Carolina Moon

Chapter 10

Lucy

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Lucy had no grip on reality. No earth beneath her feet. She was drifting away, like a balloon cut at the string.

David had just been brutally murdered in front of her. And the wolf, it had turned—it had become...Finley.

She was still screaming—hadn't stopped until Finn frantically approached and clasped a hand over her mouth. She felt the blood smear on her face, smelled the copper, tasted the bitter. Lucy screamed out again, the sound squelched by his bloody palm.

When Finn realized that smearing a pint of blood all over her face was irrefutably making things worse, he ripped his hand away and gasped. "I'm sorry—Listen, I—"

"No!" Lucy wailed, clapping her hands over her mouth. "You killed him! You killed my ex! Oh my god—"

"No. No, no," Finn replied, waving his hands frantically in the air. "No, he's not dead. Take a look for yourself."

Lucy was afraid to see him—afraid to glance over to the corpse that laid strewn on the lawn. But when Finn stepped aside for her to take a look, he wasn't there anymore. Instead, a pile of ash laid where his body had been. In a damn near perfect outline of him, too.

Lucy felt a numbness creep up her extremities. She swayed and her eye-sight went bleary. 

"Oh, bloody hell. Don't faint on me," she heard Finn say.

Then everything went dark.

When Lucy awoke, she was in her own bed. In her own room. In her own apartment.

She wondered for a moment if she'd dreamed it all, but when Lucy tossed her blankets off, she was still wearing her jeans. Still dressed in her jacket from her shift that evening. She chanced a look at the clock. Two in the morning.

There was a sound rattling from her kitchen, and Lucy wasn't sure whether she should have been unnerved or angry. She looked around her room for something to defend herself with, selecting an old riding trophy from her equestrian days. She stalked slowly into the kitchen with the object behind her back, hearing the sound of drifting music from the speakers by her television. Smelling cooked pasta, watching steam rise from the pot of water that seemed to be magically boiling itself.

Then, a creak from behind her.

Lucy spun, swinging the trophy—

It stopped, captured in Finn's hand. He looked clean and wet, smelled of Lucy's fruity body wash and...had he used her hair mask, too?

"Calm," he whispered slowly, "down."

Lucy felt her chest heaving, large uneven breaths racking her lungs.

"Who," she whispered back, just as slowly, "are you?"

Finn delicately plucked the trophy from her hand, releasing one finger at a time. "I'm not going to hurt you," hesaid. "I'm your friend, Lucy."

"My friend?" Lucy looked around at the food piled on the counter, all the ingredients for a pasta pulled out of her cupboards. He'd certainly made himself at home. She touched her face, finding the blood from before had been wiped away. "How did you get into my apartment?" Lucy asked.

"You passed out," Finn said. "I found your key in the pocket of your bag."

"How did you know which apartment I live in?" Lucy pressed.

Finn opened his mouth and looked away, like he was thumbing through a file cabinet of explanations in the back of his mind. Eventually, he seemed to give up and admitted, "I've been watching you?"

The way he said it as more of a question than an answer set Lucy's face on fire. She smacked him, open-palm, again and again and again, "Get out! Get out of my apartment! Out!"

"Lucy," Finn said calmly. He caught her wrists gently and held them still, not moving, not harming her—just holding her in place. "I'm your friend," he said again. "Your mate, love." Lucy didn't understand what he'd meant by that. She barely knew the guy. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'm here because I got you involved in something, and now I need to protect you."

Protect her?

Lucy's mind suddenly reared back to the sight of David, lying on the lawn. The way his body had turned to ashes in less than a blink of her eye. "David—I need to call the police. David—"

"The lad stalking you home? That wasn't David, Lucy. You saw yourself—there was no corpse."

Lucy searched his eyes, failing to find answers in either one of them. "Who...was it then?"

Finn gave her a difficult look, and asked, "You know what I am, surely?"

"How would I know anything about you?" Lucy replied.

Quickly, Finn turned away from her. She only noticed now that he was wearing an apron she'd received as a birthday gift from her grandmother two years ago. It had been lovingly stitched together with cupcake-textile fabric, in all the pastel colors of a pallet fit for an Easter egg, but Finn wore it unashamedly.

He moved to where he'd laid Lucy's bag down on the kitchen island and dumped out the contents. She opened her mouth, prepared to shout at him when he produced her book from the pile—the second book in the werewolf series.

He pointed to it. "You read this, didn't you? I thought surely, you..."

Lucy's face flared. She marched to him, clawing for the book. "That's a friend's—"

But Finn yanked it out of reach. "Let's see how accurate it is," he said. He flipped through the pages, too tall for Lucy to snag it in time before he was pursing his lips at a passage. "What is this?" Finn cooed. Then he began to read aloud, "Alexandra looked up at Zad's strong, sculpted body. His divine manhood glistened with—"

Lucy batted the book out of his hands like a basketball player blocking a shot. It went skittering across the island and hit the floor with a thud. Her face radiated with heat, and her hands trembled in embarrassment as she rounded the island to collect the book. "I told you, it's not mine," she said. "And what does it have to do with you, anyway?"

All the humor seemed to dissipate from Finn's face as he approached her. He leaned in, blocking Lucy against the counter. One hand on each side of her, flat against the laminate top.

 "Listen to me closely," he said. He looked her in the eye as he spoke, and Lucy had the strange sensation that it was for her. That he was inviting her into his gaze, allowing her to look around for the shadowy lies that simply didn't exist within the ever-blue.

When he was sure he had her attention, Finn said, "You hit me with your car a little over a week ago. Not hard enough to do any damage, but I was a bit fucked already from a previous engagement. You took me to your shed. You talked to me about that David prick and what he'd done, and you fed me chicken—absolutely revolting, by the way."

Chills marched up Lucy's arms. Finn was too close to ignore—too pretty to pretend she wasn't intimidated by all physical aspects of him. And the way he looked at her made Lucy feel like her heart was being plucked right out of her chest. She couldn't stand the attention anymore, and crouched to slip suddenly under his arms and escape the closeness.

Then Lucy looked down at her book. The cover looked the same as every other cliché romance novella she'd ever seen—a shirtless man and a hot model, standing in front of the moonlight with a transparent wolf in the background.

"How—"

A knock came from the door.

"Lucy? It's me. Open up!"

Lucy panicked at the sound of Cam's voice. Her face washed of color, and suddenly she was dragging Finn by the apron, pushing him down the hall with all her strength. "You need to hide. Hurry!"

"Hide where?" Finn whispered back at her.

"I don't know! Just hide!"

Lucy shoved the bedroom door open and pushed Finn inside with her foot. She heard him crash into something, but she didn't have time to investigate before pulling the door shut behind her.

Cam was here. And he sounded pissed.