The Killing Moon

  “I don’t know,” said Dana. “I think we just happened to be on the same side of the gym. And his sister was dead by then. He knew it.”

  “How?”

  “He saw. The wolves were ripping people apart. Everyone was screaming, but no one outside the gym thought anything of it. They thought it was just cheering. A basketball game was supposed to be going on. The wolves had enough time to kill everyone.”

  “Except the two of you.”

  “Right. And we were just lucky enough to get away. It was so chaotic that we managed to slip out.”

  “So, you think he would have saved anyone. He only took you because you were close?” said Hollis.

  Dana had never really thought about it before. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “A chance connection, then,” said Hollis. “But it obviously became very significant to him. He saved your life and then, ten years later, tried to kill you.”

  “But then he didn’t kill me,” she said.

  Hollis laughed. “It’s a little ironic.”

  “It’s my life,” she said. “It doesn’t feel ironic to me. Just kind of... horrible.”

  “Sorry,” said Hollis. “I didn’t mean to imply that I wasn’t taking this seriously. You have been through a lot.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Do you have a lot more questions?”

  “Are you kidding? We’re barely getting started,” said Hollis. “So, when Randall had you chained up in the basement, he didn’t give you any indication why he was sparing your life?”

  “He said he wasn’t ready for me yet,” she said. “I think he was using the other kills as a warm-up. When I realized he could be a victim, I took him by surprise. He couldn’t let me take him into protective custody. That would have kept him from being able to kill. So, he tried to kill me then. But he said I was meant to be the finale, and that he wasn’t ready for me.”

  Hollis raised his eyebrows. “The finale? He planned to kill you and then stop?”

  “Not exactly. Killing me would end the first phase. Then the next phase would begin. He wasn’t entirely clear on what that phase would be.”

  Hollis whistled under his breath. “He really had this planned out.”

  She shrugged. “He’s arrogant. From what I understand that’s typical of serial killers.”

  “So that was it? Just that he wasn’t ready. He didn’t give you any other impressions?”

  “What are you digging for here, Hollis?”

  He smiled. “Who says I’m digging?”

  “You’re always digging. You have some kind of theory, and you’re trying to get me to fall into it, whether it’s the truth or not.”

  “Now that wouldn’t be very journalistic of me, would it? Creating the story instead of uncovering it? That would make me a very bad reporter. And I’m not a bad reporter. I am trying to get to the truth.”

  “Well, that’s the truth. He wasn’t ready.”

  “Okay,” said Hollis. “Look, maybe I’m asking the wrong question, anyway. Maybe I don’t want to know why he didn’t kill you. Maybe I want to know why he wanted to kill you in the first place.”

  Dana took a deep breath. “Well, he was crazy, Hollis.”

  “Right. Of course he was. So, he never talked to you about that either?”

  “No, he talked to me about it,” said Dana. “Not that it made much sense.”

  * * *

  Six months ago, Dana winced each time the needle went into her skin. Cole was sitting on a stool in front of her, stitching up the gash he’d ripped into her belly. He’d wrapped two blankets around her—one on the top, one below her waist. Both were secured tightly around her body so they wouldn’t slip again.

  “You’re always screwing things up, Dana.”

  She didn’t respond. Since he’d hurt her, she was more frightened of him than she had been before. And she was less hopeful, too. She didn’t see a way to get away from him. He hadn’t killed her. Yet. But he clearly meant to. She didn’t know how long she could hold him off. Or what he’d do to her in the meantime.

  “I don’t know what it is about you that makes it impossible to stick to my plans. Good plans. Plans I’ve been working on for a very long time. And then you show up, and I can’t do anything right.”

  He jabbed her with the needle. She could feel the thread pulling through. It hurt.

  Cole looked up at her. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  She cleared her throat. “It’s not too late to let me go.”

  He laughed darkly. “I’m not going to let you go. Things have gone too far for that. I can’t keep you here, and I can’t kill you. And why? Because you give me a raging hard on?” He glared at her. “I hate you.”

  She bit her lip.

  He concentrated on her wound, yanking the thread tight. “No, I suppose it’s not your fault. Not really. You didn’t ask to be kept alive down here. If I’d done my job right in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this situation.” He shook his head. “I take it back. I don’t hate you. I only hate myself.”

  He sounded crazier and crazier by the minute. She was terrified of him. She couldn’t believe that she’d been attracted to him. Ever. Not least when he was fondling her down here. Something was wrong with her. Well. Something had been wrong with her. It was over now. Now that he’d shown his true colors.

  “Maybe if I just had you, just once, maybe that would make it better.”

  Her stomach turned over. It was going to happen. He was going to rape her, and then he was going to kill her, and it was all going to be over.

  “Except I can’t stand the smell of fear that’s pouring off of you right now.” He tied a knot in the thread and cut it. The stitches he’d left behind were sloppy, but her skin wasn’t gaping open anymore. He put some gauze over the area and secured it with some tape.

  Relief washed over her. She was grateful to him. Grateful that he wouldn’t take her against her will. There was something very screwed up about that, and she knew it. She didn’t have a single good reason to actually be grateful to him.

  “I wonder if I could change that,” he mused. He pushed aside the blanket around her legs, and his hand snaked inside, his fingers brushing her inner thigh.

  She squirmed away from him, panic splintering through her again. She wasn’t safe after all.

  “Hold still,” he muttered, securing her in place with his other hand. The fingers inside the blanket stroked the sensitive flesh inside her leg, dancing their way up higher.

  And her body responded again, to her disgust. It felt good. He seemed to know just how to caress her. Something inside her gave a languid stretch. It wanted him to keep touching her. It urged his fingers upward. But no. Dana hated it. She wasn’t actually divided—her sex drive and her mind. She was in control. “Don’t,” she managed.

  He dropped his hands, moving the blanket back in place. He got up off the stool and kicked it over. “Damn it.”

  And relief poured through her again.

  Cole began to pace. “No, it will have to be the way I planned it before. My wolf against yours. You’ll shift, I’ll shift. We’ll fight. Best wolf wins.”

  The relief was short-lived. Letting the wolf out was her idea of a nightmare. Thinking of completely shifting made her feel everything that terrified her. Lack of control. Loss of herself. And if Cole killed her while she was in wolf form, she’d never even know it. She would sink into the blackness of the wolf and never come back. “I won’t shift,” she said.

  Cole stopped moving. “What?”

  She lifted her chin. She had a little bit of defiance left in her. “I won’t shift. I hate that. I never want to be a full wolf again.”

  Cole chuckled. “You know what, Dana? That is exactly your problem. You never got it.”

  “I don’t think I’m the one here with problems.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Touché. I haven’t been my best recently, I’ll give you that.” He stroked his jaw. “But regardless
, hating the wolf is your problem. It’s not your fault, not exactly. You believed all the shit the Sullivan Foundation crammed down your throat. All that divisive crap, that the wolf was separate from you, not part of you.”

  “It is separate,” said Dana. “I’m not an animal.”

  “We’re all animals,” said Cole. “Even humans.”

  She shook her head. “Not in the same way. Humans can reason. They can feel. When the wolf takes over, all of that is gone.”

  Cole took off his glasses and began to clean them on his shirt. “You’re like a walking, talking SF propaganda pamphlet.”

  “We don’t have pamphlets.” She was starting to get angry. She liked it. Anger was stronger than fear, and she had been drowning in fear for what seemed like a very long time.

  He put his glasses back on. “Why do you suppose we became werewolves, Dana?”

  What kind of question was that? “We got bitten. We caught the virus.”

  “Right,” he said. “It’s a virus. At least that’s what they call it. Mostly they call it that because there’s no cure, don’t you think? It doesn’t really behave like a virus, does it?”

  She didn’t know. She hadn’t spent a lot of time studying that aspect of being a werewolf.

  “But virus is such a nasty word,” said Cole. “It’s the first step in making people think that they’re sick. That they need treatment. That what’s happened to them is a horrible, terrible thing.”

  “It is,” she said. “And it’s good to think of it as sickness. It’s better than being a monster.”

  “Monster,” said Cole. “There’s another nasty word. With everything that you’ve heard about how bad it is to be a werewolf, no wonder you hate it.”

  “Werewolves kill people,” she said. “Werewolves killed your sister.”

  “Yes,” said Cole. “That’s true.”

  “So anything we can do to stop the killing, we should do.”

  Cole laughed. “People get killed every day, Dana. Whether there are werewolves or not.”

  “But we try to stop that,” said Dana. “That’s what people do. We cure diseases and make cars safer and put child-proof additions on lighters. We try to keep ourselves from getting killed.”

  “Do we?” he said. “We make hand guns and bombs, and we start wars too, don’t we?”

  “That’s different.”

  “It’s not. We’re animals, Dana. Sometimes animals kill.”

  “Well, I don’t want to kill,” she said. “I should be able to control that.”

  “Should you? If it’s your nature to kill, should you be able to stop yourself from doing it?”

  “It’s not my nature to kill.”

  He laughed again. “Do you know anything about fire climax pine cones?”

  “No.” What did that have to do with what they were talking about? She kept forgetting that Cole was totally insane.

  “Their fertilized seeds can only be opened by the heat of a forest fire. If there’s no massive destruction of a forest, everything blazing, they can’t reproduce.”

  “So?”

  “So, death is part of the cycle of life, Dana. Imagine if no one died, ever. Imagine if everything living thing that ever existed still existed. What would happen?”

  “Well...” Dana was confused. What was he doing to her? “I guess that there wouldn’t be room for everything.”

  “Or resources, right? In fact, it’s entirely impossible, because all living things feed on other living things in order to stay alive, don’t they?”

  “Well, there are vegetarians,” she said, thinking of Hollis.

  Cole laughed. “I’d forgotten that plants no longer qualified as life.”

  She blushed, embarrassed for making such a stupid mistake. It made her even angrier that he was mocking her for not being able to think clearly when she was chained up in a basement with open wounds on her body and nothing in her belly except soup. “Whatever. There are different kinds of life, okay? No one gets upset when you uproot a potato, but people do when cats get run over in the road. It’s not all the same.”

  “Yes,” said Cole. “It is all the same. You only think it’s different because you’re focusing on things from a human perspective, and that perspective is skewed.”

  “Why do you keep saying things like that? We are human. Both of us.”

  “We’re wolves too, even though you and the whole of the SF seems to want to repress everything about our wolfness.”

  “Because it’s dangerous.”

  “And that’s the point,” said Cole. “Who says it’s a particularly good idea to keep all humans safe and to keep them from dying?”

  “Why would it be bad?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Cole, “maybe because humanity is killing itself anyway? Maybe because no matter how hard humans try to fight against nature, they can’t help but play into her hands? Maybe because fighting nature is pointless?”

  She strained against her chains. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He sounded even crazier than before.

  “Then I’ll explain,” said Cole. “In order for everything to function on this planet, there has to be balance. There’s a limited amount of resources, and to make more of one thing depletes something else. And all of it is necessary. Are you following me so far or is that too complicated for you to grasp?”

  “Fuck you.” She wasn’t an idiot. And if her thoughts were sluggish, she was hardly at her best. And whose fault was that?

  “If something uses up all its resources, it dies,” said Cole. “That’s the natural order of things. In order to maintain balance, the system attacks whatever is screwing everything up. Kind of like when you get an infection. Your body kills it off before it kills you. Our planet functions on the same principle.”

  “Oh shut up,” she said. “I’ve heard this argument before. Humans are not a virus, and the earth isn’t alive.”

  “Doesn’t matter whether or not the earth is alive or not,” he said. “It hosts all living things. And it has natural means by which to keep balance. Things like floods and earthquakes, and, yes, even war. Humans fight against nature, but we are all natural beings. We can’t all live forever. Some of us have to die, and if we don’t want to screw everything up, then a lot of us have to die, because there are too damned many humans on the earth.”

  She snorted. “So that’s your justification for killing people. You’re fighting overpopulation.”

  “I don’t need a justification,” he said. “I’m a wolf, and I do what comes naturally. If we all do what comes naturally, everything works itself out all right in the end. In fact, if the SF weren’t meddling in everything, there wouldn’t be so many werewolves as it is. The system creates more because the ones who are here aren’t functioning properly. Did you know that the percentage of werewolves is double what it was just one hundred years ago?”

  “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  He walked over to her, his face inches from hers. “It doesn’t matter what you think, Dana. It’s inevitable. That’s the way nature works. There are too many humans on earth, and one way or another, a lot of them will die. It will either happen from werewolves, or because a volcano explodes, or because humans themselves put so much pollution in the atmosphere that they make the environment inhospitable and kill themselves off. It will happen. The system cannot function out of balance. Fighting it is exhausting and pointless. Giving in is exhilarating and relieving. Give in to your wolf.”

  “I hate my wolf.”

  “Then you hate yourself. Because the wolf is part of you.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not. It’s a disease. That’s all.”

  “I’ll have to show you,” he said. “But I can’t do it until you shift. Shift for me, Dana.”

  She shied away from him. She would have run if she hadn’t been chained up.

  He walked around her, so that he was behind her. He leaned close. “Relax,” he whispered.

 
She didn’t. She struggled against the chains, wanting nothing more than to be free of him.

  He grabbed a handful of flesh at the base of her neck, and something inside her went limp and malleable.

  “Shift,” he murmured. “Shift for me.” He tugged at her flesh, so that she was suspended by her neck and not her chains.

  An involuntary yip escaped her lips.

  Before she could quite tell what was happening, she felt the change rushing at her, scrabbling its way up her spine, hot and yearning, the thing inside her ready to stretch its limbs.

  Cole let go of her neck. “Good.”

  She screamed. Every bone in her body was changing shape. Fur was pushing its way through her skin. It itched. And as the shift built up momentum, it all sped up. Her thoughts began to fritter away, scatter. They were replaced by strange sensations and feelings. Hunt. Run. Howl.

  And then there was nothing but darkness, like there always was. The wolf swallowed her whole, and Dana was no more.

  * * *

  Dana leaned back in her chair in Hollis’ hotel room. “Cole thinks that humans have messed up the natural balance on the earth, and that nature is doing whatever it can to try to restore the balance by killing humans. He thinks werewolves are just part of that. The natural urge to kill is something they should give in to, not fight, like the SF teaches them. Near as I can tell, the first phase was Cole eliminating werewolves who hadn’t killed anyone, because they were useless, and they hadn’t fulfilled their natural edict to kill.”

  Hollis laughed a little. “You’re kidding me.”

  She shook her head.

  “It kind of makes sense,” he said.

  “It doesn’t make any sense at all.” Thinking back over being with Cole, remembering the way he’d made her shift, was making her uncomfortable. It was as if the wolf inside her had suddenly gotten antsy. She could feel it stirring inside her, teeth and claws and fur. It wanted out.

  “Well, I mean, it doesn’t make sense because he’s justifying killing people,” said Hollis. “Society pretty much dictates that when someone decides to do that, they’re crazy.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “There are justifiable reasons for killing people, like self-defense. Cole was cold-blooded.” She struggled with the wolf, trying to shove it down, the way she usually did. The wolf wasn’t listening. Its claws were at the back of her neck, trying to bust out.