Because You Love to Hate Me(84)

The redheaded Bellerose twins claimed they saw it roaring in the moonlight at the edge of the Hush Woods. They said it was ten feet long with six-inch teeth and it seemed to “worship the night” . . . whatever the hell that meant. They said they took off running and barely escaped with their lives.

I just laughed in their faces.

I was sure they’d seen a bear or wolf or something else furry and large and got so scared, the cowards, that their reason and common sense shut down and their craven, sixteen-year-old brains conjured up a monster.

People in the Rocky Mountains had been trying to kill the Beast since the Colorado gold rush. It would appear, slaughter a few kids, and then vanish again. On and on and on for the last hundred and fifty years. It had all happened before, and it would all happen again. Unless I could stop it.

I’d been waiting for the Beast to return to our woods since I first learned how to use a bow. I practiced archery, hour after hour, while other kids did stupid, unheroic things like kick balls and fall off skateboards and take piano lessons.

I was ready. I was born for this. It would be stopped, right here, right now, by me.

Three nights after the Bellerose twins said they saw the creature, three nights after I laughed them off and called them cowards . . .

I saw the Beast for the first time.

I was night-hunting in the Hush Woods. I felt my skin prickle, instinct, basic and primal. I froze in my tracks and looked up . . . and there it was, crouching over a fresh kill, teeth ripping into a deer, bones crunching, blood spraying.

There isn’t a cowardly bone in my body. I didn’t run like the twins. I sucked in my breath, slipped lithely and shadowy behind a tall pine tree, and watched the creature that had killed so many people, the creature that had loomed so large in my imagination since I was a little kid.

The Beast was lupine in shape, broad nose, short ears, angular limbs, soft-looking fur. But there was something sentient about it, too. Sentient and savvy. It seemed . . .

Aware.

The animal tore off the deer’s hind leg in one hard jerk, held it in its mouth, and sniffed the air. It turned and looked at me—straight at me.

I’d watched a lot of animals in the woods. Killed them, too. I knew them, knew their emotions. I’d stared into their eyes and seen surprise, and hunger, and fear, and indifference. But I’d never seen anything like the Beast’s. Its eyes were sad, lonely, angry, proud. Human.

I should have nocked my arrow. I should have shot it, whoosh, slice, fur parting, skin tearing, muscles ripping.

This was my moment.

Instead, I called out, “Who are you?”

The Beast flinched at the sound of my voice, gaze still locked with mine. We both watched each other for one second, two, three . . .

And then it bolted through the trees, deer leg tucked between its jaws.

I didn’t tell a soul. I was Brahm Valois, after all, heir to the Valois fortune and not some idiot redheaded twin. I couldn’t tell people I’d seen the Beast bloodily eating a deer in a cursed patch of Colorado woods . . . and then had let it go.

People were counting on me.

They were expecting me to do what no one else had ever done.

Kill the Beast.

I dreamed about it, every night since then. But in my dreams the Beast didn’t run away. It just tilted its head back and howled.

Someday I would put an arrow through its heart. I think it had known. I think it had seen this in my eyes. I held its fate in my hands, and it had run away.





Valois is a rich ski resort town in Colorado. It’s also my last name. That’s right, my ancestor founded this town. My great-great-great-grandfather pissed off a French lord a hundred and fifty years ago—they hunted down Jean George Valois and threw him off a cliff. But he lived. The Valois men are survivors. He booked passage on a ship to America and then followed the gold rush up into the Rocky Mountains. My family has never lacked ambition—when Jean George’s claim dried up, he paved roads and built hotels and saloons and churches. Then, when he was in his nineties, he built the first ski resort in the Rockies. The wealthy followed.

I have fourteen cousins and three brothers, and I’m the oldest male. And I could have ended up one of those spineless, sniveling, special-snowflake trust fund kids, but my dad is Brahm Valois the First and he didn’t raise spoiled pansy boys. I’ve camped in freezing temps, in ten-foot snow. I killed my first buck when I was five and then helped skin it afterward. I spent my summers at hard-core wilderness survival camps, where I was dropped in the woods alone for a week with nothing but the clothes on my back and a hunting knife. I spend my days in five-star restaurants with pretentious one-word names, but I have also eaten squirrel, and possum, and jackrabbit, and swamp rat. I have nibbled on frog legs roasted over a spit in the wild . . . as well as fried in panko and served with lemon, grass-fed butter, and frites at the downtown Fourchette restaurant.

I saved our town from a forest fire two years ago. Me and my younger brothers—Jean George, Philippe, and Luc—were in the front lines, battling the flames day and night, no sleep. We turned the tide. We saved our town and Broken Bridge—the other rich ski resort twenty miles over. We rescued half the county from the burning inferno.

We were heroes.

Me and my brothers owned Valois, ran Valois, saved Valois . . . and my life could have gone on like this forever and forever for all I cared. Once I killed the Beast I’d have everything I wanted from life and could just coast on a wave of glory and self-fulfillment until the end.