Four Moons: The Complete Collection: (Books 1 - 4)

by Amos, Richard

  Damn this blushing!

  We sat there for about twenty minutes, talking about when Mrs. Wallace’s late husband had burned the kitchen down while frying eggs.

  “That was when we lived down south. Clumsy git.”

  “Frying eggs?”

  “That’s what happens when you leave men to fend for themselves—present company excluded.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know.” She looked up into the hanging candelabra above us. “I miss him a lot.”

  I knew he’d died ten years ago. Heart attack. So quick, a complete shot out of the blue. They were getting ready to watch their favorite program on the telly. He’d sat down with a cuppa, said something about custard creams, and died right there.

  I took her hand, slightly gnarled by arthritis.

  “Times like this are the worst,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a hanky that’d been tucked up her sleeve. “I know I can talk to people, and I have my friends. But it’s not the same as being indoors, talking with your husband, that person who is yours, talking to feel safe, knowing they’re right there with you in their armchair or sleeping in the same bed. Even in a different room, being a presence a few feet away.”

  Man, she was choking me up.

  A weird crimson glow filled the shrine. “What the hell is that?” I got to my feet. The red light was streaming through the windows.

  Hurried footsteps. I turned to look. “G?”

  “You need to come and see this. I think it’s time for Mrs. Wallace to go home.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  I helped her up, and the three of us walked down the aisle, followed by the praying guy.

  Stepping outside was like being walloped with a baseball bat straight in the gut.

  Mrs. Wallace gasped.

  The praying man collapsed, G catching him before he cracked his head on the steps of the shrine.

  “What the fuck?”

  Sitting in the inky black sky, the moon had gone red.

  Red!

  I’d never felt so small under the bloody glow, completely clueless as to what the pissing hell was going on.

  G groaned behind me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He lowered the geezer, then grabbed his head. “No…”

  “G?”

  He was folding into a ball, his fingers proper digging into his skull. Too hard. Fuck! He’d crack it open.

  I reached for him, then his head jerked up. Bloodshot eyes met me, wolf fangs jutting out of his mouth. “Get away!” he growled.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Get out of here! Now!” He roared and then howled. I’d heard plenty of wolf howls in my time, but this was something else. Bloodthirsty to the max, dripping with something mega scary.

  “G?”

  Black fur rippled across his skin. He was shifting, but not in the usual way. His muscles were bulging wider, ripping his clothes, sprouting fur everywhere. Even his head was swelling, those fangs getting bigger and bigger, his eyes moving from bloodshot to a blazing gold.

  Holy shit.

  Then the other wolves started to follow the same action. Every single one of them.

  I moved quickly, grabbing Mrs. Wallace. “Time to leave.”

  The three SCU agents had their guns aimed at the twenty wolves. Twenty-one including G.

  “Get in the van,” a woman agent barked.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “The moon—”

  “Get in the van!”

  “What’s happening to my friend?” Don’t know why I was yelling, expecting her to be the fucking oracle. Frustration was a sod.

  Something in that blood-red moon was affecting them. Wolves didn’t shift like this, didn’t bulge out and look like a cross between human and scary-as-hell beast. They were either wolf form or human form, not a place in-between. Zach had shifted this way when he’d showed me, ‘cos he was half-wolf, half-elf. That was different, and not on this level at all.

  Twenty-one pairs of hands were now claws that could cut me down the middle.

  I got Mrs. Wallace and the praying guy into the blue SCU van, slamming the door closed.

  “Akira!” Mrs. Wallace cried.

  “Don’t open that door. At all.”

  “You!” the SCU agent yelled at me. “I told you—”

  “If you think I’m sitting around waiting for shit to go down, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  The three agents stood together—two women, one man. He was putting a call out for backup on the radio.

  “If you get hurt, your dad will have our heads.”

  She could fuck right off with the guilt-tripping.

  It hit me. I might have to fight these wolves. These mega strong peeps to start off with, now beefed up like they’d had ten steroid cocktails each.

  Including G.

  Shit.

  No.

  I did something I never did in these situations. I paused, hands resting on the hilts of the katanas on my back. Me. Paused. If my hands were going there, those steel slicers were coming out to play.

  But G was here.

  Maybe there wouldn’t be any fighting.

  A collective howl ripped through the night. More in the distance, a chain of wolf cries set off across the city.

  Oh, fuck.

  All of those blazing golden eyes snapped our way.

  This wasn’t happening.

  The first wolf charged, a guy called Carl, and my swords were out.

  Chapter Eight

  One of the SCU agents fired her gun, but the bullet was useless against the runaway train that was Carl. He crashed into her, pinning her down under all that muscle and weight. Within seconds, he tore out her ribcage. The only sound was the crunch and the wetness—the poor woman had gone down quietly. Not one scream.

  I swung a katana at him, then leaped out the way to avoid a swipe of his claw. The air from the near-miss rippled across my neck. Yep, that would’ve been my head.

  The wanker was quick. I jumped back, avoiding being grabbed and crushed, and went for his thick neck.

  Wham!

  The blade got stuck halfway.

  Didn’t stop my flow.

  I let go of the weapon and ran, leaping over the vehicles that’d carried me and these wolfy protectors here. I slid over bonnets, darted one way, then the other. Carl howled, the boom of a car meeting a crunchy death followed.

  I was buying a tiny piece of time to get some gain on him.

  Screams of people unfortunate enough to be out on the street filled the air. Great. It was chaos. I saw it. Wolves tore into the streets, hunting down prey, smashing their way into buildings.

  Fuck!

  I’d heard a lot of screaming these past weeks.

  I circled back to the tenshi shrine wall, Carl hot on my heels. I dove to avoid another wolf, making a beeline for the white brick.

  Please, let this plan work.

  Rather than leap over the wall and into the graveyard where some of the other wolves were lurking, I turned at the last minute, pushing off the brick with my right foot and flipping backward, up and over Carl.

  Before he could snare me, I grabbed the hilt of the sword still sticking out of his neck, hit the ground, and jumped to the side, grip tight on my weapon. With the motion of my side jump, the blade cut through the rest of the bone and muscle, until the wolf head dropped to the floor.

  The body spasmed and fell hard, just as G leaped onto the top of the wall, howling. His eyes locked onto me. Not G, but the eyes of a killer, full of hate and savage shit.

  “G…” The state of him shook me to the core.

  This was G, my buddy. An iron fist closed around my heart as those killer eyes roamed over my body, hungry for violence.

  Not my G…

  That iron fist split in two, the new addition swimming from my heart in a cold stream, making its way down to my stomach, taking up residence there.

  Not my G…

  I wanted to squeeze my eye
s shut, chant him back to normal because this wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to my buddy. Nope. Not fair. Not fucking fair!

  Not my G!

  His next howl broke me out of my trance, my feet pounding the asphalt as he rushed at me.

  The air around me prickled, his hot breath dangerously close. Bob and Rose burst out of me, whining, fully alerting me to G’s gains on me.

  Way too close!

  I went into a dive to my left, landing awkwardly and scraping my knees. Shit! I was proper rattled. G being this monster did not compute.

  Crap! I had to snap out of this! The whole situation was do or die.

  To do would be to kill my buddy.

  No!

  Then what? Let him kill me, let him rampage and join the other wolves to slaughter the entire city?

  I was up and running, leaping over a car bonnet, dashing round another and crouching beside it, failing to plan my next move. G was too fast. I wouldn’t be able to outrun him.

  Crap! There had to be a way to stop this.

  G was mere feet away, growling on the other side of the car.

  My body was a cocktail of spiking adrenaline, sadness and a bladder really wanting to let loose from the sheer terror of the moment. The sound of G sniffing the air made it all ten times worse, holding me in suspense.

  I had to run. Which way? Gah!

  Not my G…

  I shook the repeating grief off.

  A roar and the car lifted off the ground. I broke into a run, the car tossed overhead. It landed dangerously close in a mega boom. My reflexes kicked in and I did an about turn, right in the path of a charging G.

  Oh, shit! My katanas trembled in my hand. This was it. Oh, tenshi! This was it! It was me or him.

  Don’t make me do this, don’t make me do—

  Gunfire. G ground to a halt, turning to roar at the guy SCU agent standing on the roof of a car, his gun aimed at G.

  Fuck me! I was gonna faint!

  “Run!” the agent bellowed.

  G howled and leapt onto the car bonnet as the agent jumped off the roof, firing behind him. “Run, Akira!” he cried.

  Yeah, so on the edge of passing out. I’d come so close to… No… I wouldn’t have killed G. No.

  Man, I wanted to puke.

  I heard Mrs. Wallace scream as two wolves attacked the van.

  A slap to the senses. Time to go.

  I broke into a run, heard G’s heavy body thump down behind me.

  No hesitation. Hesitation fucked you up.

  I charged at the van and sliced at the wolf peeling open the sliding side door across the back, then dove to the left and threw open the passenger door of the front cabin before he or the woman on the roof could get to me.

  A boom on the side of the van. Mrs. Wallace and the praying man cried out some curse words. The whole vehicle shook like there was an earthquake going down. As I moved over to the driver’s side, the passenger window shattered.

  G. He was clawing at me, missing me by inches.

  Man, I’d timed that move well!

  The keys were in the ignition. Thank the tenshi!

  Fun thing was, I didn’t drive. Had a license for a motorbike, but nothing else. Yep. This was gonna be, well, fun.

  Not.

  I fired up the engine as the windscreen caved in, glass miraculously missing my eyes but biting my cheeks as it flew at me. I slammed the gear stick into first, but a crash into the rear of the vehicle had my head bounce off the steering wheel, and the damn van stalled. My nose broke at the impact, but I had to push through the nasty pain and the blood gushing into my mouth.

  No hesitation.

  Just as I got the van ready to move again, G leaped onto the bonnet. He hooked me by the suit jacket with his claws. It tore straight away, giving me precious seconds to escape. I tried to wiggle out of reach and got hooked again—a claw slicing open my right side.

  I bit back a cry of pain, still trying to get the hell out, blood gushing from my nose, hot wetness on my side.

  Fucking pig balls!

  “G!” I blurted. “It’s me! G! Stop this! Please!”

  What a way to go—killed by your buddy!

  A howl, then a flash of silver.

  The hell?

  I took the opportunity to push the passenger door open and tumble out onto the asphalt, landing heavily on my hands.

  “Shit!” I yelped.

  Beside me were the other two SCU agents. Dead.

  Sirens were coming.

  I lifted my head, the pain in my nose and side exploding. How deep had I been cut? I couldn’t stay on the ground. I was a sitting duck, and I had to protect Mrs. Wallace and the praying man.

  As I tried getting to my feet, I noticed all of the wolves writhing on the ground, clutching at their eyes. But not G.

  Footsteps, heels on concrete. It was another one of my enemies.

  Whoopee.

  “How lucky am I?” Violet Cross said, looking down on me. “Fate must have my back today.” She giggled. “Let’s go for a little chat, shall we?” She clicked her fingers.

  Hands grabbed me from behind, hauling me up. I did let out a mighty roar of pain then, drowning out the cries of Mrs. Wallace.

  Chapter Nine

  Howling. So much wolf howling in the city like a death knell.

  At least I hadn’t been KO’d by Violet’s new fave thug—she’d killed off the last one with her stupid poison spell.

  I wasn’t even tied up, just locked in the back of a car and in a shit load of pain. A heavy-duty grate partition cut me off from her and the geezer with a buzz cut and overly tanned face driving the car. An old, battered leather sofa I’d once had sprung to mind. The sofa was much prettier than his mug.

  They had my weapons. I’d watched them chuck them into the boot before I was tossed into the back, with no shits given about my injuries. I mean, why would they? Not their problem.

  Violet was twisted in her seat, immaculate as always in a turquoise boiler suit, her blonde hair now a sleek, sharp bob, her amber eyes full of…was that triumph?

  “I’ve seen you look better,” she said to me. “That poor suit.”

  “Not my best look.”

  “Definitely not.”

  The glass of the windows was thick as fuck and tinted for days. Who knew where this bitch was taking me for more torture and death?

  “What do you want?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she replied like we were old friggin’ chums. “We’re picking up where we left off. I’ve been stalking you for a while, and you never noticed. What sort of werewolf are you? But then, you’re not the regular kind, are you? Those silver chains I put on you didn’t do a thing. I’m surprised the beta didn’t smell me out, though.”

  Must be wicked having magic to sneak around with!

  “Very surprising,” she added.

  G and the wolves and Mrs. Wallace. Shit. Shit! I had to get back there, to sort it, to see…

  Fuck. The moon had turned red and driven the wolves wild. Why and how was anyone’s guess, which made me wanna punch stuff even more. It was still a scarlet disc in the sky, casting its bright and bloody light across the road ahead.

  G. What if he was hurt. He’d hunted me, tried to kill me…

  I’d killed a wolf…

  What the hell was I gonna do? What was my Dad gonna do? Had he gone nuts too?

  “Interesting turn of events.” Oh, she was still talking.

  “You could say that.”

  “The moon is acting funny, isn’t it?”

  “Guess so.”

  “I think you know so.”

  If only she’d shut her gob! “Why’d you say that?”

  She leaned closer to the grate. “Wherever you go, things happen.”

  “Ain’t that just living?”

  The wolf howling outside would be on a global scale. Shit. All those cities and towns hit at the same time. No one was safe.

  “Not the sort of living most people do, Akira,” she answe
red. “You’re walking chaos.”

  “Cheers.”

  She smiled sweetly. Even though she was the queen of a gang, she always had a sweety-sweet act going on. And it was an act. Let it drop, and you saw the monster beneath. If I didn’t kill her one day, she’d kill me. Well, unless these injuries did. Tenshi knew how bad they were.

  “The streets are dangerous,” she said. “More than normal thanks to your people. We’ll be off the road soon, though. I, for one, want the safety of my haven.”

  Man, I needed some chocolate raisins and some painkillers. Trivial shit, but the soul wants what it wants. And I wanted to see G’s face, his normal face, so I knew he was my G again, not the crazy thing he’d become.

  “What did you do to them?” I asked, a major effort getting the words out. “I saw…the silver.”

  “Think of it as a flash grenade. A new development. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Moved into terrorism, have you? Maybe even got some elves on your side to provide the silver?”

  Violet fiddled with one of her dangly gold earrings. “You’re so full of knowledge, aren’t you?”

  “Nah. Small talk, init?”

  “Right. Well, I wish I could get an elf on my side. How wonderful it would be to team up with them. They’ve got much better tricks up their sleeves. But they don’t come out to play anymore. Obeying the High Alpha. For now.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I’ve heard whispers of a new rebellion.”

  Again, I didn’t answer. What was there to say about that? Wouldn’t surprise me if there was. Shit was gonna go down after this crazy wolf stuff—stoke up some serious fires.

  “Part of me wants to keep you around to see what happens next. But then you’re dangerous. Look at all the grief you’ve caused me.”

  “Same. I’m still mourning my bike.”

  “What?”

  “Bike. You know, vroom, vroom?” Ah, man. That was the thing about pain. It bugged the hell out of you with all its throbbing and made you run your mouth.

  Bye to the sweet bullshit. “You’re seriously equating a motorbike with the lives of men and women? Namely, all the people I’ve lost because of you.” She shook her head. “You can see my predicament. I want to see the chaos you bring, where your journey will take you, but then you show what a cold-hearted beast you really are. You don’t care about anyone, do you?”