Full Moon in December (Book Two of the Night Person Series)

By Lisa Rusczyk

Kayla knows what the birds and trees and plants are saying. She doesn't know anything outside of her second mom, Elle, and her Aunties and Uncle Bingo. When Elle brings a night person named Sam to their basement, Kayla is more than disappointed. She wanted Kelly, the handsome football star. She knows why Elle is doing all this, but why is life so hard? And why did her moon flower die? She's never had a plant die before.

Sam's life has changed. He is a different person than he was years ago. He's made a new life and doesn't want the change that came to him. What does this woman, Elle, want from him? He wants to find some way to convince Kayla to release him from the basement Elle is keeping him in. Will Kelly, the pesty young night person Sam used to teach, come to his rescue? Sam refuses to do anything himself, and doubts that he could even if he wanted to. He's made tough choices, and another is to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Rusczyk
• Release date: Sep 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466076815

Lisa Rusczyk

I'm a writer and editor living in North Alabama with my beloved husband and stepsons. Seven little lovers of fur and whiskers are my greatest non-human companions.

Book preview

Full Moon in December

Lisa Rusczyk

Copyright 2010 by Lisa Rusczyk

Smashwords Edition

The girl and her brother were both crying the day the men came and took them. She was fifteen, her brother only twelve. The man with the strange words had touched her hand then pointed at the two of them amid the burning village and said something to his men. They were carried on separate horses. From the mountain pass, she could still smell the smoke and burning flesh, hear the cries of her people, and when she peeked back to the village from a hilltop, she could only see smoke rising up from the brush. She did not care for them, she just did not care. Even at a young age, she knew that changes come, and that she must go with them. It was her way; she had control, except for her tears. They were not tears for her people, or her village, but for fear that the strange man with the long, black hair and the silver stallion would try to control her. Her brother was quiet after his tears dried up.

That night, they stopped in the desert near the mountains, and the man from the silver stallion had put brother and sister into a bedroll together, wrists and ankles bound. She needed to empty her bladder, but she dared not ask for it, knowing she would not get privacy in this act. Her brother, close and sweaty, asked, Where’s our father? Where is he?

She did not answer. Then her brother whispered her name and said, What will become of us? Why were our lives spared?

She kicked him with both her bound feet and said, Shut up, you fool. We are still alive, and that’s all that matters.

The next day, her brother had wet the bedroll. It disgusted her, and she chided him for it. Can you not hide your weakness?

The man who had ridden the silver stallion came to them, and picked her up under her armpits, glaring at her with a touch of sweetness. He spoke in her language, which she did not know he knew, and he said, You are Elle. You are my wife now. You will learn many things from me and will live for many years. Have no fear.

She spit in his face and said, I know not the meaning of your words, you bastard.

He laughed and dropped her abruptly, and she landed on her knees before him. He said, You and your brother are like me, I have seen it. Then he stood over her. Tell me, my wife, he said, Do you like to play games?

She twisted her clothes and pissed at his feet. He grinned and said, Now it starts.

CHAPTER ONE

Kayla was only two when she was taken. She remembered the woman who had her before. She smelled good, like flowery trees (Dogwoods, she had said they were called Dogwoods), and when she hummed, the plants outside the screen of the kitchen window would lean in to listen.

The woman who took her said, My name is Mom. You will call me Mom. Kayla did not argue. She thought this woman has the same name as first Mom. Kayla liked Mom. She was tall and soft around the hips and breasts, and Kayla’s legs fit nicely around her waist, like Kayla was an inner tube. Kayla liked water, especially liked being in the lake the first Mom took her to. That’s when the second Mom came for the first time. She came right up to the dock then and first Mom fell asleep at her touch. She said, Hi. Would you like a carrot? Kayla loved carrots. The woman looked into Kayla’s eyes, touched her hand and nodded as Kayla chewed around the outside of the unpeeled carrot stick, then the woman smiled at her like she was very special. It was the way the first Mom looked at her when she said, I love you. Kayla liked the second Mom right away.

The woman came to Kayla again when she was in the backyard. First Mom was playing in the flowers, and did not see second Mom when she waved to Kayla from the side of the house. She had a carrot!

She whispered to Kayla that they had to go, that there would be as many carrots as Kayla could eat. Kayla wanted to go with her. She had such pretty long hair, black, and it felt like cotton. It floated with the slightest breeze.

After a couple of days of driving around in a big, white car with the woman, Kayla forgot what the first Mom’s hair looked like. She just remembered her smell. She said, Where Mom?

The woman said, I am right here.

Where other Mom?

She is at her home. You will not see her again.

Kayla cried, and second Mom comforted her by putting her long arm around her shoulders and saying, She wanted you to come with me. Deep in her heart, she knew I would come and your life will be better. That is what all Moms want. They want their daughters to have great lives. Now, you will forget about her. I will call you Kayla.

Kayla couldn’t remember her other name after a couple of days.

Mom was very kind to her, and spent much time talking to her and reading books with her. Kayla liked books, especially ones with pictures of animals and trees. The best ones were the pictures of monkeys in trees. They made her laugh and she would try to jump from couch to couch in the new house. The new house was around lots of people (the only other person Kayla had seen was first Mom), and Mom put lots of plants in Kayla’s room. She also gave her an aquarium and Kayla would watch the fish swim around and, when nobody was around to say no, she would stick her hand in the water and pull out a fish! It would wiggle and Kayla would giggle, then drop it back into the tank. The fish loved her and she loved them, too.

She had three aunties and an uncle. Two aunties and Uncle Bingo visited her and Mom several times a week. They taught her numbers and helped her learn big words, like octopus and siphon. She liked those two words best. The Aunties and Uncle Bingo would bring her gifts, like the one Auntie Tessa brought, which was a stuffed rhinoceros. She couldn’t say that word very well, so Auntie Tessa said, Let’s give him a name. Kayla said she wanted to call him Paulie and Auntie Tessa said that was a good name. Kayla took Paulie everywhere in the big house they lived in, and would show him to the Auntie in the basement when Mom let her go down there. The Auntie in the basement was Auntie Stephanie. She was a dark-colored Auntie and she was sad sometimes. She told Kayla, These walls are going to kill me. I will never do what your mother asks. But usually she didn’t talk like that. That was only the first time Mom left them alone together for a few minutes.

Auntie Stephanie eventually moved upstairs to the bedroom with the orange cat lamp and she and Mom were sisters. She would pull five-year-old Kayla into her lap and say like a song, You are a cuuuutie. You are my best friend, you know that? If it weren’t for you… and she would wipe a tear of joy from the corner of her deep brown eye.

Auntie Christa was not as fun as the other two Aunties. She would sometimes sit perfectly still when everyone else was talking and she would stare right through Kayla. She had white hair and looked too old to be an Auntie. But it was she who started teaching Kayla numbers. She said, You will have to learn to count fast, and use all of your fingers at once. She spent six days a week teaching Kayla.

Uncle Bingo read her stories about all kinds of things. Kayla’s favorite was about a little girl with a magic horse. Uncle Bingo said there was no such thing as magic, that it was just a fun word. He said Kayla could make any story come true, if she wished hard enough. She wished as much as she could, but she couldn’t grow wings.

It was Mom who taught her most of her subjects. She told her she would never have to go to school if she didn’t want to, and Kayla thought she must not want to if Mom made this sound so good.

Auntie Stephanie once told her she was a very lucky girl to have a Mom like Mom.

Sam relaxed under a thick-branched tree on the lawn of UNC with a copy of Henry II in his hands. It was cloudy out, and the sky looked like the roof of a cave. He wore sunglasses despite the overcast day.

Sam had studied in college relentlessly for three years, then began working on his masters in the fourth. He had about nine months left to study until he was free to find a teaching job. Most likely, his 16th century European Lit professor told him, he would be offered an undergrad teaching position as UNC, after his brilliant effort on deciphering a middle English text in his second year as an undergrad. This did not seem to thrill him overly much, and his professor secretly felt uncomfortable with Sam’s cool appearance.

Sam never closed a book unless it was finished, but on an April day in North Carolina, skies covered and trees quivering in the pre-spring storm breeze, Sam’s pages fluttered in the first part of Act II and he closed his eyes. He did not mark his page, but rather remembered the last rhyme he had read, and let the book slide out of his hands. He could smell the storm coming; it was going to be short, but surely there would be branches on the porch of his apartment.

He thought he might just stay right where he was until it was over.

As part of Sam’s student teaching that fall, he was required to teach English Composition to the newbies. He did not dread it, but instead he got excited that he would get to encourage young minds to think about literature on their own terms. He had disagreed with the teaching methods of many of his teachers, thinking they taught what they thought was the only way to interpret and write text. Sam thought differently. He wanted students to enjoy reading and thinking about books as much as he did, and he had confidence that he could help them do it. He reminisced for only a moment about a time long ago, when he had been a teacher of things that aren’t taught in any school.

His Composition students, half of them shiny with expectation, the other drowsy with hangovers, greeted him on his first day with the wide eyes of those who don’t yet know what they think enough to write about it, but to Sam, they were all stories and points-of-views waiting to be exposed, like snails snooping along a sidewalk before it rains. He pondered that the skinny blonde girl with the thick mascara in the front row had had her heart broken, like Ophelia in Hamlet, and that the kid with the Primus shirt in the back row had wondered what it was like to kill someone, like the murderer in Crime and Punishment, both of which were on his list for students to read. He knew many of them had been kicked in the thinker’s teeth by high school English teachers, and he felt it was his job to bring them back to the idea that original, progressive thought was good.

The blonde in the front row examined his long, brown ponytail like it was a noose. He smiled at her, and she lowered her thick lashes.

Instead of introducing himself to the quiet classroom, he said, What’s your name? to the blonde girl.

Sandy. She said it like she was defending herself from an F.

What’s your favorite book? He sensed the guy next to her, who already had his copy of Hamlet open on his desk, was grinding his teeth with desire to answer the question.

I don’t know, she said with a sweet smile and red poppies in her cheeks.

Good answer, Sam said. And the first day of teaching began, but Sam had a strange feeling as the class progressed, like he was being watched, like there was an invisible eye picking through everything he did and…It was a familiar feeling, one from years ago, but this time it was not threatening. It was like he was the character in someone else’s book, and the reader was a kid in the third row all the way over by the window. His short, brown hair was spiked a bit in the back, and his sharp, blue eyes watched Sam like he was a movie star. It made Sam sweat lightly by the end of the hour, and after the class was over, he watched his students mumble out the door. The attentive kid stopped for a moment, eyes meeting with Sam’s as if to say Sam’s full name, then he was out the door with the rest of the group.

For the next two classes that week, Sam felt the kid with the stylishly unkempt hair’s eyes and mind watching his every move, and by the weekend, Sam wondered about him every couple hours. What was it about him? There was something almost familiar about him, but Sam felt he’d never seen him before. The kid had the build of a twenty-something athlete, yet had the overall look of a teenager trying to keep a low profile because he had a bag of weed in his shorts.

It was a warm August, perfect for camping and hiking, but Sam stayed in his apartment reading a fiction manuscript one of his friends from his first year had written. She had asked Sam to check it out, to tell her if he thought it was publishable. Sam thought everything was publishable, but that was not what she was looking for. He read it straight through, and thought about it for a few hours before he called her early Sunday evening to tell her he thought she should go for it.

He kept his heavy drapes closed at night and usually went to bed around eight. It always took him a couple hours to fall asleep, during which time he sometimes would listen to music and concentrate on every single beat played until unconscious, rising at dawn to the sound of his stereo playing a CD on repeat. He hadn’t picked up a drumstick in years.

On Monday, he decided to ask the strange kid a question so as to just hear his voice, but when the perfect time came as they were discussing the first few chapters of Gilgamesh, he looked at the bright eyes of the watcher and shied from calling the class’s attention to him. It felt natural to do so, a strange protective urge calming his curious mind. He hadn’t felt that kind of instinct in years, and he felt immediately the sense that the kid was certainly a night person. He looked out the window next to the young man and blinked, then turned his attention back to the class and made himself forget the revelation.

After the class ended, Sam went outside to his favorite on-campus place under the wide-limbed tree, which he only visited when the sky was cloudy. He didn’t bring a book, instead he lay back in the grass and thought about nothing, and tried not to hear the kid’s footfall as he approached Sam.

Hi.

Sam looked up. He raised himself to sitting position and looked the student in the eyes through his sunglasses. Hello.

The kid paused, then sat down next to Sam. Do you remember me yet?

Sam looked all over his face, then at his broad shoulders. Sam was at least half a foot shorter than the one sitting next to him. He shook his head.

Kelly. That’s my name. You and Jeremy taught me six years ago. I was a lot smaller then. He smiled and held out his hand. Sam felt Kelly’s trepidation, and sighed. He shook the outstretched palm.

Kelly. Kelly from Galveston. Of course I remember now. You look a lot older.

I am.

They sat in silence.

Kelly said, I’m a freshman.

I know.

Kelly looked down and plucked at a blade of green grass. You know, you’re just as good at this as the other.

Thanks. Sam took off his sunglasses, glanced at the sky to make sure the clouds were still there, and said, What made you chose UNC?

He shrugged his shoulders, and said, I got a football scholarship.

Football? You weren’t into sports when we were living there.

I started playing in high school.

So you stayed in school.

Yep.

Silence, and Sam wished the wind would blow away the discomfort he felt. It was like he had frozen his own veins, but the blood flowed so fast that he rubbed his chest.

Kelly said, I can hear your heartbeat. I’m sorry I make you so nervous. I was hoping you’d be happy to see me.

No, Sam said, and pulled at his ponytail, It’s not you.

Kelly looked at Sam’s cloth bag, which held his notebooks and pens, then said, Do you really like this English crap?

I do. He looked to his bag too, and in the awkward moment, to someone far off, it would look as though they discussed the style and make of the satchel.

So, this is where you’ve been?

What do you mean?

I mean, everybody kept talking about you. Talking about how you disappeared.

I didn’t disappear. I decided to get an education. Sam heard the tone of his voice, sounding like a lonely old man trying to justify why he took so many pills. He lowered his voice. I wanted a different life.

A different life than what?

"I was getting too old to teach that stuff, anyway.