Wolf's Bane (Monstrous Hearts #2)

Chapter Thirteen

Author's Note: Thank you SO MUCH for your patience while waiting for this chapter. I hope you enjoy reading it!

The moon glowed red as it rose half-full, casting the road in unfamiliar light as they drove to the party. Alice looked at it through the passenger's window in silence, stomach tightening at how the cool, serene face had transformed into something bloodstained.

When the surrounding trees opened up into wide sky, revealing the eerie sight in full, she found herself saying, "A lot of folklore warns about a blood moon. It's supposed to be an ominous sign."

Colton didn't seem impressed, remaining intent on the road ahead without so much as a glance upward. "Never found it any worse to hunt under."

The very indifference of his voice steadied her. It was solid rock against shrill winds. It was rope anchoring her to time and place while currents threatened to pull her into the suffocating past and chilling future. It was a shadow that never fled in the face of light, as magnetic as any malevolent moon, and she found herself looking over at him.

The black suit he wore hadn't diminished any of his danger, instead emphasizing broad shoulders and lean strength. And the crisp collar of his white shirt only drew attention to the sharp hunger of a jaw already dark with stubble despite how she'd shaved him an hour earlier. There was nothing tame about him at all, nothing sated, and even as the glittering lights of civilization appeared in the distance, his eyes continued to gleam like a beast's.

She wanted to see his teeth. "You don't believe in supernatural signs?" she teased, feeling her shoulders relax. "Or that nasty things might come alive under strange moonlight?"

Now he glanced over. "Whatever's out there worries about me. Not the other way around."

She should have laughed. From the quirk to his mouth, he expected her to. And yet something about the way he looked at her, gaze unguarded, made her lungs squeeze until it hurt to breathe, and a thought came to her with all the clarity and mercilessness of a mirror: she would never stop grieving if she lost him.

It wasn't the old panic that had been instilled in her from the moment scrubby grass and shadowy oak had swallowed her mother whole, the one so easily stoked by Magdalene once she'd found out about its existence. It wasn't even the slow-creeping form she felt whenever she looked at her father and saw a gravestone of unspoken thoughts and confessions. The terror of separation, the agony of abandonment... No, this was much different.

There in the flickering darkness, she watched this beast who wore the clothes of a man without taking it to heart, and realized what she felt had nothing to do with fear. She loved him.

Could a witch die of grief? Perhaps not. And she, the incomplete girl, the so-called doll, was quite used to scar tissue filling in the missing pieces. She would endure, as she somehow always did, but the beat of her blood as it sang through her veins would fade into a drone, and the hunger in her heart, so demanding even as the rest of her hunched in silence, would dull into a vague pang. She would exist without living, and a howl in the night would be as unreachable to her as a half-remembered dream.

To lose oneself in a beast—to go into the forest and offer tender heart to slavering jaws—is to learn the grief of not what is given but of what might become lost.

A short growl brought Alice back into herself, brought her senses back to her seat in the car and the bracelets on her arms and her neatly-pinned hair. Colton stared at her, and she realized they were at a stoplight—already in town. The red light glared across them both as she shook her head, trying to clear it. "I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. I..."

When her voice trailed away, his thumb ran over her cheek, wiping away the wetness.

She gasped, realizing she'd been crying. "That's not waterproof mascara. God, it must be running down my face."