You refuse to leave and instead offer your heart and soul to Craven. He accepts you happily and you embrace.
As the sun rises, you wait together at the sleeping Alexander’s bedside. The light illuminates a painting of a sweet little girl, the very image of Alexander. It is strange, for the painting hangs in so prominent a place, but you could have sworn it wasn’t there before. The girl smiles out beatifically, as if in thanks.
Little Alexander awakes and tugs your hand. “I dreamed of Helena. She said she is at peace now that the bad man is gone.” A shiver runs down your spine, but not an unhappy one.
“I love you, my darling,” says Craven, like a man transformed.
Blissful time passes. You see young Master Alexander off to school in the fall, a confident and changed boy. And yet…for all that Craven seems happy and content, he still does not ask for your hand. Rather, he pauses whenever you speak of the future. “There is something I must tell you…but cannot,” he sometimes says. You know not how to press him on the matter, nor on his strange absences which occur once a month.
Nevertheless, a period of torrid pleasure and peaceful companionship passes…until you decide to take action.
On the evening that you enact your plan, the sky darkens and a full moon rises. You smile to yourself. This promises to be the night you will make Craven face the last of his demons, once and for all. But first, you make love, experiencing total ecstasy in both body and soul.
You lie entwined with your lover in a corner of the library, the moonstone of your sex still aglow with otherworldly desire for him.
He places that broken-statue hand of his on your left breast, which he has taken to calling Grecian Urn. His other hand travels to your right breast, which he has nicknamed his Sepulcher by the Sea.
His hands are as hungry as his heart, and oh! how they hunt your flesh for sustenance.
“You make me feel as if I am half woman, half beast,” you moan into your lover’s lush but well-groomed pelt.
Lord Craven emits a growl that could also be a knowing laugh, slipping his explorer’s tongue over the valleys and peaks of your topography.
“Your womanly orbs undo me as much as the moon does,” he whisper-growls into the soft fur of your womanhood. Your womanhood responds with some whisper-growling of its own.
The actual moon, which has heretofore been hidden by sumptuous cloud cover, breaks through the late-evening gloom with the same vigor as your pleasure breaking through your lover’s embrace.
The moment a sliver of moonlight slices his ethereally pale flesh, Lord Craven screams as if stabbed by a saber.
“NO!” He flings you into a pile of watercolor silk cushions, which you can’t help but wonder if he placed there much earlier to soften your landing, should he ever choose to fling you across the library floor due to an errant moonbeam.
“Run, my love! Run for your life!” The screams rip through his body, competing with the strange forms and shudders also ripping forth from him as the moonlight plays brighter across his bare, beautiful frame.
“Call Mrs. Butts!” he screams. “She knows how to chain me!”
“Chain you?” You frantically gather your silken robes around your orbs, womanhood, et cetera. “I bid the servants retire in the furthest chambers of their quarters so that we might enjoy each other in uninterrupted freedom!”
Terror colors Lord Craven’s darkly handsome features, mixed with respect for your command of your desire as well as of his household staff.
“NOOOOOOO!” He screams as fur and blood tear through his desirable flesh. The transformation shows you what he truly is…
“A were-creature?!” You scream and duck behind a chaise lounge toppled earlier by vigorous lovemaking.
“A monster.” His words are raw, his breath ragged, his teeth sharp and long. His voice is the only thing you recognize. The rest of him is a hulking mass above you, the wild night made flesh, out for blood, and out for you.
“Blanche…she left me for a time to be with her poet lover. When she came back, she had changed. She had become a monster.”
You shake your head. “No, she was a monster long before. She merely came back a wolf.”
Lord Craven stares at you, eyes drenched in sadness. “She then turned me into this—this thing. She wanted to change the children, too, but I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—let her. So she turned on them instead. She took Helena…” A single tear runs down his wolf face.
He could destroy you with a single swipe of his knife-sharp claws. End you with one snap of his abominable jaws. But you place your hand on the center of his chest.
“Are you not afraid?” he cries.
“Not of you.” You reach out to embrace his terrifying form. He trembles at your touch.
“Not,” you say as you draw his horrible maw to your delicate mouth, “of my monster.”
You kiss him. He shudders in tender ecstasy. He shudders with relief.
“Make us as one,” you command. “You never have to be alone. Never, as long as either of us has breath left in our bodies.” You share a look between your eternal souls. You nod. He nods. The kiss turns to teeth and tongue and magic.
Together, your bodies are rewritten by the moonlight.
The legend of Hopesend Manor now speaks of two demon beasts who stalk the moors as a pair. One is never seen without the other, and when they howl at their moon-made-master, no creature has ever been said to sound happier.
The End