Marked by the Moon

by Lori Handeland

  “I didn’t. I’d never—”

  “Did you or did you not shout, ‘Do it!’”

  “I meant tear out my throat. Kill me.”

  If a werewolf bit a human, the human become a werewolf. If the ravenous beast ate from its victim, blessed death was the result.

  Her tormentor tilted his head, and his long hair slid across his neck, spreading outward like a golden fan. “You’d rather be dead,” he murmured, “than a werewolf.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “And my wife would rather have been a werewolf than dead.” He shrugged, unconcerned. “I guess you’re even.”

  Frustration and fury welled within her. She yanked on her bonds again, and the cot rattled as she lifted first one side, then the other from the floor. She was already getting stronger.

  “Let me go.” He did nothing but laugh. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I want you to understand what you’ve done.”

  “I killed monsters. Evil, demonic creatures that belonged in hell.”

  “You killed wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, someone’s children. You think we don’t love? You think we don’t mourn?”

  “Animals don’t feel.”

  He grabbed her by the chin again. “You’re wrong.”

  Alex should have a huge bruise from when he’d wolf-handled her before. His touch should hurt, but it didn’t. She was already healing faster than humanly possible.

  He let go of her with a flick of his wrist, as if he couldn’t bear to have his skin in contact with hers for one second longer than necessary—she knew the feeling—and walked away. Alex had to crane her neck to watch him disappear out the door.

  “Hey!” she shouted, then paused. Would she be better or worse off if he left her behind?

  The question became moot when he reappeared carrying an inert body, which he placed on the floor.

  “Don’t worry.” He walked to the door again, drawing it closed behind him. “He’s a very bad man.”

  As soon as he was gone, Alex fought to get loose in earnest.

  He’d bitten her instead of killing her, then tied her down and left her in a room with a helpless human being. She had to pull free and run, then find a silver…anything and kill herself before she changed. Because as soon as she did, she’d need human blood, and there was some right here.

  Her struggles only served to make her sweat. The room had no air-conditioning, no window. She pulled on the restraints so hard her wrists bled. The scent of blood, of man made her stomach growl.

  Once bitten, a human shifts within twenty-four hours. Traditionally werewolves can only change between dusk and dawn—except that first time. Then it doesn’t matter—day or night, full moon or dark, new wolves become. They had no choice.

  Suddenly the room vanished, and Alex ran through a dense forest. Warm sun cast dappled shadows through the branches. The cool air seemed to sparkle. The scent of pine surrounded her.

  She burst from the trees onto a rolling plain. Here and there patches of snow shone electric white against just-sprung grass threaded with purple wildflowers. In the distance loomed piles of ice that appeared as high as a mountain.

  A sense of freedom, of utter joy filled her. She wanted to run across this land forever. It was…

  Home.

  Except Alex had no home. She’d been born in Nebraska—not many mountains there, ice or any other. They were a little short on forests, too. And she hadn’t lived in one place for longer than a month since she was five.

  She caught the scent of warm blood, of tasty meat, and turned tail—she had one—to return to the forest. Something flashed up ahead, crashing through the brush in terror.

  Wham!

  Alex fell back into her body, still lying on the cot in the horrendously hot, horribly small room. She wasn’t any closer to being released, but from the way her skin felt, too small to contain her, she was much closer to being inhuman.

  “Collective consciousness,” she muttered. “God.”

  Once a victim is infected, the lycanthropy virus changes him from human to beast. He begins to remember things that have happened to others—the thrill of the chase, the love of the kill, the taste of the blood.

  “It’s coming,” Alex said in a voice that no longer resembled her own. Deeper, garbled, she’d heard the sound before.

  From the mouths of the soon-to-be-furry.

  The pain became more of an itch, a need to burst forth. Alex tried to fight that need but couldn’t. Her dark jeans and black blouse tore with a rending screech; her boots seemed to explode as her feet turned to paws.

  Her nose ached; her teeth were too big for her mouth. Then suddenly that mouth became part of the nose, and those teeth felt just right.

  The bonds restraining her popped. She writhed, contorted, snarled, moaned, and when she at last rolled to the floor, she was no longer human but a wolf.

  Alex stared at her paws, covered with fur the same shade as her hair; she didn’t need a mirror to see that her own green eyes stared out of an animal’s face.

  The world expanded—sounds sharp as the blade of a knife, smells so intense her mouth watered with desire; she could see every mote of dust tumbling through the air like snowflakes of silver and gold.

  Hunger blazed, a pounding pulse in her head. If she didn’t eat soon, if she didn’t kill something, she thought she might go mad.

  Then she saw him—there on the floor, trussed up and still. What was his name?

  Oh, yeah. Brunch.

  Alex took one step forward, and the door crashed open. The silhouette of a man spread across the floor. She skittered back, startled, growling, then lifted her snout and sniffed. Recognition flickered, just out of reach. She knew him, yet still the hair on her neck lifted as the growl deepened to a snarl.

  The urge to attack warred with the clawing hunger in her belly. Her head swung back and forth between the two men as her human intelligence weighed the possibilities.

  The bound one could wait; he wasn’t going anywhere. Once she took down the newcomer, there’d be twice as much to eat and a lot less to fear.

  Her muscles bunched, and she leaped. Before her body began the downward arc that would send her sailing directly into the man in the doorway, a sharp pain bloomed in her chest. Her limbs felt weighted with sand but strangely her mind cleared, and as she tumbled to the ground, she remembered who he was.

  Edward.

  Now she was definitely dead.

  Chapter 2

  When Alex came around, she was no longer a wolf but a woman. Naked, she lay beneath a blanket on the cot where she’d so recently been tied. The trussed man was gone. Unfortunately, Edward wasn’t.

  Tall, thin, pale, Edward Mandenauer, the leader of the Jäger-Suchers, didn’t appear concerned to be in a small room with a woman able to sprout fangs and a tail. Probably because such things had been happening to him for more than sixty years.

  With the rifle slung over his back, a pistol in hand, and a bandolier of bullets across his cadaverous chest, Edward was, as usual, ready for Armageddon.

  “It has been a long time,” he murmured.

  You’d think that after residing in the United States for better than half a century, his heavy German accent would have faded. Everything else about him had. His once-blond hair was now white, his eyes pale blue, his skin paper-fine. It never ceased to amaze Alex that the man’s kill count was twice her own. Or at least it had been when she’d still been required to count.

  She sat up, uncaring when the blanket pooled at her waist. A few hours ago she would have been mortified, which only proved she’d changed in more ways than one.

  She felt damn good. Any minor aches and pains were gone. Energy pulsed within her, the buzz reminiscent of the one time she’d tried to unplug a cheap motel hair dryer while still sopping wet from the shower. Zap! She’d never done that again.

  The world seemed so much more there. Alex could feel the air on her skin, hear every breath Edward took; if she li
stened she could probably distinguish the dull thud of his ancient heart and the slow flow of blood through his veins. She bet she could smell it.

  Lifting her nose, Alex sniffed, then licked her lips. Edward lifted his gun.

  So it was going to be like that.

  “Let’s get this over with.” Alex repeated the same words to Edward that she’d so recently used with the wolf man, even as her gaze slid to the left, the right, searching for a way out. Though her mind had accepted the inevitability of her death, her body quivered with the possibility of escape.

  “Get what over with?” Edward asked.

  “My unavoidable demise. I suppose you want me to grow pointy ears and a snout again so you have less to explain after you shoot me in the head.” Although Edward never had much of a problem explaining anything—one of his many talents.

  “I’m not going to shoot you in the head, Alex.”

  “Chest then. Whatever.”

  “If I was going to shoot you with silver, I wouldn’t have bothered with the tranquilizer dart.”

  Then why had he?

  For that matter, why had she shape-shifted again? A werewolf must ingest human blood under the full moon before morphing back into a person, and after the initial change only a kill would do. Otherwise madness was the result.

  Alex ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. She probably had a raging case of halitosis but no blood breath. She was also way too calm for a just-made wolf, and while she did feel different, she didn’t feel crazy or evil. Sure, if she had a chance to get away, she’d take it, and if that meant going through Edward, she wouldn’t cry about it. But that was simply survival.

  Alex studied the old man, who lifted his bushy white brows as if waiting for her to catch up. Eventually, she did. “What did you do to me?”

  He held up an empty syringe.

  Ah-ha!

  Edward had his very own Dr. Frankenstein on the payroll—a virologist who’d spent a lot of time trying to cure lycanthropy. The main reason Alex had left the Jäger-Suchers was their edict that agents give werewolves a choice of being cured or being killed. In her book they didn’t deserve a second chance. Her father hadn’t gotten one. Hell, her mother hadn’t, either.

  “You cured me?” she asked. Alex didn’t feel cured; she felt a little wolfy.

  Edward shook his head. “I gave you a serum that removes the bloodlust, at least for a little while.”

  “Handy. Why don’t I feel possessed?”

  “It takes time for the demon to awaken. At first a new werewolf is confused, crazed. Most do not have access to this.” He lifted the syringe again. “The more you kill, the better you will like it. Soon there is no going back, and you do not want to.”

  He pocketed the syringe, then removed a sheet of paper from another pocket and laid it on the table. “You will look at this.”

  Though Edward giving her orders made Alex’s teeth ache—or maybe that was just because she was grinding them together with so much more force than she used to have—nevertheless she stood and crossed the tiny room, leaving the blanket behind. She didn’t like how it felt against her humming skin.

  The sound that rumbled out of Alex’s throat at the sight of the drawing wasn’t even close to human. The man portrayed in the sketch wasn’t, either. He’d been a werewolf when he bit her.

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “Julian Barlow.” Edward’s thin lips tightened. “One of the oldest I’ve ever known.”

  Which explained why Edward had brought a drawing instead of a photograph. Werewolves didn’t show up on film. Any photos would have to have been taken before the people became werewolves, which made Alex wonder about Alana.

  “Barlow isn’t one of Mengele’s wolves,” Alex concluded.

  “No.”

  According to Edward, whom she was inclined to believe since he’d been a double agent during The Big One, Hitler had demanded a werewolf army. His equally psychotic pal, Mengele, gave him one.

  When the Allies landed and began to sweep across France toward Germany, the evil doctor panicked and released everything he’d concocted in his secret laboratory deep in the Black Forest. Edward had been trying to rid the world of them ever since.

  What Edward hadn’t known then, but found out fairly quickly, was that there had been werewolves long before Mengele. A lot of them.

  “What is he?” Alex asked. “From where? When?”

  “No one knows.”

  “You don’t? How can that be?” Edward knew everything, or at least pretended to.

  “Barlow has more powers than any werewolf I’ve ever encountered. He can change in an instant. He can run so fast he seems to disappear. He can make things happen just by thinking of them.”

  “He’s more than a werewolf.”

  “I want you to find out what.”

  “I don’t work for you anymore. And besides, I’ve got a little problem with my tail.” Alex wiggled her ass. It was still naked, and she still didn’t care.

  “He could have killed you,” Edward murmured, “but he didn’t.”

  “Dying would be too easy. He wanted me to suffer.”

  Actually, he’d wanted her to understand, and she was starting to. She was still Alex but better—and that she believed she was better, not doomed, scared her.

  “I know you can fix me,” she blurted. She just wasn’t sure how.

  “Barlow has been following you,” Edward continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “He’s had this planned for a while.”

  As the words sank in, fury rolled through her, a wave of ice just beneath the surface of her overheated skin. It felt…glorious. She wanted to leap across the table, grab Edward by the throat, and—

  Alex rubbed a thumb between her eyes, where her pulse still throbbed. Allowing the anger in was letting the beast out. She had to take several deep breaths before she could speak again.

  “You let him bite me.”

  He didn’t deny it; she hadn’t expected him to. Edward could be depended upon for one thing, and one thing only. He’d do whatever he had to do to defeat the monsters.

  “We need someone on the inside of Barlow’s pack,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s up to something, Alex.”

  “Werewolves always are.”

  Edward’s face tightened, the expression stretching pale skin over sharp bones, making him appear almost skeletal. “There are rumors of another army amassing, with Barlow at the helm.”

  “A werewolf army?” Alex clarified.

  Edward dipped his chin. “Can you imagine one with him in the lead? They will march over the earth, leaving blood and death and fire behind.”

  For an instant Alex saw the world in flames, an army of werewolves on the rampage, and she ached to be one of them. She’d never be alone again. She’d never be afraid. No one could ever harm her. Then the image vanished, and she was left blinking in confusion, stunned at the duality raging within her.

  “I don’t want to stay like this,” Alex said urgently. “Cure me. Then tell me where they are, and I’ll turn them to ashes.”

  “We don’t know where they are. Anyone who’s ever followed Barlow hasn’t come back.”

  She lifted her brows. If the British SAS were considered by many to be the best Special Forces in the world, and the US Special Forces were easily the best equipped, the Jäger-Suchers were both. Not only did Edward recruit those who were willing to give their lives, but he had them trained by agents who had seen everything, fought it all, and won. Like her father.

  Edward also had a secret ops budget that would make Delta Force envious, if they knew about it, and an in with whatever weapons and technology experts were considered the boy and girl geniuses of the moment. Edward volunteered his elite group to test new toys, and if they lived, they got to keep them.

  So if every J-S agent he’d sent after Barlow had failed to come back, Alex had to wonder what the wolf man was packing. The only thing more powerful than
American weaponry was magic.

  “We’ve never had a chance like this before,” Edward continued. “You’re one of his now. He’ll take you with him.”

  “He hates my guts.”

  “Nevertheless, he has made you. If you’re in danger, he cannot abandon you. He will teach you things. It is their way.”

  Huh, their way didn’t sound half bad.

  Alex smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. She had to stop thinking like that.

  “What if he takes one whiff of me and smells you?”

  Edward narrowed his eyes, sensing an insult in there somewhere but not quite sure what it was. “You’ll have to take that chance.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because someone in that pack killed your father.”

  Alex froze. “What?”

  “You think I allow the monsters who murder my agents to run free? It may take time, Alex, but eventually I find them; then I make them pay.”

  She didn’t need to ask how he’d discovered the information when she couldn’t. She’d been traversing the country hunting on her own, taking odd jobs wherever she could find them just to have enough money to keep herself in ham sandwiches and silver bullets. Edward had access to resources she did not, and still it had taken him eight years.

  “Are you in,” Edward asked, “or are you out?”

  “In,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.

  Julian’s plan had been to infect Alexandra Trevalyn with the lycanthropy virus, gift her with a man who deserved very much to die, then leave. She would shift; she would kill; she would have no choice. Then, when she changed back, maybe she would understand a little better what she had done when she had murdered his wife.

  That was the part he would miss seeing. The ecstasy followed by the agony. The unbearable hunger, then the quenching of it. The inevitable realization of what had happened beneath the moon and the horror that would result from it.

  Most werewolves were evil, but some were not, and all the wolves in Julian’s pack were of the latter variety. He’d heard of others as well, though he’d never met them.

  Julian was different, and because of that, those he made were different, too. Instead of being consumed by a demon that urged them to kill at every opportunity, Julian’s wolves retained their humanity. They valued their lives and the lives of others. Certainly human blood was required beneath the full moon. But blood and death were two very different things.