Page 8 of Blood Moon
On the second page, underneath the illustrations of how Aadan transformed into a wolf, was a small Latin sentence:Amor vincit omnia.
This was where Rena’s story differentiated itself. Her storytelling was less bleak. There were more mythical creatures, more adventures, and in the end, Aadan fell in love.
“You know, there’s some truth in the old story.”
I looked up to see Abba across from me, peering down at the same glass case. Her skin shimmered in the yellow light, and there was something warm and honeyed about her that made everything she did seem inviting.
“Really?”
A gentle hum slid from her lips. Then a smile. “Wolves have been around si—”
Em pulled my arm, her face flushing. “Looks like our group is leaving now. We’d better catch up.”
I was jolted away from the case with barely the chance to say goodbye.
Em pulled me closer and whispered, “I’ve heard she’s an old bat who believes in fairytales.”
I scrunched my nose, wondering who she’d heard that from, and if it was just a rumor. As I returned my gaze to where we’d been, there Abba was, fixing her scarf and looking at the book below her. I couldn’t help but think about how I wouldn’t mind being classified as an old bat who believed in fairytales.
Because believing in fairytales meant there was hope somewhere in the world, innocence.
And I wished I still had that.
A little after two in the morning, Stevie was still in the communal bathroom shower, and I was all smiles as I returned to our dorm room, removing my shower cap and placing it on the hanger behind the door.
Stevie had brought a speaker into the bathroom, and all of us girls screamed out song lyrics until one of the RAs came in. A complaint from someone saying we were too loud, which we were, but the trouble was worth the memories that had been made.
Apart from that, our dorm room was really beginning to feel like a home. We’d finished plastering framed posters and pictures on the cinder block walls with tacky, strung small lights across the ceiling to create a warm and inviting ambiance. We’d arranged our beds in a way that allowed for a small living room area, complete with a love seat, a rug comfy and thick enough to fall asleep on, a mini fridge, a microwave, and a TV.
The window was next to my bed, cracked open and sweeping in a cooler breeze that made the curtains dance. It had taken Stevie and me almost twenty minutes to get them perfectly in place. That felt like years ago now.
I gazed into the night. Hester Hall backed up to a wild green forest where the underbrush snaked around the roots of shrubs and trees until it stopped abruptly at manicured grass. The leaves rustled gently, and I inhaled the smell of wet wood and moss.
Back in the shadows, branches snapped—a noise that caused me to lean in, to look harder. At first, I thought I saw a person dressed in black, pressed against the trunk of a tree. The sight made something in my chest jump, and I hurried to pull the blinds closed.
But on a second look, the darkness revealed something else: two faint round circles glowing back at me.
Not circles.Eyes.
They were bright yellow with a green glare to them, reminiscent of a large animal. A blink, and they were gone. I locked the window and closed the blinds, my heart racing.
As I lay in bed with my towel wrapped tightly around me, I felt the panic pushing me to move, to run. A deep-seated reminder that first, the eyes in the dark were too large to belong to any animal I’d learned about in my eighteen years.
And second, potentially more terrifyingly, I swore I’d seen those eyes in the night before. It was precisely five years ago, the day Rena left and never returned.
CHAPTER5
This I pass to you: fight it or accept it.
Article V, Lost Letters from Aadan the First
Anxiety was an understatement.
I tried to convince myself that everything I saw last night was a figment of my imagination, a symptom that came from lack of sleep, but even as I unwrapped my hair from my bonnet, even as I pulled on my jeans, my shirt, nothing worked.
Those eyes I’d seen outside my window haunted me, and this time, I knew they were real because the first time I’d seen them was the night Rena left.
I remembered the moon. It was large and burning red as we rushed to the station five years ago. It seemed fictitious. Too large. Too perfectly round. A face there, staring down at us.
