Moon Cursed: The Reluctant Werewolf Chronicles, Book 1

by Centanni, Tori

  I burst into tears.

  I hadn’t expected to cry like that, it just happened. All of the chaos from the past few days, being attacked and shot at, and now being told that my house had burned down, it was just too much and it finally hit me like a freight train.

  Raff clearly hadn’t been expecting it either because he looked at a loss for what to do, flailing around helpless until he managed to find a box of tissues and offer me some. I blew my nose and managed to pull myself together.

  “I take it that means everything is not okay,” he said, the master of observation.

  “My house burned down.”

  “Holy crap,” he said, his eyes widening. “The monster hunters burned down your house?”

  My heart managed to hammer even harder. I hadn’t been awake enough to really process the news. I’d been stuck on the idea that all of my stuff charred to a crisp. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the monster hunters had started the fire, but of course, that made perfect sense.

  “You think they’d do that?” I asked, though I knew as well as Raff did what they were capable of.

  “I think they really have it out for our kind,” he said. “Let me get dressed real quick. Two minutes.”

  He bounded back up the stairs and I stood there, squeezing tissues in my fist and feeling as helpless and frustrated as I had the first time I’d gone through my first month as a werewolf.

  * * *

  “Burned down” was a pretty accurate description of the damage, unfortunately. While there were still some walls and studs, and a roof (albeit a charred roof with a massive hole over the kitchen, like a meteor had come crashing through it, according to the photos I was shown later), there wasn’t enough left to call it a “house.”

  Smoke and ash hung in the air. Firetrucks and police cars blocked a chunk of the street, making other cars go around. Raff had to find parking a few blocks away while I ran toward the remnants of my life and then froze in sheer shock at the extent of the fire.

  A police officer tried to push me back, but I said, “I live here! That’s my house!” and he let me through. A woman in a firefighter suit cradling her helmet under arm said that the fire had been contained, but that I wasn’t allowed inside. And then two men in plain clothes—one with a fire department t-shirt under his jacket—pulled me aside. “We need to ask you some questions,” the mustached police officer said.

  I nodded. My knees felt weak. My lungs burned from the debris in the air. I told them my roommate was coming from his boyfriend’s house and we’d both be happy to tell them anything.

  “Where were you last night?” the cop asked, without missing a beat.

  “At my place,” Raff said. I hadn’t even noticed him come up beside me. “I’m her boyfriend.”

  “Name, son?” The cop’s pen was poised over the notebook.

  “Nathaniel Rafften.”

  I gaped at him. Nathaniel? I’d assumed Raff was his first name. He didn’t look like a Nathaniel. He was too rugged, although nerdy rugged. Even now, he was wearing a Nintendo t-shirt and his bright orange chucks. So maybe the name suited him after all.

  “Why were you there?” the cop asked. The man in the fire department shirt just watched me.

  “Because I spent the night at his place. What happened? How did the fire start?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to determine,” fire department guy said. “You have any enemies?”

  Just a group of tenacious, malicious monster hunters who want me dead because I am, by no fault of my own, a supernatural creature who turns into a wolf every month.

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “No one who’d burn down my house.”

  I couldn’t tell whether they believed me because their faces remained hard and impassive. Given that I’d just lost ninety-nine percent of everything I owned, it wasn’t very compassionate, which made me think I was definitely a suspect.

  “My life was in there,” I said, eyes tearing though this time it was more to do with the smoke in the air making them itchy.

  “I live there!” I heard Michael arguing with the cop and turned. He was wearing black pajama pants and a gray sweatshirt, his inky hair sticking up in ten directions like he’d just rolled out of bed. Which he had.

  “That’s my roommate,” I said, and the cop nodded at another cop, a woman with black hair, to get him. They wanted to talk to us separately, which was no surprise, since they seemed convinced one of us had started the fire.

  “You usually keep kerosine?” the fire marshal asked.

  I shook my head.

  He made a note.

  “Are we going to get to grab our stuff?” I asked.

  The cop leveled a look at me and then exchanged a look with his partner. “Darling, there’s not much left to grab.”

  Chapter 12

  After answering more questions—yes, I kept lighters in the junk drawer for candles and incense; no, I didn’t have any problems with Michael that could be solved by a good ol’ house fire—they finally let me walk the perimeter. The kitchen floor had burned through entirely and I could see our washer and dryer buried beneath debris in the basement.

  The basement.

  My heart dropped into my stomach. Raff was beside me, playing the part of the sympathetic boyfriend, and I whispered “shackles.” His eyes widened as he realized what I was saying, and just how bad something like that was going to look to authorities who were already deeply suspicious.

  He bent his head toward mine as if speaking soothing words to comfort me in my time of loss. “Maybe we should go,” he whispered.

  “They can find us,” I said.

  He huffed out a breath and then looked around. Michael was still answering questions, and his arms crossed and his shoulders squared. I gave up on the perimeter walk when I got to my bedroom. The fire had swept down the hall, and eaten most of the carpet. In my room, it had jumped onto the bed, which a burned mess of melted polyester. The walls were black. Everything in there was going to smell like smoke for the rest of time. The closet doors looked untouched, but I wasn’t allowed to go in and survey the damage to my wardrobe. I now deeply regretted packing my work uniforms and a few pairs of jeans with sensible shirts instead of my expensive dresses and skirts.

  “I can’t look at this anymore,” I said, and headed for Michael. An officer tried to hold me back, but the woman interviewing him gestured that it was okay.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Michael asked.

  “Right now, I’d find some place to stay. Once it’s clear, you can go inside to retrieve whatever might have survived,” the officer said. “The property owner will be arriving tomorrow to survey the damage. In the meantime, I wouldn’t leave the city. We might have more questions.”

  Or arrest warrants, I thought. And serious questions about our use of chains and shackles in the downstairs bedroom. And the gouges in the walls of that room from werewolf claws.

  As if reading my mind, the officer asked, “You guys have a dog?”

  “No,” Michael said. “No pets.”

  The officer nodded sagely. “That’s a relief, then.” He apologized for our loss before going to join her coworkers. Police cars were slowly leaving and the firetruck was packing up.

  Michael shivered. His sweatshirt was nothing against the November chill and he wasn’t wearing socks with his sneakers. The morning light wasn’t doing him any favors: his cheeks were sunken and his coloring was pale and sickly.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  “My house was just burned down along with most of the things that I own, including expensive makeup and recording equipment,” he said sharply. “Of course I’m not okay.”

  Raff’s shoulders stiffened and opened his mouth. I shot him a look. This wasn’t the time to make comments about makeup or whatever had his panties in a twist. He cleared his throat as if to shake out whatever he had been about to say. “I can give you a ride back to Holly’s,” he offered.

  Michael swallowed
uneasily and turned toward the burned shell of a house we’d called home up until last night. He sucked in a shuddering breath. His eyes were glistening but then, so were mine from the smoke in the air. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

  We piled into Raff’s car, me in the front, Michael in back. As Raff drove, I said, “They aren’t going to stop. They’re going to keep coming. Which means we need to stop them.”

  “We’re working on it,” Raff said.

  “We need to work faster.”

  I turned around and said to Michael, “And you and I are going to need to explain the spare room.”

  Michael folded his arms across his chest. “I told you that was a bad idea.”

  I blinked, my stomach turning to stone. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did. When we moved in. I said you should find somewhere more secure and less likely to lose us our security deposit to do your little change thing,” he said, lip stiff.

  I couldn’t believe it. We’d talked about it at length when we first moved in and Michael had agreed that it was best for me transform at home, where I was less likely to get into trouble. Sure, at first he’d been a little reluctant to have a werewolf going nuts in the basement every month but hey, I wasn’t happy about his boyfriend putting blood bags in our fridge, either. The spare room had been too perfect to pass up and the chains easy enough to bolt to the walls. The damage, well… I’d promised to paint and spackle over everything when we moved out. Which would have worked.

  Except now the idiot monster hunters had set the place on fire, meaning there’d be no fixing the damage or pulling out the chains.

  “I’ll handle it,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I turned back around in my seat, trying not to feel utterly sick. Michael was never like this. Sure, he got cranky, especially when he didn’t eat at regular intervals. One time he went vegan for two weeks and turned into a whiny devil. But this attitude wasn’t like him at all.

  As soon as Michael got out of the car at Damien and Holly’s apartment, I said, “He thinks it’s my fault.”

  Raff furrowed his brow.

  “The fire. Michael thinks it’s my fault. And he’s right. The hunters aren’t after him. They’re after me, and that’s why they burned down our home. Because of me.”

  Raff put his hand on the gear shift and then stopped. “It’s not your fault and it didn’t happen because of you. It happened because there are hateful assholes in the world who are inadequate and worthless, so they cling to their hate and try to destroy others, rather than fixing their own pathetic little lives.” He clutched the gear shift so hard his knuckles turned white. “And as for your little friend, he’s a blood bag. He’s not getting enough nutrition and that leech is sucking the life out of him, literally. Which is why he’s being a dick.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said, my blood getting hot. I was angry that he was being such a jerk about vampires and even more angry that he was making me defend Michael right now. “Michael was up all night and then I called to tell him all of our stuff was destroyed in a fire. He’s exhausted.”

  Raff shrugged and peeled out from the parking spot. “Whatever. I don’t know why you’re so happy to defend vampires but so disgusted by your own kind.”

  I sighed heavily and leaned back against the seat. “I’m not disgusted.”

  He shot me side-eye that definitely said he wanted to argue, but I guess he decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  “Plus, vampires have cool powers and stuff,” I said. “What do we have? Compulsory transformation and a heightened sense of smell? Big deal.”

  Raff’s jaw tightened.

  After we arrived back at his place, Raff asked, “What do you want to do next?”

  “Find the bastards who set my house on fire and shot Drake and make sure they don’t get to keep hurting people.” I checked the time. “But first, I have to go to work.”

  Chapter 13

  “What about the strawberry? Can I taste that?” the man asked. He’d already tasted vanilla, chocolate, peach, and coconut. I was pretty sure he was going to sample his way through all twelve of our flavors and leave without buying anything, but Yogurt Time policy was to let customers sample as much as they wanted.

  I filled the sample spoon with strawberry yogurt and handed it over the counter, and the guy rolled it around in his mouth like he’d never had strawberry anything before.

  “It’s good,” he finally said. “What about cookie dough?”

  I held in a sigh and filled yet another sample spoon. Raff was sitting sideways in a booth near the register, reading something on his phone, keeping an eye on sample-man, lest he turn out to be here for more than free frozen yogurt. After trying one more flavor, the man actually ordered a small cup of chocolate yogurt with sprinkles and left.

  It was late afternoon and I only had three hours left of my shift, which could not end soon enough. I was itching to hunt down the hunters.

  Actually, I was terrified of doing so. I didn’t have weapons or superpowers that would allow me to fight them. I honestly didn’t know what we’d do once we tracked them down. But I was eager to have this whole nightmare over with.

  Lisa emerged from the back carrying plastic sleeves of paper yogurt cups in various sizes. She tore open the “kids” cups and began restocking our supply.

  “How was your vacation?” I asked. Today was her first day back and it had been too busy up until now to really chat.

  “Pretty good. Kyle and I drove up to Vancouver and met up with some friends. I ate way too many donuts, but it was really fun. And it’s gorgeous up there.” Kyle was Lisa’s boyfriend. They’d been together about a year, so I guessed this had been an anniversary trip of sorts, which explained why Lisa was beaming. “How was your weekend?”

  Awful and nearly fatal.

  “Boring,” I said. Raff looked up from his reading and shot me a wry smile. I ignored him.

  “I thought you had a family thing on Saturday, didn’t you? You always request time off for your family night.” Lisa balled up the empty plastic sleeve and then tore open the next one.

  My lunch break latte sloshed around in my stomach. I hadn’t forgotten my lie to get out of working so much as I now realized how bad it sounded when I declared the weekend boring, so I backpedaled. “Yeah, I mean, it was fun,” I said. “Just typical family stuff, nothing exciting. Not like a trip or anything.”

  Lisa nodded. “Sorry the schedule was messy. John quit without notice, which always throws things through a loop.”

  Lisa was the assistant manager, and while she rarely did the schedule herself, she often helped Fred work it out.

  “It happens,” I said. John had been one of our transient employees, as Fred called them, a phenomenon that happens a lot in retail and food service. People take the job thinking it’ll be easy to serve yogurt all day—I mean, how hard can it be?—only to learn that it takes a lot of energy, patience, and know-how to deal with customers, clean the machines, and keep everything stocked. Those people often quit without giving any notice or worse, simply stop showing up. At least John had told someone he wouldn’t be coming back.

  Not that I was sad to lose him. I’d only worked a couple shifts with the guy, but he was terrible at keeping up during a rush and anyhow, he always looked at me like he was on the verge of asking me out or something and I was definitely not interested, so I was constantly having to brace myself for giving an awkward rejection. John hadn’t been my type at all. He’d been extremely rude about customers after they left the store and struck me as the kind of guy who thought he was too good to work at a yogurt shop. Good riddance.

  “Fred is interviewing some potential candidates tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll round out the staff again,” Lisa said. “Can’t happen soon enough. The holiday rush is going to be wild this year.” A temporary “Photos With Santa” shop had opened up in the shopping center across the street, meaning there would be lots of kids getting rewarded for behaving during their
holiday photo with Kris Kringle.

  A woman with three kids came in and I served them yogurt while Lisa finished stocking supplies. Raff had finished reading whatever he’d been so absorbed in and was now shifting around in the booth looking restless.

  I felt bad for exactly two seconds before I remembered that it wasn’t like I was asking him to hang around while I worked. That order had come from over my head and if I had my way, Raff wouldn’t be hanging out making my coworkers think I had a weirdly possessive boyfriend or whatever.

  One more reason that I wanted to get this nightmare over with.

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” I asked, buckling my seat belt as Raff drove a little too fast around the parking garage. I’d brought a change of clothes to work and was now in leggings, a black tunic dress, and boots, though my hair was still up and my makeup was still “work appropriate” (read: much less black eyeliner than I’d prefer) because I hadn’t grabbed stuff to fix that. At least I wasn’t stuck running around in my work uniform.

  “Sasha wants us to look into a lead,” Raff said, glancing in my direction with an expression I couldn’t decipher.

  “Do you always do what Sasha says?” I was teasing. Frankly, doing anything was better than sitting around waiting to see if the hunters set fire to Raff’s house, too.

  “Yes,” Raff said, completely serious. “She’s the Alpha.”

  I frowned. “I thought you were progressive wolves and there was no ‘alpha’.”

  “Every group needs a leader, Charlie. Otherwise things descend into chaos.”

  I considered. Sasha wasn’t very large or burly, like I’d expect the “alpha” wolf to be, but she had been capable of directing the crowd in every instance I’d seen.

  “So what happens if I want to be the Alpha? Do I challenge her to a fight to the death?” I smiled to show I was joking, though I was curious how the whole wolf pack leadership thing worked.

  “If you thought Sasha wasn’t doing an adequate job and wished to challenge her for the position, you’d need the backing of at least ten werewolves in good standing who’ve been in the pack for at least a year. That means you couldn’t go around on the full moon and infect ten people and then force them to back you up. If you managed that, the challenged leader, Sasha, would get to choose the method of contest. Some might choose a fight in wolf form or human form, but most people choose a simple election.”