sounded crazy, but I can feel it working when I change. It’s like a match is always on inside me. Kind of like, you know, inside a furnace?”
“A pilot light?”
She nodded and then smiled wistfully. “I used to like watching my dad light the pilot light at the old house back in West Virginia. Sometimes I snuck down there and left the little door on the side of the furnace open so that little flame would go out. Dad would go down there with a coat hanger he’d twisted up to hold a match and I’d follow him to watch.”
A semi pulling a trailer rumbled down the interstate. After it passed, a stray breeze swept across the camp. Her hair fluttered like streamers against her unmoving face. Crossing her arms and standing against the wind, she looked less like she was bracing herself against the elements and more like she was giving them silent commands to function around her.
“When my dad would light the match and stick it into the end of that bent metal hanger,” she said, “he told me to stay back. Then he stuck the match into the furnace and …whoosh!” Even as she said that word, her eyes sparkled as if she was looking at the little spectacle that had captivated her all those years ago. “The flames just exploded in every direction. They filled the whole furnace and all these streams of fire came out of all those metal pipes or whatever was in there. You know the ones I mean?”
“Yeah,” Jessup replied. “I do.”
She nodded, acknowledging him, but just barely. “That’s what it feels like when I change. Inside, there’s this little flame in me. Always burning. When I change, though …whoosh. It fills me up. Kind of like sex, but more.” She glanced over at him with the sly expression of a girl who’d done the deed, but not enough times for it to have lost its shock value. When Cole failed to react in kind, she rolled her eyes and nodded. “I’ve had sex, don’t you worry about it.”
She was just learning to use her sexuality as a tool. If he’d been about fifteen years younger, it would have had a lot more of an effect. Instead, he was able to see her as the young pup that she was. “So what’s this got to do with the Breaking Moon?” he asked.
“All the Full Bloods—and I don’t think there are a lot of them—we’re like the flames shooting out of those pipes. We each have some of that fire in us and we can use it however we like. Randolph says that part just goes into living, but we get to live for a real long time.”
Cole felt like a spy who’d found himself sitting at the dinner table inside an enemy’s camp when he asked, “How long?”
She glanced over at him, smirking like an officer who’d just found a spy sitting at her dinner table. “A long time. That is, unless we’re hunted down and murdered by some psycho with a Blood Blade. Oh yeah. He told me all about that too.”
“Sounds like you werewolves do a lot of talking.”
“I haven’t slept since that first change. That leaves a lot more time for talking.” After that, Cecile became more focused. “So anyway, we all get our share of the fire and the whole world is the furnace. Like, the ground. The earth. That sort of thing. We pull it up and draw it in to …”
“Recharge your batteries?” Cole asked.
Cecile snapped her fingers. “Exactly! Wherever it comes from, it’s tied into the moon cycles. He told me I wouldn’t be able to become all of what I can be until I pass some sort of Blood Moon trial.”
“You mean a lunar eclipse?” Recognizing the puzzled and vaguely annoyed look on her face after seeing it so many times when trying to bring various girlfriends in on the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate, he said, “When the moon passes between the earth and the sun, it’s a lunar eclipse.”
“No,” she said after an impatient click of her tongue. “That’s a solar eclipse. A lunar eclipse is when the earth is directly between the sun and the moon.”
Before fighting back with a scathing commentary on the modern school system, Cole paused and said, “Oh. You’re right. Yeah, I was thinking of the other one. But they’re called Blood Moons because when there’s a lunar eclipse, the moon looks all …you know …bloody.”
“Done?” she asked.
Suddenly, Cole didn’t miss Paige so much. If Cecile had a stick in her hand and was about to crack him upside his head, she might even make him homesick for his days at Rasa Hill. “I’m done,” he said.
“The Blood Moon is different. That’s something each of us needs to go through. With the Breaking Moon, we all get our fires stoked. It’s supposed to come up through the earth to keep us going for the next however many years it’ll be before the next one.”
“You don’t know how many years that is?”
“Nah,” she replied with a shrug. “But I know it’s a lot.”
A lot of years in Full Blood terms could very well mean several of his own lifetimes, Cole thought. Rather than break her conversational stride, he let it pass.
“Whatever the fire is, it’s drawn to us,” she continued. “Like in physics, how air will move from one spot to another to fill a vacuum. Know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh,” he said in a way he hoped was convincing.
“All the Full Bloods draw more of this fire than anything else, so they all picked their own territories and patrol them. This is Randolph’s territory. I think it goes up through Canada and covers most of the States as well. That system got messed up when that friend of his came over to rip up Kansas City.”
“Liam,” Cole said. Finally, it seemed all the crap he’d gone through since becoming a Skinner was coalescing into something greater than chasing monsters through back alleys.
“He was here for too long,” she continued. “Randolph said that two Full Bloods in the same territory will threaten the Balance.”
“What balance?”
“
“No.”
“I guess another Full Blood in someone else’s territory can draw some of the fire away from where it was supposed to go,” she said. “This whole system has been going for a while, and all that stuff in Kansas City ruined it. The other Full Bloods know Liam is here, drawing more energy or whatever for himself and Randolph.”
“So, if more Full Bloods are in one spot, more energy is drawn to that spot?” Cole asked.
“I think so.”
“Like the girl said,” Jessup muttered. “Physics.”
He thought for a moment until a picture formed in his head. Imagining the world as a source of energy and the Full Bloods as points scattered across its surface, he was able to make a good guess as to what that Balance was all about. If the Full Bloods positioned themselves just right, they could draw from the energy equally. Once the collection points clustered too close together, more energy would flow in that direction and get siphoned away from the others.
“That’s why they’re here,” he said. “Those other Full Bloods can’t let Randolph and Liam get stronger because it would put the rest of them at the bottom of the pile. But if they all came here, they’d draw even more of the energy, right?”
“Maybe all of it,” Jessup offered.
Cecile nodded. “There will always be this wildness in us, but the Balance is supposed to help ease it.”
“From what I’ve been hearing, you Full Bloods are a long way from being balanced,” Cole said. “One of them attacked Randolph and damn near leveled that prison. Others are tearing apart some town in Oklahoma as we speak.”
“Atoka?” she asked.
Jessup stepped forward. However she reacted, he wanted to see it first. “That’s the place. From what I’ve heard, things are pretty bad there right now.”
“Is Randolph a part of it?”
Unable to answer that, Jessup looked over to Cole. All Cole could say was, “I don’t think so. Randolph genuinely seemed to want to do something to fix whatever’s going on. Since he was attacked by another Full Blood, he may be on the outside of this whole thing. Maybe the others are looking for you.”
Cecile shook her head. “No. They’re going to stay there until the Breaking Moon rises. I was born there. That
