Shadow of the Moon by Lori Handeland Read Free Book Online

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