Wicked Moon (The Reluctant Werewolf Chronicles Book 2)

by Tori Centanni

  I sighed, poured myself a cup of coffee with lots of milk and sugar and went to the couch. I opened my laptop and did a search for the Church of Original Grace. Several churches came up with variations on the name, so I added “Seattle” to the search to narrow the field.

  A match came up, and I clicked to find an amateur-looking website that was mostly plain text with a single photo of a small church building. The site listed an address, but there were no times listed for services or hours of operation. The church was in Ballard, a northern neighborhood that had once been home to numerous small churches, though most were no longer in use and were gradually being sold off to developers who knocked them down and used the land for residential housing.

  In the single photo provided on the website, the church looked small and worn, and in need of a new coat of white paint. Nothing special as far as I could tell. Googling the name came up with nothing in terms of posts from members, event listings, or anything else. If it was still in use, it was only used by a small group who felt no need to post meeting times online.

  Raff came down the stairs with messy bed hair, his fading teal and blond locks entangled in a battle on his head. He wore sweat pants and a loose t-shirt with the skull of a wolf in a red circle surrounded by the words “Pleistocene Park.” And weirdly, I felt my heart do a little skip and jump at the sight of him. Somehow, this messy just-woken-up Raff was the sexiest one of all.

  Not that I found Raff sexy. I mean, I did, but I absolutely shouldn’t have. I cleared my throat and forced myself to look away.

  “I found the church.”

  Raff blinked sleepily, the words taking a moment to register. “Church?”

  “The church that sent Marianne a letter, I found it. It’s in Ballard.”

  Recognition dawned, but it was foiled by a half-yawn. He stumbled into the kitchen for coffee. I followed with my computer. He mixed cream into his mug and then glanced at the screen I held up for him.

  “Doesn’t look like much.” He sipped at the steaming liquid, and I could actually see him wake up slightly. “I guess we ought to check it out.”

  “It could be another trap,” I said, closing the computer.

  It sounded paranoid, but I wasn’t willing to put anything past these guys.

  “If they sent the letter hoping we’d check it out…”

  Raff drank more coffee. “It could be, but it’d be a pretty roundabout trap.”

  “So is poison sold as a potion that was never even marketed to our pack,” I pointed out.

  I didn’t know how Rob had found the stuff, nor how Linda had come across it. Maybe someone had reached out to them to tell them it existed, sent a flyer or an email or whatever, but it had still been a huge gamble that any werewolves would buy and drink the potion.

  “If it is a real church, it might lead us to the guys in the truck.”

  I shuddered at that thought, but if they were anything like the first group of hunters, they would be relentless in stalking us until they managed to catch us unawares. And they were armed with silver bullets, which were deadly to our kind.

  “That’s true.” Raff stirred more cream into his coffee to cool it down and then drank it quickly before pouring a second cup. “I’m game, if you are. But I have to check in with Sasha real quick.”

  After we’d gotten home last night, Raff had called to warn Jean and Sasha that people had followed us from the orchard. Since the first group of hunters had burned down my old house, that put the orchard on high alert.

  Raff pulled his phone from his sweat pants pocket and leaned against the counter while he dialed. I could hear it ringing, and then it went silent. Raff frowned.

  “Voicemail,” he said, and he called again. There was no answer. “Going to try the orchard’s landline.”

  I nodded, telling myself there were a hundred reasons Sasha wouldn’t answer her phone. She could still be asleep (werewolves liked to sleep during the day), she could be driving, her phone could be dead…

  “No answer there, either,” Raff said, his voice rising with a small note of panic.

  He met my eyes, and his were full of fear.

  “I’m sure they’re just sleeping,” I said, though I was just as worried as he was.

  Raff swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. His voice was tense as he struggled to keep it level.

  “I’m going to go get dressed, and then we should probably go check on them.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “I’ll try calling one more time.”

  “We should have gone back,” Raff said as he zoomed through freeway traffic heading north on the Interstate 5. For the middle of the day, there sure were a heck of a lot of cars. “As soon as we lost the truck, we should have turned around and gone back.”

  “We don’t even know that anything’s wrong,” I said, though coffee sloshed around my stomach as it churned and squeezed, making feel ill. I had been calling periodically along the drive, and there was still no answer on anyone’s phone. “And we did call and let them know what happened. Whatever’s going on, there are several warriors at the orchard, and they were on alert. It’s going to be okay.”

  Raff’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. He didn’t answer. He did speed up and drive faster.

  When we pulled down the road to the orchard, my muscles unclenched and I saw Raff relax a little, too. There were no plumes of smoke or flashing emergency lights, nothing obviously wrong. As Raff parked, I noticed the Portland Pack’s black SUV. It was crookedly parked, as if it had skidded to a halt and been left there with no regard to how much space it was taking up.

  Raff noticed too, and we exchanged a look. The Portland Pack should have made it home last night.

  Still, it wasn’t as worrying as the disaster scene we’d both expected to find. Maybe they weren’t answering calls because they were in the middle of a tense meeting.

  We hurried out of the car and the smell hit me like a bullet train. It was metallic and acrid, and I wrinkled my nose to fend it off.

  “Silver,” Raff said, smelling it too.

  I nodded. On the air, I also caught whiff of Rayna and a hint of Owen as we rushed to the door. Zara stood at the entryway, her expression grave.

  “They’re upstairs,” she said without prompting.

  We didn’t ask who or why, just rushed for the stairs.

  We found them in a spare room in the middle of the hall on the second floor. It was one the guest rooms with twin beds, like a room Raff and I had shared a month before. Sasha and Jean stood just inside the room, near the door. Owen and Levi were each laid out on a bed. Kai, our pack’s doctor, moved between them. The vile stench of the salve that helped leech silver out of the blood filled the room, as nauseating as the smell of silver itself. It mingled with the smell of iron, copper, and alcohol swabs. Rayna stood over the first bed, head bent down as she watched Owen's unmoving body.

  “What happened?” Raff asked quietly.

  Sasha shook her head and sighed heavily.

  “Bastards chased us off the road,” Rayna said.

  My heart thumped. “In a truck?” I asked.

  Rayna turned and looked at me funny. “No. A van. They ran us off the freeway into a ditch and then came at us with guns. They shot Owen and Levi. I got grazed, but it didn’t break the skin.” She was wearing a black tank top and gestured to the red welt on her arm. “A car pulled up to help—I think they thought the van was broken down—and the guys ran off before they could get more bullets in us. Took us a while to get here. I had to load these guys in and get the car out of the ditch. But we were closer to here than home.”

  “I’m still going to treat that scrape,” Kai said as she rubbed salve into the open wound in Levi’s stomach. It was hard to see what was blood and what was the black salve.

  “Them first,” Rayna said, her words almost a growl. Kai didn’t argue.

  “How many guys?” Raff asked.

  “Three.” Rayna folded her arms over her chest. �
�Wearing camouflage.”

  “It’s them,” I whispered.

  Ice rushed through my veins. Three guys in camo armed with silver bullets. That fit the bill of the Guardians of Pure Life, who’d killed Holly and others. I’d already been sure it was them, but now that it was confirmed, I felt absolutely sick.

  Plus, that meant there were two more of them than we’d known of, plus the guys in the truck. Just how many hunters were there? Panic clawed its way up my throat.

  Kai finished applying the salve to Levi’s body and called Rayna over to her. Rayna didn’t move. Instead, she stared at me with a gaze piercing enough to cut me in half.

  “It’s who?”

  I shook my head, my throat too tight to speak. Her glare made me want to melt into the floor.

  “The hunters who attacked us last month,” Raff jumped in, eyes watching me warily as if he was afraid I might choke. “We thought we got all of them. Seems like maybe we didn’t.”

  Rayna snorted derisively. “Yeah, seems that way.”

  She turned and walked around Owen's bed to Kai, letting the healer smooth the foul-smelling salve over her arm.

  “They chased us, too,” I finally said.

  I didn’t mean it to sound like a challenge, only a point of fact, but Rayna’s head snapped in my direction like I’d insulted her grandmother or something.

  “You look unscathed,” she said hotly.

  “We were able to lose them,” Raff said, glancing down at the first bed where Owen lay, pale and unconscious, sweat beading on his lip and forehead. “We got lucky.”

  Levi moaned and shifted in bed as if trying to turn over. Rayna bent down by his bed, forcing Kai to bend down to apply the bandage to her arm.

  “Levi, wake up. Please wake up!”

  Levi made a noise and his eyes fluttered, but then he stopped moving again. Rayna made a guttural sound, like a mix between a whimper and a growl.

  “The salve needs time to work,” Kai said gently.

  “He can’t die,” Rayna said, as if she were ordering the universe to make it so.

  No one argued with her, even though it was abundantly clear that he might.

  Chapter 17

  Downstairs, Jean had hot water boiling for tea and a coffee pot percolating in her large kitchen. She had bags under her eyes, and when she saw me standing there with nothing to do, she gestured to the pantry.

  “Pull out the tea, would you?”

  I had to search through shelves of cans and dry goods, but finally I found several boxes of different teas. Not knowing which one she wanted, I gathered them all in my arms and dumped them on the island counter.

  “It’s my fault,” I said numbly.

  Jean frowned at me. “What is, dear, the tea?”

  I shook my head. “We left one hunter alive. I shot him in the leg. If I’d shot him in the head…”

  I felt tears prick at my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to shoot Doug at all. Doug had been a coward, and while he’d definitely played a part in Michael’s capture and Holly’s death, there was no way he’d been in charge. He was a follower, and with his friends dead, I’d figured he’d do something else with his time, if he survived at all.

  “It’s not your fault, Charlie. It appears there’s more of them than we thought,” Jean said, sounding tired. “Their hatred is relentless, but hate never wins.”

  The hunters had killed Drake, Jean’s husband, and Holly, among others. Hate had won in those instances. Jean’s words were optimistic, but her eyes glossed over, and I knew she was thinking of Drake.

  She finished making the coffee and went to the fridge to pull out a container of cream, which she set near the mugs on the counter.

  “What happens if Levi dies?” I asked, the question tumbling out. “I mean, if he’s their Alpha, how does it work?”

  “Depends on the pack, but I assume several people will vie for the chance to take his place.” She opened a tea bag—herbal mint—and put it in a mug. “If he has a second, the second will probably try to take over, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to do so without a challenge.”

  “And by that you mean a fight?”

  Jean shrugged. “In our pack, it would be an election, unless enough people objected and insisted on a fight. In their pack, it’s likely to be a fight, yes.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s how many packs do things,” Sasha said, coming over to grab a mug and tea bag of her own. “It’s a show of strength and willingness to fight and die for the pack.”

  The way she said it, I got the impression that she’d fight and die for our pack if she had to.

  Raff came down the stairs. I’d followed Jean, desperate to get out of that stinky room, but Raff had hung back. His gaze landed on me and heat crept up the back of my neck as he started straight for me, ignoring the others in the room.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  That was what I liked about Raff: He always wanted an action plan. Like me, sitting idle made him itchy.

  Sasha considered. “I suppose we hunt down the hunters. Stop them before they hurt any more of our people.” She glanced toward the stairs. “Or other werewolves.”

  “But how? We tried that last month and now they’re back with more fun ways to hurt us,” I said.

  Sasha shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  An idea occurred to me. A terrible, awful idea. I pushed it away. Raff saw my face, though, and understood I’d had a brain wave. It was like he could read my mind, and he shot me a questioning look.

  “We should check the church,” I said instead, not willing to voice the other plan until we’d eliminated all other options.

  “Church?” Jean asked.

  Raff and I explained that we’d seen the name of the church on envelopes in Marianne’s room and Googled it. Neither of us admitted that Raff had physically stolen her mail. Seemed easier that way.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Raff said.

  “But if it is one of their headquarters, we should look into it,” I added.

  Something about the church felt right to me, like it was the best place to look. I didn’t know why. It just felt off.

  Sasha tapped her long red fingernails on the counter, thinking.

  “You can’t go without backup,” Sasha finally said and whistled with her fingers in her mouth.

  Miles came barreling through the backdoor, looking in all directions to see where the fire was.

  “Miles, go with Raff and Charlie.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Miles said, doing a weird half-bow. He didn’t even ask where we were going.

  “I’d spare more people if I could, but the rest of my warriors are currently guarding this perimeter, and we can’t risk letting them go.”

  The rest being only a handful, I knew. Our pack was woefully understaffed when it came to warriors. Previously, they hadn’t needed that many, but the hunters had changed that and killed some of the few warriors we had in the process.

  “Call me immediately if you find anything.”

  “Of course,” Raff said, and gave the same half-bow that Miles did.

  I didn’t, because it felt silly. Anyway, I wasn’t a warrior.

  “Do you really think there’s anything at the church?” Raff whispered in a breathy voice close to my ear as we headed to the car with Miles several feet behind us.

  I shrugged. I had no idea.

  “That’s wasn’t your first idea,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. Werewolves couldn’t read minds, right? I was pretty sure that was a magic only vampires and some faeries could do. Maybe a witch with the right spell.

  My expression told Raff everything.

  “I knew it,” he said.

  As he opened the driver’s side door of his car, he glanced back at Miles.

  “You can tell me later.”

  Before I could argue that I didn’t have a viable plan so much as a half-baked idea to draw the hunters out by baiting th
em, a dangerous and foolish plot I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to resort to. Miles caught up and beat me to the front seat.

  Great. Now Raff thought I had some super clever plan to catch the hunters and I had to sit in the back.

  Chapter 18

  “It’s definitely a structure. With four walls,” I said, standing on the sidewalk across the street from the tiny church.

  “And most of a roof,” Miles added.

  It looked even more rundown than it had in the photo. The paint was peeling, and the small turret had shingles missing from one side of the roof.

  “Don’t encourage her,” Raff said, unamused.

  He carried a lot of tension in his shoulders, and I could tell he was ready for a fight, but I wasn’t expecting one. The church was too small to easily hide in, and the air was still, with no scent or sound that indicated anyone was currently inside. But, like Raff, I was a little nervous about what we might find inside: a cache of weapons and silver or maybe a murder wall full of photos of werewolves and newspaper clippings connected by strings. Although, given the gaping hole in the roof, I doubted the interior was in decent shape.

  The church sat on a lot in the center of a residential block, surrounded on both sides by charming old-fashioned houses. The grass had been left to the wild and had overgrown around the church, obscuring the narrow stone path that we followed to the front door. Next to the door was a glass-covered cork board, presumably for posting notices and meeting times, but which now only held a few pushpins. Graffiti had been cleaned off of it, leaving white stains.

  I grabbed the door handle and pushed, then pulled. No dice.

  “This is the part where having, like, werewolf strength would help,” I said.

  “We do have supernatural strength,” Raff said, gently pushing me aside so he could tug at the door.

  He managed to make it move in the frame more than I had, but it didn’t open. Raff produced his set of lock picks.