"About a year ago," Damien continued, "I was in Arkansas."
"You get around."
"Have to. People disappearing is one thing. A whole bunch of them disappearing in the same place is another."
I shrugged, conceding the point.
"Werewolves crave human flesh. Most feed a few times a month, more often if they have a wound to heal. But there's one night we have to feed."
"The full moon."
"Yes. Strange things happen on that night. Ask any cop, ER worker, any third-shift waitress or bartender. Full moon equals a very busy night. A year ago I was in the Arkansas hills. There was a woman..." His voice faded and he stared at his feet again.
"Don't worry; I won't be jealous."
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted them back. I sounded like a scorned lover, a pathetic, needy girlie-girl. Everything I'd never wanted to be.
Sighing, he ignored my jibe. "It's just... hard to remember how I was. What I did."
I doubted I wanted to hear this, but I had to. "Go on."
Damien took a deep breath. "I'd done some work on her place. She was alone. Her husband took off.
She had four kids."
My eyes widened. He really was a pig.
"I'd planned on staying awhile. I could get several full moons' worth."
His voice flattened; his eyes went distant; his face was the mask it had been when I first met him, devoid of emotion and life.
"They lived alone. Existed hand-to-mouth. They were perfect, and they were mine."
"What happened?" I whispered.
"The full moon came, so beautiful and bright. The harvest moon. September. Warm days, cool nights, clear skies. I changed and ran, the wind in my fur, the grass beneath my feet. I ran until I was starving, and then I went back."
His voice shook on the last word. He scrubbed his fingers through his hair and his hand shook, too.
"Damien - " I began.
He ignored me. "She always sat outside once she got the kids to bed. A little 'lone time, she called it. I walked right onto the porch. She didn't even move."
He stared straight ahead as if he could see his past. "The youngest child opened the door. The mother cried out, tried to push her back, but the little girl took one look at me and - " Damien shook his head.
"She couldn't have been more than five or six, and she knew what I was going to do. She squirmed out of her mother's hold shouting, 'No, Damien,' threw her arms around my neck, and whispered, 'Take me.
Mommy needs to be a mommy for the others.'"
"Sacrifice," I murmured. "You didn't - "
"No. But I would have. I didn't give a shit about sacrifice, mother's love, anything but meat."
I flinched.
"I'd have killed them all, but for one thing. The child said my human name while I was in wolf form."
"That doesn't work - "
"Not to change a werewolf's form, but it works pretty damned well to curse him. If there's an Ozark Mountain magic woman nearby."
"What?"
"Mommy knew magic."
"Magic." I resisted the urge to snort. "Right."
His lips lifted, just a little. "We're discussing werewolves and you're rolling your eyes about magic?
There's a saying in the Ozarks - if you throw out the witch, you'd better throw out the Bible, too."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"If you can believe in supernatural evil, why can't you believe in supernatural good?"
He had a point. "So what did the Ozark magic woman do?"
"Not much. The most important thing had already been done. Sacrifice."
"But you said you didn't - "
"Just because I didn't kill that child doesn't make her sacrifice any less heroic. I could have run, but I was paralyzed, confused. A being that thrives on selfishness is confronted with total sacrifice. I might have been a wolf, but I still had my brain and it was on overload. I stood there while the mother yanked her child away from me. Her face was wet with tears as she cut her own wrist - "
"Blood, tears, sacrifice."
"The usual," he murmured, echoing words of my own that he'd never even heard. "Then she cursed, or maybe she blessed, me. I'm still not sure. She said, 'Damien, from this day on your soul is yours again.'"
"Huh?"
"When I became a werewolf, my soul was possessed by evil. I was myself but not myself. She gave me back my soul and my conscience."
"Ah."
"It's a terrible thing to remember what you've done and know how wrong it was."
I understood why his eyes were always sad. Why he never smiled and rarely laughed. Understood but didn't forgive.
"You chose to be one of them."
"I know."
"When did you start to hunt your own kind?"
"I left Arkansas for obvious reasons. Went to Florida, hid in the Everglades. I was haunted by fifty years of faces. Yet the next month, when the full moon came, I hunted. I had no choice. The hunger is a burning, painful thing. You can't think past it."
"Why didn't you shoot yourself before the next full moon?"
He lifted a brow. "I wasn't quite that desperate. Yet."
"Yet?"
"What do you think the gun behind the toilet tank was for, Leigh?"
"I thought it wasn't yours."
"I lied."
I blinked. He'd lied about the gun. But what was one more lie? What disturbed me was how well he'd lied. I'd believed him completely. As completely as I'd believed he loved me.
"Where is it now?"
"Somewhere safe. In case I need it."
"I used the bullet."
He shrugged. "I can always get more."
"But you can't touch silver."
"That doesn't mean I don't know someone who can."
The idea of a hidden gun with a single silver bullet, just in case, disturbed me, and I wasn't sure why. I still might shoot him myself. I pushed the thought aside for later analysis. I had enough on my plate already.
"So you went hunting in the Everglades - "
"Miami, actually. A lot more people. But despite the hunger, I couldn't do it. The very thought of killing and eating a person suddenly nauseated me. Then I came upon another like me and the sickness disappeared. I could kill them. With every werewolf destroyed I'd be saving lives, and maybe I could atone a little bit for all the deaths."
I wasn't sure if I believed him. What if he was the power eater? What if he was the white wolf and the brown? What if he was Hector? What if he wasn't? I wasn't truly certain my nemesis was here - except for the weird stinging of my back. Which just might mean I was halfway to crazy again.
I decided to try a frontal assault. "You won't get away with it."
"OK. Whatever it is."
He seemed as confused as I was, but he'd seemed a lot of things and none of them were true.
"Why are you here?" I asked. "There has to be a reason you came to Crow Valley instead of any other burg on the planet."
He blinked. "You don't know?"
"What?"
"I figured that was why you were here, too."
I started to feel uneasy. "What the hell are you talking about?"