Page 5 of The Huntress and the Blood Moon (The Huntress #1)

T he sun beats down on Carmen with surprising weight for an October afternoon, though she supposes the uncomfortable heat could be also a byproduct of all the whiskey still oozing from her pores.

Thankfully she’d been able to keep her wits about her during her brief meeting with Cody.

The poor kid is clearly suffering, and the last thing he deserves is some drunken lowlife poking around his gaping wounds with salted fingers, forcing him to relive memories she knows damn well are excruciating.

The crunch of Cody’s retreating footsteps against the fallen leaves faded a while ago, and yet Carmen still can’t stop thinking about the despair cloaking him like a heavy wool blanket.

She’d recognize it anywhere, sees it every morning when she looks in the mirror while she brushes her liquor-stained teeth.

At least she’s found a way to funnel all that rage and sadness into something that feels productive.

Where life only very recently felt like an endless black pit of whiskey-induced nothingness, she now has a goal, an endgame to hold fast to.

Hopefully Cody can find something like that, too: a purpose to carry him through the rest of his life.

Walking closer to the flowing river, the slashes along Carmen’s thigh pang with a sharp jolt that sends her doubling over.

As if her body is reliving her own harrowing run-in with the beast that left the love of her life bleeding out in her arms, utterly helpless in the middle of the desert.

She rubs against the old wound, squeezing her eyes shut as the swell of pain burns brighter for what feels like far too long to be normal before finally dissipating.

Letting out a long breath, Carmen frowns. She has half a mind to unbuckle her pants and get a look at the scars, positive she’ll see them bloody and festering all over again. It’s not the first time a phantom pain has shot through the old wounds, but it’s never been like this .

Somewhere upriver, a twig snaps. Carmen whips her head up, hand flying to the knife strapped to her leg . . .

But there’s nothing. Nothing besides thick trunks of tall oak-hickory and maple trees, shadows dancing along the forest floor from sunlight reaching through their bright green leaves. Her eyes trail along the river, hunting for any indication of movement, but she finds none.

Maybe it was the wind? Carmen looks up to the billowing branches above her, finding them still, not even a hint of a breeze creeping along her skin.

She drops her gaze back to the river, looking for any fallen branches that may have been disturbed by the flowing water.

There’s a handful of old logs scattered along the bank—one of them must have cracked from the pressure of the current.

Carmen studies the direction of the river, the way it curves north in the distance.

She tries to summon an image of the map of Renbury from memory but comes up short—she’d only briefly studied it before arriving a couple days ago.

Without knowing where the river leads, she’s hesitant to follow its path.

The last thing she needs is to end up lost in the woods, especially in a dehydrated state.

She decides to save the thought for later when she can pilfer a map from the motel’s front desk.

For now, she’ll just focus on what’s right in front of her: the campsite.

All things considered, there’s not much to look at.

The wooded area isn’t an official campground, so there’s no real designated place where Cody and Elijah’s tents would’ve been pitched when the attack occurred.

There’s also an obvious lack of a firepit, which means the boys either brought in ready-made food or they cooked over a portable burner of some kind.

The smell of food is likely what attracted the beast, but without any real evidence it’s hard to know for sure.

She sighs, feeling no closer to answers than she was before meeting Cody.

Maybe it would have been too easy to have all the clues laid out for her.

Maybe the truth is she doesn’t have the energy for any of this, but she owes it to Lacie.

One more job . One last grandstand against the evil bastards who ripped Carmen’s heart right out of her chest.

If it weren’t for the shred of hope that Lacie is still out there watching over her from the other side of the veil, pleased to see Carmen trying , she might not have the strength to keep going at all.

If not for that hope she clings to with desperate fingers, Carmen knows her own existence would have likely snuffed out months ago, her soul withering away until she was nothing more than wind and sunlight.

It’s only fitting Lacie would continue to motivate Carmen, even now.

To encourage her to give a damn about something other than herself.

Growing up, Carmen found it difficult to muster the courage to work hard for anything—but how could she?

She was a product of the foster system, passed around and picked over dozens of times, owned by a government’s failing institution built to nurture children but, in reality, only seems to neglect them more.

When Carmen found out she was going to be transferred from a run-down group home facility in Wichita to another in Topeka at sixteen, she didn’t even care.

She was a tumbleweed blowing with the wind, unfeeling and unmoved by anything.

The only issue she had was that she’d have to give up the one thing she coveted most: having her own room.

The new place would be nicer, her case worker explained.

They had more resources to offer children with no families, especially older ones like her who’d be aging out soon.

But the trade-off was that Carmen would be forced to share a room with another teenage girl, something she utterly dreaded having to do.

She’d had her fair share of batshit crazy roommates and didn’t want to have to sleep with one eye open.

But when she walked into her new airy and sunlit room and found Lacie sitting crisscrossed on the bed opposite hers, something in her chest startled, a physical reaction that Carmen had never once felt before.

Lacie, it turned out, had been brought to the facility two months before Carmen transferred there.

Her father had been arrested for burglary and attempted assault with a deadly weapon, and everyone told her he wouldn’t be getting out anytime soon, that Lacie should get comfortable with her new reality.

Her mother left them long ago and there was no record of her current whereabouts.

Lacie insisted she wouldn’t have wanted to be with her, anyway.

She didn’t seem to mind being a ward of the state, which was peculiar to Carmen.

In fact, Lacie always talked about how nice it was, like she was on some sort of vacation.

To have a real room, she’d said, to be still— it was a relief.

At first, Lacie told Carmen that her dad was a bit of a drifter.

She eventually admitted the whole truth: he was a hunter of supernatural dangers, traveling across the country to fight monsters and keep people safe.

She explained there’s an entire underworld of beasts and demons growing bigger by the day, so big their world is beginning to slip into this one—and humans are getting killed.

At first, Carmen figured Lacie was high on something—surely she wasn’t serious?

But as more details spilled out of her mouth, it became obvious she wasn’t pulling Carmen’s leg.

Nearly her entire life had been spent on the road, riding shotgun in her dad’s old Bronco as he fought against numerous threats, teaching her everything he knows and calling it the “family business.”

Apparently, he’d been arrested after following a shadow demon through the front window of a sleepy little home in the middle of the night.

The couple who owned the house had been fast asleep.

But they eventually woke to the sounds of a scuffle and found Warren Campbell wrestling with a china cabinet with wild eyes and a long blade gripped tight in his hand.

As they called the cops, he shouted at them to hide, pointing into the shadows and calling out for a harbinger of night.

Lacie said it was only a matter of time before one of his buddies got to town to help cut him loose. They’d all learned how to impersonate federal law enforcement agents who’d “take over” certain cases. Lacie would be out soon, she promised. It was only a matter of time.

The thought gnawed at Carmen, to lose this unexpected friend so quickly. “Take me with you,” Carmen whispered one night as they both laid wide-awake in their shared dark room. She hadn’t meant for the words to come out so earnestly, felt the flames of embarrassment lick along her cheekbones.

But Lacie nodded and reached out, clutching Carmen’s hands in hers, like it wasn’t an insane request at all. “Okay,” she agreed. “My dad calls me once a week from jail—I’ll tell him you’re coming with us. He’ll be able to figure out how to get you out of here.”

For the first time in Carmen’s long, terrible life, she felt what it was to hope. And that’s exactly what Lacie became to her: a promise for a better future, a chance to love and be loved.

True to her word, when her father finally came to pick her up, he somehow finagled Carmen’s release as well, and she didn’t have to lose Lacie after all.

They traded their shared room for a shared backseat, and over the years their friendship dove deeper and deeper until the lines began to blur into something else entirely.

Carmen spent over a decade with Lacie and Warren on the road, and it was the greatest joy of her life.

She kicks a rock into a tree, watching as it ricochets and falls back to the ground.

Carmen knows better than to let memories of Lacie flood through her like this—it’s always a damn struggle to stuff them back down, to lock them back into the mental chest she keeps them sealed tight in.

Frowning toward the river, her head pounds against her temples, her throat clenching with thirst.

She wonders if she’s done enough today to deserve another drink, and then almost laughs at the thought. She most certainly hasn’t —but when has that ever stopped her?