January Moon Read online

  January Moon

  Jade Sinclair Series

  Victoria Danes

  Contents

  Content Warning

  1. Monsters never sleep

  2. Unfortunate

  3. The last dance

  4. Birthday surprise

  5. Complications

  6. Meetings

  7. Games

  8. Visitor

  9. Madeline

  10. Not Today

  11. Family Gatherings

  12. Training

  13. Discovery

  14. Empty

  15. Chasing the past

  16. Milk and Bread

  17. Theory

  18. Unfriendly

  19. Shit

  20. Mother knows best

  21. Drained

  22. Goodbyes

  23. Run

  24. Claimed

  25. Ceremonies

  26. Loose ends

  27. Together

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Victoria Danes

  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © Victoria Danes 2019. All Rights Reserved ®

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without actual written consent from the author.

  Photo credit Canstockphoto.com

  Josefpitnner

  Johanswanepoel

  Neotakezo

  Cover design by D.C. Gambel

  Edited by Kathy Krick

  Created with Vellum

  Content Warning

  This book is mature and mentions sexual violence along with strong language, graphic scenes, and sex.

  “I’ve tried to contain it, but it’s too much and I can’t help but surrender to my rotten desires…”

  Monsters never sleep

  Present Day - Misery, PA

  It was cold enough that the snow crunched under my boots with each step, and my lungs shriveled up with each breath. Beneath the scent of the coming snow was a putrid smell that made my stomach roll with nausea. It was her. The last strigoi out of a group of five that I’d been trailing for several days.

  Strigoi are dangerous because they are like vampires and werewolves all rolled inconveniently into one, but it’s like they’re on steroids. Their bloodlust is insatiable, and they are difficult to kill. I used to believe that they needed to be animated in order to come crawling out of the grave at night, but my mother, a Romanian witch, says it’s not true. Some people are just prone to becoming strigoi after death. In her small Romanian town of Coves, the people who were believed to become strigoi after death would be staked and beheaded and their heart would be burned, turned into ash, and given to the family of the deceased to drink. Apparently, that was the only way to stop them. Thankfully, I discovered that removing the heart and head worked just as well. However, when I am hired by a family to hunt a member of theirs that has become a strigoi, I always offer them the option to drink the ashes. I have yet to see anyone do it.

  I’d like to believe that this current epidemic of strigoi was the reason behind the recent killings in town, but my instinct tells me otherwise. While some of the victims were beaten and completely drained of their blood from very neat wounds on the throat, others were torn to pieces and scattered about leaving nothing more than a bone or two behind.

  I didn’t need the frantic bark of the neighborhood dogs to know that she was close. I could feel her, smell the rotting of her flesh as she continued to elude me. Her desire for blood was so vivid that I could feel it on my tongue. As a werewolf, I don’t need blood to survive. Do I enjoy it? Sure. All werewolves do. Its potency gives us a rather addicting surge of power, but unlike the bloodsucking vermin that call themselves vampires, werewolves are not dependent on it. Occasionally, we allow ourselves a taste, a small sample from a donor or a blood bank, but for the most part, small animals for when we shift and human food for when we are in human form work just fine.

  Slowly, I made my way around the bare trees behind the ranch homes in the quiet neighborhood.

  A young female strigoi with long red hair dressed in a wedding gown, growling low in her throat, crouched over something bloody and steaming on the ground. It was only then I realized that the barking had stopped.

  I pulled up my black and silver Ruger SR-40c, even though I knew it wouldn’t do me any favors and pointed it at her. The bullets were wooden, carved from white oak, the only thing that could incapacitate a strigoi enough to trap them or behead them right then and there.

  Beside me, the heavy breaths of my new partner Nicholas Shaw made me scowl. I turned to him and placed a finger over my lips to silence him.

  He held his breath and lowered his pale blue eyes.

  “Sorry,” he whispered after a beat. “I’m not used to all this…running,” he admitted. Nick wanted to be a police officer for the M.T.U, the monster tactical unit, a division in the police department composed only of wereanimals and vampires that handles preternatural crime and punishment. So since Nick had a pulse, didn’t turn into some kind of animal, and had no background in working with supernatural creatures, M.T.U. denied his application. When he saw my ad in the paper for a field assistant, he applied for a job with me. I hired him because I could use the help these days.

  “Jade,” Nick said softly as we watched the strigoi devour her meal. “Can’t you just…you know, turn furry and…eat her?”

  I gave him disapproving eyes and shook my head. I had no idea my father was an alpha werewolf, which basically makes me a werewolf princess. I only shifted for the first time ever a few months ago. The popping sound of my bones breaking and readjusting to accommodate the beast inside still haunts my dreams. There is nothing I enjoy about being a werewolf. I struggle to come to terms with that part of myself every day.

  When I was only twelve years old, my father disappeared. I’d had a pretty normal childhood until that happened. I never noticed anything strange about my parents, but then again, I never really studied them. I had plenty of my own battles to fight, including puberty and managing my clairvoyant powers, which at the time I hid from my parents. Come to think of it, they were pretty good at hiding shit from me too.

  After my father vanished, my mother became catatonic because she couldn’t deal and had to be institutionalized. With no other family to look after me, I became the property of social services and spent the next three years dodging fists, bullies, and angry, drunk foster parents. I was fifteen when Detective Eleanor Bates, or Ellie as I called her, took me in and basically mothered me until I went off to college to pursue a criminal justice degree. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, but I knew I wanted to help people. Private investigating was just something I got good at and eventually decided it was the best route for me. I was twenty-four when Ellie died in the line of duty. It broke something inside me that was barely hanging on to begin with.

  As if she sensed us, the strigoi turned and hissed in our direction, blood pouring from her mouth before she leaped into the air and over a wooden fence separating the road from a back yard.

  I immediately followed her, hopping over the fence with ease and landing on the balls of my feet in a yard littered with children’s toys.

  My heart hammered hard inside my chest hoping she didn’t make her way into the house where tiny kids were sleeping.

  “Hurry up, Nick!” I hollered making my way to the shed. I knew she was in there. Her vile energy was like a beacon calling to me.

  The night became suddenly still. The only t
hing I could hear was Nick’s speeding heart and heavy breath.

  The doors to the small shed were open and flapping in the wind. Nick and I cautiously made our way toward it when a light came on and a man in a gray robe holding a baseball bat was standing just off to the side on the patio.

  “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my yard?” he asked through his teeth. Though he tried to look brave, he wasn’t fooling anyone. Fear was thick in his veins, tainting his courageous heart.

  I gestured for him to be quiet and go back inside, but he resisted.

  Damn fool.

  The night erupted with her shrill voice as she sprang out of the shed and charged the man holding the bat. I was in front of him before she had a chance to do any damage.

  The strigoi hit me full force in the chest, and we both crashed into a tree. My ribs and back cracked, pain vibrating through me, but I did not have time to dwell on it.

  Her decaying teeth chomped at my face. I grabbed for her throat and squeezed as hard as I could, tearing it out before two shots rang out.

  She slumped over me, but I knew she wouldn’t be down long. Shoving her body away from mine, I yelled, “Nick, the net! Hurry!” I scurried to my feet just in time to watch him fire the net gun, entrapping the wriggling creature on the ground.

  “What the hell is that?” The homeowner gasped as he came to stand beside us.

  “That, sir,” I began. “Is a strigoi. And this…” I held up my gun to his face. “Is a gun. When you see either one of them, you should fucking run. Got it?”

  His big, brown eyes studied me for a breath and then he nodded. “I’m sorry. Please, just get it out of here before it wakes my kids,” he pleaded, and then headed back to his house, locking the door behind him.

  I put my gun in my hip holster and took a moment to collect myself. The pain in my chest and back was annoying, but I knew my werewolf blood would heal that just fine. One of the perks, I guess.

  “What do we do with it, Jade?” Nick asked putting the net gun over his shoulder. One of the reasons I hired Nick was because of his size. He was over six feet tall with wide shoulders and heavy arms, which made him perfect for carrying around ten pound weapons, but he still had a lot to learn about the new world we lived in.

  “We have to get rid of it,” I answered, pulling my phone out from my jacket pocket. “I’m on Cranberry Avenue,” I said quickly and then hung up.

  “Was that your father’s goon?” Nick quizzed.

  I nodded.

  Since I am his daughter and was kidnapped a few months ago by a sadistic vampire, my father Lucian insisted that two of his wolves were to always be with me, or at least somewhere nearby. Also because he felt I am always a target due to the nature of my work as a touch clairvoyant and because over the years he has made plenty of enemies who would love nothing more than to see him suffer.

  A black SUV pulled up and my father’s wolf Paul stepped out. I was familiar with him. He had been charged with guarding me before. I didn’t make things easy on him, and I don’t intend to start now.

  Paul was wearing dark jeans, black boots, and a black jacket. His light blond hair was faded with tribal looking designs on one side and styled into a faux hawk on top. He had a piercing in one brow that glistened under the glow of the moonlight. Over the last couple of months, I had gotten to know him better, but that did not mean I liked him lurking around all the time. Felix, the other goon, was shorter than Paul but just as muscular, with shoulder-length brown hair, gray eyes, and a scruffy beard. He got out of the car too, but it was Paul that always did the talking.

  “You rang?” Paul boomed as he walked toward us.

  “Grab the net and pull,” I suggested and gestured at the strigoi as it struggled in the net.

  “I’m not putting that thing in my car,” he refused with raised brows.

  “What do you want me to do with it, Paul? Leave it here so the kids can play duck, duck, goose in the morning?”

  He sighed, his massive shoulders rising and falling with the effort.

  “Fuck it then,” I snapped. “I’ll do it my damn self.” I went for the net, but Paul put up a hand to stop me.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I got it,” he assured while pulling back the net.

  Behind him, the strigoi thrashed and shrieked. Nick and I followed just in case she somehow managed to break through.

  When Paul got to the car, he opened the trunk and tossed it in. “Now what?” he asked.

  “Now take her to M.T.U and let them handle it,” I responded.

  There was a look on Paul’s face that I didn’t like.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Nothing,” he replied with a shrug. “It’s just…why didn’t they handle it in the first place?”

  “I was already in the neighborhood, and I agreed to help as a favor,” I answered.

  “A favor to your boyfriend?” Paul asked.

  I shook my head. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. It was the mayor who called me…”

  Before I could finish my sentence, a large black police truck pulled up and men in gray uniforms and black bulletproof jackets that had M.T.U written in bold white letters on the front spilled out.

  Some of them were built like gladiators, tall and stocked with muscles from head to toe, while others were lean and pale but had a certain air around them that demanded attention.

  Years ago, when vampires and werewolves became public, the world suffered for it. The human government refused to give them residency or rights. The vampires spilled a lot of blood in pursuit of those rights. Innocent blood. Some vampires were caught and burned but not enough of them that it would stop their movement. We were at a catch twenty-two as they say. So, the human government came up with a way to keep the peace and give vampires what they wanted. They elected six vampires across the world to run the vampire council, a group of the oldest and strongest vampires to lead the rest and keep them in line. The council decided that they could not be in so many places at once. In order for things to run smoothly, other measures would need to be taken, which prompted them to appoint a master vampire in each city where there are more than a dozen vampires residing. A vampire has to be over a certain number of years old and have no immediate blood ties to anyone in the council. Our little city of Misery, Pennsylvania is run by a master vampire named Mathias. For the most part, he is compliant and keeps the others in line, but every now and then, some fall out of line and need to be dealt with.

  Two years after the government saw that things ran smoothly with the vampire agreement, they elected one supreme alpha to lead the werewolves. This did not go over well in the werewolf community. A lot of them died trying to fight this new law, leaving their packs vulnerable and weak. Eventually, they had no choice but to concede and obey. My father is still bitter about it. He hasn’t lost his pack in eastern Europe, but he is not happy about not being the one to make all the calls anymore. Everything must go through the supreme alpha.

  My heart fluttered when I noticed him getting out of the truck. He stood there with his hands behind his back. His chin raised, and his green eyes looking straight ahead. Everything about him said dominant. I loved the way his thick brows scowled as he watched his men and the way his square jaw flexed as he chewed a piece of gum. He let his beard grow out a bit over the last few months, making him that much sexier. Being all business tonight, he looked wickedly delicious in his dark gray police uniform, bulletproof vest, and black cap.

  The look and scent of him sent my blood into a slow simmer. My stomach tightened with desire, and my wolf instantly became alert and sat up, waiting…wanting. It felt like a magnet was pulling me in his direction. I could feel his wolf stir, his energy caressing me in places I wish he’d touch. Six months ago when I was in a car accident, Adrian was the responding officer. He didn’t know who I was, or what I was, but to save me, he bit me thinking his werewolf bite would help me, turn me. Instead, all it did was awaken a dormant beast already the
re. I was born a werewolf and had no idea because my father kept it all from me. He even managed to keep my wolf subdued, but when Adrian bit me, he awakened her. Our wolves responded to one another the moment our lips touched, and without knowing it at the time, we began the mating bond. However, it has yet to be completed.

  “Officer Kincaid,” I greeted with a smile as I approached him.

  He very briefly looked at me, nodded, and then his eyes went back to his crew as they gathered up the hissing monster from Paul’s car.

  “Jade.” His greeting was almost as cold as his piercing gaze.

  “Can you at least look at me for longer than two seconds?” I asked irritated.

  He did with a slight smirk on his full lips. “I’m burning inside to touch you,” he whispered. “And I’m afraid that if I look at you, I won’t be able to control myself anymore, and I’m not going to follow anyone’s rules but my own. Which means I’ll take you and mark you, here and now.” His eyes were focused on something in the distance. When I followed his gaze, I realized he was looking at Paul, who was watching us intently. Although our wolves have bonded, my father forbade the alliance at first. He hasn’t exactly come to terms with it now either, but he knows there is nothing he can do. You cannot stop a bond once it started. His way of controlling the situation is by keeping close eyes on me and making sure Adrian and I don’t have sex. At least not until the mating ceremony which will complete the bond and seal it forever.