Moonlight Medicine: Epidemic (The Moonlight Medicine Trilogy Book 2)

by Jen Haeger

  MOONLIGHT MEDICINE:

  BOOK TWO OF THE MOONLIGHT MEDICINE TRILOGY

  JEN HAEGER

  Copyright © 2014 Jen Haeger

  Published 2014 by Crowded

  Quarantine Publications

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

  form or by any means without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

  cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-9928838-4-3

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  Crowded Quarantine Publications

  34 Cheviot Road

  Wolverhampton

  West Midlands

  WV2 2HD

  Acknowledgements

  Again I have to thank NaNoWriMo for existing and giving me that extra push I needed to actually write yet another novel. I would also like to thank my main beta reader, Janelle, for taking the time to read MME and for giving me invaluable feedback despite the fact that she is an incredibly busy lady with a toddler. Thank you again to my publisher, Crowded Quarantine Publications, for all of your help and support, and for this awesome cover! To family, friends, and fans: thanks for believing in me and for every kind word.

  To my husband Scott. Thank you for all of your countless

  hours of editing, right down to this line of text.

  1

  They crouched in the darkness just inside the tree line, watching and waiting. The buck sensed them even though they were downwind of him. He stomped, sniffed the air, and twitched his ears in agitation. Evelyn looked to David but they did not speak. Instead, instinct led them to separate and begin to flank their prey. They moved in absolute silence as a slight breeze rustled the leaves and caused the long grass to shiver in the moonlight. The deer took a few steps back and then stood stock still. Evelyn and David also paused in their stalking. A muscle on the buck’s back leg flinched; now was the time. They exploded out of the brush and the deer shot away across the plain like an arrow. Evelyn ran through the field, her hiking boots flattening a swath through the grass. She could smell the deer’s fear like an intoxicating bouquet as she got closer and it dodged away from her. She heard a snarl escape her lips as David pounced. He was going to get the kill again.

  Evelyn put on a burst of speed, but too late. David had hamstrung the deer and was going for its throat. She howled in frustration. David ignored her, dodged a strike of the buck’s antlers, and clamped his jaws down on its neck. Blood poured down over David’s chin as the buck thrashed and landed a violent kick on David’s side. Evelyn rushed forward, but then it was over. She saw the strength ebb from the animal’s limbs, the life drift from its eyes, and felt the unexplainable sensation of living beast transforming into food. Her hunger surged and with only slight hesitation she slashed at a shoulder with her claws, stripping the skin from the meat. Only when a significant bloody patch of muscle was exposed did she kneel and begin to tear the flesh away with her teeth.

  They were well into their meal when a baying broke through the stillness of the night. David and Evelyn froze, their hackles raised. It was undoubtedly another Wolfkin. David growled low and Evelyn whimpered. It was not right. There should not have been another werewolf for at least a hundred miles. They could not be seen here, they had to move. David gave Evelyn a slight tilt of his head and they both took off running out of the valley, away from the howling. Evelyn tried to think of how much noise they had made when taking the buck. She had howled when David took it down. Had she been heard? Who was it?

  If it turned out to be a member of the Wahya pack they might be fine, depending on which member, but Amaruq or anyone else and they could be in trouble. Vulke and they were most certainly in trouble. They tried to gain distance from the buck’s corpse as quickly and as quietly as possible. They reached the edge of a stream at the bottom of a small hill when the baying broke out again. It did not sound any closer, but it did not sound much further away either. They waded into the stream, followed it down to hide their trail, and then crept up the hill trying to stay hidden in the thick foliage. A third howl echoed in the night and David and Evelyn stopped moving and peered down into the valley. They had covered quite a bit of ground, and could just make out the silhouette of the other Wolfkin. It had found the body of the deer and was eating their kill. Unfortunately, the figure was too far away to be recognizable. Evelyn sniffed the air, they were downwind, so she caught a faint scent of the werewolf intruder, but it was too weak to distinguish much. The only thing Evelyn could determine with certainty was that the fur of the mysterious Wolfkin was not white, as white fur would have stood out plainly in the moonlight against the dark field.

  Evelyn had to suppress a sudden feeling of proprietorship of the deer, and an urge to go defend their prize. She reminded herself that no one could know that she and David were there and so began to creep up the hill once more. After they crested the hill, putting it between them and the Wolfkin intruder, they picked up speed again. The next howling that they heard sounded much farther away, but they didn’t stop until they hadn’t heard any further sounds from the other werewolf for almost twenty minutes. David slowed and motioned Evelyn into a small outcropping of stones. When they were hidden from view, she gave him a look as if to say, “What the hell?” He must have understood her for he merely whined softly. One thing was certain, thought Evelyn. That was way too close for comfort. They had to be more careful.

  *

  Evelyn sat on the hillside watching the sunrise. As the sun peaked over the distant edge of the valley she squeezed David’s wolf hand in anticipation. She was certain that the sunrise would be breathtaking, but what she was really anticipating was the pain. David gave her a gentle and reassuring squeeze back. Then it hit her. It began with a terrible pressure that was particularly unbearable on her chest and skull. Then millions of tiny fractures turned her bones from a solid framework into a fluid system which began to remodel itself according to its genetic memory. Next came the agonizing throbbing of her muscles as they atrophied and reformed attachments with the solidifying bone. Finally there was the awful pinching sensation as her skin reabsorbed fur and tightened around her transforming body. Although the whole process took just under a minute, it felt like an eternity to Evelyn. Panting, she rested on the ground still clutching David’s hand weakly. She had howled and screamed, and her throat felt raw. Through half-closed eyes, she watched the rest of the spectacular sunrise while her strength slowly returned.

  Evelyn’s whole body ached in a way that few knew or could possibly understand. The first few changes had been the worst, with the ache lasting most of the day, but now the dull pain lasted only a few hours after the change. David had never told her about that part. It was just another one of the thousands of little things that blew about being a werewolf. Not to mention the fact that she was destined for insanity and a shortened life span. Yes, there were lots of things that David never told me, Evelyn thought, getting angry. But th
en again, there had not been time - or the need - to talk about it all before.

  2

  Eventually Evelyn was able to sit up and looked over towards David. He was staring off into space pretending not to be overly concerned about her. She picked up the backpack leaning against the tree and pulled out a T-shirt and a sweatshirt to cover her naked torso. Without her fur, the spring air of the Tennessee morning held a biting chill. She drank some water to soothe her ragged throat, but when she spoke to David it still sounded harsh.

  “We need to leave.”

  David looked up at her.

  “But the virus array?!” he argued.

  Evelyn shook her head.

  “It can wait. I don’t know who that was last night, but that was a close call. We can’t risk exposure of the lab. Not now.”

  She stopped and thought a moment.

  “Provided they don’t already know about it and weren’t sending someone after us last night,” she continued, grimacing.

  “Don’t get paranoid, now. They would’ve sent more than one, and they wouldn’t have paused to eat,” David said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Evelyn started to get pissed by his condescending manner, but then shrugged it off. He was right, of course. Still, they needed to be careful.

  “We should still put some distance between us and the lab for a while. Anyways, I should check back at the clinic.”

  She started packing up her backpack and strapping it onto her back. David mimicked her and then they set out silently towards the car.

  As they drove the miles back to Michigan in silence, Evelyn stared out the window, deep in thought. She couldn’t believe it had been almost two years since her life had been thrown into absolute and utter chaos. Two years since she had come to discover the not-quite-supernatural world of werewolves. And what a two years it had been. True, there had been no attempts on her life during those two years, which made them better than the prior year had been, but still, they hadn’t been great for Evelyn. First, she’d spent more than a month recovering from her run-in with a murderous werewolf in France. Then, when she returned home she’d had to concoct a wild tale about being kidnapped and held hostage for several months somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and her narrowly escaping. Not to mention staging her “discovery” by a family out camping in the woods. They’d had quite the challenge keeping the publicity down, but Evelyn finally convinced the horde of reporters that she was too traumatized to be interviewed by the media. Ultimately, interest in the story had waned, especially since no trace of the perpetrator or his deep woods hideout was ever found.

  Getting back to her life was another matter entirely. Evelyn’s mother, her best friend Sylvia, and her cat Peko, were all happy to see her, as was most of the staff of the clinic she was partial owner of in East Lansing. Dr. Alverez, the majority owner, however, was still bitter after having to cover some of her shifts until he could find a relief veterinarian. After three months with no word as to Evelyn’s whereabouts, he had broken down and hired another vet. When Evelyn reappeared he insisted they sit down and renegotiate their partnership. It was finally decided that Evelyn would only work part time, but that her share of the clinic profits was to be greatly reduced. All this and the fact that her apartment had been rented out in her absence meant that she had to “temporarily” move in with Sylvy, bless her heart. It was either Sylvy or her mother, and the latter was not really an option. Evelyn loved her mother, but she could be a bit smothering at the best of times.

  The only good news on the career front was that the USDA was much more forgiving than Dr. Alverez, and had no problem with renewing her contract Rabies work with them. Without rent to pay and only half utilities, Evelyn was able to squirrel away money for about six months and then finally able to move out of Sylvy’s place two months later, which was just before she and Sylvy might have started to really hate each other.

  David kept his distance for a while at first, but would always be there for her and help her through the change each month. This was much to his credit since, when Evelyn first changed at the Wolfkin Council manor in France, she had inflicted serious injuries upon him and then had not spoken to him for two months. She was so angry, frustrated, and terrified that it took several weeks of Clem’s calming influence to get her rational once more. She eventually had been forced to interact with David again when pack protocol kicked in and their grace period of not being an official pack ended.

  The Council had wanted the entire matter to be wrapped up with a nice, neat ribbon and to no longer concern them as quickly as possible, so after three months they had insisted that David and Evelyn officially name their pack and announce themselves to the rest of the packs at a meeting of the Betas. Since no new packs had been formed for so long, there was no particular protocol or time limit to make things official. However, since David and Evelyn had already caused so much trouble, she’d decided not to actively try to incur the Council’s wrath and went along with what the Council wanted her to do. Evelyn was annoyed, but felt that all the political crap was particularly necessary since she intended to cause even more trouble in the future by researching a cure for the werewolf virus. In fact, she very much wanted to garner the Council’s favor so that if she did find a cure she would have their support. Evelyn had been able to be cordial to David during this time, but there was, even now, a strain on their relationship that she wasn’t sure that she would ever be able to overcome.

  She turned to look at David driving her reliable Saturn in the afternoon sun. She wanted to feel affection, she wanted to feel the warmth and security that she had felt while in his arms, but there was only a surge of bitterness. Scientifically, she knew that her infection with the werewolf virus was as much her fault as it was his, maybe more. She had run to him and thrown her arms around him after his successful challenge of the Vulke Alpha, knowing full well that they both had open wounds and that the virus was blood borne. Now, there was the slight matter of Evelyn having a serious head injury at the time, which may have impaired her good judgment, and David couldn’t really be blamed for bad decision making after his ordeal. Still, a little nagging voice told her that she would never have been in that situation to begin with had it not been for David’s previous poor choices.

  Evelyn tried to adjust to her new situation, but there just hadn’t been time. After she gathered up the pieces of her old life and constructed a flimsy shell of normalcy, she started researching a cure for the werewolf virus in all of her spare time. She needed to be cautious about it, but she wasn’t willing to succumb to the virus and go insane. She had been inclined to heed The Scribe’s warning about the danger of what other packs would do if they found out what she was doing when it was just David’s well-being at stake, but when it was her own life, she felt a little more urgency. Some of the research into the werewolf virus and how to cure it could be pawned off as research for her work with the USDA, but she had still been very careful, and hadn’t even told David about it at first.

  Her initial work wasn’t very fruitful, as she didn’t have access to even a fraction of the equipment that she needed to begin the actual testing. At the peak of her frustration, Evelyn was surreptitiously contacted by a member of the Wolfkin Council. It seemed that this particular council member was slightly more pragmatic than the rest, and could feel the onset of dementia nearing. He offered to help fund Evelyn’s research into a cure in exchange for total anonymity and for being the first to be cured. Although she had been a little scared and skeptical at first, Evelyn took him up on the offer and with David’s help and the benefactor’s seemingly inexhaustible funds, they had set up a secret laboratory in the hills of Tennessee.

  After the lab was set up, Evelyn felt a modicum of relief from her terrible stress and fear. The research was slowly progressing and Evelyn felt like they might be on the brink of a small, but important, breakthrough. That was what made the encounter with the strange Wolfkin the previous night especially exasperating. It may just have b
een a fluke, but if their lab and its purpose were discovered, there would be serious repercussions. Some Wolfkin considered it blasphemy to want or seek out a cure, and the mere threat of Evelyn’s ability to cure the virus is what had endangered her life in the first place. There were laws and pack protocol to be followed, particularly now that Evelyn and David were their own pack, the Inali, but if the threat of extinction were made real, all bets might be off. Evelyn closed her eyes on the passing scenery and sighed heavily. David’s right, you are getting paranoid, she thought. But a shiver still ran down her spine.

  3

  Evelyn dropped David off and then returned home to her new apartment. Peko greeted her with a long-suffering mewl. They had only been gone a few days and he was generally fine on his own, given enough kibble and water, but he liked to pretend that it was a terrible punishment and that he had starved while she was away. She put down her rucksack and then sat and untied her hiking boots before paying him a king’s ransom in kitten scritches. He seemed satisfied, so she got up to check for messages on her cell phone. They didn’t like to take their phones when they went to the lab because they didn’t want anyone to know where they were. To her surprise there were five waiting messages. She wondered vaguely if something had happened at the clinic, like Dr. Alverez getting sick. It was Sunday and she was not scheduled to work until Wednesday, so she supposed it was possible he was calling her to fill in for the beginning of the week.

  She picked up the phone and went to the message box. The messages were not from Dr. Alverez, they were from Clem. Evelyn’s heart leapt into her throat. This can’t be good, she thought. She quickly entered her password to hear his first message, which had been left Friday night.