Moon-Touched

Chapter 1 Hide. Don’t run. If you do, he’ll find you. It’s not cowardice to stay alive. It’s called survival. Hide. Four letters. A single word command. So easy to consider, so hard to do when instincts argued every step of the way. Brambles cut at his fur, but he scrunched down more tightly to the ground, using the weeds’ natural coloring to help disguise his own. He couldn’t do much about his scent except pray the recently fertilized field adjacent to his cover was enough to put the others off. And the night… He could do even less about the full moon hanging low behind the trees. His ears twitched at every sound. When a distant baying echoed and rolled around the valley, his hackles rose involuntarily, and his lip curled. If he dared to believe the wolf was alone, he might risk venturing from his hiding spot to tear his throat out. But the first howl was met with a second, then a third, until the chorus of death resounded across the earth. He wanted to dig at the packed dirt and bury himself out of sight, but one wrong move, one wrong sound, and all was done. He couldn’t even risk closing his eyes because if they showed up, he would need every one of his senses to fend them off. Not that he thought he could. Not that a small part of him even thought he should. They were his brethren, damned souls or not. The beast in his heart believed it was their right to do with him as they wished. They’ll kill you. They had to find him first. * * * * At the first line of pink along the horizon, the shift began. It started in his bones, in the very marrow, the core of who and what he was. When he’d been young, his father had terrified him with stories about how their kind was captured so scientists could harvest their marrow for their vicious experiments. It was better to be killed than to be caught. That was the lesson learned. He still lived by that creed, though these days, it was more out of certain terror of what Perry would do to him if he ever caught up. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he always wondered if there was truth in the old tales. Because when he changed, whether from wolf to human, or human to wolf, it always began in the same deep pits of his being. It hurt, too. Both ways. Whether bones had to shrink or muscles had to stretch, the eruptions beneath his skin burned away everything else until he thought he’d die from the transformation. The pain was the reason so many of his kind howled as soon as the change was done. Baying at the demonic moon responsible for the rhythms of their bodies released all the pent-up anguish to make the night manageable. The fact that Andre couldn’t had forced him to find other ways to cope with the pain. Not all of them were healthy. None of them banished the aches like howling did for the others. Reverting to his human form was easier, if only because he could turn to pharmaceuticals to help deal with the residual pains. It wasn’t swift. He often wished for the magic of Hollywood, where glittery dust would shower down upon the writhing beast and transform him into the naked hunk of the month within the blink of an eye. How much better would his life have been if he could have withstood the change with more grace, more efficiency? Instead, he was trapped in this endless game of hide and seek, waiting for the jaws to snap one final time. There were only two ways to end it, and he wasn’t strong enough to make the necessary kill. He’d learned that lesson the hard way. So he endured the transformation. The rising sun bled over the edges of the world, rousing both beast and beauty, and quelled the silent howls trapped inside his skin for another cycle. He lay curled into a tight ball beneath the bushes and focused on his breathing. In. Out. Another day to live. Another night survived. Whether he liked it or not. * * * * His rusted-out pickup rumbled off the dirt road where he’d kept it parked overnight and onto the strip that would lead him to M-20 and back to Remus. Residents would be slow to get up on this sleepy Saturday. The town didn’t really bustle except during the school runs and Sunday mornings. The needle on the gas tank was dangerously low, too, so the smart choice would be to return and fill up at the Mobil Station. He’d have a job waiting for him as well. All it would take was turning right at the T-junction and heading back. He turned left. Remus was a known identity, safe in its predictability and size. But he’d spent the last two months in the tiny Michigan town. The wolves he’d heard in the night indicated he’d become just as known and predictable. The gas got him to Mecosta, though barely. From the food mart, he picked up a case of bottled water and enough snacks to last him a couple days. Nothing perishable. The pain from the shift was a hurricane buffeting against his joints and muscles, but he had enough drugs stashed away to forgo wasting money he might need later on. He’d be sleeping in the bed of his truck for the foreseeable future. The teenaged clerk barely looked at Andre when he rung him up, and Andre made sure to keep his head ducked so his shoulder-length hair hid most of his face from the security camera mounted on the wall. If Perry stopped in looking for him, he’d get nothing of use for his hunt. In this neck of the woods, even Andre’s 1981 Ford didn’t stand out enough for anyone to remember. He swallowed half a dozen ibuprofen with one of the waters before hitting the road again. The truck’s radio had busted before he ever took ownership, but he had an old cassette deck he’d picked up at a Goodwill in Ypsilanti that broke up the monotony of driving. He was stuck with music more than two decades old, but at least he never worried about someone stealing any of it. Billy Joel was just begging not to shut him out when he rolled into the dusty Amoco station at the outskirts of Mellowbush. The pumps were mix-and-match. One had been upgraded to an ATM model, but the other still had the old rotary numbers flipping down as the cost went up. A large sign mounted from the overhang directed customers to pay inside before pumping, though some creative individual had scratched out a couple doing it doggy-style along the bottom of the chipped white metal, and the smell of pizza wafted from the Little Caesar’s across the street. So far, Mellowbush was a lot like any of the half-dozen towns he’d stopped at over the last year. As he jogged across the lot to the station’s entrance, he had an odd sense of coming home. Frigid air-conditioning blasted into his face when he stepped inside, stealing his breath away. Northern Michigan in June wasn’t nearly hot enough to warrant such arctic temperatures, but from the way the rotund cashier fanned himself with a tattered copy of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition, they might as well have been in the tropics. “Hot enough for you?” When the man laughed at his own joke, Andre shrugged and smiled. He pulled a sweaty ten out of his wallet and laid it on the counter, then pointed at the truck outside the window. The cashier followed the line of his finger. “That yours? Looks like the rust’s the only thing holding it together.” Another robust laugh. It was probably a very good thing he could amuse himself because nobody else was likely to be entertained by his stale commentary. Andre pushed the money closer. “If you want gas, that’s only goin’ to get you ‘bout two and a half gallons. Depending how low you are, you might not even make it out of town on that.” Smiling and nodding, Andre retreated to go back out to the pump. Next to the front door, an explosion of colored flyers fluttered under the force of the overhead vents. The uppermost one was canary yellow with an ornate cross in the upper left corner. The headline, “The Light’s Always on in God’s House,” stopped Andre from stepping outside. He smoothed down the lower half, scanning over the text. It read like any other promotional material he’d ever seen for a church, reminding people of Sunday service, listing the contact information and address in case somebody needed to be reminded of where it was, but finding it now when he was on the move felt like more than circumstance. It felt like fate, like leaving Remus behind had been the exact right thing he could do. In a world where right and wrong were as elusive as trapping wind, any sort of sign was welcome. “You lookin’ for the Lighthouse?” the cashier asked behind him. Keeping his finger on the flyer, Andre looked back and nodded. He made a sweeping gesture toward the road, hoping the man understood he was asking for directions. Most likely, the only formal sign language the man knew would be the kind that got his ass kicked on a drunk Saturday night. “Anything worth finding’s on this drag. Just go down to the flashing red, go through, and it’ll be right there on the left.” Another good sign. Most people went through the rigmarole of assuming Andre was deaf instead of mute before catching on to what his various gestures might mean. His step was lighter when he returned to the truck. The aches from his shift were gone, he was far enough away from Remus to make him difficult to track, and there was a church in this tiny spot on the map that seemed to embrace strangers. Mellowbush just might be home. For now.