Lunar Marked (Sky Brooks Series Book 4)

by McKenzie Hunter

  It didn’t feel like a field but more like a chamber. I was reduced to pounding my fist against it trying to break it. Josh placed his hand on it and it finally shattered, leaving remnants of magic that felt as poisonous as they smelled. Something was terribly wrong and I didn’t know who was going to fix it.

  I tossed the Aufero in the corner, no longer caring if I destroyed it or not. This was the third time it had tried to kill me and I was starting to take offense.

  Josh plopped into a chair, his hand scrubbing over the light hairs on his face that had gone past just a simple shadow. It was time for a shave, or maybe he was going to grow a beard. He’d do whichever was easiest. His hair was longer, and he had to keep raking it away each time it dipped into his face.

  “I don’t know what else to do Sky,” he finally admitted.

  We sat in silence for a long time until it became too uncomfortable for Josh and he took another break. I knew that although he left, his mind would be on this. It was a puzzle, and he wouldn’t rest until it was solved.

  While Josh was gone I flipped idly through a couple of the books we had on the table, looking for spells that would return the Aufero to normal. Every spell that I had tried turned into something draconian, pulling me into a state of darkness where I couldn’t find an anchor. I’d learned quickly not to use it unless Josh was present.

  Quickly becoming discouraged with the spells in the books we had searched, I grabbed the Clostra, reluctant to accept that the spell we needed was probably in it. To fix a protected object, we probably needed to use another one. If that was true, we would need Samuel again, and I doubted he would be willing to help. And if he was, the debt would be too high.

  He seemed so repelled by were-animals that he would probably only agree if he was allowed to prevent us from changing into our were-half. Sebastian and Ethan would never want to lose their ability to shift into the animal half any more than Josh wanted to have his magic stripped away. I wished I had the same feeling. I had accepted my wolf—we were one—and magic was part of who I was, but sometimes I missed my old life—the oblivious state of ignorance before I was yanked into the otherworld.

  However, before I was part of this world, I didn’t have anyone except a handful of people who were casual acquaintances at best. Now I had people I cared about and who cared for me. Despite the pack’s questionable ethics that bordered on psychosis and their love that was a cross between an overprotective father and a deranged stalker, I believed they wanted to protect, in their own way. I guess the pack didn’t really know how to love, either.

  The thoughts of the people in my life usually comforted me but I felt like I had one less person in it—Steven. He was leaving. I knew he was just moving out, but it felt like he was not only changing his address but also his position in my life. I hated that.

  I shook off the thoughts and tried to focus on what seemed like a reversal spell, although I wasn’t sure because the third part of it was missing. My Latin was much better but I still needed a little help, which is where Google Translate came in, becoming the most used option on my phone. If experience had taught me anything, there was always something to magic. Spells were so simple, but a string of words linked together could have devastating results. Josh was teaching me the rules. In the past, he slacked when it came to the rules, but after being dominated by Ethos and Samuel, he had become a savant with his skills.

  “You don’t think Kelly would just leave without telling us, do you?” said a voice from the corner of the library.

  Don’t show fear. I tensed, trying to keep myself from jumping to the other side of the room at the sound of Gavin’s voice, the pack’s fourth and resident problem child. Like a shadow, he withdrew from the wall and sat on the table next to me, moving with the lissome steps of an efficient and lethal predator. His tall, lean body, built for agility and speed, made him look all the more menacing. He was a skilled hunter with the temperament to match, and it was hard not to go into high alert when he was near. If I had to name someone in the pack as a nemesis, it was him. I was “wrong” and a danger to the pack, a belief he stood by and refused to change. He pricked at my defenses until they stood like a bastion ready to protect.

  How long had he been there? When did he come in? But with Gavin you never knew; he moved in silence, his presence often unknown until he wanted it to be. And yet no one thought to make him wear a bell.

  His sharp eyes seared through me with a force I don’t think I will ever get used to. Brushing his midnight azure mass of too-long hair away from his face, he spoke again after a long moment of silence. “Do you really think Kelly would just leave without telling anyone?” His eyes were desperate and searching.

  I guess he sensed my discomfort because he moved a couple of feet back. It was hard to get used to his predacious nature and the stealth of his movements. The sharp way he tracked movements, assessing a person, was always so intensely wound and ready to recoil. He never relaxed. It seemed like it would be tiring to be at high alarm all the time.

  Taking a deep breath, I pushed aside the anxiety that afflicted me each time he and I were in a room together. “It would surprise me if she did,” I admitted. Kelly wouldn’t leave without telling us why. Even if it was because of something someone did, she wouldn’t have a problem telling us. I had a feeling she wouldn’t mind telling a choice few to go to hell and which route they should take to get there. She was a mouthy malcontent with an altruistic agenda who didn’t mind violating pack rules to help someone. In the past she went against Ethan and Sebastian to help Chris when they had chosen to let her die rather than be changed into a vampire.

  “Then tell Sebastian,” he said. Requests from most were-animals always came off like well-worded commands that you dared not ignore. “We all should be looking for her. She’s been missing for a while. I know she just wouldn’t leave but he doesn’t think so.”

  “Gavin, it’s only been a couple of weeks.”

  “Sixteen days,” he offered.

  Gavin didn’t like most people; Kelly was one of the lucky ones who had gained favor with him. But as with anything Gavin, his affections were as dysfunctional and unusual as he was. An odd mélange of paramour and hater, psycho and nobleman, protector and stalker, and it was all Kelly’s. I was about to suggest that maybe his crazy brand of friendship was too much for her to handle and maybe she needed a break, but his overt concern restrained me.

  “Will you go with me to look at her house? Maybe I missed something.”

  No, I will not. You hate me, remember? I had every intention on telling him no, but I’d never seen him so distressed. He was just three stops from crazyville.

  I nodded.

  CHAPTER 2

  By the time I arrived at Kelly’s home, Gavin was already inside. Good, I wasn’t present as he broke laws breaking into her home. But when I got closer, I noticed keys in his hand, and the door didn’t look like it had been tampered with.

  “Did she give you a set of keys to her place?” I ventured. I didn’t allow my mind to go to a place of paranoia and suspect that he made a copy of them without her knowledge, although I wouldn’t have put it past him. The affections and protection of the Midwest Pack seem sweet and comically overbearing from the outside looking in; but from the inside, it was a hostile takeover of your life where they violated and ignored your autonomy in the name of protecting you. What started off as a kind, sweet act of benevolence quickly turned into something ugly.

  I asked again, and he simply gave me an odd look of censure, as though I had asked something ridiculous. I was left trying to figure out what was ridiculous—thinking she wouldn’t give him a key or that there wasn’t anything audacious and infringing about him making a key without her knowing.

  Gavin’s fingers slipped through his hair as I watched his crazy slowly unravel as he walked through her house. “She’s at the pack’s house from eight to three Monday through Friday.” I didn’t know that.

  He continued through the house, an
d I followed him. “She has dance class on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.” He showed me her four pairs of shoes placed in order by the door; two pairs for jazz and another two for tap. I’d seen her performance last year and she was talented but didn’t strike me as someone who considered it more than just a hobby. Missing class wouldn’t be unreasonable.

  Taking my arm, he guided me to her kitchen and then opened her refrigerator. “No grapes or strawberries and her apples have gone bad. She eats strawberries and grapes almost every day, and she goes to the grocery store on Sunday. There should be some in the fridge,” he said. “Isn’t that strange?”

  There are a lot of strange thing going on, but the absence of fruit isn’t one of them. I just looked at him. I didn’t know anything more about her than she was a nurse, she danced, how she met Dr. Jeremy—which I found out just recently—and all her scrubs made me think of Skittles. And I also knew that Gavin had crossed the line from perceptive friend to possible stalker.

  “She could have gone home, Gavin. What she went through was pretty bad; she probably just needed a break. Have you spoken to Dr. Jeremy?” If anyone knew anything it would be Dr. Jeremy. She was his protégée, and he treated her like the daughter he never had.

  He nodded. “He’s been strange since that happened to her. He blames himself and has been distant.” He looked around the room.

  “Maybe she went to Georgia, to visit her parents.”

  “No, I checked.”

  “You went to her parents’ house?” Shock made my voice go up an octave.

  His head tilted to the side and he looked at me as though I was the odd one. Then he said, “No, but she wouldn’t go visit without luggage.” I followed him to her closet, where all her plaid pink luggage was aligned at the bottom, her totes and overnight bags placed on the shelf by size and color from light pink to dark pink. All the colors, like her scrubs, could be found in a bag of Skittles.

  “She was taken,” he said.

  Obviously I was missing something. Everything was meticulously placed, which fit Kelly’s personality. The only thing that stood out were a few empty hangers and a shirt that was on the floor as though she had taken her clothes off in a hurry. All her shoes where in plastic shoe boxes, each with a picture of the shoe inside on the front. It didn’t seem like any were missing out of them. Her bed was made with a plethora of decorative pillows and a fluffy teddy bear protecting them. I didn’t want to say it because Gavin seemed to be convinced that she was taken, but it looked like the place of a person who had rushed home and packed her things to get the hell away from a world where she didn’t belong.

  “What do you think?” he asked. His dark eyes shone with hope and entreaty. He needed me to agree with him, but there wasn’t enough evidence and he was on the edge.

  “I don’t know, but I will talk to Sebastian.”

  He nodded, and as I slipped out of the house behind him I got a glimpse of the Hermès Birkin bag that Dr. Jeremy had given her for her birthday a year ago. Shed’ squealed for what seemed like hours but had only been a few minutes. She’d carried it everywhere and the purse, which was the monetary equivalent of what I put down on my house, had become her most treasured possession. It was odd that she would leave it. Maybe it was symbolic, leaving the baggage of the Midwest Pack behind, but something about it didn’t fit. I stared at the purse for a long time but didn’t point it out to Gavin—he was already too intense. I had no idea what extreme he would go through to look for her if I gave him more to fixate on.

  “She wouldn’t just leave us,” he said, voice low with resolve. He needed to believe that, and part of me needed to as well. It was about acceptance. If there were ever a time we were exposed there would always be people like her who didn’t care. We were human—that’s all she saw.

  “Have you spoken to her parents?” I was just stalling.

  “Not yet.”

  “She might have gone home. It’s home, she might not have felt the need to pack a bag,” I offered.

  I’m not sure if he believed it, but he wanted to. It was better than her being taken but it was more hurtful. If she had indeed left in a rush, she was running from us—from him. I’d always considered her an adrenaline junkie, riding the wave of danger by affiliation. The rules changed when she was hurt because of her association with us and the people who dwell in this world.

  He nodded. “Yeah, she might have. She said she missed her brother.” He didn’t seem any more convinced than I did.

  Gavin’s eyes narrowed as he raised his head, inhaling and slowly surveying the area. My focus landed on the jackal moments after his as it started to retreat back into the thicket, the spark of its eyes the only thing that shone through the dusk. Gavin darted, moving fast toward the animal, which turned and flitted around the trees. It was just barely seconds ahead of Gavin, whose speeds were faster than I had seen anyone run. Winter was fast—very fast—but Gavin seemed just as quick. That was another thing that I filed away along with his skill of moving in silence. Two things that didn’t bring me any comfort.

  I waited by the car, and when he returned, his breathing was heavy but substantially lighter than I would have expected after running at that distance and speed.

  “Why did you go after it?” I asked.

  “Were-jackal” was all he offered, as though it should have meant something. It didn’t.

  “So?”

  “We’ve never had any around here. It’s new. I think it was watching you.”

  Great, another person that seems to just watch me. Logan did it often, but he didn’t do anything. Just an odd demon, in whatever form he had chosen that day, staring at me—not staring, leering. Added to the list was a jackal.

  “Why?”

  “When it comes to you, who knows,” he snipped.

  There it was. His general disdain for me had reared its little head. He ducked into his car and I expected him to speed away, but instead he followed me home and waited until I was in the house before he left but not before doing a cursory look around my home, out the back, and in the greenhouse. He even searched near my neighbor David’s home.

  “That has to be exhausting,” I mumbled, walking into the house.

  “What has to be exhausting?” Steven asked from the couch. He must have parked in the garage because I hadn’t seen his car. My heart jumped and I wanted to ask him if he’d changed his mind. But out of my peripheral vision I saw the packed boxes on his bed, and I felt that the world was too heavy. I tried to ignore them, but it was hard.

  His feet were propped on the coffee table next to a bottle of hot sauce and a bag of dill-flavored potato chips. He had convinced me to try his little concoction that didn’t seem fit for consumption by anyone. At what point in his life did he decide those two things should ever be near each other at any given time? But Steven considered it a genius idea, a culinary masterpiece, and didn’t take it kindly when I pointed out that whoever decided to make a cookie with M&Ms was a genius and what he created was an assault on the taste buds. He attributed his creation to being a “southern thing.” I argued that there were a number of people living across the Mason-Dixon line who would take offense to being associated with that snack disaster.

  “Being on high alert at all times. It just seems like a waste of energy to be prepared for some kind of apocalyptic danger at every given moment,” I said.

  “Who, Ethan or Sebastian?”

  “Gavin.”

  He looked surprised and then frowned. “What were you doing with Gavin?” He moved over to give me room to sit on the sofa next to him. He put his bowl of yuck on the coffee table and grabbed my legs, and I turned my body with them to face him as he rested them over his legs. It was how we usually sat when we were going to watch a movie, which apparently we were because he turned the TV to Netflix.

  I told him everything, even about Kelly’s favorite bag being left behind. His mouth twisted as he rested back against the sofa, his fingers tapping against my leg. “I don’t get her.
I can’t imagine she would leave something she loved so much behind, but I can see how she could. I don’t blame her for leaving and needing some distance from us. It just seems like she would at least tell Gavin.”

  “Maybe she thought he would try to talk her out of it.”

  “Maybe. But if she needed to leave, I would hope he would care enough to respect her wishes,” he said softly, but there was a weight to his words like a hidden meaning. Just as he expected from Gavin, he wanted me to respect his wishes about leaving. I wanted to, I really did, but the thought of him moving out just made me sad.

  “What about the jackal?” I needed more to focus on, anything other than the boxes sitting on his bed. “He seemed very concerned about it, too.”

  He shrugged it off but didn’t seem as unconcerned about it as he wanted me to believe.

  “I should be concerned, shouldn’t I?”

  He sagged into a sigh. “We’ve always had small cliques of were-animals that consider themselves nonconformist and resist joining a larger pack. Refusing to bow down to ‘the man.’ Sebastian and Ethan usually don’t bother with them because they usually stay to themselves and cause little trouble. Most have just three or four weres; we never give them a second thought. There are four that we keep a watch on. Two are so small they don’t even have a name, there are about eight in each one. But there are two others; Worgen—”

  “They sound scary.”