Red Moon (18 page)

T
HE MOON IS FAT
and aglow and seemingly balanced on the chimney of the house Patrick stands before. A few minutes ago, he parked his Jeep on the snowy shoulder of the road. Though he duct-taped the hole Claire tore in his roof, the cold still finds its way in, and he is shivering from the drive when he walks the unplowed tire-rutted driveway. The wind is at his back. He hopes the dogs will remember his scent.

They do. A few preliminary barks give way to mewling and whining and huffing, and he tells them
shh
and kneels down to face their slobbering tongues, flopping their ears and making their legs kick with his rough scratching. As he suspected, his mother’s car is parked nearby, glowing as white as the snowbound woods around him.

When he circles the house and crunches through the drifts and peers in the windows, the dogs trail him, nudging at his hand with their cold noses. In every room he expects to find his mother cowering on the floor with her hand held over a swollen eye, a bleeding mouth. She divorced his father more than fifteen years ago—she can see who she pleases; he understands that—but if this man is hurting her, then Patrick plans to hurt him back.

But the house is seemingly empty. He is surprised by what he sees, every room clean and sparely decorated with the kind of modern hard-edged bright-colored furniture on television shows that take place in fancy apartments in LA or New York. Not what he expected from a guy who owns twenty dogs and lives in an outlying neighborhood whose defining landmark is the city dump.

Then he hears a scream. Muffled as if filtered through a pillow. He pounds up the front porch and tries the door, the knob loose. He pushes inside. Vanilla candles burn on the kitchen counter. Soft jazz mumbles and hoots from the stereo. He hurries through the house, checking every room twice, not sure whether he should call out for his mother—and then he hears it again, almost a squeal, from behind a door in the kitchen.

He yanks it open and the floor falls away, a wooden staircase with rubber grips leading into the dimly lit basement. There is a terrible tang to the air—like the worst the zoo has to offer—that he barely registers when dropping down a few steps and leaning over the railing to take in the view.

His guts go cold, as if he has just gulped down an icy glass of water.

At first he isn’t sure what he’s looking at, the splatter of bones and blood, and then he spots the tufts of white fur and realizes it must be a goat. Perhaps. It’s difficult to tell. Hunched over it, with the posture of buzzards, are two naked figures. They are feeding. He remembers the cat his mother brought here the other day and wonders if it met a similar fate.

He cries out for his mother—and then, too late, brings a hand to his mouth. They both swing toward him at once. The white stripe of hair gives her away, though her face is otherwise unrecognizable, deformed and bloodied. The man is covered with a thick down of hair, everywhere but his head, which remains ridiculously bald. His mother rises and moves toward him, and her feet smear the concrete with tacky prints the color of molasses. Her mouth is moving—she is either gnashing the air or trying to speak—but he doesn’t wait to find out.

Claire is not sure how much time has passed. A day, maybe two. She has messed herself. She has not eaten or had anything to drink. She has slept some, but even when awake, she might as well be sleeping, the world dark and unavailable to her. Her hands are cuffed to her opposite ankles, making an X of steel chain that rattles when she moves and makes it impossible to pull the burlap sack off her head. She finally does so by rubbing her head against the stone wall and licking the sack upward with her tongue. When it peels away, she sees that she is at the end of a shadowy corridor. The floor is black sand. Along each wall hangs a strand of LED lights that give off a blue glow and lend to the air an underwater quality.

She can see that the ribbed lava tube reaches for twenty yards before elbowing to the left. She guesses she is deep underground—the air is still and musty, smelling of mud and sulfur—in one chamber of many that network the ground.

She has called out for help a few times before with no response. But this time, after fifteen minutes, someone comes. She hears first his whistle. A low-noted song that comes from a long way off and that she does not recognize until the distance closes. “All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel.” The slowness of the song is maddening. It reverberates with an eerie echo, sounding like many more than one whistler coming toward her. “The monkey thought ’twas all in good fun.” And with that he steps into view, his body slowly bending around the corner when he whistles the final notes. “Pop goes the weasel.”

His hair is the color of electricity. That’s the first thing she notices. The way it glows weirdly in the light thrown by the strand of LEDs. And then his size, as small and muscular as a gymnast. He wears black boots and black jeans and a black leather jacket. Now in the room with her, he has his hands in his pockets and kicks his way through the sand, kicking a small wave onto her when he comes to a stop a few feet away.

“Hello, little missus,” he says, his voice high and vaguely accented, maybe British.

“Little,” she says. “Look who’s talking.”

He smiles without humor. “Got a mouth on you, do you? Just like your bitch of an aunt.” He takes his right hand out of his pocket. It is a small hand, made even smaller by his missing two fingers, the ring and pinky, the place where they ought to be mucked over with scar tissue. But it grows bigger a moment later when it curls into a fist and comes speeding toward her, filling her vision.

She hears a muffled thud and realizes it is her head impacting the cave wall.

When she comes to, her nose is throbbing and swollen, crusted with blood. She cannot breathe through it. She is on the floor, her head pillowed by the sand that crumbles off her cheek when she raises her head to observe the three men standing nearby.

There is the man who hit her—who seems more sprite than man, someone out of a fairy tale—someone you’d come across on a dark forest path who would try to trick you or knife you. And there, next to him, the man who stole her away. The giant. As unreasonably wide as he is tall, his head nearly touching the cave’s ceiling. Long red hair, long red beard obscuring what little face she could see, two small eyes that seemed to look nowhere and everywhere. A black leather duster flaps loosely around him like a set of baggy bat wings. Hands that could palm and crush a basketball. She knows their strength from when they clamped hold of her, dragged a bag over her head, tossed her over his shoulder, where she spent the better part of a day jostling through the woods.

The third man she recognizes but at first cannot place. He has a broad face with a pile of brown curls surrounding it. His cheeks are dirtied with week-old whiskers. He wears jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms tattooed with running wolves whose bodies melt into each other in a surging wave of hair and paws and fangs. He is pacing, raking a hand through his hair. “You’re out of control.”

Peroxide Hair has his arms crossed. His voice is high and reedy when he says, “Some say the same of you.”

Then the man with the sleeve tats says something Claire doesn’t understand, something about a hot springs, about the foolishness and impulsiveness of his actions, about how he has put everyone at risk. Then his eyes fall on her. “Don’t touch her.”

“Not even for a squeeze? A peek at her little cunnie?”

And now she places the man with the tattoos, the brooding photo on the back of the book,
The Revolution
. Jeremy. Miriam’s husband. Her uncle. His eyes are wide with barely controlled rage. “Don’t touch her, Puck.”

“Supposing I do?”

“I’ll touch you back.” He cocks his arm and the wolves inked there seem to crouch, readying to leap.

The giant—so still until now, seeming a part of the cave, a stalagmite mounded over thousands of years of dripping from some poisonous source—comes alive and steps between Puck and Jeremy—her uncle? can she really think of him like that?—who appears suddenly so small.

In that moment, halfway down the basement steps and ready to bolt back up them, Patrick did not know that sixteen years ago, a homeless man crashed onto the trail and tackled and bit his mother as she was hiking John Muir Woods—a man who turned out to be an unmedicated lycan—the sort of encounter that these days happened so rarely, like a grizzly attack, but when it did happen ended up highlighted in the news and played into everyone’s worst fears and set off two days’ worth of television interviews and newspaper editorials about stricter regulation and enforcement.

Nor did Patrick know that his parents divorced because of it, that her infection became more divisive to their marriage than politics or religion, that Volpexx spiraled her into a gray-skinned, sour-stomach depression, that she once swept Patrick’s cereal bowl off the table and hurled his milk glass against the wall because he wouldn’t stop whining, that she eventually decided life would be easier and safer for him if she just went away. But she was better now. Still infected, of course, but better mentally, able to manage her urges and transform only in contained circumstances, so that she knew it was safe for Patrick. She wouldn’t have ever let him come otherwise.

He did not know, either, that the man she has been seeing for the past two years is a physician, that he was infected with lobos when treating a patient who, in a fevered delirium, bit him, that his mother met him in an Internet chat room for lycan singles, that they have fallen in love and that he freed her from Volpexx by falsely reporting her blood tests.

That comes later.

After Patrick races from the house in Juniper Creek and kicks through the snowy woods and leaps into his Jeep and slams the gas and drives for hours, directionless, not going anywhere, just moving, hurrying away from what he has discovered, checking the rearview constantly as if worried what might race out of the shadows behind him, until his heart stops pounding and his balled-up muscles loosen and his eyes shutter with exhaustion and he pulls into a truck stop where sleep finally drags a black bag over his head.

After he wakes with his face against the steering wheel, after he drives home, the inside of his windshield glazed with the frost of his breath, he finds his mother waiting for him on the living room couch. She wears a sweatshirt and jeans and her face is weirdly absent of makeup, puffy and unfamiliar, splotchy with bruises.

It is a struggle to keep from shaking. “You don’t look good,” he finally says.

“That’s how I always look.” Without the makeup, she meant. Without the mask. “You don’t look so good yourself.” She tries to smile and he tries to smile back.

“I didn’t sleep much.”

“I don’t imagine you did.” Her face seems to crease and pale. She pats the cushion next to her and tells him to come, come sit, she’ll explain everything.

He skips school. It would be impossible to concentrate. It would be impossible to look anyone in the eye. It would be impossible to make his way through the swarm of bodies, to suffer through droning lectures and math quizzes and a lunchtime conversation with Max when he has lost, in the space of a few hours, all sense of who he is.

He spends the morning with his mother and the afternoon alone. He goes for a drive, and the rumble of the engine makes his entire body shake and a bitter taste fills his mouth like week-old coffee. The sun sets so early these days. In Old Mountain, in the deepening gloom, he passes a construction site for yet another new development. Trucks with generators and hydraulic lifts spotlight the frames of half-built homes and cast skeletal shadows. Everyone is working overtime, chasing the final days of November.

In the middle of town rises a cinder cone called Lava Butte. At the last minute, he yanks the wheel and heads up the road that curls around and around to the summit, because what the hell, when you needed perspective, you were supposed to go up high, right? The road hasn’t been plowed and his wheels slip and scud over the ice pack.

He parks and sits on the hood of the Jeep and watches the sun die and the moon rise and the stars blink to life. Below him the city glimmers like a pond reflecting the sky above, making this butte an island looking over the drowned.

His mother, when he asked what it felt like to transform, gave him a smile with a troubling quiver. It feels good, she said. Not the first few times. The first few times you wake up with a suck of air, naked and blue lipped and curled up in a ball and covered in bruises and scratches and blinking confusedly in the morning sun. You feel hungover, unsure of what’s happened, of where you’ve been, what you’ve done. And then—snap—a memory from the night before.

But later, when you’ve gained control, later it feels like being a child again, which is the only time you’re ever truly alive, unrestrained, driven by hunger.

Below him, in the near distance, he can see the construction site, glowing blue like an underwater city. He can hear the distant rumble of tractors and payloaders, the whine of circular saws and clatter of hammers and shouts of foremen and beep of back-up alarms. Yet another subdivision. The town looks less like itself every day. The town Max grew up in—that his father grew up in, and his grandfather before them both—is a new kind of creature that has condos in place of mills, roundabouts instead of intersections, white and Mexican and Asian and black and lycan. Everything is getting eaten up and spit out differently. Patrick sees for the first time how small Max is, how impossible his resistance to change.

Patrick isn’t much for reading, let alone the plays his English teacher is always shoving down their throats, but the last guy they read, whatever his name was, was all right. No annoying symbolism and pointed pushy message, just a bunch of smart-asses saying things that made his head spin, like: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” A line he streaked a highlighter through.