Blood Moon Eclipse
Shadow Lands Book Two
By
Lloyd Behm, II
PUBLISHED BY: Blood Moon Press
Copyright © 2019 Lloyd Behm, II
All Rights Reserved
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Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”
and discover other titles by Lloyd Behm, II at:
http://chriskennedypublishing.com/
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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Dedication
To Brandy, for putting up with me, and to Dan, Doug, Mike, and Nick for reading these things when they are still rough.
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Cover Design by Brenda Mihalko
Original Art by Ricky Ryan
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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
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
About the Author
Excerpt from Book One of The Devil’s Gunman
Excerpt from Book One of The Fallen World
Excerpt from Book One of The Darkness War
Excerpt from Book One of the Turning Point
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Chapter One
Stewart’s team had drawn the short, ‘lucky’ straw—for given values of ‘lucky’—so I was sitting outside, stuck in a stuffy, under air-conditioned Tahoe, listening to Buck Dharma entreat his lady love not to fear the Reaper, while I waited on something to break. Things were back to their usual fucked-up level of normal in Austin, and we were out as backup for Stewart. At least I had two months of reports from the sensors and teams deployed to the Shadow Lands to read, even if I wasn’t officially supposed to be reading them. I also wasn’t wearing the bite-proof armor like Padgett, Wilson, and Holt, who were sweating their balls off.
“Nardo to Jody,” Callie, the Team Two lead for Ted’s Interspatial Trauma Services, called over the radio. “Has Wool Hat signaled they’re moving in, or has anyone seen anything?”
“Negative,” Jed (Jody) answered. “Maintain radio silence.”
Jed had gotten a real stick up his backside since Goodhart had pulled him into the office and first reamed him out, then promoted him to regional co-coordinator. It meant less trigger time for the Brute Squad over all, but they were getting pretty fucking beat up.
Buck had quit crooning about suicide, and the next track started playing. Tokyo was about to get beaten into the ground by a large, rubbery monster, when something crashed from an upper story window.
“I guess they kicked in the door,” Wilson said from the back seat. “Wonder if it’ll stick the landing?”
“Contact!” I shouted, keying the mike and slapping Hiebert on the shoulder.
Hiebert dropped the Tahoe in gear and put the hammer to the floor. Whatever it was that had come out of the building did a perfect three-point hero landing on the roof of an old Honda Odyssey some enterprising soul had embellished with the Austin skyline—crushing the roof and shattering the windows in a crystal spray across our headlights.
“Oooh, the Russian Judge gives that a fucking four,” Padgett joked from the back seat.
“Roger,” Jed said. “Remember, we want it alive.”
Damn job is hard enough when we’re trying to kill the monsters. Bringing ‘em in alive is some Hatari/John Wayne level shit, and I hadn’t signed up for that.
Until now.
Austin’s always had a ‘supernatural’ problem—back in the 1880s, the Servant Girl Annihilator roamed the streets. One of the first ‘famous’ serial killers, the spree ended on 24 December 1885, when the killer completed his sorcerous act and faded into the night that had spawned him. Over the next century plus, things hadn’t improved, and the whole ‘Keep Austin Weird’ movement of the late 20th and early 21st century hadn’t helped. By the time I was taking a paycheck from Quentin Morris Security Group (QMG), bizarre and unusual creatures were the norm, not the exception. Now, admittedly, most of them are just trying to get on with their lives, but there’s always one or more who think humans are cattle or worse, and that’s where QMG enters the picture—Group hunts the things that go bump in the night.
The target had jumped from the car and loped south on Colorado. Corporate had hoped the target would be reasonable, which showed they were really out of fucking touch.
“Jesse,” Hiebert started.
“I know,” I interrupted, keying my mike. “Break, break, Jody, this is Malone. Target is headed south on Colorado. Can you have someone move to a block?”
“Roger, Malone. Break. Jody to Reverend Jim, what’s your location?”
Reverend Jim was the call sign for Ted, of Ted’s Interspatial Trauma Services.
“Turning on North Colorado from 7th street,” came Ted’s laconic reply.
I saw the lights turn into the street ahead. Ted was running the red and blue flashers under the grill, since he was running against the legal flow of traffic on Colorado. Luckily, this late at night, there wasn’t too much traffic to dodge.
“Target has turned on 8th street,” I said.
“Ramming speed!” Callie shouted.
You could hear the big diesel in her Tahoe ramping up over the radio. The Tahoe’s crumpling-crash came a few seconds later. We beat Ted to 8th, where Callie’s Tahoe stood in the middle of the street with a new V-shaped front end.
“Nardo?” I asked over the radio as we rolled past.
“We’re not mobile,” Callie replied. “Target went up the alley to the north.”
“Roger that. Break, Dragon, what’s your location?”
“I’m about a thousand feet up and behind you to starboard,” came the reply.
We turned, blocking the alley, as the big spotlight on the S-70 lit it up. Officially, Dragon was flying a civilian variant of the Sikorski Blackhawk used by the military. Under the paint, it was a UH-60M—the special operations variant flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, minus the in-flight refueling probe. All of Group’s US pilots came from the 160th SOAR, and most of them had seen weird shit flying for the Army, so flying for Group was just another day on the job for them. Dragon dropped the bird down al
most on the deck, the rotor tips just above the tops of the trees lining the street.
“Target acquired,” Dragon said. “Tortelli-2, take the shot.”
“Roger,” Dalma said from the back of the bird.
Normally, there would have been a loud bang—even with the distraction of a treetop-level Black Hawk, people would have heard the bark of Dalma’s suppressed .338 Lapua—but since we were ‘trying to take this one alive’, she was using a dart gun.
“Target is down,” Dragon reported.
“Tortelli-2, good shot. Dragon, hold position. Malone, move in,” Jed said over the radio.
“Roger that,” I replied.
Hiebert eased the Tahoe down the alley, stopping about halfway down. We could see the beast laying there in a pile.
“Right,” I said, opening the door and dismounting. “Malone team, this is Malone-1. Move in. Tortelli Elements, you’re on overwatch.”
“Roger.”
Wilson, Holt, and Padgett all climbed out of the Tahoe behind me. The heavily-padded suits they wore gave them slightly more mobility than EOD armor. Since I was team lead, I’d given myself the worst possible job—kicking the lycanthrope to make sure it was down, and injecting it with a colloidal silver solution to make sure it stayed down.
The shadows cast by the others waddled behind me as I moved up toward the lycanthrope. What I saw did not make me a happy camper.
“Jody, this is Malone.”
“Send it.”
“Intel was wrong, I repeat, intel was wrong. Negative on the target being a werewolf. Therianthrope, looks like a werebear.”
“Oh, that’s peachy,” Jed replied.
“Yeah. Break. Tortelli-2, do me a favor,” I said.
“Send it.”
“Dart that big fucker again, huh?”
A couple of wererats from the Rodent Liberation Front had dropped a dime on the target, and Dispatch had tried to get every bit of data they could from the informants. What we received turned out to be shit, but that was normal. The problem was, we’d based the dosage for the darts on average werewolf body mass—which for a male werewolf of average height in human form is around 250 lbs. Werewolves are muscle dense and it throws off everyone when you meet one. Darting a therianthrope—the technical term for all shapeshifters—isn’t quite as risky as watching Jim Fowler and Marlin Perkins on ancient episodes of Wild Kingdom shoot bears with darts, in part because a werewolf or a werebear can take a hell of a lot more drugs than a dog or a bear, and their metabolism clears the drugs from their systems that much faster. To top things off, werebears are a lot heavier, requiring larger doses of drugs, and so on and so forth. Finally, because we didn’t usually try to bring them back alive, we were flying by the seat of our pants when it came to dosages.
“Roger,” she said, just as the werebear lurched to its feet.
“FUCK!” someone shouted over the net.
“Malone elements, stay the hell back,” I said. “Break, Jody, I’m going hot.”
“Roger. Try not to kill it,” came the laconic reply.
The werebear stood on its hind legs and swatted something out of the air.
“Negative on the dart,” Dalma said.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied, flipping the selector switch on my UMP to ‘full.’
The werebear raised its head and roared a challenge.
I shot it in the leg. It roared in pain, dropped to its three functional limbs, and then began a limping charge at me. The charge got better as its superior healing kicked in. Shooting an apex predator the size of a Kodiak grizzly with .45 ACP just makes things worse.
“Take a jump to the left,” Dalma said in my ear.
I jumped. The bear turned slightly and accelerated into the dart. Which didn’t do shit, because the damn thing was hopped up on adrenaline, or its werebear equivalent hormone. The ketamine cocktail Dalma was trying to pump into it might kick in before the damn thing ate me, but it would be an even bet which one happened first.
I did the only logical thing, and dumped the entire magazine into its face. That really just pissed it off. I dropped the magazine to reload, scrambling backward and praying there weren’t any trashcans or homeless behind me. The werebear grunted and pulled out the first dart with a paw, then the second, while its face reformed.
“Tortelli-2, quit pissing it off,” I said, bumping into a dumpster. This was going to be fun.
“Roger, hold one,” she replied.
The werebear finished its ablutions, rose again on its hind legs, and roared at the helicopter hovering in the intersection behind me. There was a sharp, flat Crack, and the werebear slammed to the ground. Dalma’s silver-cored round broke its right rear thigh. I’ll give it this—it was game, and tried to rise on the other three legs, so Dalma shattered its right front leg for good measure.
I dropped my reloaded UMP to hang from its sling and pulled the modified injector off the back of my armor, where it was velcroed. The mad science team at HQ had started with a CO2 injector, used by divers as a shark defense—Barf the Magic Dragon—and modified it to pump colloidal silver into targets as needed. They hadn’t done anything about the length, so the damn thing was still only 18 inches long, which meant I had to get in close to use it. I also had to ‘hit a meaty part of the body,’ according to the mad scientist who’d delivered them to us, otherwise the needle would probably just come out the other side and spray silver everywhere.
Crack!
Dalma fired again, this time hitting the left hindquarter of the werebear, shattering the left thigh as well.
“Malone-1, this ain’t a videogame, and I’m not carrying infinite ammo,” Dalma said. “You want to get your ass moving, boss?”
“Love you too, Tortelli-2,” I replied, moving in.
I moved behind the werebear as it lay there staring and growling at me, then jabbed it in the right buttock. There was a hiss as the injector fired. I stepped back. The bear shook twice, then started transforming back into a human.
“Corpsman!” I called out of habit.
Harrison, Ted’s medic, came at a canter—which made sense, since mine was forty feet off the deck, shooting werebears with dart guns and other toys. Harrison’s head was swathed in gauze, so I figured he’d been riding with Callie.
“Malone-1 to Jody. Target is down,” I said.
“Roger, Malone-1. Break. Dragon, where can you put down?” Jed asked.
“Congress and 8th should be wide enough,” Dragon replied.
“Roger. APD has both streets blocked off. We can’t do anything about looky-loos in the buildings, but you should be able to dust off ASAP.”
Street theater was a thing in Austin. Especially in the big hotels just north of 6th Street, which was home to Austin’s version of Bourbon Street.
While I’d been standing there with my thumb up my fourth point of contact, Holt and Padgett had waddled in, cuffed, shackled, and strapped the werebear to a backboard. The minute the colloidal silver had hit its system, it had started changing form, and turned out to be emphatically female. Hell, if it weren’t for the blood and shit covering her, she might have been kinda cute.
“Recovery is on the way for Nardo’s ride. Anyone else need anything?” Jed asked.
Everyone answered in the negative as Dragon set down in the street. Wilson, Padgett, Harrison, and Holt went past with the werebear and trotted to the waiting helicopter. Diindiisi sauntered past me and collected a sample of the werebear’s blood and hair from the ground.
“You ok?” she asked when she was done.
“Nothing hurt but my pride,” I said.
“Good,” she replied, putting the samples away. “I think there’s a problem with intelligence on this one.”
“What was your first clue?” I said, rinsing my mouth from the CamelBak in my armor.
She just grinned.
“This was supposed to be a kitsune or a skinwalker, not a werebear,” she replied.
“As if either of thos
e would have been easier,” I replied.
“True, but our worst-case scenario was a skinwalker,” Diindiisi said. “Admittedly, they’re tough, but…”
“Nowhere near as tough as a werebear. I get it. The report came from a couple of wererats, and their reliability is shit at best. The report was, and I quote, ‘something big and hairy, but not a monkey or ape, in the hotel on Colorado, with people meat in the fridge,’ end quote. We shot craps on this one,” I replied.
“It’s not the first time we’ve been dropped in the shit on bad intel,” Ted said, walking over to where we were standing. “It’s just, after that shit y’all went through last month at NAMC, we’ve expected werewolves to start dropping out of the walls. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”
NAMC had been my team’s baptism of fire. Dispatch sent us to the hospital for a frequent flyer to the ER, whom the doctors suspected was a werewolf. We’d found two—Patient Zero, Lawrence Thurgood, a nice guy now that he was getting real help for his issues—and Doctor Roland, ER Resident. Roland had turned, fast—Thurgood had bitten Roland, and Roland had transformed all in the same night.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Problem is running the backgrounds on all the targets. Who knows, maybe this one is a transient, and was somebody else’s problem that we’ve taken care of.”
“I thought you hated coincidences,” Diindiisi said with a laugh.
“Yeah, well, they’re right up there with decaf coffee and Austin drivers on my list of evil things the world must be purged of, but occasionally they happen.”
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Chapter Two
“You know, I love the night,” I said, as I clicked ‘Send’ on yet another damn report.
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 1