Under a Raging Moon: Part One

by V. J. Chambers

  * * *

  Kale showed me a bedroom in the lower level, which was right next to the bathroom I’d used before. He handed me a stack of sheets and a few towels, and then he disappeared, leaving me to make up the bed in the room myself. During our interaction, he barely said ten words to me.

  As far as seductions went, I was crashing and burning here. Kale clearly wasn’t attracted to me, or even interested in me.

  But I was in the house, so that was a plus.

  Still, it wasn’t perfect. I needed to be able to look around in this house, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do that. He seemed like the type to kick me out if he discovered me snooping.

  I’d just have to keep from getting discovered.

  For right then, I made the bed in the bedroom and got myself settled in. Then, on the pretext of going to the bathroom, I did a little looking around the lower level.

  There wasn’t much down here besides the bedroom and the bathroom. The rest of the basement was a big, carpeted great room, probably meant to be a second family room, a den, or a game room. But the whole thing was empty. No furniture, nothing on the walls. Even the carpet looked spotless.

  On my way back to my room, I opened the closet across from the bathroom. It contained some linens and towels, but other than that, it was empty. And the closet in my bedroom was completely empty. It didn’t even have clothes hangers.

  I wondered why someone like Kale had a house this big. The split-level wasn’t a mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but I bet that there were two other bedrooms upstairs. What did a guy like him need all this space for?

  Maybe it had been for the girl. My clients had told me a little bit about why they wanted to hire me, and so I knew that Kale had been engaged to a girl from their family. Maybe he got this house for her, so that they’d have a place to be together. Hadn’t worked out that way, though. The girl had died—bad car accident. Her family had buried her, and they’d barred Kale from coming to the funeral.

  They didn’t like Kale, you see.

  They liked him even less when they discovered that the girl—her name had been Lila—hadn’t been wearing the family heirloom necklace when she died. This necklace was not only financially valuable, it was priceless to them for sentimental reasons. It had been in the family for years, owing to the fact that it had belonged to some werewolf princess from the 1910s or something.

  Ugh. Werewolves.

  Werewolves were the part of this job that I liked the least. I almost hadn’t taken it because of that little fact. Never mind that it was the exact reason my clients had tracked me down. They thought that because I was a werewolf, that I’d be a great fit for this case. But they didn’t understand, because they were what people called natural werewolves. Other people just called them illegal werewolves.

  The clients didn’t like Kale because they were werewolves, and so was Kale. And apparently, there was some big werewolf feud between their families.

  I was one of the legal kinds of wolves. All werewolves were required to register with the Sullivan Foundation and go through a training process that allowed wolves to control ourselves during the full moon. That way, we didn’t have to shift, go crazy, and kill people. Werewolves like me were just regular people. We lived in the regular world, and we didn’t necessarily have to spend our time with other wolves.

  The illegal kinds of wolves, though, weren’t registered. They didn’t go through the training process, so they could still shift on the full moon. They were dangerous. They lived in packs and family groups, and they hid their true nature so that they couldn’t be discovered by the Sullivan Foundation.

  Despite the fact that I’d been born a werewolf, I wasn’t the least bit interested in fraternizing with other wolves, especially ones that embraced their furry side. I didn’t do that. Being a werewolf had practically ruined my life. It had caused the deaths of innocent people. It was a curse. I wanted to be as far as I could get from it.

  I agreed to do the job, though, because of how much cash they were waving at me.

  And, stupid me, I’d thought it would be easy. I’d stolen jewelry from museums and from billionaires’ safes. I thought nabbing one measly necklace from one average guy would be easy.

  Unfortunately, it was turning out to be anything but.

  I waited until around midnight, and I crept up the steps to the upper level. I was planning on looking around as quietly as I possibly could.

  At the top of the steps, I emerged into a sparse living room. There was a black leather couch, a matching chair, and a television hanging on the wall. There wasn’t anything else in the way of furniture.

  A noise to my left.

  I whirled.

  And saw the doorway into the kitchen, where Kale was padding out wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. He had a glass of water in one hand. His chest was bare, an expanse of smooth, tanned muscle.

  “Something I can do for you?” he said.

  “Um…” I needed an explanation for coming upstairs. “Out of toilet paper. I was just going to pop up here and get—”

  Kale pushed past me. He reappeared in a moment with two rolls of toilet paper.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking them. I started back down the steps. Damn it.