Unleashed (Dark Moon Shifters #1)

by Bella Jacobs

  All right then, time to woman up and face this head on. Rolling my shoulders back, I turn back to Creedence, who has mercifully grabbed his T-shirt from the ground and is holding it in front of his hips, shielding the part of a man I’ve never seen in real life before.

  Yes, I did my share of sneaking peeks at kinky websites in college, back when I was supposed to be using my internet waiver to study and nothing more. And yes, I’ve seen naked statues of men, but statues and the internet are nothing like a flesh and blood man standing in front of you. And call me old-fashioned for real, but I would like for the first man I see naked to be someone I care about.

  Though, if I were simply looking for man candy, Creedence would certainly fit the bill. From his sandy head to his tanned toes, he is incredible to behold, and he knows it.

  He smirks as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, studying me from behind the shaggy hair that’s fallen into his face. “You ready, Slim? Seen enough to be positive I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve? Or do you want to see the view from the back?”

  I give a small shake of my head.

  “Are you sure?” He cocks one hip to the side as if preparing to turn around. “The view from the back is nice. Or so the ladies tell me.”

  “Just get on with it, asshole,” Kite grumbles at the same moment Dust sighs, “Give me a fucking break.”

  Creedence’s grin widens, and I can’t help but laugh. The man is pure mischief. It makes the crazy half of me wonder what sort of animal he’ll turn into—a ferret, maybe, or a crow, though it’s hard to imagine this golden creature growing midnight feathers.

  “Then without further bullshitting.” Creedence gives a slight bow, his chin dropping to his chest, concealing his face as the rest of his skin begins to ripple like the surface of a lake after a handful of stones hits the surface.

  My jaw drops, but the rest happens so fast that by the time a soft cry of surprise makes its way from my parted lips, a miniature-pony-sized cat is standing beside me on the deck, its large paws soft and fluffy-looking against the weathered wood. I gape at the creature, unable to remember what this particular cat is called, the one with golden fur painted with wisps of dark brown, a jaunty white beard beneath its powerful jaws, and tufts of feather-like fur sticking up from the tops of its ears.

  “Lynx,” I finally sputter, huffing in surprise as the cat rises onto its hind legs, bringing his paws to rest on the arms of my chair and his head even with mine. I gaze into eyes the same golden as Creedence’s, but with pupils shaped liked tiny seeds instead of the circles of his human form.

  But it is unmistakably Creedence. Even his grin is the same—smug, but charming and roguishly full of himself.

  “Well, then,” I finally say. “That settles that, I guess. Thank you, Creedence.”

  He cocks his head, and a soft rumble, like a distant motorcycle engine trying to turn over, fills the air. It takes me a moment to realize he’s purring—it’s a deeper, more gravelly sound than a house cat—but when I do, I grin. “You’re a charmer in all your forms, aren’t you?” I reach out, scratching the soft fur around his neck, smile widening as his rumbling grows louder.

  “Shameless,” Kite says. “Completely shameless. Just remember he hasn’t been declawed, Bird Girl. Keep your guard up with him when he’s human. Don’t let the fluffy purring kitty crap fool you.”

  Creedence glances Kite’s way, slitting his golden eyes as his lips peel away from his teeth in a soft hiss.

  Kite laughs. “I like you better in your kin form, Tigger. Harder to run your mouth this way.”

  Creedence pushes off from my chair and prowls slowly around the table, his short tail whipping ominously from side to side.

  “What, you don’t like being called Tigger, wittle kitty?” Kite asks in an over-the-top baby voice. “Since you like calling me Pooh Bear so much, I thought it would tickle your whiskers.”

  This time the rumble emerging from Creedence’s throat is clearly a growl, not a purr, but Kite doesn’t seem worried about what the claws hiding in the other man’s fluffy paws might do to him.

  Still, I would rather they hold off on any further teasing or scratching until I’ve fully wrapped my head around all this.

  “Shifters are real.” I test the words, finding they’re easier to digest than I expect. “And I am one…”

  Dust nods, relief clear in his expression. “You are.”

  “What am I? Is there any way to know?”

  Dust casts a glance Kite’s way. Kite purses his lips, silently communicating something I can’t get a read on. Whatever it is, it makes Dust turn back to me and say, “Not yet. It’s too soon.”

  I frown. He’s a bad liar—and I’m about to tell him so—when an unearthly howl fills the air, making me flinch and cringe lower in my seat. It’s a horrible sound, simultaneously threatening and pitiful, the cry of a wounded animal caught in a trap. It is protest, prayer for mercy, and promise to seek vengeance all in one, and I instantly know it doesn’t belong to a normal wolf.

  I can also tell it isn’t coming from the hills outside.

  It’s coming from much closer, from…inside the house.

  “Another shifter?” I scan the faces surrounding the table, but none of them look surprised. Uncomfortable, but not surprised. “Who is it? Why aren’t they out here with us?”

  “Luke is…complicated,” Dust offers.

  “Definitely not all we’d hoped he would be,” Kite agrees. “But he’s coming around.”

  Creedence simply rolls his cat’s eyes before dropping onto the deck and stretching out in the sun, apparently deciding a nap is in order before that run he wanted to take. No answers coming from that corner—at least, not for now—which leaves me to squeeze the truth out of the other two.

  “Explain,” I demand. “And then take me to him.”

  Kite visibly balks. “You don’t want to do that, Wren. He’s definitely not up for making new friends right now.”

  “And why’s that? Is he hurt?” I ask. “He sounds hurt.”

  “Not hurt,” Dust hedges. “He’s a bit…uncomfortable, due to factors beyond our control at the moment. That’s why he’s currently in containment in the basement.”

  “Containment in the basement?” I blink fast. “You mean you’ve got him locked up down there? You’ve got a man locked in the basement?”

  Kite lifts his hands off the table, bringing his palms to his chest and slowly lowering them to his midsection, one of the tai chi moves I know he uses to soothe himself and others, but I’m not in the mood to be soothed.

  “Talk, Kite.”

  “Relax,” he says in his Zen-master voice. “He’s okay. He’s being fed and taken care of. We’re not monsters. We just can’t have him running off just yet.”

  Dust stands with a sigh. “Give it up, man. One whiff of injustice and she’s like a dog with a bone.”

  “Yeah, well, Luke is like a wolf with rabies,” Kite counters as he comes to his feet. “We just got her believing that we exist and we’re here to help her. Are you sure you want to undo all that by making introductions to Mr. Tall, Mean, and Scary?”

  “She can decide for herself.” I stand, proud of how steady my legs remain—even when another unearthly howl shatters the silence, lifting the hairs at the back of my neck. “And I want to know what the hell is going on. All of it—including why there’s a man… A wolf…” I wave a hand through the air. “A shifter person locked in the basement. Let’s go. Now.”

  “There’s more you need to know first.” Dust crosses to stand beside me, making me marvel all over again that the frail boy I used to know is now a man I have to tilt my head back to look up at. “Luke is important. We need him. Until you understand why and how he fits in to the big picture, there’s no chance you’ll find the current situation tolerable.”

  “That’s stuffy Brit for you’re going to lose your shit,” Kite mumbles.

  I prop my hands on my hips, finding this situation less tolerabl
e with every passing second. “Then tell me, but I’m warning you right now, it’s going to have to be a pretty compelling story for me to even consider that locking a man up against his will is necessary for whatever you three have planned.”

  “It’s not just us. It’s so much bigger than that,” Dust says. “But the best way to tell you is to show you.” He lifts a hand, his fingers spreading wide as the lines on his palm begin to glow a bright, piercing white. “May I touch you, Wren?”

  The way he says “touch” makes it clear he doesn’t mean it in any sense of the word I’ve ever known. He means something bigger, deeper, more intimate than simply skin on skin.

  For a moment, I hesitate—I would have trusted the Dust I used to know with my life, but this man isn’t the boy who told me stories in his tree fort while our parents had dinner inside. This man is for, all intents and purposes, a stranger, and one who seems comfortable with a lot of things—kidnapping, for example—that aren’t on my approved behaviors list.

  “I promise it won’t hurt,” he whispers, his gray eyes cloudy with what looks like regret. “I would never, and will never hurt you, Wren. I swear it on my life. My touch can conceal things, but it can also reveal them, if you’re open to receiving what I have to give.”

  I hold his gaze, looking deeper, deeper until I see him again, my friend, the silly yet solemn, curious but wounded child who once knew all my secrets.

  He’s still there. And though I have no idea what he might do to the man locked in the basement or anyone else who threatens the success of this mission he’s on, he won’t hurt me. Instinctively, I know I can trust him to keep me safe or die trying.

  So I nod, shoulders relaxing away from my ears as Dust says, “Thank you,” and reaches out, wrapping his glowing hand gently around the back of my neck.

  For a moment, there is only the warmth of his skin and a slight tickling sensation, like a faint current of electricity buzzing between us. And then the world goes white, vanishing in a flash as bright as the flare from an atomic bomb.

  Chapter 15

  Wren

  My lips part on a scream, but the sound is lost in the wind howling in my ears. It stings my face and tears at my clothes, tugging me back in time, in space, through a thick gray fog to the place where this story begins as Dust’s voice rumbles softly through the air.

  “Atlas was born just after the Peloponnesian War, the son of a Spartan merchant and a woman who had fought on the front lines for the fate of the city state. They called her Wolf Mother, but very few knew how apt the title was.”

  The fog clears, and I see the shadow of a woman in a short tunic holding a sword, who transforms into a wolf as she leaps at her enemy’s throat.

  “Her husband was human, but she prayed for her children to inherit her shifter blood and grow to be great warriors. Her wish was granted on her youngest son’s third birthday, but his kin form proved unlike anything she’d encountered before.”

  The violence playing out of the battlefield gives way to a more domestic scene, drawing me into the cozy main room of an ancient home. A toddler plays with his carved horses in front of the hearth. As he stares into the flames, he suddenly transforms into a ball of fire with a delighted laugh.

  “He was a Fata Morgana, a rare shifter who can take the form of multiple animals and elements and who requires intense training to grow successfully into his or her power. Knowing she would never be able to keep her son’s exotic abilities concealed in their village, his mother took Atlas to a temple in the mountains to be raised by the oracle. The prophet there was a lioness shifter who had dedicated her life to the service of the gods. She graciously offered to take the babe under her wing and to educate him until such time as he gained control over his powers. And for a time, all was well.”

  The toddler’s mother hands him into the arms of a woman swathed in a long white robe. The child hugs her tightly around the neck before squirming free, leaping to the ground where he transforms from a dog to a mouse to a dragon rearing onto its hind legs and finally into a sure-footed goat that dashes up the rocky cliff toward a marble temple.

  As he runs, time speeds faster.

  “But as he grew in age, Atlas also grew in lust for power. It soon became a sickness that consumed his soul, a hunger he would go to any lengths to feed.”

  I watch the boy grow ten years in the blink of an eye, and then he’s back in the robed oracle’s arms again. But this time, instead of embracing the woman who raised him, his fingers close around her throat and squeeze—tighter, tighter, until her knees buckle and her bulging eyes roll shut.

  I suck in a horrified breath and the scene vanishes, the shadows of both murderer and victim dissolving into ash as the wind stings my face once more and the fog rolls back in.

  “The oracle was his first victim, and his first human mask,” Dust’s disembodied voice intones. “He stitched her skin into a suit he wore as he made his way down the mountain, and practiced living inside her form until he could take on the oracle’s appearance at will.”

  Gorge rises in my throat, but I press a fist to my mouth and force it down. I can’t be sick. I need to focus, to absorb every detail of this story. I don’t know why, but I almost feel as if I know this man, this monster who strides into Sparta wearing the face of his adopted mother and sets a terrible series of events into motion.

  “Disguised as the prophet, Atlas summoned the Spartan army into the service of the gods, insisting it was the holy mission of their people to rid the world of demons masquerading in human form. With the army’s help, he rounded up shifters from across the Greek city-states and into Persia, imprisoning them until he found what he was searching for.”

  I watch as weeping women are herded into pens not fit for animals, some of them clinging to children until the soldiers rip them out of their arms, some of them not much more than children themselves.

  “The oracle had told Atlas that there would be shifter women who bore the mark of a potential Fata Morgana mate, and that forming bonds with these women would make him even more powerful than he was already. And so he set about choosing four brides, one from each of the kin groups—canine, feline, forest kin, and the beasts of antiquity. He took them from their families and gave them the choice—bond with him or die.”

  Atlas strides into the pens, selecting his prey, chaining them around the neck before dragging them back to his quarters where the scene thankfully fades to black before I’m forced to watch any more.

  “As the oracle foretold, he did grow in power. He began to be able to sense the whereabouts of others like him, those rare shifters with the capacity to express the entire spectrum of creation, and to hate that there was anything living that might someday challenge his supremacy. So he began to hunt.”

  The taller, broader, even more powerful Atlas creeps into a man’s home and kills him in his sleep, slits a woman’s throat while she’s bathing in the river, and rips a babe apart with his bare hands only seconds after the child has emerged from its mother’s womb.

  This time I can’t control my visceral response to the carnage. I groan as if I’ve been punched in the gut and clutch at my stomach, but thankfully the scene is already fading and the wind picking up again.

  “Soon there were none left to challenge him, but Atlas’s thirst for power was unquenchable. He began to seek out oracles and prophets, craving mystical secrets that would make him even stronger still. And finally, one day, he found someone willing to tell him what the others had not.”

  A man with his feet thrust into a fire screams something in a language I can’t understand, and Atlas turns toward his wives with a terrible smile. The next tableau to emerge from the fog is so horrific I can only watch for a moment before I have to squeeze my eyes shut with a whimper.

  But I know I’ll never forget the images burned into my brain—the sight of Atlas sitting at a giant table feasting on the roasted bodies of the women he’d forced to marry him.

  “Atlas claimed more mates and th
e cycle continued, until he was as mighty as a god. Until his magic and influence became so strong it began to shape the course of history.”

  Images flash faster now. I watch as the darkness and drudgery of the Middle Ages gives way to the modern horrors of the twentieth century—scenes of progress turned to poison as greed leads to putting profit before the health of the planet and the things living upon it. I see species die out and rainforests disappear and eventually the superstorms rise and the Meltdown floods the coastlines of the world.

  “But all power comes at a price and Atlas paid for his with his sanity. With each spouse he consumes, he loses more of his own humanity. And as he declines, the health of our world declines with him.”

  The wind grows warmer, and I feel it pulling me forward, back toward my own space and time. When the fog clears now I see a burly man with a thick gray and black beard seated on a throne, his bloodshot eyes burning with a mad intelligence and his fingers gnarled into claws that clutch the gilded arms of his seat. His face makes me shiver in terror and recognition, and again I’m filled with the sense that I know him—or that I will know him.

  That we’re connected in some way…

  “If he isn’t stopped, there won’t be a planet left worth saving. A new Fata Morgana must rise. And fight. And win, no matter what the cost.”

  The skin on the back of my neck lifts and I turn to see the silhouette of a woman striding through the mist. Slowly, one by one, the shadowy forms of four men come to stand beside her, each one lending her strength and his own special gifts until she’s glowing with potential energy, a bright golden light poised to take back the dark throne behind me.

  And then she steps out of the shadows and my heart stops.