by Annie Bellet
Broken Moon
A Short Story by Annie Bellet
Copyright 2011, Annie Bellet
All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.
These stories are a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected].
Cover designed by Greg Jensen with image from © George Mayer | Dreamstime.com and NASA and Christian Mehlführer, User:Chmehl (creative commons)
Electronic edition, 2011
Broken Moon
Janie felt the moon rising hours before the deep orange disk crested the horizon. It was a blood moon tonight; a hunter’s moon, and the wolf within sang through her heart, demanding freedom.
She took deep breaths and visualized her wolf all quiet and sleepy just like Roane had taught her. He’d promised to take her hunting, but she had to wait until moonrise proper. She lay on the window seat of the small cabin and watched the blood moon rise. Finally, Roane came through the door, his thick arms full of firewood.
“I can’t take it,” Janie said, going to him and helping him stack the wood beneath the river-stone hearth. “I have to change.” She licked his chin, her tongue sliding over the roughness of his short beard.
Roane shook his handsome head, his eyes brown-gold in the fading light.
“All right, love. Let us hunt.” His grin was wild and full of teeth.
Janie needed no further encouragement. She stripped off her sundress and pulled the scrunchy from her curly black hair. Laughing, she dashed ahead of Roane, throwing the cabin door wide and leaping out into the gathering gloom, racing toward the scrub plains.
The change came easy, as it always did on the full moon. One moment she was a woman, hair streaming behind her as she ran. The next she was wolf, lean and silver brown beneath the orange moonlight. She lifted her head and drank in the world, a myriad of scent trails offering up their stories to her keen senses. Dark and huge beside her, Roane’s wolf form nudged her shoulder and they raced off together into the night.
They brought down a deer under the cottonwoods that grew along the banks of the lazy river. Janie chased the young buck into Roane’s waiting jaws, snapping at its heels. Roane leapt for the throat and Janie’s teeth closed on a hamstring, tearing into it the way Roane had showed her. The hunt was high in her blood now, her mind singing wolf as the human part of her took a backseat. She jumped onto the dying creature and bit deep.
Roane’s heavier body slammed into her and threw her down. He growled in warning and, confused, Janie backed off. She lay low to the ground, panting, and watched Roane take the first bites of their kill. Only when his belly was full did he move away from the buck and let Janie come in for her own meal.
* * *
Janie stood in the shower, letting the deer’s dried blood wash away in slow pink trails down her skin. Roane was outside, hanging the rest of the deer up to cure in the smoke house. She shivered. She didn’t want to be resentful of his actions the night before. Wolves weren’t like people, she knew that. He’d just never growled at her before or shoved her away.
Janie had always kept her distance from others. Let anyone too close, and they might find out what happened to her on the full moon. Her mother had been the only one to understand, since she too had shifted with the moon. But her mom died in a car accident when Janie was only thirteen, leaving Janie to be raised by her father’s sister. After high school Janie’d gotten a little trailer of her own and waited tables at Bella Mae’s diner. She had a reputation for being quiet and keeping to herself and she liked that just fine. At least, she had until Roane came to town.
She’d known that he was like her, the first of her own kind she’d met since mom had died. He’d known her too, she was sure. And then she went into what Roane called ‘heat’ and he’d taken her away from the people who looked through her, away to his ranch, to freedom as a wolf.
Janie smiled and turned off the water. She hadn’t told him about the babies yet. She could feel them, two tiny bits of life, sparks down deep inside. She’d tell him now, he’d be pleased and they’d forget the growling and the selfishness the night before.
She found him by the smoke house, cleaning the remains of their kill.
“Roane,” she said and put her arms around him from behind as he scraped the deer hide. “We’re gonna be parents.”
His body went hard beneath her arms and he turned to look into her dark eyes. He bent his head to hers and breathed her in, tasting her scent. Then he whooped and lifted her high in the air, his grin wide and white in his tanned face.
“Janie, Janie. We’re going to build a pack, you and I. A whole pack of people just like us. Our babies.”
Janie gripped his arms and grinned back. Then a shadow passed over her face as she remembered something he’d said.
“What if they aren’t like us? What if they are pure wolf or pure human? We’ll still raise them of course, won’t we Roane?”
His brown-gold eyes hardened and he set her down. “Sure, Janie. But you’ll have good babies, babies like us. Don’t even talk about the other. Now go make yourself useful and draw up a list for town. I’ll head in on Saturday.”
Janie nodded and walked back to the house. Something about his expression, his tone, bugged her. Even his scent had gone odd for a moment, something metallic and hot tainting his clean wood and earth smell.
