The Moonlit Curse

Ch 22: A Selfish Request

"Did you do this to me?"

August's whole body stilled, and a mix of shock and hurt glistened in his deep silver eyes. "No," he breathed after a long second. "Goddess, no, of course not."

"How do you know? One the full moon, you turn feral. You have no memory of what you've done."

Slowly, August backed up until he was sitting on the edge of Elise's bed. Kiya sat up just as slowly, watching him warily as he sifted through the bundles of paper until he found the one for the Silverkeep werewolves and tossed it at her. "It's thinner than the others. I take it your masters don't have much to go on," he said with another sigh. "Which means that no matter what I say, you're just going to have more questions, and a lot of it won't make sense. But I'll try to answer them all. I won't hide anything from you."

Kiya flipped through the pages without really seeing them. Like all the others, she helped Elise put it together before they left the capital. August was right. All they had were a few rumors that had to travel across the country and through several interrogation-level interviews to be written into the archives. There were also a couple of concept drawings of mutated wolf heads on human bodies. None of them depicted the true horror of what she saw that night. At the end was a summary of the heavily edited version of Silverkeep's history. No mention of the war, the massacre, or the arrangement between the two kingdoms.

"Start from the beginning," she said hoarsely. "How do you know you didn't bite me?"

"Most werewolves turn savage on the full moon and have no control over their actions or memory of what they have done. But there is a small, small number who remain fully conscious. I am one of them. After you and your team left for your patrol, I locked myself in my cellar the way I always do on the full moon."

"Why? If you can control yourself, why lock yourself up?"

A muscle in his jaw twitched, and just like that the air was thick with tension again. Already, she was testing his promise. "When I started over, I spent a few years in complete solitude," he finally answered stiffly, as if he was chewing on every word. "I went thirty months without seeing or speaking to another living being. I had enough of running wild as a younger man. Now I prefer to wait out the full moons behind doors sealed by rune-carved locks."

"Alright," Kiya blew out a long, slow breath and ran her hands through her hair again. "So, if you don't go feral, and you remember everything, and you didn't bite me, then there's another... someone else had to do it. Who?"

August raised a critical eyebrow. Her inability to even say it out loud was becoming all the more obvious. "The man from the other night. I don't know who he is. I've never seen him before."

"The other... that was real?"

The back of her head was starting to throb. It was hard to divide what was a dream and what was real from the last couple of days. Too many dreams. Too much new information. Everything was blurring together, just like it did before.

"Fuck," she hissed. "I can't do this again. This can't keep happening."

"What? What's going on?"

"How can I trust what you're telling me? I have no way to know if you're telling the truth. I mean, it's pretty fucking convenient for you if there is some stranger walking around turning people."

August huffed out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl. "All I'm trying to do is help you. Sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith."

"But why do you want to help me? What do you get out of it?"

"Is it really so hard to believe that I don't want anything?"

"People don't just do things out of the goodness of their hearts." Even she didn't believe her own words. Kiya pulled her thighs up to her chest and dropped her chin on her knees. "How long have you been a... when were you bitten?"