The service started off simply with a call to prayer, and I lowered my head. Beside me, Charly took my hand and bowed her head and closed her eyes. I watched her through the prayer, and she listened to the preacher with a focus that was unusual in one so young, her lips moving with his words, her head nodding in agreement.
After the prayer, the Lord’s Supper was given, and we took the unleavened cracker and the grape juice, even though I wasn’t sure I should. I’d been taught I should be right with God to take it, and . . . I wasn’t. Not at all. Uncertainty crawled through me on slimy little feet. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t deserve to be here.
After the ritual, I relaxed back against the wooden bench and let my thoughts meander, not listening. Until I realized that Charly was up and moving to the front of the church, Bobby trailing behind. “Charly!” I hissed. But she was already at the front of the church, and I shuffled around in my brain for the last thing I’d heard before the kids moved. Preacher Hosenfeld had called for prayer needs. “Crap,” I muttered under my breath, frozen in my seat.
The congregation shifted and strained to see. This was something out of order and unexpected, and they were intrigued. Many of the curious looks fell on me and I lowered my head, keeping an eye on my charges. What was I supposed to do? Having no idea, I stayed put, my eyes on the children as Charly pulled the preacher down and whispered into his ear.
Hosenfeld’s face changed, and he nodded, dropped to one knee, listened, spoke, and listened again. Then he raised his eyes to the congregation and said into the mic, “This little girl is a visitor in God’s house today, and she has a need. I’d like her to say it to us all.”
“Crap,” I muttered again. I put one hand on the pew in front of me, ready to pull myself to my feet and grab Charly back to her seat.
“My mama is missing,” Charly said, holding the mic like a pro. “We think she’s been kidnapped by vampires. And I have leukemia and my hair is falling out, and I need to be healed. So you got to pray. Thank you.” She handed the mic back to the preacher and pulled Bobby back down the aisle by the hand.
Preacher Hosenfeld blinked back tears. “Let us pray,” he said. Charly and Bobby retook their seats and Charly took my hand, her other one still holding Bobby’s. Her fingers were icy and ashen and a tremble quivered through her like a cutting pain, her pearl ring sliding around her slender finger. Getting up in front of the church had taken too much out of her. I removed my shawl and wrapped her up in it. Then pulled her on my lap and dropped my head into her hair. No more was loose. No more clumps. But I could see patches of her scalp through what was left.
The preacher’s prayer was heartfelt as he addressed his god for the sick and needy in his church. When he reached Charly’s requests, his voice lowered, softened. “Almighty God.”
And I remembered Miz Esmee’s words at the front door earlier.
“Heal this little girl,” he said. “And bring her mother home safe from the clutches of the blood-drinking evil in our town. In his holy name. Amen.”
I was glad it wasn’t one of those long, flowery prayers full of thees and thous and names of God. This one felt real and somehow potent. It was how I prayed—just talking. And I realized I had been praying with him, for the first time in a long while. I took a ragged breath.
Charly was exhausted, fighting to stay awake, and I shifted her on my lap to cradle her better, and stood. As I walked out of the church, the preacher told the congregation that there was to be a baptism in the font at the front of the church immediately after the service. I smelled water, then, and knew it was to be an old-time dunking.
• • •
My eyelids were glued together when I woke in the afternoon, and I knew someone was in the room with me. I sniffed and smelled . . . Rick. And he smelled like cat. Too much like cat. I mentally reviewed the time until the three days of the full moon and realized we had only a little more than twenty-four hours. Inside me, Beast woke and stretched, yawning and showing me her teeth.
Black leopard big-cat. Want as mate, she thought.
You said you wanted Bruiser, I thought back, still smelling him on my sheets where he’d sat as we chatted.
Want more. Want both. She parted her lips and panted at me. Want Ricky-Bo.
And the full moon was nearly here, a time when Beast was more in control than I wanted. Not good. Rubbing my eyes, I managed to open them, pushed up in the bed against the pillows and headboard, and found him sitting in the corner, in a beam of slanted sunlight that had made its way between the blinds. He had been there a while.
Feeling no overt threat, my eyes traveled over him, my mouth opened to take in his scent. Beast leaned close and studied her former and prospective mate. One knee was up, Rick’s jeans as black as the coat of his were-animal, his feet bare in the shadows. His eyes were glowing softly greenish gold, his black hair falling over his forehead, far longer than when I’d first met him, and forming ringlets at the ends that nearly brushed his shoulders. He was shirtless, his chest that wonderful olive shade from his French and Cherokee heritage, marked with a perfect triangle of fine black chest hair trailing down into the low-riding waist of his jeans. His mangled tats no longer looked like a mountain lion, a bobcat, and mountains, the scarring of his torture by werewolves twisting them into shapeless masses and white scars, all except the four glowing gold spots of cat eyes. I knew if I touched the eyes, the golden tats would be hot beneath my fingers, part of the spell that was still working in his body, the spell that kept him from changing into his were-cat form, and might keep him forever in cat form if he did ever shift. My fingers curled into the covers to keep from reaching for him.
Rick closed his eyes, taking in my scent. Minutes trickled by like sand through a glass. He didn’t attack. He didn’t do anything except breathe, until he said, “I see the way he looks at you. I smell his scent in this room. Have you taken him as mate?”
I flinched. “What do you care? You have Monica.” My tone was childish and laced with hurt, and I wanted to cringe. It also sounded as if I’d slept with Bruiser, which I hadn’t.
He opened his eyes and a smile pulled at his lips, a real smile, not a heated or resentful one, as I’d expected. “Monica? You mean Monkey?”
I looked away, trying to place the name. And then I remembered. Monkey was one of Rick’s sisters, the only name I’d ever heard him call her. “Monica is Monkey? Oh, crap,” I breathed.
Rick’s smile spread. “Yeah. You are jealous of my baby sister,” he said, sounding pleased. I wanted to crawl under the covers and hide. “Do you remember a talk we had about boyfriends, the morning after the first night we were together at my place?” he asked.
Instantly, I did. It had seemed important even then. And might be vastly important now. Bruiser had called, we had chatted, and I had hung up on him, rudely.
“That your other boyfriend?” Rick had asked.
Shock had zinged through me and I rolled back on the bed on top of him. I remembered the swish as I slung my hair out of the way. “Other boyfriend?”