Read Online Red Moon Rising by Peter Moore - Free Book Online Page B

body—too many things to be coincidence. I don’t think I can ignore it anymore.
    I put on my shirt and go back to my room. It’s almost noon, and the house is totally quiet. Everyone’s asleep.
    The piece of paper is in the back of my desk drawer. I take it out and look at it. I had to write it down, because I used it so rarely that I couldn’t remember it.
    I open my phone and dial the number.
    The phone rings, and then I hear his voice. “Hello?”
    â€œHi. It’s Danny. I know this is out of the blue, but if you can, I need to see you. Dad.”

I t’s been a while since I took the train into the city. The 7:34 p.m. train—the first one after sunset—is almost empty, which makes sense, because people who work in the city but live in the suburbs will be going home, in the opposite direction. Before going to bed I told Mom I’d be leaving for school early because I had to work on a social studies project with some kids from my class.
    It’s only a twenty-seven-minute ride downtown. The train leaves the suburbs and enters an industrial area, then a neighborhood of run-down tenements at the city’s edge, where the poorer wulves and humans live. I’ll be getting off at the next stop.
    I’m nervous. I haven’t seen him since I was twelve. I was in a play at Murnau Night Middle School, a shortened version of Our Town . I was Howie the milkman. Mom was there with Troy, who she was dating at the time. I invited Dad, but he told me he couldn’t make it because of a house that needed emergency roofing work.
    My hair was still dirty blond then. At that point, my skin was just slightly darker than the average vamp’s. I could still pass.
    When the play was over and we were taking our curtain calls, there was plenty of polite applause from the audience. Then came shouting from the back of the auditorium: “Yeah, Danny! Nice job, kid! That’s my son, there!”
    I never found out if he was loaded or just really proud of me. But everyone in the auditorium looked back at the wulf, who was cheering and whistling. I could see Mom and Jess turn to face forward, their features like stone. They made sure to steer clear of him on the way out.
    But he was really whooping it up at that curtain call. There was no ignoring him. “Is that your dad?” Tiffany Welsh asked.
    A vocabulary word we had learned earlier in the week came to mind. I was mortified .
    â€œI don’t know who that is,” I lied.
    Word got out after that night: Danny Gray’s father is a wulf.
    I never said anything to him about being embarrassed. But I resented him for letting the cub out of the bag, and I started to be busy on the weekends. Then, for some reason, I kept forgetting to return his phone calls.
    It would have happened soon enough anyway, even without the play incident. That summer, my hair darkened and my growth slowed down, while all the other vamp kids got taller. Nobody, even people meeting me for the first time, could mistake me for a full vamp anymore. By then, things had already settled with my friends: the ones who were going to drop me because of my background had dropped me. The ones who could tolerate it were still around. But by that point, I wasn’t seeing Dad anymore.
    Jessica dumped him suddenly and completely, though. I thought it was horrible, but I had no right to judge her: not too much later, I abandoned Dad, too. Only I’d been a lot closer with him than she had, so my betrayal was worse.
    A lot of vamps would be nervous walking in this neighborhood. The buildings are run-down, and it’s not clean and sparkly like the North Side, but surprisingly, there’s not a lot of crime.
    Looking around really brings back memories. I’d totally forgotten the huge ad painted on the side of the building next to the vacant lot. It’s a picture of a very serious-looking woman—whether it was human or wulf was left