To Crave a Blood Moon

by Sharie Kohler

  Unfortunate that she had not found the strength of will. Unfortunate that a mere knife would not have ended his life. For he now sat a prisoner in a rotting cell… waiting for the beast within to surface and devour whatever hapless female they chose to toss at him. Maybe his mother should have finished him then and spared him—spared the world.

  Emotion burned through him, incinerating all shields he had constructed. He could no longer fight it. Closing his eyes, he rolled his head against the cold wall, unable to stop the despair from flowing free.

  PALACIOS, TEXAS

  Rafe Santiago woke with a scream thick in his throat. Instantly, his wife was beside him, wrapping her arms around his sweat-dampened chest in a fierce hold.

  “Rafe, what is it?”

  “Sebastian,” he spit out between gasps. “He’s in trouble.”

  His eyes locked with Kit’s. The green pulled him in, a calming balm to the stark horror he had just felt. His brother’s horror. They had always felt a connection, a bond that could stretch across the ocean which separated them.

  Seb had felt Rafe’s turmoil when he turned Kit into one of them—a hybrid lycan, a dovenatu, a rare species created through the mating of a lycan with a female descendant of Etienne Marshan—the world’s first lycan.

  Kit’s voice swept through him. “Then we’ll find him.”

  Slowly, he nodded. Rafe had been unable to reach his brother for months now. Not unusual. Sebastian was like that. Aloof. Solitary. He had broken free from Rafe years ago. Still, Rafe had suspected something was wrong. Whenever he tried to tap into his brother’s head, he only got gray static.

  He suspected. And now he knew.

  Rising from the bed, he faced the window, staring down into the yard and beyond at the gently swelling waters of the bay. The swing on the porch where he and Kit sat after dinner creaked in the breeze.

  “Did you… sense where he is?”

  He recalled the dream, saw the awful room, felt Seb’s pain, his battered body as if it were his own.

  Seb’s tormentor had spoken in Turkish. “Turkey. The last time I heard from him he was hunting a pack in Vienna. Something took him east. I can track him.” He splayed a hand against the cool glass, fingers curling, pressing as though he would shatter the delicate barrier. “We’ll need help.”

  He felt her move behind him. Her small hand came to rest on his shoulder. His brother would never have been taken easily. Only an army of lycans could bring him down. They would need their own to go after him.

  “Darius,” he said.

  “Gideon,” she added.

  He nodded. The four of them would be a force for any army to face, mortal or otherwise.

  2

  Ruby Deveraux woke with a sharp gasp tight in her throat. Her dream vanished like fast-fading smoke. She willed it gone, willed the frightening images and sensations from her head. She was good at that. Good at tossing up barriers.

  Pulling the comforter tighter, she burrowed into the hotel bed, groaning as she eyed her murky surroundings. Sleep rarely gave her any sense of peace. How could it? Her defenses fell then. Dropped like a row of dominoes. Especially in a place teeming with people. Their thoughts and emotions hunted her in sleep, penetrated the closed shutters of her hotel room, finding her, becoming her own.

  Rolling to her side, she inhaled the pungent aroma of Turkish roses outside her window. Her dream clung, not yet ready to let go. A brutal shadowland of dark images that twisted with pain. Flashing teeth, snapping, tearing… rancid-hot breath on her neck.

  She hadn’t dreamed of monsters since she was a child. Not since her father deserted her. The months following that had been fraught with nightmares.

  Still tired, she chafed her palms against the side of her face. In a few days, she would be on a plane home. Soon she would be safe in her house again. Safe and blessedly alone.

  Sighing, she dragged a hand through her loosened hair and rolled her head side-to-side on the pillow, stretching her neck. Nothing would lure her from her hotel room tonight. The peanut butter crackers in her luggage would work for dinner. She needed to gather her energy to face the onslaught of tomorrow. Airports were never fun. Plenty of negative energy there.

  Adele had been right. An empath should never stray too far from home. But Ruby had insisted she could handle it. The constant throb at her temples told her how wrong she had been. She should never have agreed to the trip. It wasn’t like back home, when she could leave and escape the solitude of her farmhouse. Adele had warned her, tried to tell her there would be nowhere to run, but Ruby hadn’t listened.

  This trip had been important. A grand gesture of rebellion—freedom. Something she had to do to give back, to help girls like her. Like the girl she once had been.

  The sunset call to prayer rang outside her hotel, vibrating the window’s shutters. Solemn and dark… almost like everything else in this foreign land.

  The familiar urge to flee seized her. Maybe she could catch a late-night flight out of Istanbul. She could be back in Louisiana tomorrow.

  The rattle of a key in the lock had her peering at the door. Rosemary entered. The retired social worker looked closer to seventy than her fifty years. Hard lines edged her eyes and mouth, and when Ruby stared at her she felt only her weariness, her deep dissatisfaction with the world. Defeat. Sourness. It pulled her down, weighed her into the hotel bed.

  Moving about the room, kicking off her shoes, Rosemary studied her for a long moment. “Rough day?”

  Only two people knew of Ruby’s… gift. Rosemary, who placed her in home after home. And Adele Summers, her best friend. Her only friend in Beau Rivage. Everyone else just wrote her off as the weird eccentric who lived on the old Deveraux farm.

  She nodded weakly. “Yeah.”

  “I thought bringing you along as a chaperone wouldn’t work.” She sighed and Ruby felt the full bitter wave of her disgust. It wasn’t new. Rosemary often felt disgusted with her over the years, mostly due to Ruby’s inability to keep a foster family. She grimaced. Families had never wanted her once they realized what she was.

  “I can’t hide away forever.” God knew she had hidden long enough.

  “Well, what good are you to yourself or the girls when you get exhausted before noon? You should have stayed holed up at your farm.”

  Ruby swallowed down the lump in her throat. True. What kind of chaperone was she if she had to hide away instead of chaperoning the girls?

  “What are you doing here? I hope you didn’t skip dinner to check on me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I came back here to look for Amy and Emily. Hoped they were in their rooms.”

  Ruby frowned. “Shouldn’t they be at dinner?”

  “Should is the operative word. I just checked their room. They both complained of stomach aches and took a cab back here earlier.” She shook her head. “Those two. I never thought I’d ever have a kid under my care that could give me more grief than you, but they take the prize.”

  Ruby sat up, ignoring the jibe. “You believed they both had a stomach ache? And you let them return on their own?”

  “I didn’t want to miss the tour of the Blue Mosque.” Rosemary’s eyes glinted defensively. “And they did share a plate at lunch today.” She shrugged. “Maybe it was food poisoning.”

  “Right.” Ruby swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed to her feet. Amy was a good girl, but easily misguided. Ever since she paired up with Emily, Amy had turned into someone else. A perfect parrot of the wilder Emily.

  She hastily put on her shoes. “We should have split those two up from day one.”

  “Should,” Rosemary said again. “That word comes up a lot with these kids.”

  Ruby resisted reminding her that the word should needed to be applied to the parents who brought children into the world and then failed them. Rosemary always had a way of blaming the kids. “I suggested you split them up.”

  Ruby had been one of them. Rejected. Abandoned. Left to the system. Ruby kn
ew. She knew well.

  “Any idea where they went?”

  “Kevin said they were talking to some older guys earlier when we were browsing tapestries at the Bazaar. They invited them to a party. He heard the girls agree to meet them at six at that pastirma shop where we ate.”

  A party in a strange, exciting city. A pair of fifteen-year-old girls. Older exotic men. Great. It was a formula for disaster. Rising, she faced Rosemary. “Ready?”

  She blinked. “Where are we going?”

  “To get them.”

  The social worker’s face screwed tight and she waved a hand. “They’ll be fine… probably drag in after they’ve had their fun.”

  “And you’re okay with that? What if they don’t? What if they get into trouble? Or hurt?”

  “Look. I’m not about to scour the city for them. And I don’t know why you think I would.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Because it’s your job.”

  “I don’t get paid enough for that.”

  “Fine,” Ruby bit out. “Where’s John? I’ll get him to go with me.”

  “Don’t bother. He can’t leave the rest of the kids to go off after two troublemakers.”

  She inhaled deeply. “All right. I’ll go alone. I’ll find them and bring them back.”

  “How?” Rosemary glanced at her watch. “You’ll never make it there by six. The traffic—”

  “Maybe.” If she could get close enough it would be enough. She just had to get close enough. Her gift would do the rest.

  Rosemary shot her a skeptical glare, and Ruby read the doubt there. More than that. She felt it. As always. Buried beneath Rosemary’s general ennui and dissatisfaction with her life was her skepticism that Ruby could do nothing more than hide away in her farmhouse—the oddball loner everyone thought her. “You don’t do crowds.”

  “I’ll be back soon.” She clicked her money belt into place around her waist, beneath her tank. Adele had bought it for her, insisting she wear it instead of using a handbag, so that her money, passport and visa never left her body.

  “The girls will be long gone by the time you get there,” Rosemary predicted. The bed creaked as she lowered her square, solid frame onto it.

  Maybe. But not what they left behind. Not the lingering trace of their emotions. Not their blind, youthful enthusiasm. She should be able to feel them, track them. As long as she lowered her guard and let them in…

  Rosemary continued. “You’re wasting your time. They’ll be back sometime tonight.”

  Ruby placed one hand to the door’s latch. “I can’t do that.” Without another thought, she stepped out into the hall, into the waiting world with all its people, all its pain, ready to sink their teeth into her.

  3

  “Wait here, I’ll be right back,” Ruby instructed the cab driver before hurrying out into the labyrinth of streets, into a fog of spices and herbs.

  In the fading dusk, she scanned the narrow streets for Amy’s blond hair, bypassing the pastirma café where they ate earlier. Seeing nothing, she closed her eyes and released a deep breath… and let it all flow in. Every vile, poisoned sensation. Good existed, too. Amusement. Joy. But those faded amid the onslaught of negative feelings. The mean, the ugly, the sinister—they always hit harder.

  She staggered from the force of emotions swirling around in the sultry air, bombarding her in wave after wave, eddying along her senses. Her stomach twisted and knotted. There was little time to process. Closing her eyes, she breathed thinly through her nose, swimming through the thick fog, searching until she located the girls.

  She found them.

  Emily and Amy. Excitement. Eagerness. Pride.

  It thrilled them to have attracted the notice of men. They knew they were being bad, breaking the rules. But they reveled in it too much to stop themselves.

  Ruby walked, following the heady sense of euphoria the girls emitted. Ferry horns blew low and deep from the nearby port. Eyes thinly parted, she pushed ahead, following only her awareness of them. She strode from the center of the bazaar quarter, down a street of busy shoppers vying with vendors for their evening fare.

  Mingled with Emily and Amy’s emotions lurked those of their companions. Two of them. Ruby’s stomach knotted and clenched. She had never felt anything like them before. The sensation they emitted was more of a condition than a feeling. Black hunger. A mawing ache. And in that hunger, nothing else existed. Bleak emptiness. And that was even more frightening. Because there should be something. Some feeling. Some sentiment. There always was. She could always feel something. No one felt nothing. It simply wasn’t human to feel nothing, to possess only that unnatural hunger. Even a starved man must have other thoughts in his head, feelings in his heart. But these men with Amy… they felt empty. Dead.

  Weaving through the warren of streets, Ruby’s stomach twisted tighter. She had to reach the girls. Fast.

  She shook her head as one determined vendor waggled a dead chicken in her face. Pushing ahead. Ruby tuned everything else out as she clung to the thread of emotions from the girls. Dodging a cyclist, she hurried. The thread suddenly grew thinner. Gasping, she jerked to a stop. Looking left and right, she concentrated. Listening to her instinct, she ducked into a small side street.

  Sheer curtains billowed off windows high overhead as she hurried down the narrow cobbled street. The market’s volume faded to a dull purr behind her, and the thread grew stronger again.

  She passed an old lady. Sitting on the stoop of her building, she stared out at Ruby with night-black eyes and spat something in Arabic from lips that moved as quickly as the fingers shelling chickpeas into a bowl.

  A sense of urgency stole over her and Ruby quickened her pace. Tenements reached for the sky on either side of her. A baby cried from inside the one to her left, the wail stretching and twisting into the twilight until it died suddenly.

  She stopped abruptly amid the growing shadows as the street came to an end at a courtyard. A fountain sat at its center, its gurgling water the only sound in the silence of impending night. A warehouse-type building sat within the courtyard, a squat, solid structure that crouched wide in the shadow of tenements. With its massive double doors of ancient wood, it looked nearly as old as the city itself.

  The skin of her face tingled, stomach queasy with knowing. Amy and Emily were behind those doors.

  The same black wave of hunger she had felt earlier swamped her as she faced the building. Aching. Craving. Only stronger. Only more. Fighting back the nausea welling up inside her, she approached the door and rapped until her knuckles burned. Her knocking ricocheted off the courtyard around her.

  Moments passed before the door opened. A man stood there, his dusky-skinned face curiously ageless. “Yes?” he asked, blue-green eyes glittering against his camel-toned skin.

  She moistened dry lips. “Hi. Two of my friends are guests here. We were invited to a party—”

  Suspicion. Anxiety. He pasted a smile of welcome on his face, despite his tension. “Ah, yes. Of course.” He stepped aside, waving her in.

  She stepped inside a mosaic-tiled foyer, not at all what she expected given the building’s dismal exterior. Congratulating herself on the ease in which she had infiltrated, she looked expectantly at the man, wondering at his unease over her arrival.

  “The young ladies are this way.”

  She followed him, trying not to stare at the opulence around her. Surely nothing the girls—or herself—had seen in their corner of Louisiana. The paintings on the wall, the gilded chandelier, the ageless sculpture set upon a strategically placed marble pedestal.

  The soles of her sneakers fell flat on the tiled floor. She clung to the jumpy thread of emotions that ran a direct line to Amy and Emily. Harmless compared to the dark ache swirling on the air. Desperate need. Thick as smoke, suffocating, threatening to drag her down and make her sick. As sick and helpless as she used to get when she was a kid, before she learned control, before she learned to set up her barriers. She sucked in a deep bre
ath.

  They stopped before a door of carved pewter inset with opals. The beauty of it almost distracted from the fact that it was bolted on the outside. The man sent her a smile, knocking once before lifting the hefty bolt with a grunt. The smile might have disarmed her if she did not sense unease tripping through him… and a skittery sense of urgency. He wanted to run away, to flee…

  Why? What would he have to be afraid of?

  Then the door opened.

  Clawing hunger. A pulling ache.

  Struggling past the strange… condition—not a feeling; there was no feeling, no sentiment—she spotted Amy laughing on a couch, sipping champagne and talking to a pair of very attentive men.

  And Ruby couldn’t go anywhere. Couldn’t leave.

  She cleared the threshold, noting with some relief that the room was crowded with men and women alike. It was a party. That much was true, at least. Softer, milder emotions existed beneath the hunger. Glee. Delight. Levity. All too light to make much of an impression on her. The black ache eclipsed everything else.

  Music filled the room. Blood-pumping hip-hop piped in from an overhead system. A huge spread of food and drink weighed down one table, which everyone appeared to be sampling, making the hunger even more puzzling.

  Ruby drove a hard line toward Amy.

  “Ruby,” she cried. Annoyance. Guilt. “What are you doing here?” Amy looked over her shoulder, as if she expected to see Rosemary and John in tow.

  “I’ve come to take you and Emily back to the hotel.”

  Emily arrived then, one hand propped on her hip. “We’re not going,” she announced. Hostility. Aggression.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Ruby countered. “You are fifteen years—”

  “Ruby, is it?” A man stepped in front of her. Tall, dark, his eyes glittered an eerie silver. Hunger swathed him. Controlled. Careful. And beneath that… the familiar nothing. Emptiness. An animal that did not feel emotion, only the physical demands of his body. Hunger. She resisted the impulse to retreat a step.

  “I’m Gunter. Why not stay and chaperone the girls? Eat. Drink. Be our guest.”