Christmas Moon by Sadie Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

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