Transient Moon
Gaja J. Kos
Copyright © 2019 by Gaja J. Kos
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-961-94374-7-6
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Published by Boris Kos
Celje
February 2019
Kolovrat Universe
The Lotte Freundenberger series sits at the heart of the “Future” portion of the Kolovrat universe. However, several other works exist in the same sphere.
Each series/standalone title can be read individually, or as a whole for a more complex insight into the universe where myth and reality blend into one.
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PRESENT
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BLACK WEREWOLVES SERIES
Urban fantasy
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Novels:
The Dark Ones
The 24hourlies
The Shift
The Ascension
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Novellas:
Never Forgotten
Chased
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NIGHTWRAITH SERIES
Paranormal romance
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Windstorm
Blackstorm
Nightstorm
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FUTURE
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PARADISE OF SHADOWS AND DEVOTION
Standalone paranormal romance
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LOTTE FREUNDENBERGER SERIES
Urban fantasy
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Shadow Moon
Darkening Moon
Transient Moon
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SHADE ASSASSIN
Urban fantasy
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Shadow World
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DAWN OF KOLOVRAT
Urban fantasy standalone novellas
* * *
Destiny Reclaimed
For Boris.
Because we’ve beaten the odds.
One
Machines beeped away in their gleeful rhythm as I ran on the treadmill, wishing with every step that the screech marking the end of the test would sound through the sweat- and disinfectant-filled space.
It wasn’t that I minded the additional exercise. Far from it. The burn in my muscles was always a gratifying sensation.
But after doing the same damn thing for nearly three months, it was getting kind of tiresome.
“Five more minutes, Lotte,” Agnieszka said from behind her station.
I let out an obligatory groan, but the petite brunette didn’t react. She kept staring intently at the monitors, a travel mug filled with blood that prickled my nose in one hand, a pen with Interspecies Crimes and Relations Agency spelled out on the side in the other. She marked something down on her trusty pad, although for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine just what it could have been aside from SAME.
Same results. Time and time again. Whatever those bastards had done to me while I’d lain unconscious in the lab, it didn’t seem to take. I was still the same werewolf, one with unsettling memories I knew I’d have to deal with eventually.
When that screech finally cut through the air, Agnieszka set her blood on the black rubber coaster and powered down the treadmill. Her white lab coat swished as she skirted around the station to unhook me from the five machines monitoring my vitals—a pleasant change in sound after the beeps that still echoed in my skull. As the vampire got to work, I simply stood there like an obedient test subject, sweating and eyeing the large chrome clock on the wall. The notion transported me back to my middle-school days.
I suppressed a chuckle. Who would have thought school and ICRA had something in common…
Wolves and captivity, even if just for a few hours, weren’t exactly the best of friends.
I peeled my gaze away from the minute hand.
Agnieszka worked swiftly, with the ease of someone who’d been at this job for a while. Not for the first time, I wondered what her profession had been before she joined ICRA upon its inception after the War. She might not look a lot older than me thanks to her vampiric genes halting her aging in her prime, but Agniezska was actually fifty, give or take a few years. She’d lived through the times when vampires, while out to the general population, had been discriminated against. A fanged physician wouldn’t have exactly thriven back then.
“Dopfer said he wants you in for one last examination,” Agniezska said as she cleaned the glue residue off my skin just beneath my collarbone.
I groaned. “I thought I was done for today.”
“Yeah.” She flashed me a sympathetic smile, no fangs in sight, then ran the disinfectant pad across another sticky patch. “But it is just one more day… Wouldn’t do to piss someone off now, would it?”
She had a point. I wasn’t thrilled about being passed around like this, but I reminded myself that I would walk out of those front gates tomorrow morning, liberated from ICRA’s clutches for good.
Maybe one last fight wasn’t such an awful thing after all.
“You know”—I climbed off the treadmill and tugged on the warm ICRA sweatshirt I’d left on a nearby rack—“you’re the one person I’m actually going to miss from around here.”
“Despite the goop I kept smearing all over your skin?”
“Despite that.” I took her hand in mine and squeezed. “Thanks. For being a friend.”
“I think I had just as much to gain as you.” She shrugged, but the warmth in her blue-gray eyes negated the casualness.
I released her hand to snag the small towel and dabbed the sweat off my face. “You mean a reprieve from the assholes?”
Agnieszka’s gaze flickered to the closed door, her lips pressed tightly together as she held in a laugh. It was all the answer I needed.
With a wink, I wiped away the rest of the sweat and tossed the towel in the laundry bin set by the low bench. I plopped down, retied my running shoes, then ambled over to the mirror to fix my drooping ponytail.
Three months and no hairdresser accounted for a style a bit longer than I was used to.
Leaning against her station, Agniezska sought out my gaze in the reflection. “Will you let me know how your results turn out? I swear Dopfer would rather suffocate than spill anything.”
I tightened the band, chuckling. “Sure. We can meet up for coffee sometime, too.”
“I’d like that.”
After a brief hug that only confirmed we were both serious about developing our friendship further, I set out the door. While coming to ICRA’s research facility outside Fürstenfeldbruck was a nuisance I’d rather forget, the same thankfully didn’t apply to my relationship with the brainy vamp. Even when we had been no more than an ICRA physician and her subject, Agniezska had carried an air of compassion and comfort around her none of the others treating us shared.
Needless to say, we clicked very early on.
I stopped by the water cooler on my way to the training halls that took up about as much space as the medical center. ICRA had really spared no expenses setting the complex up. Even my resentment wasn’t enough to chase away the thread of appreciation for what they’d done here.
Had to be the CEO in me speaking.
I placed the plastic cup under the warm water tap, then topped it with just a touc
h of cold to get the perfect temp. Melina had once explained how frigid drinks depleted a person’s natural body energy, and the tip had stuck with me ever since. So I sipped my slightly hotter than lukewarm water, leaning against the wall with one shoulder, and allowed myself a short reprieve.
Dopfer would probably be pissed, but if he’d wanted me to be on time, he shouldn’t have set such a tight schedule.
Several scientists and agents passed by as I bided my time before my face-to-face with the hard-ass trainer, none of them paying me any particular attention. Even without the final results on the state of my body, I knew I wasn’t considered a threat. Just a were who’d been experimented on. Much like Greta, who’d actually been released early thanks to her agent status.
But whether free or on the verge of it, my sister and I had gotten off easy.
Most of the victims we’d rescued from that wretched facility, on the other hand, weren’t as lucky. Of course, nobody said anything to me directly, but Greta had passed on bits and pieces of information whenever we met in the canteen. There were days I almost wish she hadn’t…
I winced and threw the plastic cup in the trash. I’d spent enough nights agonizing over what we could have done differently to get to those supes sooner—especially the ones who’d been drained to the point that left them lying in a coma two floors up with chances of recovery about as slim as snowfall in May.
“Freundenberger,” a man’s voice growled from the end of the hallway.
Crap.
Dopfer.
I put on my best innocent face and crossed the distance between us in record time. Though with the way everyone in the hallway suddenly had somewhere else to be, it wasn’t all that hard.
Clearly, Dopfer terrorized more than just the rookies. A thought that was as disturbing as it was comforting.
His steel gray eyes narrowed on me.
It was an effort not to squirm.
“Just wrapped up with Agnieszka—Dr. Kaski,” I offered quickly, although it was clear by the look on his face that he hadn’t bought my slightly altered truth.
And I was about to pay for it.
Like a scolded pup, I trailed behind Dopfer through three sets of swinging doors. I kept my gaze fixed on the agent’s back—not a statement or anything of the sort, just the natural consequence of him being fucking huge. The man was half-Leshy, but instead of their size-shifting abilities, he had inherited only the woodland spirits’ giant form. Well, that and the uncanny ability to cast illusions.
Which Dopfer wasted no time ensnaring me in.
The spacious training room we’d entered was there one moment, then gone the next. A creepy, dystopian landscape replaced the walls, floor, and ceiling, far more real than any nightmare a person’s imagination alone could conjure. I couldn’t help the light huff that escaped my lips.
Even for Dopfer, this was a bit dramatic.
Without waiting for his command, I shrugged off my ICRA sweatshirt and tossed it on what appeared to be the remnants of a building. The fabric caught on something and stayed there—possibly the high bench buried beneath the product of Dopfer’s mind.
I spun around to ask him what he had in store for me today, but the man was nowhere in sight. There was someone else though.
A mean-looking shadow of a man, his murderous gaze pinned on my solitary figure.
Great, I thought dryly even as a whisper of trepidation slithered down my spine.
Another parry with Kveder was just what I needed.
After a couple of slow exhales, I cracked my neck and twisted my body to stretch the kinks from my back. Then lunged.
Kveder sidestepped my attack, my fist only grazing his corded arm. Power electrified the air.
Shit.
Being a Blud, disorientation was Kveder’s specialty. And combined with Dopfer’s illusions, keeping my grasp on my surroundings proved strenuous enough to give me a mean headache on a good day.
Today wasn’t it.
I gritted my teeth and focused on the sounds, the scents—the slight shifts that indicated Kveder’s movement. My werewolf traits certainly helped, but not by much. The Leshy magic cloaked his figure one moment, uncovered it the next, but the real gem was when Dopfer created mirror images, surrounding me with a creepy set of matching Kveders.
Fortunately, Dopfer’s replicas of the Blud’s scent were fainter than the original, though my mind swam nonetheless thanks to the power Kveder had tainted the air with, fucking up my internal compass. These exercises really gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘pushing someone to their limits.’
I feinted fighting the fake Kveder on my right, then lashed out with a foot when the real Kveder approached.
His oof was music to my ears, but I didn’t let myself savor the moment. Instead, I attacked, blocking his blows while forcing a couple of mine to go past his defenses. One of them caught him straight across the orbital rim, the copper tang of blood exploding through the air and working like a beacon.
Naturally, it was then that Dopfer upped his game.
The illusions around me shifted and changed, becoming thicker, more oppressive. Nausea rolled through me as every fucking thing spun then undulated, Kveder turning into nothing more than a rippling smudge.
I knew what they were doing. What they wanted to achieve. But like all those bloody times before, I couldn’t access any additional powers aside from those I already had. Werewolf ones.
If there was some other force locked in my body, it seemed more than happy to let me collapse on the ground and wait patiently while Kveder beat me into a fucking pulp.
Not that I had any intention of letting that happen.
I crashed down on all fours of my own accord, then closed my eyes to focus on the senses that were at least moderately accurate. Moderately being a term I used loosely.
Dopfer had really gone all out for this little farewell party. If it hadn’t been for the traces of blood not even the best illusion could duplicate—not those finer threads my werewolf nose could pick up on—I would have been utterly fucked.
As it was, when the Blud charged me and released another blast of power aimed at shattering my orientation, I threw myself into a backward roll, then jammed my feet into his stomach. Kveder hit the wall—that was one sound I heard clearly—and before he could get up, I sprang on him, pinning him down with all the strength I could muster.
“Well done.” Dopfer’s voice came from behind, and the illusion dropped. “You’re cleared, Freundenberger.”
A grunt was the only response I could give him as I staggered to my feet, then used every ounce of my preternatural speed to get my queasy ass to the bathroom in time as my stomach revolted.
An hour later, I was still fighting the headache Dopfer’s little test had stirred. The ginger tea I made myself in the cafeteria helped stem the residual nausea enough that I managed to eat a few bites of plain white bread, but I knew there was only one true cure for what I was feeling.
I closed my eyes against the cool February sun as I exited the building and inhaled deeply. The wind carried the fragrant scent of the woods stretching just beyond the parking lot and outdoor training grounds, beckoning me to enter. I stripped off my clothes and placed them in a neat pile inside the locker attached to the wall. Although I harbored no great love for ICRA, I had to admit they were at least considerate of the needs of the various species they employed.
No werewolf in their right mind would refuse running these woods, and it was nice to know our clothes would be safe from the elements while doing so.
Brisk air rolled across my skin and made me shiver for that split second before the warmth of the change washed over my body. The world became sharper, clearer, my mind free of those pesky thoughts I would never have been able to quiet down while in human form. The wolf, however, didn’t care for trivialities in light of the pure beauty nature had to offer.
I lolled out my tongue to sample the air, then started running. The deeper I went into the shadowed embrace of
the forest, the more snow crunched under my paws—an entrancing melody that eased my very soul. I pushed on, eager to drink in more of the exquisite solitude.
A small frozen creek came into sight ahead. I leaped over the ice, then dashed up the light incline before looping back. Only instead of passing over the stream locked in glistening stasis again, I followed it all the way to where it thawed under the caresses of the sun filtering through the trees. Unlike my human mind, the wolf didn’t care about body energy.
I lowered my muzzle to the water, shuffled aside rogue chips of ice, and drank.
Engrossed in the way the cool liquid calmed my heated flesh, I hadn’t noticed a damn thing until a pair of arms wrapped around my pelt and lifted me effortlessly off the ground.
No, actually, it was the ground that went away.
Along with the rest of my reality.
Two
Having my body blasted into particles was something I had become accustomed to over the past months. But I’d never been quite as worn out before as I was today.
Nor did I ever manage to shift along the way.
“You do know that I’m being released tomorrow, right?” I half laughed, half swallowed the new surge of queasiness that overcame me once my very human feet landed on solid ground.
Afanasiy brushed the tangle of blonde hair away from my face, his violet gaze consuming me with such need and affection that the streak of nausea quickly became a thing of the past.
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