Marked by the Moon

by Lori Handeland

  Her eyes widened, and the angry color drained from her cheeks. “They’re your family, yet you chase them through the woods beneath the full moon, and you tear them into pieces.”

  “What?” he shouted, releasing her as he straightened to his full height.

  Barlow towered over her, and for an instant Alex was reminded of the polar bear, roaring and posturing. She half expected him to shape-shift into one. She’d studied berserkers, and in the legends many could turn into both a wolf and a bear. She wouldn’t put it past Barlow to have left that part out.

  But he didn’t shift, not even his paws. Instead, he closed his eyes, and his lips moved silently, as if in prayer.

  “How do you pray and not burst into flames?” she wondered aloud.

  He opened one eye, which was all he needed to give her a very impressive glare before he snarled, “Explain why you think I’m accepting human sacrifices.”

  The rumble beneath the surface revealed just how close the beast within him had come. Oddly, Alex wasn’t scared. Considering what she’d just learned, she wasn’t sure why.

  “Werewolves must kill, then consume fresh human blood on the night of the full moon,” Alex said. “I knew that even before I became one.”

  “We require blood, yes.” He opened both eyes, and though the blue had hardened to the color of ice beneath a clear, summer sky, they still bored into hers with such heat she was surprised her corneas didn’t explode. “But blood and death are two very different things.”

  “How would you—? Can you—?” She leaned back. “Wait. What?”

  “I have told you over and over that my wolves are different. Our full moon craving can be satisfied with blood. No death involved.”

  “The Inuit give you blood,” Alex clarified. “Like some full moon communion?”

  “If you like.” His lips tightened. “You really thought I’d let my wolves kill one person a month?”

  “You let me kill someone,” Alex said softly.

  He looked away. “That was different.”

  “Oh, right. I needed to understand.” Alex allowed the full weight of her sarcasm to fall on the last word.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But I didn’t have much choice once I’d made you.”

  “You could have not made me,” Alex muttered.

  Barlow ignored her. “Every new wolf must kill the first time or embrace madness. Even my wolves, if that initial kill isn’t accomplished, become killing machines ever after.”

  “You think that’s what happened to the wolf that’s stalking the Inuit?”

  “No. All of the wolves here were made by me and brought into this life with their consent.”

  “Not all,” she said.

  “All the ones that count.”

  Well, she’d asked for that. “Were every one of your wolves given a very bad man as their first meal?”

  “Not every one.”

  “When did you grow a conscience?”

  His eyes narrowed. “I became a werewolf in the ninth century. Conscience was a little different back then.”

  “I suppose you just tossed them a conquered captive and called it a day.”

  When he didn’t answer, she knew she was right. She also knew that living for eons meant that a lot of things had changed, including how people viewed right and wrong. Judging a Viking with the mores of the twenty-first century was as backward as he had once been.

  She didn’t like cutting Barlow any slack, but to be fair she had to.

  “You’re certain none of your wolves might have made another and let him or her run wild, so to speak?”

  “They wouldn’t dare.”

  Alex snorted. She couldn’t help it. “Not everyone is as beta as you think.”

  She could tell by the way he went silent and still that she’d gotten him thinking. She decided to leave him to it.

  “I’m going back to Ella’s,” Alex said. If she didn’t sleep soon, she just might fall on her face.

  Julian glanced up. “Don’t tell anyone who you are.”

  She’d been headed for the door but turned at his arrogant command. “I think that ship has sailed.”

  His eyes flared. “Why would you do that?”

  “I didn’t. You introduced me the instant we got into town.”

  “Oh.” He let out a quick, sharp breath that blew a stray strand of golden hair away from his face. “Your name. That’s all right. But don’t tell anyone why you’re here.”

  “You think your people would mutiny if they discovered you hadn’t followed your own rules? That you made someone against their will?” Alex’s lips curved. “That might be fun to watch.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Do not tell anyone you’re a hunter. Do not tell anyone you know Edward. Specifically do not tell anyone you murdered my wife.” He dropped his hand and looked into her face. “Werewolves can die, Alex, and mine will kill you.”

  “They can’t. There’s a fail-safe in the lycanthropy virus that keeps werewolves from killing one another.”

  “Not around here.”

  Alex stilled. “What?”

  “Because I’m different, my virus is different, and so are my wolves. No demon. Also no fail-safe.”

  Her eyes widened. “Then how can there be any of you left at all? Why haven’t you torn one another to shreds? Why isn’t there only one wolf left standing?”

  “Because we don’t kill for sport. We don’t enjoy it. And while we can kill one another, we don’t want to.”

  “But sometimes,” she murmured, staring into his face as she heard what he’d left unsaid, “you have to.”

  “It’s the only thing werewolves understand.”

  Barlow offered to take her back to Ella’s, but Alex refused.

  “Even if I didn’t know the way, I could follow my nose,” she said. An appendage that was becoming increasingly useful with each passing day.

  During the return trip, which took her along one street, through the square, and halfway down the avenue on the opposite side of town, no less than a dozen villagers greeted Alex.

  The place was a hodgepodge of accents and nationalities, races and ages. But one thing she didn’t see were any children.

  “Guess that makes sense,” she murmured, considering the conversation she and Barlow’d had earlier.

  They all seemed damn glad to see her. Ecstatic almost. Like she was the best thing to happen to Barlowsville in years.

  But they wouldn’t be happy, or welcoming, or even civil if they discovered who she was, why she was here—be it Barlow’s reason…or Edward’s.

  That knowledge, combined with the town’s excessive friendliness, made Alex feel like the lowest of lying scum. She had to remind herself that this was a town of werewolves, the lowest, lying scum on the planet.

  And she was one, too.

  Yet she still didn’t want to eviscerate small children. She wasn’t consumed by the urge to rip off the faces of everyone she met—except Barlow. She didn’t feel evil. She felt like…herself. Which went against everything she’d ever believed about werewolves. Sure, Cassandra had said she’d removed “the demon,” but maybe there hadn’t been one there to remove.

  Alex reached Ella’s house, climbed the steps, then hesitated. Should she knock? She wasn’t sure. If the door was locked she’d have to.

  It wasn’t. Did anyone lock their doors in Barlowsville? Knowing Barlow, the punishment for theft was the removal of a paw with a silver axe. Which should be enough to deter any werewolf with kleptomaniac tendencies.

  “Hello?” she called, thrilled when no one answered. Alex had done all the talking she could stand for one day.

  She searched through the armoire for pajamas, sweatpants, scrubs, anything to wear to bed that wasn’t the gorgeous cream silk peignoir she found.

  No such luck. Since Alex would rather sleep in nothing than that, she did.

  The bedroom came equipped with custom shades that blocked the sunlight, or what there was of it, no doubt very handy for tho
se mornings after an all-night run through the woods as a wolf.

  Alex planned to sleep away what remained of the day and maybe even the night. What she hadn’t planned on was the dream.

  She hadn’t had it for a very long time. She’d begun to hope it was gone. Then she’d begun to fear that it was.

  Though the dream always ended badly—because it was a memory as well as a dream—it began with Alex and her father together as they could never be again. And for the short time before the werewolf came, Alex could exist in a world where he was still alive.

  Wasn’t that what dreams were for?

  They’re having breakfast in a small mountain town in Tennessee when the call comes. The previous night had been busy, and they hadn’t yet gone to bed.

  A rash of drownings in the area, combined with tales of a really big snake and a mysterious, decrepit old woman, had precipitated their visit. Sure enough they’d found, then dispatched, a nasnas.

  Every culture has a shape-shifter legend. What the common folk don’t know is that those legends are true. For a Jäger-Sucher, legends are the stock of their trade.

  A nasnas is an Arabian shifter, which takes the form of an old man or woman and begs for help crossing bodies of water. Once in the water, the nasnas changes into a sea serpent and drags its victim beneath the surface to feed.

  To kill one, the victim must yank the head of the nasnas below the water first, then hold it there. Which had proved damn difficult despite the old lady weighing about eighty pounds soaking wet and possessing the bony fingers of a baby bird.

  Still, Alex managed. They celebrated with pancakes.

  “Full moon tonight,” her father observes, pouring half the syrup in the pitcher atop his Paul Bunyan–size stack.

  Alex, being fifteen, widens her eyes. “You think?” She counts the nights between full moons, and so does he.

  Charlie doesn’t tell her to behave, be respectful, watch her mouth, or anything of the sort. Charlie pretty much lets her be. He knows the only thing that might save Alex in the long run is being tough, smart, and really, really bitchy.

  “Where to?” she asks, carefully pouring syrup on only a portion of her cakes. She doesn’t like them soggy.

  “Haven’t heard.” Her father speaks around a mouthful of food, and as he does, his cell phone rings. He pulls it out, glances at the display, lifts it like a toast, and greets the caller with, “Elise.”

  Elise Hanover is Edward’s right hand. Alex has never met her, never spoken to her, doesn’t know all that much about her. Elise lives at the Jäger-Sucher headquarters, wherever that is, and spends what time she has that isn’t taken up coordinating the agents and their assignments trying to discover a cure for lycanthropy. Alex has always figured the best cure is to wipe every werewolf from the face of the earth. If there aren’t any left, they can’t make any more.

  Of course that hadn’t stopped Hitler.

  “Will do.” Charlie shuts his phone and goes back to eating pancakes.

  “We’ll do what?” Alex asks.

  “Not we’ll,” he corrects. “Will.”

  Alex doesn’t think Elise knows that she’s been hunting with her father for two years. Although maybe Edward’s told her. According to her father, Edward knows everything.

  “What will we do?”

  Charlie smiles, though since the day he went looking for Alex’s mother and came back alone, that smile no longer reaches his eyes. Alex knows he feels guilty, that he believes her mother would be alive today if he’d never been a Jäger-Sucher.

  But the monsters are out there, and without people like Alex and her father, every person on the earth will eventually be a victim. Charlie’s mistake wasn’t made when he became a Jäger-Sucher. His mistake was in believing he could ever not be one.

  “Rogue black bear a few hours from here,” Charlie answers. “Northern Alabama.”

  “Is it really a bear?” Alex lays down her fork. Her father is already pulling out his wallet to pay the bill. When Elise calls, they move, because if they don’t, people die.

  Charlie merely lifts a brow. Elise wouldn’t have called if it were really a bear.

  “I meant, is it a bear shifter or code for werewolf?”

  “Guess we’ll find out.” Charlie tosses some money onto the table.

  Ten hours later, they do. The hard way.

  They perform their recon same as always. Head into town and split up, Charlie to the police station, followed by the hospital and the newspaper office, where he learns all he can with a little help from his Jäger-Sucher–supplied fake IDs. His favorites, which label him a warden for various Departments of Natural Resources, usually get him access to just about everything.

  Alex works the locals, hanging out in the coffee shop, the diner, the pharmacy, the gas station—anyplace where people might discuss what’s going on in their town. They’re often more willing to talk to a kid than the hunting and fishing police.

  Go figure.

  When each has discovered all he or she needs to know, they meet at the local ball field, where they play catch and share info. It’s what they do, what they’ve always done, the single connection they’ve kept to the life that died with Janet.

  By the time Alex and Charlie head into the hills that night, they believe they are on the trail of a standard werewolf. Stronger, faster, better than the average wolf, with human-level intelligence, but nothing unexpected. Nothing that will prevent them from killing it with the silver bullets they keep in their guns.

  In her sleep, Alex stirred, hoping to wake up before the bad thing happened. She even heard herself whimpering, the way she’d whimpered when the night had gone still, and she’d realized she was alone and would be for the rest of her life.

  It happens so fast. One minute they are moving through the trees, confident, sure, their rifles ready, their pistols, too, the next a figure steps out of the trees. That it steps, as in on two feet, causes her father, causes Alex, to hesitate, and that is their fatal mistake.

  The werewolf takes Charlie down with one swipe of its massive paw. The claws, razorsharp, slice through his jugular with the ease of a sword through whipped cream. The spray of blood arches like a glistening black fountain across the silver moonlight, plopping against last year’s leaves like rain.

  The monster shoves Charlie Trevalyn aside as if he is nothing more than a gnat in the way of a windshield wiper, before falling onto all fours and moving toward Alex with the flash of speed common to the breed.

  Chapter 14

  Julian had plenty of work to catch up on, but the moon called, and he was helpless to resist.

  Not that he wanted to. The instant he stepped beneath the cool, silvery glow, he felt calmer. Since Alex had left, he’d felt anything but.

  Hell. Since Alex had become like him, he’d been feeling a lot of things and calm wasn’t one of them. He was starting to believe that his plan for her might not have been one of his brighter ideas.

  Gee, ya think?

  Considering he continued to hear her mocking commentary in his head even when she wasn’t around…yeah, he thought.

  Julian drew off his shirt, shucked his pants and everything beneath. Shadows flitted through the streets—woman-shaped, manshaped, wolf-shaped; his people had been marked by the moon just like him.

  He jogged toward the tundra, the change rippling along his skin, warming him, soothing him. Often, when he had a seemingly unsolvable problem, clearing his mind and giving in to the wolf helped. By the time he came back from an all-night romp across this icy land with nothing in his head but the concerns of an animal, the answers to his all-too-human problems would be clear.

  He raced through town; the buildings on either side of him became a blur as he gained superhuman speed. He would leap from the streets of Barlowsville as a man and land in the wilderness as a wolf.

  Julian gathered his power, pushing off with his feet, reaching for his beast, and he heard a soft, heart-wrenching whimper.

  He came dow
n hard but not on his paws; he ignored the burn of ice across his bare skin as he turned toward the sound. His gaze zeroed in on Ella’s house—dark, seemingly deserted, yet he knew it had been her.

  The thought of what might make Alexandra Trevalyn whimper had Julian heading with equal speed back in the direction he’d come. Dozens of figures, in various stages of shape-shifting, brushed past him—a bizarre Wild Hunt beneath the Arctic night.

  He was halfway up the front steps when he paused, tilted his head, and listened. Alex had come out the rear door, and from the sound of things, she was running for her life.

  Julian leaped off the porch and sprinted for the back of the house, everything around him blurring in a pulse of panicked speed. They came around the corner at the exact same time and slammed into each other. Julian snatched Alex before she could fly backward and smash into the ground.

  She fought, cursing and kicking, and he shook her. “It’s me, Alex.”

  “I know,” she said, and slugged him.

  He should have dropped her right then—on her head—but he couldn’t. Something was wrong.

  She’d left the house unclothed, and it wasn’t because she wanted to join the village wolves for a nice, long lope. Her skin beneath his hands was like ice, not the usual fiery temperature that preceded the change. Instead she’d dashed out in a panic, forgetting her bra and pan ties, let alone a pair of shoes.

  She continued to fight him, even though she couldn’t win. But naked, sweating despite the chill of the air and her skin, she was slippery. He lost his grip, and she tried to dart around him. He snatched her back and pressed her body between his and the house.

  “What happened?” he asked. When one of her arms slithered free, and she raked her nails down his side, he took both wrists and yanked them above her head, pinning them to the wall along with the rest of her.

  She stilled then, thank God. All that wriggling and squirming and struggling was exhausting.

  “What happened?” he repeated, more gently than before.

  Her chest heaved; her breasts rubbed against him in a manner that would have been provocative if she hadn’t been so obviously distressed.