Defy the Dark

Sarah Rees Brennan I Gave You My Love by the Light of the Moon

There was a creepy guy staring at her in the coffee shop.

Berthe, sitting up at the high table by the window with her two best friends, became aware of it in a gradual, nasty way, like when Berthe had gone camping for the first time, years ago, and only realized the ground was damp when the wet had already seeped into her clothes. As soon as she was aware of his stare, she knew it had been going on too long.

She even got up from the table to fetch herself a tiny packet of sugar that she didn’t want. She was hoping that he would look at Natalie or Leela, that the stare was just the unpleasant one some guys would give any girl, not personal but something they apparently felt you had brought on yourself by having boobs.

It wasn’t. His eyes followed her path to the unwanted sugar and then back. Berthe perched on the edge of her stool, self-conscious and furious, too, that some idiot just looking at her was enough to spoil her fun with her friends.

Being almost six feet tall and a sixteen-year-old girl made you self-conscious enough most days, and today Berthe had the worst cramps she’d ever had in her life.

So someone giving her the stalker eyeballs was the outside of enough. He looked like a college guy, or maybe he was a bit too young, maybe he was one of those high school boys who couldn’t wait to get into college where everyone could appreciate his tortured soul. He was wearing a tweedy hipster scarf and black rectangular-framed hipster-boy glasses. His eyes gleamed behind them, pale and intent. In fact, he was pretty pale all over, that particular shade of pale that suggested he was waiting for someone to invent technology that would allow him to get a tan from the light of his laptop screen alone.

Not at all the sort of boy Berthe would have anything in common with, even if he hadn’t decided to stare at her like a creeper when she already felt like crap.

Another cramp made Berthe hunch forward, almost tilting off the stool. Her face must have shown some of what she was feeling, because Leela reached over the table and touched her arm.

“Are you all right? You feel hot.”

Natalie, the vivacious creature of the group, all laughs and curls, and the one who usually drew boys’ eyes, raised her eyebrows at that and said, “I bet she does. Rawr.”

Leela was too concerned and Berthe was frankly too freaked out to laugh. Berthe didn’t feel hot. In fact, the skin at the back of her neck was prickling with cold sweat. She touched her fingertips to her cheek and felt them slide on the clammy surface.

“I just have, you know”—Berthe waved her hand at her midsection even as she lied—“a headache.”

As though it were punishment for her lie, Berthe actually felt a twinge start in her head, a jagged line of pain that went from skull to spine. She put her elbow on the table and put her head down, brow pressed against her palm, until the sharp pain and the slow grind of agony in her stomach eased.

She looked up. Natalie looked serious now, and almost as concerned as Leela. Berthe really didn’t like being the center of attention; eyes on her made her feel as if she should be doing something and was too inadequate to know what. Unless she was playing lacrosse.

“I’m just going to go home,” she said abruptly—she didn’t want any more fussing, she didn’t want to spoil their day—and she got up, holding on to the edge of the table as she did, so that she would look steady. “I just need an Advil and a nap. Call you guys later.”

She left precipitately; if she didn’t want one of them coming with her, haste was essential. They would be held up paying for their coffees and discussing whether to go after her, and she’d be long gone.

When Berthe found herself staggering down the steps of the exit and almost reeling into the alleyway beside it, pressing the clammy-cold, prickling-hot skin of her face against the brick wall, she began to rethink her amazing strategy. No matter how awkward she felt about being fussed over, it beat not getting home at all. It was pitch-black outside, the night sky pressing down on her, dense and dark, and she did not think she could walk.

Pain crumpled her insides like tissue and she made a sound horrifyingly like a whine, like the sound of that animal at the campsite weeks ago, the wild snarling thing Berthe had barely seen but whose teeth she could sometimes still feel, as sharp in her memory as they had been in her skin. Berthe wanted to touch the bandage on her arm, but she gritted her teeth and kept her hands flat against the wall, braced. She wasn’t going to fall down.

“You can’t stay here,” said a voice behind her.

Berthe wanted to spin around, but the voice barely cut through the waves of pain. The most she could do was force her eyes slightly open.

The boy from the coffee shop swam in her vision, his pale face blurring into moonlight and then coalescing into features behind spectacles again. Sweat stung Berthe’s eyes. A stalker had her cornered in an alleyway at night, and she could hardly bring herself to mind.

“Oh, give it up,” she said, always bad at being tactful and now not even able to be polite. “Do you have some sort of fetish for girls getting sick on your feet?”

“I implore you not to give me the chance to develop one,” he said. “But you need help.”

His face kept disintegrating with each new wave of pain, nothing but glittering shards of moonlight in her vision. Berthe put her hands to her stomach, clutching at it, and realized her mistake when she almost toppled over sideways.

The boy had hold of her arm suddenly, grip cold and firm and inexorable, like being held up by a piece of machinery. Berthe was vaguely startled that he could hold her up at all, since they were the same height, and he was so skinny.

Berthe was starting to think she did need help. But that didn’t mean she had to accept it from him.

“So g-get my friends,” she said, her teeth chattering so hard that she was afraid they would smash like porcelain. “They’re in the—you know who I mean, you were staring like a—you’re creepy.”

He seemed entirely unaffected by this assessment. Possibly it was not news to him.

He said, as if she had not spoken at all and in relation to nothing, as if he was just plucking random words out of the air: “You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?”

It was strange enough that Berthe opened her eyes all the way, even as another snake of pain uncoiled and struck in her belly. He looked at her, eyes unblinking behind his silly glasses, everything she saw about him at odds with his stone-fast grip.

She saw he was perfectly serious.

“Of c-course I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she gasped out.

“Come with me,” the creepy boy from the coffee shop said. “Or you’ll kill someone.”

Come with me if you want someone else to live, Berthe thought, her mind so muddled she could not even remember what movie she was mangling a quote from.

She wouldn’t have responded to a threat to herself; she would have screamed and hit out at him, not because she was brave but because that was something life prepared you for, creepy guys threatening you in darkened alleyways. She was not prepared for someone to say that she could be dangerous. She had never hurt anyone in her life and never wanted to. It was not a warning she could ignore.

Berthe staggered, a violent enough lurch so she was almost jarred out of even this boy’s grasp. “All right,” she got out, between stiff lips and chattering teeth.

The creep from the coffee shop wasn’t just strong, he was fast. Berthe stumbled in the boy’s speeding wake, and after a few streets, tilting into swathes of moonlight and then back to shadowy road, he stopped at a door. Berthe leaned her face against it, forehead pressed to peeling gray paint, and the boy fished out a key from the pocket of his skinny jeans and opened the door.

She went sprawling into a tiny coffin of a hall.

“Come on, come on,” the boy muttered, his keys falling to the floor with a clatter and a thud. He hauled her up again, arm an iron bar across her midsection, and pushed her up stairs covered in brown carpeting, worn white with the constant passage of feet. Even the white traces of age on the carpet shimmered in Berthe’s eyes like moonlight.

They got up the narrow little stairs and into another tiny hall, then through a door that looked out of place, heavy and dark in the midst of all this cheap flimsiness. The boy towed Berthe inside the door.

There were shutters on the windows, heavy and dark like the doors. There was a single bed in the corner, neatly made.

Sick and staggering, Berthe still felt a panicked fist clutch at the inside of her throat. She remembered what she had allowed herself to forget amid all the pain—that what she was doing was crazy.

“Oh no,” she said weakly, and backed right into the boy. She spun to face him, even though the sudden movement made her stagger and sway. “No—” she repeated, raining down blows on his narrow chest. They landed like kittens on lily pads.

He caught her wrists in that stone grip of his, pushing her firmly into the room and stepping backward over the threshold as he did so.

“Trust me,” he said. “You couldn’t pay me to stay in this room with you.”

He slammed the door shut. Berthe did not even feel afraid that she was now trapped in a stranger’s bedroom. She was just relieved to be alone with her miserable sickness, not to have to split her focus between current agony and present danger.

She sank down onto the carpet on her hands and knees and arched her back; she felt as if her spine were made of metal and somehow turning molten inside her skin, dissolving and burning at once. She gagged, wrenching pain all the way through her, as if her insides were being torn out. The bite on her arm where the creature from the campsite had sunk its teeth in throbbed as if it might start bleeding again.

Berthe sobbed. She was scared that she would choke up her internal organs, have them laid out ruby red on the carpet before her, her heart bitter in her mouth.

Her fingers clawed on the carpet, tearing it into ragged shreds. Berthe howled her agony and her vision whited out, all moonlight, moonlight, moonlight in the dark.

Berthe woke up aching in a nest of chaos. She lifted her head, her hair a snarled blond veil between her and the world. When she reached her hand to brush it back, her whole body shuddered in protest.

The room she had seen last night was destroyed. The bed was a metal skeleton, scraps of cloth that had been sheets and a mattress hanging on it like mournful ghosts. There was a wardrobe at the other end of the room that she had not even noticed: its door was torn off its hinges. The walls had been beige: now they were carved with deep, gray lines. The boards beneath the torn carpet were savagely scored as well, the floor a mess of splinters and nails.

Berthe was naked. She very urgently did not want to stay naked, curled up and whimpering like an animal.

She climbed gingerly to her feet and went over to the wardrobe with its door ripped off. There were clothes inside, boys’ clothes, and weird boys’ clothes at that, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and naked people couldn’t be fussy about fashion.

There were a lot of button-down shirts that did not fit across her boobs, but she got into a T-shirt that said ORGAN DONOR, INQUIRE WITHIN. The fit made it embarrassingly obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra.

She went down the stairs barefoot.

It was silent in the house, so silent she thought that perhaps she was alone here, that she could just open the door and go home now without having to face anything.

She pushed open the other door in the little hall, just the same.

Inside was a kitchen-cum-living room, all the blinds drawn. In the dimness she could see clean countertops, a battered sofa, and on a low table, a cup of tea with a cookie lying beside it.

In the darkest corner of the room stood the creep from the coffee shop.

He was still wearing his jacket and his dumb scarf, and he had his hands in his pockets. He looked up as she came in.

“I suppose you have a lot of questions,” he said. He sounded patient, like someone talking to a small child who could not possibly understand anything on her own.

“No,” said Berthe. She was grateful, suddenly, that he put her back up. It pulled her away from the edge of screaming, senseless terror. “I went out camping in the woods, and I was bitten by something that I thought was a wild dog. Last night was the full moon. And I’ve seen horror movies before. I think I know what’s going on.”

She did not know until he just kept looking at her, gaze level and undisturbed, that she had wanted him to come up with another explanation. She’d wanted him to tell her she was crazy.

“What I don’t know,” she said, hearing her voice go high and unpleasant, “is how you knew.”

He didn’t say a word.

She plunged on. “I mean, do you make a habit of staring like a freak at girls and then, if they seem ill, dragging them into your bedroom on the off chance they’re . . .”

“I can tell,” he said. “I could smell you.”

She felt a flash of shame stronger than terror, so ferocious and so unreasonable—that she could care how she smelled, with all this—it made her furious with herself and him.

“And how could you—what were you—” Embarrassment as well as rage throttled her. She could not believe she could not even ask him something important about her own body.

“You’ll be able to do it as well,” he said. “Smell things other people can’t smell. See things other people can’t see. Do things other people can’t do.”

“Will I be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?” asked Berthe. Her mouth tasted sour, and her words were all coming out sour, too. She could not seem to care.

She went over to the window and began to fiddle with the pull on the blind so she wouldn’t have to keep looking at him.

“Medium-sized buildings,” he said. “Crouch first. Don’t go for a skyscraper. I’d describe that as o’erarching ambition.”

Berthe twisted the pull around her wrist, plastic beads digging into her flesh hard. She could not believe he was trying to make a joke.

“So you’re—” she said, and could not find the words in her sour, dust-dry mouth. She tugged hard at the blind. “You’re like me?”

The blind tumbled down with a rattle and a bang, the plastic cord suddenly slack around her wrist and sudden sunlight flooding in, making her blink.

Her ears filled with the sound of the boy hissing, a cat’s noise from a boy’s throat. She saw him move fast, backing away from the sudden sunlight and into a different dark corner.

There was a hand held up, protecting his face, but she could still see his bared inhuman teeth.

“No,” he whispered. “I’m not like you.”

This last revelation was too much, the world of strangeness expanding too far. Berthe could not bear another second in this little house.

She turned and ran, as she’d wanted to before, out into the sunlight where he could not follow her, and she told herself that it would not happen again.

She kept telling herself that. She sneaked in through her bedroom window and pretended she had got in late and slept in her own bed that night, tucked in innocent and harmless under her sheets.

She told herself that when she lied to her friends that she was all better now, she told herself that when she refused to go on the next camping trip, even though she had always signed up to go on every trip before. She told herself that, lying in her safe bed, under her safe sheets, with the windows open so she could see the moon had not become bright and dangerous yet.

She could hear her parents having whispered fights all the way across the house, and even though they were ordinary fights that left no trace of bitterness behind, she had never known they had those fights before. She didn’t want to know now. She could hear Natalie and Leela murmuring secrets meant to exclude her, and even though she knew she’d done the same thing with both of them, that every pair of friends had secrets between just the two of them, actually hearing it hurt.

That she was able to hear all these things hurt worse. The scar on the inside of her elbow was a silver crescent moon, shining and smooth on her skin, but the moon was long past crescent.

She could not get away from the world or herself. The night and her body lay in wait to betray her.

She stopped telling herself that it would not happen again, because she could not bear to think about it at all.

But she remembered, as well as the fear and pain, what the boy at the coffee shop had said.

You don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?

She walked across town as the sun died, on the night of the next full moon, and knocked on a gray door.

The boy from the coffee shop let her in.

It happened again.

Berthe came downstairs in another pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that read BEING PESSIMISTIC WOULDN’T WORK ANYWAY. She was not tempted to run out the door this time. She had spent a month running already.

The boy was standing in the same shadowed corner he had stood in the last time. Berthe noticed he had fixed the blind.

He had loomed large in her mind, the moment of hissing and teeth overwriting everything else, but he looked very much like he had in the coffee shop, dark hair swept back in a particular, deliberate way, wearing fingerless gloves of all things. The room looked exactly the same as well, down to the cup of tea and the cookie on the table.

“Thank you,” said Berthe. She felt she had to, even though she didn’t know how to mean it.

“You’re welcome,” he said quietly. He gestured toward the table. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Yes,” Berthe said. “All right.”

She walked toward the table and sat down in the chair. “Can I—”

“I do not drink . . . tea,” said the boy, and smirked to himself before his face smoothed out, serious and pale. “I don’t eat. It’s for you.”

It made her feel strange, to realize that he had gone out and bought tea and cookies for her last month, laid them out thinking she might be hungry.

She took a sip of the tea. It was cooling, but she saw the strips of sunlight on the kitchen counter and knew he could not have made it later. The whole room had sneaky pieces of sunlight in it.

The heavy shutters and door upstairs clearly formed his refuge, and she had exiled him from it.

“Thanks,” she said again, and meant it a little this time. “The tea’s good. Is there a cure?”

“It isn’t a sickness,” said the boy. “It’s who you are now.”

“So that would be a no.”

He was silent, though his attention stayed fixed on her. Now that Berthe was looking back at him, she saw why he might wear glasses: they helped hide his eyes’ strange brightness and the way they tracked movement, more alert than a human’s would.

Or maybe he needed glasses. Could a creature like him need glasses?

“You knew what I was,” Berthe said, utterly unable to talk about him smelling her. “You recognized it. So you must have met other people like me.”

“I knew one. She was kind to me,” said the boy. “But she can’t help you. I’m sorry. She’s dead now.”

“What did she die of?” Berthe heard her voice shake, felt her lips tremble, and put the cookie to her lips to hide it.

“She killed herself,” said the boy softly. He added, “I’m sorry,” again.

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” Berthe said, swallowing desolation and a mouthful of cookie so dry it scraped her throat. “She was your friend.”

Killed herself, Berthe thought despairingly. Because she hurt somebody, or because she could not live being like Berthe was now a moment longer? She didn’t know, and the woman could not tell her now. She could not tell Berthe anything.

“What about the—the person who bit me in the woods?” Berthe asked desperately. “They must be like me. Couldn’t we find them? Couldn’t you smell them?”

The boy’s eyebrows rose. “I’m not a sniffer dog,” he said mildly. “Even when you were human, I’m sure you could smell a pie. I don’t imagine you could wander the city streets and track a pie down by scent.”

“Isn’t there some way?” Berthe said. She put down the cookie and the tea and put her face in her hands, too wretched to be embarrassed. “Isn’t there any way?”

The boy cleared his throat, a soft apologetic sound, after she had sat with her head in her hands for some time. She looked up and saw him looking at the floor, at one of the strips of sunlight.

“They might still be in the woods,” he said. “If they are, I don’t think they’ll be able to help you. But if you want, I’ll go with you to look.”

“Yes,” Berthe said. Any relief at this point felt like overwhelming joy. “Yes, please. Thank you. Can we go now?”

“Well,” the boy said, “no. I fear that if I burst into flames and died in agony, it might hamper the expedition somewhat.”

“Oh.” Berthe felt like an idiot and also just felt lost. She had seen him leap away from the fallen blind, seen his teeth, but every moment in his company it seemed more unreal. She could run around the room pulling up blinds, and though he seemed solid and real, he would turn to ash. A shudder rang through her, all the way to her aching bones. “Can we go tonight?”

The boy said, “Of course.”

“Thank you,” Berthe said again. Every one of her thanks had become more real, by degrees. She turned away from her tea and the crumbs on the table, tilted her head so she was looking at him, at the strange eyes glittering behind his glasses. “I’m Berthe.”

“Berthe,” he said, pronouncing it correctly right off. “That’s French, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Berthe always felt a bit awkward about her name. She didn’t look elegant and French, dainty and well dressed like her mother, who she’d once heard described as everything a woman should be. Berthe was tall and blond with strong shoulders, like her dad. But they hadn’t known what she would be like when she grew up.

The creepy guy from the coffee shop, the creature with the teeth who had saved her, said, “I’m Stephen.”

It was such an ordinary name, it made Berthe almost smile, and then bite on her lower lip in case that offended him.

He didn’t look offended.

“I can’t say it’s nice to meet you, under the circumstances,” said Berthe at last. “But . . .”

He smiled, mouth closed and teeth hidden. It was, under the circumstances, quite a nice smile.

“Likewise.”

The woods near her town were not full of gnarled oaks and whispered legends of a curse. The trees were all pine trees, grown for lumber, with a lot of handy campsites. Berthe had gone hiking through these woods a hundred times and never felt the least alarm. She had been so absolutely sure that when it came right down to it, she was safe.

The woods at night, nobody but her and a relative stranger, were very quiet. It was also very bright, even considering that the moon was one night past full, a shining coin in the sky. Berthe could see the silver stir of pine needles as a tiny animal ran through them, yards and yards away. Every tree branch was a clear silver line struck against the sky.

When she looked at Stephen, he had his glasses off. She’d been right, she thought: he didn’t need them for anything but concealment. His eyes looked silver, too, his pupils subtly wrong, darting after every movement in the wood.

Just like her eyes were. Berthe wondered what her eyes looked like to him.

“Which of us can see better?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Stephen answered. “Does it matter? We can both see very well. We are predators. But you’re stronger and faster. My kind are built for a more cunning type of hunt.”

Predators. Hunt. The words danced grotesquely in Berthe’s mind.

Stephen blinked. “Sorry. That came out a great deal more disturbing than it sounded in my head. I’m afraid I’m out of practice with conversation.”

“You don’t talk to people?” Berthe asked blankly.

“Not really,” said Stephen. “Not in depth. The less contact with other people, the less chance they’ll notice I’m not aging. I can stay in one place longer.”

“You don’t,” Berthe said. “You don’t age. Right, obviously. Because that’s how you work, with the no sunlight and the—not aging. And you talk like an old person. How old are you?”

You talk like an old person, Berthe repeated to herself silently. She never had known how to talk to boys.

“Sixty-two,” Stephen answered.

Berthe stared.

“I know,” said Stephen. “It seems glamorous and otherworldly for someone like me to be a hundred years old, or two hundred. But there is the problem of getting there.”

It was a real age, an age that a person could be, the age for women with blue hair and blouses, for men with canes and tweed caps, for grandparents. That made it much harder to assign to the boy in front of her, his face smooth and his eyes faintly glowing.

“You wait until I’m a hundred years old,” Stephen said, mouth quirking. “The ladies will love it.”

“I’ll be fifty-four by then,” Berthe told him.

There was a brief awkward pause.

“I meant the ladies in general,” Stephen said. “They will be lining up. I will have to carry extra dance cards, on account of how my dance card will be entirely full.”

There was another silence, broken by a rustle far away that made Stephen’s head turn, chin lifting, scenting the air. Berthe turned with him, trying to make out whatever he did, and caught something: wild and strange, musk and fur. She wondered if that was how she smelled to him, and then she did not have time to wonder further: Stephen was running, fleet and sure, faster than any boy who looked like he did should have been able to. Faster than anyone should have been able to.

Berthe was fast. She didn’t run track or anything, but she played lacrosse and in gym she tended to win races. She wasn’t fast enough to keep up with Stephen, she knew, but she tried, anyway, and it was shockingly easy. Her feet found every place, tree roots and leaf drifts where she might have tripped or slipped, seeming not even there. It was like running over smooth ground, and she was past Stephen, toward the wild scent, with the wild wind in her hair.

There was a dark shape at the foot of a tree, and it twisted away from her and almost ran into Stephen, who hissed at it, teeth gleaming. For a moment Berthe felt a tremor run through her, a chill of profound unfamiliarity: that Stephen was not like her, and the shape between them was.

Except Stephen was here to help her, and this was the creature that had attacked her.

“Why,” Berthe said, voice tearing in the wind, “why is he still a wolf? It’s not the full moon—he shouldn’t be—”

“Some of you turn wild.” Stephen’s voice was calm because it was always calm, but there was a slight strain to the calm now. “And you don’t turn back.”

Berthe’s heart banged in her ears like many doors slamming all at once: no answers, no hope, no help to be had, just a dumb thing with eyes shining up at her, green like her own but split with lines of yellow like lightning.

It was moving, low on the ground but with intent, toward Stephen.

The hair on the back of Berthe’s neck stood up, but for once she didn’t feel afraid. She felt—it was more like outrage, and she moved in her new smooth way and was standing between them, making a sound that was mangled by her human throat.

I won’t let you: challenge: mine, said the sound, and the animal backed away. It understood her.

It understood her because she was halfway to being an animal herself, because there were no answers but only this horror beyond words in the woods.

The wolf backed away on its belly, and Berthe sat down among the pine needles.

“Sometimes they still turn back,” Stephen said. “I thought perhaps—I wanted there to be something here for you.”

“A look into the future?”

“No,” said Stephen. “They make a choice—they turn toward the wild—”

“And what other choice is there to make?” Berthe demanded. “The one your friend did?”

Berthe had to look up from the pine needle floor because she could not hear Stephen. He did not breathe and his heart did not beat; when he was still he was a creature of perfect silence and she could not tell if he was there. She was suddenly afraid that he had left, suddenly aware that things could get worse.

Stephen had not left. He was looking down at her, eyes moonlight-eerie in his thin, serious face, and then he knelt down so they were on a level.

“She was very lonely,” he said. “She didn’t know what was happening to her at first. She hurt people. She hurt her family. You haven’t done that. You’re not alone.”

“No,” said Berthe, and thought painfully of her parents, and of Leela and Natalie. They all seemed so far away in a world she did not know how to scramble back to. “But I could hurt them,” she said. “And I can’t tell them. And I’m alone with this.”

“You’re not,” said Stephen.

“You’re not like me,” Berthe told him, her voice low.

She did not just mean what they were, or the feeling of being on different sides in a dark wood. He was in control as she was not: he was not tearing rooms into shreds.

“I only wanted . . . ,” Berthe tried to clarify, “I wanted someone who could explain this to me, from the inside out.”

Stephen looked off into the trees, after the fleeing wolf, and then knelt down on the ground among the needles with her.

“I’m not telling you this to trump what you’re feeling,” he said, “or to try and win the argument. I was made by a man who had a whole bevy of us—teenage minions, old enough to be useful, but not old enough to survive on our own with ease. He told us what was happening to us, and what to do, how to feed, how to serve him and recruit for him. We were dependent on him, because of what we were.”

Feed, Berthe thought, and whispered, “Did you kill someone?”

“I killed three people,” Stephen answered, without hesitating. “The last one was the worst, though I doubt the first two would agree with me. I had a family, once. I waited for my chance to get back to them. When it came, I didn’t get away clean—someone was watching me. A window broke, and I was cut, and one of the others had her teeth in my wrist to the bone. I had to tear free. They were hunting me through the streets, and I did not know what to do. I knocked on doors and a woman let me in, a teenage boy covered in blood. In return for her kindness, I knocked her to the floor, ripped her throat out, and gulped down her heart’s blood. I stayed in her house all that night and the next day with her body. Without her, I don’t think I would have escaped.

“I wanted to get away from the man who made me and taught me. I wish I had not asked for that woman’s help. Being able to depend on nobody but yourself isn’t so bad.”

“If you can depend on yourself,” Berthe said shakily.

“You can,” Stephen said, and sounded sure, calm again, the alien creature, the murderer who had saved her from hurting anyone. “And you’re not alone.”

The night was crystal clear and terrifying, the wolf running through the woods, and when she closed her eyes she could not hear anyone’s breathing or heartbeat but her own.

But when she looked up, she wasn’t alone, after all, and when she got home from the dark woods, her mother made her hot chocolate, popping in a marshmallow. Berthe looked at the tiny treat in the cup and thought about all the little sweetnesses love slipped into your daily life, almost unnoticed except that when they were added up, they meant you could bear anything.

At her next lacrosse game she was running, running across the field with her stick in hand, her parents and friends cheering as they watched. Another girl ran at her full tilt, body-checking her.

Berthe barely paused, but she bumped the girl’s shoulder—carefully, careful, she had to be so careful, you don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?—and the girl fell back, and Berthe ran ahead with the ball and her victory.

It was a bright sunlit moment, but the girl had a bruise on her shoulder afterward. She said in the locker room, with a little admiration but mostly spite, “You’re an animal, Lindstrom.”

The other girl was the one who had not been playing fair. If Berthe was playing fair by playing at all, considering what she was.

Berthe went and took a hot shower, scrubbing hard at her unmarked body. She came out of it and looked in the fogged mirror set over the sink, misted glass reflecting back pieces of her grotesquely: blond hair dark-stringy with water, pale blur of flesh and eyes cut with lightning, like the eyes of the wolf in the woods. She pressed her face against the wet glass and took deep shuddering breaths, and outside the building she heard Natalie and Leela whispering secrets Berthe was not supposed to know.

When she was done taking breaths, she leaned back from the mirror, wiped it with her shaking hand, and looked at herself whole and clear.

“How do you,” Berthe said, on the third morning after a full moon, sitting with her cookie half-eaten in her hand. “How do you feed now?”

Stephen sat in the corner away from the sunlight. He did not, as she had feared, look offended by the question.

“Not well,” he answered. “There is no way to do it that’s right. People who are sleeping on the street. People who are passed out drunk at parties in a garden. Stealing from a blood donation clinic, or a blood bank. I feed in small, dark ways, but I don’t kill.”

It was a horrible picture, the monster preying on unsuspecting people. The savagery that ripped through Stephen’s bedroom every full moon, that would rip through people, was horrible as well.

And there was something else besides horror in it: the thought of kind Stephen spending half his life desperately scavenging for sustenance.

“You must be hungry a lot,” she said quietly.

He was silent.

“If you want,” she began. She had brought her own clothes this time, and she fiddled with the sleeve of her warm, comforting sweater, pulling it up to expose the veins on her wrist.

It could not be anything like as bad as the liquefying pain she had suffered last night and would suffer, again and again, as long as she lived. And she would get to do something for Stephen: something that might make him happy.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she told him.

“My kind can’t feed on your kind,” Stephen said, and after a pause, very politely: “But thank you very much. I mean it. Nobody’s ever offered me that before.”

It hurt for a moment that her body was disqualified to do something for him. She felt monstrous for not being prey for him, and how stupid was that?

“When I’m—like I am, upstairs, can you hear me?” she asked. “Is it awful?”

“No,” said Stephen.

“How can it not be?”

“How can you stand to look at me,” Stephen said, “when you know what I am? Once you change things from the general to the personal, what does ‘monstrous’ even mean? It’s not awful. I hear you and it’s Berthe, upstairs.”

It didn’t seem like her, and she was scared of thinking of it as her, but she gave some thought to trying to remember next time.

Berthe tucked her feet up under her. “How’d you get so smart?”

“Well, I’ve been around awhile,” Stephen said. “Gives you time to think things through, even if our minds don’t mature like yours will.”

“How do you know your mind isn’t mature?”

“I’m speculating,” said Stephen. “Of course, it’s quite probable that being scared and uncertain and stupid is something you never grow out of, and I just want to think there’s some way for other people to do it.”

Berthe blinked at him, startled into speechlessness by the idea of Stephen being scared or uncertain.

He looked the same as ever, inhuman-bright eyes steady behind his glasses, wearing a T-shirt that seemed to be about robots, his face pale and thin and thoughtful.

“I’m glad I can’t drink from you,” Stephen told her. “I don’t want to be a monster with you.”

“You’re not,” said Berthe. She didn’t like words as much as Stephen did, couldn’t frame the right things to say the way he could, but she smiled at him and said awkwardly, “It’s personal for me, too.”

Stephen smiled back. She thought he might cross the room to her, but of course he could not get past the sunlight, the rays between them like iron bars.

It was three weeks more until Leela told Berthe what she had already told Natalie: that she was gay. After Berthe told Leela that she loved her, was glad to know anything about her friend that Leela had to tell because she loved her, and nothing would change that love, Leela let her know when she was planning to tell her parents, and that she wanted a sleepover at Natalie’s house afterward. On the night of the full moon.

Berthe had to say no and hurt Leela with awkward lies. Berthe knew that in the human world, there was no excuse for what she was doing.

“You did get back to your family,” she said to Stephen as the sun was sinking behind his blinds, and her whole body wavered on the edge of the abyss. “Didn’t you?”

“I did,” said Stephen. “I got back to them, and I got to stay with them for two years. But after that—it was beginning to be obvious I wasn’t aging, and hunting was so hard to hide. I couldn’t stay with them.”

Berthe could not talk to him any longer. She had to run up the stairs, lock the door behind her, and feel pain twist her body into a whole new shape, casting her humanity far, far away. She lifted her face to the shut-out moon and howled because it would not stay.

The next day she did not stop for tea or Stephen, just threw on the clothes she had left outside the door and pushed her battered body, used all of her inhuman speed, for the task of getting coffee and pastries from Leela’s favorite place. She ran all the way to Natalie’s house and rang the bell with the sun still tentative and new in the sky.

Leela opened the door and looked at her, and for a moment there was a silence of hurt and hesitance, a possibility that the door would be shut in her face, but instead Leela reached out and drew her inside.

The three of them spent the day together, talking about how it had gone and what Leela was thinking and feeling, and planning out things they might want to do next, discussing movies and sports and coming back around to Leela because this was her day.

They walked around town until evening came and they got to a certain coffee shop and went in to find crowded tables and people who looked like they were in for the long haul, student types with their laptops.

Stephen, with a book and a coffee cup he had not touched, wanting to be with people even though he didn’t speak to them. Stephen, who had made his house something like a home for her—somewhere he had chosen to always let her in, whenever she came—but who had been too scared to stay in his own home, had told her that he felt eternally young and scared, so scared that the only thing he could think of to do was spend all his life in hiding.

“I see a table,” she said to Leela and Natalie, and marched up—the idea of it, of her marching up to a table where a boy was. “Hey,” she said as Stephen blinked inhuman-brilliant eyes behind his glasses and let his book fall onto his saucer. “Can we join you? This is Leela and Natalie. Girls, this is my friend Stephen.”

Leela turned out to have read Stephen’s book and discussing it with him made them both smile. Natalie drew Leela to the register, on the blatant pretext of wanting another cookie, to discuss Stephen and Berthe with her, and Berthe stayed behind to discuss them with him.

“Won’t they wonder about—where I go to school?” Stephen asked, apparently nonplussed and pleased enough to come close to Berthe’s level of conversational flailing.

“Tell them you’re homeschooled,” said Berthe, tactfully not adding that the way Stephen talked, they might be assuming this already—though either she didn’t notice how he talked was strange anymore or he was talking a bit more normally. “Or maybe a college guy taking a year out. Very glamorous.”

“Do you really think I look old enough?” Stephen asked, sounding almost shy.

“Definitely,” said Berthe.

“Dad,” Berthe said a couple of weeks later. “Next time you have a little space between jobs, I was wondering if you could help out a friend of mine.”

“Space between jobs, what are you talking about? I work my fingers to the bone keeping you in designer clothing and handbags,” her dad told her, pulling on the hood of her sweatshirt. “Is it Natalie or Leela? Leela needs a bookcase set in her wall—I’ve been saying it for years.”

“It’s another friend,” Berthe said. “Um. A boy. Stephen. Is his name. He has porphyria.” And here she turned her face away, because she’d never lied to her dad before. “He’s sensitive to sunlight. And he works at a call center—he doesn’t have a whole lot of money. I thought if we could put shutters on his windows downstairs . . .”

Her dad was quiet for a little while. “Is that where you’ve been, some nights you’ve been home pretty late? Or rather, pretty early in the morning?”

“If the boy can’t go out during the day, it’s different,” her mother said, as quick to sympathy as she was quick to anger, and her dad looked at her and then pulled Berthe into a hug.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“You should bring this Stephen around for dinner,” said her mother. “What does he like to eat?”

Berthe could not tell her mother that Stephen liked to eat people. She could not tell the people who loved her best in the world what she had become.

But she wasn’t like Stephen. She was going to grow up, and maybe that meant becoming a little less scared. Maybe by the time she was ready to go to college, she could tell them. Maybe she could think about telling her friends.

Leela and Natalie assumed Stephen was Berthe’s boyfriend, that he was a little weird but nice, that he and Berthe fit, though being at opposite ends of some spectrum. Her parents clearly thought so as well. They all thought they knew what was going on.

They knew nothing about his weird staring and wonderful rescue in the coffee shop, or his silent presence in the woods. And Berthe knew nothing about romance.

He liked her, she thought. But he never did or said anything like that: he was the boy who had quietly left his home to spare his family, who did not talk to other people at all, who kept hidden.

Berthe rather self-consciously wore a T-shirt that said TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ she’d bought, because it made her think of Stephen and also said something about herself, on the night of the next full moon.

It made Stephen smile his small, crooked smile as he opened the door, but he didn’t comment on it. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do if he didn’t say anything: Stephen always knew the right thing to say.

“See you in the morning,” she told him, for want of anything better, and smiled back.

She took off her shirt in his hall, folding it neatly, took off the rest of her clothes as well and realized for the first time that he could probably hear her getting undressed. She went into his bedroom with her cheeks burning.

Stephen always made the bed, even though he knew she was going to wreck it. Berthe went and lay down on it, felt the cool material of his pillow against her face, and concentrated on that scrap of comfort through the pain.

When she woke up, there were more scars on the walls, but she had not ripped the mattress apart this time. It still looked as if there had been a beast inside the room, but just a little more controlled this time.

She dressed slowly, getting comfortable with being back in her own skin, went downstairs, and opened the door to find her tea on the table beside her cookie, her Stephen in the corner shutting his book as soon as he saw her.

He had reached out when they met, she thought, taken steps with her she could not have taken alone. She could do that now, when he might be paralyzed from being in hiding, from years and years in the dark.

Berthe crossed the floor, and the sunlight was no bar to her. She approached Stephen and he rose politely to meet her approach, and she did not try to say the right thing.

She took his face in her hands and kissed him. He moved in toward her at once, a little awkward and seeming so glad, and she was so glad, too. It felt like a different kind of moonlight moving through her and changing her.

He was a little shorter than she was now, and he hadn’t been a few months ago. She was growing up, and he was not. This moment, his narrow chest against hers, could not be kept. She smiled against his mouth: a little sweetness in the cup of her life and his, having this moment and the next, and being unafraid of change.

“I was wondering,” Berthe said, soft as her own breath. “What are you doing tonight?”