Page 30 of Bad Moon Rising
He opened the refrigerator and drew out a vial of moon-madness serum, the concoction that kept lycan males from going bonkers with drive for sex when a full moon rose in the sky. With the event forty-eight hours away, he needed his boost. The drug usually lasted three months, but as he got older, its effectiveness seemed to be lessening. He unwrapped a new syringe with an attached needle from its plastic, drew up 2 ccs of the golden solution, and injected it into his thigh. Well worth the burn to avoid losing his mind, especially around Nova.
Females experienced the same insanity during the full moon, according to his mother. No way to know if Nova had injected herself before she became amnesic. No reason to chance it. He threw the rest of the vial and a new syringe into his bag in case Nova had problems.
Leaving the bag, he climbed up one level to the meeting room. The fireplace blasted his face with heat and saturated his nostrils with the stench of natural gas. He sat in one of the three stuffed chairs near the fire. The heat wasn’t for him, but for their soon-to-arrive guest.
He rolled the Turkish tobacco he’d picked up a few weeks ago and lit up, puffing slowly. Ah, such good stuff.
He flicked his brother’s silver lighter on and off a few times before lighting the note at a corner and tossing it into the gas fire. Shane, his brother who died, had bought this lighter when they chased a witch across Asia three years ago.
“All they had was this shite lighter and no hand rolls,” Shane had said before taking a swig straight out of a six-liter vodka bottle, which he finished within the hour. Shane had tossed down a pack of Marlboros from the Bangkok corner store. He’d despised the American rubbish. Each cig burned too fast and was weak. Hisclick clickto strike the lighter eventually became a tell that he was under stress.
Back then, Shane had been desperate for anything to stupefy his mind. His drive to dull himself went way beyond what all of them experienced on a day-to-day basis. Each of his three brothers would do anything to erase the memories and deaden the guilt, which attacked them in quiet moments. Humans and non-humans died because of what they did and sometimes from what they didn’t do. He, Flynn, and Ky had thought their little brother was recovering after a nasty demon possession. How wrong they’d been. Shane had been irritable and angry since the failed exorcism to rid him of the demon, but he’d progressed to insomnia and delusions right up until he martyred himself. For them.
Death was a way out of the curse to the Crown, a way Roman considered for himself on an almost daily basis. But if one of them didn’t die in the line of duty, if they committed obvious suicide, then the monarch—well, the new king’s recently deceased mother—had promised to kill all of his remaining brothers. It was likely a bluff, but none of them would risk testing her over it. At least, none of them had personal families who’d be in peril as well.
Long ago, he’d dreamed of a family. After decades cursed, he let the fantasy go.
The drive to fight evil and those harnessing its powers was in his soul, not something generated by the blood curse. Being told what to do by some dickhead human and having no choice but to follow orders? That he had a problem with. Especially in the ugly moments when the lines between black and white blurred. Not every non-human who threatened England needed to die. Sometimes a being got possessed or misdirected and might warrant a second chance, not that the monarch or Gerard cared. These humans viewed anything non-human as the enemy, even him and his brothers. More than once he’d prayed for God to be on his side when faced with creatures from hell and found himself out of his depth. An angel showed up. Twice. God listened. That had to mean Roman was doing something right.
He’d asked the angel how to get rid of his curse but received no answer. Not even a clue. All he got was a cryptic smile, which he interpreted as an indication of far more shit in his future before he figured a way to end it.
He said a quick rosary and kissed the pendant around his neck, an ancient Byzantine protective talisman he wore at all times. Although constructed from lapis lazuli blue stone, the pendant had lost its luster long ago.
The door scraped against the floor as it opened, which hurt his ears. King Francis, the new monarch since the queen died three months ago, strode to the chair across from him. It was Roman’s first time meeting him, since he usually sent orders through Gerard. His receding blond hair looked as if he’d walked through a windstorm, but his dull gray suit was perfectly turned-out. He reeked of cigarettes and the hormonal odor of conceit.
The king’s phone dinged—amazing to get reception this far underground, but now that cells worked on wifi, getting a signal down here wasn’t an issue. The king scrolled through an incoming set of images and chuckled. He glanced up with a smile—a politician’s smile, animated with a delight designed to seduce cameras and win favor with people who’d be discarded later.
Behind the king stood Gerard in his skinny jeans and an untucked flannel shirt, an odd outfit that made him look like a yuppie dad about to do a juice cleanse. He refused suits and hated uniforms, but he wasn’t a family man and ate meat three times a day. Hidden beneath the hideous shirt was a sculpted bulk Gerard worked hours a day to maintain. His physical fitness obsession was his way to cope with his inhuman charges, as if being in shape might make him a match for them, as unrealistic as that might be. His short hair had completely grayed out over the past few years. Deep creases covered his face.
“Gerard.” Roman nodded in his direction.
As usual, when Gerard entered, it felt as if everything in the room quieted, not because he was unfriendly, but because he took everything in. He seemed to be constantly analyzing. Never one prone to casual banter, Gerard was tough to read. Roman could rarely figure out what was going on inside the human’s mind. Gerard excelled at secrets, which worked well for his job as their handler and mission support. They had put their life in the hands of his intelligence many times over the past four decades since their induction. Hell, that made it sound like a fraternity. Since they’d been tricked by the witch and cursed to serve the Crown for eternity. None of them had been given a choice about enrolling. Gerard hadn’t been given a choice either and wasn’t thrilled to be reassigned from MI6 to handler duty. But he was a man who, like Roman and his brothers, believed deep down in duty and in fighting evil.
“Which of them are you?” the king asked.
The one you recalled.Roman stared in silence for long enough that King Francis dropped his gaze and shifted on his seat, but he wasn’t frightened by lycans like most humans. He came off acclimated, whereas most humans had a flight instinct when Roman didn’t use a glamour to fully mask himself. He didn’t drop eye contact from the thirty-six-year-old who’d inherited the crown after living life under the microscope of the media. The man had a perfect wife, an adorable toddler, a second child on the way, and made frequent trips around the world to play hero to the oppressed. All of it beautiful rubbish the media ate up. The world wasn’t beautiful, not a quarter mile beneath King’s Road and below the Underground. Here was where the war against the unknown was fought. This one-hundred-ninety pounds of smirk and smarm in a three-thousand-dollar suit had his royal hand on the trigger of a secret preternatural weapon—them—without any hint of compassion.
“Sit,” the king ordered Gerard, who complied immediately by taking the third chair. The royal smirked this time, a patronizing version of his earlier smile. His smugness warned this was going to be much worse than expected.
Roman waited. The bullcrap would rain down within minutes. It’d be a long list of justifications and reasons he had to do whatever absurdity caused them to recall him.
Finally, the king said, “You’re Roman, aren’t you? The leader?”
“You’re Francis. The newly crowned monarch.” The smug asshole better be glad he’d been the one recalled and not Ky, who would’ve flipped off the king and walked out when subjected to this much disrespect, no matter how much the curse punished insubordination.
“It’s ‘Your Majesty’ to you. Turn into a dog. I want to see it.” He waved his hand, leaned forward in the cushy seat, and stared as if about to watch a circus act.
“A dog? Clearly you skipped the briefing on what we are.” He pinned Gerard with a double eyebrow raise, but the man gave nothing away in his expression. “We’re not shapeshifters. We don’t turn into animals.” He would never change into his primal form on command like a pet monkey.
“Then why do they call you wolves?”
Roman took a deep drag on the tobacco and blew out the smoke, watching it until it dissipated. Gerard didn’t reveal an ounce of emotion, not even a smile at the king’s naïveté. He’d be a good poker player.
Patience. That seemed to be all Gerard communicated.
He needed to find that kind of tolerance. “Your mother labeled us the Crown’s Wolves. She, like many people, thought that lycanthropes and werewolves are the same thing, but they’re not. Werewolves are technically fiction. Lycanthropes don’t turn into any type of canid—when we change, we just get bigger and stronger. In fact, I have yet to run into a person who can turn into an animal, and, believe me, I’ve seen a lot of strangeness in this world. There are witches who can cast spells and transform a person into an animal or object temporarily, but most spells make a person think he’s a dog rather than turning him into one. Even our name, lycanthrope, is a misnomer, since its root word is Greek for ‘wolfman.’ The idea came from a confused juvenile lycan who thought himself a human that turned into a wolf, when it really wasn’t the case. Then they labeled it a psychological derangement, which later came to be called Werewolf Syndrome.”
“You’re just people with some sort of mental problem?”
