The Blood Moon

Epilogue

"Deli!"

"Jessie, how are you today?" I waved to the apparition who managed to skip through the air without touching the ground. Behind the youthful looking specter was the ghost of her mother, who glided through the air with a quiet smile upon her content and semi-transparent face.

"Good," replied Jessie with a clap of her hands, though no sound accompanied the action. "I'm very happy I can't feel the material world anymore because mom tells me it's over 90 degrees today." She then stuck her ghastly white tongue out before turning to face the searing July sun.

August was just around the corner and I wasn't sure anyone in town was looking forward to the heat and humidity that would come with it. Either a person was a human, mage, werewolf, or zombie, who could feel the heat and in all its glory, or they were a vampire whose days were shortened by the lengthy reign of the sun. Ghosts, of course, couldn't feel any of it, but to me they had the least appealing existence so I was glad they at least had heat immunity going for them.

"Me too," said Violet with a playful chuckle as she slid beneath the shade of the tree I had taken refuge under. "Well, Delilah, you'll be glad to know it's not just freedom from the heat we're happy about, but we also found some information for you."

"I did," said Jessie proudly as she made joyful circles around the old maple tree. "I'm the one who found it."

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, leaning forward and wrapping my sweat slick arms around my bare knees. "Did you find some way to reverse this?"

"Remember, Delilah, I can't promise anything," said the motherly figure, who lowered herself to the ground to see me eye to eye, though she still hovered an inch above the crispy grass blades. "But, we may have found a resource that Alpha Everett hasn't looked at."

"That's good to hear," I muttered as relief eased the grip I had on my legs. "Besides checking with the surrounding packs, he's really only asked about my circumstances with the elders in town. I don't think he understands there's a whole wide world of sources out there." My last words took on a more gravelly timbre, a growl resonating in my chest. I shivered at the reminder of my tainted existence.

A creature not human and not werewolf, and most importantly, not welcome anywhere. It'd been a month since the bite that changed my life, but only a week since I'd been properly introduced to the pack. Everett had installed wards, sealed the windows, and made sure all the wolves outside of his inner circle kept a wide berth of the alpha manor so no one picked up my scent until I was ready to be seen. Had I realized how poorly received I would be, I would have stayed in that dark sweatbox.

The smell, they said. The smell was wrong. For creatures with such heightened senses, my stench was like living with a dead skunk. Or at least that's what some of them have so kindly explained to me.

"Remember, dear," said Violet in her best motherly tone, "most everyone in this town grew up here. And in the case of werewolves, who live for centuries, that's a long time in one place. They know their territory, outside of that is not their business because it is another pack's territory. It's hard to grow up like that and remember there's a world that exists beyond here. Don't be so hard on him."

"I have my reasons to be hard on him," I grumbled, lowering my head to my knees and burying my words into the folds of my arms.

"Are you still mad about what he did with Claire?" asked Jessie with a pout. As usual it took me a minute to remember that Jessie was, in fact, my age when she died and that I wasn't actually discussing a rather intimate situation with an eight year old. "He was doing it for the pack and he just wanted to be a good Papa. I had a bad father, the baby alpha deserves to have a good one."