Lori Handeland: Marked by the Moon

Wham!

Alex fell back into her body, still lying on the cot in the horrendously hot, horribly small room. She wasn’t any closer to being released, but from the way her skin felt, too small to contain her, she was much closer to being inhuman.

“Collective consciousness,” she muttered. “God.”

Once a victim is infected, the lycanthropy virus changes him from human to beast. He begins to remember things that have happened to others—the thrill of the chase, the love of the kill, the taste of the blood.

“It’s coming,” Alex said in a voice that no longer resembled her own. Deeper, garbled, she’d heard the sound before.

From the mouths of the soon-to-be-furry.

The pain became more of an itch, a need to burst forth. Alex tried to fight that need but couldn’t. Her dark jeans and black blouse tore with a rending screech; her boots seemed to explode as her feet turned to paws.

Her nose ached; her teeth were too big for her mouth. Then suddenly that mouth became part of the nose, and those teeth felt just right.

The bonds restraining her popped. She writhed, contorted, snarled, moaned, and when she at last rolled to the floor, she was no longer human but a wolf.

Alex stared at her paws, covered with fur the same shade as her hair; she didn’t need a mirror to see that her own green eyes stared out of an animal’s face.

The world expanded—sounds sharp as the blade of a knife, smells so intense her mouth watered with desire; she could see every mote of dust tumbling through the air like snowflakes of silver and gold.

Hunger blazed, a pounding pulse in her head. If she didn’t eat soon, if she didn’t kill something, she thought she might go mad.

Then she saw him—there on the floor, trussed up and still. What was his name?

Oh, yeah. Brunch.

Alex took one step forward, and the door crashed open. The silhouette of a man spread across the floor. She skittered back, startled, growling, then lifted her snout and sniffed. Recognition flickered, just out of reach. She knew him, yet still the hair on her neck lifted as the growl deepened to a snarl.

The urge to attack warred with the clawing hunger in her belly. Her head swung back and forth between the two men as her human intelligence weighed the possibilities.

The bound one could wait; he wasn’t going anywhere. Once she took down the newcomer, there’d be twice as much to eat and a lot less to fear.

Her muscles bunched, and she leaped. Before her body began the downward arc that would send her sailing directly into the man in the doorway, a sharp pain bloomed in her chest. Her limbs felt weighted with sand but strangely her mind cleared, and as she tumbled to the ground, she remembered who he was.

Edward .

Now she was definitely dead.

When Alex came around, she was no longer a wolf but a woman. Naked, she lay beneath a blanket on the cot where she’d so recently been tied. The trussed man was gone. Unfortunately, Edward wasn’t.

Tall, thin, pale, Edward Mandenauer, the leader of the Jäger-Suchers, didn’t appear concerned to be in a small room with a woman able to sprout fangs and a tail. Probably because such things had been happening to him for more than sixty years.

With the rifle slung over his back, a pistol in hand, and a bandolier of bullets across his cadaverous chest, Edward was, as usual, ready for Armageddon.

“It has been a long time,” he murmured.

You’d think that after residing in the United States for better than half a century, his heavy German accent would have faded. Everything else about him had. His once-blond hair was now white, his eyes pale blue, his skin paper-fine. It never ceased to amaze Alex that the man’s kill count was twice her own. Or at least it had been when she’d still been required to count.

She sat up, uncaring when the blanket pooled at her waist. A few hours ago she would have been mortified, which only proved she’d changed in more ways than one.

She felt damn good. Any minor aches and pains were gone. Energy pulsed within her, the buzz reminiscent of the one time she’d tried to unplug a cheap motel hair dryer while still sopping wet from the shower. Zap! She’d never done that again.

The world seemed so much more there . Alex could feel the air on her skin, hear every breath Edward took; if she listened she could probably distinguish the dull thud of his ancient heart and the slow flow of blood through his veins. She bet she could smell it.

Lifting her nose, Alex sniffed, then licked her lips. Edward lifted his gun.

So it was going to be like that.

“Let’s get this over with.” Alex repeated the same words to Edward that she’d so recently used with the wolf man, even as her gaze slid to the left, the right, searching for a way out. Though her mind had accepted the inevitability of her death, her body quivered with the possibility of escape.

“Get what over with?” Edward asked.

“My unavoidable demise. I suppose you want me to grow pointy ears and a snout again so you have less to explain after you shoot me in the head.” Although Edward never had much of a problem explaining anything—one of his many talents.

“I’m not going to shoot you in the head, Alex.”

“Chest then. Whatever.”

“If I was going to shoot you with silver, I wouldn’t have bothered with the tranquilizer dart.”

Then why had he?

For that matter, why had she shape-shifted again? A werewolf must ingest human blood under the full moon before morphing back into a person, and after the initial change only a kill would do. Otherwise madness was the result.

Alex ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. She probably had a raging case of halitosis but no blood breath. She was also way too calm for a just-made wolf, and while she did feel different, she didn’t feel crazy or evil. Sure, if she had a chance to get away, she’d take it, and if that meant going through Edward, she wouldn’t cry about it. But that was simply survival.

Alex studied the old man, who lifted his bushy white brows as if waiting for her to catch up. Eventually, she did. “What did you do to me?”

He held up an empty syringe.

Ah-ha!

Edward had his very own Dr. Frankenstein on the payroll—a virologist who’d spent a lot of time trying to cure lycanthropy. The main reason Alex had left the Jäger-Suchers was their edict that agents give werewolves a choice of being cured or being killed. In her book they didn’t deserve a second chance. Her father hadn’t gotten one. Hell, her mother hadn’t, either.

“You cured me?” she asked. Alex didn’t feel cured; she felt a little wolfy.

Edward shook his head. “I gave you a serum that removes the bloodlust, at least for a little while.”

“Handy. Why don’t I feel possessed?”

“It takes time for the demon to awaken. At first a new werewolf is confused, crazed. Most do not have access to this.” He lifted the syringe again. “The more you kill, the better you will like it. Soon there is no going back, and you do not want to.”

He pocketed the syringe, then removed a sheet of paper from another pocket and laid it on the table. “You will look at this.”

Though Edward giving her orders made Alex’s teeth ache—or maybe that was just because she was grinding them together with so much more force than she used to have—nevertheless she stood and crossed the tiny room, leaving the blanket behind. She didn’t like how it felt against her humming skin.

The sound that rumbled out of Alex’s throat at the sight of the drawing wasn’t even close to human. The man portrayed in the sketch wasn’t, either. He’d been a werewolf when he bit her.