Blood Moons (11 page)

96

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

She was still shivering occasionally from the news Dr.

Chase had delivered. Though she was certain it was a lie, Dara knew there was something else, far worse, that the doctor had kept from her. She was scared, a state of mind that made it all too easy to put herself in Tristan's place, hiding from a monster while it destroyed his parents just beyond a locked door.

Dr. Chase was not the monster in Dara's case—she was the door.

This place ... now she knew how it worked. The incarceration was nothing. That was merely putting a wild beast in a cage. What truly broke its spirit were the tortures of the mind. The looks that promised unimaginable pain. The secrets only hinted at, the things that poked at the beast and taunted it without ever revealing themselves. No matter how much she tried to resist it, despite the brave front she put up, it was fear that would finally break her. Fear of the things that hid in the darkness of her captors' minds.

"Why confide in me?" she asked when he hadn't replied.

"Because, sooner or later, you will get out of here. But things in this prison will get much, much worse for you if it doesn't happen sooner rather than later. And when they do, I may be the only one within a hundred light years who can help you."

What happens to one, happens to the other,
he thought—

to her, or to himself?

"Worse how? And why do you talk like there's no more hope for you?"
Duh.
Maybe because he'd killed God knew how 97

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many people—soldiers. The better question was, how he was even still alive?

He laughed. "Dara, I just told you that I am a trained killing machine. If anything, this place gave me an upgrade.

You really think they'll ever let me surface again?"

"They might," she mumbled, but she didn't really believe her words. Crimes like that didn't usually get forgiven. For a civilian to harm a politician or soldier was treason. But he hadn't been executed. Maybe there was still hope. "You lasted this long; don't give up now." If Tristan was all that stood between her and whatever the bad stuff was, then she needed him to stand strong. "Self-pity is very unattractive,"

she told him.

Tristan shook his head and hopped up onto his bunk. "If I ever get out, it'll be to a place far worse than this," he said above her.
"They might be gracious enough to hire me on as
a government assassin."

Dara took the clip out of her hair to play with it. A month ago she never would have thought evil like he'd described could exist outside of books. If Tristan had gone to the authorities, would they have helped him? No. Brothers-in-arms always protected their own. Most likely the soldier's crimes against Tristan's parents would have been covered up, and Tristan would have just been locked up that much sooner. Wasn't that almost exactly what had happened to her? Justice had died a quiet death long ago.

"The doctor,"
she said after a while.
"She said I can't have
children. But she was lying."

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Tristan felt some of his tension ease.
She found a loophole,
then.
He hadn't meant for Dara to hear, but she did.

"A loophole? In what?"

"It's better not to know,"
Tristan said. He sure as shit didn't want to be the one to tell her the whole truth.

Dara sighed, a feminine sound of frustration, and for a moment Tristan didn't feel as if he was in prison anymore.

He'd forgotten how much he'd once enjoyed the simple things in life. The sound of rain hitting the roof. The sweet smell of a woman. The joy of simply having a conversation without having to choose his words carefully for fear of exposing his abilities.

At that moment, he felt almost ... normal. Just a simple man, spending an evening with his woman. He imagined her lying next to him, nestled against his side. He'd have his arm around her, fingers sifting through her hair. The image wasn't sexual. Instead, it gave him a measure of peace and deep contentment. Both so foreign to him he didn't know what to do with them.

He was changing. The latest treatment might have tempered outbursts of strength but there were other changes that were not so easy to control. His senses were sharper now whether his strength increased suddenly or not. Whispers from cells across the abyss were now as clear as if he was right there, a fly on the wall. He could see things from so far away it felt inhuman. And the scents ... Tristan doubted he would ever rid himself of Dara's.

But the most disturbing changes were with his instincts.

His id was gaining supremacy. The other prisoners were no 99

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longer just a nuisance. They were trespassers on his territory.

Someone baiting him into a fight was a challenger, and resisting the urge to fight to the death was becoming more and more difficult.

The only thing that seemed to help was Dara's presence and
that
inspired entirely different instincts. It put him in an untenable position. Although any contact with her seemed to temper the beast growing stronger inside him, it also intensified his possessiveness of her. Tristan didn't know when, but at some point he'd begun to think of her as
his.
His cellmate. His woman. And that became dangerous when it bordered on obsession, as it was beginning to.

Which meant that not having her around drove him up the wall. He worried.
Worried
, for Christ's sake, about a woman he'd met little more than a week ago. And when he didn't worry, he raged, irrationally and insanely jealous of any other male even looking at her.

But when it was just the two of them, it felt like his right to be near her, to touch her and taste her. He wanted to bury his nose in her hair and just breathe her in; he craved her scent more than air. And he wanted to—he frowned, trying to identify it. Sex was too tame a word. What he felt was more possessive and animalistic than anything he'd ever felt before. Tristan needed her to recognize that she was his, needed to put some kind of claim on her.

The need to stake his territory baffled him.

Tristan punched the pillow, then tossed it to the foot of his bunk when it stubbornly refused to remain disfigured. The problem wasn't the serums and the experiments. What really 100

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drove him up the wall was that after years of solitude in this prison he was forced to spend almost twenty-four hours a day with a woman he
liked.
It was a purely male response. He probably would have had the same reaction with any other female.

So why was it that since she got here he felt at the same time more human and more animal than he had in years?

His heart slammed against the wall of his chest, knocking
the breath out of him. Dizzy with the urge to protect, he
jumped down from the tree and landed on all fours. It felt
natural to him.

Lifting his nose to the air, he sniffed. He was looking for
her.
Because she was in danger. He could smell her fear and
it made him crazed. Whatever was threatening her had no
scent. It was a void where
something
should have been and it
felt ... wrong.

The city was abandoned. Transports stood out like
tumbleweeds in the desert; white drapes billowed out of open
windows and artificial lights flickered at all levels—but nothing
living moved. Nothing stirred in the night and he wouldn't
have cared if it did. With single-minded determination he
loped through the empty streets, reveling in the feel of it.

Running free.
Hunting.

His mate screamed nearby and he shouted in response—

but it came out as an animal roar. He ran faster.

Turn the corner. Run to the end of the street.

Jump over an abandoned transport.

Another corner...

And then he saw them.

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She was backing into a corner, frantically looking for a way
out. There was none.

He growled and launched himself onto the man pursuing
her. Instinct took over and he bit into the fiend's neck with
relish. He tore at the flesh, ignoring the ache in his teeth and
claws as he buried them in the attacker's body.

But he didn't die.

The killing rage subsided, the bloody haze cleared, and he
saw his prey covered with his own blood, flesh torn open at
the neck and chest—
laughing
. He didn't make a sound but it
was no cough that made him shake like that. The man—the
thing that didn't smell like anything, not even bleeding out on
the ground—opened his purple eyes and kept on laughing as
he pulled himself up to sit. His head fell back on his shoulders
without the neck's support and still he laughed.

Still down on all fours, Tristan backed away toward his
mate, shielding her with his own body, wanting her far away
from this.

The monster before him laughed and laughed, and then he
leaned forward and his head flipped back to its normal
position. But it was no longer the purple-eyed puppet that
stared at him.

It was the soldier.

Tristan jerked awake and struck out blindly at the wall.

Something sharp bit into his hands and he uncurled his fists, horrified to find sharp, inch-long claws pulling out of his palms. Even as he watched, his nails retracted and dulled back into their normal shape.

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He clenched his fists again to stop the bleeding and jumped down, landing on the balls of his feet without the smallest sound. He was in the bathroom before a single drop of blood could fall to the floor.

It was there that he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. Hair streaked with light brown, slitted yellow-green eyes, sharper cheekbones ... and fangs.

Christ, what was happening to him?

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103

Blood Moons

by Alianne Donnelly

6th Day of the 4th Blood Moon, 3028

There were seventeen TVs in a room acoustically designed to deliver sound only to those people watching the individual movies. Each TV had an area that seated forty people.

And all of them were playing slasher flicks.

Wonderful. Just what Tristan needed—a werewolf movie.

And a bad one at that. He should have gone to the gym instead.

Ah, but there the pool's sensors would have detected traces of blood and then he'd be in deep shit indeed. Because the docs would want to know what he'd impaled his hands on.

He kept his hands in his pockets to hide the marks on his palms. The claws had gone almost clean through, not quite long enough to pierce through to the other side. He had bruises on the backs of his hands where they had tented the skin.

At least the good thing—if it could be called that—was that he was healing rapidly. Mind over matter? Hardly. It was just another part of the exciting New Alaska chemical gift package. The fun never stopped.

"Word on the block is you got yourself a sweet young thing in that burrow of yours."

Anthony Sinclair. The man was as wide as he was tall, and that was saying something, since he was as tall as Tristan.

Disgusting slimeball of a human being, he forced the weaker prisoners to wash those parts of him he couldn't reach in the 104

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shower. And still he smelled like regurgitated molding sewage.

He plopped himself down into a chair, making it creak dangerously under his gargantuan weight while his greasy long hair swept the floor.

Tristan almost gagged. He turned to leave the other way and found his path blocked by Switch.

"Yeah," the scrawny guy agreed. "That's what we heard."

He was the human equivalent of a hyper weasel. His hair was spiked and he had dark circles around his crazed eyes from lack of sleep—his assigned treatment. Sinclair and Switch were joined at the hip. Wherever Sinclair went, Switch followed like a lapdog. He had no choice, really. At barely five feet four, he was the smallest of them all and his life literally depended on Sinclair's size. Parasite.

Tristan sat back down. No point fighting them here. He might get one lucky punch in before the guards rained down on them, and then he'd have to wait until the next ambush to finish it. Might as well save himself the trouble. But even while his mind decided this, his body went on alert, muscles tightening to ready for attack and senses sharpening to catch the smallest change in the environment.

"Word on the block is Sinclair is using your head as a vibrator," he said to Switch. "Should I believe it? It would explain those brown spots around your eyes. And your hair is sort of a shitty color."

Switch's expression turned wrathful, but before he could lash out as he was prone to do, Sinclair put a massive hand on Tristan's shoulder and turned him to face his armpit. "No 105

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need to fight," he said pleasantly, ever the businessman looking to deal first and crush the opposition later. Often that was literally what he did. "I'm sure we can come to some sort of agreement."

Tristan winced sarcastically. "I don't know, Blubber, I've had some bad experiences with whales before. They always find a way to renege."

Sinclair's chuckle jiggled parts of him in a ripple effect, releasing new and exotic scents from skin folds that hadn't been touched by air in years. "That mouth of yours is gonna get you killed one night," he said. "But I'll take it as a compliment this time. Whales do have the biggest dicks in the whole animal kingdom, don't they? And that's why we're here to talk to you in the first place. It's not nice of you not to let your plaything enjoy it."