Unleashed (Dark Moon Shifters #1)

by Bella Jacobs

  And if it decides to strike, I won’t be able to fight back. The serpent moon can do anything it wants with me, and so can Kite and his cohort. And even though a foolish part of me wants to believe that Kite is still my friend—or at least a well-meaning crazy kidnapper—I don’t know this other man at all.

  What if Kite leaves me alone with him?

  Passed out and sick and completely unable to defend myself?

  I’ve been sheltered from many of the ugliest realities of the world by my overprotective parents and the limitations of my illness, but I’ve worked with street kids long enough to know what happens to girls who are unlucky enough to find themselves vulnerable and unconscious around strange men.

  Sometimes they wake up to find they’ve been raped.

  Sometimes they don’t wake up at all.

  My pulse races faster, dumping adrenaline into my system. I use the burst of energy to thrash my arms and legs as hard as I can, which isn’t all that hard, but thankfully the suddenness of the movement surprises Kidnapper Number Two.

  He grunts—a high-pitched sound that’s surprisingly breathy—and I roll from his arms into the grass.

  Seconds later, I’m on my hands and knees, crawling back to the house, only to find my path blocked by an olive-skinned girl with dark, kohl-rimmed eyes and a shock of inch-long hair sticking up in spikes around her head.

  Kite’s accomplice is a she, not a he.

  It’s enough of a surprise to make me stop crawling and stare up at her face, wondering why she looks so worried when I’m the one being kidnapped.

  “I feel you, Mama,” she says in a rich, husky voice that belongs on the radio advertising Kentucky bourbon. “I know this is scary, but there’s seriously no time to explain shit, and you’re safe with Kite. We go way back. I trust that boy with my life, and you can trust him with yours, but only if we get you out of here ASA-fucking-P.”

  She reaches for me, hooking her hands under my armpits as she stands, lifting me to my feet and pinning me to her side with a strength and ease that makes me suddenly, fiercely envious.

  What would it be like to have a body that cooperates? A body that responds positively to proper diet and exercise? A body that can fight back and push through and experience the highs and lows of human existence in a way a sick kid benched at the side of the playing field never has?

  If I make it to the procedure tomorrow, I might finally be able to find out. Which means I absolutely cannot let myself be taken. I have to get help, get Mom and Pops to call the police before it’s too late.

  “Mom, help!” I shout as I lunge out of Spiky Hair’s arms, falling for a split second before she catches me around the waist with a grunt.

  I claw at her fingers with my nails, making her curse, but she doesn’t let me go. She simply flips me around like I’m a rag doll, shoves her shoulder into my stomach, and says, “Ain’t got time for this, Mama. Sorry.”

  And then the world is upside down again, and I’m bobbing along with my face in some strange woman’s butt while my stomach churns and exhaustion seeps back into my limbs. I’m so pissed off I shout with every bit of strength left in me, “Help, I’m being kidnapped!”

  A second later the front door swings open and light streams out onto the dark garden not three feet from my face. But before I can call out again, Spikey Hair breaks into a run. The sudden motion sends her shoulder jabbing even deeper into my gut, stealing my breath away, so I’m unable to answer when Pops calls out, “Who are you? Who’s there? Get out of my yard before I call the police!”

  Gasping for breath, I try to call out—to tell him it’s me and I’m being taken and he absolutely should call the cops right freaking now—but Spikey picks that second to leap over the fence. My stomach flips in response, swooping into a sickening swan dive that ends in a crash landing as Spikey touches down on the other side and her bony shoulder slams into my solar plexus.

  I clench my abdominal muscles against the invasion, avoiding losing my dinner by the barest of margins, and then immediately regret the choice to fight my gag reflex. I may not be able to kick ass, but I could have at least made a disgusting mess all over my kidnapper.

  I’m coaxing my stomach back to the pitching place when tires squeal beside us and Spikey grinds to a stop. A second later, I’m upright again, staggering a step to the left before she grabs me by the shoulder and hip and tosses me bodily into the back of the car.

  I land sprawled half on dank-smelling upholstery and half on the floor, with one elbow wedged behind my back. By the time I pull myself together, Spikey is in the passenger’s seat and Kite is swinging the car around in a swift circle.

  I slide across the back, slamming into the door before Kite accelerates with another squeal of tires and gravity presses my shoulders into the seat.

  “Took you long enough,” Spikey mumbles, glancing over her shoulder. At first I think she’s looking at me, but she’s gazing over my head through the back window as if she expects something a heck of a lot scarier than Pops to be chasing after us.

  “Sorry,” Kite says. “I parked three streets over. I don’t think they’ve got watchers on her, but you can’t be too careful.”

  Spikey’s gaze shifts to mine, and I narrow my eyes, glaring with as much fire as I can muster considering I’m on the verge of passing out again. Infuriatingly, she smiles at me and says, “You’re cute when you’re pissed.”

  “Shut…up,” I rasp. Even the effort to speak those two words leaves me winded. Still, I force myself to keep going. “Take me back.”

  “We can’t do that, Wren.” Kite meets my eyes in the rearview mirror, dividing his attention between the road and me, captive in the back seat. “I know this seems crazy, but it’s not. You were in danger there, more than you can imagine. And we’re still not out of the woods. We won’t be safe until we’re out of the city. But as soon as we’re safe and you’re feeling up to it, Sierra and I will explain everything. Until then, I hope you can trust us.” He holds my gaze a beat too long, making my stomach swoop as I wonder if we’re on the verge of a traffic accident. “I swear on our friendship that I’m only doing what I have to do to keep you safe.”

  I want to tell Kite that friends don’t kidnap friends, but my brain is melting, oozing, softening into a state where only minimal function is possible. I used up every bit of fight left in me during my last stand in my front yard, and I barely made enough of a commotion to get Pops to open the door.

  How long until he realizes I’m gone and calls the police? Considering he thinks I’ve gone to bed for the night, it might not be until tomorrow morning, when he and Mom come to wake me for the journey to the clinic.

  By that point, who knows where I’ll be?

  And even if he decides to go check on me now for some reason, there’s still a good chance I won’t be found.

  Kite is making swift progress away from our cozy neighborhood, merging into the traffic streaming away from the city on the highway, the throng of commuters who stayed in the city for a late dinner, or to catch a band at one of the music venues, and are only now heading home.

  Too late, I realize that I should have tried to jump out of the car sooner, and curse my sluggish brain. While Kite was going thirty or forty miles per hour, I probably would have survived the spill from the vehicle, but at seventy, a jump for freedom would be suicide.

  Still, if my body would cooperate, I could scoot closer to the door, get in position so I’d be ready the next time he slowed down.

  But my body is done playing even remotely nice. The backs of my eyes are on fire with tiny pinpricks of agony, and my head feels like I’m trapped on a never-ending merry-go-round. Or like I’m swirling down the drain…

  Swirling and swirling, picking up speed as gravity sucks me relentlessly downward, and then there is a squeeze as I pop through the drain and then—

  Black.

  Chapter 7

  Wren

  Consciousness attacks me like a prizefighter—swift and relentl
ess, slamming me against the ropes.

  Punch one— My eyes drag open to see large halogen lights zooming past overhead and hear Kite’s engine groaning in protest as Sierra shouts, “Faster, man. We’ve got to get off the fucking freeway! We’re sitting ducks out here!”

  “I’m trying!” Kite jerks the car hard to the right and then the left, sending my pulsing, aching body sliding back and forth across the seat. “But the exits are all blocked. Find me an alternative route. If they get us on the bridge we’re fucked.”

  Kite banks right again, skidding across at least three lanes of traffic. I slam into the door hard enough to send pain rocketing through my shoulder.

  Should have put on your seat belt, genius.

  The snide voice in my head is the last thing I hear before I snuff out again.

  But consciousness isn’t done with me yet.

  Punch two— This time I wake to Sierra wailing into the phone, “You’ve got to get us out of here, motherfucker! I don’t care who you have to put at risk. They’re closing in fast from behind, and there are more of them waiting at the end of the bridge. I can fucking smell them, Ghost. Get us the fuck out of here!”

  Kite shouts in an only slightly less hysterical voice, “I can get Wren to shore if we have to go into the water, but the current is too much for Sierra. You’ve got to get her out, man. Send air support. She’s only ten pounds when—”

  “Fuck!” Sierra cuts him off with a shout-sob as she tosses the cell into the cup holder between them. “He fucking hung up on me, that motherfucker. He’s going to let us all fucking die out here.”

  “No one is going to die.” Kite sits up straighter in the driver’s seat, until his broad shoulders block what little I can see of the starry sky through the windshield.

  Even in my spinning, melting, throbbing state I can feel the energy shift in the car as he takes control in that strong, seamless way of his. The way that once made me think he had a big future ahead of him, before I knew he was a kidnapper and a criminal.

  “There’s a maintenance shed a couple miles ahead,” he continues in a no-nonsense voice. “Close to the middle of the bridge. We’ll go over there, where we can be sure the water is deep enough, and double back toward Seattle. They won’t be expecting us to swim back the way we came.”

  “Shit.” Sierra’s entire arm shakes as she braces a hand on the back of Kite’s seat. “I was raised in the fucking hood, Kite. I can’t swim. I mean, I can when I’m kin, but what if—”

  “There’s no time for what-ifs, mama.” Kite puts a hand on the back of her neck, an affectionate touch that makes me wonder what these two are to each other. “You’ve got this, and I’ve got you. You shift on the way down and get out the window and onto whatever part of the car is still above water as soon as we land.”

  “As soon as we fucking crash,” Sierra corrects, piercing the woozy fog around my brain that’s been holding all of this at a distance.

  She’s right. We’re going to crash. We’re going to plummet off the edge of a bridge into the water, and who the hell knows if any of us will survive the impact with the river below, let alone whatever comes after.

  I swallow hard and cut a glance to the door handle, knowing it’s now or never, but my arm refuses to move. My fingers twitch uselessly at my sides, and I remain crumpled in my seat, as much a prisoner of my own body as the people who stole me away from my home, my family.

  I’m sorry Mom and Pops, I think, hoping they can hear me, feel me somehow. I’m sorry, and I love you, and I’m sorry. So sorry.

  “I’ll shift as soon as I get Wren out of the car.” Kite gives Sierra’s neck a squeeze before returning his hand to the wheel. A moment later, freezing cold air blasts into the car as the windows all begin to slide open. “If you fall in, don’t freak out,” he adds in a louder voice, shouting to be heard over the rush of the breeze. “You’ll only have to hold your own in the current for a minute or two and the Big Bad ferry will be open for service. Make sure Wren’s buckled in. We’re going in ten.”

  Sierra mutters something in a language I don’t understand as she reaches over the seat, hesitating a beat as she sees my eyes staring up into hers. “Sorry, girl. I was hoping at least one of us wouldn’t have to be awake for this.” She lifts me upright and tugs the belt across my chest, clicking it into place. “Just hold onto your ass, okay? We’re all going to be fine, and pretty soon you’ll have your first Kin Born war story to share around the campfire.”

  She squeezes my knee and turns around before I can beg her to let me out.

  I’m not at war with anyone. I’m a social worker, a book nerd, a goody-two-shoes who still lives with her parents even though she’s twenty-four years old. Nothing in my life has set me on a trajectory to go out in a blaze of glory.

  But sometimes life hijacks your free will and fate makes a mockery of all your carefully laid plans.

  “And in seven, six, five,” Kite says, his voice insanely calm considering how this countdown ends. “Four, three…”

  A soft black mouth opens in the air in front of me, swallowing me whole before Kite can reach “one.” This time, I go eagerly into oblivion, diving in head first, knowing whatever waits in the belly of this blackness is far better than what Kite has planned.

  Punch three— I wake myself screaming, the sound howling from deep in my core before my eyes are even open.

  I have a split second to acknowledge the sensation of falling, falling, the bottom dropping out of the world and chaos sucking my organs up through a straw, one by one, and then black.

  Punch four— Cold. So cold. I’m soaking wet from the neck down, and I can’t feel my fingers or my toes. Gasping in a deep breath, I tilt my head back, instinctively trying to keep my nose out of the water for as long as possible, and then there is a sharp jerk and pressure against my chest before my seatbelt falls away.

  A moment later I’m pulled through the window, into the water, where the current tugs on my clothes like dozens of hungry toddlers demanding a snack, seeming innocent at first, but dangerous in numbers.

  “Hold onto me, Bird Girl,” Kite calls over the roar of the water streaming around the giant pillars of the bridge. “Hold on, baby, I’ve got you.”

  But he doesn’t have me. He lets go, and I float away, sucked downstream so fast I’m half a dozen meters away from the sinking car by the time something large and hairy rises from the water beneath me.

  My lips part on another scream, but instead I gasp and cough. Water I can’t remember swallowing spills from between my lips while high above me—up where the bridge touches the sky—a wolf howls, baying at the moon, calling for my blood.

  Somehow I know that’s what the animal wants. I can feel its savage thirst, its rage, as powerfully as the terror thundering through my veins as whatever river monster has caught me carries me away.

  This time I fight to stay awake, fearing I’ll drown if I don’t, but the darkness comes again because the darkness is an asshole who doesn’t give a damn what I want.

  Punch Five— The quiet wakes me this time.

  Quiet like the quiet after a gunshot.

  Dangerous quiet.

  Deadly quiet.

  Shh, don’t make a sound, my inner voice whispers, and without a second thought, I obey, pinching my lips closed and holding my breath.

  I want to be rescued; I don’t want to be eaten alive.

  Ripped apart. Torn to pieces and the bloodied trophies that were once my arms and legs thrust skyward in triumph by my enemies.

  The creatures out there in the quiet dark haven’t come to help me. They’ve come to hunt me. I can taste it in every sip of cool night air—metal, blood lust, hatred, and fear.

  They’re afraid of us, too.

  Afraid of…me.

  I can feel it as thick and real as the soggy fur beneath my cheek and the powerful arms holding me close to a warm, solid, not-at-all-human body.

  My breath hitches, but I stay quiet, resisting the urge to pull away and s
ee what the hell has me tucked against its chest. Whatever this massive creature is, it clearly doesn’t mean me harm. It holds me firmly, but gently, its steady heartbeat sending waves of comforting energy pulsing across my skin.

  But the things out there…

  The monsters prowling through the night…

  I squeeze my eyes closed, willing my pulse to go quiet, my breath to sip oh-so-softly in and out between my parted lips. If they find me, they will kill me, but not before torturing me a little first.

  Or a lot…

  Tucking my chin, I snuggle closer to the thick, damp fur. The creature—a bear, I think; there are no other furry animals this massive indigenous to the Pacific Northwest—covers my head with one paw. I can feel the slight pressure from its claws threading into my wet hair, but it doesn’t frighten me.

  The bear feels safe, almost familiar. And if it comes to a fight with the creatures hunting us, he will fight for me. I know it.

  I know it the way I know that the sky is full of stars and the river is full of fish and the world is full of mysteries I’ve barely scratched the surface of before today. I’ve always known I was sheltered, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been kept even more ignorant than I ever imagined.

  Hopefully, if I live through the night, I can start catching up on all the stuff I’ve missed.

  Long minutes stretch into hours, and gradually the quiet is softened by cricket song. The frogs grow bold next, adding their percussive croak and grog to the mix, and then a night bird coos in the darkness, promising that everything is going to be all right.

  I’m damp, exhausted, afraid, and far from home, but I’m alive and my head is no longer threatening to spin off my body. My stomach is still unsettled at best, my body aches in places I wasn’t aware I had muscles, and my temples pulse and throb, but I’m in one piece and the worst of the danger has passed.

  All around me, the night celebrates the return of the natural order, singing my protector and I off to sleep.