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

human is angry and I am fascinated. Slowly, I begin to separate myself from the man’s shadow. The other Weres in the cells around us press themselves close to watch the scene unfold. Yipping in excitement as I continue to grow behind the human. Stretching higher and higher. I am the tower of Babel and the human nothing more than rubble. Still talking, but unable to hear. To understand.

 

“The next time the scientists cut you apart, I’m going to be there. Standing over you. I’m going to piss on your insides. Watch you drown in it.”

 

I’m not the one who loses control. It is the woman, the one who has been rising in my mind ever since I took her body. At the man’s words violence pulses from the woman like a beacon and she is taking control. Shoving me away so that she can rip into the man’s shadow as I’d considered just a few moments earlier. Darkness on darkness. It clings to us with greedy fingers. Even if I had wanted to release the human, I cannot. On the inside, in his human shell, he is just like me.

 

Damned.

 

Unforgivable.

 

Like calls to like, and the woman and I rip the man’s shadow from the mooring of his body. The violence of the action dragging everything that is Elijah Walker out along with it. The woman is horrified, and her concentration slips as she shies away from what she’s done. She doesn’t know what to do with a man’s soul in her hands, with his shadow dripping like ink through her fingertips.

 

She doesn’t know.

 

But I do.

 

My jaws unhinge, and I consume the essence of Elijah Walker in the span of a single heartbeat. His soul screams on the way down, but that’s all right.

 

He is still tasty.

 

* * * *

 

“Found you,” I say, pleased that the Sidhe are pleased. At the sound of my voice, the Were, the wolf, the Gabriel cocks his head to one side. Horror suffuses his face.

 

“Phaedra?” His voice cracks around the name as if it made from broken glass. He looks like he is bleeding on the inside from the utterance of it.

 

“Found YOU!” I crow instead. I don’t know how to answer the question in this pain. It makes me think of my dead wife from long before. I don’t like the feeling, so I ignore it. He clears his throat.

 

“Yes. You found me.” He holds up his hands and I see that there are chains encircling his wrists. There is even a collar. A collar. Weres are not dogs. The sight confounds me. “Now you just have to get me loose.”

 

“More work,” I growl. Fingers growing like claws as my frustration builds. “It’s always more, more, more.” I slash at the bars and they melt beneath my violence like sand. How can they restrain anything at all?

 

“I FOUND YOU! I found the wolf.” I scream at him, at the Sidhe, from beside the door’s remains. I hate this world. Hate being trapped in skin. Hate breathing air. Hate having a beating heart. Death is simpler. If everything was dead, the world would be a better place. My fingers dig into the human woman’s scalp and I began ripping at her hair, so frustrated I could eat her down with that I had eaten….

 

What had been his name again?

 

I was so hungry.

 

My wail is echoing, sad, and the lights finally stop fighting me and die.

 

The darkness makes me feel a little better.

 

But only a little.

 

I snarl at the amber eyes still watching me, and the Were’s expression is both stern and understanding.

 

“I know you’re tired,” he tells me, and rage begins to boil in the darkest recesses of my thoughts. “I know you’re hungry. You must have worked very hard.”

 

My mouth twists bitterly, but I nod anyway.

 

“Yes,” I say. It doesn’t matter what I’m agreeing to. All of it’s true.

 

“You just have to do this one thing,” he continues, his voice hypnotic. I step into the cell. “One little thing, and your done and we can go home. Back to the Sithin.”

 

Home.

 

A curious notion. Home.

 

I don’t ever remember having a home, but the word is a familiar one. A strangely comforting one. I make my way to the Were’s side and I am reaching, grabbing a hold of the shackles that bind his wrists. But before I can tear them away, his fingers are entangling in my own. He is pulling me forward, off balance so that I collapse into his lap. The power in me sprouts, builds, roars, but before I can lash out at him his mouth is pressing against my own.

 

Huh.

 

He pulls back only long enough to say, “This is going to hurt.” Then he is ripping me apart and all of the world goes dark.

 

* * * *

 

Gabriel loved science.

 

It had a certain grace that magic lacked.

 

A certain finesse.

 

What made it so romantic in his mind was that there was so much untapped potential. So much of it still unexplored. When he first came to the human world he’d devoured everything he could find concerning the subject. The results had been fascinating.

 

Science didn’t explain what he and the other Hounds could do, but it gave him a better understanding of his gifts. The others thought he was ignoring his magic, but that was the complete opposite. He was just giving it a name.

 

He knew, even as he allowed the atoms holding him together to split apart, that what he was trying might not work. But if he didn’t try something, then the Specter would wipe Phaedra away, assuming that it hadn’t done so already.

 

Letting himself fade was easy. Some said that it was like exploding, like dying, like being reborn again. He’d heard all of the comparisons, but for Gabriel there was only one way to describe it.

 

For him, using his gift was like breathing.

 

One second he is solid.

 

He is real.

 

The next he is nothing,

 

But,

 

 

 

The world is a collection of thought, a kaleidoscope of flashing color where before there was only darkness. Even as a wolf he cannot see with such clarity. Cannot see a person’s breath escaping on the air like a moth or their skin like thousands of tiny particles, each with its own special brand of energy and life.

 

These particles are what he grabs a hold of. What he slips in between and pulls apart. They struggle at first, screaming and reluctant to be separated from one another. But they give up the fight soon enough. Her skin is the first to fall away, an old dress being discarded. He moves

 

through everything else quickly. Internal organs, veins, ligaments, bones, blood cells. Inch by inch he breaks her down and sends her floating into the ether.

 

He grabs for her soul last.

 

The Specter is wrapped tight around her, black tar swallowing a dying bird. He can hear the tiny sounds of panic she makes, or fear, as the Specter continues to grow stronger. It makes it easier to pull them away from one another. The Specter is buried so deep within her that he has to shred her just to erase the last trace of the creature.

 

Then he leads her, broken and sobbing, after him into the light.

 

When they are safe, he works on pulling the piece of her back together.

 

He starts from her soul and works his way up. Brick by brick, holding her together with his will alone when she would have fallen apart. His mind stretching for miles in every direction just to bring the parts of her that had wandered too far away back home where they belonged. To him it takes forever to rebuild her, but in actuality, the process only lasts a minute or two. He doesn’t have to work nearly as long or as hard to make himself solid once again. If using his power was like breathing, stepping back into reality was like holding

 

His.

 

Breath.

 

“He is where Angels fear to tread.”

 

—Phaedra Conners

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-one

 

 

 

 

 

I came back to myself with a scream.

 

Glancing around wildly, I saw that I was still on my back in the middle of the woods. Everything else was different from what I remembered last. For one thing, the Specter that had been stalking me seemed to have disappeared. For another, the building where Gabriel and I had been detained at before was at my back.

 

The most significant difference had to be the fact that Gabriel himself was sitting next to me, smiling as if his sudden and unexplained appearance wasn’t in the least bit strange.

 

“Hi,” he said happily.

 

“Hi.” My own voice was weak by comparison. He looked me over and his eyes narrowed.

 

“Are all your parts working?”

 

I gave the question serious thought and shrugged lightly.

 

“They seem to be doing all right.”

 

He blew out a relieved breath and I tried not to feel too suspicious about his line of questioning. So instead, I focused on what was bothering me the most about my situation.

 

“Were we just abducted by aliens or something?”

 

“No. Why?”

 

“Because I can’t remember the last few hours. Call me crazy, but my first assumption is always alien abduction.”

 

“Don’t worry. You weren’t abducted.”

 

I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

“You were possessed though.”

 

I gave him the stink-eye and he shook his head in wonder, as if too tickled by the sight of me to be offended by my dirty looks. Finally, curiosity got the best of me.

 

“Was I Linda Blair possessed or Amityville Horror possessed.”

 

“Little bit of both.”

 

I groaned.

 

“Great,” I grumbled, accepting his hand as he helped me to my feet. “Just great. I didn’t hurt anybody did I?”

 

The pause was barely perceptible before he shook his head.

 

“Of course not,” he said, and I relaxed. Something dark and squirming in me told me it was a lie, but I dismissed the strange sensation as nerves.

 

I was just about to question him further, when something exploded. Heat consumed me as the force of the blast lifted me off of my feet and threw me like a rag doll. I hit the ground rolling and by the time I stopped I was so dizzy I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down. There was a ringing in my ears, and I stumbled and fell as quickly as I gained my feet.

 

Gabriel knelt beside me and there was soot smeared down the side of his face. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear him past the ringing. His face contorted and he grabbed me by the shoulders. Since I couldn’t hear him, he reopened the bond and forced the words through the link between us.

 

For a moment it was like a limb had been returned to me. A part I hadn’t known was missing. It felt good to feel him, strong and clear, on the other end of our bond. Then his words hit me and all pleasure faded beneath a wash of fear.

 

“Leo must have made it to the holding cells. But if the pack steps out of their prisons—”

 

That was when I heard it.

 

It was faint at first because it wasn’t intended for me. The only reason I could hear it at all was because Gabriel could. It was a single note, buzzing in his head like bee searching for its next meal. He couldn’t escape it, couldn’t shake it, and he knelt there for a handful of seconds, shaking his head as if to clear it of the invasion. Then the note seemed to burrow into his brain. It flipped a switch in him and suddenly he was writhing on the ground before me and screaming with no voice. Claws sprouted from his fingertips as he scratched at his face, his chest, his stomach, tearing skin and drawing blood in a bid to dig the note out of his body and destroy it.

 

Only…

 

Only this wasn’t some enemy that he could defeat with strength and cunning.

 

It was a musical measure.

 

An annoying one, but still nothing more than a note. At least to me it was. But as I watched Gabriel I realized that to the Were’s it was as