Contents
Title Page
Copyright
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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
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Canticle to the Midnight Moon
Of Wolves and Woods, Book Three
Val St. Crowe
CANTICLE TO THE MIDNIGHT MOON
© copyright 2019 by Val St. Crowe
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
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CHAPTER ONE
I was lying on my bed, and Landon was inside me. We were pressed close, our hearts only separated by inches of skin and bone and fur. Well, a little fur in Landon’s case, anyway. His chest was less furry than the rest of him, which was sort of the opposite of a human man, but I liked it. I liked the fur. I liked everything about him, especially right now.
Landon and I were bonded. The bond had just snapped into place seconds ago, and I was still gasping from the sensation of it. It was a different bond than the bond I felt with the pack or even with Judah. I was still bonded to Judah, who was my werewolf mate and my fellow alpha. But Judah and I weren’t in love, and there was nothing romantic between us.
So, this bond with Landon, it was something completely new. I couldn’t quite feel his emotions the way I could feel the pack. And I had no ability to influence him at all. I wasn’t as in sync with him as I might be with Judah. But the bond went deeper than anything else I had ever felt. It was twined around my heart and my guts, and it had sunk into my marrow. Landon was mine, and I was his, and the intensity of this bond was making it hard to breathe.
“Well,” Landon panted, looking down at me. “That worked.” He rolled off of me, abruptly detaching.
I let out a little noise of disappointment.
He lay next to me, breathing hard, looking at the ceiling. “This mating bond thing? Whoa.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He turned to me. “We’re doing it again. Give me a minute.”
I laughed. “Um, are you serious?”
“Dead serious.” He shut his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, let it out, then opened his eyes. “For one thing, this is the only chance we ever get to do this, so we should make the most of the time we have left. For another, you didn’t finish, and that’s not acceptable.”
“Well, I think I would have, it was only—”
“It’s my fault.” He reached for me, his fingers skimming over my bare skin. “I knew you wanted this bond thing. You said that happened when I climaxed, so I thought we should get that out of the way first.” He cupped one of my breasts. His voice dropped in pitch. “You should be on top.”
I giggled, blushing. “Landon—”
He was tugging at me, pulling me onto his body. “I want to see you, and I want to touch you, and it’ll be easier this way.”
Now, I was lying on top of his body, and I was feeling incredibly shy about all of this. “Look, you don’t have to worry about me,” I muttered. “I don’t need to… to finish.”
“Um, yes, you do.” And now one of his hands was between my legs.
“It’s just, I’ve never done that with someone else around, you know?” And then I blushed harder, because had I just admitted out loud to masturbating? That was so not the sort of thing I should be saying to him. I was mortified.
He was grinning, though. His hand left off from touching me and grabbed my hand instead. “Show me, then.”
“No,” I whispered fiercely. “Landon, I really can’t—”
“Maybe like this?” he murmured.
Was that my fingers or his fingers and what was happening? Screw it, I didn’t care. That was good. I sighed.
“Like that?”
“Mmm,” I said, and I felt vulnerable and frightened of this, and yet eager for it. I could trust Landon. He was my mate.
“Actually,” he breathed, “I can tell. Through the bond, I can feel…” His fingers changed, moved, and suddenly did something incredibly brilliant.
I cried out. “Blood and fangs.”
He muttered something meaningless and soothing at me, something like, “Shh, I got you.” Or maybe, “Let go. That’s it.”
I was moving into a place that wasn’t about words or intelligible noises. It was only about bliss. And in this place, I wanted Landon back inside me, and I reached back to seize him and guide him back there.
He hissed.
And then I was moving, and he was moving, and his fingers were touching me in all the right places, and everything was like colored lights behind my eyelids, and I was lost, building and undulating and and losing all sense of anything in the world that wasn’t me and Landon and our bodies and our pleasure.
I couldn’t say how long it went on. It felt like I was riding the edge of the most perfect sensation in the world. Every movement I made drove it forward, tunneling me into that world of bright lights and sweetness, and I kept pushing for more and more and more.
Finally, I couldn’t take anymore. All the lights burst—like fireworks, like confetti, like sparks in an explosion, and I crashed back into myself.
I collapsed against Landon’s chest, tremors going through my legs and my arms, and he was holding onto me, and I might have been making noise, maybe I was making a lot of noise. Maybe I had been doing that for a while? But I didn’t care. I wasn’t embarrassed.
That had been amazing.
* * *
Now, we were a tangle of exhausted limbs, and we were clinging to each other and kissing and it was all perfect. It was probably the best moment of my life. I had never been this happy, this jubilantly, immaculately happy. I never wanted to let go of him.
But of course, I knew I would have to.
Landon pulled back, surveying me. “I want to look at you again.”
I smiled at him lazily.
“I won’t get to look at you again,” he murmured. “I want to memorize every inch of you.” He traced the curve of my hip.
I leaned forward and kissed him again. “How much longer do you think we have?”
“Not long,” he said. “I can feel the rage mode in there.” He touched the back of his skull. “It’s still contained, but it’s getting stronger.”
“It’s not fair,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But let me
look.”
“I want to look too,” I said.
“You can see me naked any time you want,” he said. “It’s not going to turn you into a crazed monster.”
“I just… I wish there was a way…”
“Shh.” His finger on my lips. Then he dragged it down over my chin and my neck and between my breasts, all the way down to my belly button. “You’re incredible, you know that?”
I thought I was done blushing, but apparently not. “Well, you, you know, you’re—”
“Covered in fur.”
“Which, uh, works for you.” Now, I was really blushing.
He arched an eyebrow.
“It’s, um, it’s kind of sexy. You’re so… wild and untamed and feral.” My voice had gotten throaty.
“Okay, wow.” He kissed me. “There’s no reason a woman should ever think there was anything about the way I looked that was good, but you… I love you.”
“I love you, too. Oh, Landon, I love you so much. I feel like I loved you before, but now it’s like so much more deep and real and—”
“Yeah,” he said in a low, low voice.
And then we were violently kissing for a long time.
Until he pulled back. “Fang it, that’s all the time we got, babe.”
“What?” I said. “The rage mode?”
He nodded. He kissed me again, hard, and then he was crawling off me. “Find your clothes, okay?”
I looked around. I didn’t see any of my clothes. Instead, I just pulled the sheets on the bed up over my shoulders. “Babe?”
He looked up at me. He was fishing his jeans off the floor. He smirked. “What? Too cheesy? You want me to call you something else? Maybe honeypie or sweetheart or my little avocado?”
I burst out laughing. “Avocado? What?”
“My sweet, sweet avocado,” he said.
“Stop it.” I picked up a pillow and threw it at him. Which, of course, made the sheet drop.
He looked at me, and his lips parted and his eyes went cloudy.
“Oh, hell,” I said, pulling the sheets back up as quickly as I could.
“No, I’m good. I’m good,” he gasped, tearing his gaze away from me. “I’m good.”
I drew in a breath.
We were quiet.
He turned away from me and spied his shirt. He grabbed it up off the floor and shrugged into it. “I should probably, um…”
“Landon?”
He looked at me. “Yeah?”
“I like babe.”
He grinned. “Okay.” He pointed at the door. “I’ll let you get dressed, huh?”
“Yeah.”
I wanted to kiss him again.
I didn’t.
CHAPTER TWO
“So?” I said. I was standing on one side of the barrier of the pack’s village and Judah was on the outside. “How’s the protection spell?”
“Yeah, it’s holding,” said Judah. “Yesterday, there was a spot here that was really thin, but now I can’t see through it at all. I have to touch it to bring the barrier down.”
“So, it worked, then,” I said.
Judah stepped through the invisible barrier of the spell to join me. “It did. The spell is strong. And I can feel your bond. I can’t penetrate it, but when I reach out to you, I sense it. It’s very strong.”
I looked away, blushing again. Apparently, all I did was blush now.
“Where is he, by the way?”
“Um, he’s gathering supplies so that we can go after Desta. Which no one should have any reason to object to, not now that the protection spell is back up.”
“Well,” said Judah, “I know that your sister is important to you, so I’m not going to try to convince you not to go. But just because we have a protection spell doesn’t mean that we’ll be safe from the vampires. They might find a way to get to us again.”
I nodded. “I know. But we’re as safe now as we would have been anyway. Are there still people who want to become citizens, move to a new town, give blood to the vampires?”
“They’re not vocal about it if there are,” said Judah. “But you can see how it would be appealing to them. It would be safety.”
“But it would mean that they’d be at the vampires’ mercy, certainly they see that.”
“I hope they do,” he said. “Look, you find your sister as quickly as you can and bring her back. Bring back Ewan and his mate too.”
Yes, it wasn’t only my sister that needed saving, it was my best friend Sinead. She and Ewan, her mate, had been taken along with my sister by a dark figure in a black hooded robe. I should have been able to sense the location of Sinead and Ewan, because they were part of my pack. As their alpha, I was bonded to them. But I couldn’t sense them anymore. Whoever had taken them had done some kind of magic, and they were lost to me. I didn’t have any idea where they were, but we were going to find them.
Me, Landon, and our worst enemy up until now. The former vampire king. Viggo.
We had plans to meet him outside the village that evening at dusk.
Landon complained about working with Viggo and he complained about having to rescue Desta. Landon didn’t like Desta very much, considering that she was a vampire who’d kept him as a blood slave. Desta had thought their bond was real. She’d loved him. Hell, she probably still loved him. She hadn’t been pleased to find out that Landon and I wanted to be together. Now that we were mated, well, I didn’t think she was going to like that.
I’d had to betray my sister for the pack, because I needed a non-werewolf mate to strengthen the protection spell on our village. But I’d also betrayed her for myself, because I loved Landon, and I wanted to be mated to him more than anything on earth.
And now I was. I still felt stupendously happy about that.
Yeah, it had been a one-shot deal. The injection Landon had taken could never be used again to suppress his rage mode, so we couldn’t ever have sex again. But we were mated, and that was more important than anything physical. It was enough. It was more than I had ever thought could be possible. I was happy.
“Don’t think about Desta,” I said to Landon. “Think of the others we’re rescuing.”
“What? Aston Waterfield?” he said. “I guess we do owe him since we’re mated now.” Aston Waterfield, who’d created the injection Landon had used, had been captured as well.
“We don’t owe him. He’s the one who created bloodhounds in the first place,” I said. “And he turned you into one. No, I meant Ewan and Sinead.”
“Right,” he said. “Yeah, I don’t mind your best friend. She’s great. I don’t think that Ewan guy likes me, though.”
“That’s just because he thinks you’re going to be making out with me and rage out and tear me to pieces.”
“Well, let’s face it, that could happen,” he said. “Which is why, no making out.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s smart.” I paused. “But an occasional kiss, right? That would be okay.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ve kissed before.”
“Yeah, but that was before,” he said. “Now, I know…” His gaze raked over me, and I could feel pressure through our bond, a hunger that ignited me.
My breath caught in my throat.
Landon turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.
I stayed in the room until the pressure in the bond faded. Was this how it was always going to be? Were we always going to be tortured by wanting something we could never have? Maybe it was going to be worse than I had thought.
* * *
“Oh,” said Viggo. “Well, of course you brought him.” He was standing outside the entrance to the village, dressed in a pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, which was appropriate attire for trekking through the woods, to be sure, but I’d never seen him in something so casual.
Landon and I were similarly dressed. We had bags slung over our backs. It was dusk, and we were ready to leave.
“I didn’t mention Landon was com
ing along?”
“I’m only here to rescue her best friend,” said Landon. “And because I feel vaguely indebted to Aston Waterfield. But only vaguely, as it’s been pointed out he did turn me into a monster.”
Viggo made a face like something smelled bad. “What does Aston have to do with anything?”
“I didn’t tell you that either?” I said. “He was captured along with Desta.”
“Personally,” Landon continued, “I couldn’t give a flying fang about Desta. I mean, I guess I kind of care, because I don’t want to see Camber hurt or anything. And you? I don’t want to do anything with you, ever.”
“And I despise you,” said Viggo to Landon. “For breaking Desta’s heart.”
“And I loathe you,” said Landon, “because you’re the one who ordered I be turned into a bloodhound.”
“You’d rather I had let you die?” said Viggo.
“Good point,” I said. “See? There are multiple sides to every story.”
They both glared at me.
I kept talking. “None of us like each other. Well, Landon and I like each other. But otherwise, you know, lots of hatred. So, let’s not dwell on that. Let’s just get this over with and save the people who need saving, hmm?”
Viggo folded his arms over his chest.
Landon pressed his lips together in a firm line.
I rubbed my hands together, taking this for assent. “Okay, well, where should we get started? Viggo, you said you’d found a trail of missing people, all of which had been captured by the dark figure.”
“Yes,” said Viggo. “All the way up to the town of Narthon, we’ve got reports, but after that, there’s nothing. So, I think that the dark figure’s home base must be somewhere between Narthon and Adeline.”
“Well, that seems like a leap,” said Landon.
“We have to start somewhere,” I said. “And that’s close. Now, should we all drive in one car or—”
“Oh, we get to take a car?” said Viggo, looking pleased.
“Unless you want to walk,” I said.
“I’ve been walking ever since I got exiled from my own kingdom,” said Viggo. “Driving is a brilliant idea.”
“Great,” I said. “Well, then, let’s go.” I gestured to one of the pack’s cars. I went around to the driver’s side and Landon went to the passenger’s side.
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