Chapter Text
It’s Caleb’s death that breaks him, but she doesn’t realise it until later because she’s too busy being broken by Max’s.
“I don’t understand,” she whispers, her hands shiny and slick with Max’s blood under the full moon, cradling his torn body where it rests on the edge of the pier. The average adult human male carries six litres of blood. Seeing it all spilled out of Max’s pale, white corpse, staining the wooden slats where it has dripped down into the water of the lake below, she wonders how the entire body of water hasn’t turned red with it, like Moses turning the waters of the Nile to blood. “Why didn’t he just stay on the island? We agreed – we said the island was the safest place for him, he knew I was going to come back and find him there. Why did he –”
She feels Travis’s tentative touch upon her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” she gasps, jerking away; his hand vanishes, she hears him take a step back, “don’t you fucking touch me –”
“We can’t stay here, Laura.”
“Fuck you,” she chokes. She gives Max’s corpse a shake, as if that nudge will restart his heart, as if it’ll wake him from a deep slumber and the colour will return to his face and he’ll gasp for air and his eyes will light up again, meeting hers and smiling at her with that adoring gaze. But he doesn’t. He’s cold and rigor mortis is already setting in – just another fatality of the Hackett’s Quarry massacre. Travis stays back and silent as she leans forward and presses her lips to Max’s forehead. She tastes his blood. It’s cold and sticky, she wants to gag at the taste, not because it’s blood but because it’s not fresh. God – what if the wolf hasn’t left her? What if it was all for nothing –
“Laura,” Travis says. “Please.”
Help me, he’d begged of her. Help me. We can still save Caleb – Caleb was the last beast unaccounted for, Caleb must have murdered Max, why the fuck would she want to save Caleb – we can still save what’s left of my family – the family who spent six years forcing him to betray the oaths he took as a police officer, the family who had selfishly let the monsters near children in a summer camp for two months every year for six years, the family responsible for this curse in the first goddamn place – we can help those who are still alive – there must be someone left.
Ryan bled out quietly in the back seat of the car; she didn’t even realise he was dead until after Travis ran Silas down on the road. The one he and the others – Dylan and Kaitlyn – called Nick tore the girl Abigail to shreds and escaped from the cages after Laura blew the power; he must be human now, lost somewhere out in the woods. That leaves Kaitlyn and Dylan, and the two she hadn’t met, Jacob and Emma. If they’re smart, they’ll be back at the lodge, waiting for the salvation that comes with sunrise.
It can’t have all been for nothing.
She rests Max back down upon the pier and stands to face him – the cop, her captor, her victim, her saviour: Travis Hackett, his uniform torn and covered in blood but alive – and she thinks, it should have been him. It should have been him instead of Max.
He says, “I’m sorry –”
“Don’t,” she whispers. She sounds hollow to herself.
He falls silent, bows his head and casts his eyes downwards. She holds her shoulders back and her head high as she walks past him in the torn and bloodied dress belonging to the young girl she murdered – it should have been her, he’s probably thinking, it should have been her instead of Kaylee – and he follows in her wake towards the lodge to help those who are still alive.
But there’s no one left alive. Perhaps if they’d been faster – if they’d trusted one another sooner – if, if, if – there’d be someone alive left to call an ambulance for, but instead what they have is this: a slaughter. A massacre. A bloodbath. Whatever the fuck you want to call it.
They find the one they think is Jacob in the middle of a bear trap site. He’d panicked when a trap slammed around his leg and broke his ankle. He’d pulled until he died of blood loss. Emma’s shredded body – mauled to pieces – is found in a ravine.
The boy who’d turned, Nick, was cured of the curse and died immediately afterwards, his body shattered and broken over the rocks from where he’d plummeted out of a tree, no superhuman werewolf healing to help him recover.
The lodge itself runs red with blood: Dylan’s body ripped to pieces, Kaitlyn gutted, and the side of Caleb’s small body blown out by a silver shell from the shotgun locked firm in his killer’s hand by rigor mortis.
Travis doesn’t make a sound when he kneels slowly by his nephew’s small, naked body. Doesn’t even breathe. The knees of his pants soak through in the pool of blood, the boy’s pale, limp body looking fragile and cold in Travis’s arms. He wears that same expression of quiet devastation she’d seen when he turned his gaze from her yellow wolf eyes to his father’s corpse, the pain lodging somewhere deep in his chest. He doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t shake the boy, doesn’t cry out or swear or weep. He presses one shaking, bloodied hand against the boy’s cheek and doesn’t move.
Laura should probably say I’m sorry. She doesn’t. She won’t. What good will an apology do? Of all the deaths of his family members she caused tonight, Caleb’s blood is not on her hands and her sympathy, what little of it she feels, will not bring the boy back, no more than Travis’s hollow apology could return Max to life.
She leaves him to his grief and goes back outside to sit on the wooden steps, gazing up at the full moon still high in the sky that is beginning to lighten with the approach of dawn.
“What now?” she asks, her lips numb and her mind slow when Travis finally joins her, sitting next to her heavily on the wooden steps in silence. She’s always hated that in books and movies and shows – the side female character, usually (but not always) the love interest, at the climax of the story when almost all hope seems lost, turning to the generically handsome male lead and asking “What now?” as if she had not until that point been an active problem-solving character in the narrative. Gotta give the male his time to shine.
But Laura has never dealt with a werewolf massacre or snapped an old man’s neck or blown the face off an old woman before. The only future she sees for herself when the sun rises is police cars, handcuffs, therapists, a psych ward and a straitjacket, or the business end of a gun because she can’t gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss her way out of this one, ladies. Travis is the furthest thing from a hero and he knows it, but at least – at least he’s done this before, at least he might have some idea of where to go from here.
“What I always do,” he murmurs, his voice dead and his lips twisted into self-loathing. His eyes are vacant, his shoulders hunched over and drawn in towards his own body. She has known this man for two months and an eternal night; she knows what this will cost him, what he has destroyed of himself in the past over this curse. “I cover it up.”
“Just like that, huh?” she says, not even bothering to conceal her disgust.
He doesn’t either. “Just like that.”
She wonders how many times he has done this – swept away the deaths caused by his brother and nephew and niece, how many police reports he has doctored and buried at the behest of the family that used his status for their own benefit, obeying his mother who ground him beneath her thumb and the father who cowed him to submission with nothing but a word and a glare. She doesn’t want to know, but she needs to, so she asks, not expecting an answer even though there is nothing left between them to hide.
He surprises her. “Two... three times,” he replies, staring down at the blood on his hands; there’s some on-the-nose imagery for the inevitable low-budget true crime documentary if this ever gets out, Laura thinks. “But not... not like this. Never like this.”
They figure out their story. It involves Laura claiming she and Max were at the camp the entire time – who’s to say otherwise? Children are hardly a reliable source of information in the eyes of most adults, and anyone else who could say otherwise is dead. She recites the story to herself over and over again while Travis covers Caleb’s body and carries it away – “Where are you going?” “I’ll take care of it.” “Travis –” “I said , I’ll take care it.” – and she makes herself believe the version of the night they’ll tell the police, who will tell the devastated families of the dead counsellors, who will tell the media then be forgotten within two weeks when the next major celebrity couple divorces. The van broke down, so the counsellors thought they’d stay one more night at camp. One boy set off fireworks and blew his own hand off. The blood drew feral animals – a pack of bears. They died one by one in their panic, falling to their deaths in ravines, legs caught in bear traps, faulty zip lines, accidentally shooting each other in the dark, getting mauled to death by the rabid, ravenous beasts.
This is the part she doesn’t know until he returns empty-handed, the blood on his face darkened by ash and the air thick with the scent of smoke: by the time North Kill’s sole police officer responded to a radio distress signal, it was too late for the counsellors – and while he searched the forests and only found Laura, his elderly mother whose hands were stiff with arthritis knocked over an oil lamp and the Hackett mansion burned down to the ground, taking his entire family with it.
You ever seen hay burn?
“Travis…” she whispers.
“It’s the only way,” he chokes out. “It’s the only way –”
She catches him as his knees fail and he staggers forward, collapsing as the last vestige of the strength he’d held together to commit this final terrible act for his family’s legacy leaving him as surely as the blood had drained from Max’s body. She catches him, one hand at the back of his neck, the other braced against his chest. He smells of sweat, blood and ash – how long had he stood in the smoke and flames, wondering if he too should join the rest of his family? He clutches her arms, gasping against her shoulder while the bodies rot, the blood dries, the house burns, and somewhere, behind the thick plumes of smoke filling the red sky, the sun rises.