Chapter 36 Theo
THEO
Ilose track of time, fucking Chloe there in the heat and light of the fire.
Eventually, we wind up cocooned together in one of the blankets.
Chloe is limp and sleepy in my arms, tucked up in a ball against my chest. I’m inside her, of course, her pussy warm and wet around my cock, and our position lets me kiss and bite at the slope of her shoulder.
“Don’t stop,” she murmurs, thrusting listlessly back against me.
Her words are slurred. “Don’t you fucking stop. ”
I brush her cheek with my fingers, then reach down through the warmth of the blanket to toy with her clit.
It’s hot and swollen and probably aching, although I haven’t been counting how many times she’s come.
Or how many times I’ve come, for that matter.
Inside her. On her. I feel like I could keep going.
Chloe, though, is clearly winding down. I press my hand on her hip to still her lazy, sleepy thrusts.
She gives a soft, needy little whine that just makes me pull her in closer before I go back to brushing her clit.
One more orgasm, and I think she’ll fall asleep.
She’s already halfway there; her heartbeat is slowing down, same as her breath.
I nuzzle her neck, roll her hard clit around between my thumb and forefinger. Her body pulses. I press a little harder, and—
Chloe cries out, jerks against me, and then slumps with a sigh. Her pussy contracts around my cock, fluttering like a butterfly.
Although I don’t particularly want to, I slide out of her, rolling her onto her back among the thick layers of blankets. She blinks up at me, her gaze blurry and unfocused in the firelight.
“Don’t stop,” she breathes. “Keep fucking me until I’m dead.”
Her words send heat jolting toward my cock, but I shake my head no and brush her tangled hair out of her face.
“I wanted—” she mumbles. “I was so—you left us—”
“I’m here now,” I sign, although her words make my heart feel tight and strange. I wish I could make her understand the killing moon. That it’s like the tide, something that washes in every few decades and drags me out to sea.
I tried, but in the end, even I couldn’t fight it. But at least I came back to her.
“Sleep,” I say, and her eyes roll back, her lashes fluttering against her cheek. She curls up against me.
I don’t move until her breath gets quiet and even, until I can tell from the sounds of her body that she’s dreaming.
Only then do I extract myself from her, and it’s almost painful, that separation of our skin.
Outside of the blankets, the air is frigid, and I wrap her up tight and arrange her head on one of the pillows from the couch.
The fire flickers, giving off its paltry warmth. I don’t want to extinguish it, not in this dark, terrible cold. At least it sounds like the storm is over. The winds are silent. Everything’s still.
I think of the rows of empty lakes houses.
People always leave things behind when they flee my violence.
I saw it in ’65, in ‘71, in ’87—but I mostly remember the aftermath of 2001, when Veritas finally died for good.
After I revived, I spent days picking through the dusty remains, gathering up clothes and shoes and canned food.
Clothes. I’m going to need clothes if I’m going to go out in the snow.
I leave Chloe to sleep in front of the fire. If it spreads out of the fireplace, I’ll smell it. And I tell myself I won’t go far.
Then I explore Chloe’s house, moving quietly through the cold air to open each shut door. Rooms I never bothered to look at before. Why would I? Chloe wasn’t in them.
One of the rooms is being used for storage, the space stacked high with cardboard boxes.
That’s where I find some men’s clothes, the smell of their former owner so faint I know he left them here years ago.
Jeans, a flannel shirt, tennis shoes. No jacket.
They don’t fit well, but they’ll be good enough to get me to the other houses.
I check on Chloe one more time, tucking the blanket tightly around her shoulders. Sniff the air to get a sense of what a contained fire is supposed to smell like.
I leave through the front door, not the back, so I don’t risk waking her.
When I pull the door open, a foot of snow is piled up in the doorway, and for a moment, all I can do is stand there, letting what little warm air is in here out.
The last time I saw this place was the night of the killing moon, and now it’s transformed into something beautiful and completely unrecognizable.
An unmoving, alien landscape carved out of ice.
I plunge into the snow, dragging the door shut behind me. The cold damp immediately soaks through the jeans, but I have my wits about me now, and I’m prepared for the burn of the cold. I also have a mission.
I trudge through the calf-high snow, blinking at the glittering expanse. The air is very still and very cold, and although it’s nighttime, everything is far brighter than I’m used to. A nearly full moon hangs overhead, and the snow reflects its shivery light, bathing everything in silver.
Not a killing moon, though. Not even close.
I make my way to Chloe’s neighbors, my first victims from that night. I had been in a blood haze when I rowed across the lake, and their pier was where I landed. Chloe’s house had felt dark to me. Empty. But this one, it was full of life I was meant to snuff out.
There’s no life here now.
I break the door down. Inside is empty and echoing, not a single piece of furniture in sight. I do a half-hearted search but don’t want to waste my time, so I move on. Not to Oliver’s house, but to the house on the other side of this one, which has a stale whiff of humans about it.
This one does have furniture, old and mismatched and covered in a fine layer of dust. In one of the upstairs closets, I find a rain jacket and a pair of boots, both a size too small.
I put them on anyway. In the garage, I find a tank of propane, and that I cart over to Chloe’s back porch. Then I continue my search.
I move from house to house, as silent as the ghost I’ve always pretended to be.
In each one, I breathe in the old scent of the humans who used to live there, and I can’t stop myself from wondering about this most recent killing moon.
Do they have a name for it? They name them, sometimes.
I’m curious how they reported on it, how they described me.
Usually, that’s one of the things I look for while I do my salvage after a revival—newspapers.
Clippings for my trophy box back in my cabin.
But this time, I don’t feel the urge to read the story of my murders. It felt different, this killing moon. Maybe because I wasn’t really doing it for me.
I was doing it for Oliver, even if Chloe can’t understand that.
Perhaps that’s why I skip Oliver’s house as I make my way along the lakeshore, my breath puffing out in the frigid air. I keep hearing Chloe’s voice in my head — You killed his fucking family!
I did. And for some reason, I don’t want to know what the aftermath looks like, if anyone came and cleaned the blood off the walls and out of the carpet. If Oliver’s things are still inside.
He’s in foster care! They won’t even let me speak to him!
I wrench the lock off a house a few doors down from Chloe’s. Foster care. That was not what I wanted for Oliver when I did this. I thought he would be able to stay with Chloe—that she would take him someplace far away, yes, that I’d never see them again—but I thought he’d be safe. With her.
I shove the door in, letting out cold, stale air.
Another house still filled with the detritus of human life.
I really don’t understand them, I’m starting to realize.
Humans. I don’t understand why more of them aren’t like my mother, or like Chloe.
After all, my mother loved me even when she knew there was a chance I would turn out to be a monster.
There’s no risk of that with Oliver, and yet his parents treated him like a monster anyway.
Of course they had to die, along with his cruel older brother. But why not let him stay with Chloe?
That was what I wanted. That was the gift I wanted to give her before I went into the ground. And it was humans who fucked it up.
These thoughts trail around after me as I methodically make my way through the house, finally ending up in the garage. And that’s where, finally, I’m rewarded: a portable generator sits in the corner, covered with a fine layer of cobwebs. I breathe out.
My original gift failed. Maybe she’ll like this one better.
I hoist the generator up in my arms and go back out into the strange, glowing night.
I’m not used to the lake being so quiet.
There are always animals and insects singing their songs to each other, always the constant rustle of leaves and the soft lapping of the lake against the shore.
But the snow silences everything. There’s just the starry night overhead, the bright blanket of snow beneath, and the frozen air.
I set the generator on Chloe’s back porch, next to the propane tank.
I used to have a generator like this, many years ago, before I learned how to siphon electricity off the power lines still dangling around the remains of Veritas.
A much quieter solution, to be sure, and one that didn’t require me to constantly steal fuel.
But as I hook up the propane tank, it comes back to me easily, and within a few moments, the generator rumbles to life.
I shut it off, then clear a path to the back door and slip inside.
Chloe’s still asleep, and the fire is still where it needs to be, well within the frame of the fireplace.
I go into the laundry room and switch off all the breakers, then go back outside and clear another path to her electrical panel and connect the generator directly into her house.
It won’t run everything, of course, but it’s enough to run the heater. Enough to give her a little bit of comfort.
I crank the generator until it’s rumbling again, melting the snow into the patio. Then I slip back into the laundry room, take a deep breath, and switch over the breaker that controls Chloe’s heater.
A thump echoes through the house, followed by a faint electrical buzzing that I’m sure only I can feel. A second later, the heater kicks on, smelling faintly like electricity.
I don’t know if it’s good enough. She’s human, after all, and I felt her rage at me earlier, even if it was intertwined with lust. I don’t know if this will be enough to calm that rage, but at least I know I tried.