Moon Bound

(29) Wild...lings? |Scarlet's POV|

Standing under the midnight moonshine for nearly an hour now, the person threatening us was still a no show. The conviction that this was just a joke, a tasteless one, grew.

In the midst of the nude ground, gravestone-like blocks were planted on the barren from greenery earth. Like flowers of stone, they were driven into the ground, reflecting the moonlight seeping through the opening in the tree crowns.

Is this funny to you who can see us now?

A wild desert stretched before the eyes until it was swallowed by the shadows of the treeline. Silence, not even a sound from any animal or bird permeated the eerily quiet.

Is this your punishment for us for being bad?

The first sound that came was that of footsteps. Approaching.

Whoever our little joker was, he or she, no- they were coming.

Monsters you never believed could be real. They were.

Right here.

A new life. A brand new start after leaving the past where it belonged. Behind. You can settle into that peaceful routine and forget. However, the thought keeps gnawing at you.

It always finds its way back.

The tales about them existed from the dawn of time. Hushed fables told by the moon children. Some believed – others doubted.

They were these same stories you told to frighten little children into submission, these hushed whispers around the campfire, the ones you knew couldn't be real yet you kept wishing they were not.

Perhaps, you recognized the grain of truth, just didn't allow yourself to believe. The moon children were, after all, still human. They shared that natural instinct for self-preservation as they walked the earth amongst those who kept their eyes tightly shut to all things unthinkable.

My people looked up to the Moon for guidance, they prayed and hoped for her mercy but, sometimes, forgot the lessons she had taught them and ignored her unspoken warnings.

Tales were just tales. Until they aren't.

More beast than man, the creature who stepped into the forest graveyard was nothing alike his brothers and sisters who served her brighter side. Everything good inside of him was gone. Everything natural had turned insane.

A moment later another one stepped out of the shadows, holding Jazmine in front of him.

Wondering if it was true what my people said, that they fed off both humans and their own people, that they were cannibals who didn't bind themselves to a land but roamed, I watched them approach.

I'd heard once they set foot in a land, nothing would be left. No seed would grow on the earth saturated with blood. For years, no life would return to that cursed piece of mother earth.

It would become tainted, just like they were.

As soon as the beastly men stepped into the speck of light, their cover was blown. The Moon lit up their features yet the observing eye found it a troublesome task to make sense of what it saw under their hairy facades.

The two males were so much alike that I could mistake them for twins, except that they had different height and body structure. The one holding Jaz was slightly smaller than the giant walking less than a step ahead.

I'd heard they didn't need bonds or true mates. That they would roll with their females during the heat and then discard them. Later, they would teach their children these same lessons that their fathers had taught them like a beastly tradition they followed through the generations.