Mark of the Moon by Beth Dranoff

Author:Beth Dranoff [Dranoff, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carina Press
Published: 2017-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Four hours later I stood alone, bathing in the moonlight. Trying to feel the energy of the howling and yowling beasts around me, just past the circle of the fire, flames shooting up from the safe confines of the stone circle. I was the outsider. The norm, welcomed but only just, into the inner workings of the pack for the night. Courtesy for the traveler, or something like that—I admit I wasn’t paying super close attention when Anshell went through the ceremonial drama of it all.

Maybe I should have been.

What I did know is that if I full-on shifted, I was in. Open arms, or paws, or something like that. No pressure. Automatic privileges available from the moment I said “I do” supported by a sworn pack member witnessing of “I did.”

Sam had tried to describe the sensation of the complete change to me, but I was still confused—how do you show cerulean blue to a person blind from birth? There was something about an itch and a pull and a push, but after my third wiseass sexual innuendo, he’d given up.

“You’ll figure it out,” Sam had huffed, equal parts cryptic and annoyed. I guess I deserved that.

Either way, I was now naked from the waist up, and working on the rest, but it was so damned cold I was having trouble convincing my body to obey. All those old horror movies with the pants ripping as the shift hits. I’d rather not be walking naked in the middle of winter back to the rest of my clothes with a bunch of were-people I’d only just met. Removing the clothes seemed like a good idea when I started. Now, maybe not so much; my breath was hanging on the air, an illusion of warmth surrounded by a mist of pure cutting ouch.

I’d thought I’d feel the energy of it all, the spirit and rush of being something larger than myself. Instead, standing at the edge of a snowy field next to a barren copse, I felt like an idiot losing sensation in her extremities.

What the hell was I thinking? Stupid Dana getting caught up in the lunacy of a life I thought I’d left behind. There was a reason I’d quit Ezra’s team. Same reason I’d dropped out of grad school, dropped out of my old life, lost touch with my friends from back then and taken up the rewarding career path of bartending. I didn’t want to deal with this existence bordering on reality. I didn’t want the violence. Maybe I wasn’t looking for that white picket fence in the suburbs—in fact, I was pretty sure I wasn’t—but at least I could have bits and pieces of the kind of life other people had. That one where you can get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and not worry about getting jumped by creatures with names so alien you can’t pronounce the vowels with your human tongue. Where shopping meant buying shoes

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