Chapter 29 Project Moonlight #3
I glanced down at my hands, palms still streaked with grit from the basement floor, and only then realized I was shaking.
With deliberate care, I pried my fingers off the bag that contained the folder and wiped them on my jeans.
My heart was a fish flopping inside my ribs.
I wanted to reach out, to touch Aiden, to anchor myself to him the way I’d wanted to in another life, but I couldn’t find the words for it, not now.
Beside me, Aiden’s grip on the wheel was unyielding. His golden eyes, still edged with something wild from his shift, flicked toward me for the briefest moment, as if making sure I wasn’t going to lose it completely.
Aiden reached across, resting his hand over mine. “We’ll figure this out,” he said, and I almost believed him.
The SUV coasted into a long curve, the tires humming reassurance against the road.
My heartbeat slowed, just a little, enough that I could think about what came next.
I would have to tell Mateo. I would have to tell Emily and Rita.
There would be consequences, but at least now I had a name for the monster under my bed.
At least now I knew what I was fighting.
That’s when my phone rang.
I stared at the phone, Emily’s name strobing across the screen, my thumb frozen for a half-beat before I answered.
“Hey…” I started, but my voice came out already tight with premonition.
Her words collided with mine, raw and wild. “Josie! He’s gone… Mateo’s gone…”
The pitch of her panic was so sharp it pierced the bubble of numbness I’d wrapped around myself in the car, and for half a second, everything inside me rearranged: my bones, my organs, the architecture of my fear.
I slapped the phone onto speaker so Aiden could hear, my hands suddenly too clumsy for coordination. “What? Emily, slow down. What happened?”
The background was chaos: thuds, the screech of a chair against linoleum, Ems’s voice distorted by movement.
“I went to check on him after breakfast. We’d been out feeding the chickens, and he said he wanted to lie down, so I told him to go inside and rest. Just for a minute, Josie, I swear.
But when I came back, he wasn’t there. And his door was locked.
I found him gone and… Josie…” She broke off, gasping, swallowing down a sound that was too close to a sob.
“His room. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. All of it’s covered in these…
these shapes, these symbols. They’re burned into the paint, like veins, and they’re… oh god, Josie, they’re glowing.”
A slow, sour dread spread from the base of my skull down my spine. I pictured the spare room in the farmhouse that we’ve claimed as ours. I pictured those same walls now crawling with phosphorescent veins, writhing like something alive.
“What kind of symbols?” I managed, forcing my voice to be steady for her sake. “Draw them. Take pictures. Don’t touch anything. We’re on our way.”
Aiden’s eyes cut to me, hard and glittering with the wolf’s protective focus. “Ask her if she smells anything unusual,” he murmured, steering the SUV onto a battered two-lane.
I relayed the question, and Emily was already two steps ahead. “I do. Something like… the air before a storm, but more bitter. And this other smell, cold and sharp, like metal and… dead flowers?” She sounded close to hyperventilating, her words tumbling over one another in a panicked rush.
Aiden turned to me, his face carved from stone. “Rift magic,” he mouthed, barely audible, and the world tilted on its axis.
I gripped the phone so hard I thought it might shatter. “Emily, listen to me. Was anything else weird this morning? Did Mateo say anything strange? Did anyone come by? Any phone calls, deliveries, or even someone lost on the road?”
She must have been running through the house now, the signal cutting in and out as she retraced her steps.
“No,” she said, a little calmer, panic damped down by the need for information.
“It was just us. Ethan left early for work. Mateo was quiet but not scared. He said…” Her voice faded for a moment, then came back, ragged.
“He said he dreamed he was swimming in a river made of stars. Like… actually swimming. He said it felt warm. He woke up smiling. That was all.”
A river made of stars.
The phrase hit me like a punch to the sternum, yanking loose a hundred dormant memories: childhood fairy tales, wrenching flashes of the nightmare in the dark forest, old stories my grandmother had whispered that sounded more like myths and old wives’ tales.
I tried to keep my voice from cracking. “We’re twenty minutes out. Stay in the house, lock the doors. Don’t let anyone, and I mean anyone, inside, okay?”
“Okay,” Emily whispered. “Just hurry. Please, Josie.”
The call dropped dead, leaving the car thick with the static of unshed screams.
Aiden pressed harder on the gas. His hands, still stained from the fight, clenched the wheel with a white-knuckled intensity. “They’re coming for him,” he said. “They know what he is.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to dam the flood of panic with reason, but it was useless. The world had contracted to a single point of need: find Mateo, save him at any cost. “How do we stop them? What do they want?”
Aiden’s jaw flexed, his gaze pinned to the road. “They want him… And not because he’s human.”
The phone buzzed in my lap, a new message. A photo from Emily. I opened it with shaking hands.
The image showed Mateo’s bedroom, but it had been transformed: every surface was laced with intricate, glowing symbols pulsing with a cold, blue-white light. In the center of the floor was a spiral, slick and precise, drawn in a substance that looked too dark to be paint.
My mind supplied the word: blood.
Aiden took one look and swore under his breath. “That’s a calling circle. Someone summoned him out.”
The floor dropped out from under me. “He’s alive,” I said, grasping at hope like a lifeline. “If they’d killed him, there wouldn’t be a trail, right?”
Aiden nodded. “He’s alive, but not here.” He met my eyes, his own wolf-bright and ferocious. “We’ll get him back, Josie. I swear it.”