Kissed by Moonlight

Chapter Eight





When doing something illegal I liked to hum the song from Mission Impossible beneath my breath. It was my version of “Whistle While You Work,” and it made the lock picking aspect of the evening go much more smoothly. Granted, I’d never been very fast with picking a lock, and the one that Gabriel had on the door to his inner office was more advanced than I had given it credit for. Luckily, I wasn’t in a rush.

It had been a simple matter to make my way back through the building after hours. My security clearance as Gabriel’s personal assistant meant that entering my employee ID and fingerprint got me through pretty much any locked door. A cheery wave and bag of doughnuts for the night guard and I was in, as simple as that. By far, the hardest part of my night had been the ache in my knees from kneeling in front of the lock for so long.

It was all worth it when I heard the soft “click” that meant I’d gotten through. Grinning, I stuffed the lock pick back into my oversized purse. Reaching out to turn the lock, I paused as something reached my ears.

It sounded like…voices?

Scrambling now, I got to my feet, my hand clutching my bag against my chest to keep the contents from clanking around and giving me away. Halfway back across the room, I heard the door separating my office from Gabriel’s open. Cursing beneath my breath, I changed direction and stumbled in the dark until I found the conference table. I’d just hidden beneath it when the lights flickered on.

“It’s almost time. Is everything ready?”

Gabriel.

I felt myself pale.

“Security says the last of the stragglers came in about half an hour ago. The alarm is set, the cells are locked, and the task force just arrived to help deal with the Specters.”

Specters?

Cells?

Above and beyond my concern over those two phrases however, one thing that Marcus had said made alarm bells start going off in my noggin.

Task force.

Gabriel’s specialized task force was patrolling the building. Even if I could make it out of the office now, how the hell was I supposed to make it past them? For a moment, all I could do was sit there and curse Gabriel and Marcus Evans for being a pair of no good, dirty liars. If they had just gone out of town like they were supposed to, I could have infringed on their privacy without all this added stress.

From beneath the table, all I could see of either man were their legs. I was as far back as I could get without coming out at the other side, so I had no concerns that they would see me. Especially since it looked like they were heading towards the inner office without any hesitation. They’d almost reached the door when one pair of legs stopped. I’m ashamed to admit that I recognized who said appendages belonged to, and his voice confirmed it.

“Do you smell that?” Gabriel asked, voice lowering.

His question brought Marcus to a standstill, and I froze as the other man inhaled deeply.

“Yes.” The words were a growl, a hungry little rumble, as if he’d caught a whiff of his favorite meal on the air.

My nails bit into my palms and I held my breath.

They might have gone on standing there for an eternity, both eerily still, bodies tense, if the emergency lights for the fire alarm hadn’t begun to flash. They blinked once, twice, three times. Blood-red eyes in the corner of the room. The flash was enough to drag Marcus, at least, from whatever it was that they’d scented in the room.

“Shit.” He began to move again and this time he made it to the door without distraction. “Come on, Gabe. They’re almost here.”

If I had expected Gabriel to be as easily distracted as his brother, I was obviously mistaken. Instead of following Marcus through the door (he didn’t seem to notice that it had already been unlocked), Gabriel had wandered even closer to the conference table.


I watched his footsteps approach. Noted the silent way he moved as if he were floating on air rather than simply putting one foot in front of the other.

“Gabriel!”

A beat of silence passed, and in that moment all I could hear was the sound of my pulse racing in my ears.

“I think I’m going to hunt tonight.”

“You can’t-”

“I wasn’t asking permission.” Gabriel’s voice was cold, and I imagined Marcus flinching back at the sound. When he replied, he sounded stiff, almost formal.

“Then I’ll accompany you.”

“No.”

“I insist.”

“I won’t shift, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Marcus snorted, “I’d be more worried if you didn’t shift. Especially tonight, of all nights.” He hesitated. “Are you sure about this?”

Gabriel’s chuckle was dark and smooth. Sin given a sound. “Positive.”

“Fine. I’ll see you in the morning. Good hunting.”

“Thanks.”

I listened as Marcus finally stepped back into the inner office and shut the door. I heard the lock engage, and some of the tension bled out of me. One down, one more to go. Only, when I looked back towards where I’d last seen Gabriel, he was no longer there. Cautious, I moved forward an inch to see if he’d simply traveled beyond my sight, but he was nowhere. The room was empty.

The fact that I couldn’t see him anymore was enough to give me the chills, and trying to keep quiet, I crawled backwards. Hoping to come out at the other side of the table so that I could at least have the window at my back.

He had me before I knew he was even there.

One second I was sneaking my way towards freedom, and the next, something grabbed me by the ankle and jerked me out from beneath the table. Opening my mouth, I took a deep breath to scream, only to choke when Gabriel slapped a hand over my mouth and loomed over me.

I was laid out flat beneath him, my breathing fast and ragged, and adrenaline coursing through my blood like the sweetest drug. I looked into his eyes from less than an inch away, and as I watched, he slowly raised his free hand to his lips.

“Shhh,” he breathed, gaze unblinking.

I nodded quickly and he took his hand away from my mouth. His amber eyes seemed bright. Too bright. They glistened with fever. His skin was flushed, and I’d remembered just how hot he’d felt in the brief moment we’d been skin to skin.

He shook his head, and his expression was sad. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

There was something strange about him tonight. A restless, eager energy. As if he couldn’t bear to stay in one place for too long. Even as he straddled me, I could feel the way his fingers clenched and the way the muscles in his thighs bunched and quivered like a runner waiting for the shot.

His eyes though…they never strayed from my face. The longer he watched me, the richer the amber in them grew and the darker the world became. I stared into his eyes, and it was as if they were all there was. My vision began to darken around the edges, and all I could see was a long dark tunnel and those eyes at the end of it, calling me home.

I don’t know what it was that he heard. It was too faint for me to catch. I know the lights flickered in the room before going out and casting us both in darkness. In that instant he froze above me, head lifting, and body tensing until he was nothing more than corded muscles and brutal focus.

I drew in a shaky breath and tried not to whimper.

When he looked down at me, all I saw in the darkness of the room were those glowing amber eyes, as rich as old blood and flickering like flames.

“Run.” His voice didn’t even sound human anymore, but I didn’t need him telling me what common sense had been screaming at me to do for the last five minutes.

Then, between one heartbeat and the next, he was gone.

I heard something chuckle in the deeper recesses of the room. A sound like sandpaper on baby’s flesh or broken bones running through a woman’s hair. I wanted to look. I almost needed to look. To see what sort of…thing, could make a sound like that. What sort of monster could conjure images of death and bloodshed during a fit of mirth.

But something told me not to. That whatever it was in the room with me was better left to nightmares and horror stories. So, for once, instead of giving in to my insatiable curiosity, I did the smart thing.

I ran.

* * * *

I didn’t have an explanation for what had gone on in the office, but then again, I didn’t need one. All I needed to know was that some Twilight Zone shit was going down, and I did not want to be in the middle of it.

Here’s the thing.

I’m not dumb.

As a journalist I’ve heard some pretty fantastical stuff during the course of my career, and as a child of the 90’s I’d grown up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reading all the Harry Potter books just like everyone else. My generation was the poster child of freaky occurrences and preternatural phenomenon.

You don’t have to keep shoving evidence in my face before I get the picture.

Conversations about “shifting” and “hunting,” coupled with glowing animal eyes and super fast reflexes?

If it looked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then guess what?

It was a probably a goddamned werewolf.

So I ran, and I didn’t look back. I ran until I hit the wall of elevators, and instead of waiting around for one of them to ding open and allow me entrance, I bypassed them all and took the emergency stairs instead. Now, I know in most horror movies this would be the point in which the bad guy would enter the stairwell and try to slaughter the heroine that sought safety there.

Turns out you can learn a lot from horror movies, because that’s exactly what happened.

In my haste to escape the office, I’d completely forgotten about the task force that had been let loose inside the building. I made it down two flights of stairs, tripping over my own feet in my desperate need to move faster, and faster still. When I made it to the third floor landing, I stopped so quickly I stumbled and fell back on the steps I’d just stepped off of.

On the landing before me stood a wolf.

It. Was. Massive.

Its head came up to my chest, and its paws were so big they could slice me open with a single swipe. At the sound of my sudden approach its hackles had gone up, so when I met it face to face it was already ready to go for my jugular while I was still reeling from the sight of it. It didn’t growl or bark. In fact, it made no sound at all. It just stood there, silent and ready, canines exposed and dark red tongue licking along its chops as if it could already feel my bones crushing between its teeth.

A man stood beside the wolf, decked out in all black tactical gear that matched his partner’s jet black fur as if they’d color coordinated on purpose. But the man wasn’t the one openly snarling at me, so I paid him no mind. Granted, the 9mm in his right hand was probably cause for concern.

But one disaster at a time.

I saw the wolf’s muscles tighten, and then it was leaping across the space that separated us. I cried out and threw myself out of the way, but it hadn’t been aiming at me. It had been aiming for the thing behind me. I turned just as the two collided, and to my rising horror it was the wolf who cried out in agony.

The thing on the steps just above me was a creature of fractured light. Its edges were too soft. More smoke than flesh. It was ever changing and stretching out of the corner of your eyes as it tried to form some semblance of a body. Its eyes were stretched, bottomless pits that sucked up all the light around it so that the space in which it stood was nothing more than a trembling emptiness where only silence should have been. I couldn’t make out a mouth at first, but as soon as the wolf made contact with the thing, the creature opened its jaws, shadow flesh clinging and ripping apart from itself to reveal a hungry, gaping maw that made something young and vulnerable in me begin to scream.


The wolf couldn’t pull away from the creature, in fact, the more it struggled the thicker the shadows grew, growing and crawling over the now whimpering wolf’s flesh, until it was covered in an oily sheen that seemed to breathe. A second skin with a mind of its own.

Soon the creature had an ally, and the wolf, now coated in chuckling shadows turned on both the man with the gun and me with hell blazing from its yellow eyes.

Cursing, the man in tactical gear opened fire on both wolf and shadow creature. I only stayed long enough to see that the bullets never hit their target, wolf and creature disappearing into the dark recess of the stairwell as if they’d never been.

I came down the stairs so fast I was essentially falling, and I leapt past the task force member just as something reached out of the shadows to his left and pulled him screaming in with it. He got off another shot or two that ricocheted in the stairwell, before I heard flesh tear, wet and thick.

Silence reigned but for the desperate little whimpering I couldn’t help but make as I continued my flight down the stairs. Now that I knew what they could do, what they could hide, I flinched at every shadow, muffled a scream at every creak of the stairs, or moaning sigh on the air.

Dimly, I could make out the sounds of gunfire and howls from lower floors, but I couldn’t focus on it right then. The only thought in my head was that I had to get out of the stairwell before whatever had snatched that man snatched me too.

So I pushed through the next door I came to, almost sobbing in relief when I fell into a hallway flooded with light. To my left came the sound of gunfire, and even as I watched the lights in the ceiling begin to flicker and go out one by one. To my right were elevators, and without further thought, I dove for them and punched the down button. I pressed the button over and over again, my breath hard and fast and my skin tightening in terror.

Each time I looked over my shoulder, the lights had gone out for yet another foot of the hall. In my eyes the hallway became the jaws of some great beast. Coming closer and closer and swallowing the world in its wake. In the darkness, all it left behind were those eyes. Some of them even blacker than the dark surrounding them and others the blazing yellow of the wolves.

The closer the dark came, the louder the growling grew; I didn’t know whether the four-legged animals were fighting for or against the shadows. All I did know was that pretty much everything in this building was willing to eat me at this point.

Three feet, two, it didn’t matter.

The black was moving faster now, and I pressed myself flush against the wall, my finger ripping at the elevator button and my voice rising on a scream.

Two feet, one.

The fluorescents directly above me flickered once and then died with a sigh, and all around me came the bloodthirsty howls of predators who’d just found their prey.





“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Everyone.”

—Gabriel Evans