Kissed By Moonlight

by Adrianne Brooks

  * * * *

  I weave through shadow like music.

  This body is fun. Weaker than a wolf’s, but agile.

  And young.

  So young. At least, compared to how long I’ve been around.

  I like it.

  Once upon a time, I had a body of my own. Many, many, many years ago when I lived. Before the Black Plague made me sick. Made me dead. I’d had a son. I’d had a wife.

  I’d worked as a…butcher?

  A baker?

  No, a candlestick maker!

  Laughter. Hell wrapped in an alto voice, and the grass beneath the human’s feet curls, blackens, and turns to ash. Black snow like a red carpet. A yellow brick road colored with death and disease. The creature that rides the mind of the human known as Phaedra Conners rejoices in the destruction. Screams its pleasure to the skies and crouches to rub the evidence into its skin. Glorying. It is only a sharply worded command from its masters, the Mad Sidhe so far away, that brings it back on track.

  Find the wolf, find the wolf, find the wolf. They growl, it is a mantra, a ballet with no song. The Specter dances anyway.

  Find the wolf and bring it back.

  “I can do that,” it hisses and the air around it screams.

  Oh yes, I can do that.

 

  When you become a Were, everything changes. I don’t want to be a vegan anymore. I want to eat them.

  —Mathew Dupree

  Chapter Nineteen