kissed-by-moonlight by Rakhibul hasan (ebook reader for pc .TXT) 📕

I stumbled and fell back on the steps I’d just stepped off of.

 

On the landing before me stood a wolf.

 

It. Was. Massive.

 

Its head came up to my chest, and its paws were so big they could slice me open with a single swipe. At the sound of my sudden approach its hackles had gone up, so when I met it face to face it was already ready to go for my jugular while I was still reeling from the sight of it. It didn’t growl or bark. In fact, it made no sound at all. It just stood there, silent and ready, canines exposed and dark red tongue licking along its chops as if it could already feel my bones crushing between its teeth.

 

A man stood beside the wolf, decked out in all black tactical gear that matched his partner’s jet black fur as if they’d color coordinated on purpose. But the man wasn’t the one openly snarling at me, so I paid him no mind. Granted, the 9mm in his right hand was probably cause for concern.

 

But one disaster at a time.

 

I saw the wolf’s muscles tighten, and then it was leaping across the space that separated us. I cried out and threw myself out of the way, but it hadn’t been aiming at me. It had been aiming for the thing behind me. I turned just as the two collided, and to my rising horror it was the wolf who cried out in agony.

 

The thing on the steps just above me was a creature of fractured light. Its edges were too soft. More smoke than flesh. It was ever changing and stretching out of the corner of your eyes as it tried to form some semblance of a body. Its eyes were stretched, bottomless pits that sucked up all the light around it so that the space in which it stood was nothing more than a trembling emptiness where only silence should have been. I couldn’t make out a mouth at first, but as soon as the wolf made contact with the thing, the creature opened its jaws, shadow flesh clinging and ripping apart from itself to reveal a hungry, gaping maw that made something young and vulnerable in me begin to scream.

 

The wolf couldn’t pull away from the creature, in fact, the more it struggled the thicker the shadows grew, growing and crawling over the now whimpering wolf’s flesh, until it was covered in an oily sheen that seemed to breathe. A second skin with a mind of its own.

 

Soon the creature had an ally, and the wolf, now coated in chuckling shadows turned on both the man with the gun and me with hell blazing from its yellow eyes.

 

Cursing, the man in tactical gear opened fire on both wolf and shadow creature. I only stayed long enough to see that the bullets never hit their target, wolf and creature disappearing into the dark recess of the stairwell as if they’d never been.

 

I came down the stairs so fast I was essentially falling, and I leapt past the task force member just as something reached out of the shadows to his left and pulled him screaming in with it. He got off another shot or two that ricocheted in the stairwell, before I heard flesh tear, wet and thick.

 

Silence reigned but for the desperate little whimpering I couldn’t help but make as I continued my flight down the stairs. Now that I knew what they could do, what they could hide, I flinched at every shadow, muffled a scream at every creak of the stairs, or moaning sigh on the air.

 

Dimly, I could make out the sounds of gunfire and howls from lower floors, but I couldn’t focus on it right then. The only thought in my head was that I had to get out of the stairwell before whatever had snatched that man snatched me too.

 

So I pushed through the next door I came to, almost sobbing in relief when I fell into a hallway flooded with light. To my left came the sound of gunfire, and even as I watched the lights in the ceiling begin to flicker and go out one by one. To my right were elevators, and without further thought, I dove for them and punched the down button. I pressed the button over and over again, my breath hard and fast and my skin tightening in terror.

 

Each time I looked over my shoulder, the lights had gone out for yet another foot of the hall. In my eyes the hallway became the jaws of some great beast. Coming closer and closer and swallowing the world in its wake. In the darkness, all it left behind were those eyes. Some of them even blacker than the dark surrounding them and others the blazing yellow of the wolves.

 

The closer the dark came, the louder the growling grew; I didn’t know whether the four-legged animals were fighting for or against the shadows. All I did know was that pretty much everything in this building was willing to eat me at this point.

 

Three feet, two, it didn’t matter.

 

The black was moving faster now, and I pressed myself flush against the wall, my finger ripping at the elevator button and my voice rising on a scream.

 

Two feet, one.

 

The fluorescents directly above me flickered once and then died with a sigh, and all around me came the bloodthirsty howls of predators who’d just found their prey.

 

“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Everyone.”

 

—Gabriel Evans

 

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

 

 

 

 

A ding.

 

It had never before sounded so sweet or meant so much.

 

I fell within the relative safety of the elevator as the doors finally slid open. Scrambling on the floor in my haste to get away from the shadows that reached for me from within the now dark hall.

 

The lights in my temporary sanctuary hummed ominously.

 

“Close,” I hissed it, staring daggers at the elevator doors, and wishing I could get up to push the button that would close them faster, but knowing that something would grab me if I did.

 

“Close damn you, close.”

 

The doors began to slide shut, but before I could breathe a sigh of relief one of the shadow people lunged through the opening.

 

It couldn’t come in very far because the lights were still on, and the darkness behind it began to pull it back. But its claws dug into the floor of the elevator, ripping through the metal as if it were butter. Its mouth opened and that awful emptiness I’d felt before began to suck at me. Pulling me like a vacuum against my will, so that no matter how fast my feet scrambled or how desperately my fingers clutched at the railing inside the cabin, something kept pulling me irrevocably forward. Dragging me inch by inch until that greedy salivating mouth was nearly wrapped around my foot and my mind was blank from the fear of it.

 

Then a wolf ripped its way from the darkness and threw itself into the elevator beside me. It slid in the small room until it got its bearings. Then it was turning on the shadow creature. Ripping it from the dark and tearing into it with a ferocity that made my insides quake. Darkness flew about the elevator like blood, sliding down the walls and sticking to the wolf’s jaws as it consumed the yowling creature. The sound the shadow made was like dying dreams and grief made eternal. I turned away until it stopped with a final brutal clash of jaws through meat.

 

The doors dinged shut and for a heartbeat all was silence and the sick stink of human terror.

 

My terror.

 

I found myself huddling in a corner, my fists held up defensively. I was shaking so hard I could barely sit still. The wolf snarled at me, an angry, offended sound, before walking in a brief circle, and settling back on its haunches. It took three floors before I was calm enough to notice that something about this wolf was very different from the one I’d seen before.

 

For one, it was smaller. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a hell of a lot larger than any dog I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t the size of a small pony either. Which was a vast improvement.

 

Like the other wolf, it was as black as night, but whereas the other animal had been flesh and blood, this one was like the shadow creatures. Soft and smoky around the edges as if it could simply blow away. I was half convinced that if I pressed my hands against its side, where its fur danced along its body like black flames caught in a wind, that there would be nothing solid to stop me from pushing through to the other side.

 

Its canines were very real however, a fact it proved in the next second when it yawned, as if bored by my perusal. I met the animal’s eyes, and the deepest amber stared back at me. Not yellow, not black, amber.

 

I’d know those eyes anywhere.

 

“Gabriel,” I said, voice without inflection even as relief washed through me with all the icy force of a river. My bottom lip began to tremble, my expression crumbled, and to my shame, I started to cry.

 

He came up to me, and instinctively I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face in his ruff. He was warm, solid, and as soft as down. I gave a shuddering sob into that thick coat and the scent of pine, soil, and wood smoke filled my nostrils.

 

Then the confines of the elevator warmed as he began to shift. The black smoke that made up his body coalescing and gaining color until he knelt there, hard, naked, and steaming against me.

 

“Shh,” he murmured, strong arms wrapping around my waist and large hands stroking along my spine. I shivered, but this time it wasn’t from fear. Funny how quickly my priorities shifted once a naked man was introduced into the equation and my life was no longer in immediate danger. “It’s all right. Just calm down.”

 

Sniffling pitifully, I placed my chin on his shoulder and tightened my arms around his neck. Feeling like a nasty old man, I took advantage of my position to glance down the golden toned length of his back to the top of the twin globes of his ass.

 

Mm. Mm. Good.

 

Before he could realize I was being a lecher, I pulled out of his embrace and wiped the evidence of tears from my face. I always hated crying. The weakness it represented. None of my foster parents had ever treated me any differently because of my tears and I had gotten out of the habit of shedding them. Especially in front of strangers.

 

Apparently sensing my sudden unease, Gabriel looked away from me and stood. His averted eyes were all the permission I needed to drink in the sight of him. His skin was golden from hours spent under the sun, and there didn’t seem to be an ounce of fat on him. The muscles in his arms and legs were sharply defined and coated in a light dusting of light blond hair. There were four vertical scars across his right pectoral that were faded white with age.

 

He had these muscles in his abdomen that drew the eye downward to where his bells and whistle dangled, thick and heavy, from between his legs. Some men, when naked just looked a little… depressing with all of their clothes off. As if they were made vulnerable once you caught sight of the crown jewels. Then there were other men, a blessed few like Gabriel, who seemed stronger. Larger without clothes, as if the weight of cotton and silk had been a cage they were all too happy to step out of.

 

The sight of him there, the raw, animal possibility of him, made my mouth go dry and I felt lust pool liquid heat between my thighs. I must have made some sound, because he looked down at me. I don’t know