“I know,” Abram answered, already a man again. In one swift motion, he threw me over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t be much of a curse if all it took was a couple of warm bodies to break it.”
As he sprinted forward, a cold gust of wind cascaded over my back. He was moving too fast for me to tell where we were heading. All I knew was that the sounds of the mob, as well as the lights of Main Street, were fading away quickly.
He skidded to a stop. Leaves rustled around us. After he helped me slide off of his back again, I saw we were back in the woods, only feet away from the old house.
It was strange how much time we had spent in these woods together. Along with the Castle, it sort of felt like ‘our place’ … aside from how we almost got ourselves killed every time we came here.
“What is it?” I asked, spying the way he grabbed his shoulder.
“It’s nothing,” he answered. “I just need a moment.”
I brushed his hand away, revealing his shoulder as a mess of red gashes, and I gasped. “My God! Look at all that blood!”
“One of them nicked me with something. I’ll be fine. Self-healing, remember?” His face shifted, nearly changing back into that of the beast. His mouth closed hard, and he reverted to his old (and quite stunning) features. “We need to move.”
“To where?”
“Inside,” he said, nodding toward the house, the hand of his good arm clutching his wound once more. “I’ve set up some fail safes, just in case something like this happened.
“But you won’t be you,” I answered, grazing his arm with my fingers. “How much longer can you keep the beast at bay?”
“Not as long as I need to.” He grimaced. “I think I’m out of time.”
And the way he said that, the finality of it, sparked something inside of me. I narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean by that?”
He brushed past me to head toward the house, growling under his breath. “Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”
“Hell no!” I said, grabbing his arm and spinning him back toward me. “I’m about ten miles past ready to hear that, Abram.” My hand tightened around his arm. “You’re gonna be straight with me. You’re gonna stop treating me with kid gloves. Or this is where you and me part ways. Got it?”
He glared at me. “That would be a death sentence for you, Char.”
I tilted my chin up. “Like you care.”
The expression in his face was so pained it felt like razors in my own heart. “I do,” he said, his voice shifting lower. “Damn it, Charisse. You’re making this harder than it already is.”
“It’s the damn moon,” he said finally. “And what I did to it.”
“What did you do to it, Abram?” I asked.
“Magic is about balance and energy. When Satina was on the other side, keeping the curse fed wasn’t an issue. There’s unlimited energy in the afterlife. But when I brought her back, all that changed. The curse began to sputter out. With Satina cut off from the energy that powered it, the curse began a sort of countdown. And, because that’s what she tied it to, the next full moon became the anchor for it.”
“Speak English,” I said with a growl of my own. “And do it quickly. I doubt Dalton and his mob are going to take long to figure out we came back here.”
“The reason the moon on the window phased into waxing is because I brought Satina back. With every moon, we took one step closer to stripping all the magic from the curse.”
“That’s a good thing,” I said. “It’s almost colored in now. Your curse will end. So what’s the issue?”
“Yes, the moon is almost colored in now,” Abram conceded, but he didn’t have the same joy I had. “This is the last night. This is the last moon of the curse that’s plagued me for over a hundred years.”
“That’s great,” I answered. What was his problem? Was this like Stockholm syndrome? “You can be a man again. You can have another chance. Isn’t that what you want?”
“More than anything,” he answered. “Well, more than almost anything. But I don’t think you understand, Char. I never broke the curse. The curse isn’t breaking … its ending.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, my eyebrows pulling together. “What’s the difference? What does that mean?”
He looked past me, to the sky above, to the moon with only but a sliver away from complete. “When the moon is full, Charisse, I will remain a beast. Forever.”
Chapter 30
Abram’s words literally clanged against my ears, screeching like nails against a chalkboard. Instantly, they exhausted me. It seemed it would never end, the constant twists and turns of fate. Every revelation seemed to dig us deeper into this hopeless pit. And this was no different.
We were hours away from sunrise, hours away from his curse becoming a permanent, unbreakable thing. And I could do nothing to save him.
He had to love and be loved in return. How does one accomplish that in the span of a single night?