The End of Never (23 page)

“Why does a bird fly or a bee sting?” he asked her solemnly. “Because they must. They know no other way.”

Setting her bare feet down upon the damp earth, Kraven held her arms around his neck.

“Your cousin had a choice,” the girl insisted, a fiery glow reflecting off her pale skin in the dim twilight.

“No,” Kraven said, stroking her tangled hair. Atop her head, the tattered remnants of a woven crown of wildflowers clung to the knotted, auburn strands.

“He is evil and he is jealous. He would take my home, my throne, and you,” Kraven explained.

Iselin shuddered and clutched the bronze medallion dangling by a leather strap around her neck. She regretted that in turn, she had not given her prince a wedding gift.

“Your love is the only true treasure you could ever bestow upon me,” Kraven confided in her ear.

At their backs, Bucephalus snorted and beat his hooves upon the ground. A lone cloud drifted past the rising moon. In the distance, the howls of a wolf rang through the hills.

Bucephalus smelled the smoke first and bucked at the acrid taste in his mouth.

“The beast follows,” Kraven whispered. “Hurry,” he said, dragging his bride to the horse.

“No,” she cried as he lifted her atop the horse, the leather reins slipping in her sweating palms. Astride the steed, she dug her heels into the sides of the horse and held back her tears.

Throwing her skirt back from her thighs, Kraven tugged tighter the leather strap securing a roll of parchment tied around her leg. “Stay to the river and trust in your father's map,” he told her.

Running her hands through his black hair, she promised her heart to him on their wedding night. “Forever,” she swore.

“Go now, Iselin, before I change my mind,” Kraven demanded. “I will find you,” he shouted at his bride. Then the shadows of night swallowed both horse and rider.

For several days, Iselin rode until the horse could carry her no more and collapsed in exhaustion on the riverbank. Panting, on his knees, Bucephalus gulped the icy current as Iselin kissed his forehead. A whimper escaped his throat as she retreated. She consoled herself with the assurance he would find his way home again to Castle Kilhaven. She ran with the current along the rocky riverbank.

She smelled the ocean before she heard the waves crashing against the shore. The map showed her a path away from the river. The path went up the forested slope. Following a faint trail through the brush and briar, she ignored the shadow looming over the treetops. She thought that she saw a clearing in the trees ahead and made her way to a huge tree trunk. When she looked around its great width, she saw the edge of a cliff looming beyond the border of the tree line. She approached the steep, boulder-strewn edge of the sea cliff, realizing that she could no longer outrun the beast.

“Forever,” she whispered into the sea breeze swirling her hair. Atop the craggy precipice, she stared at the vast ocean. Below her, waves pounded a nest of sharp rocks jutting up from the water, foam spraying skyward as if the sea were spitting at her.

When the talons sank into her shoulders and carried her aloft over the sea, she cried out in anguish to be let go. “Down,” she shouted in shock, the pain agonizing as the claws dug into her skin.

The dragon released her. Floating free, she felt as if she, too, had wings. Swiftly, she fell. As the ocean rushed up to meet her, Iselin held the medallion and repeated the last promise she made to her prince before they parted. “I will love you forever,” she whispered. “And some day, I will see you again.”

From the cliff, he had witnessed her plummet. His legs slipped against the loose pebbles as he prepared to fling himself into the ocean after her, but a thirst for vengeance stayed his leap. He swore that he would go on living, in order to see evil die.

The black dragon slowly turned around and headed back to face Kraven. The edges of his scales shimmered as red as the fires of hell. His eyes were as black as a corpse's tongue. The beast hovered before him, his flapping wings suspending him above the ocean.

“You will die,” Kraven cried and sprang from the cliff, his feet landing upon the dragon's scaly back.

Grasping the leathery scales in his palms, Kraven clung to the beast as the creature swept downward, his wings dipping into the surface of the rolling waves. Loosening his sword from its hilt, Kraven crawled up the beast's neck, his belly scratched and bleeding from the dragon's dagger-sharp scales. The sea, only a few feet below, added salt spray to his wounds.

Plunging the blade into the top of the dragon's skull, Kraven howled in victory. The dragon fell lifeless into the sea, and he rode atop the back of the dead beast as the waves washed them both to the shore.

“Forever,” Kraven consoled himself, as he gathered driftwood along the thin strip of shore below the cliff. His mighty pyre roasted the flesh of the dragon, and the blood of the beast quenched Kraven's raging thirst. He did not leave— he did not dare—until the dragon was consumed and his bones littered the beach like driftwood.

The conquering prince now had the soul of the dragon within him. Kraven assumed the dragon's strength and power. But he did not know what he had gained. He only knew what he had lost.

The necklace he had given to her was a medallion of a figure, half-man and half-dragon. As he sat on the beach, it washed up on the shore from the depths of the rocky seabed. “She gave it back,” he said, crying, his heart breaking for the life and love stolen from him. “But you promised forever!” he shouted. Only the sea could hear him.

22
Bad Moon Rising

“What a way to end the summer,” said a tall, tanned, young man in khaki cargo shorts and a pumpkin-orange Polo shirt. Brad Chesley was standing on the swaying deck of a sailboat named Miss Alex. His bangs, dirty blond and shaggy, hung in his hazel eyes and over the tops of his sunburned ears. He mentally created a list of what he had to do. He needed a haircut. He had to pack for the fall semester at Vanderbilt University. His parents told him to make the Dean's List or his motorcycle would come home and stay there permanently after Christmas break.

But what he wanted to do was to sail. June Peyton never minded him taking the Miss Alex into the harbor whenever he wished. Sometimes she accompanied him, but most of the time, she did not.

He loved the spray of the water on his skin, the sting of an ocean breeze in his lungs, and the red sunsets that lit the water on fire in the evenings. What Brad hated was studying pre-law. “What's so bad about not wanting to be a lawyer?” he asked the waves lapping the sides of the docked sailboat. He kicked a pile of sopping, mucus-green seaweed from the deck back into the ocean.

As he stowed a life jacket inside a deck bench, his mind wandered to Alexandra's shy, freckled face. He wondered when she'd be back. He would not mind seeing June Peyton's granddaughter again, not at all. “She's cute when she's angry,” he recalled.

If she had not left the island so soon to escape the storm, he was sure that she would have eventually told him that she did not like the ocean. He could tell that the endless expanse of waves frightened her, especially because she did not know how to swim.

Leaning over the deck railing, he smiled at the rising tide. He remembered his sail into the harbor with Alexandra and her blonde friend, Taylor. That was before the hurricane warnings, before the girls had to go back to Atlanta to school. On that sail, she had fallen head first into the choppy Atlantic. She swore she saw a shark, even though he never saw a fin break the surface. He smiled about how mad she was after he'd pulled her out. He assumed, with a sigh, that she'd never want to sail again.

Nevertheless, Brad wanted to take her sailing if she ever came back to the island. He wanted to see her again, even if she did not want to go sailing.

Jumping to the dock, he double-checked the knotted ropes securing the sailboat to the wooden pier, just in case. As he recalled, Hurricane Emily had snuck up on the island. Only a few days before the storm had struck, Edisto Island was not predicted to be in the path of her fury. The weather forecasters on television swore she would not make landfall anywhere south of Virginia.

The marina had weathered the storm with little damage. None of the sailboats needed any more than a scrub-down to get rid of the globs of mucky seaweed littering their decks.

Too bad Alexandra can't stay longer
, Brad had thought at the time. But with the hurricane looming, June Peyton told her granddaughter to go home to Atlanta, which was three hundred miles inland. June repeated this reasoning again to him when she called to thank him for taking Alexandra and her friend Taylor sailing during their abbreviated visit to the island.

In the empty marina parking lot, Brad shoved his motorcycle helmet over his head and revved the engine on his sleek, silver Ninja street bike.

Maybe I should check on Miss June
, he considered. He had to pass her driveway on Black Hall Trail to reach his parents' beach-front estate.
Just to be neighborly, in case she needs help after the storm
, he told himself. Then, of course, he might ask about Alexandra.

At the calm horizon, the ocean drank the last drops of sunlight as the sky faded from red to black. A full moon glowed above the tops of the magnolia and mossy oak forest along the lonely strip of asphalt named Black Hall Trail. The headlight on the front of the motorcycle cut through the twilight as Brad pushed the bike fierce and fast down the unlit road, his pulse racing as madly as his tires.

Rounding a bend, he passed an ancient oak, a gaping hole scarring her wide trunk. It was then that he saw a truck in the driveway. The storm had tossed a pine tree on top of the iron driveway gate and had bent the frame toward the ground. Brad took his thumb off of the throttle and eased his purring motorcycle toward the bumper of the truck. The rear door had been rolled up, and inside, crates and reels of chain and nylon rope lay strewn across the plywood floor.

“Hello?” Brad called at the open driver's door. Lowering the kickstand of the bike, he shut off the engine.

When he removed the helmet, he had to wipe sweat from his forehead. He listened patiently for an answer. “Anyone here?” he yelled.

Peeking inside the empty truck cabin, he saw the keys still in the ignition.
Something is not right
, he thought.

A low, angry growl shattered the silence.

Their eyes met through the windshield as Brad glanced up at the broken gate. Snarling, with his lips peeled back from his yellow fangs, a mottled-brown wolf stalked the gravel driveway on the other side of the fencing.

Slipping backward from the driver's seat, Brad fell, rear first, to the rocky path. Scrambling to his feet and to the bike, he felt the piercing black eyes of the growling wolf boring into the back of his skull.

Shoving on his helmet, he hit the accelerator, the rear tire fishtailing back and forth on the gravel as the motorcycle fought for traction. Hitting the paved asphalt of Black Hall Trail, the tire squealed as Brad fled toward home.

Alone in the driveway, Cyrus pounced into the trees. He sprinted over gnarled tree roots, where, under a canopy of moss-drenched oak branches, he found Jasmine. She was resting on the rotted, termite-eaten porch steps of her crumbling shack.

“Cyrus,” she sighed when the wolf approached from the shadows. In her lap rested a snow-white wolf pup, his belly swollen from a dinner of squirrel and rabbit.

Nudging her elbow, Cyrus rested on his haunches and licked her wrinkled face. “Ya done a mighty good, Cyrus,” she told him and scratched his back.

Cackling, she petted his forehead. Inside the shack, their hostage, bound and gagged, slept on the dirty wood plank floor without a stir or whimper.

Exhausted from dragging his prisoner through the woods, Cyrus yawned happily. He preferred his wolf form.

“Good Cyrus,” Jasmine purred, her hand scratching his upturned belly as he rolled his back against the dirt at her feet.

He remembered and howled. His frail human body—his wrinkled flesh and straining muscle—had stopped the truck in front of the storm-damaged gate at the mouth of the Peyton Manor driveway and yanked his hostage into the woods.

Jasmine had waited patiently. The hostage could not walk fast. Limping, his knee crushed and his hip bruised, he had collapsed at her bare brown feet when he saw her.

“Johnny,” the witch sang and clapped her hands together. Securing his binds, Cyrus threw the hostage to the floor of the shack just before the beast inside his frail human body burst through his pale, drooping skin. The wolf reclaimed Cyrus's body and soul for himself.

A full moon rose above the trees. A steady ocean breeze wafted from the Atlantic toward the shack. Sucking the salty wind into her chest, Jasmine howled. With a grin on his muzzle, Cyrus wagged his tail and joined her to serenade the moon.

By this time, Brad was parking his motorcycle outside the three-car garage in his parents' driveway. Brad heard their song, carried well by the wind, and cringed.

There's another way
, he thought. Miss June's home sat on the beach a few hundred yards south. He decided to walk there along the shore.

Alone in her bedroom, June heard the hellish howls from the woods. “Jasmine,” she said, raising the window to listen to the feral cries, “and Cyrus.”

In the study downstairs, Ian snored loudly enough to shake the dust from the fireplace mantel. June suspected he might not wake up for days.

“For a retired doctor, sometimes he's not very clever,” she said.

Slamming the window down, she cringed as the bellows of the beast and his wicked mistress swelled in fervor and zeal, their cries racing through the treetops with the rising of the moon.

“Ian should have known better,” she said, shuffling from her room.

Outside the door in the silent hallway, Dixie whimpered and whined at her feet until June scooped the poodle into her arms. Tucking the dog under her robe, she carried her slowly, patiently, down the hallway toward the attic door.