Moon Cursed: The Reluctant Werewolf Chronicles, Book 1

by Centanni, Tori

  “But why are you still locked up?” I asked. “The next full moon is more than three weeks away.”

  The young woman’s lips bowed into a little pout. “Because I cannot risk spreading the curse.”

  “Werewolves aren’t contagious in human form,” I said, and then glanced at Raff to make sure that was correct. As far as I knew it was, but I hadn’t gone around biting people with my human teeth to test the theory.

  “Every month, I turn into a monster. I must be locked up for my own safety and the safety of others.” She shook her head sadly, fingers digging into the side of her nightgown. “I should be put down, but Johnny loves me too much and I can’t insist I leave him, not after we lost our father.”

  My mouth actually dropped open and I forced myself to close it. I didn’t know what to say to that. Raff scoffed in disgust.

  “You’re not a monster,” he said. “You’re a werewolf. If you want to confine yourself during the change, that’s all well and good, but you don’t need to be jailed or… or put down.” He spat the last words like they tasted rotten. He pulled out his lock picks and began work on the cage door.

  The young woman backed away from the door. “No, no, no, you mustn’t let me out. I cannot be trusted.”

  “You can’t stay locked in there. You need to eat and Johnny won’t be around to feed you.”

  “I can’t eat!” she shrieked. “I must starve the wolf to keep it from gaining power over me.”

  I stared, disbelieving, at her emaciated frame. No wonder she looked malnourished if she was refusing to eat.

  “Trust me, curing werewolfism isn’t that easy,” I said.

  “There is no cure,” Raff said, a little more harshly than normal. The cage door popped open. The young woman pressed her back against the wall, nails digging into the paint behind her as if she could claw her way through the drywall and escape. “If you come with us, we can take you to the pack, to people like us who can teach you—”

  She screamed. The sound was so loud it rattled the windows. She screamed until she ran out of air, took a deep breath, and screamed again.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll leave you alone,” I pleaded. “Please stop screaming. We won’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go. We just have some questions and then we’ll leave.”

  If a neighbor heard the screaming and called the cops, Raff and I were going to have to explain why we were standing outside of a cage with a sickly woman inside it, and that wasn’t a conversation that would go our way.

  Best case scenario, they held us up by making us answer questions and give statements, and we didn’t have time for that kind of delay, not while Michael and Holly were being held by these monsters who thought werewolves needed to be starved and put down. Worst case, they’d arrest us, and that was bad for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that us being in prison during a full moon wasn’t going to end well for anyone.

  She didn’t stop screaming.

  “Hey,” I said sharply and pulled the cage door closed. The lock clicked into place. The woman finally, blessedly closed her mouth, but her eyes were still bulging out of her head. “Just tell us where the Guardians of Pure Life meet or hang out or whatever. We need to speak with them.”

  She sniffed as she slowly edged away from the wall. “Where’s Johnny?”

  Raff made a frustrated noises and went deeper down the hall, his fingers digging into his scalp.

  “We’re trying to find him.” The lie was bitter in my mouth, but I was desperate to find Michael and Holly. She didn’t seem to remember what I’d said earlier or realize that I knew exactly where he was, and I was out of time. “Can you tell me where the Guardians usually hang out? That might help.”

  Her shoulders slumped and the fight went out of her. “Usually they meet up at Harvey Fisher’s place. But John shouldn’t be out with them. He should have been back…” She trailed off as if she didn’t know exactly how long it had been since she should have seen him.

  “Can you give us an address?” I asked. I glanced down the hall and realized with a start that Raff had disappeared.

  The woman shook her head. “I’ve only been there once. If Johnny is there, please send him home.”

  “Let us leave the door unlocked,” I said. “In case Johnny can’t get home.”

  “Why wouldn’t he get home?” Her panic made her voice got up an octave.

  I sighed. I didn’t want to keep lying to this chick, but I didn’t know if the truth—that he was being held captive by werewolves for murder—would only reinforce her ideas of how terrible we were. “You don’t know where he is or what’s going on,” I said. “You might starve if he can’t get back.”

  She sat on the edge of the easy chair and folded her hands in her lap. “Good. That’s what I deserve.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not. You’re not a bad person because you got bitten by a wolf. Yeah, it sucks to be forced into turning every month, but that doesn’t mean life isn’t worth living.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m tainted, now. No longer human and pure, but contaminated.”

  I shook my head. “You’re still human.”

  “I’m an aberration and need to be eradicated.”

  Raff came out of the third bedroom, which he must have slipped into when I wasn’t looking. He nodded at me and then gestured for me to follow him downstairs. I gave a long, final look at the young woman.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She hesitated and then said, “Marianne.”

  “You sure you don’t want come with us, Marianne?”

  “Just get Johnny to come home,” she said. “And close the door behind you.”

  I did, but not all the way, though as I walked away, I heard the door click shut. She must have reached through the bars and pulled it closed. Downstairs, Raff stood near the door, shifting from foot to foot.

  He held up a paper. It was a map in black and white, printed off the internet. “I got directions.”

  “How?”

  “John had a couple of maps lying on a desk under a notebook in the spare room.” Raff held up a battered green notebook the size of a tablet computer. “This is full of notes about tracking creatures. There’s a whole section on you.”

  “What?” I reached for the notebook, but Raff held it out of reach.

  “We can mine it for clues later. Right now, we need to get a move on.”

  I was itching to go, too, but then I pictured Marianne upstairs, locked in a room she wasn’t able to leave. John probably wasn’t coming back and she would starve to death up there.

  “We can’t leave her,” I said.

  “I’ll send people from the pack to come retrieve her as soon as this is done. Sasha is good with people. Maybe she can convince her to go stay at the orchard. Right now, we can’t drag her out of here. She’s been locked in there for God knows how long. One more day won’t kill her.”

  I swallowed uneasily. Marianne looked on the brink of death to me, and I didn’t know how long she had. But Raff was right. We couldn’t drag her out of here right now. She was safer than either Michael or Holly. We’d have to leave her for now, sick as it made me.

  I slipped out the front door and toward Raff’s illegally-parked car, not daring to look up at the windows to see if Marianne was watching.

  Chapter 21

  The sick feeling I’d gotten at John’s house was sticking to me like a cold sweat I couldn’t shake. I kept seeing Marianne’s haunted expression and hearing her words about how she needed to be “put down” like she was a rabid raccoon. I’d hated being a werewolf, downright loathing it at times, but her level of self-hatred was far beyond anything I’d ever felt.

  Raff pulled through a fast food restaurant’s drive-thru and we ordered several burgers each plus fries and giant cups of caffeinated soda. It was early afternoon but given that I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, time was losing all meaning.

  Raff ate one burger in the parking lot and then put the
address he’d found into a map app and started driving, while I continued to scarf down food.

  “How do you know this is the right place?” I asked, crumpling my third burger wrapper and studying the paper map. It was a section of Washington State with a circle in pen around a spot that, upon Googling, turned out to be a cabin near a campground in the woods close to Walla Walla. It was also a four hour drive so if we were wrong, getting back on the right track would literally take all day. I doubted Michael and Holly had that long.

  “Based on the notes I skimmed in his notebook, it seems like the best odds,” Raff said. “Besides, if you’d kidnapped two supernaturals and you knew other supernaturals were likely going to come after them, wouldn’t you drag them out to your cabin in the woods? Especially if you planned it to be a trap? Makes more sense than trying to keep them in a house with lots of neighbors.”

  “I guess.” I picked up John’s green notebook and flipped through it idly, pretending that I wasn’t looking for mentions of myself. Of course I stopped when I got to his notes about encountering a—his words—“vampire groupie” who might be used to lure out “the vampire” (Damien, I guess) and the “bitch” (me). He’d described me in less than flattering terms, calling me short (I was five-five, okay?) and chubby and “hideously over-done with makeup.” What a prick.

  How did I not see him looking at me during our yogurt shop shifts and realize there was nothing but hate and disgust in his eyes? I thought I was a better judge of character than that.

  I skipped ahead to his revelation that I was a werewolf. He’d known “something was wrong” with me, which was why he’d taken the job at the yogurt shop. He’d put the pieces together pretty quickly. It was melodramatic and might have been funny if he wasn’t so dangerous.

  I flipped through more of his notes, many of which read like nonsense, or were in some private shorthand that only John could decipher.

  Then I came to a page that almost made me drop the book. I stared in horror at the hand-drawn sketch of a werewolf, in wolf form, on autopsy table, complete with one of those Y-incisions on its furry chest. The wolf’s tongue lolled comically out of its mouth and its eyes were drawn as X’s, but despite the imagine cartoonish style, it was completely horrific. The organs were drawn outside of the wolf in jars, and there was an IV behind the dead wolf, which didn’t make sense. John had written “M - Cure,” underneath the sketch and suddenly I understood why these assholes had taken Holly.

  Anger flooded through me, hot and sharp.

  “You okay?” Raff asked, sensing my distress.

  “I think I know why they took Holly alive,” I said. “They’re looking for a cure for Marianne.”

  “And they think Holly has one?” Raff asked.

  I almost didn’t want to correct him. “No. They want to cut her up and try to use her to find one.”

  “Oh,” Raff said, paling slightly.

  I swallowed back bile and tried not to think as trees clipped past the windows.

  About an hour into the drive, on a long boring stretch of road, Raff tugged at a blue strand of his hair. Then he glanced over at me and turned away quickly. “Can I ask you something?”

  My stomach roiled but I said, “Sure.”

  “Do you hate us as much as that woman back there? Werewolves, I mean.”

  I blinked. Then blinked again, as if I might somehow open my eyes and find that Raff hadn’t asked me something so impossibly stupid.

  But was it stupid? I obviously didn’t think I needed to be locked in a room 24/7 or whatever, but I did speak about werewolfism with a similar frustration.

  “I don’t hate you,” I said, cold flooding my chest. “I mean, I don’t hate us.”

  “Right. Of course not. How silly of me to think so.”

  “I don’t.”

  His side-eye said it all. He didn’t believe me. “You chain yourself up like a monster every month and try to pretend you’re not a werewolf. You talk about it like it’s an illness. How is that different than that woman, living in a cage and trying to starve the wolf out of her?”

  “Well, for one thing, I only lock myself up when I’m dangerous. What’s the big deal? I don’t want to run loose in the streets biting and attacking innocent people.”

  “You could learn not to.”

  I stared at him. He’d said something similar before, about learning to control the inner wolf. “I’d never heard that before this week and I’m still not sure I believe it. I totally black out. It’s worse than going on a drunken bender.”

  “It takes time to learn,” Raff said. “Some people are better at it. Sometimes people resist because they don’t want to be a wolf and to control yourself as a wolf, you have to accept what you are.” He glanced over and I quickly turned toward the window to look out into the darkness. “If you resist it, it won’t work. But once you accept it and get to run free as a wolf…It’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  He sighed heavily. “Forget it. Let’s just get our people back, destroy these hunters, and then I can go back to my life.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, and pressed myself against the seat. My heart pounded and I waited for several minutes to steal a glance at Raff.

  His jaw was tight, his blond-blue hair curling around his ears. I tried to picture him as a wolf, running through a meadow totally aware that most of the time he was a nerdy gym rat in a human skin. Then I tried to picture myself as a wolf. I’d never seen it, since I always blacked out during the transformation. I knew my fur had silver in it, because I’d caught glimpses of it before passing out, but I didn’t know what wolf-me looked like. How could I connect a form of myself that I’d never even seen?

  “I didn’t want to be a werewolf,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’ve made that clear.”

  I ignored his Grumpy McGrumperson attitude. “I wanted to be immortal and live forever. That’s why I wanted to be a vampire. I’ve seen death. It’s not pretty. I wanted to escape it.”

  Raff turned a single eye in my direction. “Vampirism is not escape from death. It’s perma-death. Vampires aren’t alive.”

  I shrugged. “Alive enough. My sister—” I shook my head, stopping myself. I never spoke about this. Michael knew because Michael had been there, but he never brought her up. Although sometimes he’d send me flowers on her birthday.

  “What, is your sister a bloodsucker?” Raff asked, but for the first time, he didn’t sound like talking about vampires made him want to spit.

  “She’s dead. She died of leukemia when I was thirteen,” I said. “She was sick for more than six years. Most of my childhood was wondering when and if Casey would rally or die. My parents became ghosts. Not literally, but close enough. Death was this shroud that hung over our apartment all the time. It was agonizing. So I started researching ways not to die. At first, I wanted to save Casey. But I wasn’t fast enough, and after she died, I just wanted to save myself. On my eighteenth birthday, I marched up to Damien and asked him to turn me. But it was a full moon, and Holly bit me. Now I’m stuck as a mortal, but a mortal who has to turn into a wolf all the time. It’s like… the opposite of what I wanted.”

  Raff was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, “That’s terrible. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  I shrugged. It sucked. I still missed her all the time and wished I’d been able to do more for her. And I missed having a real connection with my parents, who’d disconnected more and more every time Casey’s illness got worse. But it had happened almost a decade ago, and I had accepted it. There would always be a little Casey-shaped hole inside me, and sometimes grief would kick me in the face at the most random moments, but by and large it was just part of my life.

  “We do live longer than humans,” Raff said after another long pause. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we age a lot slower.”

  “We do?” I examined my hands, as if that would tell me anything.

  “Sure. Jean is almost ninety. I think the av
erage werewolf lifespan is around two hundred years.”

  “Oh,” I said. I hadn’t realized that. “I’m actually twenty-one.”

  “You’ll notice it more when you hit thirty,” he said.

  “Are you…?”

  “I’m only twenty-seven.” He grinned and waggled his eyebrows. “But imagine how hot I’ll be at fifty.”

  I laughed. It was strained and borne more out of exhaustion and relief of unburdening myself that actual amusement, but still, it was nice to laugh. “How come I didn’t know that? About aging slower?”

  Raff lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “I guess because you never asked. Seems to me that you’d rather pretend it wasn’t happening instead of researching werewolves the way you’ve obviously researched vampires.”

  I folded my arms over my chest, but Raff wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t wanted to know more than necessary: what could kill me or hurt me, what I needed to expect each month, and nothing more. For three years, I’d been trying to live my life around being a werewolf, rather than embracing it.

  “I guess I could have asked more questions,” I admitted. “And maybe gone to one of the pack meetings sooner.”

  Raff’s lips twitched and turned into a small, genuine smile. “Yeah, that might have helped a little.”

  “Can I ask how you became a werewolf?” The question popped out before I thought through the ramifications of asking something so personal when we were on tenuous terms and running on fumes.

  Raff’s smile faded and I immediately wished I’d kept my big mouth shut. He tapped the steering well with his index fingers and the car zoomed along the empty highway.

  “Never mind,” I finally said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  He swallowed. “You’ll think I’m stupid.”