Running with the Moon
The travel from Lighthouse Beans coffee shop, seaside town to Evangeline’s coastal rental house, then a secluded motel on the highway consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The timer on the stove clicked over to 3:47 AM. Evangeline had been standing in the dark kitchen for eleven minutes, watching the digital numbers change, her hand still pressed flat against the counter where Gideon had touched her an hour ago.
She’d sent him to the couch. Then she’d stood here, unable to climb the stairs to Toby’s room, unable to lie down in the bed she’d shared with no one for four years.
*You brought danger to our door.* The words replayed, acidic and true.
The mist outside the window had thickened into something denser, pressing against the glass like a living thing. She could taste the salt from the coast, could smell the brine and the wet wood of the pier a quarter mile down the road. Normal smells. Safe smells.
Then the headlights came.
Two sets, turning off the coastal highway, cutting through the fog in parallel beams. Black SUVs—no plates visible from this angle, but she didn’t need to see plates. She knew the kind of men who drove black SUVs at four in the morning on a road that led to exactly three rental houses and a dead end.
Her feet moved before her mind caught up. Up the stairs, three at a time, her hand finding Toby’s door in the dark.
“Baby, wake up. Now.”
Toby was a light sleeper—he always had been, even as an infant, as if he’d known even then that the world required vigilance. His eyes snapped open, gold-flecked in the dim light from the hallway. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
“We’re playing the quiet game,” she said, the lie smooth and practiced. “The really quiet game. Can you be really quiet for me?”
He nodded, already swinging his legs out of bed, already reaching for her hand. He was eight years old and he trusted her completely, and that knowledge was a knife turning in her chest.
Downstairs, she heard Gideon’s voice—low, controlled, speaking into a phone. Then the creak of the front door opening.
She grabbed Toby’s backpack from his desk—the one she kept packed with clothes and water bottles and a first-aid kit, the one she’d told herself was just for emergencies, just for earthquakes or fires, never for this—and pulled him toward the hallway.
“Where’s my sword?” Toby whispered.
“You don’t need a sword.”
“But it’s cool.”
“Toby. Quiet.”
The back staircase was narrow, barely wide enough for her shoulders, and she’d always meant to have it widened, always meant to fix the third step that creaked, but she hadn’t, and now she had to step over it, pulling Toby with her, counting the seconds in her head.
Seven steps down. Turn. Four more.
The basement smelled like mildew and the lavender sachets she’d hung from the rafters. The hidden door was behind the water heater, a panel that looked like drywall until you pushed on the bottom-left corner. She’d installed it herself, watching YouTube tutorials at three in the morning, convinced she was being paranoid.
Above them, something heavy hit the front door.
Not a knock. A breach.
“Mom.” Toby’s voice was small, but steady.
“I know, baby. I know.”
She pushed the panel open, revealing a tunnel that led to the garage next door—the one she’d rented under a fake name, the one with the car Helena had helped her buy for cash. The passage was dark and cold and smelled like dirt and concrete, and she pulled Toby inside and pressed the panel closed behind them.
The lock clicked.
The sounds from the house above were muffled now: shouts, furniture overturning, glass breaking. She heard Gideon’s voice again, sharp and commanding, and then a sound she couldn’t identify—something between a growl and a crack, like wood splitting under pressure.
She put her hand over Toby’s mouth. Not for quiet. Because she didn’t want him to hear whatever came next.
They moved through the tunnel in darkness, her hand on the wall, counting the steps. Twenty-three to the first turn. Eleven to the second. Sixteen to the door.
The garage was cold and empty except for the gray sedan she’d bought six months ago from a seller on Craigslist who’d asked no questions. She helped Toby into the back seat, buckled him in, and slid into the driver’s seat with her hands shaking so badly she almost dropped the keys twice.
The engine turned over. The garage door opened. She pulled out onto the service road just as the front of her house exploded in a shower of splintered wood and shattered glass.
She didn’t look back. She couldn’t.
The highway was empty, the fog thinning as she drove east, away from the coast, away from the house where she’d left Gideon to face whatever had come through the door. Her phone buzzed in her pocket—once, twice, three times—but she didn’t answer. She couldn’t afford to stop.
Toby was silent in the back seat, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. She caught his gaze in the reflection and saw something she’d never seen before: not fear, exactly, but an understanding that cut too deep for an eight-year-old.
“Is he dead?” Toby asked.
“No.” She said it firmly, because she needed to believe it. “He’s not dead.”
“Then where is he?”
“I don’t know yet.”
The motel appeared at mile marker 47, a pale yellow building with a flickering neon sign that read “WOODCREST INN—VACANCY.” She pulled into the lot and killed the engine, and the silence rushed in like water filling a sinking ship.
She checked them in under a fake name—the one on the driver’s license she kept in the false bottom of her purse, the one that cost her two thousand dollars and a favor she’d never wanted to call in. Room 12, ground floor, back corner, with a window that opened onto the woods.
Inside, the room smelled like bleach and old cigarettes. She locked the door, checked the window, pulled the curtains closed. Toby sat on the edge of the bed, his legs dangling, his backpack clutched to his chest.
“We’re camping?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
“Without tents?”
“Best kind of camping.”
He almost smiled, and she almost cried, and then her phone buzzed again and the moment shattered.
This time she answered.
“What the hell happened?” Helena’s voice was sharp, cutting through the static. “I saw the news. A fire at your address, Evangeline. A fire.”
“It wasn’t a fire.”
“Then what—”
“They found us. The Blackthorns. They sent people.”
A pause. Then: “Where are you now?”
“Somewhere safe. I can’t tell you where.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I trust you completely. That’s why I can’t tell you. If they come for you, you need to be able to say you don’t know.”
Another pause, longer this time. When Helena spoke again, her voice was quieter. “Grant called me. He said Gideon made contact. He’s alive, Evangeline. Banged up, but alive. He’s on his way to you.”
The relief hit her so hard she had to sit down. “How does he know where I am?”
“He said you’d go east. Away from the water. He said to tell you he’s sorry.”
“He’s sorry.” She laughed, and it came out hollow. “He brought an army to my doorstep and he’s sorry.”
“He also said to tell you that the Blackthorns are human. No wolves, no claws, nothing supernatural. Just money and guns and a lot of men who don’t ask questions. That’s your advantage—they don’t know what he is.”
“They will now. After tonight.”
“Maybe. But Gideon’s still standing. That’s going to make them nervous.”
Evangeline looked at Toby, who had pulled out a notebook and was drawing something with careful, deliberate strokes. A wolf with silver eyes, standing in front of a burning house.
“Helena, I need a car. Something that can’t be traced.”
“Already on it. There’s a 24-hour garage on Route 9, the one with the blue sign. I’ll leave the keys under the third trash can from the left. Pick it up before dawn.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. This isn’t over.”
The call ended. Evangeline sat in the dark, watching Toby draw, listening to the ticking of the cheap clock on the nightstand. She counted the seconds, because counting was easier than thinking about what she’d left behind.
At 5:23 AM, there was a knock at the door.
Three knocks. Pause. Two knocks.
The signal.
She opened the door to find Grant standing in the orange glow of the parking lot lights, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and a Glock holstered at his hip. His face was bruised, his knuckles raw, but his eyes were clear and cold.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Fair enough.” He stepped inside, scanning the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d done this a hundred times. “Gideon’s ten minutes out. We’ve got a safe house in the mountains, eighty miles from here. Untraceable, stocked for six months, satellite phone only.”
“And the Blackthorns?”
“Flynn Blackthorn is currently sitting in a hospital waiting room while his son gets stitches in his arm.” Grant’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Gideon sends his regards.”
Toby looked up from his drawing. “He bit someone, didn’t he?”
Grant met Evangeline’s eyes. “Your kid’s perceptive.”
“He’s a Holloway. We’re perceptive.”
The next ten minutes passed in a blur of packing and planning, of Grant checking the perimeter and Evangeline stuffing Toby’s backpack with the few things she’d managed to grab. She found herself checking the window every thirty seconds, waiting for headlights, waiting for the knock that would mean they’d run out of time.
When Gideon appeared at the door, she almost didn’t recognize him.
He was still dressed in the same clothes, but they were torn and bloodied, and there was a gash across his forehead that had been hastily bandaged. His eyes were the same—that impossible amber that caught the light—but there was something different in them now. Something that had been waiting beneath the surface.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“I told you I would be.” He stepped into the room, and for a moment, they stood facing each other in the fluorescent light, the space between them filled with everything they hadn’t said. “The car’s outside. We need to move.”
“Grant said safe house.”
“Grant’s right. I have a place in the foothills. Nobody knows about it except me.”
“And now us.”
He held her gaze. “And now you.”
Toby slipped his hand into hers, and she felt the small, warm weight of it, the trust that she hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. “Is he coming with us?” the boy asked.
She looked at Gideon, at the blood on his shirt, at the wolf in his eyes that she’d been pretending not to see. “Yes. He’s coming with us.”
The drive was silent, the highway stretching out before them like a dark ribbon through the trees. Toby fell asleep in the back seat, his head against the window, his notebook open to the drawing of the wolf.
Evangeline watched the miles pass and tried not to think about the house she’d left behind, the life she’d built, the woman she’d been before a man with silver eyes had walked into her world and set it on fire.
The safe house was a cabin at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by pines so thick they blocked out the sky. Gideon killed the engine, and the silence descended like a held breath.
Inside, the cabin was sparse but functional: a wood stove, a kitchen with canned goods stacked in neat rows, a bedroom with two twin beds pushed together. Grant had already scouted the perimeter, already checked the windows, already pronounced it secure.
But Evangeline couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched.
She put Toby to bed on the cot by the fire, tucking the blanket around him, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. His eyes were half-closed, gold glinting in the shadows.
Then he spoke.
“Mom, I saw his eyes—they turned like mine did once.” Toby whispered, and Evangeline felt the world tilt.