Blood Moon

by A. D. Ryan

  “Who says I’m in charge of anything?”

  Desperate for answers, I peered around Nick’s hulking frame. “Why me?” I bellowed, my throat raw from being strangled. For the second time that night.

  Seemingly bored—or maybe annoyed—she looked at me pointedly. “Funny, I’ve asked myself the same thing.” Glancing at Nick, she rolled her eyes. “Especially given the company you choose to keep.”

  “Where is she?” he demanded again, his voice so loud and rough I no longer recognized it.

  Samantha just laughed. She wasn’t afraid, and her lack of self-preservation baffled me.

  “You think if you kill me they won’t come for her eventually?” she goaded him. She flashed her elongated canines with a smile and leaned forward, not affected by his hold on her neck whatsoever as she whispered. She must have figured I couldn’t hear her, but my enhanced hearing allowed me the advantage. “You already know this, though, don’t you? It’s why you jumped at the opportunity to come out here, right? Did you really think you could save her? You are aware that they don’t care what she is, right? So what you did—”

  Nothing she said made any sense, but questions arose and I craved the answers. Before I could even get them, Nick reacted.

  With a flick of his wrist, he snapped her neck, and I screamed, slapping my hands over my mouth. I watched, somewhat horrified as he let her body drop to the ground, pulled out his matches and lit her body on fire. There was an ear-piercing shriek as the flame ignited, then nothing but the crackle of flames as her body turned to ash.

  Nick walked toward me, but I was too stunned to move, watching the fire as it quickly engulfed her and then dwindled to smoldering ash within a couple minutes.

  “We have to go,” Nick said. “You should get back to the house.”

  “You… You just…”

  Nick exhaled heavily. “She wasn’t human. It’s what we do.” There was no remorse in his voice. It frightened me.

  My hands trembled in a combination of fear, irritation, and shock over what I’d just witnessed. I was numb. From my head to my feet, I was frozen, but Nick grabbed my arm and pulled me to the mouth of the alley. “We have to go,” he repeated urgently.

  As he pulled me farther and farther away, my anger lessened, making room for my concern regarding David’s condition again. I picked up the pace, following Nick through the darkness, always looking over my shoulder as if Samantha could pop out again. Then I remembered she was nothing more than a pile of dust in a filthy alley.

  The flashing lights of the ambulance and police cruisers in front of my house came into view, and I stopped abruptly, unable to find the courage to go on. What would I find when I got there? Would David be conscious? What would my dad have to say? What was I going to say?

  “Tell them you guys fought and you went for a walk to clear your head,” Nick said, turning my body toward his. It was as if he could read my thoughts. “You don’t know anything beyond that. Do you understand?”

  I was looking at him, but I wasn’t really; my mind was so overwhelmed that I looked more through him than anything.

  “Nod if you understand.” Slowly, my head bobbed up and down. “Good. I’m going to try and pinpoint Gianna’s whereabouts, but I’ll check in soon, okay?”

  “O-okay,” I rasped, pulling out of his hold on me and turning for my house without another word.

  I’d made it to the end of the block before I heard my dad’s relieved voice. “Brooke?” He was standing in my driveway as I started to cross the street.

  I looked up and increased my pace to a jog. The flashing lights were messing with my perception of everything because he looked off somehow. Worried? Scared? Sad? For some reason, I just couldn’t pinpoint it. Then my eyes drifted past him and I noticed the gurney being brought out of my house…

  The gurney with the zippered black bag.

  My knees buckled, but I pushed through it and ran forward. “No,” I whispered, head shaking, heart racing, pulse pounding in my ears. Tears burned my eyes and obscured my vision. I was seeing things. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. “No!”

  Before I could get close to the ambulance, my dad grabbed me around the waist and held me back. He was saying something I couldn’t comprehend in my frazzled state. I picked up bits and pieces—“thank god you’re okay…so worried”—but all I could focus on was the black bag that looked like there was a body in it.

  “He was fine when I left!” I sobbed, tears flowing down my cheeks as I tried to wrench myself out of my father’s unrelenting grasp. I punched his arm and pushed against his chest, trying to force him to let me go. He held firm. “He’s fine!”

  My dad used all his strength to drop to his knees on the pavement, taking me with him, and I gave up trying to escape. I was far too overcome by emotion. “He was fine,” I repeated quietly, crying into his shoulder while he stroked my hair and tried to calm me down.

  “Someone broke in. It looks like there was a struggle as David tried to stop it. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. They did everything they could, but his heart stopped shortly after they got here. They couldn’t bring him back.”

  My cries became louder until even I couldn’t recognize them.

  David was gone.

  Chapter twenty-eight | grief

  Everybody works through their grief differently. Some people barricade themselves in their house and cry for days on end, while others try to distract themselves with whatever they can to try and forget. Drugs, alcohol, sex, or whatever other vice they might have. They shut down, the loss they feel so overwhelming it makes them numb to everything and nothing makes sense. None of what happens is right, every bit of it still hazy and surreal in the wake of emotional trauma.

  I know this, because I lived it once before.

  There was a light knock on the bathroom door before it slowly opened. I sat on the porcelain floor of the tub while warm water beat down on me, and I rested my chin on my knees and sighed. There was only one person it could be.

  “Brooke, honey?” my mom inquired softly, carefully. She’d been tiptoeing around me these last couple days—everyone had—and for good reason. “You doing okay?” She pulled the steam-covered glass door open a little to find me on the floor, and her forehead furrowed with concern.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, tucking my legs closer to my body and turning my face away from hers before she could see the quiver in my lip. “Just tired.” I sensed she was about to add something, so I cut her off. “I’ll be right out.”

  She exhaled softly, defeated. “All right. Well, just remember, the funeral starts at two.”

  There was a soft click as she closed the door behind her, and I stood up, pushing my face beneath the warm spray of water, washing away a fresh onslaught of tears that started to fall. I was so sick of crying, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I knew exhaustion had something to do with it, but it wasn’t the main source.

  David was gone. He died in my living room—without me there, because I’d been so hell-bent on tracking down the monster that did this—and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. I should have stayed with him.

  Nick warned me that I was dangerous, and now I believed him. How could I not? I was so careful around David, and yet he died anyway. Was it because of what I had become? I was starting to think so, but I was having difficulty sorting it all out in my head. Everything was pretty jumbled in there due to my lack of sleep. I didn’t get much the night before—if any, to be honest. My eyes were swollen and heavy from a combination of crying and exhaustion, but every time I closed them, all I saw was David being thrown across the room before bleeding out on our living room floor.

  The memory made me shudder violently, but I let it play out, feeling far too weak to fight it this time.

  It had been five days since David’s death. Five days, and it still wasn’t any easier. How was I supposed to go on knowing that Samantha Turner was there for me and David just got in her way? He was nothing to her…and e
verything to me.

  I hadn’t done much since it happened. I was put on bereavement leave, and I didn’t argue the strong recommendation from my father. There was no way I could be expected to put my all into a case, given the circumstances. So, I did nothing. I didn’t go to work. I didn’t watch TV. My parents offered me my old room since my house was still an active crime scene. I was okay with this new living arrangement, though, because I didn’t think I could walk by my living room every day and not relive every detail of that night.

  I already felt the emptiness that his absence brought. My anxiety heightened exponentially by the second and refused to relent, and I didn’t like it one bit. The reality of David’s absence in my life suffocated me until it felt like all the air had been sucked from the room.

  Taking several deep, cleansing breaths, I pressed my head against the cool tile wall, closing my eyes as the water rolled down my back. Soon, my thoughts were thrust right back to that night.

  My anxiety spiked, rage consuming me wholly, and I pulled my arm back and punched the tile wall of my parents’ shower, over and over and over again. I screamed as tears flowed freely down my face. Blood covered my knuckles as shards of tile fell at my feet. The bathroom door flew open so forcefully that the knob cracked the wall behind it, and my mom rushed to my side, draping a towel over me before leading me out of the tub and to my old bedroom.

  As she sat me on the end of my bed, my hands shaking and oozing blood, I looked up to find my father watching from the hall, horrified and looking helpless. It was a look I hadn’t seen in his eyes in years.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, not really sure what I was apologizing for. The cuts? The mess in their bathroom? Being an absolute train wreck? What happened to David? Everything?

  “Oh, honey,” Mom soothed. “You have no reason to apologize. Not after everything you’ve been through.” She assessed my wounds as best she could before turning to my father, who made his way to the doorway of my bedroom. “Keith, grab me the first aid kit from the bathroom, please,” she requested, taking my hands in hers as gingerly as possible and trying to gauge the severity of my injuries.

  When Dad returned with the first aid kit, Mom took everything from him and soaked some of the gauze in rubbing alcohol to clean my cuts. It didn’t matter how lightly she touched; each pass over my skin set my nerves on fire. I welcomed the pain though, because I deserved it. It should have been me, not David.

  Sadly, the pain lessened with every second that ticked by, and as the blood was cleared away, I saw that my skin was already knitting itself back together—a wolfy perk I had forgotten about. I chanced a quick glance her way to see her eyebrows pull together, confused.

  “I, uh, guess it looked worse than it really is,” I said, trying to draw her focus from this oddity.

  She looked doubtful at first, but since she didn’t really have an explanation for it, she accepted it at face value and continued to clean and bandage my hand. Meanwhile, I heard my dad down the hall, cleaning up the shattered tile and tossing it in the wastebasket.

  After she left, I took a few minutes before getting dressed. I pulled on a black knee-length shift dress and a pair of black heels and walked out of my closet. I paused at the foot of the bed. Even though it wasn’t the bed from my house, I stared at it for much longer than any sane person would, focusing on how the blankets on my side were rumpled while David’s side looked untouched.

  Because it is, I reminded myself. He’d never lie next to me again.

  The phone rang from the kitchen, jarring me from the morbid turn in my thoughts. This wasn’t new or unusual as of late. The phone had been ringing off the hook since the day after the incident. My mom offered to unplug it since I had no intention of talking to anyone yet, but I told her not to worry about it. It was the only thing that kept pulling me back from reliving that awful night over and over again.

  In addition to all the calls, people also kept sending flowers. The house was starting to resemble a florist’s shop, and while the gesture was intended to be sweet, I was baffled as to why someone would send something as delicate as flowers to someone whose loved one just died. To remind them that something beautiful only lasted so long before it wilted, died, and then began to rot? Nice sentiment.

  Assholes.

  All right, so I was a little bitter. Could I really be faulted? I’d finally made peace with what I had become and was ready to tell David that I wanted more from our relationship. This news would have made him happy, but before I could deliver it, his life was taken from him by something even I didn’t fully understand yet.

  But I was going to figure it out. As a cop, that was what I did.

  When the phone stopped ringing, I deduced that either the machine or my mother picked up. With a sigh, I headed back toward the bathroom so I could get ready to face the day…even if it was the last thing I wanted to do. Every day since losing David had been rough, but I feared today would be the most difficult of all. Today, we buried him. This made it final. This made it real.

  After my hair was done, parted in the middle and pulled back into a sleek chignon, I met my parents out in the living room. Dad helped me into my black knee-length jacket before doing the same for my mother, and then we left the house. I slid into the back seat of his car, clasping my hands in my lap and staring a little too intently at them as we drove across the city.

  All of this took me back to the day of Bobby’s funeral. It was all too familiar and unsettling, and I knew my parents felt it too. I sensed it rolling off them in waves of despair and fear. Mom might not have known David as well as Dad and I, but she knew how I felt about him, and she approved. He was the first guy she approved of since Nick.

  Nick.

  I still hadn’t heard from him since that night. He said he’d check in when he knew something, and the fact that I hadn’t heard from him meant one of two things: he’d come up empty-handed, or he’d suffered the same fate as David.

  Or maybe he bailed. Wouldn’t be the first time he left you to deal with tragedy alone…

  I refused to believe the uninvited suggestion, because something deep inside told me he’d changed. And he couldn’t be dead, because I felt certain I’d have sensed it. I had to believe that, because I didn’t know that I could handle the alternative.

  We arrived at the church, and I wasn’t surprised to see so many officers in their uniforms. O’Malley, Keaton, Clarke, and the rest of the department donned their uniforms as a sign of respect for their fallen comrade. I debated doing the same, but ultimately decided against it. I just wasn’t feeling worthy of the badge these days.

  Dad led Mom and me to the front of the church where we sat in the second row behind several people. The woman directly in front of me was crying, while the man next to her—her husband, presumably—had his arm around her, holding her against him while she sobbed onto his shoulder.

  David’s parents. Not only would it explain why they felt the way I did—like their hearts had been ripped from their chests—but I could tell by their smell. They shared a similar and unique scent with their son.

  Before I could even think about what I was doing, I reached forward and laid a supportive hand on the woman’s shoulder. Startled, she lifted her head from her husband’s shoulder and turned to face me. She was shocked and confused at first, but then a look of recognition flashed in her eyes, and she offered me a small smile.

  “Brooke?” she asked, and I responded with a nod, not trusting my voice enough to speak. “I can finally put a face to the name.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Samuels,” I managed to say, my voice breaking as guilt consumed me again. “I’m…I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Our loss, sweetheart,” she corrected, tilting her head to one side as she reached out and tucked a wayward strand of my hair behind my ear. “He cared so deeply for you.”

  Tears formed in my eyes, blurring my vision, but before they had a chance to fall, the pastor started the service. Everything about it was beauti
ful, and David’s cousin, Darryl, delivered an emotional eulogy filled with only the best memories. It made me wish that I’d known David back then, or at least gotten more time with him to hear those stories in his words.

  After the service ended, O’Malley, Keaton, Clarke, and a few others from the precinct joined a couple of David’s cousins, and they carried David’s coffin, draped with the American flag, out to the hearse that would transport him to the cemetery. When everyone arrived, we gathered around the plot of land where David would be laid to rest, and I looked across the hole in the ground to find his parents.

  Seeing David’s name on the dark gray headstone made my stomach roll, the reality already starting to set in. The first of several tears fell as the pastor spoke again, and when the 21-gun salute started, I jumped with every shot, the sound of the shots drowning out every gut-wrenching sob I released.

  Standing next to the grave with my arms crossed in front of me, I watched as the flag was removed from his coffin and folded into the standard triangle, and I empathized with how his mom and dad must have felt as they were presented with it. She couldn’t stop crying, and this definitely wasn’t helping. I’d barely composed myself as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and when the pastor spoke his final words, people started leaving for the celebration of life function being held at a nearby hall.

  My well had run dry as the tears finally stopped. Not because I wasn’t still sad, but because the shock had finally set in. O’Malley and the rest of the precinct—including Clarke—gave me their condolences after having done the same to David’s parents, and then headed to the hall. I stayed for a minute, staring down into the grave as dirt slowly covered his coffin.

  Even though I tried, I couldn’t will myself to move, even as David’s parents approached and we officially met for the first time. Just one more regret to add to my ever-growing list, I suppose.

  God, I was a shitty girlfriend.

  “Are you coming?” Dad prodded, nodding in the direction he parked the car.