Moonlight (18 page)

“
Just ask us to come in
,” Michelle whispered. “You don’t even have to stay. You could take the chance to run.
To get far away from Thaddeus.
He is the one who will kill you, not us.”

With Michelle’s words floating around in her mind, and knowing that she just wanted to run and run until her heart burst, Winnie pulled herself to her feet and walked slowly towards the front door.

“You promise you won’t hurt me?” she sobbed, her arm shaking uncontrollably as she reached out for the door handle. “You promise you will let me run far away from here?”

“We promise,” Nate said, his voice now sounding as smooth as silk, like Michelle’s.

With her heart beating at a deafening level in her ears, Winnie curled her fingers around the door handle. Then, in between the beats of her heart, she heard another sound.
A voice – a
little
voice.

No
, it whispered.

Winnie snapped her head around, half expecting to see her friend, Ruby
Little
, standing at the foot of the stairs, bathed in moonlight, her bright red coat shining, like the drool of vomit e
ncrusted around her mouth. T
here was no moonlight, and no Ruby Little. Winnie looked down at her fingers curled around the door handle
,
then let them slowly slip away.

“I won’t invite you in,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

No sooner had the words passed over her lips, the
strangers outside erupted in a frenzy of anger
.

“I will burn you,” Nate hissed around the edges of the doorframe. “I will
burn
both of you.”

With her back against the wall in the hallway, Winnie slid slowly to the floor. She sat in the dark, listening to the strangers’ threats,
then promises, and pleas
. With her eyes shut tight, and hands pressed flat against her ears, she thought of her friend, Ruby Little, as if waiting to
hear her tiny voice again. I
t didn’t come. Just before dawn, the banging and the screeching from the other side of the f
ront door finally stopped. W
innie was unaware that it had, as she
had finally given
in to her tiredness, and fell asleep on the hallway floor.

Why did you clean the windows?
the
voice asked.

The voice came again, but Winnie just thought it was coming from somewhere way off in her dream. She felt cold. The surface beneath her was too hard to be the wild heather and grass she was lying on in her dream.

Why did you clean the dirt from the windows?
the
voice came again, and Winnie recognised it to be Thaddeus’s.

She rolled over to find him lying next to her. Winnie could hear the sound of the sea rushing up the shore. The sun was high above her, and its bright rays of light blurred her view of him. She could see his chest was bare. She feared that he was still in love with Frances, the woman he had once loved...the woman he had murdered.

Why did you clean the windows?
she
heard him ask yet again behind the dazzling sunlight.

Because it’s my job,
she whispered, suddenly feeling scared.
Because if I didn’t clean the windows, you would be angry with me.
You would murder me just like you murdered...

“...Frances,” Winnie murmured, opening her eyes. She looked up to see Thaddeus standing over her.

“What did you say?” he
asked,
a deep frown across his brow.

“Huh?” she mumbled, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“Why did you clean the dirt off the windows?” he repeated, reaching down and pulling Winnie to her feet.

“What?” Winnie flustered, feeling disorientated and thick-headed. She slowly glanced about as if getting her bearings, and she could see by the pale light that was streaming through the open front door, that it was dusk. How long had she slept? She wondered. Then focusing on the front door again, she pulled herself free of Thaddeus’s grasp, ran across the hall and slammed it shut.

With a perplexed look on his face, and seeing the sudden look of fear in her eyes, Thaddeus said, “What’s wrong?”

Winnie turned to face him, and as the memories of what had happened the night before flooded her mind, she turned around and yanked open the front door again. Before she had even stepped over the threshold, Thaddeus had taken hold of her arm again.

“Get the fuck off me!” she screamed at him, punching and kicking out wildly at him.

“What’s wrong?” he said, soaking up her punches.

“You’re a freaking murderer, that’s what’s wrong!” she yelled at him.

Looking as if he had been suddenly struck across his face, Thaddeus said, “What are you talking about? Who has said this about me?”

“The faces I saw in the moonlight!” she shouted, trying to pull free of him. “The faces you said I had imagined.”

“Did they speak to you?” he snapped. Then shaking her like a ragdoll, he roared, “
What did you tell them?
What did they say?”

Winn
ie looked into his eyes and screamed
,
“Apart from wanting to rip your fucking heart out, and drain you of all your blood, they said you murdered Frances.”

Hearing this, Thaddeus glanced back at the tree line, and then slamming the door shut,
he paced up and down the hallway. Thaddeus ran his long fingers through his hair. He looked anxious and drawn. Then turning, he stared at Winnie and said, “Oh my God, what have I done? I’ve failed.”

“Did you kill Frances?”
Winnie
yelled, screwing her hands into fists by her sides.

Then, taking a step closer to her, he whispered, “Yes, I killed her.”

Winnie reached for the door handle again, but Thaddeus was too quick and gripped her wrist.

“It’s not what you think,” he shouted at her, his eyes dark and desperate
-
looking. “Yes I killed her, but it was an accident. I never meant to kill her.”

“You said she died of cancer,” Winnie spat at him.

“I didn’t murderer her!
” he shouted, the veins bulging beneath the flesh that covered his neck.
“You’ve got to believe me.”

“Why should I believe a word you say?” she yelled back. “You’ve done nothing but lie to me since I arrived here
!
I should never have accepted your offer. I should’ve stayed in London. By the sounds of it
,
I would have been safer living and sleeping on the streets.”

Winnie turned her back on him and opened the front door.

“Where are you going?” he asked her.

“Back where I came from,” she said.
“Back to what I know.”

“You can’t leave,” he whispered over her shoulder.

Winnie could feel him behind her, his breath cold against the nape of her neck. “Why not?” she
breathed,
too scared to turn around.

“Because it’s almost dark outside and they will be back before you reach the end of the co
a
stal path,” he said.

“What?  These people you’ve pissed off only come out at night
,
do they?” she asked with a sneer.

“They aren’t people,” Thaddeus whispered in her ear. “They are vampires.”

With the sound of disbelief in her voice, Winnie said, “Bullshit. There isn’t any such thing as
v
ampires.”

“Nor werewolves?” he said, pulling her
around
to face him.

With her eyes wide open
,
and a scream trying to escape from her throat, Winnie collapsed in shock against the door. Dropping to her knees, she fought desperately to suck air into her lungs as she looked up at him. Thaddeus stood before her, his eyes bright and yellow, like two burning suns. The shape of his face hadn’t changed. He still looked like Thaddeus, other than the bushy
-
looking sideburns whi
ch now covered his cheeks. H
is hands had changed, Winnie noticed
,
as she stared in horror at him. Where he had once had those long
,
slender fingers, were now a huge set of claws. They looked strong and powerful
–
deadly.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Winnie finally gasped. “What are you?” 

“I am a
Lycanthrope
,” he said, baring a set of razor-sharp
-
looking teeth. “But you would probably know me better by the more common term, werewolf, or wolf man.”

“You’re not real,” Winnie gasped. “None of this is real.
Things
like you are just stuff off stories and nightmares.”

Thaddeus took one of her hands in his claws. She immediately tried to pull away, but he held firm. His claws felt warm. The skin covering them was coarse and tough. Then, taking her hand, he placed it against his chest. Beneath his fine cotton shirt, she could feel his heart racing.

“I’m very real and so are the vampires you say came here last night,” he whispered.

“Are you going to kill me like you killed Franc
e
s?” Winnie breathed.

“If my reasons for bringing you here were to simply kill you, I would have done so already,” he said, letting go of her hand. 

“So why did you bring me here?” Winnie asked, pressing herself against the door, desperate to keep as much distance between her and Thaddeus as possible.

He saw her flinch away, and desperate to show Winnie she had nothing to fear from him, he walked over to the staircase and sat on the bottom stair. Then
,
looking over at her as she cowered in the darkening shad
ows, he said, “As you can see, v
ampires and
w
erewolves are very real. We don’t make the habit of revealing ourselves. The reaction that you’ve just had is proof enough that we are better off living in secret, keeping ourselves away from humans as much as possible. They would only
hunt
us down and kill us. We have done that to our own species well enough without the help of humans.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Winnie asked, drawing her knees up beneath her chin.

“I am the last of my race,” he started to explain. “Hundreds of years ago, our two races inhabited the Carpathian Mountains, which bordered the countri
es of Bukovina and Moldavia. F
or as long as we lived in those mountains, the vampires and
Lycanthrope
fought for dominance of the region. The vampires were far greater in number, and they hunted down and killed my race. They drove us to the very brink of extinction. With only a small pack of us left, we fled the mountains, but this wasn’t enough for the vampires, they wanted all of us dead. They pursued us across the remote regions of Eastern Europe. One by one, they killed the
Lycanthrope
until there was only the one left –
me
,” he said, patting his chest with his claw.

“I managed to outwit them and stay alive, which enraged Nicodemus, the pale king of the vampire race. So desperate to hang my dead body from the walls which surrounded his castle high up in Carpathian Mountains, he sent his most cunning and ruthless warrior to hunt me down and kill me. For months, this feared warrior tracked me down, until at last, I was ensnared.  But Nicodemus’s plan went wrong
,
because instead of killing me, Nicodemus’s most deadly warrior fell in love with me. Not only had he lost a great warrior, but he had lost his daughter, Frances, as it was she who he sent to kill me.
N
icodemus had promised his daughter’s heart to his second most trusted.
A vampire by the name of Nate Varna.”

“He was one of those staring at me from beneath the trees,” Winnie said.

“I know,” Thaddeus said, looking at her with his yellow eyes.

“You knew all along,” Winnie said, feeling betrayed by Thaddeus.

“Yes,” he said with a nod of his head. “When Nate Varna discovered that the woman he loved – the woman who had been promised to him – had given her heart to a werewolf, he became lost in a fit of rage and despair. He vowed to Nicodemus that he would hunt me down and not only
bring
my carcass back, but his daughter, too, where she rightfully belonged. Frances heard of Nate’s plan, so in secret, she visited her father and told him that if I were ever to be killed, she would take her own life, too. Loving his daughter with all his heart, and not wanting to be responsible for Frances taking her own life, he
forbid
Nate from purs
u
ing us. However much Nicodemus detested and loathed the thought of his daughter being in love with a
Lycanthrope
, he hated the thought of her killing herself even more.