Under a Blood Moon

by Rachel Graves

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Under a Blood Moon

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  A thousand details flooded into me.

  My mind filled with images of fur and teeth, something large and rank. Her death had been terribly slow. Claws ripped into her skin, tearing her limbs apart. The strength of those hands sealed the wounds closed, cheating her out of a quick death from blood loss. A heart attack killed her. I wondered if she recognized the symptoms as she watched her attacker eat her limbs.

  I moved from her body to the limb beside it. The leg was still wearing its white nurse’s uniform. The knob of the joint looked polished in the morning sunlight. I put my hand on top of the cloth and a second surge of information flooded me. He ran from them, listening to the sounds of his coworker being torn apart. He had been a runner, but he hadn’t been fast enough to outrun the thing that ripped him apart.

  “Older female and middle aged male,” I said to the technician. He replied but I didn’t catch it. My mind was still with them, still dying with them. I walked up to the tree. There was a thick stain six feet up on the trunk. I put my hand on top of the mark and saw the death of the man.

  “What happened?” Danny asked quietly.

  “It chased him down, grabbing his leg there,” I pointed to where the limb remained. “It ripped the leg out, and then carried the rest of him back here. It lifted him up. It looked at him. Then it ate the heart out of his chest.”

  “Zombie?”

  “Werewolf.” The wolf had devoured his heart in front of him, just like in my nightmare.

  Under

  a

  Blood Moon

  by

  Rachel Graves

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Under a Blood Moon

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Rachel Graves

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Black Rose Edition, 2015

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-0228-7

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-0229-4

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  The sweetest sunrise I have ever seen

  came through an ICU room window

  after they told me I wouldn’t live through the night.

  This is for Robert, who watched it with me.

  Prologue

  I’ve known death all my life. My mother started dying when I was 13. She died by inches, first inches of her lungs, and then inches of her bowel, her stomach, until finally the doctors ran out of inches to cut. Every operation was a last ditch effort, each cancer was the one that would kill her. The social workers prepared me for her death a dozen times each year but it never happened. They shook their head and said she must have an angel watching over her.

  My mother looked at them with haunted eyes in her drawn-too-thin face. I went in to see her in the disinfectant-drenched ward one night after a decade of surgeries. She asked me to let her go, begged me to stop protecting her and let it happen. She screamed I was a freak like my father. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I thought the pain had driven her mad.

  She died a week later when I was away with my boyfriend. We buried her in January. Two weeks later, I was married. Numb, cold, and dull in the white wedding dress Greg had bought for me. Yesterday I went back to the same cemetery. This time to bury my husband, after only four years. Today I sat on his freshly packed grave. January was a time of graves for me. If I had someone, a dad, a friend, hell anyone, they would have forced me to go home, but the only person I had was underneath me.

  How does any witch call their element? Do fire witches start with an already lit candle and one day realize they can make it burn faster? Do water witches make water dance by mistake? I’d never known a witch, so I didn’t know. I know how I called my ability that day.

  I flipped over on to my belly and pressed my cheek against the wet graveyard dirt. The rain hit my back, soaking into my shirt and rolling down my side. I dug my fingers into the earth and screamed a pure primal scream of pain. Greg had left me. The one who propped me up for all those years, who kept me insulated from the pain of the world around me, was gone.

  I cried and begged him to come back. I moaned and told him I couldn’t do it without him. I apologized for wanting more, wanting someone who made me feel more than numbness. I cried until the tears fell down my cheeks faster than the rain. I curled my body into a tight ball and chanted over and over again, ‘don’t leave me alone, come back to me.’

  A groundskeeper found me. He was coming out to put a cover over the new grave. He’d dealt with people like me before, and was gentle when he put me in the cemetery golf cart. I got into my car still crying, tears leaving clean stripes down my muddy face.

  I woke up the next morning in the safest place I had ever been: Greg’s arms. I knew before I opened my eyes it was him. He held me too close for me to move, too close to be comfortable, that was Greg. There was something else though, under yesterday morning’s cologne, a smell that made me think I had forgotten something important. Then I remembered.

  Greg was dead.

  Chapter One

  Three weeks after the sex witch killings faded from the spot light, my life was finally getting back to normal. I had time to organize my desk, and even ordered a little plaque that read “Detective Mallory Mors.” The lieutenant had given us a few weeks of light cases. My partner, Danny and I got to do things like interview old ladies who were sure their neighbor was raising demons in the middle of the night. We were on our way to an interview when the radio squeaked to life.

  “All units please respond, all units to Qu
ickstop at 597 Hartford, code 874, code 874, zombie attack in progress. Officer down.”

  “What? I thought only death witches could make zombies?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know anything could really make zombies,” Danny replied.

  Danny swung the car around, we were only two blocks away, but the drive felt like a lifetime. ‘Officer down’ made my heart beat fast. Most likely the zombie attack was a mistake, some kid on drugs or some idiot in an outfit, but dispatchers didn’t make mistakes when it came to an officer down. Danny parked badly, leaving skid marks behind him, the nose of the car almost blocking the front door. We rushed into the building, guns drawn.

  I froze, stunned to see two real zombies. They stood in the snack foods aisle ripping open bags of chips and throwing food on the floor. Finally, one of them got tired of the chips and pushed the shelf over; behind him, I saw a foot. It threw us into action. Danny grabbed his gun and three shots went into the first zombie’s head. Its glazed, milky white dead eyes didn’t blink. I hadn’t had much practice with zombies but dead is dead. As a death witch, these two should have been mine. I centered myself, drawing the power up from the balls of my feet, feeling it grow inside me, then finally throwing it out at the two of them with one word: “Stop.”

  The zombies stopped, shuffling their weight from one foot then the other, moaning in an ugly zombie way. I had used the ‘stop’ command once before, on a vampire. Back then, it put me under for a few hours and required a trip to the hospital. Now I felt wobbly. The zombies would stay there until I lost consciousness or told them to move. For a minute there was comforting silence, then a woman wailed and everyone started talking at once. The man who owned the store stood inches from Danny screaming about his shop. Three other police entered through the door, their guns pointed at me. Danny barked orders at them to cover the zombies, not the detective. My gratitude nearly overwhelmed me but I couldn’t break my concentration.

  “Uh, Danny? I can’t hold them forever.” I tried to keep my voice low; it hurts your powerful death witch image if you don’t know what to do with the zombies you just commanded.

  “See if you can find out why they’re here, then get rid of them.” He gave me only part of his attention—an ambulance pulled up, lights flashing. Danny had to move our car to get them in. As far as he was concerned, I had the zombies, and he would handle everything else. Sometimes our division of labor left a lot to be desired. I turned back to the two of them.

  I raised a zombie once by mistake. It was someone I loved, someone I thought I couldn’t live without. At the time, I didn’t know I was a death witch. I didn’t know what I was doing. That zombie—the one that looked like my husband of four years—had been put down by the local police. ‘Put down’ was a polite way of saying burned to ashes while begging to see me. These zombies weren’t begging to see anyone. They were just confused men, slightly over six feet tall and dead for a while. One wore autopsy scars poking out from behind his burial tie. The other had no visible sign of death, just two hundred pounds of reanimated muscle.

  I gathered the power inside me again, this time putting it into my words.

  “Who sent you?” I kept my sentence simple. Zombies weren’t known for their brains.

  They stopped shuffling and looked at each other. The scarred one spoke in a voice thick with the grave, “Madame Marie.”

  I felt someone brush me and turned around. The EMTs had stopped, first because of the zombies, but then meeting my eyes, they flinched backwards another step. A cop, probably a good cop, was on the floor hurt, maybe seriously, and these two wouldn’t walk forward because of my swirling opal eyes, the eyes of a death witch. Sometimes the world is a messed up place. It pissed me off. I used the anger to channel my power, to pull more of it than I needed. I looked at the zombies and hissed, “die.”

  They did, falling to the floor in a crumpled mass, whatever spark that illuminated them snuffed out by my word. I turned to the useless EMTs.

  “Can you do your job now?” I asked with venom in my voice. They rushed around me, far around me, finally able to get their shit together.

  Danny came toward me holding a cherry slushie. I concentrated on details while he walked, his short dark hair, the freckles on the back of his hand where he held the cup. When he got closer, I grabbed it and started sucking down the sweet drink. Showing off aside, I didn’t want to pass out.

  “Nice work, Mal, careful of the TV cameras.”

  He pointed at the window and I saw them, at least four TV crews. I’d never been on the news before, but I hated the idea on principle. The owner led us into the back of his shop to a small office. He offered profuse thanks and many more slushies. Grateful for a place to sit away from the cameras, I let Danny lead the interview.

  The office smelled like curry and felt cramped. The owner hadn’t done much by way of decorating; the framed medical degree from a college in New Delhi was the only thing on the walls. I didn’t have to ask to know the degree wasn’t worth much more than the frame in the States. No one runs a convenience store if they can be a doctor instead. There was a religious icon on the desk, a statue of the Goddess Kali, the mother-destroyer, the goddess of death. I concentrated on her while the cherry slushie brought my blood sugar level back to normal. I caught that the owner’s name was Rakesh, but by the time I started listening again, Danny had finished the early interview questions. It sounded like he hadn’t gotten very far.

  “Can you think of any reason why this happened, anything at all? Even a wild guess could help,” Danny was saying.

  “No need for me to take a wild guess. I know why. I did not pay.” Rakesh didn’t bother to conceal his anger.

  “Didn’t pay who?” I asked in an effort to make myself useful. Both men swiveled their heads to look at me. I was fairly positive that my eyes had returned to their usual pale green, but you wouldn’t know it from the looks they gave me.

  “Thugs who are more dogs then men. They came one week ago, dressed as security guards, to ask if I needed their protection. I am not some immigrant fool to be intimidated. When I told them so, they started going on about bad things that could happen to a business owner.”

  “Did they mention zombies?” Danny asked.

  “Not specifically, they mentioned fires, robberies, and”—he made quote marks in the air with his hands— “other things. I guess I know ‘other things’ now, hmm?”

  “I’m sorry this happened,” I began, trying to diffuse the anger in his voice. “Does the name ‘Marie’, ‘Madame Marie’, mean anything to you?”

  “No. Not a thing. I saw two men, no women.”

  “Did they leave a card or a number where they could be reached?” Danny was fishing but I knew he was going to come up short. People who demand protection money aren’t listed in the phone book. Rakesh confirmed my suspicions: no phone number, no information. We wrapped up the interview and walked out into the store.

  The EMTs had taken away the fallen officer. I could tell he hadn’t died; I can’t explain how, I just knew it. Rakesh’s wife, a tall thin woman in a sari, was already sweeping up broken chips. She smiled at us and offered her profuse thanks for saving the store. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the store wasn’t saved yet. People might go to a vampire club on a Saturday night, they might hire a sex witch to spice up a bachelor party, and hey, no one minded having a werewolf around when it was time to move, but in general everyone loathed zombies. People didn’t like to be reminded that someone like me could bring them back as slaves.

  We made it back to the squad room in record time. I walked through the heavy glass doors etched with Supernatural Investigative Unit and our symbol, a police star drawn hollow like a witch’s star, thinking about what came next. Instead of going to our assigned desks, we walked straight through the open bullpen crammed with partners’ desks to the Lieutenant’s glass enclosed office at the other end. Even from across the room you could see his office was horribly clean, totally clutter free, and decorated with
a large Marine Corps flag. For once I didn’t glance at the photos of him fishing on the lake.

  “Saw you on the news, Mors.” The lieutenant was a tall, thin, black man. When he had a problem, he pressed his fingertips together. Today, his hands were so close he might’ve been praying. “I’ve got a feeling no one’s going to try to take this case from us.”

  “Agreed,” Danny said, dropping into one of the chairs.

  “You two aren’t due for another big case yet, but this one is meant for you.”

  “Because of my criminal justice degree? Or my background in social work?” I asked.

  Danny grinned and continued the joke. “Do you think there’s an Irish connection? Something I call my relatives about?”

  Lieutenant French didn’t crack a smile. “Zombie attacks are rare, even for us. When I hired you, Mors, I expected you’d be able to find a decade old corpse or maybe get a vibe on how someone died. I never thought we’d have zombies. Guess I was wrong. I’ll give you a shadow team, but the case is yours.”

  We thanked him and headed back to our desk. Getting a shadow team—a pair of detectives working the same case only on the opposite side of the clock—was serious. The lieutenant thought there was more going on here, and I suspected he was right. There were only two kinds of people who could make a zombie: death witches and Bokors—voodoo priests. I was the only death witch in the city, which meant we were dealing with a Bokor, and since zombies can’t lie, she probably went by the name ‘Madame Marie’.

  I wanted to get out and start asking questions, but there was paperwork to file. The paperwork kept me busy until the end of the day. I barely had time to print out all the reports before saying hello to the nightshift on my way out.

  Taking the train home meant I got to avoid the media coverage but not the heat. It was July, and Baton Rouge was broiling. On the subway, no one recognizes you, no matter how many photos of you with swirling white eyes have been plastered over the internet and TV news. It would have been comforting, if it hadn’t been damn near 100 degrees. If I sound like I don’t like summer, that’s because I don’t. Summer always meant heat and boredom to me growing up. As an adult, it hadn’t gotten any better. Worse, I’m in love with a vampire, and summer’s long days mean I don’t get as much time with him as I would like. Add that to an increase in crime with the increase in heat and, yeah, summer is my least favorite time of year.