Christmas Moon (6 page)

He could hear her pad across the house. The
locks flipped and then she jerked open the door. Her ruby-spun hair
was still ruffled from sleep, her eyes looked puffy and tired, and
if he didn’t know any better they looked like she’d been
crying.

“Hunter?”

“You okay?”

She scrubbed a hand over her face. “Yeah.
Unpacking.” He wasn’t quite sure what that meant but she shook her
head, obviously brushing it aside. Her eyes narrowed. “You look
like hell.”

A laugh startled out of him. He felt like
hell. “One of my pack is missing. The rogue, his scent was all over
her place. All around my house.”

She glanced at the still running truck in her
drive way, then back to him. “The phone call yesterday morning, I
heard something about Hounds...?”

“The local STE is involved but frankly, I
don’t think they give a shit. I was hoping—” The words died in his
throat as he looked at her. She barely knew him, and he knew why
she’d left being a Hound. Knew what her husband had done and no
doubt it had reflected badly on her.

And here he was standing on her door about to
ask her for help. Was that even fair?

“Give me a second to get dressed.” Hunter
stared at her, but she was already walking away from the door,
leaving it open for him to follow. “Help yourself to the coffee
maker. It’ll only take me a minute. How long she’s been
missing?”

“Bree, you don’t have to help.” He followed
her to the bedroom. She neatly stepped around a large tote and
started flipping through the clothes on the rack. Hunter glanced
down and saw a picture of her and a man with a little girl swinging
from their arms as they walked. Autumn leaves littered the ground
around them. They looked happy.

“Yeah I do.” She turned back to face him.

He opened his mouth to say something, but
damn. This was why he’d come. He wanted her help. Hell, he probably
needed it.

“Okay,” he whispered and turned away, leaving
her to change in private.

She met him in the living room a moment
later. Fresh jeans and a dark blue long-sleeved shirt. She’d
brushed her hair back behind her head, but it was the look in her
eye that stopped him. Fiery and intense. Something burned in her
gaze. Anticipation, maybe?

“Let’s go. And you can fill me on the way to
her place. I want to know everything you’ve already done.”

“Actually,” he said and met her gaze, relief
wrapping itself around him. “Let’s start at my place. He visited
there too. Maybe, I don’t know, you can find something we
missed.”

She jerked her head in a nod. “You never
know.”

And with Bree at his back, they headed out
the door and for the first time since he’d heard Rylie had gone
missing, Hunter felt hopeful.

He’d get his wolf back.

Together they’d make sure of it.

Chapter Seven

Bree paused at the edge of Hunter’s yard,
taking in the scene before her. The blood from yesterday had left
the snow tinted pink, and she could smell the musk of deer on the
wind, but the body was gone. Standing there however, it wasn’t the
gruesome trail of blood that caught her attention. Maybe she’d just
spent too long as a Hound before she left to let stuff like that
get to her.

No, it was the pack’s yard.

Christmas lights hung from the house, the
pine trees, and the fence line. Blow up characters from various
Christmas movies were scattered across the yard, along with an
assortment of lighted reindeer, and huge red sled. The kind she
could have seen being dragged behind a pair of white horses in a
white wonderland. Her breath caught as she stared at the sled,
remembering her last Christmas with Arianna.

They’d taken a sleigh ride through the park,
just the two of them.

Ari would have loved this yard.

She glanced at the man beside her. Did he do
it for the pack, or did he do because he loved the season as much
as she had once?

Hunter turned, “You getting something?”

The case
. Bree gave a small wince.
“You’ll have to decorate my house when we’re done,” she said
softly, teasing, but she turned her attention back to the yard and
this time she focused.

Bree strode forward across the snow and
roused her inner-Ridgeback until the dog was just under her skin,
waiting to be let loose. She could feel the animal quivering inside
her, desperate for that chance at freedom once more. Bree tilted
her face into the wind and breathed in the scents swirling on the
crisp breeze.

Wolf, forest, old blood, it all filtered past
her nose. But the wind would only tell her what was recent, what it
touched as it passed. Scent traveled in odd ways and sometimes the
best way to track an older trail was to simple put her nose to the
ground. Looking over her shoulder, she caught Hunter’s eye. “I’ll
need your help on this. I don’t know Ms. Kelsen’s scent.”

“Rylie,” he said.

“
Rylie’s
scent, then. You’ll need to
shift too.” Then she turned away and let the dog pour out of her.
In B-rated movies and horror books the shift from man to beast
hurt, it broke bones and was a curse. In reality, it was simple
magick. The kind buried inside her veins, a part of every fiber of
her being, and it wrapped around her and she simply wasn’t a woman
anymore, but a large rust-red dog standing in the snow.

Her clothes were gone, to wherever her human
body had gone too. Her soul and her mind were still there, just
like the dog’s was always inside her when she was human. Twin
creatures sharing one body at a time.

She could feel the dog’s happiness at being
free, at feeling the cool wind in her fur, and Bree gave the animal
a moment to tilt her nose into the wind and let out an excited yip,
tail wagging. Then she turned their attention to the job at
hand.

Her nose hovered just above the snow and she
moved across the yard, a smooth and even trot as she breathed in
the wintry scents.
There
. Alongside the streaks of red
across the ground was the scent of the rogue. He’d been a wolf when
he’d slain the animal, but she could still smell the excitement
that had filled him when he’d taken the creature down.

She was half way across the yard when she
felt Hunter join her. He was large for a wolf, with white fur
almost the color of the snow beneath his paws, only his shoulders
and back were tinged in silver. His eyes were the same brilliant
brown-gold they were as a man. He pressed his muzzle against the
side of her neck and she could feel him inhale, breathing her
in.

Her dog leaned into his touch, her nose
running through his thick winter coat. His fur was soft against her
muzzle, tickling over her lips and nose. She thought she’d known
his scent before—after all, she’d sat wrapped in his arms the other
night. But standing here—dog and wolf—with every breath she took
she found another nuance to the scent that was
Hunter
.

Then she stepped away and turned back to
tracking the rogue on his spree across the yard. He’d tortured this
deer, dragging it this way and that. Either he was inexperienced
when it came to the hunt, or a sadist. Hunter gave a low growl from
his place next to her, the quiet thundering rumble a distant echo
to the one that built in her throat.

Finally she found the spot where he’d made
the kill and she could smell another wolf, male and probably one of
Hunter’s, as he’d been human when he’d dragged the carcass off into
the woods. No doubt to feed it to the scavengers. The rogue, on the
other hand, had taken off in the other direction and she followed,
picking up to an easy lope as she followed the scent trail laid out
before her.

Thankfully there hadn’t been much bad weather
to ruin the trail, though following scent through a forest took
skill. She lost track of the time as she wove her way through pine
trees and white capped bushes. Hunter followed somewhere behind
her, his steps as quiet as hers, and they were almost impossible to
hear as they worked their way through the densely wooded trees.

The path slowly got rockier as it curved
toward an old ravine. She spotted the lean-to first, planks of
plywood hastily tossed together, branches ripped from threes to
give shelter. She shifted mid-step and surveyed the scene.

The whole place reeked of the rogue, but a
squatter didn’t exactly fit the profile of a stalker or a
kidnapper. Hands braced on her hips, Bree scanned up and down the
ravine. There was no sign of their mystery wolf, but this was
definitely his place.

“Hell,” Hunter said from behind her and Bree
turned. “It makes no sense. If he’s simply a homeless rogue why not
just ask for admittance into the pack. I’m known for taking in damn
near every wolf that crosses White Pine’s city limits.”

Bree didn’t have a way to answer that, but
she had a niggling feeling this wolf didn’t want to be part of a
pack. Careful not to slip on the rocks, Bree worked her way down
into the ravine and into the small hovel the rogue had built
himself. The place reeked of blood and she covered her nose with
her coat sleeve.

Blood smeared the walls and there was a
bloody deer leg lying beside the cot.

“Shit,” Hunter muttered as he stumbled up
behind her.

She knelt next to the cot and reached over
the sweat stained sleeping bag for the small brown book beside it.
The leather bound journal flipped open easily in her hands. A
picture of a slim man slipped out. Brown spiked hair, a dashing
smile, the leather jacket over his thin shoulders and a motorcycle
behind him. He grinned up at the camera.

She slid the picture back into the book and
flipped through the pages only to have her breath catch in her
throat, snagged on the lump of fear suddenly threatening to send
her into a panic. There were pictures of her. In her robe making
tea one morning, scrubbing clean her garage this past summer,
answering that damned phone...

Her face was circled in red in almost every
one of them.

Hunter growled behind her, a low, dark sound
that crept through the small hovel and filled it with all the rage
that trembled through him. He reached for the pictures but she
swept his hand aside. “Don’t. I’ll need these untouched.”

She forced out a shaky breath.

“And I really don’t think this bastard wants
in your pack.”

But she did want to know what he wanted with
her.

She kept flipping the pages. A newspaper
clipping on Caesar. Her hands were cold with chill as she turned
another page. Just how long had this psycho been stalking her?

And what did any of this have to do with
Rylie Kelsen and Hunter’s pack?

After that, the pages were all blank until
the very last one. Another picture of the guy with the motorcycle
and another guy, but she didn’t recognize either one of them. She
flipped the picture over, hoping for a name or a date but there was
nothing on the back. Frustrated she closed the book and set it on
the cot.

This guy seemed to know an awful lot about
her and she knew nothing about him. Then again, the bad guys almost
always started with a leg up. It was up to her to close that gap
and solve the case. She took another deep, steadying breath, and
then reached for the bundle of magick buried in the depths of her
psyche.

Not the magick that let her shift, but the
one granted to her when she’d passed through the Shifter Town
Enforcement Academy. Each member once made an official Hound was
given a gift from a witch—raw magick. Something no other shifter
had access too. You couldn’t get it without a trained witch’s
help.

She was by no means as strong as even a
lightweight witch, but this gave her an advantage over the average
shifter. And as she held her hands out over the old, worn journal
she let herself fall into a trance. Her hair whispered around her
face, lighting kissing her cheeks as the energy ran through her.
Her inner-canine cowered somewhere deep inside her, trying to avoid
the touch of magick that now spread out of her hands and wrapped
around the book.

It wasn’t natural for a shifter to do what
she could do as a Hound, but it paid off.

It was a simple ‘spell’ of sorts. Scrying or
searching, she let her magick sift through the book looking for any
details that could help her. There was so much rage in that book.
Every time that wolf had touched this journal he’d left of piece of
the anger that tore at his soul. He wanted pain, vengeance, and
Bree had no doubt it was towards her.

If the rogue had been a lion she could have
understood, but a wolf?

It didn’t make sense. Sure, as a Hound she’d
put wolves behind silver-coated bars before, even executed a few,
but her jurisdiction had largely been lion-shifters. She turned the
focus of her search towards Rylie.
Wolf. Female
. She let the
magick spread through the small lean-to, but there was nothing.
Nothing here that would explain why he’d attacked one of Hunter’s
pack.

She angled her hands over the deer leg. More
rage, but it was different. Almost like he’d taken the animal’s
life to vent. Possible, especially if he’d done it after lashing
out at her window. Bree bit her lip and pulled the Hound magick
back inside her. She rocked back on her heels.

All of this pointed toward issues with her,
not Rylie. So why take the she-wolf at all?

Why not just come after the one he really
wanted?

After all, Bree would have been more than
happy to give him a good fight.

Chapter Eight

Hunter let Bree have her silence as they
trekked back toward the house. They’d traveled at least six miles
out, a distance they could have traveled faster had they shifted,
but she seemed too lost in thought for that. He wanted to know what
she’d found when she’d pulled her little magick trick back there.
Her hair and lifted as if tugged by some imaginary wind and he’d
felt the pulse of power around her.