Kissed By Moonlight

by Adrianne Brooks

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.