The Moonlight Mistress

by Victoria Janssen

  Crispin took over then, patting her softly with one hand before engulfing Gabriel’s cock in his mouth, his cheeks hollowing with the force of his sucking. Gabriel’s hands clenched in his curls, his hips pumping, Crispin riding the motion and not once letting go; then, all at once, he took a breath and Gabriel’s cock seemed to disappear down his throat. Gabriel arched and froze; it was only after a moment or two that she realized his cock was twitching in Crispin’s mouth, spurting his seed straight down the other man’s throat.

  After, they lay in a sprawled, awkward pile. Gabriel, whose idea it had all been, was deeply asleep. Bob snuggled up to his back and Crispin to his front; then Crispin reached over and rested his hand on her back, stroking a little. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Show me that trick sometime?” she asked.

  “Trick?”

  “Did you really swallow—”

  “I did. Takes practice.”

  “Sexiest thing I ever saw,” she said sleepily. Then, “Fuck, we’re due back. In another day.”

  Crispin sighed, and squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll get leave again.”

  “We will?”

  “All of us. Together.”

  24

  LUCILLA CRAMMED ANOTHER WAD OF CLOTH onto the wound in Ashby’s side and prayed that he remained unconscious. The boy, Friedrich, crouched beside her, pressing more bandages against Ashby’s mangled thigh and flinching each time he moaned. He hadn’t said a word since he’d changed form. Miss Claes, still in wolf form, paced and warily swung her head between them and the three other wolves, who huddled together against the wall, as far as possible from Kauz’s torn body. It was clear she did not trust the boy, but Lucilla needed another pair of hands, and Miss Claes did not seem about to provide any.

  Pascal ran back into the room, carrying an armful of cloth and wooden poles, which she soon identified as a disassembled stretcher. “Can he be moved?”

  Lucilla had seen men wounded worse who suffered days of exposure with no dressings, and some of them had survived. Ashby’s inhuman constitution would no doubt aid in his survival, as well. And it wasn’t as if they had any choice. Quickly, she began to bind on the pads of fabric. “How will we get him up the stairs?”

  Pascal spoke to Friedrich in rapid German, requesting his aid. Cringing a little, the boy crept forward. Pascal gentled his tone and gave the boy instructions concerning opening doors and holding a lantern, then pointed to the other wolves, commanding them to change form.

  Miss Claes stalked over to them, lowered her head and growled. Lucilla glanced up in time to see the wolves writhing into human shape. They were older than Friedrich, but not by much, perhaps fifteen or sixteen at the most. At Miss Claes’s significant growl, they stumbled forward. Two of them helped Pascal to assemble the stretcher. The third knelt next to Lucilla, uncaring of his nakedness, his overlong dark hair hanging in his eyes, which were an odd pale green, hooded beneath full lids.

  “I will lift,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Immanuel,” he said. He wrenched at his collar. Lucilla stopped him, made him turn around and unbuckled it from his throat. He seized it from her hand and flung it, hard, into the corner, onto Kauz’s body. Then he helped her lift Ashby’s supine form onto the stretcher.

  The route by which Kauz had entered the room was a narrow tunnel that presumably led to the surface; after she opened the door, Immanuel whispered, “It stinks.” She gathered this was a chemical stink, specifically chosen to repel the young wolves from attempting escape by that route.

  Pascal said, “We’ll retreat as we entered. We will discard the stretcher if it becomes too cumbersome, and carry Ashby in some other manner.”

  “Let’s hope he’s as hardy as I think he is,” Lucilla commented. She turned to Immanuel. “Come along. And you—what’s your name?”

  The tallest boy’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. He swallowed and looked embarrassed. Immanuel said, “He is Emil.” He pointed to the other boy, who now crouched next to Friedrich. “That is Kurt.”

  “I’ll need two of you to help me,” Lucilla said.

  Immanuel shook his head. “We cannot leave.”

  “We must leave now,” Pascal said. “We have set explosions. These corridors will collapse.”

  “No! We must find Bruno and Franz.”

  You might have mentioned them before, Lucilla thought irritably. “Could they be in the surface structure?”

  Pascal growled in frustration, sounding uncannily like Miss Claes. “The ground will collapse, as well. Do you have any idea where they might be?”

  Kurt spoke for the first time. His voice was surprisingly deep for his apparent age. “We know their scent. I will change.”

  Pascal glanced at Lucilla. She said, “We must get Ashby to safety. Perhaps Miss Claes—”

  Pascal dropped to his knees. “Tanneken. Will you accompany this boy?”

  Drying blood spiked her blond fur, and Lucilla could have sworn her fangs had grown, or perhaps it was that her lips had drawn so high on her gums as to expose every wicked inch of shining tooth. Her eyes had a mad gleam. For a moment, it seemed as if she might not understand Pascal’s words, but then she abandoned her scrutiny of the boys, licked Ashby’s cheek and nipped at Kurt’s leg, obviously encouraging him to get on with it.

  Lucilla turned away as Kurt shifted form, unable to watch what seemed to be a much more painful process than Ashby’s normal transformations. Perhaps he trained his muscles in some way. She knelt beside the stretcher and checked his pulse until Miss Claes and Kurt trotted from the room. Pascal was marshaling the rest of the young werewolves, and soon the two older boys had lifted the stretcher. Pascal led the way down the tunnel, his own pistol in hand and Ashby’s tucked into his clothing. Friedrich carried the lantern just behind him, and Lucilla kept an eye on the rise and fall of Ashby’s torso, also making sure no more blood soaked through his dressings.

  The shotgun blast was bad enough. She hated to think of what bacteria might live in the mouths of werewolves, particularly ones who looked half-feral and bore an unwashed odor even she could smell with no trouble whatsoever. If she’d had carbolic, she would have doused his wounds in a gallon of it. Add the risk of bacteria to Ashby’s having attempted to shift while he’d been attacked, and she couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what damage had been done to his muscles. It worried her that his wounds had not shown any signs of healing when he’d become human again. She could not care for him on her own. He needed a hospital, and soon; his wounds needed disinfecting and irrigating and likely some delicate surgery.

  Of course, all that would be moot if her carefully placed explosions completed before they had escaped the tunnels. She couldn’t stop it, not in the time allotted, and with no supplies to do so.

  Immanuel said, “I know a shorter way out.”

  Pascal whirled, causing Friedrich to jump. The lantern light flared wildly. Lucilla saw Pascal’s nostrils flare as he asked, “Where,” and she wondered if he was actually scenting the air, trying to determine if the boy spoke truth or lie.

  “From the big cage room,” Immanuel said. “I saw.”

  “You didn’t,” said Emil. His voice was hoarse, unused.

  “Did. I woke up one time.” He looked to Pascal. “There’s a box, with a rope.” He shuddered. “Small box. But it goes up.”

  “A dumbwaiter,” Lucilla surmised. “It’ll be rough on Ashby, but so will an explosion.”

  Immanuel had not lied. She and Emil went first, holding Ashby between them. He roused enough to whimper, then passed out again when she had to bend his leg to make him fit. Inside the wooden cabinet, Emil dragged on the rope. Lucilla chewed the inside of her cheek, trying not to choke or gag on the mingled stenches of blood and old sweat and horrid chemicals, not sulfur or acid but something infinitely worse that stung the soft membranes of her nose. It was like the powder she’d tested, though less potent. Whatever it was, it
would soon go up in flames with everything else Kauz had created.

  Once outside under the clean stars, she expected Emil to run, but he did not. He sent the dumbwaiter to fetch Friedrich and Immanuel. Pascal had decided to go last. In the meantime, Lucilla showed Emil how to go about a chair-carry. The two of them hauled Ashby’s unconscious form slowly but steadily out of danger. Given the choice, she would rather have been hauling him in the dogcart, and she cursed freely every time she had to readjust her grip.

  She did not see Immanuel and Friedrich emerge, as she was too busy hurrying in the other direction, but the two boys caught them up almost immediately, Friedrich still tightly gripping his lantern. Immanuel took her place carrying Ashby, so she turned to look for Pascal.

  He wasn’t there.

  Perhaps it had not been as long as it seemed. She crossed her arms over her chest, aware of the cutting wind as it whipped across her face and throat, now bare thanks to Ashby’s excessive need for bandages. Perhaps she had missed seeing him in the dark.

  She would have heard his boots thumping on the hard ground, as she could now clearly hear the soft murmur of Friedrich speaking to the older boys. Where was Pascal? How long did it take to lift one’s self out of a hole when a perfectly good dumbwaiter was provided? She reached for the watch she habitually wore pinned to her apron only to find, of course, that she wore a now-bloody overcoat over men’s clothing. She dug for her watch in her waistcoat before finding it in an inner pocket of her jacket. By the time she had it in her hand, and realized she wouldn’t be able to see the face without Friedrich’s lantern, a bloodcurdling series of howls tore the air, swiftly followed by a flood of fur running at full tilt across the frozen ground. Following them, though necessarily slower, was Pascal.

  Lucilla yelled and waved. She immediately felt like an idiot, but at least the yelling had dispersed some of the terrible tightness in her chest. The wolves shot by her—three, pursued by the larger Miss Claes—and Pascal came next. She grabbed his arm and they ran together, while behind them the ground shuddered and erupted in dust and flame.

  An hour later, Lucilla crouched next to Ashby and waited for Pascal to return with a lorry. Miss Claes, who never had changed back into a human, lay by Ashby, her chin resting on his knees and her eyes closed. Blood was drying on her muzzle; not hers, but Kauz’s. The two smallest wolves, Bruno and Franz, lay curled together a short distance away under the protection of Friedrich. The four older boys had accompanied Pascal, primarily to keep them out of range of Miss Claes’s protective instincts toward Ashby, whom they had wounded grievously.

  Lucilla tugged off her glove and checked the pulse at his throat. It beat strongly, if a little too shallowly A human would have succumbed to shock already, she suspected. The skin on his cheek wasn’t warm, but neither did it hold a deathly chill. As she drew her hand away, he made a small sound of protest. Miss Claes lifted her head.

  “Got a Blighty wound,” he whispered. She could hear the smile in his voice.

  “Yes, you’re going home,” Lucilla said. “If you don’t heal too quickly.”

  “Won’t.” He sighed. “Too much. S’all right. Tanneken’ll come with me. She said.” He closed his eyes. Miss Claes crept forward and licked his cheek.

  Lucilla hugged Crispin one last time, then shoved him gently toward Ashby’s hospital bed. She’d managed to obtain one of the unused isolation rooms, so none of his current visitors had been chased out after shift change.

  Hailey fussed over the new uniform she’d brought to replace the one lost when Ashby had first been captured. Miss Claes sat quietly and elegantly in the corner, her feet drawn up onto a brocaded armchair that she made into a throne. Her greetings to her future husband’s friends had been equally regal; her eyes flicked warily from one person to the next. Gabriel Meyer, whom Lucilla had been relieved to find she liked, sat next to the bed in a more utilitarian chair, bent close to Ashby and conversing with him in a low voice. He had quite enough visitors for now.

  “I’m going outside for a while,” she said.

  She shed her cape and apron in the changing room, opting for an overcoat instead, then wandered out to the terrace. A couple score of the ambulatory patients sat there, listening to a makeshift orchestra play whatever all of the musicians knew, or partially knew. Presently, it was some semblance of a waltz. She didn’t see Pascal. She circumnavigated the building until she found him on the path leading to X-ray and her quarters.

  “Looking for me?” she asked.

  He turned to her and bowed, sweeping off his kepi. “Mademoiselle wishes to dance?”

  “My card isn’t quite full,” she said, and allowed him to sweep her into his arms. She slipped her arms beneath his greatcoat and held him tightly as they danced atop frozen mud. After a few minutes, she commented, “You’re a terrible dancer.”

  Pascal bent and kissed her ear. “I am brilliant instead. Also, I know where you prefer to be licked.”

  Lucilla wrestled him to a stop and kissed him. When she pulled away, she held on to his arms and studied his face in the harsh electric light from a pole nearby. “You will be careful, won’t you?”

  “Always.”

  “I would hate for you to come to any harm,” she said, her fingers plucking the sleeve of his greatcoat.

  “I plan to stay well out of danger from now on. As much as I can do so.” He paused. “And you? Will you come to see me, at Rue Deuxième?”

  “Pascal,” she said in a rush, “I’ll understand if it’s not possible, but do you think I could work with the boys, if they agree? Examine their blood, and look at their cells? Nothing invasive, I promise.” She looked at the ground. “I can’t help it. I’m so curious I think I’ll burst.”

  He laughed and kissed her lingeringly. “I’ll ask. They are eager to please. And one of them, Immanuel—he asked about you already.” He paused. He said very quietly, “I don’t think they yet understand I will not leave them to fend for themselves, no matter how I try to convince them otherwise. They believe that I will find other werewolves to be their families, but not that I do so for their good and not mine.” He looked away, then back at her. “They were not so lucky as to have a Grand-Oncle Erard.”

  “Perhaps that’s one good thing to come out of this war,” Lucilla said. “There are people from all over in France just now. It might make the task easier.”

  Pascal said, “And after this war ends? Will you stay here then, and study werewolves? With me?” He paused. “I could go to England, if you prefer. The food is abominable, but for you, I would endure it.”

  Lucilla laughed. She slipped her arms around his waist again and squeezed. “Either. Yes. I’d like that more than anything.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Ann, John and Judith made this book a thousand times better with their poolside critique of the opening chapters, and I cannot thank them enough for their insights at that crucial time. Thank you to my agent, Lori Perkins, who found my work a home at Spice Books. I’d also like to thank Susan Swinwood; my editor, Lara Hyde, for her swift, friendly and honest responses to whatever I needed; and all the staff at Harlequin Books who produced such a beautiful book. Finally, thanks to Diana for reading the revised manuscript and to Kat for the title.

  THE MOONLIGHT MISTRESS

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-4250-0

  Copyright © 2009 by Victoria Janssen.

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