Chapter 6-Sloane-ten years ago

Not long after sunrise, the monster pulls our minivan over and parks it on the shoulder. I’m confused why we stopped, because we are in the middle of nowhere, nothing but thick coverings of trees as far as the eye can see on both sides of the highway. I’m thirsty, I need to pee, and my cheek throbs in time to the beat of my heart. My heart races like it does when I watch scary movies, but now I know, there’s no escaping this by the change of the channel. This is real life. A werewolf has killed my parents, my dog, and taken me and my baby sister hostage. I don’t know what he intends to do with us. I eye the forests around me and shudder. Out here no one would even hear me scream.

“Why have we stopped?” I work up the courage to ask.

CeCe stirs on the floor beneath me. I can smell that she’s peed on herself. She’s too little to go so long holding it in. At home, Mom puts training pants on her at night while she’s still learning. Mom is working on nighttime potty training, even getting up to take CeCe to the bathroom in the night and being careful about how much my sister has to drink close to bedtime. But the wolf in the front seat drove us through the night, not stopping to allow us to go to the bathroom or get a drink or stretch our legs, and her pullup has soaked through. I’m glad my sister slept through it at least. I’m glad Mom kept that blanket over her head so she couldn’t see the things I did last night.

“You ask too many questions. Get her up and ready to go,” he snaps.

Go where? There’s nothing out here. What is he going to do with us? Why did he take us? The way he talked last night, he acted like he knew Mom. He called her bad names. Said he’s claimed her. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But something I’m aware of, when the sunlight hits the wide eyes of my little sister, her eyes seem familiar. Golden, glowing almost. Like the monster’s had last night.

He gets out of the van and walks around back to the hatch where he starts to rummage through the gear. I know Mom and Dad has bags packed for all of us back there and some emergency supplies. At least I’ll be able to change CeCe out of her wet pants.

“Good morning sunny bunny,” I manage to find a smile for her though I can’t find many reasons to smile, “we’re going on an adventure today. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

I lie as I smooth down the flyaway hairs from her pigtails. CeCe doesn’t need to know the truth. She’s too young to understand any of this. I’ll protect her in any way I can. I wait anxiously for her to say something. I hope her words aren’t stuck still. I hope she’ll be okay.

“Where’s Mommy? How did you get that booboo on your face?” she asks.

I swallow down the burn of tears, “I fell and scraped it. But Mommy isn’t coming on our adventure today. But maybe we’ll see her again later. Daddy is at work. But our new friend is going to take us.”

CeCe gazes at the stranger standing at the back of the van. He pays her little attention as he’s pulling open the bags our parents packed for us. I grit my teeth as his filthy hands touch our things. He’s a liar, a murderer, and a thief. I remember the pocketknife Dad keeps in his essentials bag. I wonder if I can get to it.

“I want Mommy. I don’t like him. He’s a stranger and he needs to take a bath. I want to go home,” she pouts, crossing her little arms.

I see tears welling up in her eyes. If I don’t come up with something fast, she’s going to throw a tantrum. A meltdown is close, not that I can blame her after all that has happened. And I don’t think the monster will react well to her fit.

“We’ll go home later. Right now, we’re going on a scavenger hunt, CeCe. We’re going to find all kinds of things. Butterflies. Wildflowers. Caterpilla-”

We both jump at the sound of his harsh voice, “Time to go. Get out of the van.”

“Let me at least get her clothes changed first. She’s dirty. And get her a drink. She’s little and she hasn’t had anything to drink in hours. There’s supplies in the back,” I argue.

He growls, “We haven’t got time for this. She’ll be fine. She’s got my blood in her veins and she will learn to toughen up. Wolfs aren’t meant to be coddled and live in houses with soft beds. We’re meant to live off the land and roam the wilds beneath the moon and stars. It’s time she learns what she is and how to live like a wolf.”

CeCe shrinks away from the bad man. She doesn’t like him anymore than I do. She bites her jutted out bottom lip. The things he says make even less sense to her.

“What are you talking about? She’s a human, not a wolf! You’re crazy just like my mom said you were!”

He moves incredibly fast. Unnaturally fast. In seemingly the space between one heartbeat to the next, he has the van door jerked open, and his hands grip tightly around my arms, his eyes burn like liquid gold. He drags me from the van and slams me up against the door so hard my head rings off the metal. I see darkness creeping in on the edges of my vision before the world comes into focus again. I’m too stunned to speak, as his hot, rancid breath is close to my face.

“She is my cub! She is a wolf. In time she will shift into her wolf skin and run free among the trees beneath the moon! She is not a human, I am her father. I sired her and that bitch you call Mother stole her from me! You will learn to respect me and fall in line little bitch. I will break you. I will make you into an obedient mate. Everyone submits to me!”

My voice is a whisper as it leaves me, “My mom didn’t. And you aren’t her father! Jack Cross is her Father. You’re a monster!”

CeCe whimpers from inside the van. I hold down the monster’s gaze. I know my defiance and smart mouth will likely only get me killed or bring me more pain, but it’s the only weapon I have against him. I’m afraid, but I won’t let him break me anymore than he already has. I won’t submit. I will never be his mate. I’ll die first. No, I’ll kill him first!

“You haven’t seen the monster in me yet, girl,” he smiles through yellow teeth.

I don’t respond and I try and keep my face blank so he doesn’t see how scared I am. He gathers up some gear from the trunk, I notice he has our camping tent he stole from the garage. He doesn’t stop to let me change CeCe’s clothes, but he does allow me to grab the bags our parents packed us. I help CeCe put her smaller ballerina backpack on, them hoist the larger bag onto my own back. I slip Dad’s knife into the front pocket while the wolf scans the road.

I take CeCe by the hand and we follow the monster into the woods. I get a bad feeling the deeper among the trees we go. Roots trip and tangle up our feet, especially CeCe’s. I can smell rot among the pine and blooms starting to open. Animals, both small and large alike, flee before us, and I know the monster is the reason they run. They can sense it inside him just like Max could.

 The woods are no place for a little girl. At least the monster allowed us to put on some shoes. It’s early March, the weather cold, especially with the thick canopy of trees blocking the weak sunlight. CeCe shivers as she walks by me. I pull her close as I can to try and keep her warm. She is back to not saying much. We walk too long and too far to keep track as the wolf sets a brutal pace. I do the best I can to make it all a game to her by playing I Spy and pointing out objects we see along the way on our scavenger hunt. But I’m not sure I have her convinced this is an adventure, as the two of us are with a smelly stranger, far from home in the middle of the woods with no picnic basket, and Mom never let us take hikes in the woods before. We used to avoid wooded areas altogether and now I understand why. Mom feared the monsters that lived in places like this.

When I can no longer hold my bladder, I ask the bad man to stop so I can find a bush to relieve myself behind. I’m beyond humiliated when he denies my request and tells me to go where I stand. He won’t allow me out of his sight, as if I’ll run off. I refuse to pee in front of him. So, I clench my legs shut and follow him deeper into the woods. I hate him. I imagine the way I will kill him when I feel the warmth creeping down my legs. But the alternative was even more embarrassing.

I have a headache from where he slammed it into the van door. My raw cheek burns and my throat is dry like a desert. Hunger starts to gnaw at my belly. I’m not sure how much longer I can go on like this, and CeCe sags beside me.  I pick her up even though I’m so tired my legs feel like they are going to fall off.

“We need to rest! CeCe can’t keep going on like this. She needs food and water. Where are you taking us?” I demand.

“Where she belongs. I hear a stream up ahead. We can drink there. The moon will provide for us.”

I’m horrified by the suggestion of drinking straight from an unfiltered and polluted stream. He really is crazy and seems like one of those nature survivalists or something. But little do I know, it’s only the beginning. Over the next couple days, the wolf falls into a routine of making camp by day and traveling through the forest on foot during the night. Even while he sleeps, I can’t find a way to escape. His body blocks the entrance to the tent, his hearing too sharp. It’s miserably long days being cooped up in the tent, and even worse nights of blistered feet and long miles over uneven terrain not meant for human legs. The wolf doesn’t seem to care that CeCe and I struggle while he is surefooted even on two legs. I have scraped up knees and bruised palms to show for it.

My sister adapts quicker to roaming in the forest than I do, learning where to put her feet, and how not to snap as many twigs, but I won’t allow myself to consider what the wolf said about her is true. CeCe is human. She doesn’t change into a monster beneath the full moon. And this monster who drags us through places humans weren’t meant to go, isn’t her father, our daddy is Jack Allen Cross. A computer analysist who has a bad sweet tooth and likes documentaries about how things are made and likes to cook everything on a grill and likes to laugh over bad jokes and is the only one who can make Mom smile on her bad nights and who loves his daughters more than all the stars in the sky.

I do my best to entertain CeCe while the wolf traps us in his tent all day. In between napping, I tell her stories, braid her hair, and we use berry juice to play tic-tac-toe on the tent floor and walls. We count things we find. I keep her as clean as I can, though with limited access to freshwater, it’s not an easy job. While the wolf slumbers, we eat the trail mix and granola bars, and drink the Gatorade our parents packed. I wonder if anyone is looking for us. I hope Mom and Dad and Max had good funerals and are all in Heaven. I keep the pocketknife hidden and wait for my chance to stab the wolf with it.

Even though it’s harder to see and move about the forest, I’m glad we travel at night and catch sleep by day. Because my dreams are so bad when the sun is up, I’m scared of how terrible they’ll be at night. Some of my nightmares seem to follow me even when my eyes are open. I watch as my parents and Max die over and over again. As the monster gets inside the shed and finds us. But most of all it’s glowing eyes and screams that haunts my dreams worst of all. CeCe asks about our parents and Max less and less, and I’m scared she’s starting to forget them already.

During the night, he makes us help him forage for food in the form of berries, mushrooms, and wiggly white worms hiding under decaying logs. I refuse to eat the worms even when he threatens to claw up my other cheek. I nearly puke when he eats them by the handful. He forces us to drink from streams. He gets angry when CeCe cries or we complain about being tired or hungry or wanting to rest. I carry her on my back when she gets too tired to walk another step.

By the end of the second day, my brow burns with fever and my cheek has started to smell bad. My fingers come away with pus when I inspect the scratches the monster left me there. The pain has gotten worse again, after it faded at first or I had gotten used to its dull ache. I know its infected and I search the bag to find the first aid kit my parents packed for times like this. I dab at the wound gently with a piece of gauze and swallow an aspirin.

The wolf eyes me from across the tent while CeCe naps. I’ve learned to be afraid more when his eyes start to glow as then his temper is at the worst. When his eyes start to glow, I really have to watch what I say and keep CeCe quiet. His eyes aren’t glowing now, but he gets angry so fast and that can change quickly.

“The wound has soured,” he points out the obvious, “we must cut out the rot or it will spread.”

I watch him warily as he moves to a bag of things he stole from our house in Camden. Mostly Daddy’s outdoor gear, though now I understand we never really used much of it and Mom feared the woods. She hadn’t even let us sleep in the tent in the backyard. He pulls out a hunting knife Dad’s grandfather gave him on one of his birthday’s as a kid and a bottle of the liquor Daddy kept up on a high shelf at home. Anger tightens my belly as I watch him with Dad’s stuff. I won’t let his filthy hands touch me.

He opens the liquor and pours it onto the knife before he stalks towards me still holding the bottle too. I edge as far away from him as I can get in the small space between us. But my back hits up against the canvas and I have nowhere to go.

“Stay away from me!” I yell.

My voice wakes up CeCe and she gazes at us through big eyes and wild, golden hair that has mostly escaped the braids I gave her yesterday. Kind of like a halo. I had helped her into her leggings and out of her soiled pajamas. My own braids are equally as messy and I still wear the pants I wore to school days ago, though I tossed my blood-stained shirt into the woods and wear one of Mom’s long sweaters. The monster smelled the air when I had first put it on and looked at me in a way that made my belly tight. The sweater allowed me some modesty to cover my private parts when I had to go to the bathroom because the monster still wouldn’t let me have any privacy to do my business. At least CeCe is too young to care about such things.

He doesn’t heed my warning and comes closer. No matter how hard I fight him or how loudly I scream, I’m no match for his strength as he pins me to the tent floor. CeCe is crying now, in terrified shrieks. The monster’s grip bruises wherever he touches. He bites his own wrist and then shoves the open wound to my mouth. I clamp my jaws tighter as he smears his blood against my lips. But he pries open my mouth and his metallic blood fills it. He pinches my nose shut until I have little choice but to swallow it. I gag, I choke, I cry now just as loudly as CeCe does. And I don’t understand why this is happening.

Some of the fight dies out of me after, his blood still coating my lips, as I try not to be sick on the tent floor. But what he does next has me screaming allover again, as he pours Daddy’s whiskey onto my infected cheek. It burns the raw skin like a thousand bee stings, and I scream until I choke on my screams, until my eyes stream with salty tears, and I sob on the tent floor. But the worst of it was yet to come, as the monster takes the knife to my face and begins to cut. The pain is too much for me to handle as I pass out and remember nothing after.

I awake to a fierce ache in my cheek and mud now coats the wounds. I touch it as I pull myself up off the tent floor and hug my knees to my chest. CeCe sucks her thumb and plays with a zipper on the backpack next to me. The wolf is holding a dead rabbit, cutting away the poor animal’s fur. The sight turns my stomach and I look away.

“It is clay from the river to stop the bleeding. The land provides by way of the moon. You need some meat to regain your strength.”

I don’t want to eat a rabbit, but I feel too bad and weak to fight with him at the moment. Daddy made rabbit stew once when I was little and he didn’t die from it. I know people eat rabbits, but I can’t stop thinking of fluffy bunnies, the kind people keep for pets. CeCe doesn’t say anything about him skinning a rabbit before our eyes. That kind of worries me that my little sister is adjusting to all this not normal stuff the crazy stranger does. We don’t even know his name and I don’t ask. I don’t tell him mine. He only calls me girl or little bitch anyway. He calls CeCe his cub.

But when I realize he makes no move to start a fire to cook the rabbit, when instead he slices a chunk of the raw meat from the animal’s back and puts it in his mouth, I gag and taste my vomit. He laughs and has another piece as I press a hand to my mouth to physically keep from throwing up the trail mix in my belly.

He holds a piece of bloody meat towards me. I shake my head and scoot back away from him.

“I’m not eating that! It’ll kill me and make me sick. Meat has to be cooked.”

“You’ll learn to eat what is given, when it’s given or you won’t eat at all,” he barks.

“I’d rather starve. And my sister isn’t eating that either. As of now, we’re vegetarians.”

“Then starve you will. If you don’t eat this meat, you don’t eat nothing at all!”

I clench my jaw and cross my arms. I would rather starve than eat raw meat. He tosses a piece of it on the canvas before CeCe. She takes a deep breath and moves back from the meat. I pick it up and toss it as far away from us as I can in the small space. For now, the wolf picks it up and eats it. I put my arm around CeCe as the monster tears into the meat with its teeth and eats the bones clean.

When night falls, I feel the hunger, but I refuse to give in. We pack up our camp and follow the monster through the forest like we did the two nights before. I slip CeCe berries when he’s not looking but I don’t have any myself. This battle of wills has begun, and my pride gets the better of me. He won’t win. I will not break. I will not submit.

At the peak of the night, he again offers me the chance to obey him by eating some of the worms. I again refuse. He offers them to CeCe instead, but she cries and buries her face into my shirt. I will protect her from the wolf no matter what. I will save my sister. And I will kill the monster the first chance I get for what he did to our family. I use my pain, hunger, and exhaustion to keep me going, keep me focused on that goal.

By the time dawn is on the horizon and I made it through the night without breaking, the wolf has had enough of my disobedience. He grabs my jaw and much in the way with his blood before, he forces a handful of worms into my mouth. I try and spit them back at him, but he holds my mouth and nose shut until I have to choose between swallowing and breathing. I force the squirming, fat grubs down my throat. The moon is a witness to my hatred and my anger, as I glare at him.

“I’m going to kill you one day,” I tell him again.

He juts out his chest and stands to his full height. He towers over me like the trees that surround us. I wipe at my mouth and hold his gaze.

“You keep saying that. I’ll be right here when you feel brave enough to try. I’ve killed humans far bigger, smarter, and stronger than you, little bitch. I’m moon favored and I will never die,” he boasts.

“Everything dies.”

“When my final battle is fought, I shall take my place of honor in the sky, close to the moon. My spirit will live on forevermore.”

He beats a fist to his chest and looks up to the sky. I don’t tell him he’s not going to a place in the sky, because there’s a place for monsters like him, the bad place where they burn.  He has no honor. He is crazy and sick in the head. He doesn’t deserve to go to Heaven or find peace in death. Instead, I take CeCe’s hand and follow him to the edge of the forest. Finally, a break in the trees and I see the first signs of civilization in days. People, lights, walls and a roof, a road. Across it is a box of a building with loud music, neon lights, and a sign flapping in the wind that reads Another Bar, Crosby Tennessee, voted second best bar in The Smokies.

We wait just hidden in the trees, he tells us to keep quiet, but what we wait for, I’m not sure. I can see the glow of the lights in CeCe’s eyes. I swallow hard as I notice her eyes glow more like a cats than mine in the darkness. People come in and out of those double doors. They laugh, they sing, they don’t seem to have a care in the world. I consider screaming for help. But I’m too afraid he’ll drag us back into the woods again. And I’ll never come back out.

The wolf waits until one man alone staggers out into the lot.  He has on cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. He sings loudly and off key about salt and margaritas and a woman. We watch as he goes to the side of the bar and unzips his pants and pees against the trees. That’s when the wolf strikes, quick as lightening, he’s across the road and behind the man urinating. I know I should take CeCe and try to run now, this is our chance, but I’m too stuck again. I watch as the wolf drags the man deeper into the trees. I put a hand over CeCe’s eyes so she can’t see the man die. But I don’t close my eyes. The monster snaps his neck just like he did Mom’s and drags the body deeper into the forest to hide.

I want to run. But I know the monster can smell me. I want to scream, but I know the monster will hear me even over the music drifting out of the bar. I want to take CeCe and hide, but I know the monster will find us. There’s nowhere we can go that he can’t find us.

He comes out of the woods seconds later with car keys dangling from his fist. The keys belong to a big red truck, that unlocks when he presses a button on the fob. His eyes catch mine in the light of the moon and neon lights, and he motions us to come to him.

I obey as I’m too exhausted to fight him or do otherwise. Besides, I don’t want to spend another day in the woods, cramped up in a tent, and I’m tired of walking. My blisters have blisters. My body still aches as it fights the fever and infection. I lift CeCe up inside the truck and climb in beside her. The soft seats in the back feel like Heaven as I lay my good cheek against it. I snuggle up next to CeCe and we drift asleep to the sway of the tires, the sounds of the road, and the last thing I see are a pair of golden eyes before sleep takes me all the way under.