Moon touched, p.1
Moon-Touched, page 1
Moon-Touched
By Vivien Dean
Published by JMS Books LLC
Visit jms-books.com for more information.
Copyright 2019 Vivien Dean
ISBN 9781646561254
Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com
Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.
All rights reserved.
WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.
This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
* * * *
Moon-Touched
By Vivien Dean
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 1
Hide.
Don’t run. If you do, he’ll find you.
It’s not cowardice to stay alive. It’s called survival.
Hide.
Four letters. A single word command. So easy to consider, so hard to do when instincts argued every step of the way. Brambles cut at his fur, but he scrunched down more tightly to the ground, using the weeds’ natural coloring to help disguise his own. He couldn’t do much about his scent except pray the recently fertilized field adjacent to his cover was enough to put the others off. And the night…
He could do even less about the full moon hanging low behind the trees.
His ears twitched at every sound. When a distant baying echoed and rolled around the valley, his hackles rose involuntarily, and his lip curled. If he dared to believe the wolf was alone, he might risk venturing from his hiding spot to tear his throat out.
But the first howl was met with a second, then a third, until the chorus of death resounded across the earth. He wanted to dig at the packed dirt and bury himself out of sight, but one wrong move, one wrong sound, and all was done. He couldn’t even risk closing his eyes because if they showed up, he would need every one of his senses to fend them off. Not that he thought he could. Not that a small part of him even thought he should. They were his brethren, damned souls or not. The beast in his heart believed it was their right to do with him as they wished.
They’ll kill you.
They had to find him first.
* * * *
At the first line of pink along the horizon, the shift began.
It started in his bones, in the very marrow, the core of who and what he was. When he’d been young, his father had terrified him with stories about how their kind was captured so scientists could harvest their marrow for their vicious experiments. It was better to be killed than to be caught. That was the lesson learned. He still lived by that creed, though these days, it was more out of certain terror of what Perry would do to him if he ever caught up. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he always wondered if there was truth in the old tales. Because when he changed, whether from wolf to human, or human to wolf, it always began in the same deep pits of his being.
It hurt, too. Both ways. Whether bones had to shrink or muscles had to stretch, the eruptions beneath his skin burned away everything else until he thought he’d die from the transformation. The pain was the reason so many of his kind howled as soon as the change was done. Baying at the demonic moon responsible for the rhythms of their bodies released all the pent-up anguish to make the night manageable.
The fact that Andre couldn’t had forced him to find other ways to cope with the pain. Not all of them were healthy. None of them banished the aches like howling did for the others. Reverting to his human form was easier, if only because he could turn to pharmaceuticals to help deal with the residual pains.
It wasn’t swift. He often wished for the magic of Hollywood, where glittery dust would shower down upon the writhing beast and transform him into the naked hunk of the month within the blink of an eye. How much better would his life have been if he could have withstood the change with more grace, more efficiency? Instead, he was trapped in this endless game of hide and seek, waiting for the jaws to snap one final time. There were only two ways to end it, and he wasn’t strong enough to make the necessary kill. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.
So he endured the transformation. The rising sun bled over the edges of the world, rousing both beast and beauty, and quelled the silent howls trapped inside his skin for another cycle. He lay curled into a tight ball beneath the bushes and focused on his breathing. In. Out. Another day to live. Another night survived. Whether he liked it or not.
* * * *
His rusted-out pickup rumbled off the dirt road where he’d kept it parked overnight and onto the strip that would lead him to M-20 and back to Remus. Residents would be slow to get up on this sleepy Saturday. The town didn’t really bustle except during the school runs and Sunday mornings. The needle on the gas tank was dangerously low, too, so the smart choice would be to return and fill up at the Mobil Station. He’d have a job waiting for him as well. All it would take was turning right at the T-junction and heading back.
He turned left. Remus was a known identity, safe in its predictability and size. But he’d spent the last two months in the tiny Michigan town. The wolves he’d heard in the night indicated he’d become just as known and predictable.
The gas got him to Mecosta, though barely. From the food mart, he picked up a case of bottled water and enough snacks to last him a couple days. Nothing perishable. The pain from the shift was a hurricane buffeting against his joints and muscles, but he had enough drugs stashed away to forgo wasting money he might need later on. He’d be sleeping in the bed of his truck for the foreseeable future.
The teenaged clerk barely looked at Andre when he rung him up, and Andre made sure to keep his head ducked so his shoulder-length hair hid most of his face from the security camera mounted on the wall. If Perry stopped in looking for him, he’d get nothing of use for his hunt. In this neck of the woods, even Andre’s 1981 Ford didn’t stand out enough for anyone to remember.
He swallowed half a dozen ibuprofen with one of the waters before hitting the road again. The truck’s radio had busted before he ever took ownership, but he had an old cassette deck he’d picked up at a Goodwill in Ypsilanti that broke up the monotony of driving. He was stuck with music more than two decades old, but at least he never worried about someone stealing any of it.
Billy Joel was just begging not to shut him out when he rolled into the dusty Amoco station at the outskirts of Mellowbush. The pumps were mix-and-match. One had been upgraded to an ATM model, but the other still had the old rotary numbers flipping down as the cost went up. A large sign mounted from the overhang directed customers to pay inside before pumping, though some creative individual had scratched out a couple doing it doggy-style along the bottom of the chipped white metal, and the smell of pizza wafted from the Little Caesar’s across the street.
So far, Mellowbush was a lot like any of the half-dozen towns he’d stopped at over the last year. As he jogged across the lot to the station’s entrance, he had an odd sense of coming home.
Frigid air-conditioning blasted into his face when he stepped inside, stealing his breath away. Northern Michigan in June wasn’t nearly hot enough to warrant such arctic temperatures, but from the way the rotund cashier fanned himself with a tattered copy of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition, they might as well have been in the tropics.
“Hot enough for you?”
When the man laughed at his own joke, Andre shrugged and smiled. He pulled a sweaty ten out of his wallet and laid it on the counter, then pointed at the truck outside the window.
The cashier followed the line of his finger. “That yours? Looks like the rust’s the only thing holding it together.” Another robust laugh. It was probably a very good thing he could amuse himself because nobody else was likely to be entertained by his stale commentary.
Andre pushed the money closer.
“If you want gas, that’s only goin’ to get you ‘bout two and a half gallons. Depending how low you are, you might not even make it out of town on that.”
Smiling and nodding, Andre retreated to go back out to the pump.
Next to the front door, an explosion of colored flyers fluttered under the force of the overhead vents. The uppermost one was canary yellow with an ornate cross in the upper left corner. The headline, “The Light’s Always on in God’s House,” stopped Andre from stepping outside.
He smoothed down the lower half, scanning over the text. It read like any other promotional material he’d ever se
In a world where right and wrong were as elusive as trapping wind, any sort of sign was welcome.
“You lookin’ for the Lighthouse?” the cashier asked behind him.
Keeping his finger on the flyer, Andre looked back and nodded. He made a sweeping gesture toward the road, hoping the man understood he was asking for directions. Most likely, the only formal sign language the man knew would be the kind that got his ass kicked on a drunk Saturday night.
“Anything worth finding’s on this drag. Just go down to the flashing red, go through, and it’ll be right there on the left.”
Another good sign. Most people went through the rigmarole of assuming Andre was deaf instead of mute before catching on to what his various gestures might mean.
His step was lighter when he returned to the truck. The aches from his shift were gone, he was far enough away from Remus to make him difficult to track, and there was a church in this tiny spot on the map that seemed to embrace strangers.
Mellowbush just might be home.
For now.
Chapter 2
It might have been a decade since Thomas Durling had last driven the road into Mellowbush, but time had chosen to ignore the town, leaving it so similar to his last visit, his stomach churned in rebellion. The Amoco upgrades still hadn’t been finished, which meant Rudy was probably still driving down to Mt. Pleasant to hit the reservation for gambling every weekend, and the pothole that had ripped out his transmission the last time he’d visited had been filled in and then broken down again, the darker concrete at its jagged edges defying anybody to object. He avoided it easily, but the urge to keep on going when he hit the four-way stop had him clutching at the steering wheel until his knuckles hurt.
It wouldn’t be hard. Turn around, head back to Philadelphia, forget the phone call that had turned his world upside down.
Live the rest of his life haunted by the fact that he’d been a selfish bastard all the way to the end.
He made the turn onto Oak automatically, blind to the few properties he passed for the first mile. The road narrowed and stretched, refusing him the room to turn around safely even if he tried. When he finally spotted the house, his heart lurched.
Weeds had overgrown the ditch that channeled the front yard, nearly obstructing the drive from view. The delicate yellow flowers rustled in the summer breeze, offering an illusion of welcome that tightened the vise around his chest even more. He was ten years older, but he felt like he’d just stepped into one of the family photo albums he’d permanently borrowed when he’d moved away.
Two cars sat on the dirt drive. He didn’t recognize either the rusty pickup or the tan Corolla, but the latter made him smile. Its rear bumper was masked beneath an array of stickers— Tolerance: Believe in it, Practicing Rampant Non-Judgmentalism, and his personal favorite, God is an equal opportunity lover. Only one man in Mellowbush decorated his car like that.
He parked behind it and got out, still wearing the smile. The humidity choked his breath way, but not even that was enough to wipe away his relief at the sight of the portly man sitting on the front porch.
“You’re early,” Pastor Schmader called out. He lumbered to his feet when Thomas came up the two steps, reaching for his hand in greeting. “Good to see you, Thomas.”
“Same here, Pastor.”
He said that with honesty. While he wasn’t thrilled about being in Mellowbush, Pete Schmader was one of his better memories of the place, a bulwark from his teenage years and every visit since. At sixty-one, he liked his food too much to give it up for his health, but the grip of his short, stubby fingers was as strong as ever. The ready smile was the same, too, friendly to one and all. Seeing Pastor Schmader was like getting a hug when least expected. Warm. Accepting.
He was very glad Pastor was the first person he met today. It made the inevitable easier to face.
“How is she?” No reason to beat around the bush.
“Today’s a good day.” He clapped Thomas on the shoulder, a reassuring gesture that also proved to steer him toward the front door. “Let’s let her know you’re here.”
The screen door creaked when he pulled it open, but the netting he always remembered being torn at the corner was intact, blocking egress for the flies and mosquitoes so common this time of year. The inner door was already flung wide, but that hadn’t seen the same sort of repair as its counterpart. Scuff marks from heavy boots marred the bottom. It even had the gouge in the wood from when Thomas had slipped on the icy porch his senior year of high school and his keys had scored a path downward as he tried to catch himself from falling.
So many memories he’d conveniently stored away. Would these be the thoughts he lived with when he was in her shoes?
The small living room was empty, but the sound of movement came from the kitchen. He followed the clink of dishes and the soft thud of cupboards shutting to the rear of the house, with the scent of baking sugar wafting out to greet him. Pastor Schmader came behind.
She sat at the kitchen table, using dental floss to cut even slices off a roll of cookie dough. It wasn’t the refrigerated kind that now prevailed upon the market. Oh, no, not in the Durling household, regardless of how Amy Durling was feeling. The cookies she placed on the waiting baking sheet were pinwheels of chocolate and mint, rolled out thin before combined into a single log. He couldn’t count how many batches he’d helped her with growing up, or how many variations. Vanilla and strawberry. Chocolate and peanut butter. Lemon and lime. The mint/chocolate combination had always been his favorite, though. How had she known to make them today of all days? Nobody but Pastor Schmader knew he was coming. Had he told her about his arrival? He almost hoped not. He didn’t want to face the disappointment of her not remembering in case he had.
Her gray hair had more white threaded through it, but the thick braid she wore it in was exactly the same. His hair would probably do that, too. He’d started going gray at thirty, just like she had. Upon his entrance, she glanced up, but when her gaze caught on him hovering in the doorway, her blue eyes widened with delight and recognition.
His throat closed, and tears pricked the back of his eyes. She knew him. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized how afraid he was that she wouldn’t.
“Thomas!” Grabbing a kitchen towel, she hurriedly wiped her hands as she rose from the chair and came toward him. She tossed it aside at the last moment and threw her arms around him in an all-encompassing hug. “What’re you doing here?”
He wasn’t known for being an affectionate person. More than one previous boyfriend had complained that he shut down in public. But with the familiar smell of his mother’s White Diamonds filling his nose, and her embrace swallowing his reservations about coming back to Michigan, he returned the hug without a second thought.
“I came to see you, of course.” He pulled back to hold her at arm’s length, the better to get a good look at her. “How are you, Mom?”
“Can’t complain.” Said with a smile. The refrain of her life in more ways than one. “Are you staying long enough to have some cookies?”
He ignored the tug at his heart her innocent question provoked. “Now would I skip out when you’re making my favorite kind?”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing I asked Andre to pick me up some mint at IGA this morning.”
“Andre?”
Pastor Schmader cleared his throat. “That’s who I’ve had helping Amy out here.”
“He’s been more than helping. He’s staying in your old room, Thomas.”
The announcement shocked him into letting her go, stepping away to cast a sweeping assessment over the kitchen. When he’d received the call, he hadn’t pressed when Pastor Schmader said, “We’re keeping a good eye on your mother, Thomas. She’s being taken care of for now.” He hadn’t even considered it. Pastor had been an authoritative figure his entire life, one Thomas was actually proud to look up to. Maybe this time, however, he should’ve asked questions.
