Mark of the Moon

by Beth Dranoff

  Okay. I shook my head to clear it. We had a Sandor to defrost.

  The last time we needed to defrost someone, we had a dragon to help us out. But Celandra was nowhere to be found—even if I knew where to look in the first place—so we had to come up with plan B. Which in this case, we decided, would involve putting the industrial oven in the kitchen on the highest setting with the handle pulled all the way open so that the heat blasted at Sandor. An oversized exhaust fan angled just so made sure the air flow went where we needed it to go.

  Turns out melting by open oven is a slow and messy process. I made a mental note to thank Sandor for putting in such a good drainage system.

  Wait.

  If we were pouring all the demon ice down the drain, weren’t we destroying any evidence we might have of who had created the prison in the first place?

  Claude was pacing back and forth alongside the blue-tinged Sandor statue. Every so often he would lean forward and touch his nose to the edge of the dripping puddle before the seeping liquid could descend into the murky depths of the drain. Once or twice I caught him with his tongue out and the sides of his mouth pulled back into a grimace as if tasting the air itself. Maybe he was.

  Hmm. Maybe if I was a cat, I could do that as well. I pulled my own lips back into a tentative grimace, inhaling through the sides of my forced smile. A bit of drool as I sucked back, but not hard enough. Yuck. Something familiar? Claude noticed what I was doing and shook his head, a microcosm of a smile twitching at his mouth.

  “Give it up,” he said. “You will never be the cat you want to be. You are nothing but a bastard blood. A plaything to be toyed with and then tossed aside. I’m pack and you are this week’s charity case. You think either of these fine men care about you beyond a quick fuck? You think you have a future with them?” Claude shook his head, an evil glint to his eyes, and licked his lips. “You don’t. I do. I give my man all the blood he needs. Wants. That’s how I know, long term, you do not matter. And I will be here, waiting, when you are no more.” He rolled the rrrr on his tongue, very French, almost a purr of pleasure.

  Ass.

  Jon and Sam were out of earshot, unfortunately for me. They were over in the corner, speaking in tones so low that even with my newly enhanced hearing I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Didn’t look like they were planning to fight each other to the death though, so I couldn’t complain. Much.

  I shifted my attention back to the glacial heat wave progress, if only to tune out Claude’s words and the implication behind them. Oh sure, he had self-interest written all over him; I knew which way he swung and where he hoped to lay his head tonight—or should I say between whose thighs. The fact that I knew exactly how those thighs tasted was the problem.

  For both of us.

  I sighed heavily, the weight of our complications hanging between myself and the jealous cat. But Claude was the maker of his current confines. He’d come here with Jon—and I still hadn’t gotten a straight answer on the why or how of it. Either way, it wasn’t my fault that Jon was not monogamous when it came to partners; it was Claude’s responsibility to accept that he continued to hang around a situation that made him miserable. You know what they say—if you can’t take the heat and all that.

  Claude kept laying the blame directly at my feet. As though, if I wasn’t a factor, he would become the focus of all of Jon’s attentions. Not bloody likely. Pun intended.

  “You don’t seriously think that if I wasn’t here, you’d have Jon all to yourself, do you?” So very tired. “You wouldn’t because that’s not who he is. You can’t keep torturing yourself—and anyone else who comes on the scene to steal a piece of Jon’s attention. It’s not going to happen. He’s not that guy.”

  Claude stared at me a moment, venom in his half-lidded gaze, before he spun on the balls of his feet to stalk out the side door. Fine by me.

  * * *

  My mind was churning as I went to find out how the defrost-my-boss project was going. First me, then Sam, then Sandor. There had to be a connection.

  Sam was linked to both the Swan and to me the night of the Feed, either because he was helping me—or, given what Claude had said, possibly because Goth Boy had at one point been pack. Pack was the connection between Sam and Anshell. Anshell and Sandor knew each other, and Sandor was the Swan. The Feed was linked to the Swan by geography; it had also tied Sam’s fate and mine together. Or the Swan and all of us to whatever summoning Sam and I had interrupted.

  What if we hadn’t crashed the party early enough?

  Worse—what if the common denominator in all this was me?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It took the better part of the next few hours to fully defrost Sandor, and even then the tips of his claws and the upper bits of his several ears were still tinged an unhealthy shade of blue. I hovered, pacing back and forth, as the massive chunk of ice dripped down the drain.

  Jun hadn’t been able to ascertain from taste or smell who had been behind the creation of the Sandor Popsicle. Score one for the other team. But it seemed, by the twitching of his left nostril and the fact that we might have just heard him grunt, my friend and boss might actually be alive. So maybe the score was evening out a bit for us as well.

  “What the frakking corpse-hole of a scaling drakking baby’s arse happened?” Sandor spit out the words with the last of the spewed frost demon liquid. In fairness, the liquid made it sound more like “Oot desh frasshken cofs-hll eff eh sshklig drkeg bbsharsh hippned?” But his meaning was clear.

  “You tell us,” I said.

  Sandor let out another string of curses. I was pretty sure some of them were in another language. Finally he paused for breath and I got in his face, eye to eyes. I even grasped his double chin with part of one hand and flicked its underside with an overly long index fingernail. That got his attention and earned me a growl of my own until Sandor realized who he was directing it at and sent it off under cover of a fake cough.

  “So, nu? Well?” Every so often I got my Yiddish on. Especially since politeness and patience had their limits and I was stretched past the edges of mine for both. “What happened to you? More to the point, who happened to you?”

  “Same thing that’s about to happen to you, bitch,” said Claude. Seconds slowing and stretching. Frost all around me, suddenly, my nose hairs sticking together as the air closed in. Ice like bullet-proof glass. A glacial see-through barrier between me and those who would see me safe. Then, closer: the crack of a gunshot, a flare of blue light eclipsed by a searing pain in my shoulder.

  And everything went black. Again.

  * * *

  Heavy breathing, not far from my ear. It would be great to stop waking up like this.

  The light shone down through the bars of the small window above my head, illuminating my cellmate, a.k.a. Heavy Breather Guy. A man, reedy and dressed in black, lay on his back on a cot against the far wall.

  “I recognize you,” I said.

  “How nice for you,” Joseph Morgenlark replied.

  I rolled my head slightly to the left, then the right, making note of the sore spot on the back of my skull, the throbbing pain that was my shoulder blade. Had Claude shot me and whacked me on the back of the head? And gotten Frost Demon help? Talk about overkill.

  Then again, he’d somehow managed to do it from right inside the Swan Song. A handful of feet from everyone else. Either the Swan’s security system wasn’t as good as we’d thought, or whoever had breached it was stronger.

  I looked around the cell one more time. It didn’t look familiar.

  “So, any idea what we’re doing here? Or at least what I’m doing here?”

  “You must have really pissed someone off,” Morgenlark said. I couldn’t read him from the distance of the room and the gloom of the shadows, but I got the feeling his eyes were closed.


  “I piss off people for dinner,” I replied. “Any idea whose skin in particular I managed to crawl under this time?”

  He seemed to think about that a moment. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I would go with someone who either hates the Moon with Seven Faces pack or has some connection with Ezra Gerbrecht.”

  My breath caught at the name.

  “Of course,” Morgenlark continued, “it may have nothing to do with any of that. Could be a grudge match.”

  “Why? Because we rescued you from bleeding out?”

  A shrug from my cell mate. I believed in many things, but coincidence wasn’t one of them.

  “How do you know Ezra?” A sideways approach. I still couldn’t believe I was saying those words to a person who hadn’t been part of the old team. A team that would be just as likely to turn me into an electrode-protruding test-tube-spurting science experiment as they would to welcome me back into the fold. If they knew.

  They couldn’t know.

  “He’s the asshole who helped out at the pack house,” said Morgenlark.

  I chuffed my surprise.

  “How did you think I got out of there?” He gave a small laugh. “Anshell and Sam and the rest of them, they weren’t about to let me go so easily. I made a deal with the...” Morgenlark was about to say devil, I just knew it, “with Ezra,” he finished lamely.

  The room tilted precariously and I felt like upchucking the contents of my last meal. Cereal and milk? How long had it been? Based on the timing, counting back the days, there was no way Ezra could have personally helped out Joseph Morgenlark in his escape from Anshell’s. Right? I saw his head severed from his body. Right? At least twelve to twenty-four hours before he was miraculously present for Goth Boy’s escape.

  It couldn’t be.

  “How, exactly, did Ezra help you out?” I tried not to let this relative stranger know just how much I needed the answer. But if Ezra was alive, I had to know.

  Clicking, clacking. A red light tracking in the dark. Suddenly, I realized that all of this was being recorded via camera in the far corner.

  “He reached out a hand and showed me the way,” said Morgenlark, without a trace of irony.

  “Seriously?” I echoed my last thought out loud, the words escaping tone intact before I had a chance to properly filter them. “Ezra literally reached down and extended a hand to you and poof, you were free?”

  “Pretty much,” Goth Boy replied. “But he used his proxy. Big blue demon. You’re in tight with Ezra—maybe you’ve heard of him. Gus Lazzuri?”

  My turn to swear, long and hard and in several languages both from this dimension and beyond. Granted, this would put Lazzuri’s help of the enemy to just before he was caught, captured and made a deal with us. Still. It was all a little too convenient for my taste.

  Speaking of, my mouth tasted like gritted sand. The only water I saw came from a stainless-steel dog bowl on the floor. Didn’t mean I had to bend down and slurp it up, right?

  “Want some?” I held out the bowl to Morgenlark. After all, it wasn’t me he’d sold out. Not yet anyway.

  Goth Boy glanced over at the bowl I held out and mutely shook his head.

  “You probably shouldn’t have from that,” he commented. “I have a feeling they’ve spiked it with something.”

  I growled frustration and put the bowl back. Felt around in my pockets and found a hard candy only somewhat covered in lint. I picked off what I could and popped it into my mouth. I offered to share the next semi-wrapped candy I found with Morgenlark, but he graciously declined.

  “I think you’re going to need that more than me,” he said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “It’s a full moon,” he replied. “You’re new. How good are you at controlling your shifts?”

  I snorted. “What shifts?”

  But I caught myself before I shared last night’s abortive—and rather bloody—debacle. Some things you wanted to keep private just between you and your nearest and dearest hundred or so pack members.

  Morgenlark caught none of my inner dialogue, waiting patiently for me to go on. When I didn’t immediately fill the pregnant pause in our conversation, he gave me a verbal nudge.

  “Your shifts?”

  Ever aware of being on closed-circuit television, I thought for another moment about how to respond. Admit to being a shifter, and I could become either a pawn or a science experiment gone wrong in the power struggle going on between factions unknown but clearly having something to do with Ezra. Deny being a shifter, and perhaps I would be seen as expendable—but maybe less of a threat. Plan C? There had to be a plan C.

  “So, if you’re so cozy with Ezra,” I asked, trying to poke a rise out of Morgenlark instead, “how did you end up here locked up in the same cell as me?”

  Yep, when in doubt, defer and deflect.

  If he caught my move, he didn’t let on.

  “I’m bait,” he replied simply.

  “For who?”

  No reply. Only the whirring of the video camera as it swung back and forth, recording our entire conversation for posterity or hilarity or, really, who the hell knew.

  * * *

  The moon rose higher in the sky. Morgenlark had closed his eyes again and, based on the shallowness of his breathing, seemed to have fallen asleep. Apparently shifting wasn’t much of either a fear or a need for him.

  I had lots of time to wonder why as boredom and fear warred for my attention. Me being identified as a supe of any kind could make me a target; the Agency had no love for the non-norm humans. Unless the Agency or its agents weren’t behind this. Hell, with the exception of the video camera’s blinking red eye and the presence of a bowl of water which may or may not have been laced with substances, I had no actual empirical proof that there was anyone else out there.

  I twitched with adrenaline that seemed to build with each passing moment I remained a caged animal.

  I started pacing. Back and forth. I counted seven strides from the bars to the window; six from where I’d been to where Morgenlark lay, muttering softly now in his sleep. Couldn’t make out anything useful from his mumblings. Pity, that. I suspected if I lay on my back and started walking up the wall I’d have about another seven strides to the cinderblock ceiling that rained down flecks of peeling something onto us every so often. Like something even heavier was pacing atop our box, or maybe a giant stone toddler having a hop skip and a jump above our heads.

  Then again, maybe I was just going crazy.

  My eyes tracked the moon as I paced, measuring out the dimensions of our enclosure again and again. In case I’d missed something. In case my count was off. Tried not to recognize the pattern in my bipedal hamster wheel, the similarity to how all those big cats in the zoo got after a while, stalking back and forth.

  Captivity was not my friend.

  My upper lip prickled. I felt what had to be phantom whiskers, twitching in the light of the moon which was now a smidge away from being full-on high noon in the middle of the otherwise dark sky.

  I reached up to touch my lip and came away with fingers pricked by bristles, sharp enough to draw a single drop of blood. Redness reflected in the eyes of another. I realized, with a start that had my heart pounding in my throat, that Morgenlark had stopped snoring and was tracking me with those unearthly eyes.

  His nose and jaw had elongated slightly, and his ears had furry tufts on top. His whiskers were fully in. From what I could tell, his hands were still just that but maybe a bit longer, a bit hairier. But it was his pink tongue, hanging out as if to scent the wind between perfectly formed fangs, that was really freaking me out. I knew I should sit tight, not move, not draw any more attention to myself; I did not want to be locked in this room with a predatory cat for whom I could suddenly become a midnight snack.

&nb
sp; But I couldn’t stop myself.

  Morgenlark opened his impossibly wide mouth into a yawn, licked his now darkened and thinning lips.

  “Hey,” Goth Boy said. “I never thanked you for the other night.”

  Given the change in his face, I was surprised I could understand him at all. I reached up to touch my ears to check that they hadn’t morphed into pointed tufts. Still human.

  “Thanked me for what?”

  “You know,” he replied. “When you saved my sorry ass from turning into a vampire barbeque. How’d you do that anyway?”

  I shrugged. It all kept coming back to that night.

  The question was why.

  “So tell me,” I said, picking at nonexistent dirt beneath my fingernails. Because I had Morgenlark when Anshell and Sam had lost him. “How did you end up at the wrong end of the straw of that ritualistic milkshake anyway?”

  “Fucked if I know,” Morgenlark muttered through a face that was looking more like a tiger and less like a pussycat with every passing minute. “I remember picking a fight with Anshell over my clan membership. All the rules and responsibilities were pissing me off. Except now I have no idea why I felt that way.”

  “Hmm,” I said, as much to make him feel as though he’d been heard as it was a reflection of my, well, reflection on the situation. “What happened next?”

  “I remember this gorgeous demon hitting on me—fuck, she was hot; I couldn’t wait to get in her pants. Sorry,” he muttered, an afterthought as he realized there was another female in the room who might get pissed at his directness.

  “No worries,” I replied, shrugging it off. I had a sneaking suspicion about the identity of that “hot” demon, and I gulped back a recollected moment of my own. “Then what?”

  “We were making out in that hallway, you know—the one that says ‘employees only’? That one.”

  “Employees only” indeed.

  “One hand was up her shirt, the other one down her pants. I’m thinking, shit, I’m going to get sooo lucky tonight,” Morgenlark said. “Then, blank. Nothing. I come to feeling like I’m being sucked. For a moment I think I’m getting the blow job of my life. Except I’m not.” He shuddered.