Bad Moon Rising.

*(Part one of four.)

It’s been a very busy last few days. Mostly it was getting the resources together that we were going to need. I wanted my people safe but I wanted to leave a really good message to these Templars.

Templars, a group of well funded, well organized human fundamentalists that have been long recruited to keep the old races from ever making a comeback since their near obliteration by the Roman Empire who sought to increase to dominion of man.

This was picked up as the mantra of the Templars as they added the vows to destroy anyone that didn’t fit their ideals. Those with the gifts, the elder races, gays and lesbians and anything that doesn’t fall into the strict doctrines of their version of the church.

Iraq, yeah that was them. Fighting “The Terrorists” is their new crusades. Fringe groups, hate groups, Fox News, Homeland Security…yep they’re behind all of it.

Grandpa says it’s not just them, that everything is interwoven in layers and layers of the factions out there trying to manipulate the world each for their own benefit. Well so am I.

Derek Martin’s information led us to several evangelical yet small churches and several out of the way but close to the highway roadhouse bars. I could say we got the information we wanted easily but we didn’t. They hated us, they obviously hated us and there was violence. There was death and blood as they so often shot first and asked questions later. I killed seven people myself in the last three days. I’m not proud of it, I fucking hate it. This isn’t me. But they had guns, drugs and they could be ordered to go after our human families. I killed five in my warrior form, my half wolf form and two I shot. Mom and dad don’t know. They don’t know that I killed people; I’ve no idea what they’d say. Hell they’re still trying to get used to me being Stevie.

Dad’s less than thrilled about it but seeing as he comes from mage blood as much as he’d like to deny it he gets the hows and the whys. He just really is rankling about me being Queen. Part of it’s, this me being a girl thing and part of it is me being in charge. It’s not that he thinks that he should be in charge but it’s more like I shouldn’t be and the whole parent taking orders from their kid thing.

Mom, mom’s just freaked out about the whole thing and blames herself for not coming clean about the whole me being intersexed thing. To her it’s something off the internet and not a magical shift. She thinks Katya and I are…were… a lesbian thing.

To me…no matter what, no matter who I’m with now and no matter how short it was. Katya and I were…are a forever thing.

Dom’s not happy about any of it.

“Dammit Stevie you have to stop this.”

“No, Dom I don’t, more to the fact I won’t, I don’t dare stop.”

“Why, you hate this? I know you hate this. You have nightmares and you cry in your sleep. This is killing your soul Stevie.”

“I can’t stop Dom, I can see it! I can see them coming for us in my dreams Dom! I can smell them; I can feel it when it happens….”

He can smell the fear and the truth on me. He looks at me with such great love and takes my face in his hands and he kisses me. I cry, I cry and lean into that kiss and let him take care of me.

“I didn’t know Stevie, I didn’t know.”

“It’s real Dom, there’s going to be a war coming and we’re all on the extermination list.”

He looks at me and I open right up to him. I kind of fall into those eyes of his then he kisses me again. The best part of this is when he holds me. Guys never really admit it but we like being held. When we’re growing up the last and usually only people to hold us are our mothers. Then we’re just not allowed to, it’s girly, you gotta be a man about things. My dad or my grandpa never said that stuff they never had too. Society can do that all by itself.

Now I’m allowed to enjoy it. To have someone else be the strong one and just let me have a break. Let my soul take a bit of a breather and heal.

The money we take, the drugs, the cars, the weapons we take. I’ve pack members who are on the wrong side of the law. Man’s laws. They can get us things we need from their contacts. They can chop the vehicles, I’m taking it all. The rest get’s burned.

I’m not kind to the ones who I can smell lying to me. I’m too young to be becoming the person I am. But there’s so many depending on me. Torture, torture yeah…there’s times in the last three days that I am, or see that monster that I’m becoming and what they claim I am coming to pass.

Dom, my sweet Dominic is keeping me alive. We fight a lot; argue because he doesn’t want me doing the things I’m doing. He says that it’s all beneath me. He says that we shouldn’t do the things that we’re doing that we have never done before. I argue about it, tell him that this isn’t the old world. He then argues that the down and dirty bad things I should leave to him.

It’s easier to argue, to be assertive when I’m Stevie and not shifted. I’m further away from my instinct to give in the closer to human that I am. But arguing isn’t the only thing that we’re doing.

I’m becoming a sex addict I‘m pretty sure of it. It’s that lately I need to be feeling something, anything else than the things that I’m doing, that’s the biggest part of it and just because he loves me so passionately, so powerfully another part of it is that I am falling in love with Dom.

I’m a bit scare of the passion of where we’re going… every time I kill, we have sex, every time I have to hurt someone for information we have sex. I wake up in the mornings or lately earlier and we have sex.

Only the nights are really different, that’s when Dom makes love to me.

It’s when I can just let go of who I am completely and let Dom literally take over, let him take me and turn me into a completely different person when we’re together like this.

It starts after the crap and all the ugly shit is done for the day. And Dom and I are done our getting me through it screw. He’ll hold me after and kiss me then he’ll push away and shift into his wolf form and I’ll chase him, follow.

He runs some of that crap that I’m living through out of me. I can see where someone who’s a churchman would be disturbed by us if even in our disposition. It’s freeing in a way I’ve never known.

You run through the wilderness clad only in your fur, and feeling the world in a whole new way. Were-senses are stronger vision better than human, able to see in the dark. And being able to scent things…it’s not just smelling like we do, there is a sense of color to things as you smell them like this, and there’s this strange kind of texture to it too.

It’s kind of like this. You don’t just see the apple, but smell it too. You can smell the juicy inside of it and you can smell its skin to and in such a way that you can tell almost exactly how crispy it’s going to be. Now just apply that idea to the scents of everything.

You can just fall into these senses and actually just stop being yourself for awhile. Then there’s the running, the speed of it and the endurance that you have not just as a wolf but there’s the were aspect as well. You can literally run for days on end, wolves are made to run down their prey. Were’s are faster and bigger and stronger, I can lightly run myself about thirty miles an hour, just over fifty in a full out run. Out in a field it feels like I’m flying through another world.

It’s a world that Dom’s been showing me.

A whole new world and way of living and seeing things the I’d have never known if he hadn’t taken the time to show it to me. There is a closeness to nature that can really only be described as a religious experience. I can see if one person was really connected to this it would lend a soulful quality to them that would drive most of the churchmen into fits. I know that it very well could be one of the very reasons why we are so hated by the Templars.

How dare some filthy animal have more soul than they do? Heresy, Sacrilege kill them all burn them all scrub them from the earth for daring to make us feel inadequate.

These wild runs are the most freeing and meditative thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Well not the only thing that’s like that. Being with Dom and letting go is…I think the letting go, the release of all my control is better than the sex. It’s so intimate its part of me now and part of how I show my love. Of how I make love.

Dom…

It’ll be night-time wherever we are and despite the long day we’ve eaten out someplace. I’m teaching Dom about the joys of American food.

I undress and sometimes if the clothes are just too dirty or bloodstained they just go into the trash. I make my way into the shower and step under the hot water and try to wash the feeling of hell off of me.

Dom…

He slips into the shower behind me and his hands run over my skin, always raising gooseflesh on me no matter how hot the water. He takes the soap from me and the washcloth, he soaps me up and he washes me. Makes me clean for him, the way that he wants. If I’m sort of in a mood I’ll fight him. He’ll growl and lets some of his wolf out…he gets about three inches taller, and he gains about twenty pounds of muscle and he pins me, puts me breast first against the shower stall wall. His nails have gone to black claws and have curled around my neck. His chest is pressed to my back and when he growls at me I feel it vibrate through me and I feel my legs go weak and I get so much more wet than the shower can get me.

He turns me to face him and kisses me forcefully and as he does his claws just drag over my skin, scrape my breasts and flick over my nipples making them cry out…it’s just a tiny kinda sort of scrape and it hurts but it hurts so right, so good…Then his claws are between my legs just teasingly, threateningly tracing over my sex…those hands work their way up to my throat and rest there…He pushes me down to my knees and growls.
Dom…

There’s the threat there between the growl and the claws. I start giving him a blowjob, he’s thicker than usual. It’s a struggle to service him. I resist sometimes a bit but I always give in, I have to let some of the she wolf out for her mate and that’s when everything changes…I, her, she catches the scent, sex scent, his scent my mates scent and taste and it’s so good, so overwhelming to my brain I cum with as much of a canine whine as I can with him in my mouth…as he hears it he pushes in the rest of the way down my throat and he groans…I did good, If my tail was out it’d be happily swishing. Me moves his hips, I give him every ounce of my desire my aching need to please him, I let go of Steve/Stevie and become She/His Mate…I worship him as I do, run my nails now claws over his powerfully muscled body. His claws move to my head and run lovingly over my head, through my wet hair and I touch myself my fingers moving in rhythm with him pumping, gliding in and out of my lips, my throat. He talks to me, I’ve no idea what he says but its so loving, and it’s all in this sexy Hungarian growl…

Dom…My Dom….

He scoops me up hands under my arms and into the air and my legs almost involuntarily wrap around his waist. He carries me into the room where we are staying and he lays me down onto the bed. I make canine whines of pleasure as he licks and suckles my breasts, the nipples oh so tender from the graze of his claws. He’s so tender being that softly loving male wolf as he suckles from me, occasionally kissing me, nibbling at my jaw as I cum in his arms and bare my throat to him.

He soon takes me but it’s not rough, it’s not gentle it’s slow, careful and utterly insistent that he is making me his and to be wanted so aggressively is something that my heart screams yes over…and over and over…He’s large and he’s thick and there’s even this extra band of thickness of where the knot would be if he shifted more. He moves though like the canine he is when he gets going with this heavy, fast, instinctual motion that possesses me and takes me over.

I try to help, to give him even more than all of me…it becomes something else as he takes me through position after position in this yoga, tantric, Kama-sutra kind of lovemaking where he is my master, teacher, lover and my mate…I’m his slave, his disciple, his whore, his lover and in the tender moments his mate.

In the end of it when we’re done, sated and fulfilled he takes me into his arms and nuzzles and spoons against me. He holds me like he’s afraid I’ll vanish on him and he’ll kiss my hair, smell me and whisper to me.

“I love you Stevie, You are a miracle to me.”

***
The Mission was a seedy bar in the outskirts of Bangor, Maine. It was one of those off the beaten path from the highway out in the county biker clubs. It was the base of operations for the Heaven’s Soldiers biker club.

The Deacon (Club President) looked around the club as he turned off his cell-phone and looked at his LT. Jobe. “We got word; we might be having some trouble. It turns out the freaks and the monsters are raising Caine with our friends and affiliates through out the state. Get Henry and git the dogs from the fighting pens outside but chained up where they can pick up any of those heathen freaks coming after us.”

“Sure Boss anything else?”

“Yeah, break out the silver buckshot and whatever else we’ve got.”

Deacon looked at the guys who had quieted down to listen up. He had seen one of those freaks when he was a kid. His old man had taken him on a hunt for one when he was nine and when he saw the guy change from a guy into this wolf like creature he knew all his old man’s talk about heaven and hell and freaks and demons was true. He prayed for real in the first time in his life when it came for him and his dad had put a silver bullet into the thing’s guts. It took a long time to die. It looked human but it wasn’t human.

He told that story to his guys a hundred times and some of them had gone on hunts for these things too with him even. “The Bishop says it’s getting worse and worse boys and that it’s coming, judgment day fellas, fucking judgment day.”

It took some time getting things ready and the guys were telling war stories and getting their guns ready, guzzling beer, smoking, popping pills or smoking or snorting their drug of choice. Deacon lit up and took a haul/pull/puff off his joint and held the lungful while he washed it down with two fingers of Jack Daniels before exhaling. He got up and stomped around checking on the guys and looking into the back room.

The little bitch was still in there, this cage that his bosses had him build. It had all kinds of real holy designs on them. The girl was about ten years old and cute for a nigger, naked. She stared at him and he splashed some of the Jack on her and she cries out as some of it gets in her eyes. He kicked the cage, grinning as he caught a couple of fingers.

“Why are you doin this to me!” She screamed.

“’Cause yer a fucking witch, you ain’t supposed to have powers over men and not from god.”

“All I ever did was heal people! I was helping them out!”

“Yer an unnatural whore is what you are, what’d you do spread your legs for Satan?”

Deacon reached in and grabbed her by the throat through the bars of the cage. She struggled but had no where to go. He pulled her by the throat up against the bars and she cried out he started to push her legs apart and insert the bottle.

He felt the cool touch of gun metal at the base of his neck. “You even think about hurting the girl any further Deacon I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

He knew the voice, it was Shannon, the pledge Rick Lane’s bitch. She was a bit of a cougar but he had thought, they all had thought she was a decent cunt. She’d done things for the guys, for the club that no cop bitch would ever do, had too much ink.

“Shannon…what the fuck do you think yer doing? This girl’s the devils own and she needs to be culled.”

“Like the other girls you’ve snatched Deke?, All those non-white girls that you’ve taken and shipped off to Hades knows where.”

“Hey it is what it is, God never put them here. Fuckin Spics, Niggers, Chicks, all of them are Satan’s Spawn, the reason the country’s falling the fuck apart. It’s all been going to hell for a long time Shannon. The Jews even got their pet Nigger into being the president.”

“I’ve met President Obama, not a bad guy as far as politicians go.”

“Who the fuck are you really?” He asked as the cunt used zip restraints to cuff him but to also hook under his belt. Shit she knew what she was doing. He debated yelling for the guys but she pressed the gun a bit tighter…considerin she had his dick in her a couple of days ago she might just pull the trigger. Bitches were like that.

“The name’s Andrea DiMaggio, FBI.”

“You’re a fuckin Fed?” He started to chuckle, then quietly laugh. “So how’d you like sucking all that cock Fed?”

“I didn’t, but me…I don’t matter Deke. You steal kids and you hurt them, you sell them as slaves and abuse them. They’re children you fucking piece of shit and it’ll never matter what happens to me. I’d…I’d die a hundred times to save just one.. You’re very, very lucky Deke that I need you alive. Now what’s the deal with the cage?”

***
Athena:

I had gotten the call from the head office that pulled me out of Miami on an emergency flight up to Quantico. It’d been about a week since she’d dealt with Rapture and had been waiting on word from Jonelle. The ley lines in the southern states were starting to act wonky.

Sister Sarah a friend in the Cubano community had been talking about the steady rise of Stigmata and reports of possessions were getting more frequent. It was building fast…I could feel it, there was a feeling in the air, this…surge coming, I needed to know what.

It feels like…But I have to be sure.

I was brought in because of my “experience” with abnormal psychology. There was some serious trouble in the north east. They had figured on some kind of big unheard of gang war. Somebody new was clearing house with the gangs up there but not just the gangs, drug dealers, convicted sex offenders and other criminals. It had all the ear marks of pure vigilante work.

The kicker was this new gang was a bunch of psychopaths that were acting like animals. I knew there was something there, I mean it’s very rural and home to a few things that could do this, but they wouldn’t…I mean it’s not the way that they are or operate.

What am I talking about? Werewolves, I’m not kidding either but they’re not the kind of beings that do this kind of thing. They’re passive, they stay in hiding fighting only to defend themselves. There’s kills in the files that look like something like a Were has been killing but there’s other evidence. Military experienced by the evidence, different styles of doing things, and then there’s the thefts. It was the mauling and the kills and the evidence of something supernatural that had me take the assignment.

I went undercover getting picked up by another agent who’d be my “boyfriend.” I became a waitress at the club and was treated like some cheap biker slut for the most part and I’ll admit to there being part of myself liked it, like I was being punished for past sins.

Heaven’s Soldiers were one of the last bigger gang groups out there. They were a part of the biker fringe that was borderline militia group. I wasn’t really going to stick with it not until I saw them get a call, a bunch of them left and that’s when they brought back Hannah…that’s the name of the little black girl. That’s when they trotted out the crosses, and the guns and the silver and wolves bay along with a whole bunch of other stuff like you’d see…Templars, these guys were hooked up with the Templars.

They brought Hannah in calling her a witch a little girl who had seen these guys show up and from what I heard literally lynch and hang her family. This caged and scared little girl that was brimming with magical energy like I hadn’t felt in hundreds of years.

They stuffed her in a cage made to disrupt magical power. My thought was WTF was a biker gang doing with that. Why hadn’t they killed the girl? Templars are as bad as the KKK.

So… in this deep I stayed undercover and through myself into being Shannon. And in trying to find out what was going on I found out they were kidnapping kids, not a one of them white and selling them as domestic slaves here and abroad.

Kids, it had to be kids.

I can’t have any of my own, Athena, goddess…Immortal…and everything else unable to do the thing that almost every woman can do.

So I debased myself, did everything I had to do to do to stay undercover, to find a way to help those kids…There were times I just wanted to curl up and cry, or throw up for hours. Even fighting the need to scrub my skin clean for hours. I thought I could take it right up to when Deke was going to molest the girl.

I look at Hannah. “Sshh, honey it’s going to be alright.” I need to think of something. It was just me and Rick my undercover partner and twenty of them.

I hear pop music? Outside and a few minutes later there’s laughing and giggling inside the club house. I keep my gun on Deke and peer through the door.

Shit! There’s a gaggle of teenaged girls all dressed up in that out to party skimpy stuff and their asking for “like” directions. This is all I need, fuck, fuck, fuck. The guys start to hit on them and the stupid bitches are flirting with trouble that they can’t imagine. They’re prime targets for these guys. They’ll be raped and worse if I don’t do something.
Then I feel it, the change in energies in all five girls. There’s this blonde in the middle of the girls and she let’s out a ripple of mana, and the doors and windows all shut and slammed closed, I saw her eyes change and become wild and feral the blue eyes of a wolf…her ears went pointed and her nails became claws, and so did the other four girls.

I see her tilt her head to talk into a transceiver mike. “Now.” Then someone blew the lights, and stun grenades got fired through the windows. She raised a shield barrier around her and the others.

Then all hell breaks loose and They become whirlwinds of death and superhuman strength and intense claws. They’re good, really good and they’ve done this before. They don’t shift all the way either. The bikers freak out and in the first few seconds there’s blood everywhere, a few heads hit the walls and I step out. I can’t let them kill Rick.

“FBI!, Everybody freeze!”

Yeah, they ignore me.

I hate being ignored. “Rick!, Get the fuck down and stay down!” I see him drop and one of the bikers takes a shot at me. I put him down with a few shots. One of the Were’s swings at me…alright enough. I block her claw strike with my forearm and was going to smack her down but she’s good, and I’m defending myself for all this body is worth…I pull on the free energies and take a claw hand to my upper right shoulder, it’s just a slice.

She should’ve ripped my arm off if I was human. I’m not…I’m Andrea Lena DiMaggio I am Athena returned to Earth! I hit her in the chest with a palm strike and send her all the way acrossed the place and smashing through the wall to the outside.

Then I’m facing the blonde and she stares at me hard.

That’s alright I’m a hard bitch too, I stare right back. There’s guys in commando gear and full on wolf form Weres in with them taking the rest of the bikers down but not killing them.

She looks at me and stays in that feral state, I’ve known her kind before. That takes a lot of control of her essence, plus she’s a mage. That’s nearly unheard of amongst her kind. Her nostrils flare pulling in my scent. “You’re not human.”

“Neither are you.”

“Good guess, FBI?”

“Yeah, I’m here because of you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, nobody gets what you’re doing even me.”

“I’m clearing house.”

“We’ve noticed, are you crazy kid do you have any idea who these guys are hooked up with?”

She leans down and picks up a rosary with skull beads made of silver and holds them and the cross and her hand starts to burn. She stares right at me not showing the least hint of pain. “The Templars I hope.”

“You hope?”

“Yes, I’m sending a message they’ll never forget.”

“You’re going to get you and these people killed. They’ll reach out and use means to hit you that you can’t believe kid. They’re everywhere.”

“So are we.”

I look at her and the others are tidying up the scene. I point to Rick who’s cornered by a huge black wolf, a European looking wolf…his Glock is in pieces apparently reduced to a chew toy. “He’s with me, also FBI.”

She looks over that way. “Dom, come here honey.” The big black wolf gives Rick another growl before padding over. He head rubs into her hip. She’s scratches his ruff. Some of the non-wolves help Rick up. A guy in a bunch of fatigues with a combat assault shotgun comes over. “We got them all, There’s a kid out back in a cage and Deacon tried to make a run for it. What’s your orders your highness?”

She looks at him. “Give me a few moments Hasen, The agents and I need to talk.”

The guy gives her this claw over his heart gesture and she returns it. There’s this look from all of them in here that say they respect the shit out of her. He goes away to do whatever.

I look at her. “What are you trying to accomplish really.”

“Who are you really?” she counters. I look at her and consider things for a moment.

“Athena of Olympia.”

She looks at me, then I feel her reaching out to feel me out with her magical senses. I open up enough for her to get a look at me. She stares at me considering, not freaking out. Then she runs her fingers through the wolf’s fur looking down at him after awhile.

“I’m defending my people, Athena. I see things in my dreams, real things. There’s a war coming and the Templars are going to try to do their damned best to wipe us out and it’s coming soon. I’m defending my Pack and the other Packs too if they’ll join us.”

“The others, the elder races will be out for blood kid, they won’t want you and this war of yours to bring them out of the closet.”

“That’ll be my problem then.”

“It’ll start a war kid.”

“Not if they back off. I just want the Templars to know if they come for us, they’ll pull back a bloody stump.”

“You’re getting in over your head.”

“I know but there’s nothing else I can do. They’ll find the gene, and then they can find out our families even those who cannot change. They find us and they’ll find ways to wipe us out. Then who else? The other tribes of the moon for sure, The Fae, Olympians? I thought we learned that lesson with Hitler.”

I stare at her. WW2 was complete hell…literally. It’s what made me come to Earth. But there’s this sick feeling starting…like the other feeling… “Okay, you might be right, I’m not going to stop you, at least not now.”

“Thanks, thanks so much.” She’s a little bit snarky. “So what are you going to do to explain this?”

“I don’t know, what are you planning to do?”

“You don’t want to know.” She stares right at me.

“You’re not going to…” Then I notice, they’ve got Deacon. And they’re shoving Rick over to me. He looks beaten up a bit and in shock. I look him over and guide him to a stool. Part of me wants, needs to be a decent person, to uphold those beliefs. But there’s this feeling in my gut, in my empty womb that is screaming louder than my conscience.
“They’ve been selling off children, non-whites, slave trading. I don’t know where they’ve taken them or to who.”

“I’ll find them, or everything they know about them. Why don’t you take your agent and the girl out of here.”

“Yeah, that’s the other thing. They put Hannah in a magic negating cage instead of selling her.”

“I’ll find out if I can. Athena, I can smell it, you should go. Take them and get out of here.”

“Andrea, I go by Andrea DiMaggio”

The girl gives me a look.

“I like Baseball.” I say with a shrug. It makes her smile a little and I can see the tiredness in her a bit through her eyes. War does that to people. I pull Rick off the stool, and take Hannah with my other hand. “So…what do I call you?”

“Stevey, Stevey Parker.”

I stop long enough to get my knapsack and write my number down . Then head out of the club house and get into the old Chevy I’ve been using. Rick still hasn’t said a word yet and Hannah’s crying and shaking against me. Some one of Stevie’s crew’s got her in a sweater and a combat jacket. I put an arm around her shoulder and pull her a little closer as I drive and head in towards Bangor.

It’s quarter after four in the morning when I get us into a motel with adjoining rooms after stopping into Wall-Mart and get some clothes for Hannah and some other things. I feel …numb but also kind of good when I get to get Hannah cleaned up, I get her into bed and kiss her goodnight and spell her asleep.

My own shower was really needed and when I’m done I’m shaking. I get into a cheap white guys undershirt and it barely covers what’s needed. Rick’s been smoking one cigarette after another and has been in the other room killing a bottle of wild turkey. I hear the shower turn on. I close my eyes for awhile and then just reach over to the nightstand and take out the bible.

Yes I read the bible, I know the reality of it. I was nearly destroyed as in my true self fighting Lucifer, When he was cast out of heaven. What most people don’t know was there was a battle on earth before he was cast into hell. I know what I am, but I’m also a believer in a creator, I need to. There has to be something more of it all right?

I read the New Testament mostly, I read about Jesus‘s words on the mountain. I start crying, remembering the times I heard him speak. I remember feeling hope for something better in the world then for the first time in a long time.

I curl up and cry holding the bible to me like a teddy bear. I feel, a hand gently rubbing my shoulder and see Rick there sitting on the edge of the bed. I look up at him. He knows things now and…He leans down and he kisses me…

(To be continued.)

Bad moon Rising-2

Athena/Andrea’s part…

Rick who I’d been undercover with for awhile now and had even had sex with and slept with, who had found out about there being real para-normal forces out there in the world and that I am a goddess.

Was kissing me…

He’s never kissed me like this before; on the job he was never this good. I’ve got the bible still in my hands and he’s kissing me. His tongue is playing naughty things with mine and he’s kissing me like he used to study scrolls with Venus.

“R...Rick?” I manage to gasp out when he breaks the kiss. “Whatthehell!?”

“Don’t you mean what the Hades?”

“What are you doing?”

“It’s called kissing Andrea.” I give him my don’t be an idiot look.

“I know that Rick but why are you kissing me, the case is tanked and you know both who and what I am and a whole lot more and you come in here and dare to kiss me?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time, with everything in my world as I knew tossed on its ass and a war that I have no idea how to understand is about to start and thinking things over and after having a good long talk with Mr. Jonathan Walker I decided that I needed to actually open up and come here and kiss the bravest, hottest and most beautiful woman I know, ever known.”

“You’re Drunk.”

“He smiles at me and does that forefinger almost touching his thumb gesture. “Just a bit.”

Okay, I’m kinda mad and hurt at him kissing me like that when he’s drunk. It kind of both put me off because I only drink infrequently and the whole thing of him needing to get drunk to kiss me.

“I hate it when you get that look in your eyes.” He says staring right at me.

“What?”

“That hurt, angry, alone in a crowded room story look. I hate seeing that look on your face.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I fell in love with you ‘Drea.” He’s staring right at me. I pull my legs under me kind of defensively. I mean he’s not a physical threat to me but my heart…my heart’s always been an entirely different matter.

“You can’t fall in love with me, you know what I am. Or rather you don’t have any idea of what I am.”

“Yeah I know, but I want to know you more. I need to know you more. The woman I’ve been undercover with is just paint on the surface of something, of someone that’s amazing.”

“Yeah, something is right.”

“Look you… I know you’re different hell I saw you wallop that wolf thing across the bar and stuff but thing…Hell No! I’ve been to war Andrea, I’ve been in this job for seven years and even though I never seen the supernatural stuff I’ve seen plenty of people that were monsters and grade A shitheels. I’ve also lived with you, been with you and seen you with that little girl. There are just some things you just can’t fake.”

“How can you just sit here and say that Rick? You can’t, You’ve got no idea the enemies I have or what they can do and …..”

He cuts me off with another long really good kiss. Then looks me in the eyes again. “The same goes for me ‘Drea, there’s people that want me dead if they can swing it. I’m not afraid of them and I’m not afraid of the things that are after you. I never joined the FBI to be safe.”

“Me neither.”

“So how does a goddess get into the FBI?”

“Same as you, through the academy.”

“No snapping your fingers?”

“No, I can’t do that, that’s restructuring reality. And that’s not allowed.”

“Why not?”

“We had to establish rules; rules keep the universe from crashing in on itself or worse. Say one person does that, well that sort of breaks the surface tension in reality and others can do it to and each time it’s done it gets easier and easier and any one with enough power could do some really bad things and then there’s the worse stuff.”

“Worse stuff?”

“Lucifer getting free of hell, demons crossing over, The Old Ones waking… if the barriers that make up reality get to turbulent then the walls of the places that hold the worst terrors out there do too.”

“And that would be bad…?”

I give him my don’t be stupid look again.

He smiles and raises his hands. “Joking just joking.”

“It’s not something to joke about; this is just a part of my life, just a part!” God he’s frustrating………bloody men!

“Easy ‘Drea, easy I meant what I said; I’m in love with you. Why can’t you just take that at face value?”

“Because people lie Rick, people lie and say they get what I’m talking about and they really don’t, they get to a point of where they just can’t handle my life and then they leave. Or they leave me when they die.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not like them.”

“That’s what every one of them have said Rick! You all fucking say that and it hurts! It hurts so much and I’m not sure if I can take having my heart broken all over again!”

He reaches out and starts to wipe the tears off of my cheeks with his fingers and gives me this look that almost breaks my heart so full of sweetness and caring and even understanding. “What about the ones that didn’t leave you, the ones that just died?”

I hold up the bible a little. “I may be a goddess but I have my own faith.”

“So how does that work?”

“Who made the gods Rick?”

“I don’t know?”

“Mankind did, we’re living energy given form, until at a certain point the power of belief actually woke us from just energy to being alive and awake and conscious. Man was made in God’s image and we are the children of man.”

“I thought the gods made mankind.”

“No man evolved and we were created as the first line of defence against the darkness out there, against evil. At best we made or influenced several cultures.”

“Okay…but about the bible thing.”

“When creation was started there was darkness before there was light then the big bang happened or rather was willed to happen and the great working had begun. As there is light so must there be darkness and a balance had to be part of the primal formula like the elements. But the creator hadn’t planned on it creating the universe had destroyed the darkness, tore it and ripped it to bits and every universe it got shoved away into the cracks of things and it condensed, and it became aware and as it became aware it became angry, it was just as powerful as creation was and it pushed back against the universes and became darkness and became evil.”

I sigh and shift and take a breath.

“Life became and it evolved everywhere and everywhen. The first of this came from the primal emotions from life, fear, anger, hunger, the things that animals feel, then primal aware life forms had felt the first stirrings of thought and free will. From this mixture of nature and early though came the primals, the gods before there were gods.

The Darkness answered by fragmenting, changing and creating The Old Ones.”

I hold the bible up and look at it and smile. “We gods had our time here and it’s pretty much gone and passed and others have either stopped or moved on. Me, I couldn’t’t, evil hadn’t packed up and left just because we were losing power and energy and influence. A lot of people hate this book the stories and words here and there’s a lot wrong with the damned thing but it’s backed by something true, something real and I know these are the true words in a lot of cases.”

“You do?”

“I never left Rick, I died a few times and had to be reborn into a new body and such but yes I really haven’t left Earth for too long or given up on humanity.”

“Why?”

“Because, I’m made that way.”

“So you’ve seen all of the bible then?”

“No not all of it but I was in the Middle East when Moses led his people free. I was in the crowd as Jesus gave his sermons and I was touched by the message he brought to us all.”

“Touched?”

“I believe in God Rick, more than my father and more than the other religions out there I believe.”

“Why?”

“Why does anyone believe Rick because I have to, it’s how I’m built. I could have left, stayed safe on Olympia and stuff but I chose to come here and in having choice I’m just as much a child of god as humanity is. And for someone who began as a bunch of stories that became beliefs, that became energy…how isn’t that a miracle worthy of belief?”

“Wow…” He’s staring at me. I look down a bit; gnaw on my lower lip a bit. Then he smiles again. “You are a very amazing woman. The fact that you haven’t given up on us has to be a record or something. Does the church know that you’re here? That you are what you are and everything?”

“Yes, I think so. I haven’t actually made that much of an appearance with the bigger church crowd in a long time. There’s too much politics and stuff, too many dangerous factions. I’ve always tried to just keep to good men and women out in the smaller churches and places really doing the work just going through all the crap going on around them from sheer faith and hard work.”

“So you’re actually pretty much the person that I think that you are.”

“I am?” God he’s staring at me and I can’t help but to start blushing.

Rick leans in and kisses me again and I get this kind of charge from it like no kiss I’ve ever really had before because he’s really kissing me. I start crying and feeling him just to make sure that he’s actually there and start to struggle with my own clothes. I’m clumsy and stuff, you want a sexy suave vixen go find my sister Venus. Me I’m not that smooth.

But this, this is unexpected, and I really need this, him especially after Nate. Nate never got it and Nate left breaking my heart. I’ve had my heart broken just too many times.

“Rick…Rick stop…”

He stops.

“I need to see the truth of you. I’ve been hurt too many times, just too many…will you let me look into your heart, into your soul?”

He looks scared, he looks like Nate had when he refused and left only I’d been with Nate for three years before everything had come out with me. We broke up six months after he said no.

“Yes….You might not like what you’re going to see though. You’re not the only one with secrets or that’s been hurt ‘Drea.”

I nod but kiss him, it’s almost a goodbye kiss and then I take his face in my hands and I stare into his soul.

It’s a rush of things. Rick’s not really Rick, he never was. He’s actually Miranda, or Randi. He has been ever since he could remember but you don’t go all faggot in a household full of macho cops and stuff. He grew up in an alcoholic household and got beat a lot as a child and as soon as he could he opted out for the army, actually the navy and joined the marines. He even got as far as becoming a navy SEAL.

He buried Randi under training and pain and the horrors of war and when that doesn’t’t work he tries to drown her with the bottle.

But they’re a good person, they take on missions that might get them killed in the line of duty more than most but they don’t go out and try to die. But if death would come, death would be a release.

But they are a warrior, they believe strongly in love, in right and wrong in those that can if they’re brave enough have a duty to make the world a better place in whatever way that they can.

She’s gone on so long despite the pain, that soul deep pain.

I look into her heart and her soul and for the first time in my entire existence, that soul I’m seeing feels it. Miranda feels my eyes on her and as brave as she has ever been she looks back.

Nobody has ever looked at me like that, no one has ever looked into my soul before and I can’t help it. I’m crying, all the parts of me everywhere and when are crying because she looks right into me and she’s crying because she loves me, because she’s seen all that I am and she thinks I’m beautiful anyways.

Then the power breaks, it breaks and Rick cries out and he tries to run, tries to roll off of my bed and he’s freaking out and crying because everything’s been buried for so long under so much and it hurts to have it surface, it hurts him that he’s not the person that he should have been.

I have to use my strength, my immortal power to hold him there to bring him to me and to keep him there until I can…can hold HER there. “Miranda, Miranda look at me, please, please baby look at me…” I’ve never loved a woman before, all these lives and I’ve never been in love so hard, so fast and with a woman. Dammit Randi look at me!”

She stares at me her eyes red and wide and full of fear like some feral POW let loose.

“I love you. I don’t get it and I don’t care but I love you Miranda.”

“But…but...”

“You’ve got a nice butt.” She gives me this whiny; please don’t make fun of me look. I kiss her. I pool essence not mana and I kiss Her, Miranda not the armour she wears called Rick.

She kisses me back. This is why the kiss was so good; I’m being kissed by someone who knows that yearning a woman has inside to be really kissed. I melt a little. I feel her pulling in on me, my essence my kissing her like a dying flower in need of rain.

And suddenly we can’t get out of our clothes fast enough. We’re passionately kissing and caressing each other and my God the feeling of another woman’s breasts in my hands, yielding to me yet the nipples hardening under my touch, my lips and my tongue has never entered my brain before yet feel s so, tastes so right.

Yes, yes, ten thousand times yes our souls cry out to each other as fingers dip deeply into each other and we touch each other’s sex’s. I’ve never tasted woman before but this, this was something so good, so beyond good that it’s…there are no words.

And yes Randi has changed, not her sex not truly but my essence has left me in a permanent way, the essence of a female goddess and it’s displaced all that energy in making her Rick, muscle has moved and shifted and relocated, heavier set bones change and her hips widen and leg bones lengthen and so do the bones in her arms and her fingers making her tall and graceful, fat moved from her other areas to settle into her breast and her bottom and just under her skin and the flush of hormones filled her as she stopped making one kind and started to produce another kind.

I never meant for this to happen, I never knew that this could happen and I feel the permanent loss of that essence and power as it becomes one with her. I break the kiss scared of her reaction. “Oh God Randi, Miranda I’m sorry…I never meant, I didn’t know I…” She cuts me off with another one of those kisses that rock me to my heart and she stares at me, she looks right into my eyes and says.

“I did it, It was me not you I felt that surge, that energy filling me up when you where actually kissing me ‘Drea and all I could think of was this was it, the only woman who has ever seen the real me and loved me anyway. I needed that kiss and everything around it so much my soul was screaming Yes! I wanted this! I wished for this!”

“God Miranda I’ve never felt anything like this for anyone before.” I’m shaking even as her hands glide over me making my skin all goosefleshed and excited yet scared. I’ve never been this horny before in any life I’ve lived. My nipples hurt, and so does my maiden’s glory…my pussy aches like a bruise. I’ve never felt such a connection and I feel like I could crawl right out of my skin. She’s so beautiful in makes my heart hurt, lurch like a lunging horse on a lead.

It’s the most erotic thing I’ve ever known or done. I’m kissing her and it’s soft lips on soft lips that spices the entire sensation of being kissed by someone who gets and needs to be kissed in that way. It’s the same thing with our breasts and she bites her lip, cries from being touched like that, feeling those feelings that she’s needed to feel for so long…I know I’m not the one feeling them but witnessing it, seeing just how powerful and profound a thing it is that she’s treasuring so much when I, even I took it for granted is beautiful and humbling. The feeling of fingers touching running through each others hair. I never knew how sensual a woman’s hair can be. Especially when she has me on my back and is kissing me…our breasts touching barely but that chestnut hair of hers just teasingly, erotically caressing my skin.

Randi has this shy, timid look as she positions to enter me. Partly nervous, partly scared and something else. She slides into me and it starts normally until we get going and it’s better than any sex I’ve ever had before, it’s like she knows every right way to move, to touch and we’re whispering and moaning into each other and she cries out that it’s never been like this, that it’s never felt like this…never…then she has a climax, as she shoots her cum onto me there’s not a male sound about it, she doesn’t move like a guy cumming and shudders body deeply as she seems to hit this other point and shoots a another few spurts as I squeeze her breasts. My own orgasms are the sweetest I’ve ever had.

It keeps going after that for an hour or more before we fall asleep entangled into each other. I sleep like I’ve been spelled myself. I can’t help but slither against her as we cuddle and get comfortable it’s the best afterglow and after-sex sleep I’ve ever had.

I wake up and I here the lovely sound of SpongeBob and Patrick laughing on the TV and I’m in the bed alone. There’s a flash of panic of this having been a dream and I hear two people laughing. It’s coming from Rick’s I mean Miranda’s adjoining room and I get up and wrap the blanket around me and lean onto the door-jam. Randi is sitting in Her boxers and a baggy t-shirt sitting on the floor eating honey comb cereal and watching cartoons.

Miranda looks at me smiles. “Morning Beautiful, How’d you sleep?”

“Like a rock, you went out?”

“Nope, called in a bit of groceries and got a cab to deliver it. Uhm nothing I own fits.”

The grin of pure happiness on her face is just…it’s worth so much. It’s just...It’s seeing the smile of being really happy on the person you love. I can’t help but to smile back at her. I waltz over and lean down and kiss her and she kisses me back and it’s so good and just topped off with the taste of the cereal and the sweetened milk. It’s like I’ve been blessed. I can’t help but smile and say.

“Yes I can see that.”

“I get what happened sort of and I love this ‘Drea, I feel like I can breathe, like my skin fits just right…finally.”

“I know Randi, I saw.”

“This is going to cause problems isn’t it?”

“Yeah, You’re not exactly Rick Lane anymore. You might have the same DNA and Prints but what are we going to tell people.”

“I don’t know.”

I sit down on the floor beside her and lean against her and leaning back to the bed and watch cartoons. Hannah notices me and hugs me tightly and smiles. “Are you my Mum now?” God the lump in my throat is huge. I stare at her and I ache, every part of me is crying out… “I’ll do everything I can to be that Hannah, I promise.” She looks at Randi. “You look better now that you stopped pretendin to be a boy yanno.”

Randi smiles at her and hugs her. “You’re right, I feel better too.”

Hannah grins back. “So you gonna be my other mom?”

Randi looks me in the eyes and it’s soulful and true. “Yeah, I’d love to be your other mom.” That look says simply I Love You.

We sit for awhile and watch cartoons, we eat cereal out of the box and wash it down with milk right from the carton and just be for awhile. I use the time to try and think things through. What to do with Randi and with Hannah and the were-girl queen and her fight with the Templar’s. Then there’s the lines of power down south going wonky and the rise of Stigmata, that’s never a good sign. It means that there’s something coming that is stirring up the mana of the faithful.

I hope Jonelle finds something out at least about what the heck is going on down there.

Randi’s quiet thinking her own deep thoughts most likely and she’s got this serene yet intense look on her face as she’s watching something really strange with Hannah on TV, it’s a cartoon but really weird. The only modern cartoons to me that are any good are Disney because I love Disney, I have ever since Walt got started and I like the old bugs bunny characters too. Sam Sheepdog is still my favorite. Although Bugs reminds me of Mercury back in the old days, he was mouthy like that.

She finally speaks up. “We can’t go in, not until we find a reason for what happened to me.”

“I know so that means we have to find a way to disappear.”

“What about the wolves?”

“No that’s too dangerous.”

“Why, I didn’t catch all of your and her’s conversation.”

“Parker, that’s the new Queen of the Crescent Moon. That’s the pack that roams New England.”

“That’s a lot of area.”

“Were’s have learned to thin out their ranks in an area. There’s trouble when you too many together just like a pack of dogs.”

“I dunno ‘Drea, that bunch looked organized as hell and there were a lot of non-wolves with them and some of those were Special Forces types.”

“Yeah…that’s not right or even something I’ve heard of before. Were’s don’t deal with outsiders much and they tend to be elitist or hierarchical with their standings and stuff. Parker said that those were her pack…They don’t let those that can’t shift into the pack.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ve never done it, I suppose it was so that some of the bloodline kept going on.”

“But she’s doing it now. She said these guys might find the gene for them?”

“I never thought that could be done either.”

“And if you’re wrong and these Templar guys can?”

“Dammit! Parker’s right. If they can isolate the genes for the Were’s then none of them’s safe and they won’t stop there.”

“And this means what ‘Drea?”

“War…Old school war with the old races involved. And factions that have been silent for thousands of years going to war against mankind.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, there are those there that mankind had wiped out over time or have come close to it. They won’t want to get dragged back into things and they’ll be pretty vengeful.”

“Why?”

“When the church came about it took power from the old world beings and gods, there were sorcerers that had once commanded great power and instead of losing power the sought it out from the church. These were the roots of the Templars who were their minions and warriors and they hunted down anything that was involved in the use of or was in possession of magical power right up into the crusades and the Spanish inquisition and even the Salem witch trials.”

“So why would these old races then go to war over the wolves?”

“I’m not sure they will now…If the Templars and their masters are finding ways to find the world’s paranormals, they could be revving up to another crusade, with modern weaponry…this will be bad. They won’t lie down and hide this time, they still haven’t recovered from the last war.”

“When was that?”

“When the Nazis were in power, a lot of people died but so did a lot of other-folk, when we, the USA used the bombs on Japan it sent the other folk into deep hiding.”

“So we’re going to have to become part of this then.”

God she’s looking me in the eyes and yes she’s Randi, my Miranda but just because she’s changed doesn’t mean she’s changed. That fighter, that never give up part of her is almost standing up and shining through her skin…My Navy SEAL girl. She wasn’t asking me a question this time and just the way she says that and stares at me makes my nipples harden.

“Yes it looks like we have to get involved.”

She kisses me, long and slow and deeply and I melt, swoon into that kiss. Nobody kisses me like that. Nobody has ever kissed me like she does. I break the kiss and rest my forehead against hers and tell her.

“This will turn into a war Randi, a war like no-one has seen before. It’ll change the world.”

“I know ‘Drea, but maybe the world needs changing with people like Deacon in it and what he’s done.”

We Kiss like that for I’m not sure how long, I’m pulling strength from her, from her courage and resolve and feeling more of myself than I have for years. Miranda breaks the kiss.

“First clothes and then we go and find Ms. Parker.”

God…I’d follow her into hell.

Bad Moon Rising-3

Part 3

Stevie’s part:

It’s a really bad scene here in this back trail hillbilly biker bar. Most of the scum are being questioned and dealt with. I do the questioning. I’m getting good at using my majik to refine my wolf senses to detect a lie. The questioning techniques I’m learning as I go, there’s enough cops and military in my pack now that I’m getting really good at being a really bad person.

Deacon’s the guy I really get my claws dirty on. There’s me and three others that I’ve chosen to help me with this because they’ve had their children taken, abducted from them for reasons that they’ve never found out so Deacon and his ilk are held in a place of deep dark hatred by the three that I’ve chosen. I chose them because in their hearts they’re loyal and when it comes to this; to the children they’ll do anything necessary.

He’s mouthy, swearing and has guts in his own twisted sort of way. Right up to when we start to break things, using supernatural strength, and tools…even then he withstands the things I do right up until I pop his right testicle like it was a grape. We use drugs and majik to keep him awake. He spills his information strapped to a pool table laying in his own blood and urine and feces.

Is it a sign that I’m really getting or going bad that I feel for the damage done to the pool table than the way we left him?

His gang and others hooked up to the Templars are stealing children from places wherever they get word that there’s a kid with a gift, or something weird happens with the child around. They keep the white male kids that fit a certain profile and those are taken to a rendezvous with a church that’s Templar and gang friendly. These are I guess the ones that get to grow up to be little Templars. The others of color and that are girls are gathered and sent someplace else. The little black girl was supposed to be picked up by this guy that Deacon calls the Frog. A French —Canadian who gets them up to a secret place. We already know the place.

The fact that there might be children in the place changes things and makes the need to stop the more needful.

We get a list of the churches all over the country that are allied with the Templars, friendly biker clubs and gangs too. The lists get pretty long and really spread out as there’s Cops, EMT’s, State Troopers, Homeland Security…Politicians…Surprisingly there’s no agents of the Templars in the FBI, CIA, or the NSA…Deacon says the word is that these groups are allied with creatures like us….and worse.

We questioned to others left alive too, just to be thorough... I order everyone else out even Dom. He’s pissy about it but I give him this very, very serious look and he relents but gives me this…I’m worried about you look. It damned near cracks my resolve. I love him for in really but hate him for doing that now.

I use a clawed fingernail and I slice a circle of banishment onto their skins, the thugs and Deacon. Banishment…yes, I know that when people die there’s supposed to be rules of some kind and all that but they fucked with me, they hurt innocents and messed with my family and murdered the girl I’ve loved since forever.

I chant the chant, I rip out one’s throat and I send the soul of the bastard straight on a one way ticket to hell. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. They screams they make as there souls are sucked into the flaming abyss are the worse thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

I ask my questions again, I get the same answers but them telling me the truth doesn’t spare them. One by one I send each of them away saving Deacon for last. He screams the longest; he fights the hardest to hang onto this world. He knows with a certainty what’s on the other side.

I’m sick to my soul when I limp my way outside of the bar into the sunlight and I almost wince at its touch. I feel unclean as deep as unclean can go and I don’t really realize Dom’s arms are around me until I’m not shuffling my feet anymore. He looks down at me with that love, unconditional love and sympathy that only a mate can have for you and that undoes me. I cry, I fall apart and cry because of everything.

Athena/Andrea’s Part:

Randi and I drove back with the girl in the old beater we’ve got to the bar and we’re stopped at the start of the road by a few trucks pulled across the road and the buys there wearing DEA vests. I flash my ID and they show me there’s and they wave me through.
I look at Randi. “They looked legit.”

“They very well could have been. Look what she said about the pack thing and genes.”

“I know, it’s just not done. The children of the moon have never worked like this with non-shifting members of their blood before. Only those that shifted were considered to be part of the packs or prides.”

“Well it’s happening now.”

“Yes and that’s changing everything Miranda. It’s tipping the scales of power.”

“I think these Templar guys already did that honey, I think that Parker just said I’m not plating your silly games and knocked over the table the scales were on.”

I smile but shake my head. She’s just so blasé about all of this. It’s scare though that I’m not sure if Randi just doesn’t get it. This is way bigger than she thinks. I’m not sure just how big this is going to get. We’re either going to squeak through this whole mess with a lot of Elder cover ups or this very well might just spark a war.

“I think you still don’t get it or you’re showing a lot of false bravado.”

“Well a bit of bravado ‘Drea but I mean come on, this was coming. I mean one way or another this was coming and it just happens to be now. What good is completely losing it over this going to do?”

“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

“Yeah and I thought you got what Parker’s trying to do. You know I bet a lot of people thought Jesus was crazy too.”

“Yes amongst a lot of other things and look what it got him.”

“A book deal?”

Okay that might be heresy but I couldn’t help the snort that came out of me. I look over to where she’s grinning back at me and even looking in the rear view mirror so does the girl.

We pull up to the bar still seeing the Wolf Pack there and the place is on fire now. They give us some hostile sort of looks and I shut the car off and get out showing my hands.

“I’m here to see Stevie Parker.”

One of them in fatigues with a .45 looks me over. “Thought you buggered off Agent.”

“Things changed and came up, where’s Stevie?”

“Her Majesty’s a bit busy, what do you want?”

“That’s between me and her. Go tell her Athena’s here.”

He growls at me, he’s not a true wolf but he growls nonetheless and stares at me hard. I flex a bit of power and stare him down and there’s the not so subtle hint that I’m more than I appear and not to be trifled with. He gets jumpy and starts to raise his piece. I see one of her little chippies saunter over and she goes partial form just enough to be feral looking and witchy even. She’s young a teenager and she’s definitely enjoying being open and able to flex her powers and show off. She postures a second before looking at me.

“Come with me the queen has said that she would see you.”
I look at Randi. She smiles at me. “I’ll stay here with her okay?”

“Thanks, I was going to ask but…”

The wolfling looks at us her clawed fingers on her hips. “Maybe I should have said summoned?”

“I’m honoured.” I say not without a little sarcasm in my voice.

“You should be.” She bitches back to me turning on her heels and swaying her way up the road and just around the bend where there’s a large very expensive motor home and she’s sitting inside of it on this sectional sofa her head in her man’s lap. Having at least a bit of manners even though the side door is open and she can see me I knock anyway.

“Agent DiMaggio? Please come in.”

I look her over and honestly she looks awful, it’s more than the mana loss too. I can feel she’s used a lot of magic recently which is one of the reasons why this girl is so dangerous. Were’s are deadly enough on their own, add in the potential for magic in that blood and…but that’s sort of not important now considering she’s wiped out. I catch the stink of hell lingering, the psychic trace of it is cloying and not in a good way. I look at her again and open my senses…Oh Dear God. I cross myself by force of habit. She looks at me, and doesn’t defend what she did, if she did then this might have turned out differently but instead she locked her eyes with mine and held them just for a minute before closing them and starting to cry all over again.

There’s a shitload I could say or have said and nothing at all because I’m guilty of the same thing and sent for more of those that had been on my wrong side into my uncle’s clutches in Tarteterus. In the end I just take a seat by her and her man/wolf that’s looking at me warily and I pull her onto my lap and hold her and console her.

It’s later that night after we’ve moved in an almost convoy through the back roads to a Pack owned farmers field that we talk strategies.

***
Northern Vermont on a back road forty four miles from the Canadian Border.

1:36 AM

Jacques Trembley stopped the transport truck and was staring at his companion who was the trigger man on this trip. Over a dozen gleaming yellow eyes stared out at him from the darkness. He clicked on his brights even though they really tried not to use them because they’d attract attention.

There were just over a dozen extremely large wolves there in front of the truck and they actually started advancing on his rig snarling and growling. He reached for the radio and tried to call back to Pierre in the second truck. Nothing…just messed up static. The cell phone was just as useless and he looked at his gunman Marchande who leaned out the passenger side window with his shotgun and began to yell at the wolves. Jacques stared in horror as Marchande was yanked out of the truck faster than he had been able to see.

Just one minute he was there, the next a muffled scream and he was gone.

He stared to rev up the truck and a sudden boom of a tire scared him. Then another, then another…He felt the front tires go, blowing out but no gunshots were being fired. In his rear view mirror he saw something that he had been told was real, an abomination, something not a man but mostly a wolf ran to the side of his truck and with a terrible slash of it’s claws ripped another tire to ribbons.

From the sounds he was hearing the same was happening to the other truck as well. There were gunshots fired from Pierre’s truck and he could see him firing his glock emptying the clip trying to shoots at the monsters. But they were too fast, they were too many and all too soon he was out of bullets.

He tried the radio again in vain and the cell phone too. He tried to find another gun and he pulled a .357 from the glove box and there was a heavy thud on the hood of his truck and there was this girl there, slender, blonde, naked and beautiful if her teeth hadn’t unnatural points and her eyes shined in the darkness and her long nails weren’t nails but claws. He crossed himself over and over and brought the revolver up at her.

“That better have etched rounds or silver in it otherwise you’re screwed.”

Was that true? Was she immune to anything but silver? He shook, his hand shook and she smiled at him even at point black range.

“I can see from here all you’ve got is lead, and all lead’s going to do is piss me off enough to eat your face. Go ahead, use it, blow your brains out Templar. That’ll just send you where you belong anyway, suicides go to hell don’t they. C’mon do it, it’ll be no fur off my tail just one less over zealous douche bag in the world.”

She started changing more getting more feral looking fine ivory and white and steel grey velvety fur started to form on her skin and she began to shift right there into a real, way too real monster right before his eyes. He through the gun out the window and through himself to the floor of the semi truck crying and praying to god and the Holy Spirit the alabaster one the angel with the green eyes.

He heard her growl out “Good boy.”

***
Athena/Andrea part-2:

Stevie had found out where the Templars were going to be crossing with two truck loads of special children that would be headed to a place she knew of somewhere up in Quebec. The children would be taken and they were to be killed as sacrifices for the majiks the Templars were using. Only the white male children that could be raised up Proper were being kept and those were being shipped off somewhere else.

“Where?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, I won’t know until I get to their base and tear the place down around their ears.”

“Where’s their base?”

“The one, I’m hunting now? I thought you didn’t want to know?”

“I told you this is different, kids are involved. Children are different; the gloves come off for this.”

“FBI doesn’t have jurisdiction in Canada.”

“Not without the proper paperwork. Besides this like I said is different.”

“Oh it’s a goddess thing now?”

“No it’s a Christian thing. These people are monsters and they’re tearing down everything me and a lot of others truly love and believe in.”

She snorted at me, well wolf snorted/huffed. “Whatever DiMaggio, you’re weird but if you’re in then it’s okay.”

“I’m in, like I said the girlfriend convinced me that you’re not a total nutcase either Parker.”

“Yeah, was she looking a lot different the last time I seen her?”

“Yeah it’s complicated, but Miranda’s good with it. Why you have a problem with her being transgendered?”

“Me, hell no. Let’s just say it’s going around.” She smirked and walked off to make plans while I got on the phone to arrange an arrest and see if Parker really knew what she was doing.

As it turns out she really did know what she was doing, or rather she had people in her pack that did. This really changes things. She planned out the attack and stopping the trucks with her packs cadre of old and young military and police veterans. Most of them weren’t true weres and she gave them the respect that they were rightfully due. She corrected her true wolves fast and violently in treating these people with respect. They said nothing of the pack before all of this, they kept the family secrets they fought for their homes, towns, and even their country and they had best keep their tails tucked in respect because they were a lot more the future of the pack than some power tripping hot head.

Parker’s such a curious person. I’ve felt her do such horrible shit and here she’s respectful, caring and loving but runs the pack like she’s a mom. She even takes the ones she corrected aside and gently explains the stakes of this war that’s coming to them and points out that most of them could die or might be dead yet with out their wisdom and that of others who haven’t been born on the fanged and furred side of the family but still have the wolf running through their veins.

They ended up using a cell-phone jammer and jammed the radios with a pack member who was an old Vietnam vet that used to be a radio man. They had stopped the trucks just by being there, then shredded the tires, took out the armed escorts and bound them and terrorised them all until my boys and girls of the FBI showed up and showed up in force.

***
Adam Sinclair…agent FBI, Bit character…

We move in and we got the call from agent DiMaggio about a tip on this missing person’s child abduction slavery case she had been working on. When we got there we saw a bunch of eighteen wheeler trucks that were stopped and all of their tires looked ripped apart.

She meets us there pulling in as we do in an old beater and with some girl in the back seat and this really cute looking woman in the passenger side. The whole thing is freaking me the hell out and I got no idea what the heck could have tore up the tires like this, or these many tires and I mean literally. There’s two guys out on the ground laying in the ditches screaming stuff in French and are wide eyed and frothing at the mouth. I hear stuff like Loup- Garu? And there were monsters, monsters everywhere from their bits of broken English. The two guys still in the trucks weren’t any better and this is definitely right up Andrea DiMaggio’s alley she’s supposed to be into all that crazy cult and serial killer stuff and people refer to her as agent x-files back at Quantico.

But I don’t really care what they’re saying about her when we break the seals on the trucks. There’s dozens of kids inside from all over that race and age spectrum, they look abused and beaten, starved and there’s not even water or a bucket for them inside of there. I’ve seen illegal aliens in shipping containers have better treatment that these kids.

Most of us are crying or damned close to it and I wanted to shoot one of these bastards so bad when they hauled out the body of the first child that didn’t make it.

There were a hundred children in there piled almost on top of each other between those two trucks and there were only eighty six of them alive and some of them we called in helicopter to lift them out to the hospitals, we had ambulances from all over the state here and several from New Hampshire too even.

It wasn’t a big surprise that the director and brass for the FBI showed up and after a few brief reports they headed aways off with DiMaggio.

Athena/Andrea part-3:

I watch as the head of the FBI himself came over towards me and he was flanked by two special agents. Tyrone Ward was the first African American in this position and he from all accounts seemed a very good and solid man.

He had a black leather glove over his prosthetic hand and he stared at me with his steel grey rare eyes.

“So what exactly is going on agent DiMaggio?”

“It’s exactly what it looks like sir. I was working the case I had been assigned and I uncovered information about this human smuggling ring and called in back up to help me with it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me sir?”

He switched to ancient Greek…. “Bullshit Athena, there’s one hell of a lot of mana in those children and this place is littered in wolf tracks.”

I tense and really look at him, use power to look at him. He looks very close to being the same only white, and grey haired and a hammer head like a sledge in place of his artificial hand. I know him.

Tyr

Asguardian god of truth and justice.

He stares at me with this entire are you done look.

I have to ask. “How long have you been around here, been back?”

“Never left. I’m not the type to just cut and run even if the people have lost respect for us.”

“Respect’s a two way street Tyr, we weren’t exactly civil beings in those days.”
“True, too true but there are many who never left and are working still even now to try to right the wrongs done back then, trying to make the world a better place.”

“So you knew about me when I joined up?”

“Yes and I knew you’d be an asset to the agency and to the fight.”

“Okay but I didn’t know that things were this widespread here, what’s the landscape?”

“You first.”

“Alright; this is all the Templars work. They’ve been snatching kids for god only knows how long with powers or talents and been sacrificing them to somebody or something that we probably don’t want making earth-fall.”

“So how’d you tumble onto it, you were assigned to find out about these gang killings with the bikers and stuff.”

“They were working for The Templars. Doing their dirty work and getting away with it because we’ve found evidence of them in State police, Homeland security, National Guard, and a whole bunch of others. Not all branches of the government though.” I give him a questioning look.

He stares at me and lights a cigar. “I’ve got people like me and like you in the FBI while there might be the occasional bent nail, they’re of the mortal sort. We’d know about any infiltrators.”

“The CIA?”

“Odin and Loki wouldn’t put up with anything in their agency that they couldn’t control.”

“The NSA?”

“That’s The Ash’s playground and he’s been looking hard around of lately too.”

“Okay…shit…”

“I take it that this might be a problem with who you’ve been playing with.”

“Yeah Maybe, I don’t think that she knows that The Elde are holding positions of power like this.”

“And your playmate is?”

“The Queen of the Crescent Moon Bay Pack from Maine.”

“A were is doing all of this?”

“Yes she is and she’s not just broken a whole lot of the old ways she’s throw them right out the window. She’s got her whole blood of the pack working together as one, bound by blood and power and she’s just as in through everything as the Templars are.”

“She’s going after them and starting a war why?”

“She’s had a vision. She’s seen the Templars using technology to track down those with the Were-gene. They’re going to hunt the Were down and make them extinct.”

“If the Templars do that then they’ll start a war with the children of the moon. They’d get killed off for trying it.”

“Yes but what if they found a way to do it en-masse, like a biological weapon. If they can make a virus spelled or otherwise that can kill off the Were then who’ll be safe. Who amongst the other folk will be safe?”

“Why in the name of the light would the church allow this?”

“They’re not. Just like a lot of the other church based atrocities. Some one or something had turned somebody enough to let them in. The Templars have been homicidal witch burners for a long time. We left them alone because they have no love for anything supernatural. But what if that’s not the case anymore…or not quite anymore. The Elde keep the balance between many worlds buffering ours with theirs. If they’re gone, and most of those who can really bring it to a fight then the demons and the leeches will have a hell of a head start at bringing about…”

“Ragnarock…”

“Armageddon.”

“Are you sure of this?”

“Oh getting more and more sure everyday. My contacts have all been telling me that the signs aren’t pointing to something good.”

“Alright…keep me personally informed about this if and when they turn serious.”

“They’re already serious Tyr.”

“No I mean end of days serious.” He looks over at my car. “Is that?”

“Yeah.” I can’t help but to blush.

“He was a man wasn’t she?”
“It just happened, I we…just happened and I didn’t mean to change them but she was in so much pain and we’re…”

“Fine, fine I’ll make it work. I’ll fix it.”

‘Thanks sir.” I blush again.

“Ha! It’s worth it just to hear an Olympian say that. You know you’re just as bad as your father.”

“Huh?”

“Zeus, the famous philanderer? How do you think half of the stories about him got started?”

I stare as he leaves to head up the investigation with the other agents and there’s press starting to show up and even helicopters too. I go over to my car and get in and pull away and out of there and start driving to the next rally point that Parker told me about.

Miranda looks at me and asks. “How bad?”

“Oh bad but not at all what I expected. I really need to talk to Stevie about all of this and stuff.”

“That bad?”

“Sort of? Oh by the way the Norse god of Justice is our boss and he’s going to keep you on the payroll.”

“Cool.”

That only Miranda off handed taking things as they come way of hers has me laughing again into the steering wheel as I drive…or its nerves…No My Girlfriend is crazy.

Bad Moon Rising-4

Chapter 4

It’s all coming together. It’s all going to be worse than ever though. I’m sleeping or trying to as the motor home drives through the northern parts of the state as we head to the Canadian border.

Dom’s spooned into me running his fingers through my hair and occasionally just touching my skin. I relax into it trying to. I need to; I think if the stress keeps up the way it does I’ll explode or something.

……………..Athena talked to the Fed’s, turns out she got more than an “In” with the Fed’s head honcho. We drove away with the semi trucks like I was planning without the Feds kicking up a fuss once we replaced the tires. I let him keep the drivers and the kids. It’ll be good press for him and the bureau. I might need the friends, the news will get to the Templars soon enough and the trucks will get us close enough.

I close my eyes and feel the wolves getting closer and closer as we get to the border. I sent the pack over the border as soon as we went after the trucks. Passports and as tourists, at different places, small groups. Just coming over to Canada…The wolf-able members of the pack crossing over in the deeper woods carrying all our contraband stuff in bags and such things. Wolves don’t run guns…we fucking do.

The border crossing was pretty standard fare with a cursory check and My Folks and Grand-dad are useful too. It’s a family vacation. Just what we all wanted to do, take off to Canada head off to what’s suppose to be a beautiful part of their country and then wage a war.

I had my first cup of Tim Horton’s coffee disguised rocket fuel just passed the border crossing while coordinating with the others and getting a place for us to all meet and arm up. It’s still better than Starbucks but I’d rather have my Dunkin Doughnuts over either of them.

It was strange and odd and kind of nice to see Andrea and Miranda leaving together against their car sharing kisses as they have their coffee’s with the little black girl healer with them is looking disgusted from it being a PDA more than the whole lesbian thing and frustrated as she’s eating Timbits? And fighting with an I-phone with buds in her ears for music or something.

Seeing them reminds me of Katya…and of a chance she’d never have, that I’d never kiss her again.

Then I look over and see Dom over paying for the gas all caught up in this, in me and my crazy shit turning everything in his world inside out and upside down and I don’t really treat him nearly good enough. I feel guilty for thinking of Katya like that over Dom… but…she was that first person that I ever really truly loved. She loved me back when other people barely even seen me.

I feel so tired it hurts. I feel actually as old as my wolf years.

We don’t take too long and dad’s driving, he hates being part of this whole thing. He hated being part of a family that did majik and he left Maine to go all the way home to Chicago. I had the mage blood gift passed to me even before I received The Wolf Legacy.

I’m sitting at the bench/booth table thing in the motorhome/RV with Grand-dad who is a mage and I’m working on building a few spells to have at the ready. The longer that you can prepare something, the more you can invest mana into the separate acts of a spell.

I’m pulling mana from the pack. Yeah this is why they really frown on Weres especially Alpha’s being mage blooded too. I can’t pull of anyone’s essence but I can reach out to my pack subjects and draw on their mana. I’m building some pretty big spells here. I won’t be casting them or in this case releasing them. That’s going to be Grand-dad’s job, he’s at least with me on this and I think he really believes the dreams and the nightmares I’ve been having about this.

I’m reaping the benefits of a man whose done majik all his life. He’s never been a big time majik worker but he has been a really good teacher. We’re making the power focus components for the big spells I want and need and trying my damnedest to get everything prepped. I only feel like I need another hundred years of time to get ready.

Mom’s gone from completely losing her shit over everything to being scared of me, to being scared for me and she’s now gotten to her new spot that she’s still my mother alpha or not and she’s bound and determined to get me and our family through this. She actually has started to believe me too telling people that she knows that look on my face when I wake up freaked out. Any woman knows that kind of deep down gut feeling of intuition look on another woman’s face. She’s been schooling me in all these things about being a girl or rather a woman too, clothes, posture, but attitude as well. She’s starting to become a rock for me really.

The fact I’m doing spells with her father in law, and I’m a girl and a werewolf queen, dad’s pissed off at all of it because all he wanted was a normal life so bad he dumped all his denied powers into me and what is my mom doing?

She’s doing Sudoku, and talking to the other pack wives about the final camp stop before we head off to war. And…and she’s got a home made deep dish cooking in the oven here in the RV.

I look at her and can’t help but mouth to her Thank you and I love you to her. She smiles and mouths that she loves me too.

It really is the little things that keep you going.

***

We drive through most of the day and into the early afternoon before we stop at a farm owned by a far flung member of the pack. French Canadians they greet us very friendly like and the pack is massing here and we’re soon making a camp of tents and everything we have brought with us under the cover of the Doucette family reunion.

There is a lot of music and there is a lot of food and beer and all the things that you’d expect from a family reunion and in the tents with other family members/pack members running interference just in case we’re arming up. Pistols, rifles, assault weapons we got from taking out some of the various biker Templar interests. Dynamite and explosives even some dangerous military hardware is all being put back together gone over two or three times and we start briefing ourselves on the attack plans.

Athena is helpful in a lot of the strategy session; she’s seen a lot of battles. I’m relying her more for the heavy support of there’s mystical badasses or something there. But we’ve got lots of other resources. The pack is old for a North American pack. Only bested by some of the Native American ones. But when you include the members who can’t wolf shift…we’ve got cops and a few feds plus a lot of guys from the military that’ve fought in one war or another. I’ve got three old guys tough as nails that did sniper duty in Vietnam and they’ve kept their skills up…experiences over there having taught them a lot of harsh lessons.

***

The semi trucks are rolling ahead and soon they get to the first check point. Our vehicles are following behind then slowly, lights off. We’re using night vision and other optics since we’re well away from any light sources heading out into the countryside. They realize the drivers are their guys and by the time they try and radio in, we’re on them.

It takes a few minutes to stop them from struggling and I use essence in a hypnosis trance on them to get them to call us in as okay, no trick words, no messages. And I know it’s not honorable or some crap like that but once we’ve cleared the check point its three silenced shots to each one of them, I don’t ask any one of my pack to do anything I’m not willing to do myself. My hand is one of the hands pulling a trigger. The looks that I get from Dom and Andrea and Grand-dad make me feel dirty, dirty and hurt and lonely. I get back to business stuff ing it away for later and we leave our own guys in their places as a rear guard for us and move onto the next stop doing the same thing twice more before we get to the valley where the Templars have made their secret compound.

* Shadira’s part…

The radiance of Allah’s messenger shines on my face as Adam Harcourt Justifier of the Holy Templars and agent of The American Office of Homeland security again looses his composure when I start to recite my evening prayers.
“Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up you freak!” He says as he steps out of the way of the bucket of feces and urine the demon tainted guards throw on me. He reaches out and touches me once more with the jumper cables he’s got hooked to the generator.

I scream. You would too, we’re only human.

But the pain hits a point where it hits the light and it just isn’t anymore. It’s vexing The Justifier very much. Once I’m done spasming I look up at my angelic friend and know that Allah has not forsaken me. I know that Allah is stronger that them for he does not see my heavenly friend, he doesn’t see the sunshine on my face.

I push him a little harder. “Why have you picked me out of the crowd agent? How am I a threat to you? I’m a simple Muslima girl, even when I didn’t know who I was and was younger you’ve had it out for me.”

“You’re the child of a baby murdering terrorist. You think that you rag heads have the exclusive rights to communing with god? I was shown the abomination that you are by a messenger of god almighty.”

My Malak, my Angel looks at me and lowers his head…her head.

~What he says has some truth to it. He is the scion of one of my kind. Of one who was my kind. A child of the traitor that is Shai-tan. ~

I look at him. “Adam, you’ve been fooled. The one who speaks to all of you is no true messenger of god. Allah would not ask of you to do this to your fellow man these things that you do.”

“You’re a liar, Steven; you’re a liar in your faith as much as you’re a liar about what I have seen first hand and felt singing in my soul. You are a liar that pretends at not being a monster just like you pretend at being a real woman.”

“Please Adam; you can leave the path that you are on. Putting your immortal soul in the hands of some unholy thing will only lead you to destruction. Let go of the darkness in you. You were a good man once; you were raised to be a good man. Do the right thing and help me get these innocents out of here and Allah will be merciful to you.”

He gestures and the demon touched ones lash out with fists and plastic piping and beat me. I’m not sure how long they beat me for but he’s talking, ranting as they are.

“We were chosen out of a long, long line of crusaders. We were chosen to defend humanity and god and the church against the evil that things like you bring to the world. I’ve seen the green eyed Angel! He talks to me in my dreams; I’ve seen the great serpent of god! The wise one that showed us all that Eve was a failure, that women cannot be trusted! You dare talk to me about things being holy; about you’re demon master Allah! You’re kind are worse than Eve! You know her failure, her treachery and you sought to become one of those things! I’ve seen these so called children you speak of cavort with things unclean and use the darkest of powers without restraint. We have the Wisdom of Solomon with us and we use the powers of god almighty to fight back the darkness!”

I feel my angel descend unto me and I feel the power there filling me up, healing my hurts and washing me clean of the filth just like I was baptized in The River Jordan. The ones beating me pull back and away from me with a hiss as the get burned by my touch. Adam Harcourt shies away shielding his eyes from me. His demon tainted friends beat a hasty retreat out of the room and some of his misguided mortal brethren zealots come in.

Adam’s yelling and pulls his pistol and I feel the shots rattling my body. Angel or Malak there is just so much that she/he/ they are allowed to do. I can taste blood and there’s a nasty taste of bile in my mouth.

Her voice…no…THE VOICE is in my head again and I start to chant out as the words come to my mind. I’m still chanting them as I feel the visions coming true…as I feel them running this way…

………………………..They thrown me into the cell to leave me for dead and yet shot seven times death is coming slowly…I feel him though, he’s going to be busier with other things soon enough….

Justin’s there beside me suddenly or maybe not so suddenly and he kisses me gently, his fingers run through my hair and his eyes are so beautiful. I would be more than happy if this was my end. I my end was with the first and only man that I had ever loved…the one person besides my god that has ever truly loved me.

*Adam Harcourt….

He glared at where the took the girl, no the thing that she-male succubus demon thing that tempted him with that dark hair…those long lashes and those haunting eyes. She was a majik user, she had to be. Beguiling him, witching him like she had.

She was gone now, out of his life forever and she should have died like the others given up as gods rightful sacrifice like was done in Egypt to the heathen creatures then.

He turned to Moses Jameson who had a confused look on his face. He spoke sand nigger better than Adam did and he had the look ever since she had started babbling.

“Moses; what the hell was the witch babbling on about.”

“She was chanting a song in really old Arabic. I don’t get why though….”

He stops looking scared a very shaken as there this static sound that goes through the PA system and all of the radios around them…it actually is coming out of anything that’s getting a signal…jamming everything completely as it takes over….
“That…she was chanting that Adam!”

………………………….it was music, it was good old fashioned rock and roll and the song started soft but every second it was gaining in volume.

“I see the Bad Moon arising.”
“I see trouble on the way.”
“I see earthquakes and lightnin”
“I see bad times today.”

“Don’t go around tonight.”
“Well, it’s bound to take your life.”
“There’s a Bad Moon on the rise.”

“I hear hurricanes a blowin”
“I know the end is coming soon.”
“I fear the rivers overflowing.”
“I hear the voice of rage and ruin.”

“Don’t go out tonight.”
“Well, it’s bound to take your life.”
“There’s a Bad Moon on the rise.”

“Hope you got your things together.”
“Hope you are quite prepared to die.”
“Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.”
“One eye is taken for an eye!”

“Don’t go out tonight.”
“Well, it’s bound to take your life.”
“There’s a Bad Moon on the rise.”

“Don’t go out tonight.”
“Well, it’s bound to take your life.”
“There’s a Bad Moon on the rise……….”

He wasn’t sure why he moved, why he went to the window cover in cheap plastic blinds but looking through on a night that wasn’t suppose to have a moon at all showing the moon was huge, huge and full and filling the night sky of the valley and it wasn’t just that…it was changing color…turning red like it was getting stained in blood.

There was a line of something burning, two of them actually burning and leaving a trail behind then like…rocket? The main gates blew inward at the force of a double hit from two rocket propelled grenades…the alarms never sounded? The sentries never said there was trouble? There were armed men pouring in from outside into the complex and the place was filling with gunfire and explosions and…and…howling?
Werewolves, dozens of them pouring in from the outside, tearing out of the trailers of the trucks that brought God’s tributes.

“To arms! To arms! Satan’s at our door!”

He ran to the armory. She must not be dead…she couldn’t be dead because she did this! Shadira….she fucking did this! He’d make sure the whore was dead then he’d take care of the rest of the hell spawn.

*Andrea’s part…………

I’ve seen a lot of things.

I’ve seen a lot of battles and wars and I’ve seen people do some very hard things. Stevie Parker is one of the hardest women I’ve ever met. Still a teenager and yet she’ll never be that ever again.

I left my daughter now with the others back at the farmstead and me and Miranda joined the mission to go and take out this Branch of the Templars. I saw her kill their sentries after using powerful majik to trace them into letting us pass unmolested. It rankles at my sense of honor and fair play. She left them tranced out when she put two in the head and one in the heart.

She ran this like some kind of military op but one if you had majik and werewolves and military rated weapons.

Ballsy, as bold as brass she had those trucks full of her and what Weres she could fit in there. She and her mate of course going in with the troops. Me as stupid as it is I’m right there in there with her and waiting for the signal to move.

I look at her in the dark of the truck’s container. “I get three of your wolves right? They come with me and we get the kids out.”

She nods. “I told you yes. Look ‘Thena I’m not some crazy psycho bitch. I’m not out to butcher every living thing in this place. I want the innocents out just as much as you do and I’ll do my damnedest to see that your get your shot of getting them out and to safety.”

“Good, like I said Stevie, it’s about the children for me.”

“I respect that…” she stops talking and closes her eyes but smiles and she grows as she starts to touch the Were. I hear the first spell go off, cast by her grand-dad. I hear majik being used to take over every transmitter and receiver for at least five miles as CCR’s Bad Moon Rising begins to play and get louder and louder taking things over and we can hear it from the trucks radio and it’s cb system, the PA system for the old mining complex turned Templar compound. It lyrics winding her and the other Weres up as the song plays…over and over it’ll play and she’ll make life and death imitate art…
Then I can feel the truly mind messing giant light spell designed to look like the moon was full. I know Stevie…knew, she knew there’d be no moon tonight and she had planned for this.

She was counting off with a watch… “Three. Two, one…there’s the tower and wall sentries gone.”

She was matter of fact about it. She could be. With her breaking the rules of the pack she had gained a huge tactical advantage over her enemies she had twenty some snipers spanning three different wars and nearly five decades, not counting cops, ATF, a few fellow feds and state troopers and others.

I hear this feral almost merry tone in her voice. “And cue the RPG’s” as she lowers her finger there’s a BOOM! That shake’s the trailers and she rears her head back and cut loose with this long loud howl.

They tear out of the trailers like they were tinfoil jumping the Templars who were running out to engage with the invading humans and Weres coming in through the gate.

I’m running with my vest on and a lot of cammo face paint to keep myself disguised and I’m using the Beretta RS-200 shot gun from my trunk to bash and shoot my way through then tide of what looks to me like ex-cons recruited like the skinheads and the Klan does from prisons, there’s merc or ex-military looking types and others of a similar military or police bent.

Through the adrenaline and the rush and horror of combat I can feel evil here. I feel this dark well here….I haven’t felt demons and man create a well of evil like this since I was a nurse in WW2 and we got to the Nazi death camps…. I can’t help it as I fight… “No, no, no…not the babies…not the little one’s…not again.”

It’s where something in me snaps but not something breaking but snapping back into place as it were. I’m very much in Parker’s wheel house right now. Take an old goddess of justice and wisdom and all that stuff I was supposed to stand for and then mix it up with a very pissed of forty year old Christian girl from Jersey…The first green eyes demon boosted human thug I run across I take his head off using the barrel of my shotgun as a quick improvised handle and I hit him with the stock end…demon…yeah I’m a DiMaggio, I swing for the fences…

There’s a mist….

I flip the shotgun end over end catching it one handed I’m more than mortal right now and I spin at the hips and the barrel catches his friend on the other side of me in the face and I pull the trigger.

There’s a mist…

* Dorian Grey’s part…..

I had been here a long time and on this earth even longer. There are times when hope has just left me. It’d have killed me normally; we of the fae do not do well confined against our will.

The curse that has been my life here has also kept me alive for far too long. I was an eager traveler in my youth, leaved the five fold realm and the eight kingdoms for the world of mortals where there was danger and excitement where there were things no fae had ever dreamed of like being with lives the span of fireflies.

I had come and gone for ages of man’s history. I would watch and learn and seldom but in truth I had meddled and interfered with mankind on a few occasions.

It was a fateful night during the renaissance in France where I sat drinking Absinthe and reading some book of new poetry that I can scarcely remember when there was a young maiden, a slip of a human lass with great power in her, in her brush as well.

Aye the story about me and the painting is true but not as well. This young sorceress had painted me unawares by my self and so enamored of painting one of the fae she painted me in my true image and bound it to the painting with her essence.

Unfortunately by the time I found out and realized what had happened it was decades later when I couldn’t leave this Earth for my home. The artist had been killed, burned at the stake by the Templars and my portrait had done me no good. I was such bound it’s destruction would kill me. And I could not have its powers undone for the majik was made by a sorceress of an ancient and thought long dead bloodline.

I am stuck unless I find her line once more. My situation saw me shunned by the fae and I’d been left to languish here rarely to be seen or contacted by my kith and kin.

I’ve wandered the world of mankind ever since condemned to live in a strange sort of fictional shadow, a nowhere man. The legend of me was due to my big mouth whilst drinking away my sorrows at a pub I can barely remember in the south of Wales.

Yes, I know that my story isn’t this story that humanity has known but that’s the difference between truth and fiction. In truth I don’t exist, I’m an elf.

But enough…

The Templars, these humans that have caught me have tortured me, done things to me all trying to define why I don’t die. They have had me a long time here…Darkness and depression had settled over me and I was in this horrible dark place until they brought Shadira into my cell block.

Shadira…so strange, her story so full of pain and hurt and yet this tiny slip of a mortal changeling has so much faith, and soul. Even when she admits she doesn’t know what to really believe…she still believes.

Twenty plus years in this pit and they deliver a person that’s like the Sun to me. I haven’t seen the Sun in that long and she shines so brightly…

We talked about her life and about the world outside of here and she saved my soul…she won my heart.

Then I see them bring her back and throw her into her cell limp and bleeding, shot several times…bleeding out. I can feel her dying…They leave and I’m gripping the bars not caring as the wrought iron bars burning my hands.

I can’t let her die. I can’t. I love her…I…thought this was true and what might be true…but when you see that person…your one dying in front of you…you just know.

I have been weakened by my being lost from home for so long, Fae do not do well unhardened, dark or light we need a spark of passion to keep going. For us depression can kill.

Anger becomes my spark.

They were very, foolish to discount me. To hurt her and hurt her and hurt her then now they’re trying to take her from me! Anger is something wise beings do not want to see come to the fae.

I’ve never been this angry.

Seventy three hundred years and change and I’ve never been this angry.

Never.

I barely remember how much, how many times I threw myself into the wrought iron, I don’t remember how I ripped her cell open after smashing through mine.

I remember kissing her…I remember Kissing her and holding her and her staring at me and calling me Justin, her eyes lost in this fog of pain and death…I know of who she was looking for, of who she was seeking out in her heart…that good man, her true love.

“Justin…” She calls barely breathing. I touch her face, her lips…she blinks over and over as her eyes go wide…dying wide, seeing something…wide…Then she’s gone. I’m crying, I haven’t cried much in centuries…seven or eight times. I’m crying and bent over her body holding her as tight as I’ve always wanted to, needed to.

I see this light over my shoulder, her Angel, Her Malak…as she calls it, him…her…not just her but Shadira…she’s the angel…her Hijab pulled back but still worn around her neck, white linen clothes, desert fare…sandals, a scarf wrapped around her neck but far too long golden writing on it. A satchel of scrolls in one hand and her sword in the other a Christian’s cross on a chain around her sword bearing wrist and she’s staring at me…I see her give me this sad sweetest of smiles and she starts to ascend called by her one God…By The Creator. I Lower my head and do what I’ve never done in my life…

I pray…I pray and thank him/them.

I pray…take her home, keep her safe, let her be loved…it’s all I want.

*Shadira continued…

I…I was/am one.

It’s so.

Then I’m Asked, I Mean ASKED.

Would I return once more to try and walk the mortal world again, would I put away my wings again.

Again?
I wasn’t human in my beginning. I was Malak…an Angel, My Angel in my mortal life was me? I remember just a flash, just a flash showing me in battle, in battle as our brother Lucifer turned on us and broke the unity of heaven and tried to destroy all of everything.

I was nearly obliterated…forever gone.

Then I was given this gift…this gift beyond all gifts. Mortal life.

Now one of the fae, one of those not of the mortal coil is knelt holding who I was, what I was and is praying for me even as he grieves. Faith, light, hope…Love…I am shown he really loves me…and I see, I’m shown…He, they…need me.

~YES.~

*Dorian Grey continued….

The light gets brighter and forces me or I force myself to look up, to see her off. Instead she’s right in front of me and sinking into herself feet first…her bullets wounds are flaring as she sinks, returns to herself and her angelic soul reaches out and wipes the tears on my face away with this smile that’s just like when god made flowers and she sinks all the way in with a flare of golden light.

I’m crying differently, I’m crying because I just… I jump startled when she arches up taking a deep breath…. Her very first words…word… “Dorian…”

I’m holding her, like I said crying. I’ve never in my life seen a real miracle before. She’s clinging to me coughing all the blood and fluids that had pooled in her lungs out and you know what?

I kiss her anyway.

“Ain’t that fucking disgusting.”

I turn and see this man, this Adam Harcourt her chief tormentor there with a gun and hard plated vest and a blade in his hand that looks like a blade from the crusades. He sneers and aims the gun at her. “It’s you’re fucking fault, it’s you’re fault! You did all of this! I’ll make sure you rot in fucking hell for this you fucking whore!”

He shoots and I stand in the way of the round and the next and the next and all the others in the clip. I can’t die, the bullets just fall out as I get to him. “You made one huge mistake Agent Harcourt.”

“What’s that.” He asks swinging the sword in a nasty arc. I duck it and turn out of the way. Tap his wrist with a light chop and catch the blade as it leaves his hand. I finish the spin and take off his head. “You brought a sword.”

She’s staring at me and I limp over and reach down and pull her up to her feet and in my arms. I was going to be the one to do something more but she’s the one who reaches out and kisses me.

“We need to go Dorian…They’re going to kill the children.”

*Stevie continued….

I move through the place and we’re fighting literally bullet, for bullet, tooth and claws knives and axes and I’m in control of myself right up until I see the same group, the same kind of cammo BDU’s and bullet proof vests and…..

I lose it.

They killed her, they killed her!

They Took Katya away from me!

It takes a whole lot of bullets, and buckshot to slow me down…surrounded by guys with this fiberglass riot like armor but more form fitting, more like something out of Starship Troopers or Aliens or something and they’re using silver buckshot in them.

The pain is unfucking real…I’m burning inside and out…silver…Oh sweet Jesus it hurts, it hurts. It makes my wounds burn blue white and not in a good way. Oh fuck, oh fuck Katya…if this is what your felt when you died.

There’s this snarl, this huge loud scream of feral wolf like rage. And Dom leaps off the compound wall where he was fighting and lands on them. I hear the crunch twist of a neck being broken. I fight to open my eyes. Dom rips a shotgun off of one of the men and swings it in a backhanded way and crumples another’s helmet with it. Another fires at him and he ducks under it and does this up swinging claw right in that space behind the guys protective cup not just ripping his balls and cock off but those claws breaking his pelvis too. One turns to run and the one that Dom’s landed on he reaches down to grab both shoulders and breaks his back, folding him backwards in the wrong way.

Shotguns are wonderful things…big enough to be used with claws…I smile through the blood as Dom turns the gun end for end and starts to shoot over and over and over until he’s downed and with a nasty heavy hard stomp severs the guys head with blunt force trauma.

Everything starts to turn red and I can’t get the taste of something so, so, metallic in my mouth. The pain doesn’t stop, it gets worse, every second it get’s worse as the silver runs through my body…the red keeps getter deeper and deeper red until it begins to become blackness.

I wake in a rush as I feel a hand on my chest and Andrea’s sending energy into me and healing me…I can see her with the powers running through me…She’s bigger without being bigger but other than being able to tell she’s something else she’s exactly who she appears to be.

I see Katya…staring at me from across the courtyard. She’s still covered in her own blood and in a white dress and white fur trimmed cloak and she looks at me so intensely. She points to one of the buildings.

I get up with a painful cry as she yanks me up, and I point with a claw. “There!, there’s something there!”

Then even as I say it the walls blow out from the sides of the large building some kind of explosives and several Humvees start racing towards the gate. They start firing with military machine guns from the top and from the sides of them and more people dying on either side as the heavy arms start chewing up everyone in their way, friend or foe.

They break through the wall and the gates and I shift. I feel it in my gut, Tarmac, they’re heading to the tarmac…I let out a hunting howl and run after them. Many of my wolves heading with me taking off after them and Dom’s with me as we build speed and dodge machinegun fire weaving in and out of each other as we try and keep going after them.

Fast move right then left as grenades are being thrown and we’re trying to catch the three cars. I see someone in the middle humvee and he’s older, white haired and dressed in a lab coat. He has lots of guards with him.

** Pontiff Hiram Sunder…………

Completely unexpected. Things were going so well, the great work of the holy crusade was becoming a thing of beauty. The great plague of the unclean were going to be wiped clean and the great lord, the one true messiah would remake all of reality…

Only Asmodeus, was the true lord, son of heaven and the very first man. He was half human and only he would even care, love them so much that he…

The Messiah’s acts still made him weep. But as with everything good true men had ever fought, bled and died over there comes a time when the forces of evil would come a test a man’s true resolve.

It didn’t come from anything they had expected. Personally he had expected the leeches because they were losing those souls they stole from humanity. He thought the alien fae beings who weren’t at all human or ever were might be the ones to wage war on the Templars.

Honestly, he didn’t think the animals had it in them. But when the attack came as a fast and hard hitting military strike it was a real surprise. He didn’t understand when that damned rock song started playing out of everything. It didn’t bode well. He had dreams, dreams sent to him by the Messiah. All his life guiding him to this, to his military service, universities and his research.

He had to dump and meltdown the computers and he pulled the releases on the pens for the beasts and the leeches. The fighting men would have to do the rest. He moved from that to the sealed bio-cooler and removed the samples and took the latest batch and gave it to the re-deemed one. The elf stared a moment before bowing eyes green like springtime lushness from his link to the Messiah. He took the thick vial of silvery tinted watery substance, slid it into this vest filled with plastic explosives and pulled his sword bowed and headed out running.

He left as fast as he could his entourage of Justifiers sweeping in to guide him as fast and as safely as possible and get him away.

He was now watching the animals in the rear view camera’s chasing them down. Angry, so determined and focused. The white and cream bitch just kept coming, she was their leader. He tapped the screen. “Her, her kill her, I want that Alpha whore dead. Use the flamethrowers.” He yanked his finger back when here eyes seemed to glow silver.

He saw the rush of flames as the gunners blasted at the animals from the rooftop placement. He smiled, as some of the animals burned. Then the trucks started taking gunfire and the gunner’s body twitched with getting hit hard by weapons fire. He cursed then saw the silver eyed bitch run right through the flames shimmering silver and then the big black animal with the bitch picked up speed and slammed into the humvee behind them rocking it, other wolves hit it from the other side and he watched closing his eyes when it was rolled by another hit by the big black wolf.

He looked the monitor and she was gone. The bitch was gone. There was the scream of metal being rent apart and the door came flying off and with it the guard beside him snapping off the seatbelt and she was there, in only three quarters human likeness and staring at him eyes silver and full of hate. He pulled a gun and she did a hand gesture heating it until his hand burned and the gun was pulled out by some kind of unholy majik. It flew to her hand and she shot the holy knight on the other side of him and the three men up front including the driver in an unnatural act of speed.

There was a bump as they went from the gravel to the paved tarmac. He stared into those cold silver eyes. “I’d have never thought that some animal would be the one to start the crusade…the war.”
She was very calm, almost sad as a few tears fell from her eyes and were whipped away by the speed they were still going. “I didn’t start this, you did. You killed Katya, You killed half of my soul.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I killed them, I killed them and started hunting you down. I know what you’re doing. I know that you’ve been making the virus.”

“Made actually.”

She looks at the case I’m carrying. “The cure?”

“The virus is the cure. The first vaccine.”

“It won’t matter either way then.”

She kicked him hard and fast in the head and he felt the shoulder strap get ripped away from him and for a second his head swam. He saw her gone but rolling with the fall and coming up again the other animals stopping beside her. Then he felt the pain in his hand. He saw a knife through his hand pinning him to the seat. The bitch must have done it as she kicked him and he was only feeling it now. He looked and stared ahead as the humvee kept going and passed the helicopter and headed to the fuel pumps.

He looked back to the bitch and saw her molding a invisible ball with her hands and red energy began to build and swirl as she made something that looked like a dark red swirling sun on her hands and the heat waves moved her hair and clothes and he felt the impact as the front of the humvee hit the tanks and she unleashed her fireball.

He closed his eyes and his hand around his emerald pendant and prayed before the fire ball mixed with the blowing tanks and with the fuel from the flamethrowers and the explosives.
His soul screamed as it was pulled into a place of green flames and the truth of the lies of Asmodeus realized far too late…

* Stevie continued….

I watch the Humvee go up into flames literally blowing itself into the air as I sent the Templar Doctor to hell. It crashes down and I slip to my knees and watch it burn and for a second I swear the flames reach all the way up to the bloody moon I made with Grand-dad.

For a second there I see this almost shape, a hint of a body shape in the flow of the fire and smoke, almost greenish with the smoke…It moves, lasting only a moment as if to look at us.
Dom’s taking care of the Chopper crew, The others that came with us are taking care of the men in the other two Hummers. It starts to rain and I look up at the sky letting it start to wash me clean.

I look at the moon and I see Katya there in front of me and she leans forward and runs her clawed nails through my hair and kisses me. She’s crying and I’m crying and there’s this sad, sad look in her eyes as she breaks the kiss and fades away… “I’m Sorry….I love you…” Is all she say’s before leaving me again, breaking my heart…I fall back on my heels shifting to half form and raise my muzzle and Howl.

* Dorian Grey continued….

Shadira doesn’t stick close to me she drags me along by the hand our fingers interlocked as we run, as hurt as we both are we run or try to through the tunnels of this place that used to be an old mining complex.

There’s an alarm going off and I can here the cell doors opening. Maniacs, Weres so tortured they’re rabid and other prisoners are all released, including the vampires. Starved, and tortured they are on a killing spree.

We join up with two women with shotguns and three Weres at the elevator cages. I move with them to this bunker area where there’s nothing but cages. Cages and Kids…even most of the dark fae have a different code when it comes to kids.

I’ve never seen Werewolves whine like that or gag from a scent before.

Shadira closed her eyes and flicked her wrist and the angel’s, her shamshir is in her hair and she’s chopping off locks as the other women are smashing them open with the butts of their shotguns. One of the women I know, I think I know her, I’ve seen her before over the ages…oh…her.

It’s very strange to see her crossing herself, but not so strange to see her just ripping off the doors of the cages. I here her friend. “It’s like those puppy mills but with children…”

You ever see a dog with a really sick or hurt child? That’s these Weres with these children. Never have I seen them being that kind, noble and…gentle.

I feel something…this shaking down here, and this smell hits. Death, foulness, carrion past undeath. It’s what they’ve been doing with the bodies, I smell Ghouls….

Shadira looks at me and walks over sword in hand and kisses me again on her tip toes. She looks back to Athena. “Dorian and I’ll hold them off, you get those children out of here.” I can feel that other part of her stirred up, I look at her and she’s still her but there’s just something…you can “Feel” her wings.
She nods and starts to hurry up and we both leave, we have to get ahead of the cage elevators in the hallway so they can get clear and up. Anything in the halls becomes tossed into the fastest pile of junk I’ve ever made and It just happens in a blur.

One minute it’s quiet and the next they’re there. Violet bruise colored skin smelling of decomp if you could concentrate it…bald, and thin, thin like you can see their ribs thin and with red eyes dull like fading coals and sharp fangs and two inch long claws. It’s been long since I’ve faced them. I forgot they climbed like spiders.

Then the wolves are with us fighting tooth and claw as we make a wall keeping these things from the children as Athena and the other person blast whatever get’s past us with their shotguns and sending the children to the surface as many in a load as they can get in the elevators. It still takes two trips, we must have fought there for nearly an hour…

We can’t let these things get passed and we stay, we stay until no more come. I reach over to Shadira and pull her from were she’s leaning on some rubble, she’s crying, and gasping having thrown up even with next to nothing in her system…I limp with her and just stare out into the darkness.

“There’s nothing left down here Dorian, I can feel it…They killed everything else eating their way here as they went.”

“Good…good, I’m not sure if there’s any fight left in me Shadira.” I actually find myself leaning on her as much as she’s on me and we get into the elevator when it comes down. The other woman Miranda has this stricken pale look on her face. I can see tears running down her face as we ride to the surface.

** Seth……..

He ran, he ran from the lab and offices smiling. He cared very little for these human’s he care very little for anything but his revenge. Long, long ago he burned his bow, he cut his hair and walked from the courts.

Asmodeus had offered him power, he offered him immortality passed the fae-ken and soon, soon his hated faeness would be burned away.

He ran out into the battle and fought, once light they said he savored the blood letting too much. The foes were too good, too many and they had too much fire power. He smiled and used his fae voice to sing in infernal as they soldiers of the wolf came to see his end.

He let go of the deadman’s switch.

*Stevie…

It seemed like an hour or more getting back to the compound through the rain but as I get closer and closer the feeling in the pit of my stomach, in my heart get’s worse and worse and I see Athena outside the compound with the three wolves I sent with her, Miranda and an elf? And an Arab girl plus close to a hundred children. I get stopped by her from going inside.

“What…what’s wrong/ I have to get in there, to make sure everything’s done. They can’t get away, I’ve…”

She pushes me back being tired as I am and what she is I’m moved back. I can’t help but to feel the whine building in me. Athena looks at me and somehow isn’t her but Andrea again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry Stevie but you were right…”

I scream and push past her only to have people hold me back, to have Dom pull me back but through the darkness and the rain I see bodies, no one inside moving at all. Everyone who stayed and fought, furred or not lying there dead. I did this…I led them to this.

Howling out my loss isn’t enough, it’s not enough for any of us but it’s all we have. It’s still not enough for me as what we lost crashes inside with the things I did to get us here and I lose control…until things just…

Fade to Black…

(Bad Moon’s Arc is concluded…Stevie is not.)