Chapter 2 — NINE DAYS, AND A DOG NAMED GREGORY (2)

Kane Voss stands on the steps, face blacker than his clothes. He looks at Luna, then at the tail, and his voice comes out like it's been left in a freezer: "Mission failed. Ten laps around the campus. Then write an apology letter."

"Captain, I'm so sorry—"

Kane turns and carries the sobbing werewolf away. Two steps. Stops. Doesn't turn around.

"Don't touch anything she's eaten."

Luna watches them go and swallows the "thanks for the jacket" she was going to say. Something about this city keeps rearranging itself in her head, and none of the new arrangements make sense.

8:30 PM. Study hall ends. Kane Voss is nowhere to be seen. In his place: the three suit-giants from day one, walking five meters behind Luna, staring at their phones with the intensity of men decoding encrypted messages.

Halfway across the quad, Luna stops and turns around.

"Hey. You three. Your phones are upside down."

All three of them flip their phones one hundred and eighty degrees without missing a step and continue "browsing," faces completely straight.

Luna stares at them.

A hundred meters later, the biggest one cracks first, whispering: "We're not following you, miss. We're... going the same way. Yeah. Roughly speaking, we're walking home together."

"You all live under my dorm?"

"...We live close."

"Close enough to cross half the campus?"

Silence. Then, in a hushed voice, the biggest one: "The captain said don't talk to her, she's too smart—" and all three snap their mouths shut and raise their phones higher.

From somewhere to the left, a black "Labrador" rockets out of the bushes, tail going like a propeller, and yells — at a volume only wolves can hear — "CHIPS OF KINDNESS, NEVER FORGOTTEN—"

A hand emerges from the shadows and yanks the entire dog out of sight. Kane's voice, drifting: "Ten more laps."

10:00 PM. Convenience store.

Luna is walking back from the club office with a stack of paperwork when three drunk guys materialize around her. Too close. Wrong eyes. Wrong hands. She's reaching for the pepper spray in her bag — because she did buy pepper spray, that was step one of her plan — when the first drunk makes a wet sound and leaves the ground, flying backward into the hot-dog cart by the door.

The other two don't even have time to turn around. They're down, silent, one after the other, like puppets with their strings cut.

The hot-dog cart guy stares at the pile of unconscious men, then at Kane, then back at the men, then slowly begins restocking his cart like nothing happened at all. Luna mouths "thank you" at the universe and walks forward.

Kane Voss stands under the streetlight, flexing his wrist. There's a fresh gash on the back of his hand, still welling blood.

"You're hurt," Luna says.

"It's nothing."

"Come here." Luna grabs his wrist and drags him into the convenience store.

Kane goes rigid. Her palm is flat against his skin, and for a second his whole body locks up like she's handed him a live wire. His pupils blow wide. He breathes like he forgot how.

Luna doesn't notice. She pushes him against the shelf, grabs a box of band-aids, and holds out her hand. "Give me your hand."

"...No."

"You saved my life three times today. I put one band-aid on you. Fair trade." Luna looks up at him. "Unless you tell me why you keep showing up near me."

Kane looks at her for a long moment. Then he puts his hurt hand in hers.

Luna tears open a band-aid. The store lights buzz overhead; the clerk behind the register has gone very, very still, watching a college girl put a band-aid on a man with a sword-cut hand like it's the most normal thing in the world. His fingers are long, callused at the knuckles, skin hot to the touch, like he's running a fever. She presses the band-aid down carefully. She is so focused on the wound that she misses the way his breathing goes uneven, the way his throat works, the way gold flickers at the edge of his pupils before he forces it down.

"Does it hurt?" she asks.

"No."

"You're lying."

"My curse, my pain, my fight—never yours." His voice is raw, scraped dry. "My curse, my pain, my fight. None of it will ever be your problem."

Luna looks up at him.

"Translate that into plain English: it hurts, and you're stubborn." She sticks the band-aid down with a final pat. "Kane, you're the type who gets hurt and won't say anything because he doesn't want anyone to worry, right?"

The gold in his eyes flares, dims, flares. He says nothing.

On the walk back to her dorm, they stop at the stairwell. Luna turns, half-joking, the way she does when the silence gets too heavy: "You don't actually believe that 'healing blood type' nonsense, do you? I'm O-negative. Only compatible with all of humanity. Thank you for your interest, no refunds."

Something in Kane's eyes changes.

He doesn't touch her. He steps forward, once, boxing her against the wall — with exactly one fist-width of space between them, not quite invasive, but turning the whole hallway into a single breath. He leans down, and his voice is hot and low against her ear, barely restrained:

"You're not a cure."

Luna's breathing stops for one full beat.

"You're a life." He steps back, and his voice returns to that flat, cold register. "Lock your door. Starting tomorrow, I pick you up."

"...You've got problems."

"Yeah." He stands in the moonlight, and for half a second gold bleeds through his irises, and he says it with alarming calm: "Almost thirteen days now."

Luna watches him walk away, heart doing something unreasonable, and she has the strangest feeling that the "problems" he's talking about and the "problems" she's talking about are not the same problem.

At midnight, she finds a contract shoved under her dorm door. Cream paper, embossed gold letterhead: THE CROSS FAMILY FOUNDATION. A note in perfect cursive:

Dear Miss Luna Hayes: We would be honored to cover the full cost of your tuition and living expenses for the remainder of your university career. Condition: meet with us once.

Luna pins it to the fridge under the "Thirteen days" note and scrawls one word: SCAM. One star.

She doesn't see the black stretch limousine idling outside her window. Inside, a young man with gold-rimmed glasses and a gentle smile watches her lit window, and says to the man beside him, in a voice like warm honey over cold steel: "Thirteen days to the full moon. She'll be ours."