“Are you okay?” I reached out, touching his hand gently. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t take my hand in his, either.
“Yeah, yeah…” Gabe said, but he wouldn’t look at me. He just kept staring off into the darkness around us. “Blood just doesn’t sit well with me.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
He shook his head. “No, no, it’s just over there.” He pointed back to where his Mustang was parked at the edge of the campsite, right at the end of the streetlamp’s reach. “I’ll be fine. You can watch me from here. Stay here and stay safe.”
I looked up at him uncertainly. “Okay?”
“Stay safe,” he repeated, then he kissed me on the forehead.
He turned away without looking at me. I stayed outside, watching him until he got into his car and sped off.
Gideon was standing just outside his trailer, wiping the blood from his hands. Once Gabe was out of sight, Gideon cleared his throat loudly, which was his indirect way of summoning me.
“Are you okay?” I asked as I approached him.
“I’ll be fine.” He lifted his head, staring off at the empty spot where Gabe’s car had been. “I didn’t want to say anything while your … friend was here, but Hutch was wrong.”
“Hutch is wrong a lot.”
Gideon managed a weak smirk. “Be that as it may, I’m talking about his suggestion of werewolves. It’s something I’d considered myself, but I’ve had a few run-ins with werewolves myself, and this is definitely no werewolf.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Werewolves are powerful. They have substance.” He held up his hands, trying to convey their heft. “Whatever attacked Luka, it was like chasing a nightmare. I could never really see it, even when it was right in front of me.”
44. sanguine
“Okay, so I got liver and beans,” Roxie said, as she came into the trailer carrying a brown grocery bag. “I tried to get him bananas, but they didn’t have any. Small-town grocery stores are lame.”
I sat on the bench inside Luka and Hutch’s trailer, the same way I had been all night since I’d talked to Gideon. Luka stayed up a bit, going into more detail about how he’d been certain that he would die and the creature was absolutely relentless as it tore at him. But eventually he’d passed out, and he’d been snoring softly in his bed at the back of the trailer ever since.
I slept some, tossing and turning fitfully on the bench, and once the sun finally poked its way through the curtains, Roxie got up, rousing from Seth’s bunk in the back. Since Luka had lost a lot of blood, she went to the store to get foods to help him replenish. He could self-heal, but he couldn’t replace things he’d lost—like a tooth he’d lost in a bar fight years ago.
“You’re up early.” Hutch yawned in his bed above the driver’s seat, and he leaned his head over so he could look down at us. “Did you guys sleep?”
“I slept some,” I replied, suppressing my own yawn.
“It was a scary night,” Roxie said as she made room in the small fridge for Luka’s supplies. “It was hard to sleep after that.”
“At least Luka’s okay,” Hutch said.
“Yeah, Luka is, but if it had been any one of us”—Roxie pointed to herself, me, and then Hutch—“we’d all be dead. We couldn’t have survived that.”
That realization had been keeping me up all night, along with the fact that Gabe and I shared something really meaningful before he’d gotten freaked out and run off. As Roxie had been quick to point out, seeing Luka like that was enough to scare away any rational person.
But it still felt odd and out of character. Gabe had seemed so … distant. He hadn’t even really kissed me before he left, and it had only been a handful of minutes before that when he’d told me that he was falling in love with me.
Of course, none of that overshadowed the fact that there may very well be some kind of monster stalking our campsite. But I was learning the hard way that it was possible to be afraid for my life and nurse a broken heart.
“It’s getting bolder.” Roxie sat down on the bench across from me. “That thing is getting stronger and bolder. That’s what I think.”
After talking to Luka more last night, he’d confirmed what Gideon said—whatever it was that attacked him was impossible to really see or describe. So, we’d ruled out the possibility that it was an animal. Whatever it was had to be supernatural.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“The attacks have been escalating in frequency and intensity,” Roxie said. “So far, no one has been killed, but Seth and Luka are both lucky to be alive.”
“Maybe it needs to feed to grow stronger,” Hutch suggested. “Like a vampire or demon or something.”