Lori Handeland - Marked by the Moon

She could tell by the way he went silent and still that she’d gotten him thinking. She decided to leave him to it.

“I’m going back to Ella’s,” Alex said. If she didn’t sleep soon, she just might fall on her face.

Julian glanced up. “Don’t tell anyone who you are.”

She’d been headed for the door but turned at his arrogant command. “I think that ship has sailed.”

His eyes flared. “Why would you do that?”

“ I didn’t. You introduced me the instant we got into town.”

“Oh.” He let out a quick, sharp breath that blew a stray strand of golden hair away from his face. “Your name. That’s all right. But don’t tell anyone why you’re here.”

“You think your people would mutiny if they discovered you hadn’t followed your own rules? That you made someone against their will?” Alex’s lips curved. “That might be fun to watch.”

He rubbed his forehead. “Do not tell anyone you’re a hunter. Do not tell anyone you know Edward. Specifically do not tell anyone you murdered my wife.” He dropped his hand and looked into her face. “Werewolves can die, Alex, and mine will kill you.”

“They can’t. There’s a fail-safe in the lycanthropy virus that keeps werewolves from killing one another.”

“Not around here.”

Alex stilled. “What?”

“Because I’m different, my virus is different, and so are my wolves. No demon. Also no fail-safe.”

Her eyes widened. “Then how can there be any of you left at all? Why haven’t you torn one another to shreds? Why isn’t there only one wolf left standing?”

“Because we don’t kill for sport. We don’t enjoy it. And while we can kill one another, we don’t want to.”

“But sometimes,” she murmured, staring into his face as she heard what he’d left unsaid, “you have to.”

“It’s the only thing werewolves understand.” Barlow offered to take her back to Ella’s, but Alex refused.

“Even if I didn’t know the way, I could follow my nose,” she said. An appendage that was becoming increasingly useful with each passing day.

During the return trip, which took her along one street, through the square, and halfway down the avenue on the opposite side of town, no less than a dozen villagers greeted Alex.

The place was a hodgepodge of accents and nationalities, races and ages. But one thing she didn’t see were any children.

“Guess that makes sense,” she murmured, considering the conversation she and Barlow’d had earlier.

They all seemed damn glad to see her. Ecstatic almost. Like she was the best thing to happen to Barlowsville in years.

But they wouldn’t be happy, or welcoming, or even civil if they discovered who she was, why she was here —be it Barlow’s reason…or Edward’s.

That knowledge, combined with the town’s excessive friendliness, made Alex feel like the lowest of lying scum. She had to remind herself that this was a town of werewolves, the lowest, lying scum on the planet.

And she was one, too.

Yet she still didn’t want to eviscerate small children. She wasn’t consumed by the urge to rip off the faces of everyone she met—except Barlow. She didn’t feel evil. She felt like…herself. Which went against everything she’d ever believed about werewolves. Sure, Cassandra had said she’d removed “the demon,” but maybe there hadn’t been one there to remove.

Alex reached Ella’s house, climbed the steps, then hesitated. Should she knock? She wasn’t sure. If the door was locked she’d have to.

It wasn’t. Did anyone lock their doors in Barlowsville? Knowing Barlow, the punishment for theft was the removal of a paw with a silver axe. Which should be enough to deter any werewolf with kleptomaniac tendencies.

“Hello?” she called, thrilled when no one answered. Alex had done all the talking she could stand for one day.

She searched through the armoire for pajamas, sweatpants, scrubs, anything to wear to bed that wasn’t the gorgeous cream silk peignoir she found.

No such luck. Since Alex would rather sleep in nothing than that, she did.

The bedroom came equipped with custom shades that blocked the sunlight, or what there was of it, no doubt very handy for those mornings after an all-night run through the woods as a wolf.

Alex planned to sleep away what remained of the day and maybe even the night. What she hadn’t planned on was the dream.

She hadn’t had it for a very long time. She’d begun to hope it was gone. Then she’d begun to fear that it was.

Though the dream always ended badly—because it was a memory as well as a dream—it began with Alex and her father together as they could never be again. And for the short time before the werewolf came, Alex could exist in a world where he was still alive.

Wasn’t that what dreams were for?

They’re having breakfast in a small mountain town in Tennessee when the call comes. The previous night had been busy, and they hadn’t yet gone to bed.

A rash of drownings in the area, combined with tales of a really big snake and a mysterious, decrepit old woman, had precipitated their visit. Sure enough they’d found, then dispatched, a nasnas.

Every culture has a shape-shifter legend. What the common folk don’t know is that those legends are true. For a Jäger-Sucher, legends are the stock of their trade.

A nasnas is an Arabian shifter, which takes the form of an old man or woman and begs for help crossing bodies of water. Once in the water, the nasnas changes into a sea serpent and drags its victim beneath the surface to feed.

To kill one, the victim must yank the head of the nasnas below the water first, then hold it there. Which had proved damn difficult despite the old lady weighing about eighty pounds soaking wet and possessing the bony fingers of a baby bird.

Still, Alex managed. They celebrated with pancakes.

“Full moon tonight,” her father observes, pouring half the syrup in the pitcher atop his Paul Bunyan–size stack.

Alex, being fifteen, widens her eyes. “You think?” She counts the nights between full moons, and so does he.

Charlie doesn’t tell her to behave, be respectful, watch her mouth, or anything of the sort. Charlie pretty much lets her be. He knows the only thing that might save Alex in the long run is being tough, smart, and really, really bitchy.

“Where to?” she asks, carefully pouring syrup on only a portion of her cakes. She doesn’t like them soggy.

“Haven’t heard.” Her father speaks around a mouthful of food, and as he does, his cell phone rings. He pulls it out, glances at the display, lifts it like a toast, and greets the caller with, “Elise.”

Elise Hanover is Edward’s right hand. Alex has never met her, never spoken to her, doesn’t know all that much about her. Elise lives at the Jäger-Sucher headquarters, wherever that is, and spends what time she has that isn’t taken up coordinating the agents and their assignments trying to discover a cure for lycanthropy. Alex has always figured the best cure is to wipe every werewolf from the face of the earth. If there aren’t any left, they can’t make any more.

Of course that hadn’t stopped Hitler.

“Will do.” Charlie shuts his phone and goes back to eating pancakes.

“We’ll do what?” Alex asks.

“Not we’ll,” he corrects. “Will.”

Alex doesn’t think Elise knows that she’s been hunting with her father for two years. Although maybe Edward’s told her. According to her father, Edward knows everything.

“What will we do?”

Charlie smiles, though since the day he went looking for Alex’s mother and came back alone, that smile no longer reaches his eyes. Alex knows he feels guilty, that he believes her mother would be alive today if he’d never been a Jäger-Sucher.