Moonbound (Moonfate Serial Book 1) Page 2

  A bear roars.

  Oh, please, no.

  I clench my fists, waiting for their screams and the crunching of bone, but it never comes. Instead, their shadows begin to fade.

  “Mom!” I yell. I lean all my weight into the tent, but it doesn’t move.

  The firelight flickers out and all at once darkness consumes my parents’ shadows. And they’re gone.

  “No, Momma!” I scream, using a word I haven’t spoken since I was small enough to fit in my mother’s arms as she whispered special lullabies just for me. She said she’d love me forever. She promised. “Please don’t leave me!” I tug at the zipper of the tent, my muscles practically tearing from the effort. It doesn’t give.

  Suddenly, the temperature around me plummets, and my whole body burns with the abrupt transition; I don’t care. “Dad!”

  Silence. And then a response, but not my parents’. A low, melodic howl arches through the air. I freeze. I know the sounds of my parents’ killers’ cries, and that’s not one of them.

  With one last yank so hard I practically dislocate my shoulder, I finally open the tent flap, and the force of it sends me tumbling out into a clearing that is not my parents’ campsite. Snow flurries through the air, coating the primeval pines around me in white. Beyond their branches is a moon so full it devours half the sky.

  “Mom! Dad!” I take one cautious step forward. “Where are—“

  I stop.

  There, standing on a crop of jagged boulders, is a wolf.

  Oh, God.

  I fall back, but only get two steps before a frozen stick cracks beneath my feet.

  The wolf’s gaze whips toward me.

  And I know. Oh, how I know. It’s him. It’s my mate.

  I can’t move. His gaze pins me in place with a lazy, predatory intensity that instantly burns my blood. Maybe it’s his eyes; the longer I look at them the stranger they seem. They flicker with the colors of the aurora, one instant green, the next blue.

  With a long satisfied growl he leaps to the ground. Snow plumes around his white paws and he pants, low and rhythmic.

  The heat in my belly pulses in time with his breath and radiates out to my fingertips. I can’t think, can’t move, can’t even dream of being anything else but his perfect prey. I hunger for it, the oblivion of being consumed by something primal, like a snowflake dissolving into the sea.

  How had I ever thought a gun would help against that?

  He lifts onto his hind legs, and it starts.

  First the shadows come, gathering at his paws, mixing with the snow, twisting around his body like dark vines as his form lengthens and stretches. Fur contracts to reveal thick ropes of pure muscle. Soon I’m sure the only hairs he has left are the messy platinum strands on his head.

  His body is smooth and defined, and as he straightens, I can’t help but notice the perfect pelvic V below his six-pack. It points down to a tuft of pale pubic hair.

  He isn’t hairless everywhere after all.

  I blush and look up.

  His snout has shrunk, revealing a jaw so strong it shouldn’t be as beautiful as it is and full lips curved into the suggestion of a smirk. Only his eyes remain the same, wide and full of some emotion I can’t name. I’d almost call it relief. But then it’s gone as his pupils expand with desire. Another shock of need throbs through my lips, making it clear that I’ve never wanted anything more. But something swells at the back of my mind. Something important. Something I’m forgetting.

  He opens his mouth and his deep, gravelly baritone scrapes the air. “Hello there, Little Mate.”

  “I—I’m not your mate.”

  He prowls forward, sizing me up like I am the wild animal. One he has no doubt he can tame. “What would you like me to call you, then?”

  “My name is Artemis,” I say slowly. It doesn’t even occur to me to lie.

  “Artemis.” He claims every syllable with his tongue.

  “You’re not real,” I rasp. “This is all just a dream.”

  “Of course it is, but we are such stuff as dreams are made of. You and I.” He gives an exaggerated wave with his right hand, and I notice a crescent of white fur there. Just like mine.

  “See you soon.” His tongue darts out to wet his velvety lips. “Artemis.”

  And I remember.

  In order for my mate to affect my dream, he has to be close to me in real life. And what’s worse, just like the light, I’m fading too. I’m waking up.

  And he is very, very real.

  Chapter Three

  Everything is white. I blink. For one crazy moment I’m convinced I’m still in the snowy forest, but then, as my gutted childhood bedroom comes into focus, I realize I’m staring at a ceiling. I’m awake.

  Something’s different, though. But what?

  As I roll onto my side, my pulse slows enough that it’s no longer deafening.

  That’s when I see a gaunt shadow lurking in the doorway, illuminated by an afternoon sun. My mate. The shadow must be him.

  I need to get my gun.

  With a speed wrought from fear, I careen over the side of my bed and grab the duffle next to it. I unzip it and pull out the gun from its nest of clothes.

  “Artemis?”

  I cock back the magazine the way I learned in YouTube videos.

  “Artemis!”

  The voice is familiar, and it’s not my mate’s. Bullets tumble from my trembling fingertips and into the clothes. The gun soon follows.

  I look up. Lawrence, my roommate, stands at the foot of my air mattress. I pull my tank top and a pair of harem pants over the gun and bullets to cover it up, breathing hard.

  “Artemis. Calm down,” Lawrence soothes.

  I can’t believe I ever mistook Lawrence for a were. My roommate is everything a were is not—willowy where they’re square, delicate where they’re thick. Not to mention the were in my dream was a white wolf and Lawrence is the color of burnt coffee. He looks especially thin today, bony arms akimbo, hands on his tiny, skinny-jean-clad hips.

  The dream has messed me up, but panic overwhelms my guilt. My weremate might not be in my room, but he has to be close. There's no other way he could’ve been in my dream. ”The doors?”

  “Locked.” Lawrence breezes over to me and offers me a hand.

  I look at it skeptically. “The windows?”

  He tilts his head in the direction of my bedroom window, which is shut. “What do you think?”

  I take his hand and pull myself upward onto the air mattress. “What about on Tracker?”

  He joins me, crossing his legs daintily at his ankles. “Tracker’s had no alerts of nearby weres in the last minute.” He pulls out a black smartphone almost as large as a paperback and about six years out of date. Holding it out to me, he hits the blue Tracker app icon and a map of our street pops up. “No red dots.”

  I sigh and squeeze his hand in thanks. His presence takes the edge off my anxiety, but doesn’t eliminate it entirely. Nothing does. “When was the last time you refreshed?”

  To Lawrence’s credit he doesn’t roll his eyes, just calmly touches the edge of the screen. No new red dots appear.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I mumble, half trying to placate him, half trying to gather my thoughts. Out of the corner of my eye I notice his phone has an alert for fifty-three unread text messages. Jesus, and I thought I had relationship phobia. Lawrence has got to start replying to his one-night stands or at least block them.

  Lawrence, however, has something else on his mind. He kicks under the bed. “What's this?”

  “What?” I run my hand through my bedhead of blonde curls. If my mate isn’t close, how did he come into my dream?

  Lawrence reaches under the bed, pulling out the duffle. “This.”

  At first I think he’s pointing at the nest of yellow Post-it notes lining the bag with bold Sharpie messages like, “Remember who killed them.” But then he moves aside a tank top to reveal the gun underneath.

  Shit.

&nbs
p; Lawrence frowns, picks up the gun, and turns it over in his hand with expert care. “At least you still have the safety on.” He does a good job of keeping the hurt out of his voice, but I can see it in the way his eyes turn down at the edges. With a guy as composed as Lawrence, even the whispers of gestures feel like screams.

  He must be thinking about John. His first boyfriend died in a drive-by. I’m not the only one who’s lost someone, and me almost pointing a gun at him is the equivalent of him bringing a werewolf to dinner.

  God, I’m an asshole.

  “Jesus, Lawrence, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  His long eyelashes flutter as he inhales and closes his eyes before gently laying the gun back down in the duffle bag. “Why did you buy it?”

  “There have been more of them around lately,” I say.

  “Mm.”

  Watching the tight edges of his mouth, I decide I’m not going to keep anything from him. “My dream was different last night.”

  His eyes open and he tilts his head, evaluating me. “How?”

  “I saw…” I swallow, not wanting to say the words out loud, not wanting to make them real. ”I think I saw my mate.”

  His eyebrows raise only a fraction of an inch, but for Lawrence that passes for astonishment. “And you woke up from the dream, saw me in the doorway, and…”

  “Yeah.”

  A wistful smile flashes across his face. “I'm flattered. All my work at the gym must be paying off. Let no one say a V-positive can’t look hot.”

  I can't even summon a weak laugh. “I'm so, so sorry, Law.”

  “It’s done.” His words aren’t a forgiveness, but the way he places his hand over mine and rubs it with his thumb is.

  “Thanks,” I say, meaning it in a way most people don’t. We may not tell each other everything, but the things we do share, we share completely. Our friendship is made of these brief moments, perfect islands of intimacy in vast oceans of secrets.

  His thumb pauses. “Just promise me you’ll be careful with it.”

  “I will,” I say throatily. But I know that a gun is useless. Not when the real enemy isn’t my mate, but the feelings he wakes inside of me.

  “Good.” Lawrence pats my hand one last time before standing up. “I’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s in an hour, and then I’m getting ready to shoot a wedding tomorrow.” He stretches, and I can count every bone in his ribcage through his semi-transparent orange tank top.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask. Lawrence shouldn’t be taking the bus, but I can’t call him a cab. I spent everything on the damn gun.

  “Perfectly fine.” He gives a too-open smile, his sharp white teeth contrasting with his dark skin and darker eyes. “Just a routine checkup.”

  “Any, you know…issues?” I look down at my wide, bare feet. We don’t call his disease by its real name…vampirism. Being V-positive is perhaps the only label worse than werebeast or weremate.

  “No.” His grin is gone, replaced by the same impassive expression.

  Lawrence is either the most honest person I’ve ever met or the best liar. Then again, I try not to pry, even though we’ve been roommates and semi-vagabonds together since we met at that dirty McDonalds, both fed up with our situations, and ran away together on a whim.

  “What are you doing today?”

  “Probably getting dressed, then the dishes, then work.”

  “You mean you’re going to check Tracker twenty million times and probably chew off the rest of your manicure before you finally throw on one of those black outfits.”

  “That’s what I said.” I offer my signature facial expression: something between a smile and a pout. I call it a smout.

  “Just don’t pick the harem pants this time. You’re too hot to look like a genie from the nineties, Artemis.”

  “At least I don’t look like a hipster road sign.” I wonder if he chose to wear hazardous colors on purpose. Unless he gets regular blood transfusions, he’s deadly, so it kind of makes sense.

  “Better a road sign than a burglar. If I dressed like you, I’d be arrested,” says Lawrence.

  “You would drown in my clothes before you could even get out the door.”

  He smiles at me with Zen condescension. “You’d save me.”

  “I’ll always save you, Law,” I promise, going for melodramatic, but somehow ending up sounding sincere.

  “I know.” He slips out the door.

  I roll over to my nightstand and grab my charging laptop. It may be bright pink and scuffed around the edges, but it’s the best and oldest protection I have against weres. Far better than any gun.

  The instant I touch my computer I feel more relaxed. The mystery of how my mate entered my dream without being nearby is a big one, but if growing up in the 2000s has taught me anything, it’s that mysteries don’t last long when confronted with the Internet. Books like Beasts, Blood & Bonds have nothing on that.

  Chapter Four

  The air mattress squeaks underneath me as I lean back into the wall and click the icon of howling wolf encircled by a red scope at the top of the screen. Then the computer screen turns bright white, filling with a map of the city of Rochester, New York, where I live. It looks normal, not a dot anywhere.

  I zoom out a hundred miles until the blue of Lake Ontario consumes most of the top of the display and the Finger Lakes mar the green of upstate New York. They look more like claw scratches to me than fingers, but they’re not what scare me. Everything outside of the city swarms with red dots.

  Holy crap. I knew there were a lot around yesterday, but now it looks like there’s a hundred—at least. Any one of them could be my mate.

  If I listen to Tracker, then the only place that’s safe is where I am, but if I go by my dreams, then my mate has to be close by. It doesn’t make sense; Tracker’s never failed me before.

  After three other campers found me in the woods with my parents’ bodies and called the police, no one listened to my side of the story. No matter how many times I told them that I had heard very human voices, they were adamant in classifying it as a bear attack. No one wanted to believe the werebeasts were back. Not after the territory wars of the eighteenth century.

  Then Timothy Higgins claimed responsibility for my parents’ murders and transformed into a bear on national television. No one knows why. I probably never will. The Federal Bureau of Supernatural Investigation will never let Timothy speak to the public.

  After he confessed, the government started experimenting with his DNA and within only a few years they had a foolproof genetic test for werebeasts. Then it was only a matter of time until they started implementing it and tagging anyone who didn’t pass. The ACLU complained for a while and others said that we should kill them all, but at the end of the day, the government didn’t do anything to werebeasts except track their locations and reinstate an old law that made shifting inside of high-population areas a capital crime.

  The media has fractured into those intrigued by the werebeasts (it doesn't hurt that they’re all very buff men) and those openly distrustful of them, but there’s one thing they all agree on: their disdain for weremates.

  The conservatives consider us sinful traitors to our species, and the liberals call us doormats with a furry fetish. I can’t imagine what would happen if any of them ever found out that Artemis Williams, darling orphan, bears the mark. They’d blame me for my parents’ death, no doubt.

  I shake my head, not wanting to think about it, and scroll out farther, until the entirety of New York State fills the monitor. Then I click on a dot randomly.

  After a second, the site transitions over to Tracker’s other function, a sort of social network called Tracker LITE whose ad costs support the real Tracker. And it gives the government more data to mine too.

  Name: Cal Singh

  Age: 27

  Species: Tiger

  Status: Mated

  My fingers unclench. I hadn’t even noticed they’d been almost peel
ing the keys off the keyboard as I read.

  I scroll through a couple more. Some of the names are familiar; there’s a werecoyote named John in Pittsford, a wereraven named Everett near Menden Ponds, but the closest one, right on the edge of downtown Rochester, is what looks like a werepufferfish named Cooper.

  Wait, what?

  A werepufferfish?

  I double-click on the last one.

  I know that weres can choose where and when they shift unless there’s no moon, and then they can’t change at all, but I still have a hard time imagining exactly how transforming into a fish would work. Does he do it in the swimming pool, or does he have his own personal fish tank?

  I grin, picturing it.

  My grin falters when his profile finishes loading and I see that he has a picture on it. He’s handsome. While his tanned face is round and his dark hair is spiky, any resemblance to his token animal ends there. He’s got that kind of sweet, slightly feminine look that parents trust and a smart, yellow polo shirt to complete the look. His profile, though, is pure assholery. A groan builds in my chest as I read it.

  Dear humanity. My name is Cooper Dunham, and I’m a powerful sea creature. Google ‘pufferfish’ for more info on that. While I’m sure you’re all lining up to get a piece of this fin, I’d ask that you keep the queue orderly and limit yourself to messaging me only if you have a scaled matemark and an interest in becoming my little mermaid. Unless you like Reddit. All hotties who like Reddit and are capable sandwich makers are welcome. Cooper ‘Spiky Fish’ Dunham, out.

  God, even the werepufferfish is a dominating bastard. I’m just about to log off in disgust when I see that one of the red dots on the fringes of the map is moving closer. And closer. And closer. A line traces its last location.

  When I see the figure on the icon, my breath catches.

  A wolf. And the only wolf I’ve seen so far.

  My hand hovers over the track pad, debating whether to click. This wolf is over seventy miles away. He can’t be my mate. There’s no way he could’ve entered my dreams from that great a distance.

  I click and am brought to a bare-bones profile.