Page 70 of It's You
Darcy blinked rapidly as more tears pooled in her eyes, spilling onto her cheeks in rushing streams.
“I shift for three days in every lunar cycle. Others of my kind shift more often, but I don’t. I don’t want to. I’ve learned howto control it almost all the time, but I can’t control it when the moon is full. I have tried so many different ways, but I can’t.”
Darcy looked at him and sobbed. “What else?”
“You don’t need to know?—”
“What else?” she persisted in a dead voice.
“It’s the stuff of nightmares for your kind. Please?—”
“The truth. Now.”
He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, looking down. She could hear him take two deep breaths before launching into it, cringing as he spoke.
“I have to feed when I turn, but I don’t hunt hum—your kind. I’m bound to you, so I refuse to hunt traditionally. So I eat fresh dead instead. Animals. Big game. And three days a month, I lock myself in a reinforced steel cage, a meat locker, under my garage with a dead?—”
Darcy gagged, then leaped off the bed like a gazelle, springing into his bathroom in time to vomit into the toilet. She retched and sobbed, holding her hair back with one hand until there was nothing left in her stomach, and she sank down on the bathroom tile, sitting up against the tub where he’d held her hand on Sunday.
I can’t lose you now.
It made her heart clutch to think of his words.
“Are you okay? Can I help you?” he called.
“No!”Youstay away from me.
She pulled a hand towel from the rack beside the sink and wiped her mouth, stalking out of the bathroom and sitting across the room from him on the edge of the rocking chair by the windows where he’d kissed her so tenderly on Sunday morning.
“When were you going to tell me?” she asked, thinking that a lie of omission was just as bad as a bold-faced one.
“Darcy. I wanted you to get to know me. I didn’t want it to…define me.”
“Itdoesdefine you,” she whispered. “Itisyou.”
“It’s only a part of who I am.”
“What if you weren’t in the cage?” she demanded.
“I’malwaysin the cage at the full moon.”
“What if you weren’t?”
He bit his lower lip, shaking his head back and forth.
“Answer me!” she demanded.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said softly. “I would never hurtyou.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do. Ican’thurt you. It’s impossible.”
She believed him.
“Okay. But you could hurt someone else. Someone I love. Amory. My mother. Willow. My neighbors. Their children. You don’t hunt because you lock yourself away. That doesn’t mean you’ve mitigated the impulse. What if…” She cringed, closing her eyes against the thought that her heart had lured such a creature to her town. Unintentionally, she had placed her entire town in danger. “You can’t stay here.”
“I can. I’m strong. I can control it.”
