Hunger Moon Rising

by Evangeline Anderson

  Hunger Moon Rising

  Evangeline Anderson

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Evangeline Anderson Books

  Hunger Moon Rising

  Copyright © 2007 by Evangeline Anderson

  E-book License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek at Alien Mate Index 4: Severed

  Also by Evangeline Anderson

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Danielle Linden

  “Come on, Ben, put your back into it.” I looked across the solid mahogany desk at my writing partner and best friend and pushed at the heavy wood again. He was being remarkably unhelpful for such a big guy, and I was beginning to wonder if he needed a multivitamin or something.

  “Since when did you turn into such a slave driver?” Ben grumbled good-naturedly, shoving at the desk, which barely moved.

  “Since I finally rate my own corner office around here. And since we're holding up traffic.” I jerked my head, nodding at Pete, the copy boy, who was giving us a frustrated look for blocking the walkway between the bullpen and our managing editor, Barry Craythorne's office. The Sun Times was a big prestigious paper shoved into a teeny-tiny cramped space. They kept saying we were going to move to a new building, but I wasn't holding my breath.

  “Ya know, that's going to be my office too,” Ben pointed out. “We're a team—we share the office and the desk.” He looked at it critically. “It's certainly big enough to fit two.”

  With any other guy, I would have automatically assumed he was thinking of having sex on my great-grandfather's solid mahogany desk. But with Ben, it was just an innocent statement. He was such a nice guy he wouldn't know how to sexually harass someone if he took a seminar on it.

  “We're not sharing anything until we get the damn thing into the office,” I pointed out. “Now come on. All those muscles can't just be for show.”

  “But they are—they're strictly ornamental. Not meant for everyday use.”

  “Just like your brain, I guess,” I said, teasing him.

  “Aw, Dani, are you saying you love me just for my looks?” he teased back, flashing that “aw-shucks” grin at me—the one that was so sweet and innocent it always made people forget he was built like Mister Hardbody. Ben was six-four if he was an inch—all broad shoulders, big muscles, and naturally tan skin I would've killed for, especially in winter when my own epidermis was a sad shade of fish-belly white. He also had coal-black hair and those big brown eyes to die for, or so my little sister Tara said. Personally, I didn't notice Ben that way. He was the nicest guy in the world, and I would've done anything for him, but we were just friends. Friends who currently weren't getting very far with moving the heavy mahogany desk.

  “Ben—” I started again in exasperation, but a frantic voice interrupted my words.

  “Danielle Linden—I need to talk to Danielle Linden!” A man with ragged gray hair and wide, frightened eyes bolted into the newsroom, followed by Sam, our elderly security guard. He clutched a crumpled piece of paper in one hand, and he was dodging around desks like an Olympic athlete to get to me.

  “That's me,” I said, climbing over the top of the desk to reach him, since there was no room on either side to walk around. This wasn't an easy maneuver in a short skirt, but I managed well enough.

  “Ms. Linden. Oh, thank God!” The man skidded to a halt in front of me, but not before Ben had managed to put himself between us.

  “Hold on a minute.” He held out one large hand to keep the frantic looking man at arm's length and frowned. “What's going on? Why do you need to see Ms. Linden?”

  “Oh, Ben, for heaven's sake.” I shoved out from behind him just as Sam, puffing and blowing like he'd just finished a marathon, finally caught up.

  “Sorry…Ms. Linden,” he puffed, attempting to grab the man's arm. “He got…right past me.”

  “That's okay, Sam,” I said distractedly. I looked at the man who was still clutching the crumpled paper in one hand. “What did you need to see me about, sir?”

  “About this.” He shoved the paper into my hands, and I did the best I could to straighten it out. It was a graduation picture folded in half, and it showed a pretty girl with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes wearing a matching cap and gown. “It's my girl. She's McKinsey. They took her. She's gone.” His words were so quick and mumbly I could barely understand him.

  “McKinsey? What's her first name?” I asked, but he only shook his head.

  “They took her. They took her!”

  “Who took her, sir? And what makes you think I can help?” I asked him.

  “'Cause you help people. I read your articles. You sent all those people to jail. Made sure they couldn't hurt nobody else in that nursing home.” He nodded at me hopefully.

  “Oh.” I nodded back, pretending to understand. He must have been referring to the article on nursing home corruption that Ben and I had won an investigative journalism award for last year. I was proud of the piece and the results it had gotten, but I still didn't see how it applied here.

  “They took her—please, Ms. Linden. Nobody else believes me. The police don't believe me. Nobody can help but you,” the man babbled.

  “I want to help you, but I don't understand,” I said gently. I pointed at the picture. “Is this your daughter?”

  The man nodded vigorously, making his ragged gray hair flap comically. Okay, now we were getting somewhere.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, who, exactly, did you say took her?”

  The man's eyes got wide. “Wolves!” he blurted, his fists clenched at his sides. “Werewolves took her away!”

  The tension that had been building from the minute he shouted my name suddenly broke as someone behind me gave an incredulous laugh. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ben's face grow suddenly tight, probably because he was worried for my safety. The guy seemed harmless enough to me, but it was clear he was just another nut-job. I sighed. And I had been sure I smelled a story.

  “Okay, buddy, that's it. Let's go.” Sam tugged at the man's arm, yanking him forcibly away from me. He was doing a pretty good job for an older man, but my visitor was still frantic.

  “Please,” he begged, tugging against the restraining hand on his arm. “Please—just ask Doctor Locke. He can tell you all about it. Please help me, Ms. Linden! The werewolves—the wolves got her.” He lunged forward, breaking Sam's hold on his arm, and shoved his face into mine. I flinched backward, startled and a little frightened. Was he crazy enough to hurt anyone? For a second I could smell stale coffee and cigarettes on his breath, and the odo
r made my stomach do a slow forward flip.

  “Okay, that's enough.” Ben grabbed the guy by the scruff of his dirty coat collar and yanked him away from me.

  “Thanks, Mister Davis,” Sam said gratefully. He and Ben dragged the still yelling, struggling man toward the exit, leaving me clutching the folded picture in one hand. When they got him into the elevator, I looked down at the blond girl again. What had the man said her name was? McKinsey? I wondered again what her first name was. Maybe her full name was written on the back of the picture.

  I tried to unfold it, but it was stuck together with something…eww. I wrinkled my nose. It was a wad of chewing gum, and that wasn't all. Stuck to the pink, sticky mess was a tuft of some kind of hair or fur. It was grayish-brown and coarse, but long, curled into a neat swirl, almost as though someone had put it there on purpose. But why?

  I refolded the picture—hair, chewing gum, and all, and slipped it into a plastic baggie in my purse for further consideration. It was probably just the ravings of a crazy old man, but it was a slow news day, and I was willing to be diverted for a while by looking for his missing daughter. If she really was missing, that was.

  “Hey.” Ben returned just as I finished putting away the picture, and his usually tan face was pale.

  “Hey, yourself. Is everything okay?” I looked at him with concern. Ben was one of those guys who never got sick, but he looked positively ill just then. “Did you have a hard time evicting that guy?” I asked.

  “Huh? Yeah, I mean, no.” He sounded distracted.

  “Ben,” I said. “If you're not feeling good, I can get someone else to help me finish moving this.” I knocked on the mahogany desk to remind him of the task at hand.

  “Uh, no. No, I can do it.” He had rolled up the sleeves of his dark blue shirt earlier, and I could see the muscles in his forearms tense when he grabbed his side of the desk again. He nodded at me. “You ready?”

  “Sure.” I slid over the desk again, feeling his eyes on my legs as I went. Well, he was a guy, after all. Ben had a nice way of looking at me, though—complimentary without being lecherous, if that makes any sense. “Here,” I said, grabbing my side of the desk. “And if you're not sick, then why do you look like a truck just ran over your puppy?”

  “I don't know.” He still looked distracted, but at least when he lifted the desk again, he was putting his back into it. In fact, it felt almost feather light as he steered it toward the door of our new corner office.

  “Wow, you're even stronger than you look,” I said appreciatively. “I guess you just needed to get motivated.”

  Ben looked at me sharply, and the desk abruptly became dead weight again. “Sorry,” he mumbled when I winced. “It's, uh, really heavy.”

  “I noticed,” I said, sarcastically. “So did that guy say anything else? Something that upset you?”

  “Upset me?” He gave me a worried look as we maneuvered the bulky desk through the doorway and into a sunny spot by the window.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged as well as I was able to lugging my end of the huge desk. “You just looked kind of, I don't know, disturbed, when the guy started yelling about wolves.”

  Ben's fingers tightened on the desk, and I heard an alarming creak from the wood.

  “Watch it,” I said sharply. “This is an antique from my great-grandfather.”

  “Sorry.” Ben set his end of the desk down hurriedly, and I did the same, and went to investigate the damage. He had been holding the edge of the desk underhanded so that only his thumbs had been on the top surface. In the dark, shiny wood I could clearly see two distinct thumbprints where he had been gripping the desk.

  I looked at my partner in wonder. “Damn, Ben, how did you do that?” I rapped on the solid surface. “This is really hard and you just—”

  “Must have been a soft spot in the wood,” he interrupted me. “I'm sorry, Dani. I can try to sand it out if you want.”

  “No, that's okay.” I reached up to pat him on the shoulder and realized his arm was as hard as a rock under my touch. “Hey, why are you so tight?” I steered him to one of the rolling office chairs we had already brought into the room and sat him down in it. “Now, what's this all about?” I asked, beginning to work on his shoulders, now that he was low enough to reach. “Why are you so upset all of a sudden? You're all over tension.” I worked my thumbs into the groove between his shoulders and spine, kneading hard.

  “I'm not upset,” he hedged. “But this reminds me of a joke. Guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, 'Doc, some days I feel like a tee-pee and some days I feel like a pup-tent. What's wrong with me?' The psychiatrist looks at him and says, 'I see the problem—you're two tents.'” He grinned at me. “Get it? Too tense?”

  I groaned. “Oh, brother—that must be one of your grandfather's jokes. What a stinker.”

  Ben shrugged and smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, I know. He's got a million of 'em.”

  “I know,” I said. Ben's grandfather was a charming old sweetheart with a thick shock of silver hair and big brown eyes. He bowed theatrically and kissed my hand every time I met him. The first time we had been introduced I had thought that it was easy to see from where my partner got his good looks and good manners. “How is your grandpa?” I asked casually, changing the subject. It wasn't like Ben to not tell me what was bothering him, but I figured he would talk about it when he was ready.

  Ben sighed. “Oh, you know. He's all right, but he's getting up in age. Sometimes I worry about him.”

  “Sure you do.” I kneaded his rock-hard shoulders some more. “So, I think I might do a little checking around. See if I can turn up anything about the picture that guy gave me.”

  “What? Why?” He turned to face me suddenly, a look of concern in his eyes.

  “Take it easy, Ben. I thought I'd look since it's a slow news day, and I don't get that many psychopaths running up to me, babbling about abductions and werewolves.”

  Ben frowned. “Werewolves. See, that right there should tell you not to bother—the guy was obviously a fruit loop.”

  “Maybe.” I gave him a final smack on the shoulder. “But I think I'll do a little digging into the missing persons files anyway. You stay here and unpack and hook up the computers.” I nodded at the pile of boxes in the corner where all of our desk paraphernalia as well as both of our computers were stacked. Cables trailed over the hardwood floor in a tangled profusion, and my framed pictures were jumbled in with Ben's toys—a bobble head of the Dali Lama and a cow that pooped out chocolate jelly beans when you cranked its tail.

  “Yes, ma'am.” Ben snapped me a salute, but his sarcasm lacked conviction and I wondered again what was wrong with him. My reporter's instinct said it had something to do with the crazy guy who had given me the picture—maybe the guy had reminded him of his grandfather somehow. Well, he would talk about whatever it was in his own time.

  “See ya, champ,” I said, and went to look for a lead. Maybe there was a story in all this after all.

  Chapter Two

  Ben Davis

  Oh, God. My stomach fisted into a knot of tension as I watched my partner saunter out of our new office. What if she really did find something connected with the picture the weird old guy had given her? What if she found out something that led to…? I shook my head. I had to stop thinking like this. I tried to dismiss my feeling of unease, but my other feelings for Dani weren't as easy to get rid of.

  Mostly what I felt when I looked at my partner and best friend was pleasure and regret. Pleasure because it was always a pleasure to watch Dani walk. She had, as my grandpa put it, legs up to her ears. And I liked to watch her long, silky brown hair sway in time with her hips when she moved. It made me remember the first time I had ever seen her, the day I'd gotten the job at the Sun Times, and Craythorne had paired us up so she could show me around.

  “Benjamin Davis.” I could almost hear my managing editor's voice booming in my ear. “Meet Danielle Linden, one of our finest reporters. She'll be showing yo
u the ropes around here. For the next two weeks, you two are partners. Enjoy.” He'd clapped me on the back and left me with a very angry, very beautiful Dani.

  I had held out a hand for her to shake, which she pointedly ignored. “I don't have time to baby-sit you,” she told me, green eyes flashing. “So if you can't keep up, don't come crying to me.”

  “Okay, I won't,” I said, taking back my hand. So much for introductions.

  It was pretty clear that Dani resented my intrusion into her perfectly ordered world intensely, but I didn't hold it against her. She was one of the top reporters at the Sun Times and moving rapidly up the ladder. I quickly learned that my new partner was pigheaded, obstinate, and stubborn. She was also brilliant, gorgeous, and utterly unattainable. To say I was smitten would be an understatement. I fell hard and fast and never looked back.

  The partnership that was supposed to last for two weeks had somehow stretched into almost five years, and had become the best and deepest friendship of my life. But that was all it was, just a friendship. That's where the regret came in. Because I loved Dani Linden with every fiber of my being, but I knew by now she was never going to return that love.

  Of course, I didn't know that when I first met her. In fact, on that very first day at work I had decided on a plan of action. First, I would win Dani's respect, then her friendship, then her trust. Wouldn't love naturally follow after that? So far, the answer was no. After I'd proven I could keep up with her professionally, she'd given me her grudging respect. With respect came friendship and, after a long time, a careful kind of trust.

  Dani wasn't exactly a man-hater, but she'd been burned before in a bad marriage and didn't intend to get burned again. Her motto when it came to relationships was, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” That, and the fact that she put work first in her life, at least gave me the advantage of having no real competition in the form of other guys. If I wanted to—and I did—I could spend twelve hours a day with my maddening, beautiful, workaholic partner. But spending twelve hours a day with your best friend isn't the same as having a romantic relationship with her.