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

be a housewife.”

 

“This is a great opportunity to raise awareness of the relationship between man and beast. I hate being considered a villain, but society needs one. No one ever sheds a tear for the wolf. Not anymore. In a world filled with sheep, of course you’d see me as a monster.”

 

“Do I believe humans and my kind can coexist? No. If you live among wolves you can’t just act like a wolf. You must be one. If you’re not another predator, then you’re just prey.”

 

“How have I changed since becoming a Were? Well my priorities are different. My beliefs. The moon is my god now. I dance for it, I pine for it, and if it asked, I would kill for it.”

 

And on and on it went.

 

My breath escaped in an explosive sigh of disbelief.

 

“Sweet, buttery baby Jesus,” I said, “don’t you guys have like a public service announcement you can release or something? Where’s your publicist? Your agent? Anyone who can juggle the shitstorm this is turning out to be.”

 

Werewolves giving interviews. It would have been brilliant if any one of them had been coached on how not to make their race come across as mindless, cannibalistic monsters. And former housewives.

 

“I can only do so much,” Gabriel told me, staring unblinking at the computer screen. “The wolves you saw were not from my pack. I don’t know them. If I’d been able to stop them before they went on air, I would have. Though,” and here his voice grew cold, “if I hadn’t been betrayed, this would never have been an issue.”

 

Holding up my hands, I backtracked in a very literal sense.

 

“Hold on there, Fido. Before you start pushing Timmy down any wells, how about you let me explain?”

 

He looked like he didn’t know whether to laugh at me or strangle me.

 

“You have five minutes,” he decided finally, and I blew out the breath I’d been holding.

 

“It’s true that I went there to snoop,” I admitted and winced when he huffed angrily.

 

“But,” I continued loudly, “I never got anything good enough to build a story off of. That’s why I went back to the office that night, to see what sort of dirt I could dig up.”

 

“I suppose I ought to offer congratulations then. Once you admit to shooting the video, they’ll be tripping over themselves to hear your story. This is front page stuff, Miss Conners. I bet the rights for the movie will be worth millions.”

 

I disliked hearing him call me “Miss Conners” about as much as I disliked the undercurrent of hurt I heard beneath the heavy sarcasm. Knowing that he thought I’d betrayed him, and that the thought caused him pain did awful things to my blood pressure and I found myself scowling at him for no good reason.

 

“I didn’t release that tape.”

 

His eyes narrowed. “Are you lying?” he asked doubtfully.

 

Snorting, I came to sit beside him at the counter. “If I were, I would have started a hell of a lot sooner.”

 

He seemed to accept this, if the way he relaxed in his seat was any indication.

 

“Look,” I continued, “one of your guys took the camera off of me that night. I wouldn’t have been able to leak the footage, because I didn’t even have it.”

 

I was about to say that I wouldn’t have done something like that anyway, but since I wasn’t so sure, I didn’t bother. If anything, Gabriel seemed to buy the idea that I would have, but couldn’t more than if I’d said I could have, but didn’t. Go figure. I guess he knew me better than I’d thought.

 

Closing the laptop, he moved it away and put his elbows on the counter, face resting in his hands as if his head were aching. I sympathized.

 

“Who would have done something like this?” he asked, quietly broken at the thought of one of his own turning traitor. “Who would have revealed us to the humans? Why? What would they have gained from it?”

 

I almost said it. Almost put his name out there. But Gabriel raised a good point. It was one thing for Marcus to work for the Huntsmen. It was a completely different thing to reveal the presence of werewolves to the unsuspecting public. What could he possibly gain from revealing the fact that werewolves existed when he was, in fact, a werewolf?

 

Or was he?

 

It had been a man who’d snatched my necklace that night. A man. I hadn’t been attacked by a wolf. At the time I’d assumed that he hadn’t shifted into a wolf because he hadn’t wanted to. But what if it had been because he couldn’t?

 

“The task force,” I began carefully, “Are all of them Weres? Are all of them a part of your Pack?”

 

“Yes and no,” Gabriel answered. “They’re members of the pack, but not all pack members can shift. Some have lost the ability. Why?”

 

Partial truth couldn’t hurt. “I was just thinking. The man who took my hidden camera wasn’t in wolf form. I was wondering if that had been done by choice.”

 

Slowly, Gabriel lifted his head and turned to me. He looked flushed, almost happy, and I realized it was because I’d given him something he hadn’t had before. A lead.

 

“No. The full moon forces the change. Only the Alpha can fight the pull of something like that. If the man who did this could change, he would have.” His grin was very wolfy. “Which will make him considerably easier to find.”

 

“When the Alpha calls…you come. It’s that simple, and that complicated.”

 

—Geoffrey Giggs

 

 

 

Chapter Eleven

 

 

 

 

 

Gabriel wanted to go hunting for the traitor right then and there, and he wanted me to come with him.

 

I said no (insert expletive) way.

 

He laughed at the refusal, however, and simply carted me along anyway. According to him I was still his personal assistant, and if I wanted to earn my more than generous paycheck, then I had better start assisting.

 

I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of his car, arms crossed over my chest, and staring out the window as he sped down first one street and then another, a smile widening across his face with every speed limit he broke.

 

It wasn’t long before I realized that we weren’t heading to L.C. In fact we weren’t even staying within the city limits.

 

“Where are we going?”

 

I wasn’t very good at silently fuming, and my curiosity got the better of me sooner rather than later.

 

“I have to call the pack together. But with all tourists in town looking for werewolves, it isn’t safe to bring them to Lumière anymore.”

 

“Hmm,” I murmured. I tried the silence thing for another few minutes, and then gave in to something that had been nagging at me for a while now.

 

“Are you a werewolf?”

 

“What?” he laughed, sparing me a quick look before turning back to the road.

 

“That night? I said you were a werewolf and you said ‘I guess you could call it that’. What did you mean?”

 

“Officially I am a Were.”

 

“And technically?”

 

“Technically, I’m what you’d call a Hell Hound. Which is a werewolf. Only, evolved. Like a Pokémon.”

 

Dum, dum, dum.

 

I had two options. I could handle this like an adult, or I could open the door and roll out of a moving car. My arm gave a warning twinge, and I decided to go along with it.

 

“O-Kay.” I began, “What’s a Hell Hound?”

 

Silence filled the interior as he considered his next words.

 

“Long ago, the Seelie and Unseelie courts of Fae brought together their greatest warriors to form a hunting party. Nobody knows who the first victim of the hunt was, or what they’d done to offend the Sidhe. All anyone knows is that once these Sidhe tasted blood, they liked it too much to stop the hunt. From then on they went after the guilty, the innocent, men, women, children, and everyone and everything else in between. Their favorite prey, however, were other supernaturals. The problem was that hunting supernaturals was a lot harder than running down some poor human farmhand.”

 

Taking a deep breath, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel before continuing.

 

“They caught the first Hounds while they were wondering the shores of the River Styx. The others they made by cursing some of the men and women they’d caught when there were more Hunters than Hounds.”

 

He considered that for a moment, and smiled slightly, “When you think about it, I guess those were the first Werewolves. Anyway, when the Seelie and the Unseelie courts went to war, they found that they couldn’t recall their warriors home.

 

“They’d broken ties with the Fae living within the Sithins and became a law unto themselves. For centuries the Wild Hunt was a story people told to frighten their children. Eventually the Hunt grew to such strength that whenever they rode, the call of the Hounds could drag the spirits of the dead from their graves. Until the people caught between the Hunt and their intended victims couldn’t tell whether the Riders were men, Fae, beast, or Specter.”

 

Specters. I shivered, massaging my aching arm and huddling a little deeper in my seat.

 

“So you were one of these Hounds? You helped lead the Wild Hunt?”

 

He nodded and his gaze looked far away, older somehow as if he’d aged when I hadn’t been paying attention. “Eventually, the Masters of the Hunt were driven mad and we deserted them.

 

They can’t ride without us, and they’ve sent Specters to search during the full moon ever since.” He scowled. “It makes hosting Pack events awkward.”

 

“There are more of you. More Hounds.” My voice was flat.

 

“Yup. Twelve at last count. All Alphas of our respective packs. Weres seem to like us.” He shrugged and threw me a smile, dimples flashing. “Probably because of all this rippling sex appeal.”

 

I rolled my eyes and he laughed.

 

* * * *

 

“This is dumb.”

 

“Your opinion has been noted.”

 

“And ignored.”

 

“Vigorously ignored.”

 

I sighed, loudly, and looked up in time to see him shake his head. We were trekking through the underbrush of Briarcliff National Park and had barely gone a mile before I started breathing hard and sweating like a weighty streetwalker in June.

 

“Are we there yet?” I groaned.

 

“Almost.”

 

“How long?”

 

“Another hour.”

 

I spit in the dirt and started cursing in every language I knew and a few I didn’t.

 

“Five minutes,” he amended with a laugh, and fuming, I fell silent.

 

As promised, five minutes later we stepped into a clearing. I collapsed in a heap at its edge and watched as Gabriel walked into the center and turned a slow circle.

 

He seemed calmer, more content out here in the woods than I had ever seen him in a boardroom. Wearing a white t-shirt and a faded pair of jeans, hair like golden fire in the sunlight and eyes closing in bliss, I wanted to…I don’t know.

 

I wanted to consume him, pull every part of him into me. It wasn’t that I loved him, or even that I was obsessed with him. It was more as if I knew, on a cellular level that we should be together.

 

In Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, Aristophanes tells how some human beings were originally born with four arms, four legs, and a head made of two faces. They had wanted to conquer the Gods and Zeus tore them in half as punishment. Ever since, humans have lived in agony, constantly searching for the other half of themselves.

 

Their soul mates.

 

I wasn’t such a romantic that I believed Gabriel and I were soul mates. I’d outgrown such thoughts a long time ago. But it was either that, or I was beginning to seriously consider cannibalism. If given the choice between the two? I’d hope for the cannibalism. It would be less complicated.

 

His head fell back, his lips parted, and taking a deep breath, he howled.

 

Music.

 

That’s what it was.

 

It was nothing like the howl I’d heard before. This was more of an invitation than a threat. A ballad of loneliness instead of a show of strength and dominance. It silenced the creatures in the woods around us and marched to the sky. Sailing, sailing, beyond and away.

 

The howls