Seduced by the Moon

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  I’m not like you, Gavin wanted to shout. I’m no killer.

  But shouting would amount to a calling card and telegraph his presence…if the thing didn’t know already.

  As he jogged up the steep path, the old thoughts returned, though answers to his questions had never been within reach. If he wasn’t like that monster, he had to suppose that the blood passed from beast to beast somehow got diluted in the transfer.

  His wounds made him suffer a change, but until he knew more about what had happened to him, he had to think of his cursed condition as a disease.

  Hell, the differences between him and his maker had to be studied. He couldn’t exact a physical change without a full moon, yet he’d been attacked without one. Feelings inside of him shifted, internal stirrings came and went, but no full transformation happened for him without that commanding silver light. When he did morph, he became a strange mixture of both man and wolf, and not more of one thing than the other.

  This damn beast was wolfish, with a lot of something extra added that had no relation to Homo sapiens. There was no full moon tonight, nor had there been the night before, which solidified the supposition that this monster either remained permanently furry, or could fur-up at will, with or without the moon’s kiss.

  So different. Yet I sense you, beast, as though what I’ve become isn’t too far removed from what you are.

  Part of that beast truly had become part of him.

  Gavin’s thoughts kept churning as he climbed the hillside trying to sift through facts, in search of answers.

  He’d tried locking himself away to avoid the moon’s treacherous call, which only made things worse. Unable to change its form, his body had betrayed him anyway. He’d nearly gone mad with the shakes, unconscious spells, roiling stomach upheavals and bouts of fever. His mind had eventually succumbed to the madness. He’d lost control of his temper, lost his mind to the pain of withholding the transformation and ended up in some godforsaken place on the mountain with no recollection of how he got there or what he might have done while his mind was in a fog.

  Lesson learned. It was a freaking sharp-witted curse that developed immunity to thoughtful manipulation.

  He had to give in to the physical changes in order to remain in charge mentally. Succumbing to the moon’s lure was necessary. As long as he changed shape, he was okay. Keeping as far away from other people as was possible near the full moon had allowed him to weather this out.

  He got that now, and guessed that without the wolfish form there’d be no survival of this monster’s horrific species, hence the absolute need to shift. That furry demon’s teeth and claws had created another similar freak, and so that had to be the way the moon’s cult passed on. If he stayed in these mountains whenever there was a full moon, he’d be safe enough, he hoped. Others would be safe.

  Gavin stopped suddenly, skin chilling, senses wide open.

  The atmosphere around him had changed, creating new pressure that was like a punch to his chest. He heard rustling sounds and thought them ludicrous for a monster excelling in stealth, as though the beast were leaving him a trail of breadcrumbs.

  There was no mistaking the smell. He knew this monster’s scent, having been up close and personal with it. Why was it here? Did it want to finish what it had started two years ago? Finish him off?

  Is that why you stuck around?

  Gavin’s heart rate accelerated. He’d left his weapon in the car before visiting the woman in the cabin. Damn it, he should have borrowed her gun.

  The wolf inside him clawed at his insides with nails like talons, sensing trouble. An icy shiver of anticipation ran up his spine.

  “Come out.”

  He spoke at a normal decibel, feeling the presence of Otherness as if it were a bad rash.

  “You can’t possibly imagine I don’t know you’re there, or what you are.”

  More rustling noises came from his right. Gavin slowly turned toward the sound, saw something. Felt something.

  The creature he’d sought for so long was here, all right, and standing its ground.

  Against the outline of the trees, nearly hidden in the shadow, a huge form took shape. Bigger than anything he could have imagined, the giant specter loomed over the surrounding brush like the main character in a horror movie.

  On that fateful night, the thing had moved so fast, Gavin hadn’t seen what was coming. But he saw something of its outline now and his inner alarms went off like a string of firecrackers.

  This was no mere man-wolf combination. Nor, as he’d guessed, was it anything remotely like him, at all.

  Its massive shape left little for Gavin to appeal to, speak to, reason with. Thoughts of getting close to it with any kind of hand-held weapon were absurd. Killing it with a spray of bullets seemed equally as unlikely. He hadn’t really expected this abomination to allow him another close-up this soon—he had meant to chase it away from the cabin. Hell, seeing it now, he wanted to run the other way.

  No doubt this monster would be faster.

  “So here we are,” he made himself say to ease a small portion of the fear knotting up his insides. “Should I call you family?”

  There couldn’t be more than one of these beasts, he hoped, because where’d be the justice in that?

  “It had to be you who did this to me. Can you recognize another freak?”

  His nemesis didn’t move, making this potentially deadly scenario all the spookier.

  “What are we to do now, since I can’t let you go around killing and maiming people?” he asked, having to talk though this creature could strike at any moment. Talking seemed necessary. He felt like shouting. One more night, and he would have been stronger, at least. He would have had claws and speed and double the muscle. Though his humanness danced on a thin thread of control tonight, there was no full moon to help him.

  “I was supposed to protect those people who died. That’s my job. Now what? You do whatever the hell you like?” he said. Then he paused to regain the strength in his voice. “If not exactly like you, I’m no longer like them, either. Not like those people.”

  Like the aftershocks of an earthquake, a series of low growls shook the ground beneath him. Darkness wavered. Leaves rustled. This beast’s rumble was terrible, threatening, ominous, but the monster stayed in the shadows.

  When Gavin let loose a responding growl, the creature stepped forward on legs the size of a grizzly’s. Transfixed, unable to get a handle on the creature’s exact size and girth, and fairly sure he didn’t want to, Gavin jumped back. This was a damned nightmare.

  “Son of a…”

  Gavin tried to ignore the tingling in his hands. Angling his head, he heard a crack of bone on bone. Licks of white-hot fire made every joint ache as a wave of lightheadedness washed over him, twisting his stomach into fits. He knew this feeling, recognized these sensations, and they came as a shock.

  The beast in front of him was able to call forth Gavin’s beast, and maybe even set it free early. Was that because what stood across from him had created him? Blood calling to blood?

  Through a slowly revolving whirl of turmoil, Gavin heard his own growl of angry protest. “I’m not like you!”

  And though it seemed impossible for anything else to get through the pain and shock of what he was experiencing, something else nipped at his attention, dragging him away from the outrageous situation at hand. Too riled up to put a name to that distraction, and feeling too ill to respond to it, Gavin kept his focus riveted to the beast less than ten feet away from him. He was close enough to hear it breathing. He heard its giant canines snapping, and the memory of teeth like that tearing into him, ripping the flesh from his bones, made his stomach turn over.

  This was no werewolf. This truly was a demon. And Gavin’s mind warned that he might not be able to get out of this in one piece. Not this time.

  When the creature’s growls suddenly ceased, the world went deathly quiet with a silence that seemed surreal. Though Gavin’s muscles ached t
o transform and his fingers stung with the threat of popping claws, the grip this specter had on him loosened. It, too, had noticed the distraction, and turned its mind elsewhere.

  The enormous werewolf, which could have squashed him like a bug, advanced no farther. After waiting out several hundred of Gavin’s thunderous heartbeats, it turned away from him. Uttering a low roar of grumbling displeasure, it drifted away as completely and swiftly as if it had merely melted into the night.

  Sounds from behind made Gavin spin around, afraid the creature had reappeared at his back. Lunging forward, taking the advantage, he rushed toward the sound, striking an object hard, taking it to the ground.

  His breath whooshed out. His muscles screamed for the strength necessary to do some damage to the thing that had damaged him so very badly.

  “This ends here, one way or the other!”

  The moment he said those words, Gavin realized it wasn’t the beast he’d tackled. The body beneath him was small, fragile, and it squirmed beneath his weight, smelling like soap and the soft fabrics covering it.

  Closing his eyes, Gavin fought back an oath. This wasn’t the monster. Not even close.

  When he reopened his eyes, he found a familiar face looking back. A small white circle of features that were pale enough in the moonlight to be almost transparent.

  “What the hell?” was all he managed to say between deep, rasping breaths of mortified relief.

  Chapter 6

  “You can get off me now.”

  Breathless from the momentum of the attack, Skylar shook so hard, she stuttered.

  Without being able to see Harris’s expression in the dark, she felt every racing beat of his heart through the chest pressed to hers.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Following you.”

  “I asked you to stay inside.”

  “About that. I seem to be going through a rebellious streak that makes me impervious to reason. I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  “Hell, woman, my warning must not have been nearly strong enough to convince you of the danger.”

  “I was pretty sure you could handle one lone wolf.”

  “Lone wolf? You have no idea…”

  Maddeningly, Harris didn’t finish the statement as he fought for his breath.

  “I thought you heard me coming,” she said. “You were speaking to me, weren’t you?”

  “I was talking to myself.”

  “Is that a habit rangers often pick up?”

  “Yes.” He took some time to go on. “It’s not safe here. Not safe anywhere near here. It was foolish of you to ignore me.”

  “Yes, well, right now the problem is being able to breathe.”

  Harris only then seemed to realize he was on top of her. Slowly, he backed onto his knees. Seconds later, he offered her his hand and a word of caution. “We have to get you out of here.”

  Skylar took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. The man was little more than a dim outline in the dark, but she saw him turn his head as if expecting someone else to appear.

  Holding tightly to her right wrist, he said, “I can’t do my job if people run all over these hills in the dark. There are always a few who think they’re above the rules.”

  Skylar stumbled forward when he snapped his arm. “Meaning I’m one of those.”

  He didn’t challenge her remark.

  “Did you find the wolf?”

  “No.”

  He was lying again. She could tell by the way her inner radar was going off.

  “I’ll go with you to look for it,” she suggested.

  “You’ll do no such thing. You can leave this place as quickly as possible. In fact, I’ll take you.”

  “I don’t need a chaperone.”

  “On the contrary, I have every reason to believe you might.”

  He began to walk, more or less dragging her with him. “Please listen to me, Skylar. There’s a dangerous animal on the loose, and that’s no joke. If you’re out here, I’ll worry about you. Distractions can make these situations so much worse. Surely you can understand that?”

  They slid in a damp patch of dirt on the slope, but righted easily enough. Skylar resolved to pay more attention to her feet. She wasn’t going to be the bimbo of horror flicks who always tripped and fell in the scary scenes. She had always been fleet.

  She wasn’t afraid to be out here with Harris beside her, yet she felt uneasy, and as if they were being watched.

  “I think my father might have been chasing a wolf when he died,” she confessed, matching Harris’s lengthy strides. “If so, then I want to see it skinned.”

  Harris’s sharp intake of air wasn’t her imagination. Something out here had bothered him, and bothered him still. He was wired and on edge. He kept looking around.

  “I’d like to hear about that, but this isn’t the time or place for conversation. You’ll have to trust me on this.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  The relief in his voice was evident. “Good.”

  The odd feeling of them not being alone stuck with her on their steep downhill descent until she had to speak of it.

  “I think we’re being followed.”

  His response was to utter a choice four-letter word and to walk faster. Skylar wasn’t going to argue with him about getting to safety this time. The new presence she sensed was heavy enough to siphon some of the air from her lungs. The night had grown colder, and each breath she struggled to take felt icy after the day’s heat.

  “Maybe it’s a ghost,” she whispered.

  Harris urged her into a jog.

  Thing was, she thought, if ghosts existed, this one hovering in the woods might turn out to be what was left of her father. But if it was her father, why did the spirit feel so dark? Why was she suddenly afraid?

  She let Harris lead her through the night, clinging to his hand. She’d been right. They were being followed, and the man in front of her knew this as well as she did. Clearly whatever he had been chasing out here now stalked them, and it was something Ranger Harris feared.

  Halfway down the path, Skylar resisted the impulse to stop and face whatever tracked them. Only then would she confront the awful fear building inside her.

  Her guide didn’t seem to share her impulse to stop. His hold on her wrist remained unyielding as he led her over rough, unfamiliar terrain ignoring holes and vines as though he saw every detail in the dark.

  She couldn’t see a blasted thing.

  He didn’t produce a flashlight, either, seeming to rely on his own internal GPS system. She supposed that rangers had to be familiar with the areas they patrolled and that Harris walked these same paths over and over on a daily basis. All she saw were glimpses of his back, highlighted whenever the moon peeked out from the clouds.

  Deliberately, she didn’t offer the use of the flashlight she’d used to find him in the first place, now tucked inside her pocket. She was fascinated by how Harris maneuvered and afraid that if she shone that light behind her, the sanity she presently held on to might desert her. She was sure something otherworldly lurked on this hillside.

  She thanked God that Harris wasn’t the kind of creature she’d almost expected him to be—though the voice he shared with the man in her dreams continued to plague her. He didn’t use that voice now, though there were questions that sorely needed answers. Questions having to do with wolves being bold enough to stalk two humans, or if it might be some other Colorado animal. Mountain lion. Bear. Recently escaped homicidal human.

  The icy sensation of being tracked didn’t ease up as they ran. Traversing the downward path, Skylar felt positive she heard sounds of the creature breathing beyond the two of them.

  She kept as close to Harris as possible and his grip on her remained a comfort. But although they had gone a fair distance already, the cabin’s porch light didn’t appear. Were they lost?

  A gravel road suddenly loomed up out of nowhere, noticeable by its ghostly gray color.

/>   “Stop,” she said, tugging at Harris’s hand. “This isn’t anywhere near the cabin. The road to Dad’s place is dirt.”

  “Just a few steps more,” Harris urged.

  When she saw the car, Skylar remembered what he’d told her about leaving it there. “We’re on the opposite side of the hill. Are we driving to the cabin?”

  “I’m thinking it might be better to take you someplace else for the rest of the night.”

  “You heard that stalker, too?”

  “What stalker?”

  More lies, in the form of withheld information. The rigidity of Harris’s arm gave away the fact that he knew much more than he let on.

  “Answering a question with a question won’t get us very far,” Skylar pointed out.

  “Maybe not, but my Jeep will.”

  They reached the car, found the doors unlocked.

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me?” she challenged, facing him over the car’s roof.

  “I don’t want to scare you.”

  “It’s too late for that. Is the rush in honor of a dangerous outlaw on the loose? I have a right to know.”

  “Would that make you get into this car?”

  “I’d just like to know what we’re running from.”

  Harris blew out a breath. “I don’t know what it is for sure, okay? I only know that something is out there, and my job is to keep you safe.”

  The moon was brighter here, away from the trees. Ranger Harris gestured for her to get into the car.

  “I’ll take you to town, where you can get a room for the night,” he said.

  “You, too?”

  “Afraid not.”

  Did he sound regretful about that? Skylar wished she could see his face more clearly.

  “Should I trust you?” she asked. “We’re running from the unknown, but I don’t know you, either. Is it wise to get into a car with you?”

  “True. I am a stranger to you. But at the moment, I solemnly promise you that I’m the lesser of two evils on this mountain.”

  Cooperating, Skylar climbed into the vehicle. The worn leather seats smelled like the great outdoors. Like dirt and greenery and Ranger Harris.