Bad Moon Rising (The Crown's Wolves)

by Zoe Forward

  She studied Roman’s lips. Their sculpted softness tempted her. She wanted to rub her hand against the scruff of his jaw, to feel the prickle against her palm while he gave her a taste of what a kiss should be like.

  She blinked and gathered her nerves to make eye contact. But remained silent.

  “Why?” he rasped out.

  “Because…Roman…all right, I’ll do it, but I have a price, too.” She swayed toward him and put her hand on his chest. Solid. Immobile. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.

  “Why do I need to pay something for you to get your memories back?”

  Hoarsely, she said, “Promise me…swear to me that before you ditch me, you’ll erase the memory of this. You’ll kiss me. Like you mean it.”

  He wrapped her hair that she’d secured into a ponytail around his hand and craned her head back. Oh my God, he was coming in to kiss her. A shudder passed through her. Please. Do it.

  He didn’t make contact but whispered, “I’ll make you forget.”

  She wasn’t sure if he meant he’d use magic or something else entirely. The certainty he’d annihilate the memory completely made her drunk with desire to have it. “I have to do this.”

  “I know,” he said unevenly as he released her hair.

  She sauntered back to Dom. With a lean into him, she touched her lips to his. A flash of an image of him in a brilliantly lit room with a brunette woman who lunged and sliced his neck. He probably didn’t want to know this.

  Then she realized Dom had frozen. She arched a few millimeters away and whispered, “Whatever I saw remains secret. To do a believable kiss requires participation.”

  Her fingers cupped the back of his head as her lips returned to his. Then she kissed him, but imagined Roman. Dom’s dick pressed tight against her, but even that didn’t make it a fuckable kiss. She fully channeled every ounce of desperation to be with Roman with a fantasy of being hard against the wall, his chest pressing into hers.

  “Enough.” Dom thrust her away from him. Face ashen, he blinked rapidly for a few moments before wiping a hand across his forehead to remove sweat.

  Desire is power, a male voice echoed inside her head. A memory from her past of someone? A male who desires you will do anything for a taste. Anything. Because of what you are.

  That could refer to either the lycan or the magic, or both.

  Dom put his hand on her forehead and closed his eyes. “Your last memory…your only memory. You wanted this, the amnesia. More than anything in your life, you wanted to forget. Remembering was dangerous. Still is dangerous. You warned yourself not to try to remember. There’s a feel of hypnosis, which might be why you can’t remember your species. I wonder if you did both hypnosis and the drug to ensure you forgot your past? Only, hypnosis is unpredictable, and as a side effect of forgetting your past, you forgot you’re lycan.”

  Dom flipped a hand, and they were back in the medical office.

  Roman looked like he was about to pop a vessel in his forehead. He panted like a wild animal with his mouth open and canines on display.

  “You don’t want to fight me, lycan. She doesn’t want me. I don’t want her. The power of that was her channeling you and me channeling someone else. It had nothing to do with anything between the two of us. I swear to all gods of the universe that neither she nor I will ever do that again.” Dom took a step away from her and addressed Roman. “You’re the fucked one. Not me.”

  “Do you want to know what I saw of you?” she asked Dom.

  “Perhaps someday. Not today.” He sobered and said to her, “Your magic will work when you need it most. Someday when you figure out what’s going on, you’ll require training to re-learn everything. Just remember the lengths you went to in order to forget. We’re done.” In a blink, he was gone.

  Chapter Seven

  Roman set his tactical go-bag on the old metal desk in the middle of the repository that acted as the brothers’ headquarters. Rusty scratches covered the entire gray-painted desktop. The place reeked of the mold from decades of underground occupation mixed with something minty, which was Gerard’s failed attempt at deodorizing.

  Confiscated relics from the past four centuries littered the room’s tables, shelves, and a few glass cabinets. A locked bulletproof, tempered glass case housed objects like the cursed Burnholm amulet, which he and his brothers lifted off a demon-possessed woman in Stockholm forty years ago. Also in the case was a Curmsun disc—a pure gold Viking relic, which would inflict upon any who touched it a one-way ticket to hell. He squinted at the cabinet, not seeing the disc through the glass door. Blood pounded in his ears while he shifted around in front of the case and angled to see if it fell to the bottom. Where the hell was it?

  He removed the protective wards on the case and unlocked it to put the newly recovered vial inside. An inspection of all shelves and corners found no disc.

  A hasty search of nearby tables that housed a jumble of jars stuffed with oddities such as a mummified foot, jeweled viper fangs, and a box of silver bullets yielded nothing. He rifled through dusty shelves and looked in the file cabinets. Not there.

  Only he, his brothers, Gerard, and the king had access to this room. Of all items to mess with, the disc wasn’t one. It had taken months to track down and contain the first time.

  The witch who cast their blood curse was the king’s second or third cousin. Maybe she’d been granted access down here and had been pilfering things? He hadn’t seen her since that fateful day decades ago, certainly never down here.

  No one touched the relics. If he could, he’d destroy every one of these terrifying items, but no one on the planet knew how. Therefore, they remained here, locked away far beneath London.

  A printed page sat on the desk. R and F, it started. He skimmed to the sign off, confirming it was from his brother, Ky. Gerard must’ve typed up the transcript of Ky’s phone call.

  OFF TO ANKARA. RIYADH ISN’T THE ONLY DEAD-END CASE. CLOSE ONE.

  Roman folded and tucked the message in his front pants pocket. When they had messages that were okay for public consumption, they called them in from a public phone. All refused non-burner cell phones out of concern that they might be tracked. Ky, their second-youngest brother, had been sent on a separate mission to Turkey. Which was odd, since normally they stayed together, with Gerard’s blessing—all the better to protect each other.

  “Close one” didn’t imply a narrow escape. It was their code that meant the note was deceiving. He didn’t want anyone other than his brothers to know he wasn’t off to Ankara. Roman had to puzzle out where in the world Ky went and why the secrecy.

  He sent a quick email on the computer in the office to Flynn, asking him to move south and track Ky. They’d meet up tomorrow.

  Weaponry from all ages and nationalities covered the far wall in a haphazard display, all of it functional, not museum quality. A hundred or more ammo boxes sat stacked against the opposite wall. Roman snagged two cases of 9 mms and tossed them in his bag.

  He opened the refrigerator and drew out a vial of moon-madness serum, the concoction that kept lycan males from going bonkers with drive for sex when a full moon rose in the sky. With the event forty-eight hours away, he needed his boost. The drug usually lasted three months, but as he got older, its effectiveness seemed to be lessening. He unwrapped a new syringe with an attached needle from its plastic, drew up 2 ccs of the golden solution, and injected it into his thigh. Well worth the burn to avoid losing his mind, especially around Nova.

  Females experienced the same insanity during the full moon, according to his mother. No way to know if Nova had injected herself before she became amnesic. No reason to chance it. He threw the rest of the vial and a new syringe into his bag in case Nova had problems.

  Leaving the bag, he climbed up one level to the meeting room. The fireplace blasted his face with heat and saturated his nostrils with the
stench of natural gas. He sat in one of the three stuffed chairs near the fire. The heat wasn’t for him, but for their soon-to-arrive guest.

  He rolled the Turkish tobacco he’d picked up a few weeks ago and lit up, puffing slowly. Ah, such good stuff.

  He flicked his brother’s silver lighter on and off a few times before lighting the note at a corner and tossing it into the gas fire. Shane, his brother who died, had bought this lighter when they chased a witch across Asia three years ago.

  “All they had was this shite lighter and no hand rolls,” Shane had said before taking a swig straight out of a six-liter vodka bottle, which he finished within the hour. Shane had tossed down a pack of Marlboros from the Bangkok corner store. He’d despised the American rubbish. Each cig burned too fast and was weak. His click click to strike the lighter eventually became a tell that he was under stress.

  Back then, Shane had been desperate for anything to stupefy his mind. His drive to dull himself went way beyond what all of them experienced on a day-to-day basis. Each of his three brothers would do anything to erase the memories and deaden the guilt, which attacked them in quiet moments. Humans and non-humans died because of what they did and sometimes from what they didn’t do. He, Flynn, and Ky had thought their little brother was recovering after a nasty demon possession. How wrong they’d been. Shane had been irritable and angry since the failed exorcism to rid him of the demon, but he’d progressed to insomnia and delusions right up until he martyred himself. For them.

  Death was a way out of the curse to the Crown, a way Roman considered for himself on an almost daily basis. But if one of them didn’t die in the line of duty, if they committed obvious suicide, then the monarch—well, the new king’s recently deceased mother—had promised to kill all of his remaining brothers. It was likely a bluff, but none of them would risk testing her over it. At least, none of them had personal families who’d be in peril as well.

  Long ago, he’d dreamed of a family. After decades cursed, he let the fantasy go.

  The drive to fight evil and those harnessing its powers was in his soul, not something generated by the blood curse. Being told what to do by some dickhead human and having no choice but to follow orders? That he had a problem with. Especially in the ugly moments when the lines between black and white blurred. Not every non-human who threatened England needed to die. Sometimes a being got possessed or misdirected and might warrant a second chance, not that the monarch or Gerard cared. These humans viewed anything non-human as the enemy, even him and his brothers. More than once he’d prayed for God to be on his side when faced with creatures from hell and found himself out of his depth. An angel showed up. Twice. God listened. That had to mean Roman was doing something right.

  He’d asked the angel how to get rid of his curse but received no answer. Not even a clue. All he got was a cryptic smile, which he interpreted as an indication of far more shit in his future before he figured a way to end it.

  He said a quick rosary and kissed the pendant around his neck, an ancient Byzantine protective talisman he wore at all times. Although constructed from lapis lazuli blue stone, the pendant had lost its luster long ago.

  The door scraped against the floor as it opened, which hurt his ears. King Francis, the new monarch since the queen died three months ago, strode to the chair across from him. It was Roman’s first time meeting him, since he usually sent orders through Gerard. His receding blond hair looked as if he’d walked through a windstorm, but his dull gray suit was perfectly turned-out. He reeked of cigarettes and the hormonal odor of conceit.

  The king’s phone dinged—amazing to get reception this far underground, but now that cells worked on wifi, getting a signal down here wasn’t an issue. The king scrolled through an incoming set of images and chuckled. He glanced up with a smile—a politician’s smile, animated with a delight designed to seduce cameras and win favor with people who’d be discarded later.

  Behind the king stood Gerard in his skinny jeans and an untucked flannel shirt, an odd outfit that made him look like a yuppie dad about to do a juice cleanse. He refused suits and hated uniforms, but he wasn’t a family man and ate meat three times a day. Hidden beneath the hideous shirt was a sculpted bulk Gerard worked hours a day to maintain. His physical fitness obsession was his way to cope with his inhuman charges, as if being in shape might make him a match for them, as unrealistic as that might be. His short hair had completely grayed out over the past few years. Deep creases covered his face.

  “Gerard.” Roman nodded in his direction.

  As usual, when Gerard entered, it felt as if everything in the room quieted, not because he was unfriendly, but because he took everything in. He seemed to be constantly analyzing. Never one prone to casual banter, Gerard was tough to read. Roman could rarely figure out what was going on inside the human’s mind. Gerard excelled at secrets, which worked well for his job as their handler and mission support. They had put their life in the hands of his intelligence many times over the past four decades since their induction. Hell, that made it sound like a fraternity. Since they’d been tricked by the witch and cursed to serve the Crown for eternity. None of them had been given a choice about enrolling. Gerard hadn’t been given a choice either and wasn’t thrilled to be reassigned from MI6 to handler duty. But he was a man who, like Roman and his brothers, believed deep down in duty and in fighting evil.

  “Which of them are you?” the king asked.

  The one you recalled. Roman stared in silence for long enough that King Francis dropped his gaze and shifted on his seat, but he wasn’t frightened by lycans like most humans. He came off acclimated, whereas most humans had a flight instinct when Roman didn’t use a glamour to fully mask himself. He didn’t drop eye contact from the thirty-six-year-old who’d inherited the crown after living life under the microscope of the media. The man had a perfect wife, an adorable toddler, a second child on the way, and made frequent trips around the world to play hero to the oppressed. All of it beautiful rubbish the media ate up. The world wasn’t beautiful, not a quarter mile beneath King’s Road and below the Underground. Here was where the war against the unknown was fought. This one-hundred-ninety pounds of smirk and smarm in a three-thousand-dollar suit had his royal hand on the trigger of a secret preternatural weapon—them—without any hint of compassion.

  “Sit,” the king ordered Gerard, who complied immediately by taking the third chair. The royal smirked this time, a patronizing version of his earlier smile. His smugness warned this was going to be much worse than expected.

  Roman waited. The bullcrap would rain down within minutes. It’d be a long list of justifications and reasons he had to do whatever absurdity caused them to recall him.

  Finally, the king said, “You’re Roman, aren’t you? The leader?”

  “You’re Francis. The newly crowned monarch.” The smug asshole better be glad he’d been the one recalled and not Ky, who would’ve flipped off the king and walked out when subjected to this much disrespect, no matter how much the curse punished insubordination.

  “It’s ‘Your Majesty’ to you. Turn into a dog. I want to see it.” He waved his hand, leaned forward in the cushy seat, and stared as if about to watch a circus act.

  “A dog? Clearly you skipped the briefing on what we are.” He pinned Gerard with a double eyebrow raise, but the man gave nothing away in his expression. “We’re not shapeshifters. We don’t turn into animals.” He would never change into his primal form on command like a pet monkey.

  “Then why do they call you wolves?”

  Roman took a deep drag on the tobacco and blew out the smoke, watching it until it dissipated. Gerard didn’t reveal an ounce of emotion, not even a smile at the king’s naïveté. He’d be a good poker player.

  Patience. That seemed to be all Gerard communicated.

  He needed to find that kind of tolerance. “Your mother labeled us the Crown’s Wolves. She, like many people, t
hought that lycanthropes and werewolves are the same thing, but they’re not. Werewolves are technically fiction. Lycanthropes don’t turn into any type of canid—when we change, we just get bigger and stronger. In fact, I have yet to run into a person who can turn into an animal, and, believe me, I’ve seen a lot of strangeness in this world. There are witches who can cast spells and transform a person into an animal or object temporarily, but most spells make a person think he’s a dog rather than turning him into one. Even our name, lycanthrope, is a misnomer, since its root word is Greek for ‘wolfman.’ The idea came from a confused juvenile lycan who thought himself a human that turned into a wolf, when it really wasn’t the case. Then they labeled it a psychological derangement, which later came to be called Werewolf Syndrome.”

  “You’re just people with some sort of mental problem?”

  “If I said yes, would you release all of us from the curse?” He blew another large smoke exhale before he glared, allowing more of his glamour to wear off. This allowed his inner predator vibe to radiate. He still looked the same externally, since he wasn’t transforming to primal form, but he exuded the aura of something humans innately feared.

  “No.” Francis’s eyes widened, and his hands shook. He cleared his throat. “There are three of you active. Where’s the missing one? Records show there are supposed to be four of you in my army. Was the fourth one executed when he disobeyed?”

  “Wouldn’t that be in your records, too?” Roman squinted at Gerard. “Did you tell him anything?”

  Gerard shrugged. “He was in a hurry and not interested in anything I had to say.”

  “Where the hell is he?” The king hit the sides of his chair like a spoiled child.

  “Let’s get a few facts straight. We are not your army. We don’t go into battles and fight. We don’t fight humans or hurt innocents. That is part of the contract. Your mother might’ve forced us into this subjugation, but we’re not your soldiers. We locate and eliminate inhuman terrorists. And the things that go bump in the night, which no human can handle.”