Full Moon Fiancé

Sacred Light of the Moon

Diana sat with the book opened to the page for a long time. She was staring at the words, but she wasn’t seeing them.

“Werewolf?” she said to herself under her breath. The word sounded ridiculous hanging in the open air, a childhood fantasy she couldn’t even begin to wrap her adult mind around. “Some kind of code?” she asked aloud. But that didn’t feel right either. Though the Westerlys were loving parents, in their way, they were not the type to engage in fanciful fits of fantasy. They’d never been ones to indulge in Joshua’s playful nature. They didn’t exactly discourage it, but they’d never play along with some elaborate imaginative dream he’d invented to the point where he believed it was real. If she wasn’t so confused, Diana would smile at the memory of the blunt talking to Joshua had been given the first time he lost a tooth. Santa Claus had never visited the Westerly household.

So if it wasn’t some childish dream cooked up by Joshua’s overactive imagination and indulged by the adults in his life, what did it mean?

A wild part of Diana’s own imagination wondered if the Westerlys had gotten mixed up in some criminal element, somehow. Anna Westerly was certainly severe enough to be a mob boss’s daughter, and it would explain Thomas’s trepidation toward her father. Though she couldn’t think of a single mafia family that would refer to themselves as werewolves. It didn’t seem the kind of thing that got one taken seriously. And though the Westerlys had more money than they knew what to do with, and seemed to find more all the time, she had no reason to believe that was down to anything but generations of wealth that had come before Anna and Thomas.

“Werewolf,” she said again. She hoped the word would feel less ridiculous as she said it a second time, but if anything, she felt more exposed and more silly than the first time.

But, she realized with surprise, she didn’t feel wrong. She sat with it.

Even though it was just a word, it felt almost like a physical presence that hung around her head like a fly, buzzing in her ear so that she never forgot that it was there.

“Werewolf?” she repeated, a different inflection this time.

It was no less odd.

Without thinking, Diana found herself standing suddenly. She crept once more toward the closet and went through her usual ritual of standing in the dark behind the closet door, waiting to be discovered.

Yet again, she wasn’t. No one stirred to come disturb her solitude. So after a few moments she climbed the ladder once more and found herself a floor above her bedroom. This time she barely glanced at the antiques and abandoned items around her as she strode with purpose to the crawlspace leading into the game room.

Diana was mostly moving on instinct, on half conscious memories of the house that had once seemed more like home than anywhere else in the world. She crossed the game room to a shelf that housed various electronics, mostly gaming consoles, a shelf she had peered at a dozen times or more a year for the years and years she had known the Westerlys.

She scanned the shelf with a little frown tugging at her lips. Letting her eyes whiz past old consoles that held memory after memory of happier times, her hand hovered as well as she searched.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, her voice soft but her tone no less victorious. A little tablet, half forgotten, lay on top of a stack of games collecting dust.

“Please have internet access,” she whispered. She couldn’t remember how old the tablet was. It felt like it had been there all her life, really. It was as immutably present in her memory of the room as the walls or the ceiling. She knew it couldn’t be more than five, or perhaps six, years old, but her brain could not picture a time when it had not been there. She pressed hard on the power button with her thumbnail. The device took a painstakingly long time to whir into life, as if it, too, had forgotten why it was there.

When it did turn on, it made a little chirping noise that caused Diana to jump slightly.

“Oh, no,” she groaned. It wanted a password.

‘Joshua!’ was not right. Nor was ‘Diana’, though she hadn’t really expected that to work. She tried Anna and Thomas’s names too, to no avail. She couldn’t even remember the original owner of the tablet, so she had no way of knowing who would have set a password on it. She’d never used it before. Never needed it, with her phone always in reach and her laptop just as close to her much of the time. When her own devices weren’t already clutched in her hands, she was usually beating Joshua at some game or another. She’d never needed the tablet. Never seen anyone use it at all.

‘158Groveside’ was her next guess, the address of the ancestral home in which she stood. Nothing.

‘TrevorToad’ didn’t work either, even though that was Joshua’s favorite video game character. ‘ToadsTremendousTravels’ didn’t work.

“Ugh,” Diana made a little noise of disgust as she typed out ‘BaileyBoy96’, the name of Joshua’s childhood dog. Her palm smacked the side of her face gently when that was wrong too, without her even realizing it, so annoyed was she.

Next, she tried ‘JAW7’ for Joshua’s initials and favorite number. When that failed, she tried her own. ‘DOT19’ was no help, and she resisted the urge to chuck the device across the room when an error message suddenly flashed on screen.

‘Too many attempts. Try again in 1 minute.’

“Damn it,” she whispered. Deciding not to risk staying out of her room, she tucked the little tablet under her arm and headed for the crawlspace back into the unfinished part of the attic.

By the time she was back in her room, a minute had passed. She tossed the tablet almost carelessly on her bed and began to pace, feeling frantic.

“Okay, think. We can’t just guess randomly. Think it through.” She circled the room twice in silence as she thought it over.

“Joshua never even set passwords on his phone or anything until maybe two years ago,” she reminded herself. “It might not even be his. It has a password, and it’s pretty old. It probably isn’t his.” This wasn’t an entirely welcome revelation. She was simply much better versed in the kinds of things Joshua was likely to cherish enough to use as a password. She knew little enough about Anna and Thomas that she didn’t think her chances were particularly high.

“It probably isn’t his name or anything like that,” she murmured. They just weren’t the sentimental type.

“Thomas likes… boats?” she said. It seemed like a weak lead. As she paced the room, she threw frequent glances over at the tablet as if it might give her some clue when she was on the right path. It did not. It remained unhelpful.

“This is so stupid,” she chastised herself. “What, am I going to try ‘boats1’ and when that doesn’t work I’ll try ‘boats2’?”

She bit her lip.

“Anna is more likely to leave a tablet upstairs than Thomas,” she reasoned with herself. “He is out of the house so much more than she is.” She stopped to stare at the tablet. She willed it to speak.

It did not. “She cares about Thomas and Joshua,” she mused. “And her charitable foundation. She cares about marine life.” Indeed, Anna was an avid amateur diver and had a degree in marine biology. One of the surest ways to get Anna talking was to ask about the ocean.

Diana crossed the room and flipped open the tablet once again. But she found herself confronted with her own utter lack of knowledge about marine biology, or what might be an important keyword to someone who enjoyed it.

“Ugh!” Diana tossed the tablet back onto the bed.

As she did so, the utter absurdity of the situation came crashing in on Diana’s consciousness and she found herself nearly doubled over laughing. Memories of her last few days flooded her mind.

“I’ll probably never get it open,” she murmured between little giggles.

Without thinking, almost without realizing she was doing it, Diana reached down again. She typed out a phrase and hit enter before she could process her own actions.

‘Sacred light of the moon’ was the password. One of the English phrases from that strange and ancient book which had stuck in Diana’s head.

She didn’t know what it meant. But it obviously meant a great deal to Anna Westerly.