Full Moon #5
"If you apologize to me again," I say, "I'm going to bite you back. I mean it. I'm a woman of my word. I once filed a complaint with a catering company over a missing fruit platter and they still talk about it."
He blinks at me. Something in his face loosens, just barely.
"I asked you to," I say, quieter. "You asked me if this was okay, and I told you yes, and then I asked you to claim me. That's not a thing you get to apologize for."
He looks at me for a long moment, and I watch him let go of something, some last hold. Then he lowers his head to my shoulder and presses his mouth to the mark, soft, like he's trying to take it back and keep it at the same time.
"It doesn't mean anything," he says against my skin. "The bite. It doesn't... there's no bond. No claiming. Not the way the stories say."
"I know."
"And you're not..." He stops, and I feel him swallow against my shoulder. "The bite doesn't turn people. Not from me, not like this. It has to be the wolf, fully shifted, and even then most people don't survive it. You're not becoming anything. You're safe. You're still you."
"So what you're telling me," I say, running my hand through his hair, "is that I got the full werewolf claiming experience and my only souvenir is a bite mark that'll be gone by next week. No superpowers. No glowing eyes. No monthly subscription."
The corner of his mouth moves. It's barely there, but I see it.
"I'm a little disappointed, honestly. I was hoping for at least one party trick. Do you have any idea how many times I've had to watch a man struggle with a jar lid? We could have had something."
He laughs. It's a real one, rough and surprised, and it breaks open something in my chest. I collect it, file it away with the others, and I know I'll spend the rest of my life trying to earn it again.
"You're ridiculous," he says.
"I'm the woman who just told a werewolf to claim her and meant every word. There's a difference."
Blood has started on his shoulder, a fresh line of red over the pink, and I touch it. "You're bleeding."
"It'll close." He covers my hand with his. "It always closes."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then he says, "I should have moved seats."
"What?"
"The first time I saw you. I should have moved seats. I knew you'd be trouble."
"Trouble?"
"The good kind." He lifts his head and looks at me, and there's something in his face I haven't seen before, something open, something unguarded. "The kind I can't afford."
I don't know what to say to that, so I kiss him, soft, and he settles beside me, and I curl into him.
His hand finds the bite mark again, thumb moving over it like he's memorizing it.
It's already fading, the sting settling into a deep throb that I know will be a bruise by morning, a set of teeth-shaped crescents that will be gone in a week.
No bond. No tether. Just a man who bit me and said mine, and meant it.
The mark will fade. I don't think the word will.
I curl closer and let it sit in my chest like a coal.
The radiator ticks. The wind pushes at the window. I am more comfortable than I have any sensible reason to be.
That's the thought I'm holding when he goes still.
It's not a normal stillness. It's the stillness from before, the animal stillness, the head-up, listening stillness, and I feel it through his whole body, the way his arm tightens around me, the way his breathing stops.
"Dean?"
"Shh."
The room is quiet. The wind has dropped. And then I hear it, the sound that made his body go rigid: something dragging across the outside of the door. Slow. Deliberate. Three long passes of something sharp against the wood, and then nothing.
He's out of the bed before I can breathe. I watch him cross the room in the dark, unafraid in a way that makes my heart stop, and he puts his hand on the doorknob, and he braces, and he opens the door.
Snow blows in. Cold air floods the room. The light from the hallway spills out across the walkway, and he stands there, looking down, and the stillness in his body changes, becomes something else.
"Dean?"
He doesn't answer. He steps back, and I get up, and I wrap the quilt around myself, and I walk to the door, and I look.
Three long marks are cut through the paint of the door, deep grooves in the wood, fresh and pale, running from chest height down to waist height.
Claw marks. Too big for any animal I've ever seen.
And in the snow beyond the walkway, leading away from the door into the dark, there are tracks.
Paw prints, enormous, deeper than my fist, disappearing into the trees.
The wind picks up. The snow swallows the last of them.
I look at Dean. His face is pale in the light from the hallway, and his eyes are on the trees, and I can see him reading the tracks the way he read the sky on the plane, counting minutes, calculating distances.
"He knows," I say.
"He knows." He closes the door slowly and locks it, and stands with his back to it. "He knows where you are. He knows where we are. And he wants us to know he was here."
The room is very quiet. The radiator ticks. The moon is high over the trees, and somewhere out there, in the blue-white dark, something is watching the door.