KISSED BY MOONLIGHT
Wild Hunt, Book 1
By: Adrianne Brooks
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Copyright © 2014 Rascal Hearts
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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[email protected] Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Restless dreamer, Restless dreamer, If you’ve missed me, come and kiss me.
I’m the nightmare you wished away, you lost me on a summer’s day.
I’ve been haunting shadows, eating wishes, stealing smiles, I feel you when you’re not around. I’ve followed you both high and low, watched you fall into the snow, crouched on your chest to hear you scream…
If only because it calmed the need, to come and claim my tithe.
-Ballad of the Hunt
“Pack is family. We keep each other safe. Keep each other human. Pack is all.”
—Gina Parkons
Chapter One
I foiled the terrorists because they’d parked in my parking spot.
You may be thinking “huh?” or even “what the Hell?”, but it’s true.
The car blew up because it was in my parking space.
I work for a newspaper in the heart of corporate America, and as a corporate American, I am predictably irritable and unhappy on a regular basis. To appease me, the corporate American powers that be assigned me my very own parking space. I suppose they figured having a nameplate in front of a designated square of pavement would keep me from wandering into the office one day hyped up on caffeine and sporting an Uzi like a Gucci bag.
And, strangely enough, it had.
My coworkers were alive today because of my parking spot.
Hell, the building was still standing because of that spot.
And then some asshole had to go and ruin it by parking in it.
To say I was pissed would be an understatement. I was enraged, hurt, and disillusioned with mankind.
Vengeful.
Most people don’t know this, but road rage doesn’t actually go away. It gets sucked into your lungs through the rising heat of the pavement and stays there just beneath the surface of your skin. Waiting. Watching for the perfect opportunity to strike and fuck up everybody’s day.
My road rage found the perfect opportunity to rear its bitchy little head when I looked through my windshield to see what had become of my parking space. I glared at the series of numbers that made up the license plate and felt the warning bells begin to chime away in my head. My particular brand of rage was so strong that by the time I realized what I was doing, I had already scrambled out of my Ford Explorer and stalked over to the offending hunk of metal.
Then I busted the driver’s side window in with my low-heeled pump.
The parking garage for the Examiner is close enough to the main building that it takes no more than five minutes to walk from there to the lobby. The paper had bought the small garage when it was apparent that not only did they need it for all the new employees, but that they could also afford it now that the money was rolling in in a steady stream.
My parking space sat up on the roof. By far the nicest, roomiest, and closest space to the main building. My parking space was a god among parking spaces. It kicked ass.
At the risk of sounding like a thirteen-year-old, it ruled.
So, when I busted in that window and shimmied my boobs past the glass still sticking up, so that I could set the car in neutral, I did so with a very clear idea of what it was that I was fighting for.
Because honestly, with my attention span, my rage could only drive me to do so much. After the glass smashed I was still seething, but no longer blinded by anger. So, telling the cops I was gripped with momentary insanity when they came for me wouldn’t work because when I set my shoulder against the frame of the door and started to push forward, my thinking was as clear as it had ever been.
I was going to push this bitch of a car (because, according to my last boyfriend, cars were females and with its sleek black leather interior this particular vehicle just screamed “vagina”) off the parking garage roof.
What about the innocent people below? you may ask.
You could kill pedestrians!
Fuck the pedestrians. The pedestrians wouldn’t cover the cost of my insurance if my car got scratched or stolen simply because I’d relegated it to a poor man’s parking space.
So I pushed and I shoved and my feet (one still in its pump and the other scrambling along the ground encased in my pantyhose) dug into the hot pavement and gave me the leverage I needed to put the guilty car in question where I wanted it.
Then the bumper hit the metal railing that extended around the perimeter of the roof and my vision went red. So I pulled back, then pushed forward. Again and again until the car was rocking like a boat tossed by waves. When it reached its backward zenith, I pushed it forward as hard as I could and was rewarded when the bumper broke through the cheap barrier.
The front two tires quickly followed and in an instant that seemed to stretch out endlessly the car teetered, lost its balance, and took a nosedive off the side of the building.
On a related note, I use Google a lot.
According to Google, there are very specific requirements that have to be met before a car will blow up. It’s actually not as simple as the movies make it out to be. For instance, being shoved off the roof of a ten story parking garage should only be enough to crush the car like a bug. To blow up I would have needed to rupture the gas tank and, even then, there would have been a spark required to get things going.
So when the car, which shouldn’t have exploded, did in fact, explode, I figured I was in more trouble than I had originally prepared myself for.
So I spoke accordingly.
“Oh shit.”