for the shape, the curve—the question. And though I have not felt this before, I have seen the shape of this mark. I will never forget it.

  No!

  This can’t be… another hallucination?

  I squirm away from him, panicked.

  “Red?” he asks, concerned. I grab at the night slip and pull it over my exposed body, scrambling to my feet.

  He grabs his shirt from the ground.

  “No!” I scream, ripping it from his hands. “No, let me see.”

  I run around him yet he follows me, circling on the spot, a daze of confusion clouding his face.

  “Let me see,” I scream again.

  The door pounds open and he turns.

  I see it.

  And I see Woolsey, storming through the door with murder on his face.

  16

  “I warned you to be careful!” Woolsey yells at me.

  I try to back away. Why won’t my legs move? Why can’t the words explode from my mouth as he charges toward me? No, not to me, to Blaxton.

  My wound pulses, itches, expands, shooting stars spreading along my skin, rippling, morphing changing.

  “The doctor, his wife?” Woolsey glares at Blaxton. “Mauled to death. You, I assume. It’s always been you, hasn’t it?”

  “I had to do something to stop Red getting incriminated by killing your mate—”

  “—Kaya was not my mate.” Woolsey shoots a greedy look at me. Blaxton follows his gaze and laughs.

  “You’re too late,” Blaxton says, a smug tone full of pride. He looks at me and licks his lips.

  A wolfish grin as he sees me frozen to the spot. A smile that says, you’re mine.

  You can’t have her, I hear Grandma’s last promise.

  When Blaxton turns again, I see the mark fully—the black curve that follows the length of his spine like a question mark.

  But I have questions no longer.

  The white wolf. The black mark along its back as it ran yelping from Grandma’s murder.

  It was the key piece of evidence I had forgotten with the power of blooded morphed footprints, dead horses, knife blades and secrets.

  The two men stand, tense and coiled, regarding each other.

  “You claimed her then?” Woolsey says, full of spite.

  Words crash in my mind but stay dammed behind my frozen tongue.

  Blaxton smirks and nods. Where i
s the soft, gentle lover now? He swaggers towards me—the wolf who got the cream—and rests an arm around my shoulder. I can do nothing to push him away as a pulling sensation tugs at my soul, pulling me into the moon marks that suddenly glow blue and golden like the full moon slowly rising in the sky outside the window.

  Woolsey shakes his head, disgust on his face.

  “You cannot keep your place as leader of the pack after this abomination. There is already talk of a revolt. I had my suspicions and I will not hold the facts back. We are forbidden to bond with humans. We are not meant to turn them,” Woolsey snarls.

  Blaxton barks a laugh. “I can do what I want, just as my father did, and his before that.”

  “Well, congratulations. You did what they could not. Your grandfather failed when Scarlett killed him. Your father failed when Red’s mother took her own life rather than turn.” He pauses, watching me.

  I feel a clawing at my fingers and toes, something desperate to escape my body.

  The pain. The pressure. I scream at last but the sound echoes as a howl and I think I already know the truth.

  Claws rip through my fingertips.

  “What makes you think Red will ever forgive you for what you have done?” Woolsey shakes his head.

  “Because we’ve mated, and so the bond has been made.”

  Woolsey hisses with clenched fists and turns away, while Blaxton looks to the window. A smile, a sickening smile that I cannot believe he can wear on his perfect face pulls his lips apart like a bloody slash. And yet, a pulling, an animal magnetism towards him that I can’t shake.

  He killed Grandma, allowed me to believe I was going crazy.

  But the pull, stronger now, like lust and love and blood. I want to fight it, but cannot.

  “When the full moon reaches the highest point, her metamorphosis will be complete. And there will be nothing she won’t do for me. She was moon bitten by me, I am inside her—” Blaxton moves behind me, pulls my body into an embrace. His hands trail a line from my breasts to my stomach—lower still, and his breath shortens. “—I am inside her blood and sinew. And she will be mine. Forever. No matter what her dead and buried grandmother said.”

  You can never have her.

  I want to scream but my mind and body rip apart, pulling away from each other. Pulling away to allow the monster from within to emerge. I feel it. Fang and fur. Blood and lust. I revere the feel of his hard body against my own, but my soul revolts. My eyes beg Woolsey to help, but he looks on, helpless, all puppy-dog eyed. There is a hierarchy; I feel it now, instinctively. I feel Woolsey’s submission—my own. Blaxton’s dominance overpowering. Overbearing. Exquisite and beautiful.

  I am his.

  I rage against the feeling as I feel the pressure of the ticking clock. The countdown of my life as I know it, while the moon inches into the sky. I feel my limbs morph, change.

  Blaxton pushes his body harder against my own. “You’re nearly mine, beautiful,” he whispers in my ear. I equally love and loathe his words, fighting the new alien feeling of ownership, of powerlessness against my will. I know, with absolute certainty, I will be his. I feel the moon pulling at lung and liver, despite him killing Grandma. Despite my loathing and hurt and pain. Despite my vendetta and revenge. The moon is washing it all away and I can’t stop it.

  I am losing myself.

  Falling…

  Falling…

  Woolsey growls, and he doesn’t have to shift into a wolf for me to know his hackles are up.

  “Stand down, Woolsey,” Blaxton warns, moving in front of me—protecting his spoils.

  Woolsey dares a step forward.

  “You will never have her,” growls Blaxton as the full moon hits her highest point in the sky. Those words from his mouth slice and stab my soul. A pain, something to cling to as I fall into something new. Falling into animal power and instincts and wild, wild thoughts.

  You will never have her.

  I grip it with my mind, grip the cruel memories the words evoke as I lose all other sense of me.

  Trapped, paralysed in my body as I brace against a noise I cannot escape—the curdling of Grandma’s blood stuck in her ravaged throat as she died.

  I howl.

  I change.

  I see the mean, greedy glint in Blaxton’s eyes—he sees me as his.

  He morphs. The white wolf with a question mark on his back and lust in his mind.

  But I too have something on my mind.

  Revenge.

  I pounce, fur and fang, my body light and agile as air. It is no longer Blaxton’s heart I desire, but his throat. I latch on. Snarling, ripping, pulling—despite his yelps, and moans, and empty eyes losing their golden glow. His blood tastes as good as a debt paid in full and I feast in the retribution.

  “Red! Red, please, stop.”

  And I do stop, breath heaving as I turn.

  Woolsey, with his greedy eyes. No. Mistaken. I feel it now, an instinct. A knowing in my animal bones. They were never greedy, they were, what?

  Longing.

  And it all fits into place.

  Woolsey turning up at Blaxton’s cabin when the ravaged beast feasted on Betsy the old, helpless carthorse.

  The warning at the funeral, ‘Be careful. Be very careful.’

  The stand-off at the doctor’s house.

  Saving me from a pack attack.

  He wasn’t watching me with greed, but with concern. With fear. With… my shoulder drop as the most innate human emotion pulls at my animal heart.

  Love.

  He was always looking out for me. Always trying to protect me. From Blaxton—from myself.

  I pounce, shape shifting as I pound into Woolsey’s arms, knocking us both to the ground. And with blood stained lips, we kiss.

  The universe suddenly makes sense. I feel it beating with my half human half animal heart. Comets surge, stars are born. The world spins, I feel it, and I feel my place within it.

  Passion will kill you, love will keep you alive, I hear Grandma saying, a faint sound disappearing into my own thoughts. And I feel both now—love and passion… and life, surging through my animal veins.

  And I hear Grandma’s voice no more. She has gone, left me, content in the knowing. Content that her dying wish has been made.

  Blaxton will never have me. Not now. Not ever.

  I allow my thoughts of Grandma to fade. There are more important things than mourning the dead after all.

  Loving the living.

  And owning the curse. It’s mine, all mine. Now I hold the power. My bloodline holds the power.

  I am a victim no more.

  * * *

  THE END

  * * *

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  Magical triples, dark secrets, magical beasts, and evil forces…

  The mysterious Cheval triplets live a peaceful life in a secluded cottage on the edge of the Mystic Wood. Yet when their mother’s illness creeps her closer to death, the three sisters, Morganne, Amara, and Fae must leave their quiet sanctuary in search of a rare cure within the darkened forest.

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p; Sisters of Three

  The three sisters peered through the crack of the door, cringing when the old wood creaked. Breath held, they squinted to better see into the darkened room. Moonlight spread from a tiny window, casting its blue glow over a motionless silhouette.

  “She’s getting worse,” Morganne said, watching their mother lay motionless, her breathing so light she hardly made a sound. Morganne closed the door, and her eyes, to stop her younger sisters seeing her tears.

  “Maybe the doctor was wrong, maybe there is something we can do?” Fae asked in a whisper of a voice like soft wind parting grass. Fae—youngest sister, though only by several hours. But triplets always cling to the important fact of who was born first.

  Morganne, Amara, and Fae. That’s the order they were born and the order in which their mother addressed them, though she hadn’t for weeks. And the girls began to wonder if she ever would again. The peculiar malady had rendered her still and silent, and all the more unnerving considering their mother had been as strong as a carthorse.

  Amara, middle sister and thus the quietest, stared out the cabin’s window searching for answers within the darkness. Dawn lined the horizon, but the sky was still inky blue, and the full moon hovered low and wide. It cast shadows and blue light across their small garden and the woods beyond. The dark soothed Amara, perhaps because the midnight sky matched her ebony hair and cobalt eyes as dark as the universe itself. But it was the moon she gazed at now, the low and heavy full moon that always seemed to speak to her, whisper secrets, grant her ideas—though she would never admit it, especially knowing what village girls whispered about the three sisters between cupped hands and narrowing eyes.

  People thought sisters of three were strange—and strange often equated to unusual, and unusual was open to gossip, and tales, and untruths; which was to say, rumors.

  “Quiet One,” Morganne said, wrapping an arm around Amara’s shoulder. “What are you thinking? Your thoughts are always so deep and brooding.”