Shadow of the Moon

SHADOW OF THE MOON

a Nightcreature Short Story

Lori Handeland

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Lori Handeland

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***

As a child I didn’t believe in the bogeyman.
There was no monster in the closet. No dragon under the bed. When I
was twenty-six I learned differently. The bogeyman was real. The
monsters popped up in my own backyard. I haven’t seen a dragon yet,
but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

I was just a small town cop, doing my job—a
little bored, a little lonely. Then the wolves went berserk and the
people did, too. Once the dust settled, and I figured out who was
good, who was bad and who was a psychotically evil werewolf, I was
no longer Officer Jessie McQuade but a
Jager-Sucher
.

My whole world changed, in more ways than
one. I swapped the relative safety of cop-hood in small town
Miniwa, Wisconsin for extreme danger as a member of a secret group
of government funded operatives. The trade-off was sleeping with
Will Cadotte. The man was a sex god.

Oh, not literally. But in my new world, you
never know. As I had to kill my best friend after she turned into a
wolf god, it isn't too much of a stretch that my boyfriend could be
an actual sex god. Stranger things have happened in the past few
months. You don't believe me, watch a person turn into a wolf and
back again, then we’ll talk.

After the wolf god incident, Will and I
became
Jager-Suchers
, or Hunter-Searchers. I was the hunter,
while Will was more the searcher. Though he was accomplished in tai
chi and had kicked my ass on occasion, when it came time to kill
things, he usually left that to me.

Late one night, not long after the previously
mentioned incident the doorbell rang. I was uneasy. My mother
always said that nothing good happened after midnight. Lately,
nothing good happened after sundown.

I retrieved my weapon and checked the
load—silver from this point forward. Once I'd taken a quick peep
through the peephole, I opened the door.

“Jessie.” The leader of the
Jager-Suchers
, Edward Mandenauer, stepped inside without
being invited. “We must talk.”

Will was asleep. He wasn’t a night person.
However I’d been working third shift throughout my career as a cop,
which worked out well now that I’d taken to hunting werewolves.
They tended to come out under the moon and run around until the sun
came back. Go figure.

“Now?” I asked, and followed him down the
hall into my living room.

The lines in his face deepened on a frown.
“What is wrong with now?”

“Besides it being . . . “ I glanced at my
watch. “One in the morning?”

“Monsters do not care about the time.”

“I bet they don’t. However I have a
life.”

He stared down his long, bony nose at me.
This didn’t happen often, since I was a solid five-ten. But
Mandenauer topped out at over six feet of tough, skeletal old man.
He’d spent his youth in Nazi Germany, spying for the good guys,
which was how he’d discovered the monsters.

“Any life you have, you must give up to serve
me.”

“Not likely, pal. I
work
for you. I
live for Will.”

It felt strange to say that. Me, who’d never
had a boyfriend. Dates? Sure. Relationships? Never. And to have a
relationship, a life, with Will . . . I was still getting used to
the concept, still waiting for him to wake up one morning, look at
me and wonder:
What in hell was I thinking?

"Spare me the nonsense," Mandenauer said. "I
allow you to work together because—“

“We’re stronger together than apart.”

Will stood in bedroom doorway. My throat went
tight just looking at him.

Short, black hair all tousled, his equally
dark eyes were still heavy with sleep. He’d yanked on his jeans but
left the button open; the buttons on his shirt were open too,
revealing his honed and toned chest.

He was the same bronze shade all over. I’d
looked. Will liked to walk around at his place—several acres in the
north woods outside of town—completely nude. He says it’s an Ojibwe
thing. Did I mention he’s a member of the wolf clan? One of the
reasons Edward shot him, but let’s not get into that.

The combination of beauty, grace and his
great big . . . brain-- How was a girl supposed to
think
when a guy looked like that?

Will gave me a lazy smile and strolled over
to join me. As soon as he was close enough, he took my hand. He was
very touchy-feely. For a girl whose dad had taken off before she’d
known what the word "father" meant and whose mom’s idea of
affection was not telling her daughter she was an unfeminine
embarrassment for one whole day, Will’s openness had been more of a
puzzlement than a revelation.

“Why are you here, Edward?” Will was very
good at getting to the point. He was also one of the few people
who’d dared to call our boss Edward right out of the gate and get
away with it.

“We have a problem.”

“
We
meaning Jessie, me and
you? Or
we
the
Jager-Suchers
?"

“We in the universal sense. Humankind may be
in dire trouble.”

“Isn’t it always?” I asked. “Foil the
werewolves, save the world. That should be our motto.”

Except mottos aren’t too common in the secret
agency biz.

“I do not have time for your humor,
Jessie.”

I guess that meant I should lay off the
sarcasm. But then what would I have to say?

“I had a call from headquarters,” Mandenauer
continued. “I need the two of you to pack your things. And he--“
Mandenauer waved his hand vaguely in Will’s direction. “Should
bring his computer.”

“
He
has a name,” I said.

Though Will had no trouble calling Edward . .
. Edward, the old man couldn’t seem to get his tight lips around
the word
Will
. I wasn’t sure if that was because Mandenauer
really didn’t like him, or because he didn’t know how to be
anything other than cranky.

I suspect having your world turned upside
down when you were still a young man wasn’t easy. Devoting your
life to killing the monsters Hitler had ordered his insane pal
Mengele to make meant Edward had been on the hunt for over sixty
years. I didn't know if he’d ever been married; the idea of him
dating was scary enough.

Mandenauer grunted but didn’t bother to
apologize, and Will didn’t seem to care. He was the least likely
person to take offense I’d ever met, which I guess was a good thing
considering how annoying I could be. There were also a lot of
people in small towns all over the north who didn’t much care for
Indians, and weren’t shy about saying so. It didn’t take fur, claws
and teeth to make some folks into monsters.

Will went into the bedroom and returned with
his laptop. Then he sat at the table, booted up the computer and
started searching for his glasses.

“Here." I snatched them off the end table
where he’d left them earlier.

Will was forever misplacing the things,
sometimes right on top of his head. I don’t know why I found that
absentminded professor stuff both sexy and endearing. The
combination of that face, the body and his wire rimmed glasses . .
. Let’s just say I asked him to wear those glasses a lot.

Glasses and nothing else.

“Where, when and what?” Will's long clever
fingers skated over the keyboard.

“The village is called Riverview,” Edward
continued. “For the past several months citizens have been going
insane at an alarming rate.”

“When you say insane . . . “ I let my voice
trail off. In our world, insane covered a whole lot of a
territory.

There were those who believed they were
werewolves and those who actually were. Both were nuts, but the
latter had enough supernatural power to cause major death and
destruction, not to mention turn normal, everyday nice people into
murdering evil beasts.

And that was only the werewolves. According
to Edward, there were a whole host of other things out there we
didn’t even know about yet.

“In this case,” Mandenauer answered, “I am
talking about normal insanity.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Will murmured,
still staring at his computer.

Edward ignored him. “The afflicted degenerate
into gibbering fools. Nothing medical science has at its disposal
will stop them.”

Will glanced up from the screen. “Has medical
science been able to determine what sent them over the edge?”

Edward shook his head. “They have tested the
air, the water, the soil, the very buildings in which they live and
the food that they eat.”

Will frowned and went back to his
computer.

“I understand why this is a concern,” I said,
“but why is it
our
concern?”

Mandenauer’s influence was far-flung. Having
the U.S. government behind him, albeit secretly, meant he not only
had access to a lot of resources but also to a lot of funding. His
spidery webs reached all over the place. Every odd report was
tagged and sent to
Jager-Sucher
headquarters in Montana,
where Edward’s right hand woman, Elise, would dispatch agents to
check out what was happening and, if necessary, eliminate it.

"I can’t find anything on the internet about
this," Will murmured.

“Do you think I would let it become common
knowledge?”

Not only was Edward sent any odd report, but
he possessed the resources to squash the information. All we needed
was for a town to be taken over by werewolves and have the media
show up. This would not only generate a panic but some very nasty
news reporters.

Come to think of it, maybe Edward had slipped
up a time or two already.

“What is it about Riverview that rated a
notice being sent to headquarters?” I asked.

Edward gave a nod of approval at my question
that would have had me preening, if I was the type to preen.

“Though the insane gibber madly, there is one
word that makes sense.” Edward glanced from me to Will and back
again before continuing. “
Boxenwolf
.”

He said the word with a German twist. I still
knew what it meant. “Werewolf.”

“
Ja
.”

Considering a great portion of the population
in Wisconsin was of German extraction, I didn’t find it surprising
that the term
boxenwolf
might be bandied about. But by those
who'd lost their minds, and all in the same town . . . That begged
a few more questions.

“Has anyone gotten up and walked out of the
morgue after a horrific and bloody death? Torn out a few throats,
drank some blood, started baying at the full moon through their
brand new snout?”

“Not yet.”

“You said this has been going on for
months.”

Mandenauer dipped his chin. “Several full
moons have come and gone, but none of the afflicted have become a
demon werewolf.”

Though a lot of werewolf lore was B.S., that
stuff about shifting beneath the full moon was not.

“Perhaps the gibbering people only saw a
werewolf, they weren’t turned into one,” Will suggested.

I’d seen plenty of werewolves; sure they were
scary, especially when they gazed at you with the eyes of someone
you knew, someone you loved. But just seeing them shouldn’t turn a
normal human being into an insane inmate of a little white
room.

“The two of you must go to Riverview and
discover what is happening,” Edward said.

“And when we do?”

His faded blue eyes met mine; not a spec of
emotion shone through. “Need you ask?"

Not really. The rules of Edward's world, and
now my own, were simple.

Monsters are shot with silver. Human beings
are not.

Determine which is which before shooting.

* * *

Riverview was a three-hour drive northeast
from Miniwa, which put us very close to Upper Michigan.

What Edward had referred to as a village was,
in reality, a town the size of Miniwa, maybe a little larger, which
made it a decent-sized town. To sport a psychiatric facility with
enough rooms to accommodate over half the residents it would have
to be.

We’d been told to go straight to the clinic,
and it wasn’t hard to find. On a ridge at the center, Riverview
Psychiatric dominated the town.

“I guess we don’t have to worry about the
homicidally crazy wandering into the maternity ward,” I
murmured.