Forged in Moonfire

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  Did you enjoy that?

  What's next?

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  FORGED IN MOONFIRE

  An Amber Lee Mystery Novella

  By Katerina Martinez

  A predator. A hunter. A survivor.

  Aaron Cooper is a werewolf. Go figure. He had always known he had a calling, but this? As the full moon wanes, Aaron sets off to the Nevada desert in search of his father and answers. But Nevada is a hot-zone of shapeshifter activity, and many of the local clans bear bloody grudges against each other. If Aaron is to find the answers he wants he's going to have to prove himself to his father and the rest of the pack by taking a trip through enemy territory.

  Shouldn't be a problem for a macho-man like Aaron, though, right?

  When the Mountain Cougars come skidding down Mount Charleston, claws gleaming and teeth bared, Aaron will have to dig deep if he wants to make it through because out in the desert you win, or you die.

  CHAPTER 1

  Leaving her was one of the hardest things he had ever had to do. Amber had saved his life in more ways than she knew, but Aaron’s hand was forced. He had to leave. There was something crawling beneath his skin, something primal and raw and angry. A monster? Maybe. Aaron had felt its terrible power coursing through him and for a while didn’t believe it was a part of him, or didn’t want to believe.

  He had forgotten most of what had happened out in the woods on the night when he turned. Whenever he reached into his mind to find the memory he found a place he couldn’t enter. He would try to visualize the moment when the bullets struck and what came after, but his thoughts always drifted to the entrance of a strange cave; a cave guarded by a hulking, snarling presence with shining blue eyes and claws dripping with blood. It was as if the animal inside his heart didn’t want him to remember the things he did when it was in control.

  But why would it do that? Where did it come from? And how long before it took control again?

  As much as he may have not wanted to leave, Aaron had no choice. The thing inside of him posed questions Aaron had no answers to, and what was worse was that he was now being pulled toward seeing his father by some kind of strange imperative that hadn’t been there before the moment of his transformation.

  He remembered his father’s old Harley. It was a red and black beast of metal and rubber and it had a beautiful grey wolf painted onto the fuel tank. His mother had painted the wolf while he and his father worked on the mechanics and made sure the bike would run. And when it ran, it roared. They had built it together as a family. It had taken months, but those months were among the best that Aaron could remember of his young life.

  But that was before his father left.

  In the days since Aaron’s transformation he had thought about his father more times than he had in the last half a decade. He didn’t want to think about him, but the memories came all the same as had the same imperative to go and see him. Unwanted. Unbidden. But there, and strong enough to pull Aaron away from Amber.

  And now here he was, idling in the parking lot of a tattoo parlor in a suburbs of Las Vegas. The banner that went across the front of the building read Wolf Skin Tattoos and it had a picture of a muscle-clad wolf with a shoulder tattoo on it. Somehow, without any help, Aaron had found his way to the right place.

  All day and all night he had driven through the Nevada desert to get to the glittering city, and when the highway turned into streets all he had to do was follow his nose. He didn’t ask for directions, didn’t stop or hesitate; didn’t even think. He simply acted, following that same unwanted imperative to its source, confident in the knowledge that it had taken him away from where he wanted to be, so it would lead him to where he needed to go.

  Aaron pulled the car into a spot on the wide lot, and when he stepped outside and his feet touched Nevada earth for the first time, it was like stepping into a different planet. The sun was a shining ball of light in the clear noon sky, but although it was beating down hard on the ground its heat was negligible. Aaron and his family were from Southern California and he had only ever visited Las Vegas a few times in his life and always in the summer, so as the winter chill caressed his skin and puffs of steam formed around his breaths it struck him a little hard. This heat-less Vegas wasn’t the one he knew.

  But the cold didn’t truly bother him much and so, armed with nothing but his opened leather jacket, the shirt beneath it, and a pair of dark Levis, Aaron crossed the length of the parking lot toward the door to the tattoo parlor. He was about to jerk the door open when someone pushed it out from inside and stepped into the cold.

  She was slight, short, and she was wearing a black tank top that clung to her body like film. Hair the color of blood hung straight down her shoulders and back; she wore it parted to the side to frame her angular, face. Her lips were full and painted plum, her eyes were as clear as the summer sky and cut through him like a winter chill, but it was the scent coming off her tanned skin that slapped Aaron hard; sweet and subtle and yet also heavy and inescapable.

  Aaron felt himself swallow, then, and that single instant, that single look they shared, was lightning.

  But the lightning was unfamiliar to Aaron. His heart roared like thunder and angry clouds rose up through his chest, rumbling and roiling.

  He lunged at her, grabbed her by the neck and swung her around and into the side of the building, pinning her against the concrete wall with a single hand. Something had gripped him then, something primal and wild; a feeling that jarred him away from reality, from civility and décor, and triggered the animal within him to act.

  But when the animal inside of him looked into the girl’s eyes it saw not fear, but anger and surprise. She wrangled herself free, slipping out of Aaron’s grasp and slamming him square in the gut with her knee. The blow took the air out of Aaron’s lungs and he doubled over and then staggered back a few paces. Her smell was all around him now, on him, deep in his nostrils. Stranger. Enemy.

  He couldn’t process the feelings, but the girl didn’t care. She launched herself at him firing blow after blow of well-trained fists into his chest and abs. Aaron could barely defend against them all—she was so quick!—let alone hit her back, but he reacted to her blows with his body well, tensing his muscles instinctively at just the right time to absorb most of her hits.

  “Enough!” a voice roared from the door to the tattoo parlor.

  The aggressor’s fist halted in midair, and she turned to face the man by the door. He was tall, broad, with strong shoulders, a thick neck, several days’ worth of stubble growing from his face, and long locks of dirty blond hair. Creeping from out of the sleeves of his Guns n Roses shirt were tattoos, so many of them so packed together that from where Aaron was standing he couldn’t make sense of any of them. And at six feet tall, with eyes like ice, there was no mistaking this man for who he was.

  “Jackal, inside,” said the man, hard and stern.

  The girl turned her piercing blues at Aaron, grinned, and made the short walk back to the shop. “I would say your son hits like a girl, but that would be doing me a disservice,” she said to the man as she disappeared behind the tinted door.

  Aaron breathed through the anger clawing its way up his throat and tried to fight it back into its cage. It wasn’t so much anger at being hit—he could barely feel the pain now as his body quickly dulled the sting of the woman’s fists—but hi
s pride had been hurt. Once, when he wasn’t able to defend himself against Jackal’s attacks, and then again when she mocked him.

  He wasn’t used to being mocked.

  And then there was the sudden urge to hurt her. Where did that come from?

  The older man approached the spot where Aaron was standing, slow and careful, but he stopped short of arm’s length. He stared, motionless and expressionless. With his dirty gold hair gently wafting in the breeze, his biker vest, and wolf’s head belt buckle and dark jeans he could have passed for a classic rock god. He looked like he belonged on a poster with a guitar in his hands, shredding the chords while screaming into a microphone.

  “I knew you’d come one day,” he said, his voice as cold as the blue of his eyes.

  “I didn’t need your help,” Aaron snapped.

  “Didn’t you? Jackal would have left you bleeding on the sidewalk if she’d carried on.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that. I’ve seen Jackal drop men twice your size. You’d better not underestimate her nor overestimate your own skill. That kind of thing will get you killed.”

  “I don’t need you to lecture me.”

  “No, you need me to teach you. So why don’t you come on inside and we can get started?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Aaron stepped into Wolf Skin Tattoo ahead of his father and crossed paths once more with Jackal, who was sitting behind a desk with her eyes on her phone—that is, until Aaron walked in. At that she perked up, placed her phone face down on the desk, and smiled honey at him.

  “No hard feelings?” she asked.

  Strangely there were none, so Aaron shook his head and then took in his surroundings.

  The tattoo parlor was a long building with two booths right up at the front, next to the front desk, and a room round the back, hidden behind a thick curtain. Motley Crue was playing Helter Skelter on the sound system, there were posters of heavy metal bands propped up on the walls alongside pictures of people with tattoos and different kinds of wolves, and shelves covered in little pots of multi-colored ink. The air in here was heavy with disinfectant and other sterile odors Aaron couldn’t recognize and his nose didn’t agree with. He wondered how anyone could breathe in here, let alone work.

  Then he noticed the woman sitting down on one of the benches laid out along the window to the outside. She hadn’t seen, nor heard, anything that had just taken place outside thanks to the earbuds in her ears. Aaron’s body relaxed, until his father patted him on the shoulder.

  “Jackal, you don’t have any more clients today, do you?” Aaron’s father asked Jackal.

  “Not ‘till tomorrow.”

  “Then we’re gonna close early today. As soon as I’m done with her.”

  Jackal nodded and didn’t question what Aaron’s father had said. Instead she bobbed her head to the music and went back to her phone.

  “Listen,” Aaron’s father said, talking to Aaron now, “I know this wasn’t easy for you but I’m glad you’ve come here.”

  Aaron was a little wary of Jackal listening, however passively, to his conversation with his father, a conversation he assumed would be shared in private, but he nodded. “I felt like I had to come.”

  “When did it happen?” his father asked, the expression on his face taking a turn for the serious.

  “A few nights ago.”

  “Full moon,” Jackal offered.

  Aaron’s father nodded. “You did right to come. Your instincts are strong, like mine.”

  Damn right my instincts are strong, Aaron thought, remembering the way his body reacted to Jackal’s blows out in the parking lot.

  “Do you know anything about what’s happened to you?”

  “Little. Only that I—” Aaron glanced at the woman sitting across from them. She was bobbing her head and deep in her phone, oblivious to the conversation. “I’m stronger, tougher, I can change shape, and I can smell… everything.”

  “Have you done much of the shape changing?”

  “I didn’t want to. The last—the first—time I did it I… killed a bunch of people.”

  Jackal’s eyes widened and she glanced at Aaron’s dad, whose face was as hard as an iron anvil. “Innocents?” he asked.

  “No,” Aaron said, shaking his head. “They were trying to kill me.”

  Aaron had dreamed about his first transformation every night since it happened. Always the images came in bursts; blood, fur, snow, silver fire. The time he spent wearing the beast’s skin was all but lost to his conscious mind, but his subconscious remembered. Somewhere, deep inside, he could still taste the blood in his mouth from where he ripped a man’s collar bone right off.

  “I don’t suppose you have anywhere to stay…” Aaron’s father said, trailing off.

  Aaron shook his head. “I came straight here. Drove all night.”

  “I’ll put you up,” he said. “Jackal will take you to my place so that you can drop your stuff off. Then she’ll take you to our slice of Charleston.”

  “Charleston?” Aaron asked.

  “As in Mount Charleston,” Jackal put in.

  “Why am I going there?”

  “To start your training,” Aaron’s father said. “I’ll come round later, when I’m done with my client.”

  “Training already,” Aaron said, “I was hoping for a nap.”

  “You can nap in the car,” Jackal said, getting up from her desk and going around it. “C’mon, big boy,” she added, car keys in hand.

  Aaron stared at his father, thought about throwing a barrage of questions at him there and then, but decided against it and left. The questions could wait. His father had changed from the last time they had seen each other, but only emotionally. Physically, the man was just as big and imposing as he had been when Aaron was a child. But on the inside, the man he once called dad had become serious and authoritative. This wasn’t the man he had spent a summer building a Harley with.

  When Aaron stepped outside into the cold, crisp air, Jackal was only paces away from her car. This would set the tone for their drive around suburban Las Vegas; Jackal leading and Aaron following. Luckily, their destination wasn’t all that far away from the tattoo parlor and a number of gas stations and fast food places were waiting to feed Aaron’s hungry body. But Jackal had other plans, and she didn’t seem to want to stop anywhere but her destination; an apartment on a low rise building just a few minutes out of downtown Las Vegas.

  It being just after noon, the neighborhood was busy with activity; cars, shoppers hitting the local supermarket, and folks walking their dogs here and there. But the wind was biting and harsh, and everyone was in a hurry to get back indoors. Everyone except for Aaron and Jackal who, while not exactly scantily clad—Jackal had put on a cropped denim jacket—still stuck out as under dressed for the cold environment they were in.

  When they crossed the threshold into the apartment building Aaron finally spoke.

  “How did you know who I was?” he asked.

  “You really wanna know?” she asked, cocking her head over her shoulder. She was walking ahead of him down the corridor, hips swaying gently with every step, the perfect curve of her behind drawing his eyes. He shook it off.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Jackal stopped, turned, and took a step toward him. Aaron flinched back a step, but Jackal’s nose came dangerously close to his neck; if he hadn’t moved there may have been contact. She sniffed, long and deep. “You smell like him,” she said in the exhale.

  When she arched her body away from him he caught a whiff of her again. Her scent was sweet and strong, and it warned him not to mess with her, but he caught an odd note too. In the close quarters of the hall that strange quality was as glaring as a neon sign in the dark. An odd quirk that made her scent seem altogether off-putting, like the ketchup on a delicious cake.

  Jackal knocked on the door to her left before Aaron could shoot off a question. A moment passed and he could hear the footsteps behind the doo
r, then the deadbolts unlock, and finally the door open. In the space between breaths, he even thought he could hear the heartbeat of the woman standing in the open arch.

  “Liz!” Jackal said, smiling and hugging the woman like a sister would, but the woman’s eyes were on Aaron.

  She had a face that may have once been round and soft and deep brown eyes that spoke of motherly warmth, but time spent—Aaron guessed—among the wolves had hardened her features and put slight bags under her eyes. Her scent, which he was easily able to pick up, wasn’t as strong as Jackal’s but it reminded him of a mother’s embrace… the kind of mother who would punch someone in the face if they said a bad word about her kids.

  “Howdy,” she said to Aaron, smiling.

  Aaron nodded and said “Hi.”

  “Your father told me you were coming. Why don’t you come on in and make yourselves comfortable.”

  Jackal stepped in first and Aaron followed. The shutters on the windows were all up so the room was bathed in light. Warm food was cooking in the kitchen—steak, with caramelized onion… and parsley—and walking toward it felt like walking into a hug. Aaron’s stomach grumbled so loudly even Jackal heard it.

  “Alright, we can eat but no sleeping,” she said, reading Aaron’s mind, “We have work to do,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t want to impose,” Aaron said, looking over at Liz. He knew the food was for him if his father had called ahead. It was the least he could do.

  Liz shook her head. “This is my house and I say that you’re both going to eat and you’re going to take your time eating. Whatever it is that you have to do, it can wait.” She turned to Aaron. “Come, I’ll show you to your room.”

  Aaron nodded and followed the woman with his duffel bag over his shoulder. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he instinctively understood that the woman was human; or at least, mostly human. It was the mostly part that kept him from walking too closely behind her. But it was her age, the way she had spoken to Jackal, and the tattoos he could see snaking around her arms that tickled his curiosity and made him want to get closer to her.